SEO Task 1 – Keyword research (fine-tuning or finding new areas of opportunities)

How to do keyword research?

• Brainstorming sessions
• Analyze at your own website’s traffic sources and webmaster tools
• Use various online tools such as Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool
• Check what key phrases are bringing traffic to your competitors
• Estimating competition for same keywords on search engines
• Create lists of key phrases you intend to target

SEO Task 2 – On-site optimization (helping search engines to find all content correctly)

How to do on-page optimization?

• Check validation of the website’s code as per W3C standards
• Optimize HTML page titles, meta tags and content
• Enhance the internal linking structure
• Sort all canonicalization issues
• Create robots.txt and sitemap.xml

SEO Task 3 – Building online authority (gaining quality incoming links)

How to build online authority?

• Search engine submissions
• DMOZ, Yahoo and other directory submissions
• Optimize press releases
• Post content on 3rd party websites
• Contribute in your niche’s blogging community
• Contact people who might be interested in recommending your website
• Promotion of exceptional content for linkbaiting

SEO Task 4 – Monitoring industry changes (keeping up-to-date with algo changes)

How to monitor industry changes?

• Participate in specialized SEO forums and online communities
• Follow and communicate with the most popular SEO experts
• Testing various SEO ideas and monitoring performance

SEO Task 5 – Maintenance and reporting (for successful long-term benefits)

What are the most common SEO reports?

• Tracking number of indexed pages and incoming links for your website
• Keyword ranking reports to monitor position on search engines
• Daily, weekly and monthly organic traffic reports
• Reporting spam in search results to search engines

The above tips are not a complete list of all SEO tasks and responsibilities, but am sure it gives a clear picture of the effort involved. If you’re looking for freelance workers, follow this link.

URLs

• It’s very clear that search engines in general, at least for the time being, give a lot of importance to keywords in urls, whether being the domain name, internal directory structure or actual file names. Whilst I personally think it’s more professional not to use hyphens when selecting a domain name, all other keywords in urls should be separated with a hyphen.

Head Area

• A title tag should be unique and be the first tag in the head section. It should “obviously” include (just once) the main key phrase for which we aim to rank for.
• You should not create a title tag longer than 65 chars, since Google will simply not display the rest.
• As regarding the description tag, you can either opt not to make one (if you have optimized content), or create couple unique relevant short sentences for each page. Remember that this description will actually be showing in search results, so it’s suggested to optimize it aiming to maximize click through.
• The meta keywords tag is not that important nowadays, but if you use it, make sure you include just once the most important keywords.

Body Area

• Use hierarchical headings, and insert the main keyword (or a slight variation of it) in an H1. Put related key phrases in the other webpage headings.
• You should emphasis and bold or display in a bigger font the most important keywords throughout the body text. Web surfers usually stay on a page less than a minute, bolded text is a clear indicator of what the page is about and this helps search engines identify your page subject too.
• Keep all content in one page highly relevant to one subject. Using main keywords close to the beginning and even near to the end of a webpage helps in this respect.
• Don’t forget to add descriptive image alt tags and include relevant anchor text links to other pages of your own site or even other websites.

I will also be reviewing some of the best tools available and giving you my personal recommendations. Will be blogging about other SEO experts in this industry that one should be aware of and mentioning some of the most successful websites owned by Maltese individuals too. Most of all, I will be around to answer any questions you might have about search engine optimization.

Learning SEO (search engine optimization) is not just about improving Google rankings, it’s much more! Check out my blog posts, follow me on twitter and you will understand what I mean.