At the start of any SEO campaign selecting the right keywords is the most important step. If you choose the wrong keywords, you simply won’t succeed with your campaign.

When selecting campaign keywords you need to consider: What, where, how and why.

• What is my main sales proposition?
• Where am I located in Google and the country?
• How good is my current website and how much history do I have?
• Why am I considering optimising for that keyword?

.Ideally you would start with a targeted keyword that is exactly what you do, what you offer and where you are located, for example if you were a “luxury hotel in Devon” that also offered spa treatments you might consider “luxury hotel in Devon with spa”.

Your first step would be to establish what the potential traffic of this keyword is. To complete this action go to the Google keyword suggestion tool.

If the above keyword had limited to no search volume, then is it worth optimising? Arguably yes, you want to show for exactly what you are, treat it almost as your brand keyword, that with good content and a well structured website you should appear in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) with minimum effort. Yes, it will have a low click level, but your conversion should be a lot higher the average.

In using the tool, “country house hotel in Devon” was a search suggestion with a search volume of 250 per month and when placed on exact match it had 140 ASV (Average Search Volume). This keyword should be another to consider, but it’s not going to Wow. Therefore, you need to look at more generic keywords.

Consider looking at generic searches, for example, “Devon Hotel”, “Devon Hotels”, “Country House Hotel”, “North Devon Hotel”, complete a Google search and find if you already have a ranking in the top 100. This is a simple task by simply changing your settings to 100 and using the control F function.

If you find your website ranks for “Hotel in Devon” in 63^rd position with no optimsation this keyword would be a good starting point for any SEO campaign. The hardest challenge is always to get a website to rank within the top 100 places, if you are already there, you have an advantage.

Finally, review the competition ahead of you, identify your main competitors and set SMART objectives.

Just incase any of you don’t know how google works, they have produced a nice simple beginners video hosted by Matt Cutts. This might be a good video to use incase you ever have to explain to a client in very simple terms.

Wired.com have recently published an interesting look at google and it’s algorithm. One of my favourite parts of the article is where it breaks down the Key Advances the company has made over the years. To read the rest of the article, click here

Backrub [September 1997]
This search engine, which had run on Stanford’s servers for almost two years, is renamed Google. Its breakthrough innovation: ranking searches based on the number and quality of incoming links.

New algorithm [August 2001]
The search algorithm is completely revamped to incorporate additional ranking criteria more easily.

Local connectivity analysis [February 2003]
Google’s first patent is granted for this feature, which gives more weight to links from authoritative sites.

Fritz [Summer 2003]
This initiative allows Google to update its index constantly, instead of in big batches.

Personalized results [June 2005]
Users can choose to let Google mine their own search behavior to provide individualized results.

Bigdaddy [December 2005]
Engine update allows for more-comprehensive Web crawling.

Universal search [May 2007]
Building on Image Search, Google News, and Book Search, the new Universal Search allows users to get links to any medium on the same results page.

Real-Time Search [December 2009]
Displays results from Twitter and blogs as they are published.

SEOmoz have launched their new website/tool with the Open Site Explorer. This backlink analysis tool and link popularity checker aims to continue what they started with linkscape. The team hasn’t got round to fully trying it out yet, but we will be implementing it in our February work. For information on what the tool offers take a look at the SEOmoz blog explaining it all.

Google have a great hour long video on how to bring more users to your sites through the search engines. You might know a lot of the information, but there could be a few new things you have yet to discover.

http://googlegooglegooglegoogle.com/

Google Blogoscoped has a quick way you can force google into showing you their new interface design. Here in the UK it doesn’t seem to work with google.co.uk so we need to add in the extra step.

1. Go to google.co.uk

2. Click go to Google.com down at the bottom

3. Copy and paste the following code into your address bar

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

4. See the new google design in all his glory

Unlike humans, search engines don’t see images, so the more image rich your site is the less likely a search engine will understand its content. This is a predicament for any web developer/owner because they want to have a website that stands out from its competition and is aesthetically pleasing, showing off the products/services they are selling to the best of their ability. A website without images would be to most people a rather boring site to be on but how do you achieve a site that is not only pleasing on the eye but also manages to rank well in the search engines? Fear not, there is one SEO element that can easily be implemented as well as getting the opportunity to reinforce your keyword phrases. Assigning ALT text to all the important images on your site will enable the search engine to ‘see’ the image and understand its content thus ranking it accordingly.

Add the ALTernate text to the HTML tag so this is displayed by the browser when a user scrolls the cursor over the image. This is also good practice for any web owner to aid the visually impaired who views your site. Contributing to usability and accessibility always gets a thumbs up and by implementing this strategy you are not only providing more content for the ‘spiders’ but also the users as well.

Tip: Keep ALT text descriptions as informative and closely related to the image subject as possible and keep it short and sweet.

You can read more at http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/dont-forget-to-optimize-for-images-including-pdfs