So it is looking likely that at long last, Superior SEO might soon be sporting a new theme. For whilst Thesis has served us well, it looks like our friends in Chicago may have moved the game on to the next level, as anybody who knows SEO Design Solutions knows this will be the ultimate in No BS SEO Wordpress themes, we can hardly wait..

After one year of toiling away in the labs, we are preparing for the launch of  The WP Ultimate Theme  a powerful, flexible and dynamic  premium SEO  framework for WordPress) designed to work in tandem with SEO Ultimate (our WordPress SEO plugin).

The WP Ultimate Theme: So Powerful, It Should Have Its Own Cape!

Our objective is simple, to provide users with fine-grained control over multiple on page settings (such as nearly instantaneous site architecture injection, custom navigation options, multiple layout and theme choices, breadcrumbs, internal links, widgets, typography controls and more) for the optimal WordPress SEO framework.

The initial tests are nearly concluded for The WP Ultimate Theme – an SEO Framework for WordPress developed by SEO Design Solutions (the creators of SEO Ultimate All in One WordPress Plugin).

The purpose of the WP Ultimate Theme is simple, to provide more on page SEO options than any theme on the market such as:

• The ability to toggle default navigation on or off (on a page by page basis).
• The ability to create custom navigation for categories, landing pages or posts.
• Optional breadcrumbs, as well as the ability to personalize the trail / anchor text.
• Multiple Theme / Skins to enhance visual appeal and aid conversions.
• A built in j-query slider with multiple features.
• A global and page level ad management system (w/import and export capabilities)
  to support banners or widgets for monetization.
• Font, Size and Typography controls.
• A logo management module (with optional widget area to support adsense or other ad networks).
• The ability to toggle between 1 column, 2 column design or 3 column pages ¾ slider ¼ ad layouts for pages or posts.
• The ability to toggle Permalink off or create override with H1 or H2 anchor text link on page or post level (to aid website silo architecture).
• Silo import module (to instantly create or import site architecture in seconds) instead of painstakingly building out your site page by page, category by category or by page or post.
• XML site architecture import features (to drip feed content, permalinks, categories, meta data and more).
• HTML 5 framework and code that validates via W3C Compliance.

- And these are just the features from the theme, when coupled with the pure on page power of SEO Ultimate  All-in-One SEO plugin (the swiss army knife of SEO) this one-two punch combination shatters the glass ceiling of what an SEO theme for WordPress is all about.

Stay tuned for updates as we polish the theme and make final tweaks and adjustments and keep abreast for our limited-time special offer.  It’s safe to say that there has never been a theme like this out of the box that does so much with so little effort.

With the advent of traffic driven conversions at the crux of this theme, WP Ultimate is the affiliates dream theme wielding ease of use and a powerful, yet flexible core based on solid SEO best practices.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to our RSS feed to stay in the loop on this promising new addition to the WordPress community so you can grab a copy when it launches.

After the roll-out is underway, SEO Design Solutions will offer a plethora of aesthetic  themes/skins which slip-on to reveal the true power of this excited new contender for the crown of the Ultimate Premium WordPress SEO Theme.

Stay tuned for updates and in the meantime, spread the word…

-Jeffrey 

If you’ve been here before you will likely know that although this site is  devoted to superior SEO in general,  as we think WordPress is a superior SEO platform, with inherent SEO advantages over almost any other web development system, we have a definite WordPress bias.

We especially like Thesis and think it’s possibly the best WordPress SEO theme available currently, however, that may be all about to change..

WP Ultimate Theme Underway by SEO Design Solutions

For those of you currently using SEO Ultimate our Free WordPress SEO Plugin, this is a heads-up to let you know that  SEO Design Solutions is developing a companion WordPress theme to complement it aptly named

“The WP Ultimate Theme”

The idea is simple, your website should rank as good as it looks, which it why we provide tons of epic, easy-to-implement features from the dashboard that will place the power of instant SEO at your fingertips.

This robust framework eliminates the need to have dozens of plugins running (when features can be delivered bundled from the theme itself) and will have your new website up and running  in minutes with powerful built-in SEO features.

Feature-Rich SEO At Your Finger Tips

What good is having a pretty website, if it’s not optimized for search engines? To answer the challenge, we are putting The WP Ultimate Theme to the test with features like:

• Breadcrumbs, toggled from page level (on/off).
• Custom template optimization for homepage, category pages and product landing pages.
• Multiple SEO Skins for content (quickly select from 1,2,3 column or news style design).
• Dynamic features (custom editable tag page where you can showcase ads).
• Page/level dynamic overrides for implementing custom masthead, sidebar, footer links and ad blocks.
• Optional navigation / theme presets (to change navigation styles).
• Ad Server Display Banner Management System for raw html and / or creative code to support affiliate SEO and ad networks for content delivery, monetization and tracking.
• Automatic Internal Linking
• Instant Silo Builder (quickly implement themed categories, nested content and landing pages).
• Dynamic Link Sculpting (i.e. 100 links on the page, turn 90 off and make them invisible to search engines) to pass more equity through the 10 you want.

- And more-

Although the feature list it growing daily and still being sorted, our programmers are in the lab as we speak tweaking variations on the theme and we will let you know when you can download this premium WordPress theme for our target price (under $100).

Push-Button SEO on the Fly

This is definitely a WordPress Theme you will not want to miss. The theme has been deployed in beta and we are hard-coding dozens of our most coveted custom SEO tips and tactics we use daily to dominate search engines directly into the theme.

The benefit to the user is simple, you save thousands of dollars on SEO (instead of us having to optimize your wordpress theme) with push-button SEO for easy/on page optimization and minimal code conflicts for plugins (which can be a problem if they are pulling from the same WordPress hooks).

For the one hundred thousand plus users who have already downloaded SEO Ultimate, you will not be disappointed with The WP Ultimate Theme. Consider this your way to give back through buying a copy so we can keep adding new and even more powerful features for both SEO Ultimate (the stand alone plugin) or The WP Ultimate Theme.  We consider this a serious one-two punch for SEO and WordPress driven sites.

Just as the feature list continues to grow for our SEO Ultimate Plugin, you can expect the same as we gain feedback from you, the user to create one of the most powerful SEO themes for WordPress ever conceived.

Want a Feature Developed, Let Us Know!

Stay tuned and we will keep you abreast of changes as they develop when the project leaves beta. If you have any ideas, now is your time to leave your thoughts on the wish-list below; if the ideas are stellar, then we will build them into the theme.

SEO by Design is simply superior

This site is built on Thesis, and there is no doubt it’s an excellent WordPress web development platform with great in-built SEO features, meaning the average person can more or less just forget about the SEO and get on with publishing.

However, Thesis is a great WordPress Web development platform with added SEO, what the boys in Chicago are planning here is an SEO theme built from the ground up full of all the tricks and hacks that they have developed and been using at the cutting edge of SEO for many years, a WordPress SEO Theme, built by professional SEOs will very likely be superior to any other approach.

We wait with baited breath, and if you need any more beta Testers boys..

If you have landed here looking for Search Engine Optimization services (or SEO) for your Ibiza-based website, you are at the right place.

Because there are SEO companies, and there are the real “Ibiza” SEO experts

For whilst lately the internet has been full of certain other companies attempting to target Ibiza businesses from far-away places, some even stating that they intend opening offices on the island specifically for that purpose, as Ibiza residents you will obviously understand the  initial difficulties they would/will face, integrating into the island and doing business here, where networking and word-of-mouth and personal recommendation are all important.

This however is for them to find out, but we would highly recommend that you think carefully before engaging a non-Ibiza specialist to work on Ibiza based business sites, because whilst they struggle with the day-to-day realities of working in Ibiza, the real SEO Ibiza will be continuing to earn our customers money from their websites as we have been for years.

We have strong experience in every aspect of internet marketing on Ibiza, from organic SEO to  overseeing £100k GBP per annum Ibiza-based Adwords campaigns, from launching the smallest one-man businesses on the web through to consulting on the global giants of the Ibiza web-world, ALL OF WHOM are available for references.

So if you have an Ibiza-based business website that is not performing as well as you would wish in the search engines, contact SEO Ibiza here

- SEO Ibiza – The Ibiza SEO experts

In today’s modern internet sales environment you need to ask yourself:

“ Will Front Page Rankings deliver the sales results I need ? “

The short answer is a resounding “No” but let’s elaborate a little on the question and then answer it. “Being on page 1 of Google”  is still a surprisingly common desire by “rookie” business website owners.

Whether it’s a new business, or a new website for an existing business, the number of people who think that if they could “just rank on the front page of Google” for a particular phrase they have in their minds, that all their problems would be over is still considerable.  .. But are superior rankings alone, enough any more?

..Consider the screenshot below.

Many people don’t even recognise the faintly pink area as an advert/s, and sometimes there are as many as 3 adverts there, so a legitimate #1 and #2 as shown above,  is already equivalent to #4 and #5, to these people.

And many SERPs these days have Local Business (maps) listings plus Videos, Images all around, so the choice  of destinations other than your site grows all the time.

So CTR (or Click Through Rates) starts to take even greater importance as even a #1 Organic ranking will probably have several enticing choices above and below it, and not even be all that clearly a #1 position to a non-techie searcher, and if you’re ranking below the fold on the browser there’s a good chance the searcher might not even SEE your listing.

So clearly, improving your click through rates on rankings that do get seen, so that the customer  (hopefully) clicks your site over and above the others all around you is not only the only way to improve traffic on a keyword when you can’t actually go any higher, but also it’s a great way to snipe traffic from above you from lower positions.

The Changing Face (& Workings) of Google.

If you’ve used Google in the last few weeks you can’t of helped noticing they have changed the look of their sacred interface quite dramatically, (leading incidentally to reports of less traffic  for some sites since the rollout) however that is not all they have changed, not by a long way.

As noted by several sites, Google caffeine is live – that is the new super-powerful infrastructure that Google runs on, and this has shaken lots of sites performance up in many different aspects, not just rankings.

We think perhaps the new version of Webmaster Tools is also Caffeine-powered because it’s pretty hyper compared to the last version and now gives far greater insight into your site’s traffic and performance across all Google indexes than has ever been available anywhere before, and now includes basic keyword CTR data, which although limited is more than we had before, and gives a reasonable indication to us that Google will likely be looking at this more and more as time goes on, perhaps even as ranking signals, finally.

What happens when they DO click my site?

Good question. Considering the ever increasing difficulty of ranking high enough to be seen,  and then of getting them to actually click yours, over your competition, what happens when one way or another a precious customer does find you? ie

Does the Website Convert (visitors into customers) ?

If it doesn’t, before you spend any more time and money worrying about SEO, you would be much better off spending some time and effort on either getting a decent site, or looking into improving the conversion rate of your current site, ie Conversion Rate Optimization.

Hence you can hopefully  see that Superior SEO in 2010 has far more wide-ranging connotations and responsibilities than ever before, and people who think that just  a front-page ranking for a keyword is all that is required to build a strong  online business don’t understand either Google, their competitors, and quite likely their own potential customers.

Obviously any system calling itself superior design must work well on not just one search engine, but should be equally well received by any and all search engines.  Any site relying exclusively on traffic from one search engine is always vulnerable to sudden algo rankings changes, competitors overtaking them etc, and is not maximizing traffic across the whole SE user-base.

A truly superior seo system will perform equally well on all the engines, anything else is, well inferior

Our own favourite superior search engine ixquick..

Yahoo..

Bing..

Dogpile..

Ask..

And finally Cuil, although this site isnt there yet, we can’t help thinking that’s a promising SE for the future, they certainly seem to be able to work out what’s what on their superior SEO listings

And finally, it should of course also be doing the same on Image search..

This is Superior SEO Domination in action…

Superior-SEO.US

A superior SEO system will always win out..

This is Part 2 of this SEO Tips series, part 1 is here, you should read it first.

Advanced SEO & Web Design Keyword Strategies

So following on from Part 1 where we discussed overall keyword strategies and how to think horizontally with keywords as well as vertically to obtain maximum longtail keyphrase coverage around your theme, today we’re moving on into structuring the site “as Google like it” from the beginning, as the fastest way into the SERP, and to ensure that you have  ultimately have the best possible chance of eventually becoming “the authority” – as defined by sitelinks on the matter. It’s really very simple, and we think you’ll shake your head and wonder why you didn’t think of this before..

Use Google Related Search to tell you how to Structure your site

We want to be presenting the most “Google logical” site structure to Google, right from the beginning.

As time progresses on and you evolve the site (which you will need to, to reach the hallowed “authority” status) you will add in more and more content at deeper levels, so the initial structure at the top will get stronger and stronger as it is now supported by more inner content.

So, say we were building a site with the ultimate (top level) target phrase,:

Search Engine Optimization

Do the search, scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll see..

These related terms are GOLD - they are the natural sub pages Google expects to see..

This is what Google is telling you are the related subjects for your term, this is what else they expect to see on a website about “search engine optimization”  so now  it’s simple, optimize the homepage for your main term (plus any “modifiers” – eg “company” that fit that page), and use the highest traffic related suggestions (and relevant to you, obviously “search engine submission” is a scam, so omit anything you don’t do) as your second level pages, thus:

Search Engine Optimization

• seo services

• seo tools

• seo techniques

• seo company – “company” is a “modifier”, and so can likely be excluded from nav and structure as it would naturally fit on the end of “search engine optimization” on the homepage.

Cross check the traffic on these with your keyword research tools, you only want the toughest of these main terms on your first page, it is important to use only the minimum of essential links from the homepage inwards**, this will maximise the strength of each link, and the amount of Pagerank reaching each inner page.

** (we’ll come back to this in depth at some point soon)

Then repeat the process for each second-level page.

So now we have..

SEO Services

• seo copywriting services

• seo consulting services

These now make up either second level sub pages of the SEO services page, or sub-headings on the page, depending on your site / keywords etc etc..  If you are using a truly superior SEO dynamic system (such as WordPress on Thesis 1.7) all you now have to do is name and place the pages (parent / child etc) and use the best keywords in the navigation at the top, and WP will do the rest for you, ie  link from every other page etc.

SEO Navigation Design Tip

Lots of people fall afoul of Google’s famed over optimization filters by “overcooking their navigation through trying to insert “top” level keywords into the nav, pointing at internal pages.

For example, go back to the second example above, the SEO services page is already (will be anyway) optimized for SEO Services, so the anchor text pointing at the Consulting & Copywriting pages does not need “SEO” or “Services”, merely the main topics, ie Consulting & Copywriting, trying to squeeze the extra SEO in will quite likely get your site labeled as an onsite spammer, and maybe even -950 (over optimization) Filtered, don’t do it, keep it as clean and neat as you can.

It must also be noted that ultimately, you probably won’t rank for the top level keywords  anyway unless your content is good enough (or you have monster link resources available to you) and that there is no substitute for compelling unique content, SEO’d or not.

It should also be noted that this is a very useful way of checking whether a Web Designer understands even the basics of how Google works in their website structuring, if you look at an “SEO web designer” s own website and it is full of “About us”, “who we are” and “what we do” -ie non-thematically constructed structures in their primary navigation and site structures, with certain exceptions, they’ve likely got no real clue about real SEO techniques past meta tags and Page Titles.

Hopefully this will be helpful, any (genuine) questions welcome in the comments.

Superior-SEO.US

We’ve been writing about this  for several weeks now, so were excited to see Thesis 1.7 is finally here ..from Chris & the Team a couple of days ago.

WE think if you don’t have it, already, you should buy it NOW

Truly Superior WordPress SEO

Hi!

It’s party time here at DIYthemes, and there are two big reasons why:

First, this week marks the two-year anniversary of day I launched Thesis. To commemorate this momentous occasion, I decided to have a look through some of the original Thesis files to see how far we’ve come…

And as it turns out, I’ve seen horror movies that scared me less than that old code

On the upside, knowing where we’ve come from makes me all the more excited to announce the second big reason why we’re partying this week at DIYthemes:

Thesis 1.7 has arrived!

While you should ALWAYS upgrade to the latest version of Thesis, this one is extremely important for three notable reasons.

1. The new Options Manager allows you to save and restore your options settings, and this will prove useful whenever you work on your site.

Whether you’re installing a new Thesis skin, sharing options with friends, or backing up your settings for upgrades or server moves, you’ll find the Options Manager to be extremely helpful.

2. Thesis 1.7 is the most efficient, fast, and flexible version to date. You’ll notice performance improvements on your live site AND in the admin panel; usability enhancements like this are what make Thesis a joy to use.

3. Although I’m known for my attention to detail, I really went nuts on this particular release. Fortunately for you, this means that there is a lot to love about Thesis 1.7! Check out the new feature list, and you’ll see what I mean:

http://diythemes.com/thesis/version-17-features/

In addition, to help you get started with Thesis 1.7, we’ve added helpful videos to the Thesis download page. Whether you’re installing Thesis for the first time or upgrading from a previous version, you’ll have a clear example of how to get Thesis up and running!

Oh, and one last thing-starting this week, we’re going to begin publishing tutorial videos, helpful tips, and community news on the DIYthemes site. To receive automatic updates by email, visit the address below and enter your email address in the appropriate box:

http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=thesistheme

Finally, thank you for being a Thesis user and having such impeccable taste in Web software

Chris Pearson and the DIYthemes team
http://diythemes.com/

——————————————————————-

In our opinion Thesis 1.7 is the best wordpress SEO theme by far. 

Or “How To“  Structure & Design a Superior SEO Website – Part 1

“SEO is misunderstood by many, contrary to what most people think it is not all about picking a few likely keywords (or key phrases) & then getting your site to rank for them.”

Because although this is how most people envision the process, this is a very myopic view. The SEO process is actually only the means to an end, the end goal is for the website to earn as much money as possible.

So you if you’re scratching your head wondering what SEO is, now that we know what it is not, let’s try and explain. To run a successful SEO campaign, you need to start with the end result you desire (sales, money in the bank) and work backwards through your sales process to the first customer contact, ie how did they find you?

Put yourself in the mind of your ideal customer and try to think how they would, what would they be looking for?

Keyword Brainstorming

This is possibly the most critical part of the process, you need to research as many possible, cover all angles to start with and then whittle down to your main target keywords and phrases.

If in Google (or another search engine)

• What did they type into it? – ie what were this customers buying keywords / phrase ?
• Is this customer typical? – your usual demographic? if not who is?
• Is this the only way of saying it? what alternatives are there?
• Then think about the other customers who are going to your competitors, what words and phrases are your main (top 5 ) competitors targeting?
• Compile as complete list as you can of the main (upper level or short-tail) phrases.

Having gotten your primary list of desired targets together we need to expand them out, like branches of a pine tree structure, each branch dividing and branching further, lets use an example to illustrate.

Say..  we were looking at the phrase “Superior SEO” as a site name

..Obviously we know that gets no traffic at all, never mind buying customers (we ve been #1 for 2 years .com and .co.uk) so to optimize a site for just that would be silly. So aim higher (ultimately) but then build downwards with all the possible variations you can think of, the thesaurus is your friend here – Superior Synonyms

“Superior” + variants and trophies

• “Truly Superior”
• “Define Superior”
• “Superior Definition”

Other ways of saying superior (applicable in context, there’s plenty more)

• Top
• Best
• Expert
• Advanced
• Supreme

“SEO” variants and modifiers

• Optimization (or optimisation in UK / Europe)
• SEO Optimization
• Search Optimization
• SEO web design

Other ways of saying “SEO” (we know they mean slightly different things, but your customers may not)

• SEO Optimization
• Website Optimization
• Internet marketing
• Search Marketing

Then start playing with combination s of the two sides, together..

Superior SEO

• superior SEO optimization
• superior search engine optimization
• superior search engine marketing
• superior internet marketing
• superior online marketing

And lastly we have to then add in the second set of modifiers, company / services / plus all the singular and plurals as well, consultant consultants consulting consultancy etc, each of which can happily sit on the end of the above phrases, giving examples as diverse as :

• superior online marketing service/s / company
• superior internet marketing company / service/s
• advanced search engine optimization
• ultimate online marketing consultancy.
• advanced seo web design
• superior web design
• Etc etc etc, almost ad infinitum..

So we can see that any truly superior SEO web design must encompass all possible ways of saying the same thing, and must rank as equally for all of it as possible, and just focusing on one or two phrases is anything but superior.

SEO Ibiza was optimized along these lines and is 2 & 1/2 years old now and so benefits hugely from this approach – if you take a look at these superior rankings you can see the effect at work, obviously these were not the prime target phrases, just an example of how a superior optimization system works across all the variations of the phrases.

So again sticking with this site, the strategy is.. (in reverse order)

1. Primary (short tail) – superior,  seo, wordpress web design, that kind of thing
2. Medium-tail – superior definition, seo web design, advanced wordpress web design, / (thesis etc)
3. Longtail – all the other terms  all the other modifiers advanced etc, and then aimed at all the subsets too, web design, techniques tips etc.

We want to rank for the big words eventually, but in the meantime we want use superior seo to rank for every single longtail hit possible, from our target keywords in any combination. Building out the lower end of your traffic pyramid like this ensures that you don’t get to the top for a phrase, only to find it was a flop, lots who should know better, do and will continue to make this mistake.

But having your list of phrases is a long way away from having a site optimized for them, although it’s a start, but in the next of this series of posts we will cover possibly the most important part of this process, how to map your keywords, to your site design and infrastructure, in the way that will best please Google, this is critical and the bit most web designers often get badly wrong with dire consequences, stay tuned..

SEO Ultimate

SEO Design Solutions “SEO Ultimate” plugin is fast becoming our favorite SEO plugin, it’s installed on all our main sites now.

In our opinion what makes this the overall superior SEO Plugin is the ongoing product development which means that since we started using the plugin there have been at least 4 upgrades adding functionality all the time, and which now sees basic autolinking functionality included in the version 1.81 release, it is both very simple to understand and use, but extremely powerful and has all the onpage SEO-related functionality you need in one plugin.

..In our opinion this is now the truly superior “All in One” Plugin.

Headspace 2

From UrbanGiraffe the extremely comprehensive and advanced Headspace 2 SEO plugin, a very good product, but possibly a little over-complicated for anyone but advanced SEO practitioners, thoroughly recommended if you want to try it. Offers very advanced features such as nesting illustrated here.

Redirection

Also from UrbanGiraffe the excellent “Redirection” plugin which allows you to use 301 redirects to tidy up old posts, change URLs, cloak affiliate links and has many more SEO uses (and we’ll be covering some of these in upcoming SEO Tips posts)

Contextual Related Posts

Ajay DSouza’s related posts plugin is our favourite because it looks at post context to suggest related posts, rather than using the tag system as most do.

Broken Links Remover

This is a great plugin, one of those you wonder how you managed before once you’re using it. Not only does it automatically check your site for broken outbound links and allow easy fixing of problem links, we also use it to remotely monitor other sites, ie if you’ve linked to a site, and it gets hacked or goes down for any reason , you’ll be automatically notified of problems (via the site running the Broken Links plugin) whenever you log into it.

Nofollow Case by Case

We didn’t like “nofollow” much for outbound links even when it was thought you could “sculpt pagerank” internally using it, we always believed that if a link deserves to be there at all, it should be live. WordPress comes with nofollow implemented as standard on comments, this plugin makes everything live as default, and you simply add /dontfollow to any URLs you may want to kill linkjuice on for any reason.

XML Sitemaps

The default XML sitemap for WordPress plugin, it rebuilds the sitemap every time you create or edit URL structures and auto-pings to ensure you are re-crawled / indexed as fast as possible. Install it, run it, forget it.

SEO Booster Lite / Pro

This is an interesting plugin we’re testing the Lite version of but think we’ll be buying the Pro version shortly, and it seems to do what it’s supposed to, i.e. advanced whitehat automated SEO.

It works by monitoring 2nd page hits you’ve had from search engines, and auto linking to them using the search term as anchor text, to try and elevate that term from second page to first, for a traffic spike. We’ll be going into more detail on this on upcoming blog posts, but suffice to say its promising enough to make this list.

Then all you need is:

The Best WordPress SEO Theme

..which in our opinion is Thesis – v1.7 (out very soon) and you’ll be away.

Wordpress SEO firepower

But SEO for WordPress is not just installing all the goodies..

Lots of people are under the impression that SEO is all automatic on WordPress, and this just isn’t true, because just like a championship winning race car, not everybody will drive it the same.

Although it is true that if you know how to write and optimize content properly WordPress does look after the technical side for you, simply having the best plugins, theme and set up is not enough, you will still need engaging and effective content, and a correct site structure to deliver superior seo performance.

For the “..How to’s ” please see our SEO Tips Series

Another in the excellent “How to” series of SEO tips from the mighty SEO Design Solutions..

This week they’re explaining how to put the “design” into SEO web design..

Over to Jeffrey Smith @ SEO Design Solutions

“Here are 10 powerhouse SEO tips that you can use to design a new website and make sure it gets off to the right start. First, the strategy, then a brief synopsis of the tactics are outlined below.

SEO Tips to Build a New Website:

1. Start with a theme (meaning your market and the top level keywords).
2. Use Keyword Research to build that theme into the site navigation, internal links, tags and naming conventions.
3. Determine the tipping point is for the top 5 competitors and exceed them using time-released content.
4. Leverage internal links to select preferred landing pages.
5. Build a stable base of off page links from trusted sources first, and then ensure a fresh supply of relevant ongoing links.
6. Build pages properly the first time “optimal” using a pliable CMS system which does all the SEO / heavy lifting by default.
7. Use keyword research to integrate less competitive keywords (branches of the root phrase) into supporting posts, pages and off page content (then go back to point #3).
8. Keep site architecture flat and make sure to link to a sitemap for that segment of the site (if you use categories).
9. Make changes to older / trusted pages – If ranking priorities change, go back and edit and add additional links and content to leverage pages 4 months or older to link to new pages with supporting keywords.
10. Measure the results and rinse and repeat.

Start with a theme: Understanding the competitiveness of the keywords, based on competing pages, the authority of the competitors holding down the top 5 spots and the content and link thresholds they exhibit is a great start for any endeavor.

You can also expand your base of modifiers to embrace multiple variations or flavors of the market to drive additional traffic that competitors may be leaving on the table due to their own narrowness or lack of creativity. *Links will be provided at the end of this post for further elaboration on various tactics and techniques.

Use Keyword Research: When conducting keyword research, keep in mind, it is the long term objective that matters, so you have to build the most competitive keywords and phrases into the site structure so that it is always present and acts as a hook for a node of relevance.

Then, using faceted or tiered navigation, you can drill down from the most broad phrases into the category and / or product level (giving each page its own focus) vs. trying to mash everything together as a keyword free for all.

The rule of thumb is a page should be optimized for 3 -5 keywords per page, anything else is just mid-tail and long-tail traffic which will happen anyway, once all the pages are indexed, linked and working in unison.

Determine The Tipping Point: Each keyword has a tipping point, determining what that is takes to outrank others requires observation, analysis and execution to overcome.

For example, is it 15 pages of content for keyword A, 25 deep links and 100 internal links from other pages, 5 pages of content for keyword B, 100 deep links and 4 months to season enough search engine trust?

They say practice makes perfect and no two websites are alike, however this is a moving target and requires persistence based on keyword thresholds exhibited by (a) your own website and (b) the thoroughness of your competitors SEO strategies and whether they are hollow or back by solid SEO metrics.

Leverage Internal Links: Leverage the links you build from other websites by using keyword relevant internal links through co-occurrence. If a keyword exists on another page you intend to rank for, and then make sure that all of the subsequent pages are linked to the preferred landing page with the keyword or semantic variation to support the preferred ranking.

Off Page Links: Getting the proper type of off page inbound links matters more than the quantity of links pointing at a page or website. Trusted links pass trust; you can have 200K inbound links from sites that are classified as a bad neighborhood that pass nothing of value to your website. On the other hand, you can have 1000 quality links from sites that have trust and authority and pass more ranking factor along than the 200K links.

Aged sites replete with either (a) trust or (b) rankings in the niche, market or segment your site corresponds to are ideal.

SEO for a CMS: You don’t have to over-think your SEO, just build it on a solid platform (such as WordPress) refer to our WordPress SEO Tips. After you set your site up properly the first time, you can easily mirroring the title, h1, meta tags and page naming conventions and focus on adding themed content to add an array of robust keywords and landing pages to garner rankings.

Keeping Site Architecture Flat: Flat site architecture implies building relevant pages in the root folder and using exact match or targeted naming conventions for the url structure. For example, instead of having a site format and naming convention like domain.com/electronics/games/sony-psp/ you could use domain.com/sony-psp-games.html to flatten the subfolders.

Here is a great piece on competition and how to leverage content silos to get that value out of your deeper pages and add traction for specific pages.

Making Changes to Older / Trusted Pages: You can benefit tremendously from refining or editing pages with trust or page rank to increase indexation for other newer pages or site segments.

Many SEO’s don’t tell you that your websites most trusted pages (older than 4 months) are a treasure trove when re-optimized or utilized (by adding additional content or links) to act as pivotal points within a website.

Linking from trusted pages passes along value beyond measureable link flow alone, it allows your other pages to rank on less inbound links from other sites (as inbound links or external inbound links are treated much in the same way).

Measure, Rinse and Repeat: No explanation needed here. Just test the metrics, keep a log and make adjustments where needed to dial in specific keyword variations.

These 10 SEO tips should allow you to make a great start and strong ranking finish. Now, as promised, here are the links.

• WordPress SEO Tips
• Overcoming Competitive Markets
• SEO and Internal Linking
• How SEO Really Works
• 6 Steps for Launching a New Website