Matt Cutts: Head
of Google’s webspam team, he has also become Google’s voice to the SEO
community. Follow Matt for information on best practices and what is
happening at Google.
SEOmoz: SEO thought leaders – advanced SEO theories, ideas, and practices.
Search Engine Journal (SEJ): covers wide range of search topics for variety of perspectives.
SEO.com: There URL is SEO.com – need I say more?
Brick Marketing: practical, insightful and actionable articles covering all aspects of SEO.
Search
Engine Roundtable: Barry Schwartz and the rest of the team report the
latest news, updates, rumors, and concerns from the search marketing
world.
Local SEO Guide: Another great source for all things “local”.
Search Engine Land: informative and actionable information. Their “local search” information has been especially helpful.
Search Engine Watch: wide range of search marketing topics, and articles for beginning to advanced search marketers.
Understanding Google Places: Mike Blumenthal’s the “go to” guy for “local search” updates and changes.
Analytics – add analytics to
your site so that you can begin collecting important data from your
site – ensuring progress and making improvements based upon the results.
Whether or not you utilize Google Analytics, I would still implement it
since it has Webmaster, paid search and social data that your analytics
platform can not include.
Design – develop a web strategy that
fulfills the needs of your web visitors and drives them to your
business. Simple navigation, one page per idea, and professional design
will drive more traffic through to you.
Conversion – how will
your website convert prospects into customers or drive additional sales
from current customers? Be sure to have conversions defined for your
site – and for better measurement, incorporate Google Analytics
conversion tracking.
Keywords – Search engines will index your
site better if they can understand what your site and pages are about.
Get some professional assistance in finding the keywords for your
industry and utilize keywords effectively within your site.
Speed
– Make sure your site is fast. Don’t pick the lowest cost host, they’re
just going to put your site on a shared, crappy server that will hurt
both your search engine optimization and your visitors’ patience.
www – Decide whether or not you’d like your domain to start with www or not. Be sure to redirect traffic to the one you select with a 301 (permanent) redirect.
Webmasters – be sure to register your domain with Google Webmasters Tools and identify whether or not you have any issues with your site.
Alerts – Maile also recommends signing up for Webmaster Alerts so that you’re notified whenever there’s an issue with your site.
Domain – it’s recommended that you do a background check of your domain to ensure the site was never in trouble prior to you selecting it. Spam, malware, indecent content… any of those issues could hurt your chances of getting ranked. If there are problems, you can notify Google via Webmasters that the domain is now managed by a new owner.
Fetch – within Webmasters, fetch your pages to ensure that the search engines aren’t going to run into difficulties crawling your site.
Submit – if there’s no problem, submit the page to Google. If you build your site with a great content management system, the CMS will do this for you each time you publish new or updated content.
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