The SEO Spiderweb

The SEO Spiderweb
By : Will Radcliffe

The SEO Spider-web basically consists of two core aspects, the Internal Web and the External Web, each web contains several key components.

Internal Web - All objects that directly relate to the site and fall under you domain name, www.your-site.com:

* Keywords, make sure your keywords within the site are befitting and do not contain "noise" by search engines, you should consider avoiding words these words, to test your sites Keywords check out http://www.websitegrader.com/, you should also take into consideration not to go overboard on your Keywords as you could potentially dilute the effectiveness of them and try to keep them to around 7-10 keywords. To get a better idea of what Keywords you should use look into SEO Books keyword research tool , try entering a term and see what comes up (I entered the term "business" and the list returned is immense).

·Odds are you probably cannot initially afford a top 10 placement keyword/term (unless you're prepared to go toe to toe with some of the major players and have some very deep pockets).

Start by looking at the top 20-50 keywords/terms and find then looking up their values using Google's Keyword tool (Select Cost and Ad Position Estimates) and since Overture decided to take their tool down, which really sucks for us, as we are starting to run out of options when it comes to "free" Quality SEO tools and beginning to see many of these helpful tools disappear (Be sure to place a high enough Bid when using the tool as it will not return a figure if the bid is too low, for example on the word Business I placed an initial bid of .25 and got zero, no surprise, but re-calculated it with and $6 bid, figures galore!!!).

·Other Keyword tools within SEO Book: Keyword List List Cleaner Master Tool List

* Image Alt Tags, search engines pick up everything now a days and tagging your images with Alt tags is another way to draw their attention.

* The Blog, having a blog within your site can drive an enormous amount of traffic to your site that would usually go unseen or unheard, of course to ensure that you do get hits on your blog means you need to provide "Quality Content", if the content is sub par, odds are your blog, just like the thousands of other newborn blogs will end up dying on the vine due to the lack beneficial information. A few tips to keep your ideas fresh and the content up to par is subscribing to an RSS feed and initially considering joining sites like Technorati, MyBlogLog & SEOmoz.

External Web - All objects that indirectly related to the site, like a link to the site found thru another blog/forum/article/etc that does not fall under your domain name.

* Web Directories, submitting your site to the top web directories can garner you some great exposure and here I've laid out a quick table of some of the webs best free & paid directories, it's currently highlighted for a "Budget SEO" scenario with a $500 limit for directory submissions which are based on their Google Page Rank and their Alexa Rank($507 to be exact). For those fortunate enough where a budget isn't a problem, I would suggest all of them and if you don't want to hit the whole lot, consider DMOZ and Jayde for the free sites, BOTW, Business.com, Yahoo Directory and Starting Point; which should create a nice surge for your sites initial backlinks, but take into account that the more credible a directory is (A higher Google PR number and a lower Alexa number) the better your chances are in an increasing the sites ranking.

* Articles/PR submission sites, play a big part spreading the news about your new/fresh content to the rest of the web. The above aspects of SEO merely just get your Domain out in the great WWW and this next part will complete the circle of information submission (The Green highlights are ideal Article Submission sites and the Yellow highlighted rows are PR Submission sites).

*MySpace News is fairly new but it is backed by a powerhouse dot com, the initial number are skewed due to the MySpace domain name, but I would not be surprised to see this aspect of MySpace grow just as fast as their user base, which is pretty fast...

As you can see by the chart it's easy to get the word out about your article without having to spend a dime, but you may spend a nice chunk of time doing so. Now the same can almost be said for most of the PR companies, but if you want to break into some of the inner circles of the web, you might want to pony up a few bucks.

* Social Networking/Blog sites, aside from providing your readers with quality content and good links, as a blogger you need to get the word out about your blog. All the steps above are primarily for getting the word out about your site time for you need to gain some credibility within the blogging community:

Technorati is a must for any Blogger, so join up, interact in their community and use their search function to help create ties & credibility to other blogs and building up your blogroll (If you can't find Blogs you're interested in at Technorati, check out Ice Rocket another blog search engine).

Now, I don't mean go and spam away your url/email address on everyone's blog within the comments section, as you'll become hated very quickly, also note that your comments should bare some useful information to the Author, not merely a "your blog is Awesome, FTW 1337 I l(_)\/z teh I/\/7@/2\/\/3bZ!!!". As far as link baiting goes, the same rules should apply, as you want to gain their trust within the blogging realm; remember everything in moderation. As far as leaving your signature in the blog comment area I would opt against doing so, especially since most comment submission boxes allow for an url; here's an older post that addresses it, but it is still a relevant issue.

Hopefully this write-up reaches those who, like myself a few months ago were completely lost in a sea of information and for those unlucky individuals who may still be lost, floating about on their makeshift driftwood rafts, like Chris Elliot in Cabin Boy, I hope that this does find you and brings about some closure to the world of SEO. Although this is merely a quick lesson on SEO, there are still many more hurdles that await you out there, like Google Page Rank and how it works.

-Will Radcliffe
About the Author

A trio of young business savvy entrepreneurs whose passion for thinking outside the books has led them down the path of the dot com world.
http://www.AdSenseThai.Net