Over at Yahoo Answers someone asked this question

New online business – SEO?

Hi there, I am setting up a new online business and need some advice on how to do the SEO. I used to look after a website with my old job and the agency I used charged us £1000 p/month for adwords but being a small business I won’t have that kind of budget. Thanks

I talk to a lot of people every day that have similar questions about SEO and how to get a website ranked. So I thought I would post it here along with my answer.

The best way to get a website ranked in the search engines is to totally ignore them. When starting out with a website you are going to have a hard time ranking the site right out of the box. So it’s best to figure out other ways to market the site, things like YouTube videos, Facebook, Twitter, Press Releases, Squidoo, and so on. This allows us to get traffic immediately as well as start building backlinks for our site.

After you’ve figured out all the neat ways to drive traffic to a website and make sales then it’s time to start on the SEO.

I’ll usually pull up Google’s Wonder Wheel to get an idea of the pages I want to create. To pull up the Wonder Wheel, hit show options in the Google search results page. A menu will pop up and from that menu click Wonder Wheel.

Type our main keyword in the search box and we will get a list of all the categories Google feels are relevant to that keyword. From here we start building pages.

I am going to build a website theme shaped like a pyramid.

Our pyramid will have three levels. Top, middle, and bottom.

Top of Pyramid

● Tough competitive keyword phrase

Middle of Pyramid

● Medium competitive keyword phrases

● A category/related topic under the keyword phrase at the top of the pyramid

Bottom of Pyramid

● Long-tail, keyword phrases with low competition

● A category/related topic under the keyword phrases in the middle of the pyramid

● Extremely specific
This makes our website extremely themed, and allows for a streamlined experience from extremely vague (at the top), to extremely specific (at the bottom).

The idea is to focus the site on one idea and keep every page relevant to that same idea.

The first step is to create the low competition long-tail keyword phrases at the bottom of the link pyramid. Since these long-tail keyword phrases generally have little competition, we will quickly be able to boost these long-tails to the top of the search engines, allowing us to get near-immediate traffic with very little effort.

The secret is in the linking structure we will be implementing. This linking structure will pass the link juice around the website and then up to the higher levels of our pyramid.

Now…keep I mind that every keyword we select for the middle level of our link pyramid, will be based off the keyword at the top level of our pyramid.

For example, if the keyword phrase at the top of the pyramid is website design,

the keyword phrases in the middle of your link pyramid will be sub-niches of

Website design (e.g. Website Design Company, Website Software Development, Shopping Cart Website Design, and WordPress Website Design).

Every keyword phrase we select for the bottom level of our link pyramid will

be based off a keyword phrase in the middle level of our link pyramid.

Now…each webpage at the bottom level of our pyramid will be in a “keyword group” based on a keyword phrase that we found while expanding on the keyword phrases in the middle level of our pyramid.

We will link each webpage at the bottom level of our pyramid together in a non-specific order. These WebPages will also link to the corresponding webpage in the middle of the pyramid, and will also link to the webpage for that group at the top of the pyramid.

At the same time these pages are being built and set up we need to be getting links to the pages from outside sites using our keywords for that page as anchor text as well as other words.

And this is just enough to get you started, there is a lot more to it.

There are so many ways to get a product or information noticed that we’ve reached the point of being able to make Money online without even having a website.

I can create a squidoo page, blog page, facebook page or even a twitter page and drive traffic from around the web to that page. Or for that matter I could advertise on Craig’s list, eBay or any of the other hundreds of classified ad/auction sites and not even have any kind of landing page.

Geeks on Steroids

I had decided this year to write some really good articles on ways to make Money online and I’ve done just that. However, what I’ve found out is that no matter how good the articles are or how cutting edge the content is it’s really hard to get people to link back to those articles.

Or for that matter even comment on the blog post. To write a good article takes about a day however, to write something just to put on the blog only takes about 5 minutes. Google sees both articles the same so I have to wonder how in the heck all these folks that believe all you have to do is write some good content and you will out rank everything comes from.

That being said I learn more and come up with more ideas when I write good information articles, so I am going back to writing those kinds of articles.

gfilotto.com

Here’s what really gets me, the guy that owns gfilotto.com website has made some personal attacks against me, my business and my husband. Even saying that we are scammers even though he has never done business with us nor does he personally know anyone that has done business with us.

The guy is suppose to be some type of Hypnotist, however I would personally wonder about someone hypnotizing me that makes personal attacks against people while having zero personal experience in the matter.

Other words, if he would call someone a scammer while knowing nothing about this person than what keeps him from claiming to be a hypnotist and having zero experience in hypnotizing people?

Think of your website as being a representative of your business. If the website is not designed properly or the navigation is confusing or even worst doesn’t work properly then people will not trust your business. 87% of every person looking to make a purchase from your business will first go online and check out your company before making a purchase.

Your website has to show your website visitors that his or her life would be easier, more productive and happier if they owned what it is you are selling.
And this brings us to the web designer.

You first need to look at the web designer’s site and see how the sites, colors, images, logo etc. flows together. If their site doesn’t pull you in and make you want to look around and eventually make a purchase then how in the world can you expect them to design you a website that will do all these things.
Color schemes are very important as different colors create a reaction within the person that is viewing the site. Blues build trust while reds are a conflicting color as well as hard on the eyes.

It’s impossible to build a site out of a single color, so your web designer needs to be able to work with colors that will complement each other. And once again by looking at the web designer’s site as well as the sites in his/her portfolio we can get an idea how good he/she is at working with multiple colors. The fonts used and the readability of the site is also very important.

Keep in mind that some clients have an idea going into a project and are unwilling to take advice from their web designer so it’s important to spend some time and look through the web designers portfolio to see how well the majority of the site designs are at pulling you into them and making you want to make a purchase.