Want search engine traffic? Like people visiting you? Then you’re like every webmaster in the world. What’s going to differentiate you, then, is the ability to implement and maintain the following website factors. Get going, be smart, and be dedicated – and you’ll be well on your way to a nice, targeted stream of traffic for a long, long time to come.

1. Title Tags – Your title tags should include keywords, have the most important keywords first, and be shorter than 70 characters. You can find a Title Tag optimizer here.

Bad Example – Mr James Handyman Shop – Tools, House Supplies, Yard Equipment, Wood & Sod

Good Example – Tools, House Supplies, Yard Equpment, Wood & Sod | Mr. James Handyman

2. Image Optimization - Alt tags should continue keywords and be included in your image HTML code. These help optimize your site further for targeted keywords and also make the site more searcher-friendly for those with disabilities, or with images disabled. These will also drive a significant amount of traffic through image search.

Similarly, IMG filenames should reflect your keywords and also the ALT tags you’re using. This will drive even more traffic, increase usability and provide keyword relevance to the search engines. For more depth on this subject, check out Pearsonified’s post on Image Optimization.

Bad example – <img src=”DSC00056.jpg”>

Good example – <img src=”House_Supplies.jpg” alt=”House Supplies”>

3. URL Structures – The search engines enjoy URL structures that are keyword rich, and short. The closer to the front of the URL the keyword is, the better.

Bad example – http://www.tools.com/shop/category/brand/132359?.html

Good example – http://www.tools.com/shovels.html

4. Redirects – Every website should have one URL that the server redirects to when people try and get to the front page. This means that http://www.tools.com, http://tools.com, http://www.tools.com/index.html, should all go to one place. Whether or not you choose http://www.tools.com or http://tools.com is up to you, but either one is preferable over the index.html version.

Doing this will tell the search engines which version of the site is your homepage, rather than having to guess. It will also redirect all the link juice on your site that points to each of the non-emphasized portions and point it towards your own website.

You can find redirect options through most hosting providers’ website control panel.

5. Content – Sometimes webmasters can make the mistake of having a page that’s all images, flash and gimmick. Search engines pick up on solid, written content that is keyword rich, so it’s important to always have at least a paragraph or two talking about the keyword focus of the page. Make sure you maintain usability, though, because sometimes trying too hard to talk to the search engines will mean that you will turn off the end user, the person that’s most important to reach.

6. Site Architecture – It is our strong recommendation that the more competitive and challenging a keyword is to rank for, the higher it should be in a site’s internal architecture. This allows for a higher amount of link juice, the stuff that enables a site to rank higher, to get to the page. This means that these pages you want Google to see (and rank), should be linked to from the front page, or at worst, two clicks away, for a moderately sized site.

How easy are you making it for Google to spider your site, and reach the sites you want ranking?

7. Duplicate Content – Many sites have duplicate content issues, in that they re-use several content pieces over, and over again. The search engines dislike that and can de-index these pages if they recognize them as such. A rough guideline is to have about 30% unique content on each page. Be aware that the search engines are intelligent enough to recognize site structure and things of that nature, and will most likely only be counting the body content portion of our website in these valuations.

Sometimes, duplicate content is unavoidable. In these cases, try and have these pages be linked to on deeper subpages, where link juice distribution isn’t as important. On the higher pages, you can waste linkjuice funneling to these pages that the engines see as unworthy of being indexed.

8. Site Maps – Including a site map is a good way to let the search engines know exactly what pages you want indexed, and with what priority. They won’t always adhere or completely stand by your site map, but it’s a good starting point for saying “look at this, it’s important”.

Google has a good guide to creating a site map here. You should create a site map within your own website, too.

Want more tips? Follow Ross on Twitter or check out his Authentic Marketing blog online.

Restaurants are generally still pretty oblivious to the opportunities that exist for them on the internet. Local companies often don’t connect the global reach of the internet to their little spot on the planet, but large opportunities still exist to connect their little world to their customers that use the internet. For most restaurants, this is almost their entire customer base.

Not saying “Hello” to your clients, continuing a relationship, and building upon the one you already formed is a large missed opportunity in the restaurant business. Use the following steps to start creating and developing your customer relationships.

1. Make Your Location Known

On your business website (you have one, right?), make sure you have citations of your location on most of the pages. Be certain it’s natural but especially try and get your contact information on the home page, about page, and contact page. These location citations are important to the search engines to prove that you are who you say you are, and your business is located in a set, established location.

2. Start Generating Local Citations

Similarly, the search engines need to find external citations of your business location on the internet to help solidify that you are who you say you are. These citations also generally serve as backlinks for your website, and are a good way to start establishing trust in the SERPs.

The first step is getting your restaurant listed properly in the search engines themselves. Use the following URLs to submit your restaurant to each major search engine:

Google Places

Yahoo! Local

Bing Local

When creating your listing on Google, you’ll have the ability to add relevant local keywords for your restaurant. You can list up to five categories. Immediate recommendations for these keywords are “City restaurants”, and “restaurants city”, as well as restaurant type specific, such as “Chinese restaurants city”, or “City Chinese restaurants”. A picture of the Google interface for adding your restaurant is below.

Google is by far the most important local listing platform, but Bing and Yahoo still have areas where you should register your business. You should use best practices similar to the instructions given above to get your website ranking for the same keywords in the local listings.

Outside the search engines, there is an assortment of general and local business listing areas with a multitude of benefits, from actual traffic, to SEO value, to citation “local listing” value.

Websites with general business value, that generate direct traffic and walk-ins to your restaurant, are listed below. Fill these out carefully to ensure you are maximizing returns from your listings.

Judy’s Book

Citysearch

The rest of these listings won’t generate as much direct traffic to your business, but it will start the ball rolling towards proving your restaurant’s legitimacy in the search engines, both locally and in the general search results.

Superpages

Yellow Pages

Insider Pages

Localeze

Superpages

Cityvoter

Brownbook

White Pages

The USA Explorer

Mojo Pages

Yellow Book

There are several ways to find places to create citations. Besides the given links on this list, you can find more creative, local specific citations with Rand Fishkin’s tip on SEOMoz.

3. Get Started on Facebook and Twitter

If you haven’t gotten your restaurant on Facebook or Twitter, you should. Before starting your page, begin “listening”. Look at other restaurants that use Facebook and Twitter successfully, see what they’re doing well, and see what parts of it you can incorporate into your own pages.

Restaurants should pay special attention to their Facebook page. There is more of your target market on Facebook to be reached, so it makes sense to most efficiently use exposure in the place where you can utilize it best.

To get you started, check out the following awesome Twitter and Facebook restaurant accounts:

Wafels & Dinges in New York, New York: http://twitter.com/waffletruck | http://bit.ly/c6z3HT

Kogi BBQ in Los Angeles, California: http://twitter.com/kogibbq | http://bit.ly/1oBx1s

Devotay in Iowa City, Iowa: http://twitter.com/Devotay | http://bit.ly/arzb75

Nine Mile in Asheville, NC: http://twitter.com/ninemile | http://bit.ly/9vLvgQ

21^st Amendment in San Francisco, California: http://twitter.com/21stAmendment | http://bit.ly/bQS1Ps

Here’s an example from 21^st Amendment’s website, where they link to their social profiles. Your restaurant should do this too. It’s also a strong recommendation to build in the social symbols into your menus, so your customers know they can connect on Facebook and Twitter.

4. Leverage Mobile and the “Restaurant Web”

Outside of Facebook and Twitter, more general-business opportunities on the internet, there are also several restaurant specific platforms you should take advantage of to make the most of your great food.

Yelp.com

Yelp is the ultimate resource for restaurants on the internet, providing the biggest database of restaurant reviews online. Because of the popularity and mass of Yelp, it is impossible to ignore this resource. Check out Yelp’s business owner’s guide to get started and also Mashable’s Yelp for Business guide to maximize the benefit you can receive from Yelp.

Grubhub.com

GrubHub allows you to find restaurants in your area that deliver and gives you the ability to order online without ever having to speak to someone. Get your restaurant listed by going to the website and contacting customer service, and they’ll get you started towards generating new business leads today.

OpenTable.com

OpenTable is a service that sets up instant dinner reservations online. Consumers looking to expidite the process will often come to OpenTable for the convenience it provides, and it’s a must for any busy restaurant. Start the listing process through their Restaurateurs page.

Urbanspoon.com

UrbanSpoon automatically redirects the incoming traffic to their local area, giving in-depth information about all the regional eateries. It offers a review system as well, making it a platform very similar to Yelp. To add your restaurant, use their submission form online.

Foursquare

Foursquare is a location platform that allows users to “check-in” at whatever location they’re at. For restaurants, this creates new customer loyalty opportunities. Your restaurant can offer specific deals through the platform for repeat visits, being the most loyal customer, or “wildcard” specials, so that a special is potentially available every time they check in. Learn more on Foursquare’s business page.

6. Coupon Sites

There are several coupon sites you can utilize to create awareness and increase loyalty for your website. Get your website listed on general restaurant coupon listings, get on Restaurants.com, or take part in Groupon.com to create huge results. Groupon.com is a “group coupon” service that requires large participation for the coupon to work, which means a potentially huge influx of customers for your restaurant.

To get you started, here are a few of the best coupon services on the internet:

Savings.com

Retailmenot.com

Couponcabin.com

Couponmom.com

Get Started!

There are plenty of opportunities in internet marketing to leverage technology to sell food to thousands of potential new customers. This guide is a great way to begin the process of driving thousands of new walk-ins to your restaurant.

Want more awesome internet marketing tips? Follow Single Grain bloggers Sujan Patel and Ross Hudgens on Twitter.

Got Great Title Tags? Odds are, your pages probably have some optimized title tags. Sometimes these are automatically created by Wordpress, or were generated by the website designer without any SEO implications in mind. Other times, someone read a Beginner’s Guide to SEO, threw some stuff on there, and off your website went. Turns out, your title tags probably aren’t up to snuff. There are a few SEO and usability improvements webmasters can make to improve their title tags, today.

Keyword, Brand

Unless you’re Pepsi or Coke or Sony Pictures, you probably don’t deserve to have to your brand name listed first. The only real benefit to this setup is branding – so unless you’re in a major brand war or have a domain that generates only brand clickthroughs (like Pepsi, nobody searches for and purchases soda online, so there is little SEO benefit to having “Soda” or something first), the benefit here is minimal. You can still get your brand name in there, but it will almost always be more beneficial to garner the strong SEO benefit putting the keyword first will provide.

Title Tag Length & You

Many people that work in the SEO industry or  on websites in general don’t really take strong enough account of title tag length. On Google, the most important search engine, title tags will only be displayed up to 70 characters. For usability reasons, and for our next tip, it is advantageous to keep your title tags under or at this 70 character limit. Your result in the SERPs will look sexier and will definitely be easier to understand, which will lend to higher clickthrough rates, more traffic and a ball rolling down the hill that will supply more and more traffic.

SEOMofo has a great SERP Snippet Optimization Tool so you can play around with title tag length and not have to do any of that garn-fangled math in your head.

Blending On-Page Optimization with your Title Tag

The great thing about this 70 character rule is that it tends to blend seamlessly with a strong on-page optimization plan. If you’re naturally using keywords in your title tag and on page, this is a near-optimal ratio for blending a reasonable amount of keywords per page, and also optimizing strongly for them in the content, H1 and Alt Tags.

When you push beyond this 70 character rule, you’re almost always targeting too many keywords, focusing poorly, and not providing strong content on page. Sticking strongly with 70 character title tags is a great first step to superb on-page SEO.

Titles Get You Jobs.. and Traffic

Once you’ve implemented the tips above, you’re well on your way to maximizing your on-page efforts. Never overdo it, keep usability at the forefront, and maintain a focus on SEO, and your website will drive good, targeted leads for the duration of it’s existence.

Ross Hudgens’ title is Senior SEO Analyst. He also blogs on his personal website, Authentic Marketing.

Whatever company can do this most effectively will most likely get the rankings, get the traffic and get the money, creating a turnover that means more money that can be spent on SEO and SEO processes, which creates a wider gap between one and two. Every business must do their best to grow their SEO efforts, get links and scale their campaign to win the battles that happen every day in the SERPs.

Here are just a few tips to get your scaling started so you can grow your SEO efforts to the top of the SERP ladder.

1. Hire well – and hire cheap. SEO campaigns have several layers, with each having various levels of experience required. Some of it is strategy intensive, with heavy experience required. Other parts simply require labor hours – parts like low quality content creation, article directories, rank tracking, and etc. These tasks shouldn’t be assigned to high-paid SEO vets, they simply need to be done. However, there’s enough required that you don’t want a McDonalds employee to be working the ship. Instead of craigslist, get on job boards at colleges and post for intern and part-time positions to fill these roles.

You’ll be able to get smart individuals who aren’t looking for career growth right away. You’ll have decent turnover, but getting three or four people doing the low-level tasks will enable you to weed out the less skilled at an inexpensive rate. For those who prove to be linchpins, you can offer full-time roles as SEO Analysts later down the line.

2. Build out in-house processes. Every time a task is performed, you should contemplate ways that you can refine and streamline that process so that you a) don’t have to do it again or b) do it faster. Implementing Standard Operating Procedures creates a company culture and a consistent standard, and also installs a methodology for future use. A few good suggestions for SEO process improvement we use at Single Grain are screen recording (Jing and Camtasia), for employee training videos, and information-architecture based organization formulated on usage frequency.

If you have a process that requires little brain power or any kind of data entry or repetition, you can build out a process to do it automatically. You’ll have initial sunk costs, but after that, your SEO campaigns will be that much more effective.

3. Outsource where necessary. SEO tools are numerous, and each one offers an opportunity to speed up a task. Instead of building out an application to do an SEO task, investigate the multitude of SEO tools available to see if someone has done it for you already. Most are free and offer a speedy alternative to doing the work yourself.

There are also several outsourcing websites you can use to get your more monotonous tasks done, quicker. Odesk, Elance, Textbroker and Mechanical Turk are all good options for your various SEO tasks. Rand Fishkin has a good post on SEOMoz about the strengths and weaknesses of each.

4. Put in the work. There is no instantaneous way to scale your SEO campaign. Many of the ways to do so come from working through a SEO campaign and uncovering the multitude of ways you can automate and outsource pieces of it efficiently. These differ depending on the vertical, but they all exist. Scaling intelligently comes with time putting in the man hours, understanding where you can scale, and immediately taking the steps to do so.

Those who continue to undergo data entry and repetitive tasks without urge to improve their processes will inevitably get left behind in the SERPs by those that chose to do so.

5. Test, rinse, repeat. Every time you implement a process or application to help with scaling, testing is crucial. If you miss even one minor detail, long-term problems can show their face in the future and cause you major stress. Undergoing strong quality assurance (QA) assessment procedures are important to make sure your scaling operations provide large positive ROI, not huge loss.

6. Think about hiring a SEO company. For many internet businesses, hiring on an external SEO company may be your best bet for immediate return on investment. Strong SEO companies already have all of the above standards in place, and since they have already done the work of refining the processes to reduce cost, their mark-up for profit will actually make it preferable for you to outsource to them rather than hire internally. Building out a SEO team is time-intensive and may take years to turn into an efficient, thriving machine, so using an external panel of SEO experts may provide the highest positive return.

While an external SEO company is doing your work, think about hiring an internal SEO intern or a relatively inexperienced SEO to begin the build out internally. Be wary, though, as losing long-term focus can turn this process into a time and money leech. Ask your SEO company for advice on how to do this, if they’re value-focused and are looking out for your best intentions, they will supply good advice on how to turn your external SEO hires into internal operations.

Want more SEO tips? You should follow me on Twitter.  Also, subscribe to our RSS feed.

Search Engine Optimization, and internet marketing in general, is a strange beast. Due to the hyper-connectivity of its infrastructure, it is evolving quicker than print can catch up. Because of this, accurate paper books on the subject are few and far between, and as such, there are few paperbacks SEO’s can take on their camping trips and beach visits to indulge in some off-hour learning.

While few directly-targeted SEO books exist, there are several other around or near the profession that will broaden and intensify every SEO’s skill set, whether it’s away from the computer or on it.

5. Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Chris Brogan and Julian Smith’s novel on how to build influence, improve reputation, and earn trust is a must for every marketing professional. The duo provides many quick, actionable tasks for the reader to immediately improve their business and/or their own internet presence. For the average SEO, expanding beyond simple link building is becoming more and more important. Building out a social network is a great, organic way to get links, and a necessary task moving forward.

As Google evolves, many believe that the search giant will find ways to incorporate the web’s social graphs into its algorithms, making getting a head start into the social world vital for any SEO’s career.

4. The Dip by Seth Godin

Seth offers vital advice for life in what is my favorite book of the renowned marketer.  Pulling the covers over one of the world’s most established clichés, Seth suggests that “winners do quit, and quitters do win.” By supplying strong. stringent details on when you should quit a job and when you should stay put, Godin supplies advice that will put you in position to maximize your career potential.

His theories don’t apply only to your career, either, as his “Dip” philosophy can be applied to several other areas of your life, saving you precious hours and making you cognizant that a “Dip” is soon to come.  Godin will let you know what to expect and what to do about the incoming slouch in the road.

3. Rework by 37Signals’ Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson

37Signals speed read is an informative book that serves both as an informative text on productivity and business, as well as a means of motivation. SEOs can benefit from its business essays like “ASAP is poision”, “Embrace constraints”, and “Interruption is the enemy of productivity”, amongst many others.

This quickly read book will undoubtedly give you a push into the next few weeks, generate a creative spark, and offer a clear path to improving your SEO processes and business in general.

2. The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence by Tom Peters

Tom has decades of relevant business experience, and he packs a lot of it into this 507-page book. The book reads smoothly because of its dissection (163 tips), but it isn’t without content. There is a lot for SEOs to learn in terms of leadership, consistency, career development, and of course, excellence.

1. Linchpin by Seth Godin

Two Seth Godin books on one list? There’s a reason why Godin is widely considered the greatest marketer in the world – it’s because he knows what he’s talking about. Linchpin dives into our current need to provide “emotional labor” in order to be irreplaceable. For SEOs, this means providing an irreplaceable “it” to our employers or clients.

Going the extra mile and offering constant process improvements are just two of the things Godin dives into in “Linchpin” that SEOs can utilize. Otherwise, the “Lizard Brain” and “shipping” are two additional tips that will make every SEO better, should they choose to utilize it.

Want more reading material? You should follow Single Grain on Twitter, or subscribe to our RSS feed.

One of the most critical errors businesses make is ignoring SEO in the initial web design process. Many of these errors can be covered up or improved slightly, but large gaffes in design can cause long term traffic loss and a quick path to an unsuccessful business.

Sometimes web designers can consider themselves proficient in SEO, but still miss certain areas in the design process, or not want to interfere with design dreams of the businesses they are creating a website for. As a business owner, it is important to keep every step of the web design process in mind and be knowledgeable about it when thinking about your own perfect design.

Step 1: Domain Registration

Ideally, a good domain name will be short, and contain some relevant keywords for your business. At this late stage in the domain registration game, if you aren’t willing to pony up a good amount of cash for a domain name, this is unlikely. A better bet is to use your company name and ignore “over-SEOing”, a frequent error of many business owners.

Keyword Stuffing in URLs
Instead of using a business name, many businesses will flood their URL with keywords in their vertical, hoping that this will mean immediate rankings in the search engines. While it may help in the short term, these kinds of domain names will lower usability, result in less clickthroughs, and also less links to your site as other linkerati determine the same thing.

Bad Example #1 – http://www.losangelescaliforniacosmeticdentist.com

Bad Example #2 – http://www.couponsdiscountspromocodes.com

Hyphenated URLs
Hyphenated URLs are commonly used because the initial keyword combination has already been registered. Unfortunately, these URLs aren’t nearly as attractive as they may seem. Studies suggest that these are seen as a poor quality signal to the search engines, and they retain many of the same qualities as the URLs that keyword stuff: lower clickthrough rates, and a strong sign that your website is not one worth linking to.

Bad Example #1 – http://www.sports-news.com

Bad Example #2 – http://www.cheap-airline-tickets.com

Poor Top Level Domain Choices (TLDs)
There is more data (and popular opinion) to suggest that many TLDs are looked at poorly over more popular TLD choices, such as .com, .org, or .net. While it isn’t a necessity to choose one of these TLDs, it’s our strong recommendation that you only choose a differing TLD if it enhances the brand or user experience in some way.

Good examples of ways a TLD can enhance user experience are with URL shorteners (bit.ly, is.gd), a music site (last.fm, has a connection to radio FM band), or television (TNT.tv).

Using it primarily as a way to get your keyword in the URL is probably a bad idea and will lead to the same long term problems that the previous two mistakes create. Even if the search engines view all TLDs equally, users don’t.

Bad Example #1 – http://www.sportsnews.biz

Bad Example #2 -  http://www.cheapairlinetickets.tv

Step 2: Website Planning

And next comes an arguably more critical part of the implementation process – the website planning itself. From top to bottom, SEO must be kept in mind, or the website will face some long term problems that may be difficult to repair.

URL Structure & Site Architecture
The biggest, and most difficult to repair problem with many websites is their initial URL structure and Site Architecture decisions. If a company starts a website and creates a five-level-deep site architecture to get to a prominent keyword, such as http://www.website.com/shop/buy/keyword.html, there is a significant link juice distribution problem that may be near impossible to repair.

Business websites should have URLs they want ranking two levels deep, at most. The deeper in the URL and internal linking structure a keyword is, the more difficult it becomes to get that page to rank for the targeted terms. Furthermore, some companies won’t even have keywords in the URL, making it even more problematic to get the desired results in the SERPs.

Content Usage
Content problems come in two forms – not enough of it and duplicating it too often. Some websites will use Flash and JavaScript too heavily and completely ignore standardized text. This text is a strong sign of keyword relevancy to the search engines and is vital to get pages to appear properly optimized for a search term you want to rank for.

If you are putting this text in JavaScript, Flash, or within images, you are short sighting your SEO efforts. Strong content is important both for user experience, and for helping the search engines connect your website to the keyword you desire.

JR.com has insufficient content on the page for MP3 players.

The second mistake is content duplication. Several websites will repeat a piece of content on several pages, most often product pages. This can come off as a duplicate content error to the search engines and cause some pages to be deindexed or devalued, or worse, make the search engine hate the entire site.

As a standard, try keeping about 30% of your content on page unique, if not more. If you have difficulties creating unique content for an enterprise-level site with thousands upon thousands of product pages, think about outsourcing content creation to cheap content providers such as Textbroker, Odesk, or ELance for affordable writing options.

Title Tag & Image Optimization
Other new designers will often forget to properly optimize their title tags or images for their SEO efforts. Luckily, this error is the most easily fixed, and can be done after the fact without much issue. However, a lack of initial title tag and image implementation is probably a good sign that the actual page itself is not properly optimized for a keyword, something that might not be so repairable after the fact.

Keyword Research
When initially implementing your website, you should have already done thorough keyword research on your industry. This will give you a structure to base around when creating your pages, navigation, and overall strategy. Even if you do every other step right, if you’re targeting keywords with little traffic opportunities, much of your effort is wasted.

Step 3: Website Rollout

There’s more to the initial design process than just the on-page design. How you roll out your SEO campaign can be a strong impact on how quickly you rank in the SERPs, and a mismanaged implementation can mean a four or five month process of getting your site seen as trusted in the search engines.

Beta Invites
If your business is some sort of web application, a good way to get links, and hype, is by offering beta invites to power bloggers on the internet. They will frequently write reviews of your service, offering high quality link juice, and also provide some much needed hype if your application is indeed up to snuff.

Don’t just send out a template to reach these bloggers. Throw out personalized, detailed inquiries that will grab these influencers. For a good list of tech influencers and a little inquisition on how they like people to query them, check out Techipedia’s post on How to Get an Influencer’s Attention.

HQ Link Directories
Every website should start their rollout by submitting to the biggest, most trusted link directories immediately. Single Grain recommends Best of the Web, Business.com, Joeant.com, and the Yahoo! Directory.  Getting your business on these four directories is a great first step to getting seen as a reputable site to the search engines.

Local Listings
If you’re a local business, make sure you get your business cited and submitted to as many local listings as possible. Getting in the “10-pack”, or the local results, is relatively easy if you optimize efficiently. You can use Getlisted.org to see if you’re included in the most important local directories.

You’re ready to start! The SEO process isn’t done, actually, it’s just beginning, but at least you haven’t ignored the implementation steps that matter most if you utilized this list. As you progress forward, think about structuring a SEO campaign with long-term focus. This important next step will help your site continue its’ success in the SERPs.

Ross Hudgens is a SEO Analyst for Single Grain. Follow Singlegrain on Twitter here.

There’s a lot of  “best practice” SEO information out there, much of it overlapping. You can find the same thing repeated and then repeated again, with a little different language and a minor detail changed here or there. This post is about providing you five hard and fast SEO tips that you can’t find everywhere, but you can use immediately to improve your SEO campaigns.

1. Using domain names in anchor text. Google’s “brand update” a long time ago brought some of the more established names on the web higher in the SERPs. How did Google do this? Did they hand pick all of these brands? Unlikely.  It is more probable that Google attached a metric to the number of domain-name instances in anchor text, a strong indicator of brand strength.

How often do you see “Pepsi soda” linked to as only “soda”? Not that often – Pepsi’s superior brand causes people to refer to them in their anchor text. While you may never be able to get as many links with targeted anchor text as Pepsi does, it can’t hurt to include your domain/brand name in a lot of your links. It is Single Grain’s suggestion that you include your targeted keywords in there whenever possible as well – such as “Single Grain SEO” or “SEO Company Single Grain”. At worst, it helps maintain a healthy, natural link profile. At best, it will spring you higher in the SERPs.

2. Using Synonyms in anchor text. Google’s search algorithms have evolved to the point where they have begun to pick up the intricacies of language – noticing when a change of plural to singular can dramatically change the meaning of the word, or when you use a synonym of similar meaning, that it is a positive indicator that the page is for the former keyword.

By knowing when our changes in anchor text dramatically change the meaning of the word, and also when synonym opportunities exist, we can maximize the anchor text value we receive for our targeted keywords.

3. Crunchbase. Is your company or SEO clients on Crunchbase? Use Crunchbase to get another company profile on the web, and a followed link back to your website. Although Crunchbase is specifically aimed at tech companies, they will almost always approve your company profile. Feel free to build it out with company information as a resource for consumers, shareholders or whoever else is interested in the company.

4. Checking your link acquisition target for full indexation. Most SEOs will look first level to see if a page is ranking for its own name and/or title tag, a strong indicator that it has the ability to pass link juice. Even if this is true, it’s important to assess whether or not the sub-pages of the domain are getting crawled as well. If your link is on a fourth-level resources page that isn’t indexed, why waste the time sending out a link request?

When checking Google for this level of indexation, check details like cache date, too. If a spider hasn’t been there for six months, what level of real link value can it pass, and if it does pass any, will you still be alive to realize its benefits?

5. Content writers. Do you manually write up content for SEO purposes? Use cheap writing services like Textbroker, or outsource your writing on Odesk or Elance to create content for you at a low cost. 300 word articles can run for as little as $3 on some services. Scaling with services such as this allow you to create great content for your websites and/or article directories without having to waste time training/hiring an intern, or manually writing them yourself.

There are layers upon layers of link sources, applications and productivity resources to make your SEO campaign more effective. Fully assessing and utilizing everything available to you is the only way you can assure your competitive advantage in the marketplace.

You should follow Ross on Twitter @RossHudgens. You can also become a fan of Singlegrain on Facebook at our fan page.

If you’ve worked in the SEO world for long enough, you’ll hear the phrase “naturally diversify your anchor text” more times than you can stand. Even if that’s the case, you hear it for a reason – doing so is very important to the health of your SEO campaign.

The good thing about anchor text is that you can manipulate it in a such a way that it will both provide a natural link profile, and also provide additional traffic through the search engines.

For the SEO optimized anchor text profile, you can equate it to something like Vitamin Water. Yeah, it’s good for you, but it was still a prepackaged equation thrown together by scientists in a factory. We can do that too, and by doing that, we maximize all those awesome clickthroughs we get to our site.

By doing keyword research, I’m assuming that you’ve established head keywords for your website. These get good volume and you constantly check their rankings because of that. Within these high volume terms, there are always “keyword splinters”, or other, less searched for variations of the head term. These vary depending on the keyword, but they always exist. These less-searched for terms nonetheless have some real volume and consumer intent to find your website, even if the relevancy isn’t a one-to-one match.

We can use keyword research tools to find these keyword splinters.  I particularly like Keyword Discovery, which will show you up to 100 keyword iterations of your short keyword search. Using the example “cheap flights”, one of the higher volume search terms in the travel space, we can see, even in the first ten results, four targeted queries we could use to mix up our cheap flights anchor text.

Cheap air flights, cheap flights airline, cheap airline flights, and cheap international flights are all very applicable for a page that is generally optimized for “cheap flights”. By mixing up our anchor text with the highest volume keyword splinters, rather than miscellaneous terms, we maximize our traffic potential while also maintaining a diverse anchor text profile the search engines love.

Depending on your niche, it may be difficult to uncover keyword splinters if the search volume is already low. Here, input yourself into the mind of the searcher and mix up anchor text with terms that properly match user intent.

If you use this methodology when mixing up your anchor text, you will see strong increases in your traffic gains, and a positive overall boost to your SEO campaign.

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Ontology, defined, is the formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. In the search space, ontology is used by the search engines to draw relationships between websites, establish link neighborhoods, and establish content relevancy on-page.

Understanding keyword ontology is vital for every operator in the SEO profession. Sometimes, they do it without ever knowing they’re doing it, as creating relevant, similar content is something that happens naturally throughout the internet. In some places, however, content breaks off this divide and hurts SEO for a given website. Other people perform ontological operations, but don’t fully flesh out its capability to maximize several areas of their search campaign.

GoRank has a good SEO Ontology Tool to get you started. Insert any word and they will pop out other synonyms for you to use in your campaign. Ontology is something you can also notice on Google’s Keyword Adword Tool, although it isn’t explicitly referred to by name.

There is an explicit difference between Keyword Research and Ontology Research. Keywords that are relevant to your website and keywords that have ontological relevance are occasionally different, and should be noted as such. The search engines will not always draw the keyword connection that you do. If Google sees a connection in its Adword tool, however, there’s a good chance that they do.

Understanding this, there are a few tips you can implement to strengthen your SEO campaigns:

Keep ontology in mind when creating content. Whether on-page or off, drawing ontological relevance when generating content will show that your website is relevant for whatever you have it optimized for, or are linking out to. By keeping a lot of these similar words in the content, you maximize the likelihood that your page is “perfectly optimized” for your targeted keywords.

Use it for keyword research. Ontology Tools are a good starting point for keyword research, and will help you spark some ideas for additional keywords you can rank or build out content for. Leveraging ontology in your information architecture will also maximize your on-page relevancy.

Diversify anchor text naturally. The search engine’s increased leans on ontology to power their search results means that you can use ontological relativity to diversify your anchor text and still garner benefit in the SERPs. Do your research in various areas, the most prominent of which being the SERPs, to identify words Google clearly sees as a synonym for your term.

Even if a word isn’t a direct indicator for your targeted keyword, diversifying your anchor text to use these natural, connected words can only improve your link profile.

Find link acquisition targets. You can use ontology to locate additional search queries to find good websites to get links from. You can also use search platforms like Google’s Blogsearch to find blogs that talk about your given target. You can either directly ask for a link or scheme a way to guest post on the blog. Either way can be extremely beneficial to your campaign given the extra ontological significance.

Ontology should be looked at as a sub-section of keyword research. Understanding how the search engines interpret your keyword set will be important for maximizing your ranking potential. Leveraging every resource you have to uncover these connections will ensure that every path and methodology you have has been fleshed out.

When looking at your SEO campaign, you should deeply consider the long-term effects of what you – or whoever is in charge of your SEO – is doing. Implementing incorrectly can mean short term success with long term fallout. Wise scheduling and long-term focus allows for a long life of success in the SERPs.

Hold your keyword focus. Are you a relatively small outfit that has no short term probability of achieving the most popular one or two word keywords? Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore them in the short term. If your SEO campaign is effective you will slowly begin to crawl up the rankings for many of the most competitive terms, and you will soon see ranking for those keywords as a possibility.

If you suddenly switch your link building efforts to focus on these keywords, your link profile will become unnatural. Why does your historical anchor text only have long tail keywords, and then suddenly gets spiced up with these super-competitive terms? An introspective competitor, or Google themselves, could investigate you and notice this, kicking you back down the rankings.

For the most long and short term victories, start using these head keywords now. Your link profile will be as a natural today as it will be in ten years, and you’ll begin to see more success with the head keywords at an earlier date.

Maintain safe link-building methods. Are you buying links? Are you frequently buying links at places that appear unnatural, with anchor text that a real end user would never create? If so, your campaign may have short-term viability, but will most likely suffer in the long term. Maintain a natural link profile at all times and do everything it takes to build links without disturbing the end user, or the engines themselves. Upsetting either can be a death blow to your website and your dreams of ranking #1 for the most attractive of keywords.

Establish a universal company outlook. Half the battle in maintaining the two above strategies is maintaining and establishing the long-term goals with the company administration. If they’re with you in your long-term goals, they will be more willing to lose short-term battles in order to achieve them. Making clear from the get-go that shady short-term practices will fry long-term rankings is your only chance to maintain the campaign with a consistent budget while keeping the website afloat. A division in expectation can create corporate animosity that will ruin morale and lose jobs internally.