1. Developing an Online Content Strategy Sandra Rand www.sandrarand.com January 27, 2011

2. Keyword Research – the List Existing keyword audit Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools Sales team Current customers List root brands and product/service names Plug ‘em into a thesaurus Study competitors’ sites Add geographic and descriptive variations Social media conversations SocialMention.com Take all the variations and plug them Google’s Keyword Tool, which will suggest numerous other variations.

3. Keyword Research - the Approach PAID: Keyword Discovery (free & paid) Wordtracker (free & paid) SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool (sometimes free?) Wordstream Step 1: Introduce competitive keywords as the major categories in your navigation Step 2: Focus on low-hanging fruit for blog posts and static pages Low competition + higher search volume = sweet spot FREE: Google Adwords Keyword Tool Google Insights Google Traffic Estimator Google Wonder Wheel MSN AdCenter SpyFu Keyword Groupie

4. Writing for Humans “Create content that's fun, useful, engaging, linkable, likeable, and most of all, shareable!” –SEO Steve How To Top 10 / 5 / 3 Lists Best / Worst Figures / Numbers Media Photos Video Audio Answer questions Seasonality Current events

5. Writing for Search Engines Page title tag Homepage Format: “KW Phrase: Keyword, Synonym, and Topic| Company Name” Internal Page Format: “Keyword Phrase: Elaborate” Must be different for EVERY page on your site Ideal length: 66 characters long URL URL Format: “www.domain.com/category/keyword-happy-blog-post-title” Use dashes Variation of keyword phrase H1 Tag Variation on title tag Page Text 1 iteration of the target keyword per 100 words Ideal length: 450 words Meta description <150 characters – what shows up in Google & FB blurb when posting a link Meta keywords – doesn’t help, doesn’t hurt (2-5 variations of the keyword phrase) Images File name format: “descriptive-keyword-phrase.jpeg” Alt text: “Keyword-heavy description of what is in the image” WordpressPlugin: All in One SEO

6. Creating an Editorial Calendar WordpressPlugin: Stresslimit Editorial Calendar Editorial Calendar Template https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Alq_vQdhINVYdGVsTl80R3VIUkRURUlQR1UxTGFveGc&hl=en&authkey=CIjJlLQN Template adapted from Stephanie Schwab

7. Link Building Link = a “vote” from the referral site Anchor text: Buy Power Tools at Bob’s Hardwarevs. Click here to buy power tools Nofollow Manual link building vs. editorial link building Identify link targets: Open Site Explorer Yahoo Site Explorer

8. Measurement Traffic Rankings Increased Exposure in Search Engines # of keywords you’re ranked for # of pages indexed Crawl Frequency Inbound Links Conversions Set up goal tracking in Google Analytics to measure success

9. Questions?