5 Steps to a Killer SEO Strategy

A killer SEO (search engine optimization) strategy does not happen after you build your website... it begins before you build your site.

Here are 5 crucial steps to a killer SEO play

1. Analyze the Market for Opportunities
You should not even build your website until you do a proper analysis of the market you're interested in breaking into. Some markets are easy to dominate and some markets are too hard to dominate without a huge budget, so be sure to analyze the market to find the keywords and key phrases you know you can generate rank for. Many website owners don't think of their SEO strategy until after they built their site and realize they're not attracting visitors. Save yourself some money and do it right from the beginning.

2. Design your SEO Strategy around the opportunities you've researched.
Once you understand the keywords and key phrases you've targeted as being vulnerable, design your SEO strategy to generate traffic for those phrases. Depending on the phrases, you must design landing pages specifically optimized for those phrases. Design your visible content and invisible content (take it easy- we're talking meta data here, not black hat SEO)to accumulate rank. This will obviously involve your main website, but and also may involve a series of other web 2.0 properties that will rank for the key phrases you've targeted.

3. Design a content acquisition strategy.
Your content acquisition must provide fresh, optimized content around the opportunities you've targeted. Content must be original, link-worthy and first class if you expect to attract visitors. If you don't have fresh content, your website may as well be a business card; it may be nice to look at, but no one will find it unless they're searching for your name, or they know the exact URL they're looking for.

4. Execute a link acquisition campaign.
Once you have great content, you need to develop links from other places on the web which point to your site. A combination of one-way and reciprocal links is important, but it is also important to have links from high quality sites which are relevant to your site and industry. (We're assuming you already have a solid internal linking strategy before you go out and develop back links).

5. Monitor your progress.
It's critical that you monitor your progress as your campaign unfolds. It's amazing to me that most SEO experts don't even know what page each key phrase is on as they expend their effots (and your money) on organic search engine optimization.

For more information on SEO and search engine marketing, you can go to Andrew Orlander and Rankdog.com.

Understanding Site Ranking

Simply put, SEO is the science of customizing elements of your website to acheive the best possible search engine ranking. This means your website has to do more than simply be recognizable; it needs to satisfy a certain set of criteria that not only gets the site catalogued by search engines, but can get it catalogued above all the other sites that fall into the same category.



This is no easy task, but if you understand the criteria by which a search engine crawler determines your site's rank in a set of results, you can build or modify your website to ensure these criteria are met.



Some of the criteria include: Anchor text, site popularity, link content, topical links, keywords, site language, content and site maturity.



Although it's easy to get caught up in a lot of technical issues, a good rule of thumb for designing your website is this: design it to be useful to your visitors above all. At the end of the day, search engines are most concerned with the behavior of visitors on your site; if they find it useful and take the actions you want them to take, the no matter how the algorhythms may change, your site will be ranked better if you keep that in mind.

The Center for Medical Weigth Loss Appoints Microsoft Executive to its Board

The Center for Medical Weight Loss appointed MIcrosoft Executive, Scott Howe to its board.

Scott Howe, a seasoned veteran in the online advertisisng space and a corporate executive at Microsoft was recently appointed to the board of directors at The Center for Medical Weight Loss.

CMWL, a 3 year old business, (http://cmwl.com) is transforming the way Americans view the treatment of weight loss by empowering physicians to help patients with obesity and the co-morbid conditions associated with it. The announcment was made yesterday.

Mr. Howe has global revenue and cost responsibility for all existing and emerging businesses in Microsoft's Advertiser and Pubisher Solutions Group.

Kevin Eberly took over the CEO position in November of 2009. The company, originally founded by Dr. Michael Kaplan, Richard Lee, Andrew Orlander and Joel Levinson has grown exponentially and now has over 300 centers in 43 states.