I totally agree that you have to stay on top of you traffic generating tasks, but there are only about 5 tasks that you need to do with your website to set it up for 100% solid SEO. Meaning, once you set up the website with this these functions, as you add content to your website, all the SEO will be handled by your website. You do not have to do anything.

That is not that same as generating traffic to your website. After you write a blog post, or add content to your website, you need to do many things so that people know you put up new content. Eventually your content will make it into the search engines, but in most cases it will take a while, and I’m pretty sure if you wait for search engine traffic to grow, your business will suffer from lack f visitors.

5 Essential Tasks For SEO success

1. Start you SEO strategy when starting the business. You do not want to start a business, build a website, then focus on SEO. When you are creating a business plan, you NEED to define your market or niche.Who are you going to sell to? Who needs your product? the more narrow your niche the easier it will be to define your SEO strategy and mainly define the keywords you are going to use to attract customers…Here is an example of a very broad target market for a real estate professional:
   “Home buyers in Oakland California” – That market is very broad and when you try to reach that market with your message it will fall on deaf ears. Here is a better target market. “First time home buyers in Oakland California that want a condo” – There are still plenty of people in that target market and it will be much easier to get your message to the buyers because of less competition.
2. Define your carrier. How are you going to get your content to your market? You can blog, make videos, podcast, etc… Each of these carriers have ways to get your content to the search engines.Try making videos for Youtube, and embedding them into your blog. Youtube videos  have  fantastic search engine placement because Google has made a video section in search results. Then, by embedding into your blog, you can double up the content and keywords in your blog post.
3. Define your message. How do you describe your products or services? make sure you use popular keywords to describe your products or services. These description are usually on static pages on your website. Since they do not get updated often, you want to make sure they have the proper keyword density.
4. Make sure your website code is well formatted. You want the Googlebot to be able to easily understand your content, therefore make sure all the header tags, title tags, and main content is defined in your code.Make sure your webpage title, header tags and meta-data is different for each webpage. If you are using a blog to update your content there are plenty of good plugins like All in One SEO to let you fine tune each page, but in general, wordpress handles most of the SEO.
5. Use images effectively. A long blog post with no pictures can not only look daunting to read, but will drive many readers away. Break up the post with pictures. Not only does the post benefit, but you can also use Google’s image search to get more traffic. Google indexes everything, so if you have video, tweets, or podcasts, there is a section for it in Google.I started making sure my images had at least a good description in the alt and title parameters of the image tag. Sometimes, if I edit the picture myself, I try to make the filename include the keywords also. Google images now account for about 15% of my website traffic.

There is not much to it. When starting make sure you define your market. Everything else will fall into place after that. If you don’t know who you are targeting, you will never now how to contact them.

A wordpress theme is made of a couple major sections. The header, footer, and sidebar are easily managed in wordpress themes. Most users that just blog, don’t really care about the backend of their website. Highly dynamic Wordpress themes make it easy to make visual changes without knowing HTML or PHP code. Moving the sidebar from the left side to the right side can have huge impacts on how Google and other search engine spiders see your website.

Spiders see your website differently then  we (humans) do. That is why I will often tell clients to blog for a human but tweak for a robot. This means your blog posts should be interesting and easy to read while making sure that your keywords are on topic, relevant and dense.

Googlebot, the Google spider, queries both the human readable text and the HTML from your webpages. It looks for highlighted sections and also looks for hidden tags. It’s a bad idea to hide keywords and links from humans in order for the spiders to see them… Google knows!

Search engine spiders look for main content first and foremost. You would be surprised how good the spiders are at finding the “meaning” of your blog posts, and in turn the topic of your blog.

What does Google look for in your blog post?

• The page title tags
• the meta-keywords
• the main header (H1 tags)
• the main content

Make it easy for the spiders to index your content. Google rewards websites that are built well in terms of SEO.

the most common problem with custom Wordpress themes is that the sidebars might be in the wrong place and therefore get read before your main content. This is because sidebars are placed with a CSS style called “Float”. You can set the float to either left or right, depending on where you want the sidebar.

Even if you want the sidebar on the right side of the blog (main content), the code might appear first on the page, before the main content section. If your sidebar has H1 tags in it, Googlebot might get confused as to what the main content, topic, and keywords are for that webpage.

It’s not that hard of a fix. In most cases you can just move the DIV tags to after the main content section on the Wordpress files that display blog posts, like index.php and single.php

Mainly used for search engine optimization, and often referred to as internet currency, the more backlinks you have to your website the more authority your website has with Google and other search engines. Pagerank is the term Google uses for website authority. Google ranks websites on a scale of 1 to 10, with the higher the rank the more authority the website has.

Only a handful of websites have Pagerank over 8. you can count the the number of websites with pagerank of 10 on one hand.

Along with more website authority, backlinks also help with driving traffic to your website.

The best way to get backlinks to your website is to be active on social networks and create content on your website or blog that people will talk about. Run of the mill content that you can find anywhere on the internet will hardly ever get linked to. There are other ways to get backlinks to your website, such as paid links, linking websites, and website directories. We cover each type here in this blog.

Read more:

1. Backlinks on Wikipedia
2. Pagerank checker – Find out what your website Pagerank is
3. The Google toolbar displays Pagerank for every webpage displayed in your firefox browser.