We hardly ever find an actual training course online for SEO training of any kind, so this is pretty cool.

The search engine optimization industry has been changing a whole ton through out 2008, we can’t wait to see whats to come in 2009!

Happy Holidays from Search Atlanta!

Is your site a steady business tool that consistently delivers highly targeted conversions into sales?

If not, you need SEO.

In short, SEO is the optimization of a site to incorporate elements that are considered best practice standards by the three major search engines Google, Yahoo! and MSN. We will be frequently posting steps for a good SEO campaign on this blog so come back for more lessons. Heres your first one!

LESSON #1

Every SEO campaign should start with keyword research. Study the industry and uncover all keywords people would use to find your site or product and dig even deeper to uncover long tail terms. Then once you have a very large list of keywords to begin with, whittle that list down by determining average monthly search volume for those keywords. This process will help you determine what keywords are popular and which ones are useless to rank for. Then you need to know how difficult each term will be to compete for, so determine where your site ranks in the engines for each keyword as well as your main competitors. If the first 5-10 listings in the search engines for your keywords aren’t that competitive, then you may have a few low competition, high traffic keywords that you should be able to rank for and convert into traffic on your site. After you have whittled this list down into these few keywords which might be like 10% of the keywords you started with (depending on your indusrty), this list is called a keyword bucket and should be archived. You may want to reassess your keyword buckets in about 6 months. Now that you have your keyword bucket you are ready to begin analyzing your rankings so you have good before/after rankings. You can also get started on writing title, description and keyword tags for the different pages of your site.

Next lesson; META Tags!

You will notice off to the right -> we will be adding links to resources we consider useful in the SEO industry. Check em out!

Keep your eyes out for more lessons as we uncover advanced tips and insights into the great world that is search.