[3 Years On BHW] The Only SEO Guide That's Worth Your Time

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SEO is like an enormous clock. It only works if all the little cogs mesh together. Now, a clock needs to be clean, well-lubricated, and wound tight. The best clocks have jewel movements, cogs that fit, that cooperate by design.

You must be bewildered right now. After all, this is supposed to be an SEO guide, so why am I over here talking about clocks and referencing a Pixar movie? Well, allow me to explain: you see, marketers both old and new to the SEO industry often become fixated on one specific aspect of SEO and ignore the rest.

Now, let's say on-page SEO is a cog for a clock and off-page SEO is a cog for a clock. Certain groups of marketers, namely some of those who identify strictly as “white hat SEOs” or “black hat SEOs”, become hyper-focused on on-page SEO or off-page SEO respectively. However, the problem with this type of thinking is that both of these groups are hyper-focused on separate parts of SEO when they would see much better results if they simply incorporated both on-page and off-page SEO tactics into their SEO campaigns.

In essence, they would have the cogs cooperate with each other to make a clock; if the clock has missing or broken cogs, it either won't work at all or won't work as well as could.

Now, let's expand on-page SEO and off-page SEO into multiple smaller factors, or cogs for the sake of the analogy. While some cogs are arguably more important than others, and there most certainly are cogs you can probably leave out, the important thing here is that you focus on all of the cogs rather than the a single one in order to build both a Google-friendly website and a user-friendly website.

Part 1: Your Specialised Tools

Before we begin, I'd like to recommend a few tools to make things a bit easier. All of these tools are available for free, so there's no need to worry about investing any money.
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics
Wordpress SEO by Yoast (For Wordpress Sites)
Google Keyword Planner
Mozbar
*If you'd like to learn how to get search volume results back in the Google Keyword Planner, please see my post here.
*I previously recommended the use of the Ahrefs Toolbar over the Moz Toolbar. Ahrefs picks up more significantly more backlinks than Moz, though they've recently limited their toolbar to only work for people paying for their service.

Part 2: Developing Your SEO Strategy

Nearly everyone has their own unique SEO strategy. For example, my usual strategy focuses mostly on technical and on-page SEO and involves targeting low search, low competition keywords in the beginning of my SEO campaign before gradually moving up to more difficult keywords as my site gains momentum (which is when I'll focus on building backlinks). The reason I like this strategy is because it requires much less effort than the other strategies I've used in the past, and because my competitors will often avoid targeting the same keywords as me due to my initial keywords not being “worth their time”.

However, much like eating a clock, one issue with this strategy is that it can be very time consuming; it might take a while before you see any decent results. Most people just aren't interested in waiting, and this is often the case when there are other strategies out there that can bring in traffic much faster.

With that said, while you can do everything in this guide verbatim, it's best if you just add your own unique spin on each section of this guide.

Part 3: Performing Keyword Research

Something important to note before you open up the Google Keyword Planner is that you should disregard the “competition” shown in the Google Keyword Planner. This is not the competition level for the search engine results pages (SERPs), but rather how many people are bidding on the keyword in Adwords.

Now, let's say you and @pewep have entered a joint venture (JV) to build a hypothetical site in the psychic niche. You two have decided that you want to write an article about the development of Pewep's powers through celibacy and you plan to promote the article on psychic forums. However, both of you figure that a bit of organic traffic would be great for exposure, so you fire up the old Google Keyword Planner and type in something like “Psychic Celibacy”.