Resources for SEO on a shoestring budget

If you are like many marketers these days, budgets are tight - if not shrinking and you are being asked to do more with less.  One tactic could be going through your current client and prospect pool and trying to re-sell, cross-sell or up-sell.  Another tactic would be to increase your prospect pool - and it doesn't always have to cost a lot of money.

What I'd like to discuss in this post is SEO - otherwise known as search engine optimization.  Most of us in the online world have at least seen this term before, even if we don't understand it completely.  The definition of SEO on Wikipedia is: the process of editing and organizing the content on a webpage or across a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines.

Basically - the goal is to optimize your web site and its content so that when people conduct online searches for terms that relate to your business, such as accounting software, productivity software, etc - you show up at the top of the list.  This is otherwise known as an organic ranking.

You can also participate in paid search - or PPC, but that topic is covered in other posts.  You want to focus on SEO as a long-term strategy for attracting and promoting your web site.  And it doesn't have to cost you a dime.  Some companies choose to hire SEO firms to come in and conduct audits of your site and provide recommendations - but if you don't have time for that you can do it yourself - but be prepared to spend a decent amount of time and effort.

Remember this one lesson - Everything on your site can affect and add to your SEO efforts.  Look at each piece of your site individually and evaluate how it can help you rank better.  You don't have to do everything at once.

Now I could go on for pages and pages about how I think you should do SEO, but there are many sites, blogs, etc that can give you instruction.  Where I will start is by giving you some valuable FREE resources that you can use to learn about, track and implement your SEO strategy.

SEO Resources
BusinessOL SEO Blog - I refer to this blog for SEO tips - very valuable ones.  Led by Catfish Comstock, who I had the pleasure to meet at OMS, who has been involved with SEO since its infancy.
WebProWorld - This is a forum for SEO - most of the people on here are SEO professionals, so it can be intimidating, but the forums hold a wealth of knowledge and if you can't find what you need you can venture a question...  If you are really a beginner, you can check out the SEO 101 forum.


SEO Tools
www.webconfs.com - all sorts of tools from spider analysis, back links, keywords, etc
Keyword Discovery - one of the best keyword search tools on the net.  A free suggestion tool.  This site will tell you how many searches are conducted for any keyword.
Google webmaster tools - You can submit a sitemap and track how Google sees your web site.  Great insight into how Google indexes your site, external links, internal links and potential SEO issues with your site.
HubSpot Website Grader - I found this to be an amazing tool that tells you a lot about your site's SEO structure.  A FREE tool where you enter your site's url and it will spit out all sorts of SEO statistics such as page titles, meta tags, headlines, your Google page rank, site rank, conversion forms, RSS feeds, etc.  100 is the top score, it's not the end-all be-all of SEO but gives you a good starting point.  Our site ranks a 98!
Alexa.com - a great place to check your traffic, rankings, back links, etc -  a good benchmarking tool for your site.

Web Analytics
Google Analytics - I am pretty biased, but Google Analytics is one of the most robust and FREE web analytics tools you can find.  Easy to implement, this is the basis for how I analyze our site's success. Google Analytics will give you everything from your traffic volume, visitor demographics, traffic sources, keywords used, etc.  If you use their free url builder, you can also place tags on your links in campaigns to track where your traffic is coming from.

I've also found a few interesting SEO articles on specific problems I faced.  Conducting SEO on html is great and easy - web crawlers are designed for this.  But what about flash? PDFs?  I found and article on how you can get your web developers to integrate flash and make it SEO-friendly.  I also found an article that gives you a few tips on making PDFs more SEO-friendly.