Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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Surfing Is not Slacking

As SEO consultants working for a small web development firm, we were lucky to have an open-

minded boss.On any given day you might have seen five other workers knee-deep in HTML edits

or up to their ears in database code, but what was on our monitors? Movie fan sites, Florida vaca-

tion sites, and sports nostalgia sites. We remember the day we had to send an e-mail around say-

ing,“Don’t worry: We’re not looking for new jobs.We’re just researching career sites for a client!”

But it was all part of the SEO job, and an important one at that.

If you’re in a corporate culture where personal e-mails and web surfing is frowned upon or down-

right prohibited, it is essential that you get the clearance you need to access the Web in the same

way that your customers and competitors do. Likewise, if there are no actual restrictions on web

surfing in your company but you just feel like a slacker when you’re surfing the Web, just remem-

ber what surfing does for your company:

•

Surfing helps you find and assess the quality of sites linking to you and locate new sites that

may want to link to you.

•

It helps you find new search products and opportunities that may be useful for promoting

your organization.

•

It helps you to think like a searcher, using a variety of techniques to find important information.

•

And it helps you get familiar with the wide range of available search engine and directory

listings.

Every SEO expert has a favorite generic search term to use for testing, one that’s broad and popular

enough to be represented by the full gamut of paid and unpaid listings, directory listings, and text

snippets, not to mention official sites, unofficial sites, and misspellings.Ours continues to be “Brit-

ney Spears.”Have fun finding yours!

Monday: Your Existing Links

Today, you will assess your website’s existing listings and links with an eye toward

improvement. We have created a worksheet to help you in your link-building efforts.

Last month, during your baseline site assessment, you determined the total num-

ber of sites linking into your landing pages. Now you will take a magnifying glass to

Now:

Download the Link Tracking Worksheet from

www.yourseoplan.com

and save it in your SEO

Idea Bank.

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