SEO - Search Engine Optimization. These might be the 3 hottest letters on the web, if not a close 2nd to CSS. SEO essentially breaks down to giving a client a better chance at showing up at the top of the major search engines. Back in the Internet hay-day, you could pay a small fee and have your site listed at the premium spot for your keywords. Fortunately, the newer, smarter Internet has gotten rid of this method, in favor of giving the top spots to the best websites. This is good news for users, but might seem like a crippling move for website owners.

You can still pay for advertisement of your site, but you’re paying for advertising space, not a higher ranking. And with high rankings being the number one way to get noticed on the web, every small business is clamoring to find experts in the field that know how to get there. Why should you be left in the dust? With this guide, you will learn just how easy it is to offer SEO services to your clients, and it will give you a great starting point so you can start making money in a field of web development that you should have been in years ago.

You may want to take a look at the related post:

• 60 FREE SEO Tools

Use Free Tools To Optimize Your Own Site

What better way to learn the ropes than to optimize your own site for search engines? Beyond the tools mentioned above, there are a myriad of great websites that will “grade” your site’s SEO performance, and provide ways for you to improve. Here is a small sampling of our favorite sites:

• BuiltWith
• Compete
• WebsiteGrader

All three of these sites will provide rich analytical data on how well your site is currently doing on search engines, as well as provide ways to improve your ranking. The Cliff Note’s version of SEO site optimization boils down to these following tips:

• Make titles, folders, meta descriptions and meta keywords accurate, succinct and informative (aka keyword-rich)
• When in doubt, always choose text over images (see Smashing Magazine’s 35 Designers x 5 Questions for more information on CSS Image Replacement)
• Limit use of Javascript and Flash unless it’s absolutely necessary
• Validate your HTML and CSS
• Ensure cross-browser performance
• If you’re blogging, use smart permalinks (like ours), tags, categories, RSS, and whatever else you can possibly get a hold of to make your sites readable and searchable
• If you’re not blogging, still find some way of getting RSS onto your site
• Build (and update) your sitemap often
• And above all, MAKE YOUR SITE WORTH VIEWING.

Some might use the terribly overused expression “content is king,” but it’s overstated for a reason. If your site is crap, no one will want to go. So start with these tips first on your own site. They’re easy to implement for anyone who already has a strong grasp of web-development, which is why there’s no reason not to offer this service to your clients.

Free Promotion

The other half of the SEO game is knowing how to promote a newly-optimized site. Rarely will a great site, even one fully optimized for accurate search, be able to generate enormous traffic from organic search alone (more on that and other terms to follow). There are many ways to promote a website without having to break yours or anyone else’s bank. Some firms make guarantees (which there are none in this business, so don’t believe and NEVER make that same guarantee yourself) and charge thousands of dollars for tasks you could complete on your own with a little bit of extra time and dedication. Here’s a quick checklist of promotional strategies you should use on every website you work on:

• Index the site on Google, Yahoo! and MSN
• Submit to no-linkback search, RSS and blog directories
• Join and submit content to key social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg
• Join and participate in related forums, newsgroups and blogs, inserting the links to your sites where appropriate. Use particular caution here because excessive links can be viewed as spamming and can lead to IP banning
• Submit to content providers such as AssociatedContent or Ezine Articles to leverage their ranking to traffic users to your sites
• Hold contents, events and promotional offers for the sites’ services to generate buzz and incentives to join/subscribe
• Find 99 more ways to promote your sites for free

Always remember that the key to grassroots promotion is to tailor it to your clients. Just because you have a strong prescence on Web Designer’s Acme Forum does not mean your client in the Medical industry should be linking from there as well. Each client is different, and needs to be promoted as such.

The abbreviated dictionary of SEO terms

Lastly, we’ll leave you with the lingo of the SEO industry that often overwhelms newcomers to the business. Knowing these will help you decipher the cornucopia of SEO articles that might otherwise confuse and weaken your expertise in this pressing field:

• Backlink/IBL - InBound Links going from someone else’s site to yours
• OBL - OutBound Links going from your website to someone else’s
• PFI - Pay for Inclusion; URL-based subscription with regular refresh cycles and click-based reporting
• PPC - Pay per Click; Type of search marketing where advertisers pay a set amount every time their ad is clicked by a prospect (otherwise known as a click thru)
• PR - Page Rank; Google proprietary technology used to determine the rank for a website for certain keywords
• ROI - Return on Investment; Also known as Rate of Return (ROR) or Rate of Profit, it’s a finance term that, in it’s simplest form means “bang for your buck”
• SEM - Search Engine Marketing
• SEP - Search Engine Placement
• SERPs - Search Engine Results Pages
• SEs - Search Engines
• SES - Search Engine Strategies; A conference
• SEU - Search Engine Usability

That should do it. A sort of beginner’s guide to SEO. Feel free to let us know if we missed anything, and we’ll be sure to update this article to make it as accurate and complete as possible.