So SEO and online marketing of websites has become a huge topic in this forum lately and I think I can help centralize a lot of the information out there and clear up some common misconceptions so the small businesses on the forum have a place to start thinking about SEO. I make no claims at SEO ninja baller status, my experience has been starting website businesses for about 3 years and the past year I have worked on a corporate ecommerce site in addition to taking the occasional client.

WHAT IS SEO
The basic answer is "search engine optimization" but really the term SEO has evolved to mean something more broad. Rand Fishkin wrote about the responsibilities of an SEO in 2011 and included things like site accessibility, content strategy, social media, search verticals, community management, etc... Really what we are talking about is "organic web strategy."

WHERE TO START
The most important idea I explain to anyone asking me about SEO is that it is a long term investment. If you are after immediate results you should consider other options. Search engine results pages exponentially reward the top spots, authority sites are significantly easier to rank for keywords and receive more links due to their traffic.

Beginner Resources:

• SEOmoz's beginner's guide is a great place to jump start your knowledge base. Explains how search engines work all the way down to how many characters you can put in a <title> tag before Google will cut it off.
• How do I build the perfectly optimized page? A great reference for how to target a keyword on a single page.
• Aaron Wall explains why you should target longtail keywords first providing a great example of using SEO strategically to MAKE MONEY.

SEO IS CONTENT
I can appreciate how SEO appears from the outside, technical jargon, black hats, white hats... But really when it comes down to it SEO is about producing and using content effectively to achieve your goals. Say you want as many links as possible from a group of 20 websites related to your industry. What you could do is figure out what those websites would link to (hint, what do they already link to?), create content that fits the mold and then tell them about it. That last component is key, you need the people who will convert to find your content. A #1 ranking in Google for a keyword with no traffic doesn't mean anything.

OPPORTUNITY COST AND SEO
In my opinion the core goal of any SEO project is to make the business the most profit. Simple isn't it? It is shocking to me how often that key idea gets lost in the shuffle. Because SEO heavily skews its rewards to the winners you want to position yourself to take small wins. The worst situation you can get in is to spend a lot of time and money trying to rank a competitive keyword only to end up 20th in Google. The more traffic you get early on the more resources you will have available, traffic means links and repeat customers while the 20th spot in Google for a keyword means nothing.

THE IDEAL PROJECT
A while ago I was working for a business and getting familiar with a new website and industry. I had some great ideas and I began running a lot of small tests looking for potential projects and eventually I found something that looked really promising. I spent about 10 hours over the next month pursuing the idea and then I waited for the results. The result was ~$2000 revenue directly attributable to that project, not too bad for 10 hours of work. So we dedicated more time and it kept growing. The more time we spent on it the more it grew. Eventually we hired two more employees just to work on the project and 9 months later it was the largest revenue source for the entire business. BOOM. Recognize how important the process was to the success of the project. Yes it was a great result to increase sales $2000 in a month for 10 hours of work but the real payoff came from scaling the investment. But now imagine if instead of testing the validity of my ideas I had picked one and invested my time into that. I would have never found the REALLY good idea, the game breaking best thing to ever happen to the business idea.

ON TESTING YOUR IDEAS
The key for testing ideas is not really to write off ideas quickly but rather to create a constant feedback process for prioritizing your projects. As I have said I believe SEO is a long term investment and not all projects are going to quickly produce profits. Set realistic expectations and don't write something off based on a small sample size of results but definitely compare your projects based on the feedback you get. One great tool for helping judge the profitability of ranking keywords is to buy that keyword with Google PPC. If you want to keep the budget ever tighter Twitter, Stumbleupon and Reddit are great tools.

OUTSOURCING YOUR SEO
Outsourcing the SEO for your business effectively is actually quite a difficult task. There are lots of issues because of how broad a field it has become and finding someone who has the correct skill set for your business while not being an SEO yourself is to put it lightly, a bit tricky. Here are some methods I have found effective for small businesses:

• Learn it yourself. Simply put if you don't have the budget to outsource and it is critical to your business, start reading up. If organic traffic is very important to your business you really should be at least versed in the basics anyways. If time is at a premium and you don't have a budget maybe you aren't in a position to be investing in a long term project like SEO.
• Learn enough. Again if organic traffic is important enough to be dedicating precious dollars you really should get the basics down so you can ensure things are being done properly. You often hear about "SEO scams" but if you have no knowledge and are trying to pay someone cheap (<$30/hour in the US) you really can't expect great results. I would much rather be paying a great consultant $100/hour for 2 hours of his/her time to answer specific questions, setup the project myself and pay a lower pay scale employee to implement my vision. Because of how broad a field it is it's quite uncommon for an in-house SEO to hire a consultant on a project requiring highly technical and specific knowledge (localization, mobile seo being good examples) and in my experience it is very effective.
• In-house. I think in-house SEO is a bargain compared to hiring a consultant on a long term basis. Consultants typically charge about double or more what someone will in-house in my experience (your results may vary drastically). You also get the benefits of having someone who becomes an expert in the industry and that is a sizable advantage. The one caveat is that these type of positions become very valuable and in my experience can become very costly to keep and replace.
• Pure outsourcing. Not ideal for most small businesses in my opinion as it is expensive and then why not just bring someone in-house.

Basically be really careful going cheap. Good SEO is in demand and if you are going to cheap know what you are getting yourself into.

Salary Resources:

• SEO salaries in 2011.
• Pricing models and consultant costs (a bit dated).

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

• If you want to go minimal on your SEO work on your site at least lock down your URLs and check for duplicate content. Strangely enough very few CMS I have worked with encourage this behavior but it is extremely important for avoiding penalties and future proofing your site. Put your content on a URL that can exist for the next 10 years and never have to change no matter what you do (including changing CMS).
• SEO goes beyond ranking keywords in Google. Youtube is the second biggest search engine, eBay and Amazon both have sizable search engines. Many industries really should focus on non-standard organic traffic first for example in e-commerce our main focus is Google product feeds (shopping results).
• Google search verticals do not rank pages the same way a normal Google result does. Examples of this include images, local results, videos, shopping results, news results. To show how drastically different Google local results pull data from Google places, Yelp rather than op-page factors.
• Traffic does not necessarily mean you can make money. Low quality traffic can be worth very little.
• Getting traffic to a page does not mean it will rank well in Google. Ranking well in Google does not guarantee traffic. Ranking one keyword in Google does not necessarily help a page rank another. I've heard all of these multiple times.

BLACK HATS, WHITE HATS, GRAY HATS AND LINK BUYING
It's hard to mention SEO without mentioning the evil black hat SEO who lurks in the shadows and hunts your children. While it is a reality that you will probably be affected by spammers and black hats the rewards for doing so are getting smaller every day. The risk with black hat and link buying is that you will get removed from the Google index permanently so it is a sizable risk for a serious business to take and the value it provides has been significantly diminished despite the fact that it still works to an extent.

SEO TOOLS I USE
Firebug (see and edit webpage source code)
SEOmoz toolbar
SEOmoz software tools (free for 30 days) includes rank tracker, on-page analysis, site crawling and social metrics
Google Keyword Tool
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics Training Videos
My Favorite Link Search (Open Site Explorer)
Open Site Explorer API (automate link request data, free for certain types of data)
Agile project management

GREAT ARTICLES AND RESOURCES
What makes a good SEO CMS?
Handling URL problems
Scalable link building
Why and how to use multiple sitemaps
How to use Page Speed for firefox (part of firebug)
Fantastic SEO for e-commerce advice
Google Panda central
Google searches now encrypted

BLOGS
http://www.distilled.net/blog/
http://searchengineland.com/
http://www.seobook.com/blog
http://www.seomoz.org/blog
http://kaiserthesage.com/

SUMMARY OF LINKED RESOURCES:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-respo...-been-upgraded
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-tale-of...ckthrough-rate
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfectin...e-optimization
http://www.seobook.com/why-it-makes-...keywords-first
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-salar...hould-you-make
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-prici...should-you-pay
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/our-stanc...links-link-ads
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboar...-and-it-worked

This is awesome Chris. I hope a lot of people can benefit from the amount of work that went into this.

Some other points to add-

-When buying/outsourcing SEO really do your research and try to find someone who is supplying the SEO (not reselling a service). In my experience I have found that in today's SEO market MOST people making money are actually reselling another groups service.

-When agreeing on a price try to set a price per week/month/overall amount of work. Paying hourly is pretty tricky online because there is no way for you to prove or disprove how many hours someone has worked.

-For any normal sized/ small business SEO project you should not be spending more than 1,000-1,500 a month. Although many SEO companies quote all there projects at this level and higher you are not getting your money in good.

-Try to buy SEO from an individual/group with proven results. Buying from a company usually means you are overpaying.

Great post, thanks!

Great thread, bookmarked.

Hopefully this isn't frowned upon but I found this signup link on hackernews that gives you 2 months free of SEOmoz instead of the normal 1:
http://www.seomoz.org/partners/hackers
I'm fairly sure this isn't an affiliate link, at least the guy said he wasn't getting $25 on each signup.

That link came from a video from the SEOmoz founder Rand Fishkin:
http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/ra...-for-startups/
Starts at 7 minutes in. Pretty interesting, talks about a lot of strategies for getting traction for a startup without spending $$$. SEO of course gets a mention but there's more.

...

Very very good post. I had to learn SEO on my own since I did not have the budget to outsource/hire. I think one of the most important and overlooked aspects is picking the right keywords, just like you said. I think also people should a/b test more and then some more and also focus on conversions and not necessarily traffic since that is what pays the bills. You have linked to some very good resources here. Thanks for the post!

Good post!

I can't stress how important it is in my opinion to understand what you are buying when you are buying SEO. You need a fairly good understanding of SEO and how it works before you go out buying it. Otherwise you'll be throwing money in the dark.

Some spam on my website I click on, and then contact the site owner. A lot of the time they have no idea the SEO guru they are paying is actually a knuckle dragging buffoon who litters the web with crap all day. I enjoy contacting these site owners and letting them know they should get a refund and cease all trading with these spammers.

It's also an industry filled with a bunch of people who think they are experts but are actually filled to the brim with pomped up illusion of grandeur and ability. It would be easy to pay someone a lot of money who genuinely thinks they are good at this stuff but who are actually just another spam organisation.

That's why it's super important to do you research first, find a firm/individual who you are confident in and who has a good work ethic. There are good SEO people out there but don't just go giving money to anybody. I think most good quality SEO is a grind (good site content, good technical structure, good white-hat link building techniques) but that's probably a matter of opinion.

Great post!

Glad you value your time.

I had an interesting discussion with someone about this yesterday. I genuinely dont think that qualifies as SEO (at least not what Im laying out in this thread) but I also dont think it would be that hard to make some money abusing short term link buying/abuse strategies.That money has a very limited life span however in my opinion. I also think very large companies (big enough they cant be remove from Google) can probably get away with a lot more than the smaller sites and maybe there is a situation it could be utilized profitably but seriously why risk it?

SEOmoz our stance on paid links...

Bookmarked.

A+ I tried the seomoz tools for the free trial and it's great but I can't justify the $99 per month yet. Any recommendations on the next best thing that's free or like $20 per month.

I found myself mostly using the keyword ranker and haven't found anything free that tells me where my keywords rank or will show me that I'm ranking on page 2 for term x. Is there anything I'm missing like that? Admittedly I haven't really looked into it but now I'm curious after using the seomoz tool.

great post, very informative

IME, SEScout is pretty good for tracking. They have a free/lite version and some very inexpensive price levels.

For KW ranking try cuterank. If you only have one site to track you can do it in the free version. IIRC it only gives you the first 100 results in the free version also.

Awesome post. Will definitely help someone like me with limited knowledge. Now I'm going to get greedy... Part 2 = adwords for beginners?!?!

Edit: also, as you mention, it is a long term thing. i went into it thinking "i'll write some great articles, tell google about it, and be ranked on page 1 in no time" (i had this idea because there is basically no competition in my area for small engine repair stuff) but it will definitely take at least a few more months a year or more

Awesome post. This is the stuff that annoys me about going to college...YOU DON"T learn super applicable things like this. I'm going Entrepruership/MIS dual degree route and haven't learned a lic about SEO yet

sweet post! work as an interactive producer and have been starting to delve into learning this on my own along with basic front-end coding.

Been working at a digital marketing consultancy company sense October, just wanted to say that this is an awesome post to aid any beginner in getting started in SEO.

The only thing under-emphasized if a pure SEO newb is reading this is the importance of keyword research and for larger sites the site architecture can hugely help you back in to traffic by targeting long tail KWs.

Great post!

Yes I can remember the feeling very well, interestingly enough I got to eavesdrop on a conversation about a class at NYU (I think) called Entrepreneurial Design where the homework was things like:
-Make a tweet that gets retweeted 20 times
-Make a tumblr that gets 50 comments

Maybe there is hope!

Funny this post got bumped I have since moved from in-house to an SEO consulting firm and information architecture is just such a critical issue particularly with large brands.

I don't get the over-emphasis on white-hat that MOZ promotes, esp. given the fact that Rand Fishkin wouldn't have gone anywhere had he not "grown up" in decidedly non-white hat places online. Grey, black, blue - it all works and is actually quite a bit more effective than pure white hat. In combination with solid onsite SEO and great content you are going to obliterate your competition. It's no surprise that the people doing the best in some of the most lucrative SERPs online are wearing hats nowhere near white

I mean we all know buying links works to a certain degree, Rand has been running a test buying links and he blogged about how it is working yesterday:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/buying-li...ats-a-strategy

The real issue is that it is either a small part of your link building or you are a taking on a substantial amount of risk. If you are a big brand there is just no reason to ever do it really. For a small portion of your link building why do it at all? You can utilize paid editorial directories to shore up the small portion of a link building you will be missing out on anyways (Matt Cutts discusses why this ok to do):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKUlVquEImc

The other side of the equation is that it really is becoming less effective and in the future this is likely to increase drastically. The flight search industry is a pretty good example of this where for whatever reason they have taken a mass link buying approach (I believe I don't know for certain):

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-i-wou...for-hipmunkcom

But here is hipmunk out ranking cheapflights.com for a "flight search" search with a very small percentage of their overall links.

Yet, Kayak outranks both with the highest amount of links total (have not done research on whether they are paid or are not paid). I think that if you are putting out quality content/service/product, buying links is the equivalent of buying a billboard, except one place removed. With the billboard you directly buy eyeballs, with links you are buying the vehicle to get you eyeballs.

Also my main point was just that MOZ isn't the end all be all like they want people to believe. There are a lot of things that they simply can't advocate because of their publicity and I think that everyone at moz knows that. Rand just launched inbound.org branding it as "The web's best inbound marketing content" but is actively censoring it based not on upvotes/downvotes or community popularity, but whether or not he himself believes it's worthy content. Just think the guy is a bit of a one-dimensional figure in SEO.

Agree with Phoenix and cwar on all points. Posting from phone..