Over the last eighteen months there has been an abundance of SEO (including mine), most provide informative and insightful SEO guides, tips and strategies. I have also come across many that have good intentions but offer very little value to other search marketers and often posts can be misleading to newcomers to the industry.

There are however a select few that continue to provide quality content on a weekly basis that I believe should be on every SEO’s RSS subscription.

1. SEOMOZ

SEOMOZ are an SEO company based in Seattle in the US and have become an anchor in the SEO industry. The leader of the pack so to speak would be Rand Fishkin who has continued to create great post content. The site offers a selection of free SEO tools to assist with analysis and they offer a members area which contains even more. Altogether I cannot find a better SEO blog out there, it’s that simple. I suggest you visit them immediately and start learning or touching up on your SEO skills.

SEOMOZ blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/seomoz

2. Search Engine People

Search Engine People are a Canadian based SEO company that have another fabulous blog that every SEO should be subscribed to. At the forefront of the great insights is Jeff Quipp. It’s strategy in this blog that I find most important, proven methods in dealing with the different scenarios of internet marketing, it’s bloody good dust I tell you.

Search Engine People blog feed: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/feed/

3. Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land is great for a number of reasons but what I like is when technical information or data comes up in posts that it’s always written in a way that is understandable to almost anyone, really great writing styles. The most recognizable character on the team would have to be Danny Sullivan the man who brought us our beloved Sphinn. They always deliver great quality and is a must for every SEO!

Search Engine Land’s blog feed: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/searchengineland

4. Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Journal has a selection of very good blog authors, I tend to get the most value from Ann Smarty, and her posts are so detailed there’s never a short read! They provide insights and links to great tools and content that as an SEO you just can’t ignore.

Search Engine Journals blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SearchEngineJournal

5. Seo Scientist

A lot of other SEO’s would probably argue that there are more deserving SEO blogs to get this number 5 spot. Branko Rihtman is the author of this absolutely fantastic blog. As the name might suggest these blog posts are based around the inner workings of search engine behaviors, with extremely detailed posts and data to back up findings. The frequency of the posts is far less than others but when content is posted you can guarantee you will learn at least 1 new piece of information.

SEA Scientist’s blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeoScientist

• Honourable mentions and still recommend signing up to their feeds:

• http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/sew
  http://www.seobook.com/rss.xml
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/SearchEngineRoundtable1
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/searchengineguide
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/Wolf-howl
  http://www.seobythesea.com/?feed=rss2
• And SeoUnique’s = http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeoUniqueBlog

Understanding where your client sits in an industry landscape is just as important as the SEO that is implemented. It’s this kind of analysis that shows how achievable it can be for a new websites to achieve success and by what measures. Clients have repeatedly asked me how long will it take to achieve good rankings? Well you could use a selection of research tools to look at the landscape, the search volumes, the competitor activity without looking at competitors individually but looking at this data won’t give you specifics.

Now from the clients brief you should understand what your client does, what products or services they sell and their USP. From this information you should be able to establish your core list of keywords, these keywords are usually the top performing keywords (the hard ones!), use the search engines to benchmark the top 5 competitors in Google, Yahoo and MSN – depending on your client you may need to look at foreign or international search engines to produce an accurate list.

So you will have a list containing he “big guns” as you will. Next you need to find out what your “clever competitors” are doing. Use keyword suggestion tools to find any highly searched keywords that could be used by your client (in website copy) and find the top 5 competitors of those terms.

You will see a lot of correlation in competitors but this is to be expected, now to get a more precise understanding of who’s doing what! I always use the following metrics and suggest you do the same:

1. URL
2. Title Tag
3. Meta Description
4. Meta Keywords
5. Homepage header tags
6. Total backlinks
7. Domain age
8. IP address
9. IP location
10. Registration details
11. Page rank
12. External links from homepage
13. Key backlinks
14. Most used anchor texts in links
15. Page rank distribution
16. Percentage of link types

Using this data from 20 or so competitors will give you a clear understanding as to what works in your clients industry online. You will see how many links and the kind of quality you will need to match, you will find additional keywords that may have slipped the net, plus more competitor insights! When deciding on keywords it much more than simply looking at what is “Googled” a lot and targeting that keyword.

Again I apologize for not having time to write more – The list is based on observations I commonly see on a day to day basis. If you notice your website with any of these, either bury your head in the sand or change it immediately to see better search engine rankings!

1. Using the same keyword more than twice in a Title tag – Having the same keyword listed in your heading 3 times or more will in fact reduce the relevance and strength of those keywords. Most important factor is that it’s readable to the user and is an accurate description of your page.

2. High keyword densities – Including your targeted keyword is obviously important but don’t think for one minute putting the keyword in every link on the page and in every paragraph will make your page more relevant – it won’t.

3. Not having a Valid XML Sitemap – Create one and submit it to the webmaster consoles on the major search engines.

4. URL’s not containing any keywords - Yes, I’m still seeing utterly useless URL structures. Just remember to include an accurate description of the page content in the URL.

5. Using <H1> tags more than once on a single page – There should only be one <h1> tag per page.

6. Not giving each page unique Meta data – should be relevant to each page’s content and unique – you will see benefits in doing this – trust me!

7. Using the same anchor text in all links – Unless you have been around for years, just don’t bother using the same anchor texts in your links. Make them as varied as possible, you will see see an increase in your targeted keywords if your site is optimized properly.

8. Putting analytics code at the beginning of your body content – Doing this will slow down the page content load which will effect usability. The amount of time is not large but noticeable to search engines, always put it at the end of the </body> tag.

9. Not using accurate image descriptions - Stuffing keywords in image descriptions will do nothing for you and may even harm your rankings if used excessively.

10. Not having a 301 redirect setup – It’s not hard to do and it will help with your indexing like you wouldn’t believe!