New to the world of SEO? Scratching your head as to where you can begin learning more? Read on!

There are a lot of interesting online tools out there for SEO. SEOMoz has some free site assessment tools, and the Pro toolset is actually very handy for assessing how your site fares against the competition. They’ve also got a bunch of great starter guides and articles. Another good high-level site overview tool I’ll use is Hubspot’s website grader. Although not perfect, it does give a pretty good quick summary of your site’s online marketing effectiveness.

There are kind of 2 camps of SEO factors:

1) on-site: website code, putting keywords into appropriate places, site copy, etc. SEOMoz has some really good starting guides that go through the basics.

2) off-site: number of links pointing to your site from sites with decent “authority” as determined by Google, Bing, etc. and the anchor text used in those links (e.g. if your site had 1000 links pointing to your website that were titled with relevant keywords, that would help your rankings a lot). A good way to generate incoming links to content on your site is through a blog that’s hosted on your domain. The other way is to just reach out to other related sites and ask for a link. Open Site Explorer is a handy tool to assess your number of inbound links. Yahoo Site Explorer is another.

Keyword research is important to both. There is a free keyword tool that Google offers and another one on SEOBook.com that’s pretty decent. To start you’re probably going to want to go after keywords with the lowest competition that still pull decent search volume, as opposed to the reverse strategy of going after the top search volume keywords that have relatively low competition.

This is just the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO, but hopefully it will provide some guidance to those just starting out and feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Have any questions? Comments? Feel free to post them and I’ll be happy to answer.

A very valuable metric in determining the performance of your SEO efforts is the brand / non-brand ratio. This is a measure of brand-related keywords to non-brand related keywords that helps to indicate how well your site is drawing traffic that wasn’t specifically looking for your product or brand. It’s a useful measure, but also one that can at first be a bit tricky to interpret, because while a lower b/nb ratio can mean your SEO efforts are succeeding, it can also be an indicator that your PR efforts are not doing as well as they could (due to lack of brand awareness).

When I was first starting out in the world of SEO, I was working with sites where the number of keywords that organic search traffic used to find a site was low. This made it feasible to simply go into Google Analytics and count the ratio by hand. As the site traffic (and the number of keywords used to find that site) grew, this became an increasingly arduous task.

My solution to this problem was to create an Excel spreadsheet that you can use to automate the calculation of the metric. Simply export your keyword data from Google Analytics as “.csv for Excel” and copy and paste the keywords into the Brand / Non-Brand Ratio Calculator spreadsheet. Enter in your brand-related terms in the box, and the spreadsheet will do the calculations for you.

Download the Brand / Non-Brand Ratio Calculator for FREE.

If you have any comments or suggestions for improvement, I definitely welcome your feedback.

Thanks and enjoy!