Here are a few tasks and areas that you should consider each month, to ensure that you keep on top of your optimisation.  Turn them into an action plan, and review them regularly.

Keywords - target mid-range keywords that have less competition yet are still relevant to your site.  Also check out both mass-market and niche competitors, to see which keywords to use and which to avoid (niche keywords might produce little opportunity for your site).

Competitor Analysis – tools like trends.google.com and www.compete.com can help you to identify key operators in your market.  Analyse the homepages of their sites to see whether you can utilise anything to improve your own ranking.

Products and Services - you should regularly review your portfolio to see if you are missing any opportunities to add something that might bring in new business – not just more of the same offers you already have!

Twitter – if you’re not there, then think about getting a presence.  Use tracking links in your tweets to monitor the clicks you’re getting, and make sure you post some tweets that are not pure marketing.  It does no harm to show a human side once in a while!

Multimedia – turn some of your articles or blog posts into video, and post them on your site and also on YouTube.

Site Content – you should be adding keyword posts every day.  Make sure you have balanced content in terms of text and links, and design pages with the most important information at the top.

However you plan to maximise your marketing efforts, when it comes to SEO, it should always start with the basics – keywords. There are two large basic disciplines that people follow when working with keywords, either they become one with the many and use the most popular keywords for their market, or they seek words that are associated, but nobody else is using (hint hint!)

Think about it – a successful keyword is successful because it attracts a lot of attention. These keywords will be fierce competition because everyone is gunning for the top five words in a given market. But what about the words ranked, say, six to ten, or eleven to twenty? Quite often, by looking at these words, you can gain a strong foothold in the market, leading to some real benefits.

Research has shown more than once that the search volumes for the top five terms in a market are lower than the search volumes for all the lower ranked words combined. Here’s a method to follow:

1. Rank the keywords - you’ll already have this (hopefully) for your market sector. If you haven’t, then Google’s Keyword Tool is the place to go.

2. Find the major players in the market, and cross-reference them with the keywords. When you find a company featuring high up on certain keywords, but lower ranked on others, then it’s clear which keywords they are investing time and effort into chasing.

3. Find the little guys – the niche listings – some of whom will be specialising on the less popular keywords. Check out their sites and see if they are making an effort, and you can assess the competition you are likely to face.

4. Go for it! You should now have identified some areas where the big players are not interested, the niche players are not particularly numerous or active, and where a bit of targeted effort on your part can reap rich rewards.

Thanks for reading, I hope you found it informative and useful. Now, go out and implement what you’ve learned and pump up those sales! That’s all for today, but feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you would like to see more of.