Some people consider SEO and internet marketing to be an art, but it is actually more of a science. It just needs a systematic approach and there are things that can be done on a daily basis to generate more traffic and buzz about a website, brand or product. Requiring some direction, experience and a set of tools, it’s just like building anything else.

SEO Basics: SEO is more about a better visitor experience, and figuring out ways to attract new visitors. From this viewpoint, it needs one to be an expert in a specific sector or field that the site caters to, rather than an SEO expert. All that really needs to be done is to be aware of the Google guidelines outlined in its webmaster section, and use a suitable platform like WordPress for a blog or joomla for a site that needs a robust CMS.

Keyword Tools: SEO begins with keywords, so before doing anything else, compile a list of keywords relevant to the website. All future activities, including those outlined below, depend in one way or other on this list. It is therefore imperative to get hold of a nice bunch of keywords with high query volumes that are actively being sought after by competitors.

SEO can be done manually, but it works better using keyword generation tools. The tools are more comprehensive and scientific in how they dig up and rate the keywords based on monetization value. The one that is used a lot is the keyword generation tool from Google Adwords, but there are other options like SpyFu, Wordstream, etc.

Onsite Optimization: The onsite optimization process essentially involves focusing the content on each page to match a specific keyword. Keywords in page titles and URLs matter a whole lot. Within the page content, the presence of keywords has to look natural and should not break the flow of the narrative. New landing pages can be created to target each keyword.

To make the whole process easy on a long-term basis, use a blog platform or CMS which can automatically generate titles and URLs and create a proper internal linking system, which is a good strategy for all Internet marketing practices. To enhance visitor experience, tweak the design templates, use bigger fonts and improve page loading speed with better back-end scripts and a faster web host.

Link Building: Search algorithms give a lot of importance to incoming links to a page and website. A link building campaign’s main task is to find and establish relations with relevant and important websites. Unless the webmaster is aware of how to work out three-way link deals and sitewide link partnerships, it’s best that a link building campaign be managed by a professional.

Analytics: Very important to have powerful analytics that can take raw logs and offer comprehensive analytical data. This includes keywords, referring source, landing pages, time spent, visitor demographics and clickthru data for banner and text ads. This data is what tells webmasters what is working and what visitors seem to like more. Provides room for doing more of what works and shows which sections need improvement.

To sum it up, SEO and internet marketing does not require a magic wand. There are things that one learns by experience, and others that can be done using tools and scripts. But the bottomline is that it’s still about talent, hard work and a solid product/service.

Metrics/Tracking: How to measure effectiveness

Make sure to tweak the links put up on YouTube (whether in a YouTube channel or in a video description) by adding “?video=1” to the end of each URL. This makes it much easier to track inbound links using Google Analytics or another metrics tool.

TubeMogul and VidMetrix also track views/comments/ratings on each individual video and draw out nice graphs that can be shared with the team. Additionally, these tools follow the viral spread of a video outside of YouTube and throughout other social media sites and blogs.

Strategic Tagging

YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content that actually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.

So how do we strategically tag? Choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags, but more unique tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s time to add some more generic tags, tags that draw out the long tail of a video as it starts to appear in search results on YouTube and Google.

Releasing all videos simultaneously

Once people are watching a video, how do you keep them engaged and bring them back to a website?

Most of the time bloggers/vloggers will say: “We’re going to release one every few days so that viewers look forward to each video.”

This is the wrong way to think about YouTube marketing. If you have multiple videos, you should post all of them at once. If someone sees the first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would they make them wait until we post the next one? You should give them everything up front. If a user wants to watch all five of our videos right now, there’s a much better chance that we’ll be able to persuade them to click through to our website. You don’t make them wait after seeing the first video, because they’re never going to see the next four.

Using this strategy, we give our most interested viewers the chance to fully engage with a campaign without compromising the opportunity to individually release and market each consecutive video.

Commenting: A conversation with yourself

Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. You get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section – especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.

Don’t be afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, you could just delete their comment. You can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.

A heated comment thread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back to our sites.