1. Long Tail Titles + Content

2. Advanced Keyword Selection

3. Video Marketing

4. Create a Link Building Campaign

5. HTML Comment Tags/ External File Names/ Optimised PDF Documents

6. Site Navigation and Usability

7. Basic SEO Checks

8. Optimise Your 404 Page

9. Google Custom Desktop and Google Alerts for Content

10. Press Releases and Syndication

11. Social Bookmarking

12. My Top SEM Tools

In highly competitive markets, generic title tags just don't get it done anymore, although title tags can be one of the more important elements that the Search Engines look at to identify and categorize your page.
End-users are becoming more and more knowledgeable about how search engines work; The more descriptive words they use, the more likely they are to get the results that they are looking for. What this means is that last year the key phrase for company “A” was Debt Help.

This year their top keyword phrase is Get Debt Free. I don't know why, maybe there is a major company out there doing debt consolidation ad campaigns that have “coined” this phrase to make it more memorable than debt help. Who knows? The point is that they are using a completely different search phrase, and the phrase is 3 words rather than 2 words.

Generally speaking, “the lower number of words the better”, has been the overall suggested recommendation to target because human nature is the path of least resistance. To a point it still is, but the people using longer phrases (based on my analytics), know what they are looking for, because they convert at a significantly higher rate.

Once I have identified these phrases I start building additional pages, or even microsites (for purposes of A/B, funnel, and conversion testing) and I target the 3, 4, 5 or even 6 word long tail phrases.
Use these longer keyword phrases within your content as well. If possible, replace enough of the current keywords with the long-tail keywords. (If you do not build separate pages)

If you are in a highly competitive market, this could be the answer that you are looking for to attract the middle 40-80% target audience that you are looking for, plus get great conversion rates. Just be sure to create well structured “call to actions” in the page. (See #5 below)

2. Advanced Keyword Selection

This has been covered over and over again, but it is a very important element and the importance of ongoing research is very important to stay ahead of the competition. There are several tools out there, most of which are free, or offer free trials. I typically use several different tools.

Google Trends – According to Google “Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. As a Google Labs product, it is still in the early stages of development. Also, it is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.”

This is great if you are in an industry that has seasonal traffic. This identifies the seasonality of keyword searches. Google also has a keyword tool that will take a large list of keywords and when filtered by Search Volume Trends gives you a list that contains 12 months data and when the highest month of occurrence was.
KeywordDiscovery collects search term data from just over 180 search engines world wide. Their database contains approximately 32 billion searches from the last 12 months. Their Premium Database contains over 600 million results.
What I like is that they cover a wider demographic than the other paid tools available.

Although the new WordTracker UK version is a great addition for our company, being that it is based in the UK, KeywordDiscovery seems to be a better choice for those in a European market. Major differences are the databases that they pull their results from. WordTracker uses 4 or 5 sources (e.g. MetaCrawler, DogPile and Overture), while KeywordDiscovery uses Google, Yahoo Groups, DMOZ, MSN, Teoma, Miva and over 50 other databases. They also pull from databases in Japan, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Canada, Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Czech Republic, Russia, Spain, Mexico, Israel, South Africa, India, and Norway. In the UK alone they use 11 different engines including google.co.uk.

SpyFu is a neat (and free) tool that can eliminate keywords that you may think are good to use, but may not convert well. It is a tool for Google Adwords and if you are trying to determine an estimated spend for individual keywords.

I use this keyword tool to see what companies are bidding on related to my query. Chances are, if they are bidding on it, then its probably converting. This helps me eliminate broad terms as well (e.g. parts, cars). I guess you can use other tools to base KEI (keyword effectiveness index) on and do close to the same thing, but SpyFu makes it a little easier and faster.

It will also show you misspelled terms. Of course many of these tools have this function but again, this tools does it quicker. Here's an example of what SpyFu came up with when I searched for ‘advanced auto parts';

advaced auto parts
advancd auto parts
advancded auto parts
advence auto parts
advenced auto parts
after market auto parts
aftermarket auto parts
anvance auto parts

So it doesn't just show ergonomic misspellings, it also shows ‘stoopid' misspellings.

HitTail is a tool that I hold near and dear to my heart because I had some of input into its development, and they added a few features that I requested while using it for Pay Per Click keyword research. (Well, that and the fact the tool saved my client £90,000 a year).

The tool was originally designed to do what log files can basically do, but quicker and easier. HitTail gathers the keyword and keyword phrases that brought your visitors to the site and graphs them to identify niche phrases that have high KEI so that you can use them in articles or online content. They added an xml export feature that I love because I can use it while creating adwords campaigns and save myself a ton of time.
The reason I use it for keyword research is two-fold;
1. It's quicker and easier than log file data mining
2. I can quickly identify the long 4-6 keyword phrases to use in my content