So without further ado here are the 25 points. Make sure you keep a score to rank yourself below…

SEO Checklist

1) Create content for people not search engines.
2) Use tools like Google Insights for Search and Keyword Estimator. They are invaluable for spotting opportunities, trending search terms and competitiveness.
3) Online press releases can sometimes be a good way to generate backlinks and secure a high ranking PR link using anchor text of your choice.
4) Optimise your Title, H1, H2, Alt and Meta Description tags. Make sure they are the correct character length and contain your key search terms.
5) SEO is to a large extent content. 50% of your traffic won’t come through your homepage as Google ranks pages, not sites. As a rough rule, more content = more traffic.
6) Link internally using a variety of anchor text to a diverse range of pages.
7 ) Make sure you utilise Google Webmaster Central. It’s essential.
Be patient – Many speculate that Google tends to favour an aged domain.
9) Use social media channels like Twitter and Facebook. People who read your site regularly are more likely to share your links across their social profiles.
10) High quality 3 way link exchanges are a good way to build links.
11) Do submit content to article submission sites. These can build good solid backlinks.
12) Keep your site and content fresh with regular updates.
13) Page load time is now a Google algorithm ranking factor. Make sure your site is optimised by having all CSS in one file, minimising calls to the server and a whole host of other techniques.
14) Link bait. Write content that others want to share! Think top 10′s, best of’s etc.
15) Make sure you have a Google XML sitemap and a standard HTML sitemap.
16) Use breadcrumbs to make it easier for search engines to spider your pages.
17) Check your competitions links using tools like Link Diagnosis. Then approach those sites to share links with your site as well.
18) When you share links make sure the site in question uses relevant anchor text.
19) Link diversity. Don’t send all inbound links to your homepage. Linking should be a natural process so if you send all inbound links to your homepage Google will deem it to be un-natural.
20) Submit your site to directories. If you can get in DMoz then you are laughing!
21) Make sure your code is clean, not bloated.
22) Use canonical URL’s. Pick a structure and stick to it.
23) If you are using WordPress make sure you are using permalinks.
24) Make sure you are using 301 redirects.
25) Install Google Analytics and use it religiously to analyse incoming traffic.

How did you score?

0-5 = Google, nah never heard of them.
6-10 = You think SEO is some sort of martial art or airport code.
11-15 = You are still living in a world of META Keywords and your favourite search engine is Alta Vista.
16-20 = Now we are talking. You are 5 steps from SEO nirvana.
21-26 = Congratulations. Your name is probably Matt Cutts, Sergey Brin or Larry Page. Either that or your work in SEO. Now tweet this link and get back to work.

In simple terms there are three pillars of SEO….

1) Code – Make sure your site is written correctly using clean code and META Tags, ALT Tags, Permalink URL’s etc.
2) Content – Have plenty of it! Unique and written for humans, not search engines.
3) Connections – The authority of your site measured by backlinks and the “page rank” of those links.

The first two pillars – “Code” and “Content” are classified as “on-page SEO”. These are, dare I say it, the easier parts of SEO. The parts we can at least make sure we get right and build ourselves. However, on-page SEO will only get you so far. You will always reach a stage where you need to improve your authority and the best way to do this is through building authoritative back links, ideally one way (i.e. not reciprocal and not on a links page) and ideally with a high page rank.

There are two schools of thought regarding backlinking. The first is that if you develop great content, the links will build themselves. In some cases this might be true but it could well take a lot of time. The second is to artificially develop backlinks via a number of means, some more underhand than others.

Some of the “grey hat” techniques for building backlinks are social bookmarking, directory submissions like DMoz, link exchanges, Squidoo and forum posts. Recent developments from Google around content farms have greatly reduced the effectiveness of  sites like Squidoo though. Another popular option is to pay for inclusion on press release sites. PRWeb and PR Fire are good examples of this.

Another popular option is outsourcing link building. Super affiliate kieron donaghue’s ContentNow offer this service. They will guanatee link transparency and UK links rather than spammy links associated with outsourcing linkbuilding to a number of Indian companies. However, ContentNow charge based upon number of email solicitations for links rather than actual guaranteed links.

Finally one of the most popular forms of link building is called link-bait. Perhaps one of the cleverest methods I have heard for generating back links for a bingo affiliate is detailed here.

Backlinks are always going to be an important part of SEO and the goal posts are always changing. You only need to take a look at Matt Cutts recent post on linkspam to see the measures Google are going to to stop people (and especially “thin” affiliates) from gaming the system.

My first month was largely spent writing content, fiddling with the design and generating price comparison deeplinks manually. Any affiliate marketers out there will know what an arduous process this is and I will certainly be using Easy Content Units going forward! Or maybe a MySQL database if I really feel brave.

Month one saw me sell 10 products which was a strong start and gave me a taste for the powers of using on-page SEO alone to rank on page 1 of Google for low funnel, search terms. Something I now know as exploiting niches. However, my goal is to make this a much bigger site and rank on Page 1 for some of the bigger generic terms. I now find myself about half way through month 2 having already trebled my affiliate commission from month 1 so it’s been a great start but I now find myself with a nice looking, content rich site and very few backlinks. So I have commenced my foray into off-page SEO or generating authoritative backlinks with a high page rank (PR). I will save my exploits here for the next blog post but suffice to say this is proving to be the hardest part of SEO and somewhat of a dark art!

What I will say is that I am hooked already. I have been busy registering domains in other niches and have plans to expand and start outsourcing content production. Whilst I won’t be giving up the day job anytime soon I must say the earning potential has now become very real! Stay tuned for my next update.