As an SEO Specialist dealing with clients I have often heard “I need a magic bullet for SEO” and then I go on to explain that as many as……okay, you get the picture.
And it’s possible I was a bit overly literal with what clients say – they may never have used those exact words; it was for effect – cool wasn’t it!

What I hear most often after providing an excellent list of recommendations, best practices and SEO ideas is “great list….but….” and that’s usually followed by “what should we do first?” or “can you prioritize this list for us” which really means – we aren’t going to spend the time, money or resources to take your excellent professional advice to really help our website’s search engine visibility; instead we’re going to try one thing, not do it very well and then after giving it no time to work we’re going to blame you for failed SEO and tell everyone we know SEO doesn’t work.

Sound familiar? 

So what can we do?  Basically we talk until we’re blue in the face (does that actually happen – can you actually turn blue?) and hope they eventually “get it” and understand what SEO really is.  Hopefully we can also provide some case studies that show, when given the proper effort and attention over a sustained period of time – SEO absolutely works!

Lastly, if you can’t beat them – join them….here’s is the Purple Widget SEO Magic Bullet List!  Lists are linkbait – right?  More about linkbait another day and this post has way too many words to be a linkbait type list.  That and it’s really not a countdown type list – sorry to disappoint…..

Keyword Research
Keyword Research
Keyword Research
Yes, it’s there 3 times on purpose.  Why? Because it’s that important.  All the SEO in the universe really won’t help all that much if you aren’t focusing on the right keywords.  Afterall that’s kind of (or exactly) what this blog is about – at least how it started. 
None of the rest of what could be a magic bullet has little to no value without the proper keyword research to back it up.  And to prove the point that there is no magic SEO bullet since you can’t (or really, really, really shouldn’t) do any SEO without keyword research that’s 2 things – a second shooter if you will….

#2 Page Titles
I’m not sure I really want to number to these, but I did on this one.
Page titles are among the most important areas of real estate on your website.  Effective title creation is it’s own very long blog post but to sum it up:
This my Website is not a good page title.
Search Engine Optimization Blog | SEO advice, tips, techniques, tricks is a good page title. 
Also – make sure EVERY page on your website has its own unique, keyword rich, effective, focused title.

Great Content
See, told you I wasn’t numbering these.
Create great content.  Have stuff that people want to link to – not because you paid them, or traded with them, or begged them, or sold your sole to the devil to get.  Having great content (and ‘content’ can mean many things of course) will go a long way to taking care of many things that drive SEO.

Inbound Links
Although it has changed SIGNIFICANTLY over the past several years, links to your website are still very important in obtaining high rankings.   Quality is more important than quantity but you still need quantity – they just need to be quality links.  Like I said above – creating great content will lead to a lot of natural links.  
What are good links, what are bad links, what are link exchanges, how do I get more links, do I have enough links?  Those are all great questions and each one a subject of a blog post of it’s own – if not a dedicated website for each one.  Except maybe the last one – do I have enough links – the answer is no.  Link building is a long, challenging process but when done well can pay off nicely – in time.

So again – THERE IS NO MAGIC BULLET FOR SEO!
But, if you can only do a few things for now these are some good places to start.

I also installed All-In-One SEO for WordPress.  WordPress by default is pretty search engine friendly, as our blogs in general, but this plugin provides a bit more flexibility and different options for optimizing a blog for search engine success.

So I still haven’t explained what this site is for and why it’s here.  Don’t worry, it’s coming….coming soon….

You’ll be learning much more in the very near future about PurpleWidget.com but for now it’s important to know the following:

It is 7:47pm CT (that’s 8:47pm ET for those that don’t realize anything exists outside the East coast) on September 29th, 2008 and I have JUST launch this blog dedicated to Purple Widgets.  

More coming soon….stay tuned!