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At the recent Conversion Leaders Summit on improving website performance, Danny Dover cut though the SEO hype to provide some fresh insight into search engine optimization. Danny is an SEO specialist with SEOmoz.org, one of the thought leaders in the space, so I’m sharing the highlights of his presentation and his six-point SEO checklist here.

Why do SEO? Because SEO drives traffic to your website—for free. The traffic-driving alternative is to buy pay-per-click ads. It turns out that organic SEO links—the actual search results generated by Google, Yahoo!, et al.—get about 90 percent of the clicks while the PPC ads on those pages get 10 percent. So, SEO is important because you can get a lot of free traffic if you do it right.

Everyone knows the higher your rank in a search engine’s results, the more traffic you’ll get, but how much more? The number one position gets 42 percent of the clicks. Number two falls to 11 percent; number three gets 8 percent; and finally, number 10 drops to 3 percent. Clearly, you want to be in the top five because people don’t look much beyond that fifth result.

How to do SEO? Two primary consideration factors in SEO—popularity and relevancy.

Popularity in SEO means links. SEO experts suspect that links account for 75 percent of the overall Google algorithm, making them extremely important. Google emphasizes link profiles—where they come from, what the anchor text says, etc.—and you can optimize your link profiles by studying them, as well as those your competitors are using. Tools such as Yahoo! Site Explorer or SEOmoz Open Site Explorer will help you with this.

Relevancy translates to on-page optimization, which includes such things as keyword choice and where it’s located on the page. On-page optimization makes up 25 percent of the Google algorithm. Here, the important things to look at are the URL, title tag, meta description, content, and images with Alt text. The title tags are probably the most important area, with the URL being second. Also, content helps build relevancy as well as popularity (gaining links).

Danny’s SEO six-point checklist of things you can do today to improve your SEO includes:

1.    Study the cached, text-only version of your site (and your competitors). Perform a Google search and select the “cached” option from the results page. Then select the “text-only version” from the cached page. The text-only version shows you what Google sees as important when trying to determine relevancy.

2.    Avoid duplicate content. Search engines have a difficult time determining relevancy when they run into duplicate content, e.g., a website accessible from both http://www.company-name.com and http://company-name.com. It’s a common mistake, and it hurts SEO.

3.    Optimize your site’s global navigation. This is especially important on ecommerce sites. Make sure your categories and subcategories are well-implemented and are as close—from a click perspective—to the homepage server as possible. Search engines rely on this categorization; and every time they go down another level, another subcategory, they devalue that page.

4.    Use a robots.txt file. This is the one file on your server that you can use to control the search engine and what it can and can’t see.

5.    Submit a sitemap. The sitemap is an XML file you submit directly to the search engines. It’s a complete list of your website, and it’s easy for the search engines to parse. Basically, sitemaps help you get indexed, so they can make a dramatic difference.

6.    Look at the links. Check out where your competitors are getting links with one of the tools mentioned earlier. By discovering where your competitors are getting links from, you can tailor your content and link building efforts to leverage their success.

If you’d like more information, you can view a 10 minute video of Danny’s presentation (by selecting View SEOmoz presentation), or view a replay of the entire webinar (by selecting View entire presentation), under The Conversion Leaders Summit here.