I am interning at a green living, yoga, fitness, & organic product company. It’s my second week, and the SEO Stratigest I am working under has gone out of town and left me to my own devices. I was given a project to help out the Director of DRTV eCommerce, however he and his wife had a new baby girl on Sunday, and so he is out as well.

This information will not be useful to you unless you know absolute zero about SEO. I know absolute zero, so I created this blog in tandem with my new SEO internship. In the future, there may be some information that will be helpful to an aspiring SEO, however it will stay relatively remedial, and include some of the processes that I am picking up.

Naturally, the place I began was keyword research. The process I was given is this:

• Create a keyword seed list.
  The keyword seed list is a list of about 10-20 words provided by the Web site owner. This will be a list of words that the site owner would like to target, and hopefully rank for.

• Create a list of top competitors, and extract the important keywords from their Web sites.
  Have a list of the site’s competitors. Use SEO tools available on the net to extract key terms from competing Web sites, and determine which words the competitors are paying for. Some of the resources I was given for this are www.spyfu.com, as well as the Term Target, Term Extractor and Trifecta tools available at www.seomoz.org. It is important to pay attention to keywords and phrases that are being repeated among competing Web sites.

• Shave the keyword list.
  Review the keyword list that you have generated, and remove any generic or irrelevant terms. When this is done you have a nice, tidy list of key terms for your project.

• Generate a list of suggested keywords.
  Google has a snappy, little keyword suggestion tool that is very helpful in generating an exhaustive list of keywords and phrases, including the relative advertiser bidding volume and local, as well as monthly average search volume.

• Label the keywords by advertiser competition, and sort them by global search volume.
  There are three levels of advertiser competition.
  1. 0.0-0.5 = Low competition
  2. 0.51-0.99 = Medium competition
  3. 1 = High competition

  The three levels are color coded green, yellow and red, respectively. The list is then sorted by global search volume, from largest to smallest.

You are left with a well organized list of suggested keywords, targeted toward your project. Once this list is complete it is manually scrubbed, once again, and all single-word and more general terms are removed. Your list provides you a snapshot of highly searched terms, and how much competition you have for each.