At the heart of it all is good content that will attract links to the site and, ultimately, buyers. Each blog entry or page should be about one keyword or keyphrase. But how do you come up with these keywords and, therefore, the blog entries? I’m in the process of optimising my candle-making blog and one of the challenges is knowing what to write about.

Most people will be familiar with the Google Adwords Keyword tool but there are many other ways of finding inspiration. Here are five of my favourites:

1. Google Wonder wheel

The Wonder wheel is an attempt to display a mind-map of searches similar to a keyphrase you type in. So, if I type in “candle making” I get a wheel made up of various related keyphrases. I can then click on each and Google will generate another wheel with that phrase at the centre.

To get to the Wonder wheel, type in your keyphrase and click Google Search. You’ll see “Wonder wheel” on the left.

2. Google Related Searches

If, like me, you prefer words to diagrams then check out Related Searches. Search on your keyphrase then click “More search tools” on the left. “Related searches” will appear beneath “Standard View”. Click it and several columns of similar keywords and keyphrases will appear at the top. Interestingly, these tend to be different to those you would see in the Wonder Wheel so it’s worth using both tools. Each of those related keywords is a potential blog entry.

3. Wordtracker Keyword Questions

Your product is the answer to someone’s question (at least I hope it is!) and one way to find out what specific questions your audience is asking is to use the Wordtracker Keyword Questions tool. I recommend keeping your keyphrase as short as possible here to get a large data set. In my case, I typed “candles” to find that by far the most commonly asked question is “how to make candles” – a perfect subject for a blog post. I shan’t be bothering with the fourth most popular “how to make ear candles” however!

4. Wordtracker SEO Blogger

SEO Blogger is a keyword plugin for Firefox. Once installed, clicking the Wordtracker logo brings up a panel on the left-hand side with two parts. The top part is a list of keywords related to the keyphrase you type in. You can then add them to the panel below and this will keep track of how many times you actually use those keyphrases in your blog entry or page. This is the sort of thing that plugins were invented for, pure genius.

5. Wordstream.com

I’ve saved my favourite till last. Wordstream’s free keyword tool presents a list of related keyphrases in a simple interface along with their relative popularity. Again, this results in what is, essentially, a list of potential blog entries.

Remember that with your blog entries or pages you’re trying to achieve two things. Firstly, you want to attract paying customers so you’d certainly want to create entries based on keyphrases that include “buying” words such as “candle making kits” or “cheap candle making supplies” or “candle making supplier”. Secondly, you need to write entries that will be rewarded with incoming links and will therefore result in pages that appear higher up the rankings. For example, if I write a post on how to make candles (almost) for free, this will attract incoming links much more readily than a post about a new product. More people will see it, arrive at the page and, perhaps, go on to become customers (they haven’t cost anything in advertising after all).

SEO won’t entirely replace your spend on advertising but it will supplement and, hopefully, reduce it – after all, cutting marketing costs whilst simultaneously increasing traffic is business nirvana.

On Bing, Microsoft’s very handy and super-relevant search engine, it would seem that Anglian Windows has bought a featured spot that pops up to tell you about the new Government scrappage scheme – not the one that applies to cars, the one that applies to double glazing.

Except that “Windows” has to be one of the most frequently searched terms on the web  -  I put it in almost every search because I’m always looking for Network error messages and their fixes, and if I leave “Windows” out then I get five times as many hits about Linux, which I don’t need to see. I am very unlikely to go from my “Windows” search to Anglian for some new double-glazing, so quite why Anglian’s ad appears when I type terms such as “windows trust failure vmware” into Bing is a mystery.

Thank God they only pay when people click on the ad, or the Government may be bailing out another company.

It’s very easy for a small site to decide that this is something that only applies to the big boys who are dealing with credit card details and have an in-house legal team ready to draft the required policy.

However this is a mistake on a number of fronts…

To begin with, as more and more sites move towards Web 2.0 handling, the chances are that your site is dealing with personal information. Maybe you don’t take financial details, for example, but do your users need to provide their email addresses to sign up to leave comments or add content?

More to the point does your site use cookies? Maybe you don’t have a clue about how you’d go about adding your own cookie, but that doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. One of the characteristics of Web 2.0 is taking advantage of third-party content and services and many of these depend on cookies. Add the snippet of code to enable Google AdSense ads or Analytics, for example, and Google will be tracking your visitors’ IP address as they move through your site and part of its terms is that you should have a privacy policy explaining as much.

The bottom line is that every site, no matter how small, should have a privacy policy. The good news is that it needn’t be intimidating or expensive – thanks to Web 2.0.

Search for “privacy policy template” and you’ll find a number of customisable privacy policies such as the one from website-law.co.uk.  Leave the link back to the source and you can use it for free (a great example of SEO 2.0 in action).

Of course it’s still a bit of a chore to create your custom policy, but it’s well worth it and not just from the warm glow that comes from knowing you’re on the right side of the law and doing the right thing. The small privacy policy link on each page is a clear indication of credibility and professionalism: an indicator that is almost certainly recognised by search engines as well as end users.

This change from SEO 1.0 to SEO 2.0 is perhaps most apparent when it comes to the use of meta tags…

In the distant past, the holy trinity of title, keywords and description meta tags were generally seen as the optimizer’s greatest weapons in the battle for high placement. The basic thinking was: Google only has the end user’s short search phrase to go on when trying to make a match so the best way to make sure that your page comes up on its SERPS (search engine results page) is by packing your meta tags with key search terms.

However look at what Google itself has to say about the meta tags in its own Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide and a very different picture emerges of what constitutes good SEO. To begin with, the keywords meta tag simply isn’t mentioned at all.

In fact this isn’t too much of a surprise. The problem with a list of keywords is that they are too easy to generate automatically and might not have anything to do with the page in question. Clearly Google wants to present the end user with truly relevant content so it’s the on-page use of keywords that really matters (how many there are, where and how they appear and so on), as well as their sensible use in the title tag.

However I have to say that I was surprised to see what Google has to say about the description tag and in particular to read the following on the Google Webmaster Central blog: “meta descriptions won’t affect your ranking within search results.”

So does this mean that the description tag is as irrelevant as the keywords tag?

Absolutely not. The description tag might not help ranking but, as the SEO Starter Guide puts it: “Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages.”

At this stage you are probably thinking “you have got to be joking if you think I’m going to waste my time writing a description that might or might not appear and which has no ranking benefit. I’m not working for Google, I’m working for me! Let me get on with something more useful like sculpting my page rank or sorting out my 301s. Hey I even used to have a life before I got obsessed with SEO etc etc…”

But hold on. There are other ways to look at this.

To begin with, there’s an important lesson here: appearing on the SERPs isn’t the be-all and end-all of SEO – getting the click-through is. And the best way to do this isn’t via keyword packing but by putting your best case forward for end users to visit your site out of the ten matches on offer. That best case is likely to include the key words that the user is searching on (which are emboldened on the SERPs), but to produce maximum traffic you can do better than that by also including any attractive selling points – “free delivery” – or maybe a hint of humour to indicate that the page was created by a real human being and one that you might be interested in reading.

There’s another important secondary point. You often have to read between the lines with Google and while the description itself might not affect your ranking, that doesn’t mean that it’s irrelevant. In particular it would be very surprising – almost negligent – if Google wasn’t monitoring its own SERPs and using click-through rates to help deliver the most attractive options up-front. In other words, the content of your description might not affect ranking directly, but its click-through rate could be crucial. These days Google is almost certainly monitoring and using visitor behaviour information such as click-thru and bounce back rates alongside web page content and back links.

Both points effectively come down to the same thing and it’s the core difference both between first-generation and current search engine technology and between SEO 1.0 and SEO 2.0: a recognition that the web traffic that really matters is live human beings.

Ultimately you’re not producing your site for yourself, or for Google, but for the end user.

Recently I decided to brush up on my knowledge of search engine optimisation (SEO) to see what the current view of best practice is. I was amazed at how things have changed…

In the past SEO tended to be seen as a battle of wits in which the optimizer’s job was to reverse engineer the Google algorithm to give their pages an advantage in the race to get to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) – most obviously by packing their meta tags and copy with keywords.

This posed a real threat to Google as it meant that machine-generated pages with no real content of human interest were topping its SERPs. Google’s response was to retreat into secrecy, keeping the metrics by which it scored pages as dark a secret as it possibly could. The only advice given was to concentrate on content and leave it to Google to sort out the rankings. The strong suggestion was given that SEO was frowned upon as an attempt to game the system and that it might lead your pages to being penalized. In short SEO was a dirty secret, practiced surreptitiously and with the real fear that it might bring down the “wrath of Google.”

Things have certainly moved on. Now Google is much more open about what it doesn’t like – in particular make sure you don’t break its ten quality commandments. More importantly, it’s clear that the Google algorithm is far more sophisticated than it was in picking out content of human interest meaning that old-style “black hat” SEO has effectively been banished. This in turn has allowed Google to relax and be far more open and indeed encouraging when it comes to “white hat” optimization.

Nowadays you even get named Google engineers such as Matt Cutts writing about SEO in their blogs and posting SEO videos to YouTube- ideas which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

The biggest sign of the change, and the most useful resource by far, is Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. Significantly this began life as an internal Google document, but was opened up to the public last November. The Guide is absolutely packed with tips and advice and links to other resources and I strongly recommend that anyone involved in web design takes a look at it as much for the broad principles as for the practical tips.

The fact that the Guide comes straight from the oracle itself means that it has immediately become the SEO Bible. Thankfully it’s a bible that is now based on a New Testament-style vision. The mystery, inequality and fear of punishment are largely gone as Google and web masters work together towards a shared goal where those producing high-quality, optimised content are rewarded here on earth in SERPs and in traffic.