In case you missed last week’s and today’s webinar on the 2010 Review of SEO Best Practices, here is an overview of the best SEO practices we covered this year.

Always keep conversions in mind when optimizing. It doesn’t matter if your site is ranking number one if the user experience is horrible. Evaluate the usability of your website. Ask yourself what you want the user to do when he or she gets to your site, and make sure it’s clear what the next step is. Define what a conversion is (form fill out? direct sale?) and build your site to guide the user towards that goal.

Optimize off-site as well as on-site. Link-building makes up about 50% of SEO, so definitely be on the lookout for opportunities to place a link. Take advantage of social media as well, as more and more evidence is coming out that it affects your organic rankings.

Take advantage of free software to analyze your site. Set up goals in Google Analytics to see how people are using your site. What keywords are they using to get to the page? Where are they dropping off and exiting the site? Make sure always to look at non-paid, non-branded terms in order to most objectively see how your organic efforts are going.

See what your competitors are doing to optimize. One handy way of figuring out who your biggest online competitors are is to check Analytics for your strongest keyword. Then, search that term to see who your organic competitors are. From there, you can use Yahoo’s back-link command to see who is linking to your competitors’ sites. Once you find out who is linking to your competitors, you know where to look for new places to build your own links! You can also use your competitors’ sites to look for more keyword ideas in their meta tags.

Of course, these tips are meant for after you have done all of your on-page optimization. Be sure to optimize all SEO on-page elements: content, meta tags, and URLs, and definitely pick the keywords carefully to bring the most qualified traffic to your site. Here’s to starting 2011 with an optimized site!!

–Cynthia | @cynniebug