While SEO is one of those great industries that moves quickly and is ever changing, a lot of the core fundamentals remain the same. Because of that, you can find yourself doing the same things over, and over, and over again.

In this post I want to look at 7 steps you can implement into your SEO projects in order to maximise efficiency but still keep up a high standard of quality.

1. Have a Strong Toolbox

There are a lot of repetitive tasks that can be sped up with the use of some helpful tools. Below I've outlined some of my favourites and the great information they can help you produce:

SearchStatus

• Quick Access to the number of backlinks / indexed pages for a site or page in Google, Yahoo & Live
• Quickly view the Meta Tags of a site
• Links to Whois, Robots.txt and Archive.org for current domain
• NoFollow links highlighter
• Show Pagerank + Alexa rank in the status bar

InFormEnter

• Fill in blog comment forms with ease
• Quickly fill-in directory submission forms

For more great tools for the likes of rank checking, detailed backlink analysis and more, I recommend you check out the tools from SEOBook and, of course, the SEOmoz Tools.

Even if checking backlinks with SearchStatus only saves you 10 seconds rather than doing it manually, those minutes will quickly start to add up.

2. Keep Records of Link Acquisitions

I'm sure this is obvious to many, but I'm also sure there are a lot of people who miss this simple but effective tactic to speed up link building. If you purchase links and find that they are working well for you, note down the details of the link seller for future contact purposes. That way you won't have to dig through forum PM's and your inbox just to find their information.

You may get a new client (or build a personal site) in the same niche and want to use that person again for some quality link juice. Additionally, keep a record of any great links you find while browsing the web, whether it be high PR sites with a 'top commentors' plugin or just a sponsored links page where a small donation will get you a backlink. Doing this will massively speed up the process of link building for clients new and old.

3. Monitor Results Only When Necessary

I think we can all get a little carried away when it comes to stats checking, monitoring backlinks on an hourly or even daily basis, and checking rankings by the minute. Although it's good to keep an eye on what is going on, your stats information is still going to be accessible tomorrow.

Keep a regular plan of when to check certain information. For example, you might want to:

• Check keyword rankings on a weekly basis
• Monitor backlinks on a monthly basis
• Check live analytics once per day
• Check overall analytics weekly

Of course, this should vary based on your own experience and if you are monitoring a traffic spike after the likes of a Digg frontpage. In essence, try to keep your stats checking to a point where you don't check them more than necessary.

4. Check Competitors' Links + Keywords

We all know that keyword research can be a time consuming process; that's because it's crucial to make sure you are focusing on the right terms before you start trying to rank for them. It's no use ranking no.1 for anything if nobody is searching for it or converting on your site. Thankfully, someone or some SEO company has probably already done a lot of the hard work.

Look at the keywords that your known competitors are trying to rank for and run them through your own keyword processes. It's likely you'll find some of the best phrases to optimize for. On top of that, look at the links your competitors (sites ranking well) have and see if you can replicate them, as they are obviously working. This will save a lot of research time.

5. Update Reports Throughout the Month

If you're the kind that waits until the last day of the month before doing reports and then spends a few days putting them together, you could be wasting valuable time. If something report-worthy happens during a month, instead of noting it down to look into later, or just hoping you remember it, put it into your report format straight away.

Did you get a mention on a high PR site? Did you make the Delicious homepage? Did you notice a large spike in feed subscribers? Get those written down during the month and you won't have to scramble through your notes or memory at the end of the month hoping to pull everything together.

6. Keep Checklists of What to Follow Through On

I'm sure most of you could look at a poorly optimised website and within a few minutes point out a number of improvements that could be made. When you do enough on-site SEO checks, certain factors become memorised and second nature. However, your memory wont serve you or others 100% of the time.

Simply put: keep checklists of how you would go about link building, optimising on-site SEO, doing site health checks, putting together reports, and so forth. This is especially useful when training new SEO staff so they don't have to constantly pick your brains, and of course update the lists whenever necessary.

7. Outsource Basic, Manual Work

If you're not already based in a third world country, it's likely you can put a lot of people in work and save efforts on your own end by outsourcing tasks that anybody could do with some instructions. Ideas for this type of work include:

• Link building
• Directory submissions
• CSS design site submissions (these can be a great source of links)
• Social bookmarking
• Content writing

Outsourcing can be a great way to free up costs and time to focus on tasks you are better at or would just rather do.

BONUS: Do Well Socially

Link building in any niche can be time consuming, especially one as big as the weight loss niche. However, with some help from social media, you can quickly rank for a phrase like 'how to lose weight', which gets over 50,000 searches per month:

With success on Digg, StumbleUpon and other social media sites, Tim was able to quickly rank for a highly competitive phrase. The exposure meant that the page got a lot of high quality backlinks and thus the only effort on his part was writing the article.

This was another YOUmoz post by me, Glen Allsopp, and I now mostly blog on the subject of Personal Development. (Yes, I kmow the links are nofollow, I'm just sure the topic won't be of interest to many of you ;).