Working with small businesses and participating in SEO communities like the one here on SEOmoz, I get to see a lot of SEO mistakes and misconceptions first-hand. These misconceptions are as diverse as the people who practice SEO, but the funny thing is that they almost always fall into one major theme: someone fails to see the forest for the trees. The vast majority of SEO problems come down to narrowly focusing on one area – whether it's trying to get every page indexed, ranking for one keyword, or obsessing over link quantity, I'd say that 80% of bad SEO boils down to missing the big picture.

So, consider this a back-to-basics post – one that I hope will be educational to newbies and pros alike. Effective SEO requires us to see the big picture, and I'm calling that picture the 4 R's: Robots, Ranking, Relevance, and Results. For each of the 4 R's, I'll provide some tips and tools for how to measure your progress in that area.

As the lotto commercial says: "You can't win if you don't play". You'll never win the SEO game unless your site gets discovered by bots and indexed. How do you get discovered? You can move to L.A. and wait tables, or you can build relevant inbound links, create a crawlable, spider-friendly architecture, and work to get mentions and citations (through social media, for example).

Tips and Tools:

• Test your index with Google's site: command.
• Check crawlability with tools like Crawl Test and Xenu's Link Sleuth.
• Register for webmaster tools with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
• Create an effective XML sitemap.
• Understand that indexing isn’t all-or-none.

Of course, ranking is the Holy Grail of SEO – we all want to be #1 on Google. I've been tough on rankings over the past year, but it's not because they aren't important. Clearly, you have to rank if you want to generate search exposure and traffic. My concern, and the message of this post, is that rankings are just one element of the big picture.

Tips and Tools:

• Sign out of Google and turn off personalization to check rankings.
• Monitor regularly with rank-tracking tools, such as SEOmoz's Rank Tracker.
• Get long-tail data from Webmaster Tools' Top search queries report.

Of course, ranking is only effective if it drives relevant traffic, and I mean "relevant" in the very practical, business-minded sense of attracting visitors who are looking for your products and services. Too many clients want to rank for what they think are the most popular keywords, but that often creates two problems: (1) What they think is popular isn't always popular, and (2) What's popular may not be relevant or ultimately drive click-throughs.

Tips and Tools

• Estimate traffic volume with Google's search-based keyword tool.
• Use web analytics to track organic traffic by engine, keywords, etc.
• Set up a limited PPC campaign to test traffic volume and relevance.

Ok, I know "results" is a bit vague, but hey, I needed another R-word. Seriously, I'm talking bottom-line results here - leads, purchases, and anything else that drives your success as a business ("conversions", in the industry vernacular). Traffic is only valuable if it drives measurable results - otherwise, it’s just costing you money.

Tips and Tools

• Set up conversion/goal tracking in your analytics software.
• Track your conversion "funnel" - the steps it takes a visitor to reach your goal.
• Segment, segment, and segment again.

Of course, thousands of blog posts have been written about each of these 4 R's, and most of us are better at some than others, but if you keep the big picture in mind and don't fall into the trap of narrowly focusing on just 1 or 2 metrics for success, you'll go a long way toward effective SEO.