7 Steps to Search Engine Optimization

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Search engine optimization basically requires making your website easy for search engines to find and boosting your position in their rankings.

There are essentially three parts to a campaign to improve your search engine ranking: planning and preparation (which includes keyword analysis and setting up your site), the campaign itself, and ongoing monitoring and maintenance. The process is ongoing, for example all data gathered from monitoring feeds back into future campaign planning.

Choosing the correct key phrase to use on your website is highly important, if you choose the wrong one for example, you are likely to waste a lot of time, energy, and money on activities that will bring you very little return.

Phrases that pay
Discovering phrases that pay is all about finding the right key-phrases for your business proposition, then positioning them for the best results in your site and campaign.

Developing the proposition of your website involves working out who your customers really are, what you can sell and promote to them online, the various methods they will use to find your website, and the convincing you will have to do in order for them to purchase or buy into your product.

Next your first draft of the longest list of possible search words and phrases your customers may use. Use your top competitors as a guide, check there keyword density and meta tags to see what they think their customers are searching for.

You may have the best key phrases, but how many of your potential customers are actually searching for them. From your list your created, you need to balance it out.

The Google Dance
Often referred to as courting the crawl, as it seems like intricate dance we do with Google in order to get our rankings up there. It involves creating the right technical structures for your new or existing website.

Very important is learning how Google, or more specifically how the Googlebot (Googles website crawler / spider) actually works. Learning how to implement sitemaps and robot.txt to control and manage what this spider sees will set you apar from your competitors.

When creating a new website, thinking from the spiders perspective gives you new insight on how to recreate your navigation, not only making it user friendly for your customers, be sure that the spider can actually “read” the buttons in your navigation can do a lot not only for getting all your pages listed but improving your rankings.

Priming your pages
As we have discussed content is still king. Creating optimized copy that is insightful and interesting will draw in your viewers, and following not so far behind, the search engine spiders. Make sure to use your top keyphrases that you have selected for your website.

On-page optimization is all about tweaking metadata, tages, body text and all the other on page elements, this helps insure that pages are keyword rich for search engines but is still easily readable for humans.

Often left out by many search engine optimizers, is the optimisation of your assets. Make sure you include you keyphrases in all your images, videos, pdfs and office documents, as search engines are starting to parse these files to and include them in their results.

Landing the links
Offsite optimisation currently is the most important part of your SEO campaign. Search engines like Google use inbound links to your website as votes, as they know, if no-one is linking to your website, it's obviously unimportant and boring.

Make sure the inbound links you are receiving are keyword-rich, and informative. Managing your inbound links effectively, can take your website from ok, to the best!

The buzz is starting to settle with Web 2.0, but it doesn't mean you can pay less attention to it! Now more than ever you need to participate in online discussions, and groups relating to your products and services. Web 2.0 offers a very big advantage for your website, especially if it is just getting off the ground.

Paying for position
35% of people still click on paid or sponsored ads! Yes, it is declining but it is still too much of a large audience to ignore. Therefore no website marketing strategy is complete without a full evaluation of paid for search engine traffic.

Make sure your ads are targeting the right audience by choosing the right location, language and time you want your ads to be displayed. This is almost as important as the keyword phrases you will use. The more targeted your ads, the better return on investment (ROI).

Plotting the map
As your website grows, your searches become more and more targeted, which you can take advantage of by narrowing down your CPC campaigns. Another aspect almost always overlooked is making your site multilingual. I know, it becomes counterintuitive when you have to update your site 4 - 5 times for one update. However the internet is global, and more and more users logging on don't speak English.

You don't have to target every popular language, have a look at Google trends, with your top keyphrases you will be surprised at which country the majority of the searches are coming from, and if you can target that countries main language, that will give you a huge advantage.

If you are only offering services in a certain area, optimise it accordingly! Users narrow there searches down by as much as 45% based on their country. If you optimising for everyone, you might be loosing out on traffic that is gold.

Tracking and tweaking
Once you have completed working through your new or existing site, you got it, it's an ongoing process. The internet is constantly changing, and you need to monitor your progress very closely in order to stay where you are or move up. Leaving your site to idle by, and your page rankings will slowly drop.

Google Analytics is one of the best free web based traffic analysis tools on the internet. It provides you with more than enough flexibility and power to make informed decisions regarding your PCP marketing campaigns and where and what your visitors are searching for and looking at.

Be sure to constantly keep at it, and your website will surely flourish.