SEO : Made easy

SEO: Made easy

SEO is not something can be done in minutes and there is no sure shot method either. It is a long term marketing strategy, involves high ROI opportunities. As it requires long term commitment there is a well formulated strategy for its success, along with strategy it is necessary to verify and scrutinize it along the way.

Steps below are part of a repeating cycle time over time while you are doing business on the internet. Due to the fact that certain steps are not repeated very often, is it necessary to give them special attention and care to get them right at the beginning. There is certainty of errors initially & will affect all the others in a negative way and hurt your efforts along the way.

Your First Step

Competitive Intelligence
Do you know your competitor! What they do? Where do they rank, for which terms? Who is linking to them and why? The things you have to do depend on what your competitors are doing. The less competitive environment the easier is it for you to outperform your competition. This is important aspect in determining cost and resources for your SEO efforts.

Web Design and Development
It’s hard to rebuild something which is broken rather than building it right from the beginning. While creating a new website always make sure to consider search engine friendly design and architecture before and during the actual development of the website. This saves a lot of time and funds, in most cases put you already ahead of a considerable number of your competitors. It is not rocket science to create a search engine friendly design and it design does not have to be ugly. The main concept behind design it should be user friendly design as well, but there are some exceptions where compromises have to be made.

Keyword Research
What about keyword research? It is the most important first step that should not be taken too lightly. While it is easy to change and test hundreds of keywords in paid search campaigns, but is this not possible for organic search optimization. Mostly one concentrate on one to five key phrases for the whole site (theme) and one to three phrases for a single page. For sites with numerous pages is it hard to optimize every single page to the full extend due to the limits in time and other resources.

About Your First Inbound Links
Don’t submit your new site to search engines and by no means pay anybody to do it for you. There are numerous services and software products out there that offer for less price for submission to thousands of search engines and in some cases even guarantee ranking #1 at them. Falling over of the business is because people are going for the later part. Don’t do it. If you see an offer like that, hold your wallet tight closed and run. The website should occur naturally in search engines and they will find your site if a page that is already in their index links to you. Why? As this is what search engines follows, following links to discover content. There are plenty of methods to get your first inbound links. Listing in known web directories recognized by search engines will do well for your site. Various directories which are recognized commercial and charge a fee for reviewing your site and the consideration for the inclusion in their directory. Thus for that reason it is important to wait with the submission to any of those directories until your website is live and ready for visitors. Check for good customers and vendors who have a website for the opportunity to have them place a link to your website.

Sitemaps

A webmaster is allowed to submit a sitemap to in larger search engines, allow them via a webmaster console. It also provides reports and other useful information, such as technical problems with your websites you might not be aware of via their console. Even if you don’t submit a site map to the search engines, is it advisable to create an account and register your website with them, just for the reports and statistics they provide free of charge and which are invaluable for your internet marketing efforts.

Frequent task

Web Analytics
Its hard to determine the success or failure of any of your internet marketing activities if you do not track and measure their effectiveness. Any type of marketing campaign being done online, be it SEO, display advertising, email marketing, paid search, social media or affiliate marketing is like fishing in the dark without any type of web analytics solution in place. It depends on you to decide if you want a hosted web analytics solution or run software on your own servers. The range for its offering is from free services to very expensive and heavily customizable package. You should determine what solution will work for you, but you have to start with one so don’t put it off. Web analytics is helpful to determine where to improve on your site and your marketing campaigns to channel your resources and money to the things that work and pull it away from the things that don’t work. Web analytics if done properly is not a cost center. It will pay many times and can make the difference between making and breaking it on the internet.

Content Building
A website is never done. It has to change and grow over time. This is a natural reoccurring process to adjust to changes in the market, with maturing in this type of medium and your normal business growth. Providing quality content that is related to what you do, but not necessarily aimed to sell something directly is the best opportunity to increase traffic and exposure of your business. Link to pages which is usually followed by most people it only serve the purpose to make a sale. leading to the next step in the process of successful search engine optimization of your website.

Link Building
The internet wouldn’t be a “net” without links. It would seem as a collection of independent pages that are not connected to each other. Pages which are disconnected cannot be found and that defeats the purpose of them, wouldn’t it? Internal site linking & inbound links are important for organic traffic, meaning people seeing and clicking on those links to get to your website, but they are also important for SEO. Inbound links play a pivotal role in virtually every search engine when it comes to ranking pages in their search results. Links are added and sometimes removed constantly. It is an endless process and while it happens naturally, so is it advisable to be a bit more pro-active from your part to get more and good inbound links. There are numerous sites out there that should link to you, but don’t know you and your content. Help them to find your content and encourage linking to it.

Engagement, Trust and Community Building
Social media and Web 2.0 might be slang words, but the core elements underlying it are made of are much more elementary and fundamental. Most important aspect is interacting with people & allows them to respond with you. This will make people talk about you, whether you being around or not. It is always necessary to become part of the discussion and take it as an opportunity to build trust and deeper relationships with your customers or potential customers. Take their feedback and learn about their needs and their wants. Hear what they say about your products & you, more specifically the criticism and improve on them. You probably spend today money on focus groups and surveys. You can get the same and free of charge on the internet more often, you just need to happen it while you are around. It also provides the opportunity towards brand building and link building on the internet for a fraction of the cost of traditional intrusive advertising campaigns that are less effective.

Ranking and Traffic Analysis
Analyze yourself at present where you are to be able to compare it with data in the future. Get updated with recent trends & evaluate the success of your goals, which you should have specified before you engaged in any type of marketing campaign. You did set goals that are measurable I hope. For SEO the important aspect is ranking, but more important than the ranking is the traffic that comes with it. Does this traffic actually convert? Does the change in ranking yields in the traffic you expected? This leads to the last step.

Conversion Analysis
Whatever you do, there is one critical factor at the very end. Did it earned you profit or you lost money. For short term losing money for strategic reasons is okay, so Is losing money in the long run deemed to failure and the end of your business altogether. Positive Return of Investment should be the main aim, whatever you do. Web Analytics is the process of making this determination among other tools and methods. Expand on your projects that are working and help your bottom line and rid yourself of the things that don’t. Improve of details to increase conversion. This requires testing. Don’t reject anything upfront without testing it first. Things working for others may not be lucrative for you, but the same is true the other way around.