How To Begin a SEO Campaign

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Whether you’ve just decided to dive into SEO or you’re reconfiguring an old strategy, beginning a SEO campaign involves the same kind of work. It’s a huge project and one that never really ends. If you start working to optimize a site for search engines it means you’ll be working towards that goal for the life of your site. There aren’t any short cuts, SEO is in constant change and so you must keep evolving to adapt. Getting started can seem like the most daunting part, but if you break it down one step at a time it’s not so bad.

Research

The first step in, well pretty much everything, is research. If you don’t know anything about SEO read a lot before you make any moves, decisions or even hire a firm. Make sure you know what qualifies as good SEO practices and what is mostly valueless, time-wasting. If you’re re-tooling your SEO tactics, do your own fair share of reading there’s always something “new” going on. Maybe there’s an update, a new tool or a new announcement that could affect your plan. Just make sure you vary your sources. Even among the “experts” there is some disagreement about who really “gets it” so read around and get all of the different perspectives.

From there you’ll want to do some keyword research and basic evaluation of your site. Using tools and your own insights into the SERPS, figure out which keywords are well searched that you can stand a chance to rank for based on your current rankings and what will convert well. You can use free tools like the SEO Book rank checker and the Google Keywords tool or you can get a paid service like Spyfu. Whichever way you go, choosing your keyword targets is one of the most important parts of the process because every other effort will be based on this research and the conclusions drawn from it.

On-Site Optimization

After the research phase you should first work on optimizing the on-page factors of your site. Using comprehensive tools like Link Sleuth will help you get an over all look at your site, find broken links, URL’s and titles. You can begin to fix, adjust and customize these aspects for better targeting and organization. But if you move pages, or rename them, be sure to use a 301 re-direct from the old page to maintain any existing links or rankings. The most important on-page elements to focus on are:

• Title Tags – Possibly them sot important on-page factor, make sure these are well written and based on keywords, without being stuffed.
• Content – Make sure you create real content. Not just an informative home page, but landing pages with original copy and product pages with unique text as well.
• Internal links – Use targeted anchor text on in-content links to augment the strength of your deeper pages
• Proper labeling – URLs, links and images should be well labeled using appropriate keyword phrases without over killing it in a spammy way.

As far as the look and quality of your site, ask yourself the hard questions. Does your site look like one that would impress you? Based on the content does your site appear to be an authority on your subject? What do you have that might truly inspire and attract links? You must address these kinds of issues honestly, because if the answer is “No”, you still have a lot of work to do. The fact is you’ll never be able to stop monitoring, tailoring and adapting these elements. You can set them for a while and study them but eventually you’ll want to analyze performance and make adjustments.

Off site Optimization

Once you’ve done the on-site work you move on to off-site optimization which is primarily about building links. Getting links is a tricky endeavor that we could write novels on. But the essence of it is producing quality content, attempting to innovate and being a bit of a self promoter. The more you can build relationships with others and become a reputable source of information the more likely you are to attract links. But you can’t be afraid of taking risks and stepping outside of your comfort zone. If you try to take short cuts when it comes to expanding your link profile, you will find that the easy stuff won’t get you where you want to be. Sure, some foundational links from directories or aggregators won’t hurt. But these kinds of links are called “Low hanging fruit” because anybody can get them. You need to acquire the kind of merit based links that only great sites can earn.

When you begin or revise an SEO campaign there’s a lot that goes into it. But it all starts with market research. The more you can understand the space you are in, the more you can find interesting angles and weaknesses that you can fill. Armed with that information you can hit all of the high points of on-page optimization and give yourself the best fighting chance for rankings. Then as you continue to test and try new things you can build links to gain trust and keyword relevance from other sites. When all of these things come together you give yourself the greatest possible advantage in the battle to top the SERPS.

Author Bio

Jessica is a writer for seosoftware.net where they offer reviews of all varieties of SEO software. Jessica has been a writer for several years with extensive experience in SEO, internet marketing and link building.

Tagged as: begin, how to, off-site, on-site, optimization, research, seo campaign, tips