22 steps to the perfect SEO campaign

[LeilerDee]

Call it what you like, but getting more people to buy from you, contact you, subscribe to your website, phone/email you - this is the goal of SEO.


But what exactly is SEO? Many business owners see it shrouded in mystery and painfully difficult to get a really clear understanding of what it involves. Is it real or just a gimmick? Are there real, tangible gains to be realised from spending money on SEO? This question is probably the most important - what bang do I get for my buck and what is reasonable to pay for this type service?


To understand SEO and why it might be important, an appreciation of how search engines work may be benefical.
How does a search engine determine what website comes 1st, 2nd 3rd..etc on their Search Engine Results Page’s? Have you ever really thought about this? Ever questioned the accuracy of the results? Think your website should in position 1 and not position 21?


Search engines use a number of different factors when determining how relevant a website is for a particular keyword. When they are determining this relevancy they take into account three main areas:

• Website Architecture
• Website Content
• Website Popularity

Let’s take each area in isolation.

1. Website Architecture
   When analysed against the W3C standards, does a website implement good clean code and more importantly is it easy for a search engine’s spider to crawl a website? What about navigation on the website? Are relevant pages easy to find or are they buried beneath a complicated hierarchy..e.g. mycompany.com
2. Website Content
   Simple this one. Does a website have the searched for keyword on a given page? This is simplistic but it’s the foundation of all Information Retrieval IR search systems. There are a number of additional factors that are looked at here, but keywords, visible on a page is the starting point.
3. How many and what type of websites link to yours and (more importantly) what keywords do they use to link to you? Unlike the first two areas, this is very difficult to control and it’s why SEO can be so difficult.

Let’s get down to specifics. You have a website that has 250 pages. You have a set of keywords; let’s say 50, that you want to rank well for. Your target country is the UK. You have not implemented any Search Engine Optimisation before (at least not deliberately).


Where do you start and what would it cost?

Let’s go with the premise that you are going to pick 25 pages and use them to target your top 50 keywords. Here’s the step by step approach (you may take) to optimising your website:


1. Initial analysis of your existing website to find out what are the chief areas of concern


2. keyword research and analysis to define top 50 keywords


3. Analysis of competitors for chosen 50 keywords


4. Analysis of traditional competitors


5. Research current visibility for chosen keywords - what is the base line?


6. Backlink Analysis - What keywords are people using to describe your website?


7. Backlink Analysis - Where are you getting links (links - not traffic) from - what countries, what domains?


We are now ready to start making changes on the website - we have all the research complete, know what the base line is and what the campaign goals are.


8. Clean up code if required, i.e. clean html, CSS, broken links, navigation


9. Get human readable urls that match chosen keywords (ensure 301 redirects are implemented when changes made to page names)


10. Setup appropriate robots.txt tile


11. Write Meta data for 50 keywords - title tag, description tag, keywords tag, image tags - let’s say we target 25 pages for the 50 keywords, 2 keywords per page


12. Generate or optimise existing sitemap, plus develop xml sitemap and upload to Google Webmasters. Setup the geo targetting option in Google webmasters.


13. Optimise or generate new content for 25 pages, e.g heading tags, bolded text, paragraphs, appropriate bullets, correct font colours and background, i.e. black against white (accessibility concerns), calls to action..etc


14. Implement internal and external links that align with keywords


15. Setup a customised 404 error page


16. Append a blog to the website, Wordpress, Typepad, Drupal..etc


At this stage we have covered a lot of the ‘on page’ SEO stuff, i.e. the areas we can control. Next is the difficult part, ‘off page’ optimisation…


17. From my existing links, see are there any that can be leveraged, i.e. one’s where I can easily change the link text to better reflect one of my chosen keywords


18. From the competitor analysis above, start looking at the links my keyword and traditional competitors have. Pick a bunch every week and start emailing them to ask for links.


19. Start writing appropriate blog posts relevant to my industry and keyword rich. Good blog posts act as a magnet for new links.


20. Ensure I’m in the right directories, I’d start with Dmoz , Yahoo and Business.com (even if this isn't deemed as absolutely, completely, no doubt about it, something Google suggests anymore).


The above ‘off page’ tasks would/should be an ongoing process.


21. For more advanced link/brand awareness building I’d start to look at online press releases and


22. Social media optimisation techniques.


So, how much would you expect to pay for this work? £100 per month? £500 per month , £1000 per month?
Ultimately the price paid should be based on the expected ROI from the campaign. As a website owner I’d be looking at the expected return in terms of traffic and ultimately new customers from the website.

[purdue512]

Nice list. Many thanks. I didn't see widgets on the list.. They are great little link-builders and can help with everything else you've listed there.

[LeilerDee]

of course! silly me.

[Duncan Pollock]

Yep, a useful and well thought out guideline to making your website effective.
Helpful as a reminder to veterans as well as a good starting list for newbies.
The kind of posting that makes WPW worthwhile.

Duncan

PS. Relative to a previous "complaining" posting of mine today, there's absolutely no mention at all of "We're your best place to buy athletic shoes"!!

[Azher Memon]

Really appreciative article. I must say thanks

[sofomor]

Great post for making an SEO check list for beginners. Keep it up

[kgun]

1. Think before you start developing your site.
2. Don't buy the first template.
3. Try to avoid redirects.
4. Write simple clean code / markup and write for the web.

[Web Design Company]

A very useful list. thanks for sharing.

[janeth]

The list is far from the perfect SEO campaign. I hate to be negative but I would like to give my thoughts.

Call it what you like, but getting more people to buy from you, contact you, subscribe to your website, phone/email you - this is the goal of SEO.

SEO is search engine optimization. It is optimizing your website for the search engines. Conversion is getting people to call, e-mail or subscribe.

[*]Website Content
Simple this one. Does a website have the searched for keyword on a given page? This is simplistic but it’s the foundation of all Information Retrieval IR search systems. There are a number of additional factors that are looked at here, but keywords, visible on a page is the starting point.

Both Dell and Apple rank for the keyword computers, and neither used the keyword in their text.

2. keyword research and analysis to define top 50 keywords

50 is really a small number.

3. Analysis of competitors for chosen 50 keywords

Analyze the competition for the top 50 keywords to find out what other keywords your competition is trying to rank for.

4. Analysis of traditional competitors

I thought we did this with number one or rather, number two.

5. Research current visibility for chosen keywords - what is the base line?

Research current visibility for chosen keywords - What is the baseline?

I have no idea what that means.

6. Backlink Analysis - What keywords are people using to describe your website?

We started off with my website not being optimized for the search engines so how could I look at backlinks and determine how people are describing my website?

Maybe a better way would be looking at my competition's website and the keywords they are targeting and using those to determine what people are searching for when their looking for my product.

Title tags usually help a lot when doing this.

7. Backlink Analysis - Where are you getting links (links - not traffic) from - what countries, what domains?

Once again, this website has not been optimized in any way for the search engines. I think it would be better to determine where I want to get links from and the type of websites I want linking to me.

There is nothing I can do about what's already been done.

8. Clean up code if required, i.e. clean html, CSS, broken links, navigation

Very little information given about the steps I need to take to do this.

For example I could use a secondary navigation if I want to keep all the pages no more than three clicks from the home page. This will insure that all pages are crawled regularly. It will also help me to achieve both clarity and focus throughout the site.

While this is an important part of the site navigation, the real power is in the ability for me to focus on my main money pages while using the less important pages to boost those pages to the top of the search results. Each time someone clicks on the main navigation the secondary navigation down the left side changes. The secondary navigation focuses on the keywords related to the main navigation.

But then I should be concerned about the fact that visitors normally become confused when presented with more than five choices in the site navigation. For this reason I could separate the sections into categories and placed headers above each category.

This would allow me to place my best keywords in the links as well as the headers. This is good for both site visitors, as it brings clarity to the site, and for the search engines, as it gives them something to feed on. As the site grows the secondary navigation grows allowing the main site and main navigation to stay the same.

Main Navigation

Depending on what the money topics are I can move the topics around in the navigation keeping the main money topics closer to the top. Feeding the spiders as well as giving the site visitors what they are most likely looking for, first.

Now that gives information to some one on how to go about setting up the navigation, in my humble opinion.

9. Get human readable urls that match chosen keywords (ensure 301 redirects are implemented when changes made to page names)

Once again, the information you're giving is very vague. It's like saying the way to build a house is put a roof on it. And it continues that way throughout.

[kntisharma]

Very nice article, can it be reprinted ? I wanted to use this in one of my blogs.