Introduction
People use search engines to find things. Although you
should avoid making your business depending entirely on
free traffic from search engines, so is it still important
to consider search engines in your overall internet
marketing strategy. Ignoring search means leaving a big
chunk of business on the table, which will make it much
harder to stay competitive depending on the industry you
are in and what your competition is doing. SEO isn't rocket
science and to a certain degree technical. It has nothing
to do with magic and fairy dust will do nothing to help you
with it. It also requires a long term strategy and
commitment in order to become and remain successful. There
is no silver bullet and no shortcuts.
Because of its long term commitment necessary, is a well
formed strategy key to success, a strategy that is followed
and verified and scrutinized along the way.
While all 11 steps below are part of a repeating cycle over
the time while you are doing business on the internet, so
are only step 6 to 11 task that need to be on going on a
much more frequent basis. Due to the fact that steps 1 to 5
are not repeated very often, is it necessary to give them
special attention and care to get them right at the
beginning. Errors made there will affect all the others in
a negative way and hurt your efforts along the way.
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research is the most important first step that
should not be taken too lightly. While you can easily test
and change hundreds of keywords in paid search campaigns,
so is this not possible for organic search optimization.
You usually concentrate on one to five key phrases for the
whole site (theme) and one to three phrases for a single
page. For large sites with thousands of pages is it hard to
optimize every single page to the full extend due to the
limits in time and other resources.
2. Competitive Intelligence
Know you competition! What are they doing? 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 your vertical is online the
easier is it for you to outperform your competition. This
is important to determining cost and resources for your SEO
efforts.
3. Web Design and Development
Fixing something that is broke is always harder than
building it right from the beginning. If you are in the
process of creating a new website, make sure to consider
search engine friendly design and architecture before and
during the actual development of the website. This will
save you a lot of time and money and in most cases put you
already ahead of a considerable number of your competitors.
Search engine friendly design is not rocket science and
search engine friendly design does not have to be ugly.
Search engine friendly design is for the most part user
friendly design as well, but there are some exceptions
where compromises have to be made.
4. Get 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 many cheap
services and software products out there that offer for
less than $100 submission to and #1 ranking in thousands of
search engines. Don't do it. If you see an offer like that,
hold your wallet and run. Your site should be found by
search engines naturally and they will find your site if a
page that is already in their index links to you. Why?
Because this is what search engines do, following links to
discover content. There are plenty of methods to get your
first inbound links. Some web directories are recognized by
search engines and a listing there will do your site good.
Most recognized directories are commercial in nature and
charge a fee for reviewing your site. Also check with
vendors or good customers (B2B) who have a website for the
opportunity to have them place a link to your website.
5. Sitemaps
The larger search engines allow webmasters to submit a
sitemap to them via a webmaster console. The search engines
also provide reports and other useful information, such as
technical problems with your websites you might not be
aware of via their console. Even if you decide against the
submission of a site map to the search engines, is it
advisable to create an account and register your website
with them for the reports and statistics they provide for
free and which are invaluable for your internet marketing
efforts.
6. Web Analytics
You can't determine success or failure of any of your
internet marketing activities if you do not track and
measure their effectiveness. Engaging in any type of
marketing campaign online, be it SEO, paid search, display
advertising, email marketing, social media or affiliate
marketing is like fishing in the dark without any type of
web analytics solution in place. The options range from
free services to very expensive and heavily customizable
package. You have to determine what solution will work for
you, but you have to start with one so don't put it off.
Web analytics helps you to determine where to improve 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 is not a cost center
if it is done properly.
7. Content Building
A website is never done. It has to change and grow over
time. This is a natural process to adjust to changes in the
market, with maturing in this type of medium and your
normal business growth. Providing good 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. Most people do not
link to pages that only serve the purpose to make a sale.
8. Link Building
The internet wouldn't be a "net" without links. It would
only be a collection of independent pages that are not
connected to each other. Disconnected pages cannot be found
and that defeats the purpose of them, wouldn't it? Inbound
links and internal site linking is 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 an important role in virtually
every search engine when it comes to ranking pages in their
search results. This is a never ending process and while it
happens naturally. Be a bit more pro-active to get more and
good inbound links. There are plenty of sites out there
that should link to you, but don't know you and your
content.
9. Engagement, Trust and Community Building
Social media and Web 2.0 might be buzz words, but the
underlying core elements they are made of are much more
elementary and fundamental. Don't live in a bubble and talk
to people without allowing people to respond and to
interact with you. People will talk about you, with or
without you being around. Take the opportunity to become
part of the discussion to build trust and deeper
relationships with your customers or potential customers.
Listen to what they say and learn about their wants and
their needs. Hear what they say about you and your
products, especially the criticism and improve on them.
10. Ranking and Traffic Analysis
Check where you are today to be able to compare it with
data in the future. Look for trends and 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. Improving ranking
is important for SEO, but more important than the ranking
is the traffic that comes with it. Does the change in
ranking yields in the traffic you expected? Does this
traffic actually convert?
11. Conversion Analysis
No matter what you do, everything will come down to one
critical factor at the very end. What is your bottom line?
Did you make profit or did you lose money. While losing
money in the short term for strategic reasons is okay, so
Is losing money in the long run deemed to failure and the
end of your business altogether. Whatever you do, it has to
contribute directly or indirectly to a positive Return of
Investment. Web Analytics is part of the process of making
this determination among other tools and methods. Expand
the things that work 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 that work
for others might not work for you, but the same is true the
other way around.
----------------------------------------------------
Carsten Cumbrowski is an internet marketer, entrepreneur
and internet marketing strategy consultant. You can find
tons of resources to the various channels and topics in
internet marketing free at Cumbrowski.com including further
details to the items discussed in this article.
http://www.cumbrowski.com/
http://www.cumbrowski.com/CarstenC/articles/20071126_11_step
s_to_successful_seo.asp
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