Creating a Good SEO Strategy

A successful SEO strategy is a major key to ensuring you easily and properly promote your website or content. An SEO strategy will also help you to focus on your actual website or content instead of spending all your time on the implementation of SEO.

The first step is to create your plan. The simplest way to accomplish this is to write out a to-do list. You'll use this to-do list to define your goals and tasks. As each goal or task is implemented, you can check it off. Here is an example of a to-do list:

1. Primary goals

• Listed in top 3 search engine
• Show within first 20 results using researched keyword
• Time frame: within the next 6 month

2. Secondary goals

• Increase website traffic by 5% within the next 3 months
• Increase sales by 3% within the next 4 months
• Increase brand awareness for product line within targeted consumer base

With your to-do list created, you can set tasks for each listed primary and secondary goal. Example tasks would be selecting the top three search engines and finding out about their submission guidelines, ensuring your researched keywords and phrases are placed within your website content and locating a good program or site that will monitor your website. The latter task leads us to the next part of a good SEO strategy, analyzing your site.

There are many programs and sites out there that will analyze your site. For the sake of this article I recommend checking and possibly using Google Webmaster Tools. This site will help you create your sitemap (another topic we'll cover in week five), show you the top search queries used to get to your site and their position, links to your site from other websites and more. Using this site (or other analyzing site or program) will allow you to see what is working and what is not working in regards to your SEO strategy. You can then make changes accordingly whether this be changing your keywords, resubmitting your sitemap, or even soliciting other websites for inbound links.

The final part of a good SEO strategy is monitoring. Once again using Google Webmaster Tools (or other preferred programs or sites) will be key in monitoring your SEO success. You'll need to adopt a wash-rinse-repeat type of attitude on SEO. It won't be enough to just do it once and call it good. SEO is a constant battle between you and your competition. Just letting it go will ensure your fast fall in the major search engines listings. That's where your choice of monitoring/analyzing program or site comes in. You should choose one that will make this part an easy ongoing task.

Your SEO strategy basically will help you ensure the success of your SEO campaign. Just remember to create your to-do goal list, assign tasks to your goals, analyze your efforts and continuously monitor.

Next week: Optimization of your content - the smallest of changes can make the biggest differences!