You’ve created a great Web site, it looks the business and clearly shows the benefits of your offering but how do you get found on the free listings of Google or any search engine for that matter? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the answer and you should plan your SEO strategy as early as possible.
Let’s now look at the six key steps to successful SEO that you can follow. Besides all these tips, if you are not that into SEO than you can also hire [google_bot_show][/google_bot_show]Dynamics Digital SEO Agency to do all the work for you in a professional and efficient way.
- Goals and Objectives
Knowing what will make a successful SEO campaign is crucial. How will you know you have got what you set out to achieve? Rather than say “when I get heaps of natural ‘free’ traffic” – try to define goals as being Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART Goals). For example, ‘To increase your website’s conversions through a natural search by 40% in 12 months for an agreed list of keywords’.
- Research, Analysis, and Strategy
First, it’s good to benchmark how well a site is doing in natural search. Take a look at the web analytics (Google Analytics) of a site and see how much natural traffic it receives. Also check the number of natural conversions, which keywords they are for, and where you are ranked for them.
Then carry out competitor research to see what is working for your competitors and what they are missing out on. Consider also doing similar research for similar but non-competitive industries. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the ideas and opportunities you can identify this way. You can build this into a Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) Analysis styled document for your site.
Keyword research, analysis, and selection is of paramount importance for setting up a successful SEO strategy. Care should be taken to select relevant keywords that are attainable, carry a worthwhile search volume, are likely to convert and not too competitive.
- Search Engine Friendliness
Hopefully, you will have thought about making your site search engine friendly from the very beginning and this will be factored into your site design and structure before it is built. If this is not the case, be prepared to audit your site and ‘fix’ any technical issues before actively optimizing the site.
You will want to make sure your site is easy to crawl by search engines. There are lots of technical things to consider such as how the site is coded and whether JavaScript and Flash could be restricting search engines accessing important content on your site. To a certain extent, you can even set up rules to automatically optimize key elements of your page based on your keyword research and site structure for elements such as title tags, meta tags, and the main heading of pages. This can be a real time saver and reduce the amount of manual work later on. You may like to consider getting professional SEO training to help ensure there are not any major technical issues.
- Relevancy
Having completed your keyword research, you will want to optimize pages on your site with relevant keywords. You should think about whether you have existing pages you can optimize or whether new pages will need to be created.
When optimizing content, limit the number of phrases to around three or four per page. Include important keywords in the title tag and throughout the copy. Always try to ensure the content reads well for humans, so think about using synonyms in addition to repeating your main phrases two or three times in the copy.
- Popularity
Search engines like to match a searcher’s query with sites that are both relevant and popular. Popular sites are ones that have lots of references and links from other sites. Each link can be considered a vote of importance. The quality of the link is also important as some links hold more weight than others. Quality links can be attained from respected sites, often from within your industry. One way of attracting links is by writing good content that people will naturally want to link to and letting others know your great content is available and ready to be linked to. Your site’s popularity plays a big role in whether your site will rank or not – never underestimate the power of a link!
- Rinse and repeat
The search landscape is not static. You must adapt to what is and what isn’t working for your business on a regular basis. Repeat the above steps and understand your web analytics and conversions to ensure you are staying on track for your goals.
