Every website owning person and their dog should know something about search engine optimization (SEO), even if it's just the name.But not everyone would know where to start when it comes to crafting a practical and effective SEO strategy.
Any SEO strategy hoping to succeed begins before the website has even started to be constructed and never really ends.
Identifying how to reach an audience that cares is the first step.The implementation of both on and off-site SEO practices is the second. And the monitoring and tracking of data is the ongoing third.
Those three stages all deserve more explanation.
Know your objectives, know your audience
Before you begin planning your SEO strategy, you need to really define what you're trying to achieve with your website. What is the real objective of your site? What do you want your visitors to do once you have them there?
Once you know this, you need to identify who your audience is going to be in order to know how to entice them in. What do they do? What do they like? What don't they like? How old are they? Where are they located? Where do they hang out online?
With this information gathered, you can combine it with your primary objective to come up with a secondary one: getting these people to visit your site.
On and off-site SEO
The single most important part of your on-site SEO is going to be the quality of your content, and you will live or die by the keywords used in that. They are going to have to be relevant to how your target audience will find you, relevant to your site itself, and with a high enough search volume to make it worthwhile using them.
Much of the rest of your on-site SEO strategy is going to follow the same formula that everyone does: making sure every title, page, image, URL, text snippet, and anything else is optimized for your target audience to find you.
Where you will need to get a little creative is with the off-site SEO strategy.
This is all about getting the word out and earning the links back.
Contacting and building relationships with peers, commenting on relevant blog posts and forums, offering guest blogs on authority sites in return for links back to your own, and having a high quality social media presence are all ways to improve your off-site SEO.
The fun part is identifying what is likely to work and what isn't. Which authority sites are receptive to guest bloggers? Which have the more open-minded audience, willing to give somewhere new a minute or two of their time?
Is the older, recipe and interior decoration Pinterest crowd better for your niche or the younger coffee shop hipsters on Instagram?
Monitoring and tracking your engagement
So having made sure all of the above has been carried out to the absolute best it could have been, you've now got traffic coming out of your ears.
Or maybe just a steady trickle.
Either way, you need to know where it's coming from and what it's doing on your site. Using Google Analytics lets you monitor all of this information, providing great insight into where you can still improve. And you can always improve.
Monitoring how changes affect your site, utilizing split testing techniques, and keeping an eye on what the more successful of your competitors are doing right is all part of an ongoing SEO strategy too.
From before the beginning to the end that never comes
A great SEO strategy treats a website like a mother does a baby.
Really.
The planning begins well before the birth, and the care and attention never ends until it's either no longer able to be given or no longer needed.
Any SEO strategy hoping to succeed begins before the website has even started to be constructed and never really ends.
Identifying how to reach an audience that cares is the first step.The implementation of both on and off-site SEO practices is the second. And the monitoring and tracking of data is the ongoing third.
Those three stages all deserve more explanation.
Know your objectives, know your audience
Before you begin planning your SEO strategy, you need to really define what you're trying to achieve with your website. What is the real objective of your site? What do you want your visitors to do once you have them there?
Once you know this, you need to identify who your audience is going to be in order to know how to entice them in. What do they do? What do they like? What don't they like? How old are they? Where are they located? Where do they hang out online?
With this information gathered, you can combine it with your primary objective to come up with a secondary one: getting these people to visit your site.
On and off-site SEO
The single most important part of your on-site SEO is going to be the quality of your content, and you will live or die by the keywords used in that. They are going to have to be relevant to how your target audience will find you, relevant to your site itself, and with a high enough search volume to make it worthwhile using them.
Much of the rest of your on-site SEO strategy is going to follow the same formula that everyone does: making sure every title, page, image, URL, text snippet, and anything else is optimized for your target audience to find you.
Where you will need to get a little creative is with the off-site SEO strategy.
This is all about getting the word out and earning the links back.
Contacting and building relationships with peers, commenting on relevant blog posts and forums, offering guest blogs on authority sites in return for links back to your own, and having a high quality social media presence are all ways to improve your off-site SEO.
The fun part is identifying what is likely to work and what isn't. Which authority sites are receptive to guest bloggers? Which have the more open-minded audience, willing to give somewhere new a minute or two of their time?
Is the older, recipe and interior decoration Pinterest crowd better for your niche or the younger coffee shop hipsters on Instagram?
Monitoring and tracking your engagement
So having made sure all of the above has been carried out to the absolute best it could have been, you've now got traffic coming out of your ears.
Or maybe just a steady trickle.
Either way, you need to know where it's coming from and what it's doing on your site. Using Google Analytics lets you monitor all of this information, providing great insight into where you can still improve. And you can always improve.
Monitoring how changes affect your site, utilizing split testing techniques, and keeping an eye on what the more successful of your competitors are doing right is all part of an ongoing SEO strategy too.
From before the beginning to the end that never comes
A great SEO strategy treats a website like a mother does a baby.
Really.
The planning begins well before the birth, and the care and attention never ends until it's either no longer able to be given or no longer needed.
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