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Organize Your SEO Efforts
Do you have a systematic approach to your SEO projects? I’ve found that if you don’t have a clear purpose when you begin a SEO campaign, you may omit and overlook key factors that make the difference between success and failure. So how do you make sure you cover all the bases? Start by determining the high-level goals every SEO project should have.
The first priority is pretty simple - get indexed. Of course this will happen without any intervention on your part, but part of any SEO campaign is helping search engines spider your site as fast as possible. How do you do that? The easiest strategy is to create a sitemap and submit it to the engines. A sitemap is a shortcut search engines can use to find all the pages on your site in the shortest amount of time. Traditionally, separate engines have had different methods of reading an accepting submitted sitemaps. Luckily, search engines have just agreed on a common format for finding and reading sitemaps. Now, you can use your robots.txt file to point to your sitemap and the major search engines will find it. Your link building campaign also affects how quickly your site is indexed. Create, or buy, links on high ranking sites and your site will be found and indexed that much quicker. If you’re creating a new site, considering buying a domain name that already has pagerank and traffic. The search engines will already be aware of the domain and will quickly index it. But be warned, if you radically change the content, the site will lose pagerank. Make changes slowly if possible - assuming you are able to buy the actual site content as well as the domain. If not, find out what content the site currently hosts and semantically include that information in your new site. That way you’ll manage the change with as little damage as possible.
After indexing, your next tasks should focus on ranking for the terms you’re targeting. As with indexing, link building comes into play here. After optimizing your site, getting links on high ranking pages with good anchor text and, if possible, on sites that are thematically related to your site, is the best way to get your site high in the SERP’s. This is an ongoing process that should involve many different approaches - blog posts, paid links, article submissions, and reciprocal linking. Don’t make the mistake of putting all your energy in one method. That’s a quick way to draw attention from search engines - and not the good kind of attention.
Finally, once your site develops consistent traffic, you need to find out how to turn visitor intention into action. This is where marketing and analytics come into play. The only way to improve conversion rates is to find out exactly what works and what doesn’t. Many times this can come down to image placement, differently worded content, or site usability. Though there are a few tips you can follow when you building your site, increasing conversions often involves trial and error until you find that sweet spot where targeted customers are consistently guided toward the action you want them to take - clicking a link, calling a phone number, etc….
One rule I’ve learned in SEO is that what works for one campaign does not necessarily work on another. There is no standard formula which will work for every site every time. Learning and implementing new methods will be a part of SEO as long as SEO is effective. But as long as you stay focused on the fundamentals, and make sure the techniques you use are for either indexing, ranking, or converting, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the curve and see results.
April 25th, 2007 at 9:55 am
As with anything you plan to accomplish, you should have a plan and a goal in mind before starting. Understanding where you hope to go with your SEO sites can keep you from running in circles. Never “put all your eggs in one basket” try several different approaches to link building as well as marketing.
Great advice on getting the “right” kind of attention from the search engines. Thanks!