This is a SEO guide (search engine optimisation) showing how an SEO campaign should be approached and undertaken, from start to finish. If you are wanting individual SEO tips, e.g. Keyword analysis, link building and on-site SEO then check out our menu links on the right.
SEO Guide Stage 1 – Research
- Keywords are the words or group or words that will relate to the searches typed into a search engine by users. For example, if you have a drainage website for the York region then your keywords may be “York Drain Unblocking”, “Drain Services York” and “Blocked Drains York” – as this is what a person trying to find a site relating to this might type into Google.
- Figure out your keywords for each page. Your home page usually has the main keywords you want to really focus on, bit don’t forget to make a list of keywords for each page of your site.
- You can use many free checkers and generators to help find keywords for your site. When deciding keywords you must weigh up how much work you would have to put in (optimising your site for that keyword), compared with changing your keyword to maybe a less competitive one that you can optimise for and see results faster.
Keyword Research
- Your competition are the websites that appear on page 1 of a Google search results page for your keywords. Research involves looking at these sites and seeing what they have done to get themselves on page 1. Use the free tools out there to do this (Firefox extensions like SEO Quake are great for this, along with META analysers, etc – see our free SEO tools at the bottom of this page).
- Once you have found the main competition see how many links are going to their domain (or page if a specific product on a website not relating to the theme, i.e. Whey Protein being sold on amazon). The best way to find backlinks is to do a Yahoo search and exclude the domain of the site you are searching (there are loads of backlink checkers that show the links from the website domain you are searching for). On yahoo type:linkdomain:www.example.com -www.example.com…..replacing “example.com” with the site you are querying the link amount for. (Don’t bother trying this on Google – it gives only a small percentage of the actual amount and Bing has disabled this feature).
- What other keywords have your competition optimised for? Keyword research ties in with competition research in that you can get a great list of keywords from looking on the competitions pages for frequent phrases (again use a meta analyser).
- Keep in mind that the first page of Google for many keywords will have listings on sites like Wikipedia, government sites and possibly major players like Amazon and Ebay. For the majority of people there is not much point trying to look at the links to these sites (the number will be vast).
- So after your competition research you should know: The top competitors (know your enemy), the link quantity you are aiming for (one-way links from relevant, quality sites to yours are weighted highly by search engines) and the keywords you competitors have optimised for in their content, META and Title’s and images/links.
Competition Analysis
- How well is your site search engine optimised? Do a review of your website using our On Site SEO Techniques Checklist.
- Look at the site structure and the content – do they conform to all the points on the seo checklist?
Current On-Site Status
- Current indexed status? How many of your site’s pages are indexed by Google, Yahoo and Bing? Use the following command in a search engine to see the number of indexed pages:site:www.example.com…replacing “example.com” with your websites domain.
- Current rankings? Where does your site rank on a search in Google, Yahoo and Bing (remember to check both local and .com search engines. Also a local site like google.co.uk will give the option for “World-wide Search” and “UK Search” – World-Wide is used most but check both!)?
- How many links do you have to your site? Use the Yahoo linkdomain query to find out. How do these compare to the competition?
- How is your social media? Do you have any forum posts, external blogs, social networking pages (Facebook Page, Twitter Page, etc). Remember social media is the new web (Web 2.0) – people no longer want to just look at a page of content – they want to interact with it and other users on the subject matter. Link all these media’s back to your site!
Current Off-Site Status
SEO Guide Stage 2 – Strategy and Planning
- From your research determine the on-site and off-site areas you can change, improve and work on.
What SEO type things should I do?
- Internal optimisation or employing an agency or contractor costs money. Work your costs out and create time-scales that you can realistically stick to. We all want a good return on investment!
Calculate Timescales and Costs
- In almost every case = yes!
- In the long run great SEO should increase visitors to your site and if you have followed our advise on display marketing and conversion optimisation then hopefully your sales should also increase. More sales = more profit = good ROI!
Will You Get Enough Return On Investment?
SEO Guide Stage 3 – Implementation of SEO Techniques
- Using the research you did with the On Site SEO Techniques Checklist, find the areas of your site that need improvement and fix them. The basic techniques give your site a good grounding for users to view the site with no errors and in a fast and well presented manner. Search engine spiders can crawl the site easily and effectively giving you the best chance to get your content indexed well.
- Use section 2 of the on Site SEO techniques checklist to optimise your content, title’s, META, internal links and images for the keywords for each page. Please remember – keywords are not site wide – they should be uniquely thought out for each page.
On-Site SEO
- From your research you should know the links to your site and the amount you aim to get (by viewing the links to the competitors). Now is the implementation. A link building campaign is essential to ranking high for any competitive keyword. See our link building campaign guide for more info.
Off-Site SEO
SEO Guide Step 4 – Continuing SEO
- Link Building is said to be half the battle to acheiving great ranking results. This is why we have created some link building guides and tried to give as much info on link building as possible. The best link building, however, is natural link building. The points below (Social networking, blog posting, etc) are all forms of “Link Baiting” and are what create the really successful websites.
- Don’t get us wrong, paying someone to build links for your website is a tried and tested technique, providing the comapny is reputable and will generate quality links from related websites (not just link farming!). You will find, however, that natural link building is more effective, more involved as a business and simply more fun!
- New to link building? See Link Building Explained for more details – or alternatively jump straight into the our Link Building Campaign Guide!
- One thing you will have to do, especially if you are paying someone to link build for you, is monitor the back links to youe website. You can download free monitors, or use the free online monitors shown on our Free Link SEO Tools page.
- Social networking is here to stay – and you can use it to your advantage for natural link building to your site, brand awareness and opening new channels and gateways into your website. Check out our social media pages for more info.
