The 7 steps to highly effective SEO!

Regardless of whether you decide to do SEO (search engine optimization) yourself or hire a reputed SEO consulting firm, you will both follow the same process. The basic SEO steps remain the same, the extent of your success depends upon your knowledge in each area, your understanding of the underlying SEO concepts and your skills in implementing the SEO techniques at each stage.

Step One – Set your SEO Goals

SEO at core is a marketing tool that can attract the desired number of visitors to your website. But just numbers, though important, are not the whole story. You must also define the type of visitors you want on your website. Be as specific as you can, for ex: “I want 1000 unique visitors everyday, from Austin TX, who are searching for SEO services”. This goal will help you set the direction for all the following steps in the SEO process listed below. Vague goals like “I want my site to be popular” will lead to wasted effort and lost time.

Step Two – Keyword Analysis

The most important step in any SEO implementation process will always be the choosing of your “keywords”. Keywords are individual words or phrases that you want people to associate with your product or service. You must anticipate your target customer’s behavior – what words or phrases will they use while searching for your business? Will the keywords be same for casual browsers and serious buyers or will they be different? If you choose the wrong keywords you will get traffic that is not interested in your business.

Step Three – Creating Website Content

There is absolutely no substitute for good content if you want to attract and retain relevant visitors to your website. Even if you have an existing site, start the thinking process with a blank slate. Create the information that you think will be helpful to your customers / audience and work in your key phrases. This should not be too difficult – if it is proving to be – re-examine your keywords. Once you have your ideal content, compare it to your existing site and make the required changes.

Step Four - Website Design

This step deals with creating individual webpage layouts and an overall website structure that is appealing to both visitors and search engines. Search engines use automated software called “spiders”, “bots” or “crawlers” to browse and record your website. The key is to ensure simplicity, both is reading a single page and navigating the entire website.

Step Five – Website Testing and Modifications

At this stage, you should now have a test site (if not a live one). Ask someone who has never seen your site to visit it. Give them objectives (finding a certain topic, product information, service price, or contact information). Ask them - how easy / difficult was it to complete the objectives and how long did it take? Which links did they click on and why? How did the content read – was it easy to understand and flow naturally? Based on their feedback, make the required modifications.

Step Six – Submitting and linking your website

This step is the heart of SEO. To make your website popular, you need to submit it to the various search engines, directories, blogs, and other Internet forums that are already popular and are visited regularly by a large number of people. This is simple work but takes up a lost of time and labor. There are innumerable sites to submit to and the best of them guard against automated submission – they want you to submit your site manually. You also need to create links to your site from other popular websites that your target audience frequents. The major search engines give credit to sites that have incoming links from other sites. The more recognized the site from which your link originates, the better ranking your site will get.

Step Seven – Monitoring, Reporting and Improvements

Monitor the major search engines for your targeted keywords and phrases. Analyze your website statistics to see where your traffic is coming from and what search terms are being used to find you. Compare your results against your goal set in Step 1 and constantly improve your website’s SEO performance by refining keywords, adding content, building links, and increasing website submissions.