Starting Off Your SEO Campaign
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If you have been doing SEO for a long time, you may have an almost intuitive sense of what you need to do to optimize a web site. You may work on several things at once rather than following a step-by-step process. But when you’re learning SEO or trying to understand what your SEO is doing to your site, it can seem a little overwhelming, especially when it’s your first campaign.
This article will hopefully help beginning SEOs to think more clearly about the SEO process, and veteran SEOs to communicate more clearly with their clients. I owe most of the information you’ll read here to SEO Chat forum member Maximum Tadpole. He noticed that many of his clients wanted a step-by-step guide to the SEO process. To help answer that need, he recorded what he did for one recent site that he took on as an SEO client.
The very first step he took for the site was opening a Google Analytics account. This free service from Google is designed to help you discover where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. This important information can help you make changes to your site to increase your traffic and make your site friendlier to visitors.
Once you have that account, the next few steps involve some serious site contemplation. What value does the site have to offer? Is it selling products or offering content? What kind of content – articles, classified ads, what? To use SEO Chat as an example, our site offers articles, SEO tools, and a set of forums with plenty of networking opportunities.
Now that you know what value the site has to offer, you need to figure out who would benefit from that value. Maximum Tadpole was working on a free web site with job opportunity listings and career advice for nurses. Clearly, this information would be of most benefit to nurses, especially nurses who were just graduating from nursing school. Keep this audience clearly in mind, because much of the rest of your strategy is going to depend on them.
Indeed, the next steps in this phase of your campaign involve figuring out how to get in touch with those people – and figuring out how to get them to come to you. After you’ve thought about all these points for the site as a whole, you want to think about them again (though not in quite as much depth) for the parts of the site to which you will want to build links aggressively, such as category pages.
Next: Considering Keywords >>
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