Whether you’re engaging professional SEO services or looking to do it all yourself, you’ll need to prioritise some tasks above others. Bringing any site up to cutting edge standards takes a lot of work- which is why many people choose to use SEO consultants who know the field to do most of the work for them- and you’ll need to have a plan right from the beginning. It’s always a good idea to put something down in writing, even if it’s just for your own reference. It’ll help keep your efforts focussed. If you do hire specialist SEO consultants, always ask them for a detailed breakdown of what they intend to do before they start work.
If your website has been up and running for a while and you want to bring it higher in the search rankings, the first thing to do is have a long hard look at your site. Is it user-friendly? Have a few of your own friends try it out and get their honest opinions. Are the graphics and layout pleasing to the eye? Take care that Flash objects and other bells and whistles aren’t intrusive or annoying. Websites can be too fancy as well as too plain.
If you’re happy with the look and feel of the site, run it through a few SEO tools and have a look at the results. There are plenty of free SEO tools out there available for anyone to use. If nothing else, collecting a few metrics like PageRank and Alexa Rank will give you a baseline from which to measure the gains made by your SEO efforts. Run a few Google searches and see where you come up too, and note this all down for future reference.
The SEO tools should give you some idea of where your site is lacking. Are you missing out on valuable directory inclusions like a DMOZ or Yahoo! listing? Is there any traffic related to your website on Twitter or Facebook? What are the keywords that the tools identify, and are they the same as the ones you thought each page should be targeting?
For almost all websites that buy professional SEO services, the key missing puzzle piece is content. Whether your site has been around for years or days, it’s important to develop a keyword structure across the whole site. Decide which keywords or keyword phrases each individual page (except things like terms and conditions and delivery information, which won’t help you get traffic) should target and make sure there is appropriate and unique content in place on every one.
Content in king in SEO. While generating content is one of the most time consuming parts of any SEO campaign, it is absolutely necessary. These days search engines demand good content as a prerequisite for ranking well for almost any strong keywords. It must be readable by real site users and as useful as possible. Remember that it’s no good bringing people to your website if they don’t like what they find!
About the author:
Posted by Phil.
Link to us
If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.