Wednesday 9 December 2009

SEO Basic Steps - Part 1

When I am looking at a website in order to update it's SEO or starting a site from scratch I have spent ages looking around for the a, b, c and you will get traffic model and it simply doesn't exist. So I had to come up with my own formula to optimize websites in order to make sure I do not miss anything.

This formula (or list of steps) breaks down to 10 stages which I follow in order to check the content. These are:

  1. Select Keywords
  2. Write Content
  3. Add Meta Data
  4. Check & Alter Page HTML Tags
  5. Generate Required Files
  6. Install Trackers
  7. Submit to Search Engines
  8. Submit To Directories
  9. Purchase Additional Domains
  10. Wait For Results

Within the next few articles I will explain how each step will affect your page ranking and what would happen if it was missed.

Select Keywords

There is no simple way of doing this, if you know your product then it is simple. I often start by writing down a list of 5 keywords that people would type in a search engine and the results would show. Doing this gives you a basic set of words for your articles, but remember, in this list avoid stop words (such as and, the it, i etc) because they do not help in the next step.

Because this is such a low number we need to expand this list and this is where keyword analysis tools come in handy such as the google keyword analysis tool.

Using this tool, enter each of your keywords individually and look at what is returned. The aim is to select some phrases which will have a higher search rate than the current ones you have selected.

At this point it is important to note that there is no point in just selecting single words, the best bet is too select some with 3 words, some with 2 and some with a single word in order to generate a decent list of keywords. Save this list somewhere safe, we will need it in a later section.

Write Content

Unfortunately, there is no substitute for well written and meaning full content so you can't skip this step or get a machine to do it for you. The best bet is to take your original list of keywords and use this to base your article on. Try to get at least 2 keyword phrases in the first paragraph will help the rankings for those keywords. This is because when you begin to read a document, you look at the first few paragraphs to see if its worth continuing, the spiders appear to do the same thing. They look at the first sections too see if the content is worth looking at or ignoring as well as continuing to the rest of the document. If you miss this step, you will end up with the first few paragraphs full of complete rubbish and the site won't index well.

I will expand on this article on the next steps and link them too here but that's it for now.

No comments:

Post a Comment