General SEO help i 9 steps

Step 1: Site/page evaluation. There are many resources to get a SEO evaluation of your site or page. Generally speaking SEO forums are a good place for this. When seeking this information, put your thickest skin on and ask simply for an SEO analysis. Bear in mind you will receive many conflicting theories and ideas, that is in fact the nature of optimization. Take these ideas, make a list of the suggestions that you need to research. There are many great optimization forums out there, I will only suggest 2. TIP Web Site Reviews, this is a very friendly forum and is host to some great SEO minds. The second is a much larger forum and also hosts some incredible SEO contributors, SEO Chat site reviews.

Step 2: Research your site reviews. They are certainly a great many resources available to research these items, including this blog. I will give some of the sites I am most familiar with to start with….But if you cannot find what you seek, a Google search or asking a question here or in a related forum can be very helpful. You might consider purchasing the SEO Book by Aaron Wall, it’s a fine resource. SEOmoz has a vast pool of information covering most of the topics you will be researching. Stepforth has great tutorials in it’s FAQ section, and glossary resource (to look up those terms and acronyms the forum folks used, that you may not understand). I highly recommend “Search Engine Marketing 101” at Search Engine Watch. I also have this quick indexing strategy post you might find helpful.

Step 3: Make an implementation plan. There are clearly going to be higher priority fixes and those that will cause more flux than other, as well. I suggest making a plan to do the higher priority fixes first, and attempt to do the implementations likely to cause the most flux all together. Examples of the fixes that will cause the most flux are redirects, changing over 25% of a page’s content, lately changing your page title, and navigational changes.

Step 4: Statistical data collection. If you do not have a stat program, you will need one to properly evaluate your success and potential for improvement. Google Analytics is pretty good and it’s free, make sure the code is inserted just before the /body tag at the bottom of your code. You will have to place the code in every page you want to track. If you already have some sort of stat program, it really doesn’t matter much what the program is as long as it tracks unique visitors, visitors, pageviews, bounce or time on site, and referrals to start with. You will want to create a chart plotting these items and anything else you wish to track for the current and previous 2 months. This is your benchmark. NOTE: Information from one stat program does not necessarily translate to the the information from another, the numbers will be different for all programs. The control here is to use the same program as your benchmark to track progress. Don’t forget to check your search position for the targeted keyword phrases you will be optimizing for.

Step 5: Begin making the changes. You are going to want to do this in a controlled manner. For example, try not to do everything at once. If you optimize everything at the same time you will have little resources to analyze the benefits properly. This is where the patience and beer comes in! It’s not out of line at all to follow up on your site review threads with changes and ask for input.

Step 6: Tools and time. Now that you have made your changes you will want to follow up with some means with which to check your results and success. I have a list of free online SEO tools you are welcome to check out, and this thread at SEO Chat is a good resource as well. Be advised, trust no tool on it’s own merit…If it’s important to you double check with another tool not using the same database or platform.

Step 7: The search engines. I highly recommend you verify your site and submit a site map to Google and Yahoo. MSN/Live has no means of helping along your indexing, but the project is in development. You can ping Ask.com with your sitemap by putting the following url in your browser window with the location of your sitemap. http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

Step 8: Link building. Incoming links are a large part of many SEO aspects. The affect indexing, crawl frequency, relevancy, search rank (SERPs), PageRank, authority, and trust. You will need to continue to build link, absolutely forever. The best backlinks are one way organic links, these are generally sites that have lined to you because your content is unique, good, and relevant to their own. To achieve this, you need only to write great content that is relevant to the theme of your site this will create long tails, as well. Social bookmarking can be useful for traffic and backlinks as well…But you must be a productive member of the community, don’t just mark your pages. Mark pages with content related to your own site’s theme as well. Here is a great get started article on StumbleUpon. Directory submissions will not provide you traffic, but if you are choosy about submitting only to quality directories, they can be very nice, relevant backlinks. Finally, reciprocal linking, no it’s not dead. However, you should be aware that reciprocal links are generally devalued and you should only be counting on them for traffic. Be careful never to let the percentage of reciprocal links outweigh your one way links.

Step 9: Tweaking and maintenance. The optimization will never be complete. The search engines change their algorithms and ranking factors, your niche will change, and search queries trend in different directions all the time. You will need to continue to remain “up to speed” in your niche, and remain a weekly visitor at a good SEO forum or 2, in order to stay on top of it. Try to create 3 new pages every month, this will help to keep your data in Google’s webmasters tool fresh and build your site’s content…Which is directly reflected in you ability to be crawled and cached frequently. Watch your internal pages for “underachievers” and work to improve their content, backlinks, and the navigation to those pages. As I said before, never stop building links.

Now get in there! Seriously, it’s a pretty big job and can be very daunting….But the rewards are very good. Let’s face it, you will improve your pages, their search engine position, and you have just added a whole new pool of skills and knowledge to your own personal growth. Can’t go wrong there! Good luck…If you get stuck don’t be shy, ask a question.

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