SUCCESSFUL SEO PLANING SHORTLIST
Without getting into the details at this time, below is a list of necessary first steps when it comes to smart planning. Every webmaster or site owner reading this will quickly realize if the were following these steps or not. Each step is important and basically irreplaceable.
1.
KEYWORD RESEARCH – This is the first step, often totally overlooked for various reasons. Without a proper keyword research, there is no way to choose the successful path. Keyword research will tell you keyword potential and alternatives in a desired niche. Successful keyword research will give you information about which keywords are attainable based on your site ranking and how many monthly searches are inputted for your selected keyword. Most importantly, this research will provide keyword alternatives (long tail keywords).
2.
COMPETITION ANALYSIS – With a list of keywords from above, your next step is to dig into the details. Considering that being ranked for certain keyword is not an easy task, it is important to know how difficult it is to get there and
how serious is your competition. If you start putting effort into something that it is clearly too competitive, you will lose money, nerves and time. This step is mandatory and where webmasters often fail to try to compete for keywords totally out of their league.
3.
PLAN CREATION (KEYWORD MAP) – Once you have separated the best keywords, it is time to make an action plan. This means sorting targeted keywords by difficulty and properly planning an internal linking structure which is very important from an SEO perspective. Besides external links, internal links tell search engines what your page is all about. You must have a smart interlinking strategy (
learn everything about Google Rankbrain). Persistence and adhering to the plan are crucial at this point.
4.
TEXT (ARTICLES) PREPARATION – Each keyword from the map above must have its own page on site. Every one of those pages must have a good SEO score (
what is SEO score is explained here) and that includes proper text on the page. What many webmasters don’t understand is that it isn’t enough to just have text heavy page. Sure, the text provides food for search engines but ONLY if it is written well. Webmasters are usually ordering articles from writers without SEO knowledge. You will need to be extremely lucky and have uneducated competition for your targeted keyword to have success with this approach. A high-quality article must have a suitable length which is something that is separately calculated by SEO experts based on current top 10 ranking competitors where relevant key sentences and semantic constructions are used. If you don’t execute in this fashion, all previous effort will be in vain.
5.
ONSITE PAGE OPTIMIZATION – This topic requires a very in-depth and lengthy explanation in its own right. Besides being long-winded, it might make this article more challenging to understand. For now, suffice it to say that Onsite page optimization is the most important step with SEO but in absolute relation with the others steps mentioned here. Please read this article which will provide a nice introduction to
what is a good webpage optimization.
6.
LINK BUILDING – Once you have gone through all the processes mentioned above, you can consider yourself successful with SEO for a targeted keyword. Now, this is where offsite SEO job starts. This means that you will need to obtain relevant links to that page from various sources. This is a never-ending process. The more you get, the more stable your position will be in search engine results page. When competition is easier (one of the reasons why you need competition analysis mentioned in #2), fewer links are necessary for a good ranking. In practice this might be only a few relevant links but, it is different for every case.
Perhaps, you have now discovered your own personal answer to a very important question; What are you doing wrong?
WHAT ARE YOU DOING WRONG?
If you failed to do at least one of the steps in the short list above, you now know what is wrong and why you are having problems with rankings. Every step is in relation to the others. To illustrate better, it is like investing and building a house without examining the ground before building a foundation. The house will stand as long as the weather is nice but it is just a matter of time before an earthquake hits in the form of big search engine algorithm updates with aftershocks of constant small algorithm updates. How will your house stand compared to your neighbors (competitors) that were built their homes by the rules?
CONCLUSION
This purpose of this article was to offer webmasters a simplified explaining how SEO works. Every attempt was made to avoid using a bunch of technical “mumbo-jumbo” terms that tend to complicate an already complicated subject. In closing, it would be appropriate to add that working on any long-term SEO strategy is like investing in education. You should plan your work, then work your plan. There are no legitimate shortcuts such as the temptation of applying black hat techniques. This approach will eventually see your site being penalized in future search engine updates. In time, results will come as this is the nature of the whole process. You can try to cheat which might yield results for a while. However, you will not survive long term if you fail to educate yourself, plan well and practice sound SEO principles.