So here the deal when it comes to search engine optimization. When most people plan to build a website they never think of the search engine internet marketing strategy until the website is complete and live. Many people make this mistake. It is always important to find the competitive markets first and plan the marketing strategy first and build around that so when search engines decide to crawl through your website they know what they are looking for. Here are some steps to take when planning.
1. Find Competition – Find out exactly what your competitors are doing. Look at how they structure their website. Go to Google, Yahoo and MSN and keep a record of the 10 ten websites for each search engine. Use SEO tools to see how many people are linking back to your competitor’s websites, what keywords are they ranking for and find out if they are doing any type of off page optimization such as backlinks, social bookmarking, article submission, press release distribution and more. Look at how many keywords they are ranking for. To find great SEO tools, just type “SEO Tools” in to google and you will find some great websites to help you out.
2. Keyword Research – Now that you have studied your competition you can see what keywords they are trying to rank for. Use free keyword tools such as Google or word tracker of even my keyword research tool to find the best keywords and phrases for your website. This can help you when building your pages and naming pages. Keywords research tools are important because they tell what keywords are being typed in the search engines.
3. Website Structure – Now that you understand the first two steps you can layout your website foundation. Each keyword you want to rank for, try to build a page on that keyword if you can. You don’t want a busy website but you want to come up for every search term possible. This part is the most difficult but once you get the layout and structure down you’ll know what needs to be done. If you need help please email me directly. steve@stevedifabio.com
4. Development – Once you complete the first 3 steps this fourth step is easy. You found your competition, you found your keywords and you found the structure you need. Start building. You build around the first 3 steps. This technique doesn’t happen overnight but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy.
These steps are critical to search engine marketing. Follow them and you will have a successful website and high ranking website.