Monday, January 21, 2008

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION GUIDE FOR YOU AND FOR ME

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the process of getting your site to rank as high as possible for the keyword phrases most relevant to your business. Let me explain briefly the best way for your blog or website gain more ranks in every search engine there is. This will help us understand more about search engine optimization or much known as SEO for all.

Before beginning a search engine optimization (SEO) project, it is important to understand the process involved in an effective SEO campaign. To that end, I have highlighted the five-step process and described the activities involved in each of these steps.

1. Base Line Reporting
The first step in any effective SEO campaign is understanding what the current site's starting position is within the search engines. Doing so ensures that you know the specific areas that need work and provides a baseline against which to gauge the subsequent campaign's success. We would use a program like WebPosition to analyze the site's starting position.

In addition, access to site traffic information is very important. We will analyze the current site traffic information that might be available to attempt to discover which search engines and what keyword phrases are being used.

2. Keyword Research
We propose to meet with you and identify a group of 10-12 keyword phrases that will be used in this search engine optimization. This step is critical and requires a considerable amount of time to find a good set of phrases that offer a balanced combination of two important factors: high usage by searchers and relatively low competition within the search engines.

3. Page Optimization and Content Development
Page optimization and content development are critical to search engine success. Content is king in search engine optimization. The search engines love text; high volume, high-quality content related to your business will serve you in a couple of important ways.

First, a site loaded with high-quality content of interest to site users will give them a reason to stay and a reason to come back. After all, the reason they came to your site was to find information. Second, you will receive the added benefit of serving up exactly what the search engines want - content. Search engines will have more information to store about your business and products; that information will translate directly into the ranking they give your site for related keyword phrases.

4. Submission
The submission process involves manually submitting your site to a few select web sites (Yahoo and Google, for example) and also placing a link to the site on other sites that the search engines like Google visit regularly. When the search engine visits these other sites, it would grab your site link in the process. A higher value is placed on that link than on a manual submission done by the site owner.

5. Follow Up Reporting and Analysis
The same reporting done in the first step is done again at 1 month, 3 months and 4 months intervals, post-optimization. Rankings and site traffic can then be compared to pre-optimization levels, giving measurable results to the SEO campaign.

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