Creating a winning SEO strategy for the year ahead

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Thursday, 14 April 2011 18:30

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Every year I see the same issue. The year begins with a flurry of interest in SEO as webmasters and website owners alike (and the two are not always one and the same) realize that unless their website is visible on search engines for particular search terms they are trapped in an effort of spending money to buy-in traffic from adverts and PPC campaigns.

These work but are expensive and, depending on the value of what you are selling and the conversion factor on your website they can fast become unaffordable as a means of bringing in traffic. This puts the onus squarely back on getting organic traffic and optimizing your website to work organically. This is good but it takes time, effort and a certain amount of understanding of all the different dynamics involved and the risk here is that while in the first month or so the will is there, the details accumulating soon begin to take their toll on time and energy and twelve months down the line we see the cycle of “I need to get my website on Google’s first page” (it is always Google), being repeated.

The suggestions which follow address this exact issue with a view to breaking the cycle and providing a year-on-year increase in a website’s organic performance through a sustained (and sustainable) SEO strategy. Let’s go and see what this means to the average website owner eager to push his site up against his competitors’ on the organic search engine results pages (SERPs).

1. Publicity – You need, throughout the year, at specific times, to release news about your website, services and products. These have to be in the form of Press Releases because they are relatively easy to format correctly, are easy to disseminate through the web and also provide potential researchers such as journalists, bloggers and news-site owners with an easy means of getting some information on your website and its services. Regular Press Releases also keep your website names and its services fresh on search engine charts by releasing search-term sensitive information at regular intervals. If you want to automate this service get a package (PR and online release) agreed with a reputable service provider, like WebDirectStudio for instance, and bargain the price for a long-term contract. Ideally you want to release a Press Release a month for at least twelve months.

2. Content – this is an inescapable part of online business these days. If your website does not have fresh content the best SEO campaign in the world is not going to give the lasting results you want which means you will only have exchanged the yoke of paying for online ads and PPC for the equally expensive process of having to pay SEO teams to drive targeted traffic to your website using means other than organic search engine optimization. Like your Press Release campaign content-creation for your website can be planned well in advance. If you happen to market services or products which are seasonal this gives you an instant guide on when to create new content and highlights the ‘gap’ months when content creation might be more problematic. If your website deals with products or services which are always on demand then you should create your own schedule on the regularity of content updates and use the visitor-numbers to your website as a guide to when you need to create content the most (i.e. during months when visitor numbers drop) and the least (when you have high visitor numbers anyway you can ease off on your content-creation efforts).

3. Social marketing – Simply put, if you don’t tell them about it they cannot possibly know. As you create content for your website you need to have a coherent plan (and a means) in place to social market it through the many social networks which have been set up with the express purpose of sharing news. Such social networks range from Digg to StumbleUpon. A more comprehensive list of social tagging websites, their Alexa rank and current PageRank (PR) exists on a separate social bookmarking web page, here.

4. Social networking – In the online world you really need to use your Facebook and MySpace profiles to market the content on your website. Both of these offer you a wide means of doing so which range from profile pages to product pages and Blogs.

5. Link Building – If you have no link building strategy in place for your website you are missing out in a vital opportunity to create automated traffic to it. Link building can be farmed out to third parties (it is tedious, mind-numbing work with few immediate returns) or it can become part of your routine (by spending a few minutes a day on it).

SEO, of course, is a lot more than just this. However, if you do actually put a 12-month long plan in place which encompasses each of these SEO-specific elements and stick to it, I can guarantee you that you will see your website begin to perform much better in terms of search engine placement. Not only will it be found easier, get crawled faster and more regularly but, in addition, you will see more targeted traffic coming to it which will be converted more readily into customers.

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