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How to Craft an Effective SEO Plan

Any experienced blogger or site developer will tell you about the importance of creating a solid, goal-oriented SEO plan before launching a website. Like a good business plan, an SEO plan outlines what you hope to accomplish with your site, who you’re looking to market your site to, and how you plan to meet these goals.

Unfortunately, so much of entry-level SEO is focused on keyword development that other important factors, including content, links and promotion, are often left by the wayside. While keywords are still hugely important, a site that focuses on them exclusively is comparable to a table with one leg – it falls down, and fast. By understanding the value and proper implementation of keywords, content, marketing and links, you can easily create a site-specific SEO plan that search engines and your audience alike will notice and appreciate.

Keywords – Low Competition and High Search Volume

When it comes to targeting keywords, your goal should be to focus on words and phrases that your target audience commonly searches for, and that competing sites in your niche simply aren’t delivering – in other words, low supply and high demand, the foundations of any profitable business.

One important argument related to keyword selection is whether to make them broad or specific. The answer is to use a combination of both, since each will bring in traffic of its own. For example, if your niche is based around a discussion of broadband internet, your instincts may tell you to focus on keywords like “high-speed internet,” “cable internet, “DSL internet” – broad keywords that people will commonly search for. The downside is that your competition probably already has many of these keywords nailed, meaning that you’ll need to take what they’re doing and do it a lot better if you want search engines and users to notice.

At the same time, internet users are often looking for something very particular. They love lists, reviews and comparisons – things that offer specific advice or help with purchase decisions. For this reason, your SEO plan should also include the targeting of more specific keyword phrases, such as “CLEAR 4G vs Verizon 4G” and “Top 5 Cable Modems for DOCSIS 3.0.” Using specific keyword phrases also indicates to search engines that your site offers more than just generic content that could easily be found elsewhere.

Content – Valuable, Informative, Fresh and Keyword-Rich

Once you develop a set of keywords on which you’d like to focus, it’s time to build your content around those keywords. Many site developers operate on the notion that by stuffing their content full of their targeted keywords and doing little else, they’ll rank highly in search engines, thereby acquiring more traffic. While that may be true to a point, the fact is that your readers will be expecting more than mediocre content that just happens to be packed with the keyword they were searching for.

This means that your content actually needs to be fresh, interesting and valuable. Start by using catchy titles for every piece of content you post, with a keyword phrase included in the title. SEO experts will forever argue about how long a piece of content “should” be, when the reality is that your content should always be as long as it “needs” to be. The key, then, is to break up the content with appropriate pictures and subheadings, making the content more scannable and appealing to the eye. The subheadings should be just as interesting and informative as the main title.

The content should also be fresh and timely. Online readers and search engines alike appreciate fresh, unique content that isn’t available anywhere else. There’s nothing worse than arriving at a site only to find that their content is no longer relevant, or that it’s been copy-pasted from another more-established site.

Links – Establishing a Natural and Robust Link Profile

One of the main things a search engine looks for when deciding how to rank your site in search results is its link profile, which includes inbound (links from other sites to yours), outbound (links from your site to other sites) and internal links (links that allow users to navigate within your site). For this reason, your SEO plan should include ways to build links to and from trustworthy, relevant sites offering similar or related content to yours.

A few things to keep in mind with outbound and internal links:

• Anchor text should often include a keyword phrase, but doing so exclusively may look forced and fishy to Google.
• Links should be placed in line with content, not just on footers and sidebars.
• Don’t be afraid to link to your competitors’ sites. You won’t cannibalize your traffic nearly as much as you’d think, and Google will definitely appreciate the gesture.

Inbound links are trickier because you have no direct control over them, unless you own multiple sites and link them together. One strategy is to compose a guest post for another site, asking permission to place an in-line link leading back to your site. Other tips include submitting your site to a web directory, placing a link to your site in a blog or forum comment (if allowed), and simply writing content so good that other sites will link to it naturally.

Marketing – The Importance of Social Media

At this point, the importance of marketing your site through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube cannot be overstated. Facebook claims over 800 million active users, Twitter claims over 380 million, and just about everyone with a broadband Internet connection uses Youtube.

In short – if you’re not marketing your site through these types of channels, you’re leaving a huge portion of your potential traffic (read: money) on the table.

In the case of Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter, many members are extremely casual internet users who rarely stray from their few favorite websites – unless, that is, they link to a site through their social media hub of choice. They may be highly interested in your niche, but they may not be tech-savvy enough to find your site, especially if it was recently launched and hasn’t had the time, content or links to climb its way up through Google’s search results.

The trick is to marry your site and your site’s social media presence into one interlocking whole. Give your readers a reason to visit your Facebook page, and give Facebook users a reason to visit your site. This could be as simple as offering additional content to those who “like” you on Facebook, or allowing your users to comment on your site’s new content posts via Facebook.

Tags: blog seo, creating your blog, link building

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