Organic SEO Revealed: A 22 Step Guide To Successful Search Engine Optimisation

Let’s assume that you pick 25 pages from your website and use them to target your top 50 keywords. Here’s a step by step Guide on how to implement a search engine optimisation project on the selected pages: 

1. Initial analysis of your existing website to find out what are the chief areas of concern
2. Keyword research and analysis to define top 50 keywords
3. Analysis of competitors for chosen 50 keywords
4. Analysis of traditional competitors
5. Research current visibility for chosen keywords – what is the base line?
6. Back-link Analysis – What keywords are people using to describe your website?
7. Back-link Analysis – Where are you getting links (links – not traffic) from – what countries, what domains?

We are now ready to start making changes on the website – we have all the research complete, know what the base line is and what the campaign goals are.

1. Clean up code if required, i.e. clean html, CSS, broken links, navigation
2. Get human readable urls that match chosen keywords (ensure 301 redirects are implemented when changes made to page names)

10.  Set-up appropriate robots.txt tile

11.  Write Meta data for 50 keywords – title tag, description tag, keywords tag, image tags – let’s say we target 25 pages for the 50 keywords, 2 keywords per page.

12.  Generate or optimise existing site map, plus develop XML site map and upload to Google Webmasters. Set-up the geo-targeting option in Google webmasters.

13.  Optimise or generate new content for 25 pages, e.g heading tags, bolded text, paragraphs, appropriate bullets, correct font colours and background, i.e. black against white (accessibility concerns), calls to action..etc.

14.  Implement internal and external links that align with keywords.

15.  Setup a customised 404 error page.

16.  Append a blog to the website, I would recommend Wordpress

At this stage we have covered a lot of the ‘on page’ SEO stuff, i.e. the areas we can control. Next is the difficult part, ‘off page’ optimisation…

17.  From my existing links, see are there any that can be leveraged, i.e. one’s where I can easily change the link text to better reflect one of my chosen keywords.

18.  From the competitor analysis above, start looking at the links my keyword and traditional competitors have. Pick a bunch every week and start emailing them to ask for links.

19.  Start writing appropriate blog posts relevant to my industry and keyword rich. Good blog posts act as a magnet for new links.

20.  Ensure I’m in the right directories, I’d start with Dmoz , Yahoo and Business.com

The above ‘off page’ tasks would/should be an ongoing process.

21.  For more advanced link/brand awareness building I’d start to look at online press releases and

22.  Social media optimisation techniques.

So, how much would you expect to pay for this work? $100 per month? $500 per month , $1000 per month?

Ultimately the price paid should be based on the expected ROI from the campaign. As a website owner I’d be looking at the expected return in terms of traffic and ultimately new customers from the website. An average price for this type of work would range from around $1,000 per month for an onshore service provider and $300 for offshore.

If you decide to select a service provider be very careful to select a good one and allow at least 6 months to measure. This post contains a checklist of 4 questions to ask any potential seo consultant.

What About You?

How much do you currently pay for your SEO? Have I left out any key activity from the list above?

Are you a web professional looking to expand your customer base to add organic search using SEO and pay per click services?

Are you a website owner seeking to do this work yourself?

In either case you may need to think about how to fast-track your learning curve about search marketing and selecting some software tools to help.

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