Creating SEO Plan

Today we will talk about creating an SEO plan for your website. SEO plan will help you create SEO goals. There will be many changes in SEO in the future, so we need to have clear goals that we want to achieve.

Your SEO plan will help you determine where you should concentrate your work. That also will change. For now, let’s focus on getting started with SEO.

In the past, SEO’s job was to only focus on selecting the right keywords. In the beginning, there were not a lot of websites at all so getting in the top 10 was an easy task.

Today search engines are much more complex and you can’t just focus only on building links.

Search engines will naturally change, as the technologies develop. That is why your PLAN should be a dynamic, changing document. To keep up with your SEO plan, you as an SEO need to be evolving or changing as well. And that’s where your SEO plan will help you stay on track.

Today search engines are much more complex and you can’t just focus only on building links.

Search engines will naturally change, as the technologies develop. That is why your PLAN should be a dynamic, changing document. To keep up with your SEO plan, you as a SEO need to be evolving or changing as well. And that’s where your SEO plan will help you stay on track.

Why You Need SEO

SEO is the science of customizing website elements to get the best possible rankings in search engines. That is a simple general description of SEO.

But as soon you start to explore the wide range of those elements you quickly find out that it is a really complex situation.

Both internal and external elements of the site affect the way it’s ranked in any given search engine, so you should focus on all those elements.

If you compare your site with a huge group of people it is really hard to find the person you are looking for in that crowd. So if you want to get your site noticed and found by people, some of the elements must stand out.

Without any SEO your site will surely land in a search engine. And it’s likely to rank within the first few thousand results. That is impossible for people to find you. Your site is practically invisible to them. To become visible, your site must be ranked much higher.

Ideally, you want your site to be displayed somewhere in the top 20 or 30 results. But the main goal is to be in the top 10 results. Many people don’t look beyond the third page if they get even that far. The fact is, it’s the sites that fall on the first page of results that get the most traffic, and traffic is translated into revenue, which is the ultimate goal of search engine optimization.

To achieve a high position in search results, your site must be more than simply recognizable by search engine bots.

Some of the important criteria by which a search engine bot, spider determines the rank your site should have in Search results are the following:

1. Anchor text
2. Site popularity
3. Link context
4. Topical links
5. Title meta tags
6. Keywords – very important element
7. Site language
8. Content – Content is king
9. Site maturity – older sites usually rank better

There are hundreds of other criteria that might be looked into before your site is ranked by a search engine.

For example, each criterion listed above has multiple points of view. For example, link context, search engine bot might take many factors into consideration like where is the link on the page (upper, lower region ….), what text surrounds it, is it leading to another internal or external page.

Many of the elements are likely to have an effect on your website search engine ranking, even when you do nothing to improve them.

So if you don’t do anything about those elements you are not doing anything that might increase your search rankings.

Setting SEO Goals

One of the biggest mistakes of many SEO plans is the lack of a clearly defined goal. The goal for your SEO plan must be built around your business needs, and it’s not something every business requires.

For example, if you are building a small site like for example blog SEO might be more expensive than it is worth.

But if you want to establish your blog as a brand, than the simple SEO technique might just slowly start building traffic.

If you have a much larger business, for example selling luxury cars, it will require much more work and money for your SEO strategy. For example, you will need to invest much more money and time to get more traffic.

In the case of luxury cars, one goal might be to increase the amount of traffic your website receives. Another might be to increase your exposure to potential rich customers in other geographic regions.

Before you start putting together your SEO plan, you need to do is determine what goal you want to achieve with that plan. You have to be sure your goal is well-articulated and specifically defined goal.

The more specific and focused the goal is the better chance it is to reach that goal. If you set your goal for example to increase your website traffic, that goal is much too broad. You need to make it more specific. If you change that goal to getting the traffic of customers interested in purchasing luxury cars, you are much more

likely to use the correct SEO that will indeed help you reach that goal. Make sure the goal is specific and reachable, possible.

With your SEO goal established, you will have a better chance of getting a balanced traffic flow, which will improve your search engine ranking naturally.

You should also ask yourself how your SEO goals align with your business goals.

Be sure that any goal you set for optimizing your site for search is a goal that works well within the parameters that are set by your overall business goals.

You should remain flexible at all times. Don’t be to rigid with your goals, create several goals instead of one and hold tightly to them during your SEO optimization. But be flexible, your goals should not get in the way of doing your SEO strategies.

SEO goals and plans must be flexible all the time and must grow with your business. So it is a good thing to review your SEO goals every few months.

Creating Your SEO Plan

Once you created a set of goals for your website, the next thing you should focus is your SEO plan.

Your SEO plan is a simple document that will help you stay focused when you are implementing SEO strategies on your site.

The first thing you should do is not to look at your site as a whole, look at every page on your site. Mark the pages that are more important than others and then plan your SEO regarding that page priority.

Top priority pages should be pages that most of the users will naturally open, for example, the home page, or pages that will generate the biggest traffic or revenue. If five pages on your site have the biggest priority then the most time, money and effort should be spent on optimizing them with SEO.

After you set the priorities of your pages, you should find out where you currently are and where you need to be with your SEO efforts.

Many times individual pages are much more important than all the pages together. So you should focus to rank one page above the others in search results.

How do you decide which page is the most important? Well, you can find the answer to your business needs.

Your document should contain columns for each of the elements of your site, the current status of that element, needed improvements, and the improvement deadlines.

The elements that should be included during an assessment of your website include:

1. Site/page tagging: Meta tags are an essential elements of each page. Mostly you should focus on page titles and meta descriptions.
2. Page content: Is your content updated, is it fresh, interesting? How much content are there on your pages? Content is one of the top 3 most important elements of your site, and you should focus on having the appropriate content on your pages.If you don’t update your content, search engines might start ignoring your site in favor of the site of your competitor that is updating his content on regular basis. But that is not always a rule. If your content is rich but not dynamic and it contains important information, your site will still rank well. Because your content is so useful you will probably rank well even if you don’t update your content. But usually fresh updated content is better.
3. Site links: Site links are super essential in Search Engine Optimization. Bots and crawlers check incoming and outgoing links to your site. They classify these links how important they are, if they are relevant to your site. Also, you have to check if you have any broken links on your website (links not opening in browsers when clicking on them – not pointing to the correct site). That is a big issue for search engines. You should regularly check for any broken links.
4. Site map: A site map is another essential element of your website. It will help search engines crawl your website faster and more accurately. She sitemap we are talking about is not the sitemap you can find on some sites that help users easily navigate thru site. No we are talking about XML-based document, which can be found at the root of your HTML that contains information (URL, last updated, relevance to surrounding pages, and so on) about each of the pages within a site. Having XML sitemap will ensure that even deep pages are crawled by search engine spiders regularly. If you don’t have an XML sitemap you should create it. Especially if your navigation system is complex.

After assessing of all the elements you should now know what areas of your site need work and what areas are in good shape.

The areas that currently don’t require any work might not always be in perfect condition. Now it is time to create an overall assessment of your site. Your SEO plan is more than just a picture of what’s there and what’s not. SEO plan will be used as glue for everything you do, for example, current rankings in search engines, marketing efforts, capital investment.

In your SEO plan, you will track your current standings, the goals that you plan to reach, marketing efforts for each page. You’ll even have the capital expenditures that you plan to encounter as you implement your SEO plan. You will add the SEO strategies you will use for example directory submissions, link exchange, what content you are planning to use, which keyword you will focus, or you can track what keyword you are focusing in PPC marketing.

Follow-up is very important. You just can't make a plan and then walk away from it. SEO will require testing, monitoring, and often rebuilding. The plan might need to be altered, updated on a frequent basis.