To summarise, the best practice approach to SEO is as follows:
Site Performance Audit
Objectives Setting
Project Plan
Keyword Analysis & Selection
Content Development
Site Structure Optimisation
Link Building
Search Engine Submission
Reporting & Analysis
Maintenance & Improvement
Remember that search engine algorithms are constantly changing their Relevancy criteria – therefore a website that is number 1 today may number 13 tomorrow. As the search engines are continually updating their search engine algorithms, it is essential once you have completed stages 1 to 9 of the SEO process – to have a structure ongoing maintenance and improvement program.
You key objectives should include;
At a minimum, your continuous improvement should include the following;
Link building – Make link building one of your most important ongoing activities. Continue to find new target sites and request new links from highly relevant site and produce monthly reports showing your list updated target sites found and new links achieved. If possible, also send press releases and articles to your target sites list because they may be of interest to content sites. Read Frequently Asked Questions on link building.
Reporting – Continue to produce reports and trend graphs showing all measurables at least monthly. Compare results against your objectives set in the objectives setting process in stage 2 of the SEO process.
New content – Continue to update and create new relevant content. Don’t simply produce content about your products and services, but try to consider what information would be of interest to your target market. Good examples are tips, articles, ebooks and frequently asked questions. See step 5 on content development.
Monitor ranking Algorithms – Try to monitor changes in the search engine ranking algorithms and updates. The best place to get insider views on how search engines are changing their ranking algorithms are news sites and SEO forums such as WebProWorld, Search Engine Watch and WebProNews. See our useful links section for all the major SEO forums and news sites online.
Optimisation reviews – Review optimisation tactics and new methods. Always review and double check you are doing everything you can – alt text, internal linking, when you create new content link the new content to relevant sections that make it easier for your visitors. Remember that you should make it easier for your visitors, not just search engines.
Search phrase analysis – Continue to monitor new phrases and re-visit original keyword research as a reference point. Most search phrase usage volumes are seasonal and are always changing, therefore, it’s important to update all your counts as often as possible to make sure your strategy is based on the most recent keywords analysis, search trends and volumes. Also, search behaviour also changes over time, for example, more people are starting to run searches on SEM rather than search engine marketing – therefore as people become more savvy and knowledgeable there search behavior changes. See step 4 to review keywords research strategy and tips.
Conversion enhancement – Driving traffic to your site is only valuable if your site is effective at converting visitors to an action, such as quote request or download. If you are going to spend lots of time on SEO then without a conversion enhancement process you will losing opportunities that may be relatively easy to fix. Your monthly reports should identify how many conversions your site is generating, which means you can experiment with signposting, offers and navigation to entice your traffic to convert.
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To summarise, the best practice approach to SEO is as follows:
Site Performance Audit
Objectives Setting
Project Plan
Keyword Analysis & Selection
Content Development
Site Structure Optimisation
Link Building
Search Engine Submission
Reporting & Analysis
Maintenance & Improvement
As with any marketing campaign, it is essential to continuously monitor the results of your search engine optimisation efforts over time. Plus, it’s important to measure where you are in relation to your objectives set at the start of the SEO campaign.
If you want to take monitoring your SEO campaign seriously, there are some basic things you need. Firstly, a quality web stats package and a search engine positioning tool to make checking your positions as easy as possible.
The only problem with stats packages is that they can provide so much information and you can spend hours going through the reports without actually learning anything about trends. It’s therefore worthwhile building your own Excel-based Report that can provide a simple central location for measuring metrics that you are interested in tracking and improving.
At a minimum you should produce the following reports regularly as monthly trend reports:-
Unique visitors – You need to monitor the number of unique visitors to your site and which pages they are visiting.
Search phrase positions – You need to constantly monitor search phrase positions and the traffic these positions are generating. It’s no use getting great positions on search engines if they are not generating traffic.
Conversions – There is no point in driving traffic to your site that does not result in conversions. You should track the number of conversions your site generates over time to truly show the return on your investment.
Link Popularity – It is important to measure link popularity (number of links to your site) on all the major search engines to measure the effectiveness of any SEO campaign and especially link building campaigns. How to check your link popularity.
Search Engine Inclusion – You need to measure how many pages of your site the search engines are indexing. How to check your sites search engine inclusion.
The vast range of excellent web traffic tools is already well documented; however, very few tools are great for measuring conversions. Your conversion tracking tool should ideally enable you to track conversions by a range of variables, such as Conversion by Country, Conversion by Search Phrase and Conversion by Referring URL.
The best tool we have found for this type of advanced conversion measurement is ClickMetrix (www.clickmetrix.net).
Tracking which referring search phrases are generating the best conversion rates split by number of conversions and/or sales revenue. As part of a search engine optimisation campaign this is crucial as it gives feedback on which search phrases are generating actual conversions on your site – meaning you can focus your SEO efforts on search phrases that are delivering conversions rather than just traffic
Conversions by Referring Search Phrase
Perhaps the most crucial statistic to be aware of is the bounce rates of first time visitors. Bounce rate shows how many visitors arrive at your site but leave without going any deeper into your site. This is important because your site may be driving loads of traffic from search engines or linked sites, but if a large proportion of people are bouncing then it could be a sign that your site does not look appealing or that you are not offering enticing links to further information on other pages.
Bounce Rates of First Time Visitors
More articles like this are available from www.clickthrough-marketing.com.
