How to Start an SEO Campaign
By: John Elder posted in SEO
Hello good people!
I get asked this question all the time, so I thought I’d write a quick little article about it. The question is: How do you start an SEO campaign?
Generally there are two scenarios.
- You’ve got a brand new site or
- 2. You’ve got an older site that isn’t ranked well
For this article I’m going to discuss scenario 2. After all, if you have a brand new site then you can work on optimizing the site right off the bat using the steps in my free 12-Week Insider SEO Report.
So let’s get right to it!
Step One:
The very first thing I do is fire up my handy Xenu Link Sleuth tool which is FREE, and analyze the site. Xenu shows you all the links on your site, what the page title’s are (so you can quickly analyze them) and a ton of other things that can quickly show you what you need to tweak. Read my Xenu article for more specifics.
After I’ve analyzed the site, I go through and fix any glaring on-page optimization problems. Do half the pages all have the same generic Title? That’s an easy fix. Are there 50 broken links? Remove them. That sort of thing. After I’ve done that I move on to….
Step Two:
Keyword Research! My keyword research is a very simple two step process. First I head over to the free Google Keyword Research Tool and drum up a massive list of possible potential keywords. Next, I export them into a spreadsheet file and then import that file into the Micro Niche Keyword Tool. That software then tells me which of those keywords will be easy to get ranked under quickly.
Armed with those remaining keywords on my pared down Micro Niche Keyword list, I head on to…
Step Three:
Web site Optimization. In this step I take the keywords that the Micro Niche Keyword Tool gave me and I create one new web page for each keyword. I integrate those new pages into the main website by linking to the new pages from the old pages. On each of those new pages, I use the keyword as the Title, use the keyword in the description meta tag as well as in image alt tags where appropriate. And finally I round out each new page with an article written around that keyword.
Now with my fleet of new pages all integrated into the old site, I move on to…
Step Four:
Linking. Step four is the last step and usually the one I spend the least amount of time on. I know that’s contrary to a lot of SEO people out there, but I get bored with getting links. I much prefer to link bait and get others to link to me because they want to. Getting lots of high quality inbound links is important because it effects your Pagerank which is a big part of how Google ranks your site.
But if you’ve picked the right keywords, that is, if you’ve used the keywords that the Micro Niche Keyword tool gave you, the whole point of that software is that it shows you keywords that you don’t have to get a ton of inbound links to rank well under. And that’s why I use it.
So that’s all I’ll say on linking.
And that’s it! That’s how I start all my SEO campaigns. Granted there IS some art involved in those four steps above….but it’s really not all that more complicated!
If you’d like to learn my SEO process in more detail with lots of examples and more in depth explanations, sign up for my free 12-week insider SEO training course at insiderSEOreport.com
Questions, Comment below!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
