SEO Strategies for New Website : SEO Checklist

These SEO Strategies assume that you have some basic knowledge of SEO- Search Engine Optimization. These basis SEO Strategies help beginners and professionals to learn SEO strategies to improve website ranking.

Search engine optimization is a marketing discipline and its strategy to be use for new website too have better traffic in search results. It is not a standalone function.Search Engine Optimization is vital for any business trying to succeed online. Potential customers are looking every day on Search Engines like Google and Bing another search engine for the products and services that you offer.

For getting your website in front of this audience will undoubtedly lead to new customers for your business and the site. Before any specific optimization activity is undertaken it is essential that two areas are non-search areas are appraised:

SEO Strategies For New Website

Understanding your Organisation’s Online Business Strategy 

Good SEO requires a thorough understanding of your organisation’s overall business strategy. How does search fit in with activities such as advertising, e-mail and direct marketing? Is there a marketing plan? What does it say about objectives, strategy and budgets? What is the overall direction of the business and what can search contribute?

Researching your Market Category, Customers and Competitors

Good SEO also requires a thorough understanding of the market category within which the search project and web site will compete. What is the category size and how is it developing. What other channels to market are there? What information is available regarding their behaviour and attitude of customers? What role in the buying process is played by the search marketing? Who are current and likely competitors? Once the above is fully grasped you can proceed to the first real activity of SEO; Keyword selection.

Keyword Selection – Factors

Keyword selection is the first search specific discipline. Having explained that spiders read and index text, we find that some text is more important than others. That text is keywords. Valuable keywords are the words or phrases that prospective customers use when searching in your market category. Keyword selection is therefore crucial and has implications for so much else within search. I have drawn up a list of factors that should be taken into account when selecting keywords.

Category Priorities

The first thing to remember is that the number of keywords you can use on any one site or page has a finite limit. A general recommendation is that there is an overall limit of 20 individual words. In my opinion – due to other factors – the limit should be drawn much tighter than this. Rather than a limit of words, I prefer, a limit of characters – including spaces – of no more than 64. In essence, you must be sufficiently focused to sum up the key priorities of your business within this limit – typically no more than 6 to 8 words.

The only way around this limit is to have an endless number of pages on an endless number of sites – all optimised, monitored and updated on a regular basis.

Search Volumes

You should use a word or phrases that have sufficient search engine volumes for your needs.You can find out about search volumes by checking with Word Tracker software or Yahoo’s Overture keyword suggestion tool. Read more about these tools below.

Competitive Advantage

A place to look for keywords is where you enjoy some competitive advantage. How are your products or services differentiated? What are the real strengths of your business compared to your closest competitors? What proprietary advantages do you enjoy? What is it you do better that may persuade prospective purchasers to visit your site?

Competition

You may have decided on your own keyword priorities but you must also check out the competition for those keywords. Selecting a word or phrase already prioritized by a multitude of competitive sites will see you struggle for visibility. Try to find words or phrases that appear ignored or underutilized by your competitors. An alternative but higher risk approach is to see what keywords are used by competitor sites and then attempt to better use of links, content and meta tags.

Relevance

The keyword terms you select must be relevant, salient and part of the vocabulary used by the audience you are seeking to attract. If that audience is a consumer one it is unlikely to use jargon. The opposite may be true if you are seeking B2B prospects. My experience suggests that consumers will often use entirely different vocabulary from marketing, advertising and IT people. To avoid confusion use simpler but more specific terms.

Making your keyword choice

In essence, you must synthesise all of the above five factors in selecting and refining your keywords. Ignoring any one of the factors could create problems. Do not rush into this process. Test out your keywords by making trial searches on the major engines and see what company results you might keep. Getting it wrong may involve a large amount of reworking.

I will be adding more posts in SEO Strategies, so please bookmark the post for future reference too.