The first thing to say is there is no one size fits all approach for SEO. It is really important to customise what you are going to do in order to get it right. Before you begin you need to do the following:

1. Set Your Website Goals

It is important to know what you want to achieve from your website. Do you want people to sign up for a newsletter, download an e-book or buy your product or service? The answer to this will determine how you want to target your campaign.

2. Profile Your Audience

What type of people will be looking for your service or products? What will these people want to see when they get to your website? What will they use to search for your website? You will need to know all of these points in order to determine how to target your campaign.

3. Check Out the Competition

You need to know what your competition is doing in order to compete with them. What keywords do they use to get visitors? How do they structure their site? These are important things to know because how can you beat them if you do not know how to beat them.

Once you have determined where you want to go with your SEO campaign you need to decide how to get there. Your plan will be affected by all of the things you have looked at before you start. As said before there is no out-of-the-box approach to SEO and there are other things that need to be taken into account. These are:

1. Budget

How much do you have to spend on your SEO campaign. This can affect how much you can afford to pay a consultant to help you get to the top. However if you decide to do it yourself you will still need a budget to do it. It is really a myth that SEO is free traffic and you will need to pay for links and directory submissions to be truly successful

2. Time

How much time do you have to spend on your campaign and how quickly do you want to get to the top of the rankings? This will affect what you put into it and the best ways to target things.

3. Competition

How competitive are your chosen keywords. This will affect the work that needs to be done, how much needs to be done and how long it will take to get those top positions.

All of the above will help you to determine where best to target your campaign. For example if you are a small company that operates in a niche industry you will have a completely different type of campaign to a multinational company operating in a competitive area.

Once you have you plan in place it is important to remember that this is not fixed. You need to continually analyse how things are working and where you want to go. Any SEO campaign needs to be flexible and change as the search engines, competition and you change.