Before you begin there are couple of basic things to do:
1. Check out your competitors - it is a good idea to research your industry and competitors. Take a look at the websites that rank at the top for your keywords. See how many pages they have in each of the search engines. Also take a look at the links they have and where they get them from. This will give you a good idea of where to begin your campaign.
2. How can you make money? - This seems an odd question but it will take a bit of time before your SEO efforts return anything. Try and think of ways that you can generate traffic and conversions before you see the real benefit of your SEO campaign. This can be done through PPC or through Google product search and many other ways.
Search Engine Friendly Website
It is important that your website is created to be search engine friendly. Below are our top tips that you should ensure are incorporated:
1. Your URLs - It is really important that you have a quality URL structure. This means they should be set up so that your keywords are appearing if possible. This can have a significant effect on your ranking on its own and is well worth doing. There is one thing to consider though. If you already have a good ranking then you probably will not want to change them but of not, do it as quickly as possible. Remember to ensure there is a permanent 301 redirect from your old pages to you new pages. Finally, ensure there are no question marks in your URL, Google will stop reading your URL when it reaches a question mark so could miss valuable information.
2. Your Header - Make sure you include the same keywords as in the URL of your web page in the header on the web page. This is basically the title of the page but in technical terms is called the header.
3. Your Title Tag - Ensure the same keywords appear in the title tag of your page. This is the name of the page that appear at the top of your web browser. This will keep the consistency with all the other factors on your page and help the search engines to know what it is about.
4. Your text - You should make sure the same keywords appear in the text of your page, not too much but probably around 3% of your text. Having said that it is a good idea if you get the words into the first sentence or paragraph of your text.
The above tips will not guarantee you good search engine rankings but following them will give you a good base to start from.
Linking Strategies
Once you have a search engine friendly website you need to start thinking about gathering links. We have written a lot about ways in which you can get links but it is a good idea to get a strategy together before you start and be prepared for some hard work.
