SEO Strategy
June 22nd, 2009 by Irina
When a site is being created from scratch, it is good practice to make it search engine friendly. That will save you a lot of effort in the future, when you realise the necessity of optimising it for search engines.
Define your strategy from the start
Try and think about the following things:
—What key phrases your target audience is likely to search for.
—How to describe the goals of your web site to the people you call your target audience.
—How easy it would be to include your keywords in the copy.
—How to interlink your pages to make your site usable and easy to navigate.
—Where to include your keywords in the link anchor text.
If you see the whole site structure with your inner eye - and see it well optimised - it means your SEO strategy is defined and, most probably, your route to the top of the search engine listings won’t be too complicated.
Once you have defined it, be true to your strategy - up to a point
Open your mind to changes. Open your heart to improvisation. It is likely that while working on the site you will find out that your well-weighed SEOO strategy doesn’t cover all the real needs of your site, or that your fresh ideas need more freedom and spontaneity. Feel free to change anything you want. Even if your changes seem to harm your optimisation strategy, it may well turn into a benefit afterwards by making your site more flexible and fit for growth.
From the start, keep in mind one simple thing: your web site is supposed to grow. So, think how you will add more pages when they are created. When you plan for a site, think about it as if it were a live thing, like a tree that continuously develops new twigs, not a box with a fixed number of sections. Leave room for those new twigs. Sites with no fresh content quickly lose their positions in search engines, however good your optimisation strategy seemed at first.
Good SEO means improvisation and variety. Add a bit of totally non-optimised copy here and there, and see what happens. Quite likely, it will be rewarded rather than penalised. SEO should never be too obvious.
Be creative - but leave the core of your SEO untouched
Although it pays to be free, if you allow yourself to drift too far away from your initial concept, you risk ruining your SEO strategy totally. It will result in lost hopes and wasted effort: you will never get rankings you expected to get. So try and find good balance between your unceasing desire to create something sensational and the necessity to include your targeted keywords.
And don’t forget to think about the outbound links. Yes, to get good rankings in the search engines you will have to link to other sites, otherwise the spiders won’t treat you as a friend. They do not like dead ends. So, be generous and link to other resources you think may benefit your visitors. Most likely, people will appreciate it and, consequently, link to you.
Thinking from the start about the resources worth being linked to - and where to place these links - is another part of good SEO strategy.
Tags: SEO