Guest Post by Alderic Fresco: The ambiguous term which I often heard is a “SEO Strategy” in concept of search. The question arises that what this term strategy means?
Search SEO Strategy: Does it refer to how to do the particular elements of entire campaign or Does it is the total of different forms of campaign? Does it refers to the method by which we integrate the activities of search engine optimization along with paid search, social media, analytic and other offline and online marketing activities.
Strategy means all the above. So, with lot of confusion around the word SEO strategy, there exists one basic approach to SEO campaigns of any size organization.
The eight elements of SEO Strategy can address in two phased approach:
- The foundational phase
- The continuous phase
The “foundational phase” is the first phase in which all the inherent values of the website are leverage where in the continuous phase, program growth through new content, social media marketing and link acquisition.
Below is the list of each element of activities. It is an imperious way to categorize the different tasks of the campaign.
- Determine and Analyze: It is the first step which involves understanding the business models, user character and selecting the most essential keywords for the campaign.
- On-page optimization: It involves content to targeted keywords, H tags, Meta data and alignment of page titles.
- Off page optimization: optimization of both internal and external links.
- Overall site SEO: Any technical problems which affect SEO performance like indexing problems, issues of duplicate content, URL structure and other technical problems if any.
- Broad search: Optimization of PDF’s, images, local search, shopping feeds and the most important are videos.
- Analytic infrastructure: There should an analytic infrastructure which supports reporting requirements.
- User Participation: Judge and improve user participation metrics like speed of the site, time spent on the site and bounce rate.
- Social Networking sites: Ensuring high valued URL will share through twitter, Facebook and Linked In, communicating keywords to all social teams.
All these elements have unique array of activities within each program phase. Some of the activities are same in both the phases. For instance, the optimization process for a new content in continuous phase is same as optimizing the previously existing content in foundational phase.
Despite, the tactics of link building are mostly different. In the foundation phase, link building tactics we use are easy and are scalable like press release optimization where as in the continuous phase, the greater emphasis is laid on content marketing.
Here is Fundamental Sequence for Foundation Phase:
- Analyze the goals of business, program
- Ensure that analytic system is present, which measures the performance that leads to make goals.
- Diagnose and index the following:
- Optimize the page speed
- Remove the duplicate content
- URL structure
- Flash issues
- Canonical tags
- Keyword research
- Categorization of keywords
- Placing keywords to preferable landing pages for better user experience
- Set the priority for the pages to manually optimized
- Optimize template
- Optimize internal site links
- Social media team alignment
- Image optimization
- Video optimization
- External link building involves press release , directory submissions etc
Here is the fundamental sequence for the continuous phase:
- Monitoring the performance
- Report of performance
- Content gap analysis
- Keyword research
- Filtration of existing target list
- Exploring opportunity
- New content
- Both on page and off page Optimization of new content and URLs
- Link acquiring campaign via content marketing
- competitive research
- content marketing
- content creation
- management of campaign and reporting
- Optimization of new images and videos
The whole process can start across multiple areas with only the tangible difference in choice and localization of keywords. In other words, the difference is only in the keywords you are targeting, rest of the process is same for every organization whether small or big. This is a detailed process but the single point cannot be described. But I assure you that this is a solid foundation for every enterprise which is planning for any SEO campaign.