A step by step guide to complete Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Process
SEO has been tricky these days and search engines keep refining their policies and systems. But on the same time, gurus of the industry are always there to trick with search engines. This very interesting phenomenon but will keep going till the last human being exists in this world.
The SEO Process basically involves two kinds of factors.
- Onsite factors
- Off-site factors
Topic of this article is not to go in detailed depth for both of these factors. But as I start explaining my own SEO Process, hope you will understand both of them well.
The SEO Process starts with making a checklist and then based on your observations, suggesting and implementing the expert methodologies. There is no hard and fast rule to envisage such methodologies and they vary case to case and the process of SEO can also very in specific cases.
SEO Process Checklist
- Check if your website is doing redirection at any page.
- Ensure that navigation through website is easy and accessible by search engine bots.
- Ensure that you are using well targeted yet sensible page titles, meta keywords and meta descriptions.
- Ensure that you pages contain text based content and are created adhering the target keywords.
- Ensure that your website doesn’t contain any html errors and is compliant to W3C standards.
- Ensure that big four parts of all of your pages are compliant to each other (page titles, keywords, headings and text content).
- Ensure that your website doesn’t contain hidden text.
- Ensure that your website is hosted on an efficient server. Search engines hate slow loading websites.
After satisfying above SEO Process checklist, see how many quality back links you have. Then a very important factor in SEO Process is “Competitive Analysis”.
One might have noticed, how some of the industry renowned SEO software’s (like IBP or WEB CEO) work? If you have not experienced any of them yet, I will recommend at least go through them. I believe, they got the biggest indicator optimizing a website and key to SEO Process. All they do is competitive analysis!
In competitive analysis you side by side compare your each web page with the top 10 pages in the search results against your specific keywords. The most effective indicators from competitive analysis you find are:
- Comparison of total word count in your page titles.
- Comparison of Importance and prominence of your keywords in page titles and theirs.
- Total word count, importance and prominence comparison between your meta keywords and description tags and top 10 pages.
- Total word count comparison in visible text of top 10 pages and over all density of your specific keywords in their text content.
- Total word count comparison in Bold text content and over all density of your specific keyword in their text content.
- Similarly prominence and importance comparison between your page top 10 pages for heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 etc..)
- Quality back links comparison between your site and top 10 competitions.
If one can follow above mentioned checklist and satisfies his website with above things, 90% chances are there that you have spotted the wall right and will hit on first page for search engine for which you did all the competitive analysis.
SEO Process doesn’t end here. Actually a new job of link popularity and traffic building starts once you are true with your SEO Process. But that’s again a long strategy and have its own process. Will talk about them later in another article.
Sounds like SEO is a simple process? Actually it is not! I always suggest business owners to hire Expert SEO Professionals who can make a real difference by following a great SEO Process.
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