In our first article, we took a very basic look at what the fundamentals of SEO are. Here we are going to look at bit more
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in depth at an actual campaign, and the four major components and stages that make up an effective SEO campaign.
The first step is:
- Effective market and keyword research.
The first step in any effective SEO campaign is performing good market and keyword research. This usually means using several different software packages to analyze different possible keywords and search combinations you think people might use to locate your service or product. These tools will let you know how competitive any given phrase formulation is; the perfect keyword is something that has low competition, is closely related to the commercial consumption of your product or service, and has high commercial intent. However, these are often difficult to find; most of the low-hanging fruit was picked up long ago by others. This means that increasingly, you have to be creative, or rely on long-tail keywords with lower volume but higher conversion rates. This is about 15% of the work of a typical SEO campaign.
The next component is:
- High-quality content generation.
After you have performed your research and know your targets, the next step is generating high-quality content specifically designed to focus on and highlight your keyword phrases. Make sure to follow best practices for density and prominence of course, but the main focus is getting content that will actually spur people to action and deliver actual value to them. This is about 35% of the work of a typical SEO campaign.
The third step is:
- Building an organic high-quality link network.
So now you have your targets in the forms of keyword phrases, and a good amount of quality content built around those phrases posted up all across the web. If you want Google to notice all of this content, and pass the link juice back to your site, helping it to raise in the rankings, you need to work on getting a link network up and in place next. This means using software to identify the best sites on the web to get links from, and reaching out to these sites. It means getting yourself listed correctly in all the business directory sites. Link building is something that will be addressed more in-depth in future articles, but suffice to say it is extremely important, and accounts for about 35% of the resources deployed in a standard SEO program.
The final component is:
- Ongoing management, maintenance, and research.
The final component in an SEO campaign is never-ending, and consists of staying on top of changes to the circumstances that you initially built the campaign on. Desirable keyword phrases will certainly change over time, and attention has to be paid to ensure that conversion rates and traffic remain stable over the long term. Identifying problems in your sales funnel early enough that correction may be undertaken without damaging your revenue stream too greatly is the main purpose of this behavior. The final 15% of resources accounts for these ongoing monitoring procedures and policies.
So, if you have been wondering “What is SEO?” or “What is search engine optimisation?” this is it in a nutshell. You perform the market research to acquire the proper keyword phrases to target, you then generate content based around these phrases, promote it throughout the web, and grow your link network until your desired level of rankings, traffic, and conversions have been reached. Then you monitor your system and funnel on an ongoing basis, nipping problems in the bud as you notice them, and generally tweaking the system to taste and budget.