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The foundations of SEO

I like to believe there are four key foundations to a successful SEO strategy. I will list these in order of priority:

1) Keyword Research

2) On page SEO

3) Off page SEO

4) Competitor Analysis

So what is involved in each stage?

#1 Keyword Research

You have to do your keyword research and do it thoroughly. There are many places out there that will teach you the basics. Check out Moz.com to understand the core fundamentals of keyword research.

Keyword research is what will determine your success.

You need to find keywords that a) convert and b) convert. There is no point in ranking for keywords that don’t create a decent return on investment (ROI), unless, you want to build brand awareness and don’t care about the ROI). This is where a lot of websites and companies go wrong. They put so much energy into the building of the links, the website and other media sources and don’t invest the time into the initial online research.

Knowing your niche in the real world is totally different to knowing your niche online. The benefit of knowing your niche in the real world means that you can often relate to your customer on a more personal level and it will also give you that edge over finding successful keywords.

#2 On page SEO

On page SEO is where you tweak factors of your site to make it more search engine friendly (this is a pretty big area that we will dive into later). If you want to read more about On Page SEO check out my post http://www.getmediawise.com/search-engine-optimisation/onpage-seo-for-ranking-high/

#3 Off page SEO

This is another very important factor; you need good quality links that are related in some way to your niche/service offering. You can usually acquire these through an abundance of techniques such as reach out strategies etc. We will cover this in a separate article.

Last but not least, #4 Competitor Research

This sort of falls under the whole keyword research and setup section but I like to treat it as its own. You need to know:

Who your competition is?

How old is there site?

What sort of SEO techniques are they using?

Can you beat them? If so how long will it take you?

Once you’ve answered all of these questions it will help you determine whether or not the keywords you’ve chosen are viable, if not, you will simply have to re-evaluate and target a different range of keywords.

The next article will be: The benefits of solid keyword research.

Till the next time.

Karl

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Karl Hudson .