While it may be true that you can achieve overnight success with search engine optimisation, this isn’t the norm and shouldn’t be counted on. You can’t expect to do a little SEO on your website and suddenly find your site at the top Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages). No, you need to plan your SEO campaign as meticulously as you would plan the construction of a house.
For example, before you start delving around in your website’s code, you first need an SEO blueprint. You need a careful plan showing what you intend you do, what you intend to achieve and how you intend to achieve it. Builders don’t turn up on site with a hod of bricks and start slapping them down in the general shape of a house, and neither should you with your SEO.
A clear SEO plan means you’ll experience fewer unforeseen problems down the line, and you’ll know each stage of your campaign before you reach it, and what you need to do to take it to the next level.
Once you have your plan, it’s not time to start hanging the curtains and selecting the pot plants. Equally, you don’t go after those top phrases that are very generic and competitive. Instead, you need a solid foundation. What existing SEO errors are there on your website, how can you fix them and how can you set your website’s architecture out so that it’s ready for an SEO overhaul?
You need to fix these basic errors, errors such as canonical URLs, duplicate pages, mirrored websites, domain aliases, JavaScript navigation, Flash content and other problems equally hazardous to your SEO health.
You’re now ready to start laying the first building blocks of your SEO campaign. The essence of any SEO campaign, the very building blocks that make up an SEO strategy, comes from pages of unique, relevant content. Without these building blocks, any attempt to SEO a website can easily fail and be blown down by the slightest wind of change from the Google algorithm. Where SEO techniques evolve, tips and tricks get found out and optimisation practices come into, and out of, fashion – once constant remains; content will always reign supreme.
If you doubt this (as incredibly some people do) perform this simple experiment. Enter the keyword or phrase that you’d most like to rank for into Google, and see what websites rank on the first page. Do they have more pages than your website? A lot more? Of course they do, and it’s no coincidence either.
Only once you have the blueprint and the foundations in place can you begin working on the fancy extras, the little bits that will help your website over the last hill and onto the first page, and ultimately to the coveted number one spot on Google.
- How to surf the rising tide of content marketing - June 5, 2018
- Money saving tips for content marketing - May 16, 2018
- Is your content readable enough? - March 21, 2018
