Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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Week 1: Basic Site Optimization

Next week you’re going to work hard at finding site owners and convincing them to link

to you. But before you call this kind of attention to your website, you’ll need to spend a

full week primping, polishing, and checking for the proverbial spinach in your site’s teeth.

In Chapter 3, “Eternal Truths of SEO,” you learned that the text in your landing

pages, tags, and titles is one of the most important and long-standing SEO factors. This

week you’re going to optimize them, with the goal of positively influencing how search

engines view and rank your website. You’ll also tackle basic site structure issues to

ensure that search engine robots have easy access to your landing pages. With these

improvements in place, your site will have a basic level of optimization: nothing tricky

or fancy, and no time wasted on tiny technicalities, just common-sense, best-practices

solutions.

You’ll keep track of all your changes in one document as you go, and on Friday

you’ll deliver this document to the folks in charge of making edits to your website. If

you’re the code-slinger on the project, wait until Friday to dive into your edits! Stay in

the “optimization groove” Monday through Thursday and you’ll benefit from a more

focused approach.

Here are your daily task assignments:

Monday:

Page Titles

Tuesday:

Meta Tags

Wednesday:

Robot Walk-Through

Thursday:

Site Text

Friday:

Implementation

Full Speed Ahead

SEO is a long-term maintenance activity, comprising both productive spells and waiting periods.

Your SEO Plan is designed so that your waiting time (waiting for site owners to get back to you,

waiting for your team to implement your recommendations, waiting for the search engines to

notice what you’ve done, and so on) isn’t spent idly. Rather, you’ll use this time to take on new

activities.And even though you’ll constantly move into new SEO territory as the plan progresses,

you’ll periodically come back to revisit and continue the work you started in earlier weeks.

The one exception is PPC management, which requires frequent quick checks. So once your PPC

account gets rolling, we’ll incorporate these quick checks into days that are designated for other tasks.

No fair trying to sneak in and start the Plan without getting organization-wide buy-in for your top

keyword choices! If you haven’t done so,do it now.It is very difficult and time consuming to

change keywords after the fact. Your time is too valuable to waste on the wrong terms or to swing

and miss with your conversion goals.

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