Breaking SEO into manageable phases
“As with any significant task, you need to break SEO into manageable and measurable stages or risk losing direction, miss deadlines and become disheartened.”
Luke Farley, Founder, LCubed.
As with any significant project Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) requires a plan divided into stages with definite milestones.
SEO projects can be a long haul, and it is essential to break them into distinct, manageable phases to help ensure that they do not become overwhelming.
With the right structure, SEO projects can be efficiently monitored, ensuring that the project continues to progress in the right direction, at the desired rate.
One of the major challenges with SEO is that results occur slowly – results (improved search engine rankings) can take weeks or months to kick in. A solid planning approach is vital because of the size and complexity of the task. Also, because of initial feedback from an SEO project can be slow, it is quite possible for a team to waste several weeks working on strategies that have little (or worse negative) effect.
A detailed plan, with measurable tasks to track, allows the SEO team to more intelligently target each area while they await feedback.
High level SEO phases:
Technological Barriers
“Technological barriers to a website’s search engine rankings are common because many people, unfortunately including website designers, are not as aware as they should be of search engine spiders and their capabilities.”
SEM expert
One reason that many websites’ keywords are not ranking well in search engines can be technical issues on the site. In many cases, code or platform barriers exist which prevent search engines seeing (or ‘crawling’) the page content. For example, some websites extensively use graphics or Flash segments, both of which search engines struggle to read and index in their databases.
Search engines do not interact with the internet in the same way as humans do – they gather information by ‘crawling’ web pages, using automated programs variously called ‘bots’, robots, or ’spiders’ (notice the continuation of the web theme). Generally, these robots cannot interpret graphics. This can create major problems when your website is image-heavy. So a balance needs to be struck between SEO needs and design considerations.
Removing technical barriers, including those that prevent search engines from reading and storing website textual content, is one key component of effective SEO.
Onsite optimisation
This is an SEO activity that should be relatively easy to address because your website is under your control. Onsite webpage and navigational optimising can have a relatively quick impact on your overall SEO campaign, although it is generally accepted that it does not have as great an impact as external factors.
There are a large number of onsite optimisation tactics including:
- Modifying content to target certain keywords (after putting in place a solid strategy based on a good understanding of your target audience)
- Paying attention to tags (within the website’ code)
- Improving internal linking structures
- Updating the content, especially the text, regularly and including an obvious site map. Both Google and Yahoo have specified formats in which they would like to see your site maps.
External factors
“SEO quick wins can be very difficult to measure. If the only feedback you are getting is the end objective (e.g. ranking in the top five for a given search term), there is no way of measuring your progress. Without milestones there can be no measurement and without a strategy there can be no milestones”
Luke Farley, Founder, LCubed
External factors are the most difficult phase to implement and control, because they are not under your direct control. Many tactics can be brought into play here though with linking strategies being the most popular.
Link popularity (the volume and relevance of links to a site) is a very significant influencing factor for search engine ranking. For example, Google uses a system inspired by academic citation. The Google algorithm considers that if a large number sites are ‘referencing’ (linking to) your site, then your website must itself be important and its pages will be ranked accordingly. With link popularity, ‘quality’ not quantity, is a major determinant, along with the perceived importance of the website linking back to you.
Numerous strategies targeting these ‘external factors’ can be brought to bear. These approaches require an investment in time and money. Given the level of investment required, and the fact that there are no guaranteed outcomes, seeking external advice is often a good idea.
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