First thing you will probably want to ask the seo company, you have chosen to promote your website, is going to be: What are we going to do about it? This article will serve as a short guide and a brief answer to this question. I will try to give a short outline of the stages of search engine optimization depending on the current level of website’s traffic and popularity.
Unfortunately, in most cases we have to deal with newly born websites: a month old domain name, fancy design and a couple of sentences of promotional text that looks pretty much the same on several pages of the website. At this point, you might have already missed some important things for the upcoming seo campaign: you bought a domain name, selected hosting and made design without seo consultancy. Website promotion is all about the details. You might have approximate concept in regards to what you are doing for your future website’s benefit, but it is only a professional seo consultancy that will be able to give you clear instructions and vivid explanation. Search engine optimization work can be further divided into several stages:
Preliminary stage: Starts with the selection of the target keywords, selection of the seo campaign strategy, definition of the target website audience and analysis of the competitors. FTP access is granted, CMS is adopted for seo purposes. Once the desired keywords are selected, client’s participation boils down to merely monitoring of the results of the seo campaign and giving questions / suggestions in regards to the current march of events.
Initial stage: Initial website optimization might presuppose that no pages from the website are indexed by any search engine, let alone some rankings with them. Google, Yahoo and MSN consider your design masterpiece a useless piece of www, and you need to convince them in the opposite. That is where on-site optimization takes place. Every page of the web site is personalized. Meta description, keywords, title, alt tags are in the perfect balance with the on-page text keyword spamming. At this point it is important to do a good homework making the page user friendly. Text should look as natural to the visitor as alluring to the search engines’ bots. Indeed, keyword spamming (which is certainly a white hat seo technique) reminds me the way you are preparing a chess-board before the game. There are definite places for the queen, for the knights, for the pawns. Once the website’s pages are customized, they are ready to give search engines’ crawlers a warm welcome and show their best. Technically, you are taking almost no chases to get into supplemental results if every page of the site is unique. And the less pages you have in the supplemental index – the better you site is treated. There is a special care for the web resources with more than 100 pages. Many webmasters notice that they are easier to promote, but I better stop my reflections regarding this issue – might be a good ground for another post.
Initial stage of search engine optimization also includes creation of the resource pages that later on will be involved in link exchange with other sites. The earlier these resources are created – the earlier they will get indexed, and indexing will bring some page rank for them sooner or later. Page rank update will actually bring in the main phase of the seo work, that is when first organic search visitors start showing up… Roughly speaking, PR update takes place once per 3 months, so the initial stage might continue for several months. In very rare cases reaching even more if the PR update took place a week or two after the seo campaign launching. Certainly, there are many useful things to do during this time, besides on-site optimization. The most useful activities are forum postings and article writing. Signature bound posting (that is where you are allowed to use a link to a website in the signature) at different thematic forums will allow actual keyword promotion at the very early stages of the website optimization. But there are certainly dozen of rules and criteria that will be applied only in regards to forum posting. Another pretty effective way of website promotion is writing an article dealing with it’s subject matter – most of the internet resources, hosting articles will allow a link or two linking to the site you want. There is a point of view that Yahoo appreciates such links, attaching special significance to them. This might end up in some noticeable ranking jump up to top 10, provided the keywords are not too competitive.
Free manual directory submission is a good, but unfortunately time consuming way to gain SE visibility. This method can and should be applied at every stage of the seo work. The number of the directories today is virtually infinite, but each of them has its own submission rules. You might not qualify today, but be a perfect match tomorrow. Well established, thematic directories stand any website in good stead.
Main stage is probably, the most routine. Its primary task is to increase link popularity by making 2 way and 3 way link exchanges. If the client promotes 2 websites that have identical theme – it is going to be pleasure of a job. 3 way link exchange is much more effective as compared to regular reciprocal link exchange. Some webmasters think that 2 way link exchange is an old and ineffective way of search engine optimization. Experience proves the opposite. Successful link popularity building will push the keywords to the top like a rocket carrier. This is not going to be an overnight traffic jump, but a gradual figures’ growth. True to its name, main stage of search engine optimization will be the most enduring one and will reveal if the website is capable of competing for new high-volume target keywords (depending on the seo campaign initial strategy). This stage of seo work might continue for as long as the client wishes, multiplying traffic to infinity.
Maintenance stage is a very important stage of the seo campaign. Its task is to keep track of traffic flow, monitor link exchange partners. It is amazing how often people are selling their domain names, leaving on-line businesses for something else. It is important to manually secure all the pages that link to your resource as to avoid what is called “bad neighborhood” in seo. Even slightest changes might cause in visible traffic losses. Most of the seo companies offer maintenance services that will cost you much less than full scale seo campaign.
I hope that the information given in this article made seo work clearer for a layermen, and did not dazzle with unknown words. Even though optimization procedures vary from company to company, there are basic methods employed everywhere, you had a chance to learn about. Seeming few in number, but a great deal when it gets down to work.
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