Creating an Overall SEO Plan

After you have set one or more goals in your mind, considering your website, now you need to create a good SEO plan. SEO Plan is a document which keeps you focused as you implant SEO strategies on your website. Your SEO plan is many more than merely a picture of what is there and what is not. Since search engines will naturally change, as the technologies develops so your plan should be dynamic, changing document. To keep up with your SEO plan, you as a SEO need to be evolving or changing as well. And that’s where your SEO plan will help you stay on track.

The Key Functions of a SEO Plan:

Web Page Prioritization

In SEO, individual pages are equally important (if not more so) than the entire site. One should assess where the site stand and what all is need to be done with current SEO efforts. Again, assess each page individually, rather than the site as a whole. This SEO plan is long term process and create an SEO plan will maximize your web site’s potential in the minimum amount of time. Highly prioritized pages should be the one which are crawled by search engine spiders on routinely basis, such as the home page of your website, or the service or product pages which are generating maximum revenue or traffic. When you prioritize your pages, you’ll also be generating a roadmap focusing your marketing efforts.

Assessing Your Website for SEO

When you finished with prioritizing your webpages, you should assess where you stand and where you need to be with your current SEO efforts. SEO Site Assessment analyzes your existing web site from the search engines’ perspectives. The site assessment enables SEO to identifying areas where improvements can and must be made such as studying and analyzing at site structure & content, existing link networks, navigability and all the other key elements for Search Engine ranking success. With your target market in mind SEO does extensive assessment based on many hours spent examining your web site.

The elements that should be considered during an assessment include:

Page content: How fresh is your content? How relevant is it? How often is it updated? how much content is there? Does the site have a lot of textual content for visitors to read and for the search engines to index? Is it done in plain text, graphics or Flash (because the last two options make it invisible for the engines)? Is it unique? Content is still important when it comes to search results. After all, most people are looking for a specific piece of content, whether it’s information or a product. If your content is stale, search engines could eventually begin to ignore your site in favor of a site that has fresher content. There are exceptions to this generalization, however. And one exception is if your content is, by nature, very rich but not very dynamic. Because of the usefulness of the content, your site will probably continue to rank well. But it’s a difficult case to determine. In most cases, fresh content is better.

Site/page tagging: The meta tags that are included in the coding of your web site are essential to having that site listed properly in a search engine. Tags to which you should pay specific attention are the title tags and description tags, because these are the most important to a search engine.

Site links: Site links are essential in SEO. Crawlers and spiders look for the links into and out of your site in order to traverse your site and collect data on each URL. However, they also look for those links to be in-context, meaning the link must come from or lead to a site that is relevant to the page that is being indexed. Broken links tend to be a large problem when it comes to search engine ranking, so be sure to check that links are still working during the assessment process.

Site map: Believe it or not, a site map will help your web site be more accurately linked. But this is not the ordinary site map that you include to help users quickly navigate through your site. This site map is an XML-based document, at the root of your HTML that contains information (URL, last updated, relevance to surrounding pages, and so on) about each of the pages within a site. Using this XML site map will help to ensure that even the deep pages within your site are indexed by search engines. If you don’t have a site map, you should create one. If you do have one, make sure it’s accurate and up to date.

Other factors include…

• Flat hierarchical site structure
• Acceptable use of flash (if any)
• Acceptable use of JavaScript - JavaScript in include file(s)
• Smart CSS use - CSS in include file(s)
• Robots.txt is correct
• 301 redirects, where redirects are used
• Acceptable keyword density
• Web Server on quality host, non-blacklisted domain, dedicated server or at least good neighbors

Retrieval Of Web Information And Keyword Ranking

The web search engine provides fresh data to Web and the retrieval of this data is a combination activity of the spider (or crawler or robot), the search engine database, and the search algorithm. All these three elements makes the retrieval of the word or phrase that is used by a surfer or a user in search engine’s user interface.

Ranking plays a major part in search engine optimization. There are several factors that affects ranking. Keep in mind, however, that different search engines use different ranking criteria, so the importance each of these elements plays will vary. Crawler-based search engines go about determining relevancy, when confronted with hundreds of millions of web pages to sort through. They follow the search engine’s algorithm. However, all major search engines follow the general rules below.

Lets discuss the factors that affect search engine ranking.

Content: Content plays a vital role in keyword ranking and is also termed ass the king of World Wide Web. In order to attain higher search engine rankings, the content on your website should be descriptive, informative, fresh and original.

Location: One of the the main rules in a search engine ranking algorithm involves the location. Location doesn’t refer here to the location (as in the URL) of a web page. Instead,it refers to the location of key words and phrases on a web page. So, for example, if a user searches for “flowers,” some search engines will rank the results according to where on the page the word “flowers” appears. Obviously, the higher the word appears on the page, the higher the rank might be. So a web site that contains the word “flowers” in the title tag will likely appear higher than a web site that is about flowers but does not contain the word in the title tag. What this means is that a web site that’s not designed with SEO in mind will likely not rank where you would expect it to rank. The site www.flowers.com is a good example of this. In a Google search, it appears ranked fifth rather than first, potentially because it does not contain the key word in the title tag.

Frequency: Frequency is the other major factor in search engine optimization and how content relevancy is determined. The frequency with which the search term appears on the page may also affect how a page is ranked in search results. So, for example, on a page about flowers, one that uses the word five times might be ranked higher than one that uses the word only two or three times. When word frequency became a factor, some web site designers began using hidden words hundreds of times on pages, trying to artificially boost their page rankings. Most search engines now recognize this as keyword spamming and ignore or even refuse to list pages that use this technique.

Links: One of the more recent ranking factors is the type and number of links on a web page. Make sure to have a number of quality links to your website as links that come into the site, links that lead out of the site, and links within the site are all taken into consideration. Valued links always help a website to rank higher. Again number of links doesn’t matter; links should be genuine and come from a quality website. More accurately, the number of relevant links coming into your page, versus the number of relevant links within the page, versus the number of relevant links leading off the page will have a bearing on the rank that your page gets in the search results.

Click-throughs: One last element that might determine how your site ranks against others in a search is the number of click-throughs your site has versus click-throughs for other pages that are shown in page rankings. Because the search engine cannot monitor site traffic for every site on the Web, some monitor the number of clicks each search result receives. The rankings may then be repositioned in a future search, based on this interaction with the users.