Handling SEO during website maintenance
Phases of SEO:
SEO is defined as the technique of producing a high volume of referral hits such as search engines, popular web directories and other informative websites with the ultimate goal of making our website popular and rank on top in SERP's.
The process of SEO involves 4 phases as described above:
Research Phase: This phase involves doing an extensive business research, competitor analysis and the keyword research followed by an assessment of the current state of the business that requires SEO. This phase involves answering lot of questions like what are the strengths of our business and what is our selling point. Are we looking for specific geographical regions? Do we have a budget? What are our general SEO goals? Do we have strict timelines for achieving the result? Who are our competitors? What is special about them? How is online information presented in their websites? What are our current site rankings? How many backlinks do we have? Who is linking to our website? Finding answers to these questions is a good starting point for SEO.
Planning and Strategy Page: This phase involves deciding on a strategy and action plan based on the answers obtained during the research phase. The strategies available are Content Strategy, Link building strategy, Social Media Strategy, Search Engine targeting strategy, SEM strategy and technical strategy.
Content Strategy addresses the organization of content presented in the website in all aspects including creation, modification, optimization and archival. Link Building Strategy is very crucial to the success of any SEO initiative. It includes directory submissions, social media sites, social bookmarking, blogs, press releases, blog comments etc. Social Media Strategy centres on popularizing your brand on Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Search Engine Targeting Strategy includes deciding which search engine we will be targeting. The most common ones are Google, Yahoo and Bing. SEM strategy involves using PPC (Pay per click) along with SEO to achieve greater results. This is absolutely not required if we are not looking at strict timelines to achieve results or if the market is not competitive. Technical Strategy involves deciding what tools and platform should we choose to build our website? Deciding on the underlying architecture is important if we are building custom websites, web portals or web applications development.
Implementation Phase: This phase involves 2 major streams of SEO – On-page Optimization and Off-Page Optimization. On-page Optimization includes Keyword Density, Proximity and Prominence, Title tag, Meta Description, Long-tail and Short-tail keywords, Anchor text, Robots.txt, URL-Canonicalization etc. Off-page optimization includes Directory submissions, Blog and Forum Submissions, Article Writing, Press Releases, Link building, Social Media Marketing etc.
Monitoring Phase: Monitoring Phase involves monitoring the web spider activities, web traffic for our website, search engine rankings, conversions, referral sites etc. Devising the right link building strategy is vital to the success of SEO. Having backlinks in websites with higher page ranks contribute value to our page rank. Often it takes time to see results with respect to Page ranks on SERP's. But be patient! SEO produces organic results and is slow but generates powerful and effective outcome!
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