Where To Get Your SEO
Lets take a little SEO Roadtrip. There are the 5 SEO Checkpoints along the way that are important and should not be skipped. You’ll want to bookmark this for future reference – ie. this is a long post!
SEO Arsenal
SEO Log Notebook: SEO Goals – Notes – Ideas, for your records so be sloppy if you want.
SEO Status Report: Strict and Specific – Accurate Record with Direct Results. Be accountable in this report.
SEO ER – Get Help: Google Webmaster Tools
SEO Wallet – Keep Filled with Good Content – Just Like Cash: Original Content – High Quality – Unpublished Anywhere
Intro
Understanding and Using Your SEO Arsenal
You have many things to do in SEO, so in order to make good use of your time we’re about to move fast. Come back here as you move from one checkpoint to the next. Have your SEO Arsenal stocked well, you’ll be using it shortly.
I. – SEO Goals
Setting Reasonable Goals – Put Them on Paper – Logbook
Before undertaking a new project, it’s a good idea to list out specifically how the SEO Goals will be reached and what it took to get there so we keep track of that with an SEO Logbook and Status Report – Download SEO Excel File.
As you can see from the sample log, we need some things to track (keywords). But lets not get ahead of ourselves, lets first see what we expect to get out of all this and then determine if it’s worth it. The first page is the status report followed by pages that are the previous weeks rankings. Add your SEO Logbook to this spreadsheet for keeping notes.
II. SEO LogbookStart Gathering Data
Think of this like you might think about a bank account. You start with a balance and it’s up to you to use that balance to make more money. So begin tracking your efforts and what they have brought you back very methodically. This will force you to stick to the tasks that produce the highest ROI. Keep a close eye on the SEO Goal that you’ve chosen, and only concern yourself with that one for now.
How To Read The SEO Status Report
It would be in your best interests to make big gains in ranking, but you need to know where you are ranked first and what keywords you’ll use to track.
Pick 3 keywords and get your current rankings, paste that into the excel spreadsheet. Now go to SEOBook and plug them in. You’ll have to wait a few days to a week to get an updated report so the status report won’t mean much until then.
Also, for the “-” I just replace those with 999 so the subtraction occurs. A “-” means your site isn’t listed in the first 200 positions, or 20 pages (10 results per page).
III. Show Your Work – Log Changes
Take Notes When you make changes
Remember in school when you had to show your work? Thats the same here. You’ll want to keep notes along the way so keep jotting them down while you are doing this work. Every change you make to a title tag, put the old one down, followed by the updated one. You should do this at the same time every week so you can see the impact it makes on your rankings.
Ok, you got your SEO Status Report and Your SEO Log.
Advanced – Long Term SEO Milestones and Goals Identified
Selecting SEO Milestones
Without creating too much distraction, come up with 1 or 2 very simple SEO Goals you can feel confident in gaining out of this exercise.
SEO Milestones – What Metrics To Track As a Milestone
Lets say you wanted to improve your OnPage SEO. One way to test whether you’re making positive changes is to think about some of these ideas as getting clicks means people are engaged with your site.
Make Them Want To Click
Place links in test locations to see which ones get clicked the most
Put a box around your permalinks so people are more apt to grab it and paste it
Offer your own branded URL shortener to create incentive for them to create a link to your page
These are clearly all link related metrics to track as milestones. You may think that this isn’t SEO but it certainly is if you have an existing site with organic traffic that perhaps has some on-site issues that hurts your ability to rank. If you can’t get people to “click through” when you have 50 visitors to the page, won’t matter if you somehow magically appear at the top of Google and get 1000 because if all 1000 just leave then you’ve just told the search engines you don’t have anything to add.
What Is A Good Starting Point
The more broadly someone is searching for information, the harder to rank because of sites like Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is good for delivering information for people early in the the discovery, or information gathering stage.
Think of someone searching the word “Chevy” is “discovery or browsing” mode and searching “2008 Chevy Silverado 4×4″ is in “lead or shopping mode”
How Buyers Search For Cars
If users could actually expect a good result for “Used 2008 Chevy Silverado extended cab 4×4 1500 gray ls under 40000 original miles automatic $12000″ – They would enter it, but most likely they’ll be missing other opportunities because that is highly targeted.
We need to consider what search is going to bring us business, one that gets searched often enough to warrant the time spent doing the work to rank well for it.
Open a browser and enter some phrases into Google to see what sites come up and if any stand out more than others. Then take note of the number of page results in the index.
We may try “2008 Chevy Silverado 4×4 Pickup Truck” or “2008 Chevy Silverado 4×4 Pickup Truck for sale” if we regularly have that inventory.
Ok not bad, Google has about 735,000 page results and this will be a good starting point for our SEO strategy.
You can dig deeper to find more stats, but for this first run we should keep it basic and not take on too many things.
So look at who is ranking for that search term, try to see why they’re ranking so well.
What might it take to outrank them.
After we have the strategy we check whether or not we have any pages indexed for that, if we do we see about updating them with content and linking to them with those keywords from other pages on our site.
Since we do have pages, and our focus was to be strictly OnPage SEO then we’ll set that up as our first initial project.
SEO is Work
Schedule time to work on this project explicitly and don’t skip it.
Do all the steps as stated, track the results, and see if you get some measurable gains. After awhile, you’ll be able to know at a glance which project will produce the best results and you can get it done quickly due to practice.
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