Steps of SEO – Part 1

September 9, 2008 by · 1 Comment 

Search Engine Optimization may be a confusing and overwhelming subject for many webmasters. Others simply LOVE the idea of SEO and determining how search engines establish their results and how to stay one step ahead of the game. Although SEO’s needs a foundation to start on, hence what I call the steps of SEO.

Step 1: Identifying A Main Topic

This is really the most crucial part of a successful SEO campaign. You must determine a main ‘general’ topic for your website. This way you can set up a latent semantic system on your website. What I mean by that is this, let’s pretend that your ‘general’ website topic is fishing. Your main page will be a landing page about fishing with separate pages for the topics of bass fishing, deep sea fishing, and fly fishing. Within that you can have an even more broken down structure. This way when one page begins to rank well for a given keyword, the pagerank and its success can be passed among your architecture layout.

Step 2: Content is King

This idea isn’t revolutionary by any means within the SEO community. Except that it is absolutely crucial if you want to be a dominating figure in search engines. By creating a website that contains well written and thought out content you can begin to become an authoritative figure within the search engines eyes. By applying this within the LSI structure I described above, Google will love you. If you analyze websites that rank well within search engines they typically have two similar variables. First they have an aged domain, and second they have thousands of pages of articles and documents.

For some reason websites begin to ‘pop’ on rankings when they achieve the 200-300 page mark. Keep in mind that these are quality and content driven pages. Not spammy or duplicated content pages! So get out there and get started writing (and or purchasing) content for your website.

Step 3: Identifying your Link Building/Site Architecture

As I’ve described in the previous steps, content and a site architecture is key to a websites success. By setting up your website with a hierarchy in mind you can target hundreds of topics while each subject remaining relevant. A ‘silo’d’ structure would look something like this.

  1. Fishing
  • Deep Sea Fishing
    • Locations
      • Puerto Vallarta
    • Techniques
      • Educational Material

Logical right? That’s the point, to make it easier for the user to navigate as well as set up a well thought out website. This not only benefits the reader but it will benefit your rankings within the search engines. By establishing a system for pagerank to flow within your site you will allow for the ‘authority’ to flow within your articles/content. This means that they will begin to rank well, once a single page on your site ranks well.

This idea reinforces the topical relevance that is so important in today’s SEO campaigns. By separating subjects, and linking to other subjects within your site when available you are allowing yourself to achieve optimal results. The ultimate goal is to start with this foundation in mind! Don’t make it an afterthought (when possible), build your site with LSI and inter-linking in mind. With time you will begin to rank well, and successfully for keywords you had not even thought of.

[tags]foundation of seo, seo foundation, steps of seo, search engine optimization steps[/tags]