SEO

The organic side of things..  This is how I got my start into marketing online and it plays a big part in my tactics for driving traffic to my offers.  A good solid search engine optimization plan is always handy in my book and I’m glad to have spent so much time learning it regardless of the fact that PPC can be the traffic generation method of choice for many marketers.

The basics of a good SEO plan are predicated on thorough upfront market research.  Finding the market is first priority.  Depending on your budget you will have to strike a balance between market share and competitiveness.  Without large funding it might be necessary to go for low hanging fruit initially until profits allow for further expansion.

Finding a niche

After you find a market with profit potential you must then slice this down to a manageable piece of the pie based of the advice above.  This is a process of sub-dividing your niche until you find an area you can own and build upon.  At that point keyword research starts to come into play.  The key here is finding enough search volume with the amount of competition you are able to conquer.  Initially focusing on the more general terms of your chosen niche you then drill down to find more long tail derivatives.  You can also look laterally to find common synonyms and related terms.  Combined you now have a target search volume to go after.

Domain names

A major consideration for a successful website is to find a suitable domain name.  Two main choices appear here, either a keyword laden name or a brand-able one.  You can go for something in the middle of the two if desired.  Having an exact match domain, one including one of your main search terms with the phrase, can give  a bonus to your rankings.  It also helps influence anchor text when link building to further enhance your rankings.  Keyword only domains can sometimes be viewed as generic and this is a case where perhaps a brand-able and memorable domain name can be advantageous.

Linking

Once the domain name is in  place content must be added to the website in a structure that is both accessible to your audience while also allowing search engines to decide the theme and subject of your site’s pages.  Grouping like themes together along with interlinking pages can give clues as to what terms your site should rank for.  Deep linking to internal pages can help label them for their targeted keyword phrases.

Links from external sites play a major role in the success of search engine rankings and constitutes one of the major activities in a search engine optimizers workload.  There are a variety of link sources available, article directories, general directories, editorial prices, paid link schemes, reciprocal links, and commenting on other websites.  Some of these are more useful than others, but generally it’s a good idea to have a diverse link structure as it is both natural and beneficial.

Tracking and analytics

Once a site is indexed and receiving traffic analytics comes into play.  One of the most popular applications used is Google’s own analytics tracking suite with is available for free and requires the addition of a script to be placed onto all of your website’s pages.  By viewing visitor data you can see how pages are performing on a variety of levels.  Besides just seeing the amount of traffic itself you can also view the time visitors spent on pages.  Whether they left the site from a page, referred to as bounce rate, can also tell you if people finding your site left from a particular page.  If a page has a high bounce rate that could be an indication that the page in general is not serving the needs of the people it is optimized for.  It’s no use to bring people to your site if they immediately leave (although there are exceptions) so this is something important to consider.

The longtail

Another important benefit of analytics data is finding other long tail keywords that your site is ranking for that you might not have intended to target.  There are many new phrases being searched for daily, it’s estimated that around 25% of all searches are new queries that have never been performed before.  In this respect you won’t always be able to plan for every variation of searches that would be related to your website.  By looking over the incoming search queries in for instance Google’s analytics, you might find some interesting phrase variations to further optimize for.  In some cases you might even consider creating new pages and content just for these phrases.  In all, long tail searches, and ones you haven’t specifically planned for might account for a large percentage of your total visits.