How to Start a SEO Campaign

Several small & mid size businesses contact us daily for SEO consultation and helping their websites rank well on search engines. One common question we always hear is:

Where and how do I start my SEO Campaign from?

We thought it would be a very good topic for our blog post & should help all our readers.

A couple of points to note before we start -

* We are assuming that you already have the domain name because finding a good domain name would be a separate topic of blog.
* This list is far from complete because there are still several other factors that affect your website position.

So, here are some of the most important steps that you can yourself take care of before going to any SEO company to manage your search engine marketing campaign.

1. Find your targeted keyword

The first and most important step is to determine what are the most important keywords for which you want your website to appear on search engines? You know your business more than anyone else. You know your target audience. So find out 10 phrases which you think that your prospective customers will search for.

It is much more complicated than it sounds. We just wrote about a simple tip on keyword research that a beginner should always do.

2. Set the title of your website pages right

After you have decided on your keywords, the next step is to set them up properly. The title of your web page is the very first thing that any search engine crawler will read and take as a factor to rank your website. Your homepage’s title should contain your targeted keyword. All the other pages of your website should have title related to the content of that respective page. For e.g., the title of the registration page should be “Registration”. Keep in mind that you are not promoting your “registration” page. The idea is to “set things right”.

3. Set up meta keywords and description

Though Google has said they do not read meta tags content but we still advise to put your targeted keywords in <meta name="”keywords”/">field and one line description of your website in <meta name="”description”/">field in your header tags. Many other search engines will still read them and Google won’t give you negative marks for that.

4. Unique content for the home page

Your website’s homepage should have a unique content describing your business. This introductory text should have the phrases that are in the title of the page. Experts say that you should use your targeted keyword 2-3 times in every 200 words so as to not get caught up for keyword stuffing. If possible, put your local business address and phone number on home page & contact us page to get noticed on “local business results” on Google.

5. Business Blog

Google loves to blog and so does the other search engines around. Having a business blog pays – and this is something you should always remember. Whatever business you have, you must write 1-2 blogs every week about your business. The articles can be about an industry news, a website update, a new recruit in your company – anything that relates in some way or the other to your business. It would be an icing on the cake, if you put these blogs on the homepage, just like what we have on Click4Joomla.

We recommend using wordpress because they are easy to set up and the come up with various SEO Plugins that help in optimizing your blog for search engine rankings.

6. Install traffic analyzer

Once your website is up, you would definitely want to monitor your traffic. Any analytics software will show you how many visitors come to your website daily, where are they coming from and which keywords do they use on search engines to get on to your website. These are the most important metrics.

We suggest using Google Analytics for 2 reasons -

1. It is free & provides everything you would want.
2. Our website discovery tool works very well with Google analytics to help you find the new keywords that bring you traffic. Read more about it on our previous blog post here.

7. Monitor your website rankings

* Of course you are just starting your campaign. You might not be in top 100 on Google but sooner or later if you do the right things at the right time, you will find yourself in top 10 for that elite group of your targeted keywords. We, at Click4Joomla, offer this service for free. You can register your website with your targeted keywords and we will monitor your rankings on daily basis. You can be rest assure to get notified by email as soon as your rank has changed for Google, Yahoo or Bing. This will even help you track the work done by whichever SEO company you have chosen for your campaign.

8. Setup business profiles on social media websites

Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious are some of the buzz words today in social media industry. Setting up your business profile on these & similar websites are must for a starter. Maintaining & optimizing them is again a different topic of discussion about which we will soon post here.

We hope that you found this list as a good starting point to help you in setting up your SEO Campaign. We also advise our clients to educate themselves by spending 30 minutes daily in reading latest news in the SEO world. You may not be professionals but you sure don’t want to appear dumb when you talk to a SEO Company. Official blogs of Google, Bing, & Yahoo are good starting point but there are hundreds of freelance bloggers that can provide really valuable information as well. A few ones that we love

* http://www.dailyseoblog.com
* http://www.seo-theory.com
* http://www.seomoz.org
* http://www.webmasterworld.com (Highly Recommended)

Well, we have finished our part. Time for you now to add more points which you think would be useful for a beginner in the SEO world. If you like reading this post on the Click4Joomla Blog, do subscribe to our feed!


Jeniffer Jen blogs about “SEO friendly website development”at Click4Joomla.
You can also follow me on Twitter @websitewithseo