SEO strategies for 2009 by Richard Vanderhurst

PRLog (Press Release) – Mar 28, 2009 – So, you know what you want from your website, but you need to plan how you’ll go about achieving it. This is where your SEO plan comes in. It will aid you in documenting your progressions and strategies in an easy to read format, while keeping you well-organizing.

Search Engine Optimization is not something with which you can simply “wing-it”. As Richard Vanderhurst explains in his lectures, it takes time and discipline, but an SEO plan can drastically improve your ability to form your website to your vision.
   
Page Priorities

It can be extremely difficult to get started on a website that has page after page of content, and there is no doubt that you will feel flooded if you attempt to take it on all at once. Try thinking of your website like a puzzle that needs to be put together piece by piece, you just need to decide which pieces come first. This is called prioritizing your pages.
   
The most important pages to think about are the ones that you expect to receive the most traffic. An example would be your home pages as well as perhaps a product descriptions page, or something along those lines. These are pages which most visitors will dwell and as such, should be well linked. If they are, you have most likely mapped out your efforts effectively. By documenting these priorities into your SEO plan, your time, strategies, and marketing efforts can be justly distributed.

Assessing Your Site

While prioritizing will aid you in picking which pages receive the most amount of effort, a site assessment will tell you what is done and what still needs to be done in the way of your current SEO work. Remember it’s not worth trying to take on the whole site at once, look at it as individual pages. Those pages are often more important than the site as a whole because of the fact that those are what you’ll be working to rank. Through your assessment, you’ll be able to measure your current effort status and implement strategies appropriately to your top priorities.
   
For your assessment, the chief components of each page should be charted on a specific document from your SEO plan and display the current ranking of those components. This might include columns for each component being assessed as well as its most recent status, any potential improvements and a deadline for completing those improvements. Some sort of check box may be helpful in staying organized, but keep in mind that SEO is a cycle that doesn’t end, consider a follow-up column that may prove to be more useful.
   
When beginning an assessment, there are four components that are most commonly considered: Page Content, Page Tagging, Site links, and Site Map.

Page content is the key when dealing with SEO. It must be new and regularly updated, appropriate and related to the subject at hand. There also needs to be sufficient, but not too much content. Richard Vanderhurst teaches that content can make or break any rank, but unique content always prevails. Consumers are searching for specific words and phrases. If your site is hosting old, overused, or irrelevant content, then Google or Yahoo! are less likely to pick up those words and phrases. Although, a piece of content may be exempt from this idea if it is particularly useful, but it is very hard to establish whether or not your content is, indeed, useful enough that updates are unneeded. It can be strongly suggested that you stick to the fresh stuff.

As far as page tagging goes, titles and content descriptions are the most essential aspects to consider, because those are most commonly what the search engine is looking at. To have your website listed correctly, use the meta tags in your SEO coding. This is a simple, but very important part of the optimization process

Spiders and crawlers are the eyes of the search engine and if they aren’t seeing you, your rank isn’t going up. This is why site links make such a drastic difference when dealing with SEO. They are the incoming and outgoing links that act as the bridge for these spiders to gather information from your pages through other sites. The more relevant data they collect, the more they can relate your website to the search topic and thus, improve your rank. But be wary, some links break from site movement and there are no red flags going up when they do, so during your assessment, check that all your links are still live.

An XML-based site map can greatly improve your ability to stay linked. It is kept at the core of your HTML and holds all the necessary data for the individual pages of your website. Creating one of these is the easiest way to make sure every page is enhanced by SEO, but be sure to update it regularly and keep it as precise as possible.

Solidifying the Plan
   
Now, once your assessment has been clearly laid out and you have sifted through every page of your site, you should be getting a better understanding of what looks good and what needs work. But be certain to come back later and reassess, because although some things may be working now, it can’t always be said that they will in the future. The web is always changing, so you’ll need to stay on top of it.
   
It is time to bring it all to a head. The SEO plan can now be assembled with the data you have gathered from your assessment and your necessary efforts can clearly be displayed. It should appear very similar to a business plan, only rather than documenting backgrounds, campaigns, growth plans and problem solving strategies, you’ll use matters more related to the SEO process and management of your website.
   
Chiefly, an SEO plan should incorporate three elements at the very least. Richard Vanderhurst explains that when preparing your plan, it is best to think about the current status, or ranking, of your site, the efforts needed from marketing instituted for the individual page of your site, and finally, the objective you are working to achieve. With those three components, your plan is well on its way to completion, but things like capital expenditures are also important matters to consider as you begin to apply your plan.
   
The final issue you must implement into is strategies. How are you planning on getting your website out into the open? Perhaps you arrange to manually submit them to search engine directories, or cater your content so as to attract the search engine spiders to your pages. Either way, you need a lure, and that is what the strategies are for.

Following-up your plan

So, your plan is all set up, you’ve applied it to your site, and things are looking good. You don’t ever have to look at that SEO plan again, right? Wrong! Despite what some people may think, a follow-up is very important. As was mentioned, the internet is always changing and thus, the SEO process is never-ending. You must be monitoring, reassessing and restructuring to keep your efforts effective and your SEO intact.

In many cases, it is assumed that a bi-annual follow-up is sufficient. Indeed, any follow-up is affective, if not too frequent, but to achieve the best results from your review, a quarterly check-up should be arranged. Again, your time can easily be wasted if you are re-evaluating too regularly. Give your site and strategies enough time to change and develop, but not long enough for them to become obsolete. A safe range to stick between is no more than four and no less than two follow-ups per year. This will keep your SEO as efficient and effective as possible. http://www.richardvanderhurst.biz