Your SEO plan is a simple document that will help you stay focused when you are implementing SEO strategies on your site.
Prioritizing pages
First thing you should do is not to look at your site as a whole, look at every page on your site. Mark the pages that are more important than others and then plan your SEO regarding to that page priority.
Top priority pages should be pages that most of the users will naturally open, for example home page, or pages that will generate the biggest traffic or revenue. If five pages on your site have the biggest priority, than the most time, money and effort should be spend for optimizing them with SEO.
Site assessment
After you set the priorities of your pages, you should find out where you currently are and where you need to be with you SEO efforts. Once again, assess each page of the site like individual page not like the sit as a whole.
Many times individual pages are much more important than all the pages together. So you should focus to rank one page above the others in search results.
How do you decide which page is the most important. Well you can find the answer in your business needs.
Your document should contain columns for each of the elements of your site, current status of that element, needed improvements and the improvement deadlines.
The elements that should be included during an assessment of your website include:
- Site/page tagging: Meta tags are essential element of each page. Mostly you should focus on page titles and meta descriptions.
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Page content: Is your content updated, is it fresh, interesting? How much content are there on your pages. Content is one of the top 3 most important elements of your site, and you should focus having the appropriate content on your pages.If you don’t update your content, search engines might start ignoring your site in favor of the site of your competitor that is updating his content on regular basis. But that is not always a rule. If your content is rich but not dynamic and it contains important information, your site will still rank well. Because your content is so useful you will probably rank well even if you don’t update your content. But usually fresh updated content is better.
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_Site links: Site links are super essential in Search Engine Optimization. Bots and crawlers check incoming and outgoing links to your site. They classify these links how important they are, if they are relevant to your site. Also you have to check if you have any broken links on your website (links not opening in browsers when clicking on them – not pointing to the correct site). That is a big issue for search engines. You should regularly check for any broken links.
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Site map: Site map is another essential element of your website. It will help search engines crawl your website faster and more accurately. She sitemap we are talking about is not the sitemap you can find on some sites that help users easily navigate thru site. No we are talking about XML-based document, that can be found at the root of your HTML that contains information (URL, last updated, relevance to surrounding pages, and so on) about each of the pages within a site. Having XML sitemap will ensure that even deep pages are crawled by search engine spiders regularly. If you don’t have an XML sitemap you should create it. Especially if your navigation system is complex.
Finishing the plan
After assessing of all the elements you should now know what areas of your site need work and what areas are in good shape.
The areas that currently don’t require any work might not always be in perfect condition. Now it is time to create an overall assessment of your site. Your SEO plan is more than just a picture of what’s there and what’s not. SEO plan will be used as glue for everything you do, for example current rankings in search engines, marketing efforts, capital investment.
In your SEO plan you will track your current standings, your goals that you plan to reach, marketing efforts for each page. You’ll even have the capital expenditures that you plan to encounter as you implement your SEO plan. You will add the SEO strategies you will use for example like directory submissions, link exchange, what content you are planning to use, which keyword you will focus, or you can track what keyword you are focusing in PPC marketing.
SEO Plan Follow-up
Follow-up is very important. You just cant make a plan and than walk away from it. SEO will require testing, monitoring and often rebuilding. The plan might need to be altered, updated on frequent basis.
