The SEO Process

There are two sides to effective SEO: (If you’re not clear about what SEO is then read this post: SEO Basics)

1) On-Page SEO

2) Off-Page SEO

Step One: Determine Your Keyword Phrases

We work with specific keyword phrases.  A keyword phrase is two or more words for which you wish your website to have top rankings in the search engines.

For example: you have a website dedicated to sausage recipes and you want people looking for spicy sausage recipes to find your site first. To come top in Google and other search engines you need to be “optimized” for the key word phrase “spicy sausage recipe”

Step Two: Analyse Competition

For your chosen Keyword Phrase we need to assess who is competing against you and how easy or difficult it will be to get your web site in the top rankings.

At this planning stage, we need to know if we are going to be building a “Shed” or a “Castle”. Obviously if the competition is low then it’s going to be easer and quicker to get in the top 10 than if there is high competition in which case it’s going to take a lot of time and effort.

Step Three: On-Page SEO

Next will be the need to either modify an existing page or create a new page specifically for the Keyword Phrase you wish to use.

There is a lot of “hype” talked about On-Page SEO but in reality there are only a few things that need to be in place for the search engines to “like” what they see.

Step Four: Off-Page SEO

This is the most critical element to successful SEO. Google and the other search engines may like your site but it’s what other sites say about you that carry the greatest influence as to where your site comes in the search results.

If others are “saying” good things about your site, Google and the others will think more highly of you. It’s also not just a case of what any other site “says” but who and what those sites are. Some sites carry more weight than others. Google measures that using something called Page Rank. If you are top of the heap then they will give you 7 or 8 or 9 out of 10. If your site is a “nobody” then you get a 0 of of 10.

This is where the Plan made in Step Two comes into play. Following the plan, we start to build what’s called Backlinks (links pointing back to your website) from the correct sites back to yours.

Traditionally this was done by buying these links from other websites. They would charge a monthly fee just to have one link on their web site leading back to yours and they were not cheap. £150 -£500 or more per link per month so if you wanted 10 links you can work out how expensive it could be.