Copyright ©2012 Fast Track Sites

Here at Fast Track Sites, a common we get is “how do you SEO optimize your website?” “What can I do to change the amount of clicks that I’m getting in the site, the amount of purchases, the amount of traffic, period?” It’s a very common question and it’s a very difficult one to answer. Each site is really different, so you really have to plan according to that one specific site. A lot of people also want to know, are they able to do that themselves or do they have to pay somebody for it? All SEO is very, very time consuming. Having a professional to guide you on the way can make that process a little easier, but again, it still takes a lot of time to do that.

The way that we usually suggest for people to get around this is a multi-staked process. The first step is going to be planning, and then you implement your plan, assess how your plan actually worked, and you can repeat that process. So that first stage of planning, what you really want to do is basically start out and map out exactly what you want to actually happen. Do you want to increase those clicks? Do you want to get people purchasing products? What exactly would be the purpose of your SEO here?

Now, just as most business will fail without a business plan, most SEO will also fail without an SEO plan. So once you’ve got your goal in mind, the next thing you want to look at is your keywords. If you’re looking to sell something on your site, you want to look at buyer keywords, such as “buy product X,” “product X download,” “product X reviews,” these are buyer keywords—people are going to be typing this into Google, Bing or Yahoo, whenever they’re actually looking towards buying something. Now, if you’re looking to just garner customers in, you might have to start with article keywords, but the main thing you want to do is look at the competition, make sure people are actually searching for these keywords before you spend all your time optimizing for something that you just won’t get any traffic from.

Now, once you’ve got your keywords in there, you want to start looking at your on-page optimization; getting your site ready for the next stage. You want to make sure you’ve got your keyword usage on your homepage, within articles from the site. The number one tip (I should say) on how to optimize your site for specific keywords is to really make sure you’re writing for the visitor, not necessarily for search engines, just putting your keyword in there and spamming it over and over again. You really want to engage your readers, no matter what your site is about.

Once you’ve got your keyword, on its actual place, you want to have them on your internal pages and your homepage, and then you want to make sure you’ve got your internal link structure correct. Are you linking to your internal pages from other pages—from your homepage, from a sitemap page—for a great kind of web effect, interlinking all your content together.

Now, once you’ve got all your on-page optimization on, you want to move onto your off-page. These days, again, Google, Yahoo and Bing are all going towards a more social style search algorithm, so you want to make sure you’ve got social media links coming to your site, social bookmarking, some Google+ plusses, some Facebook likes—you also want to kind of diversify yourself there, so take your keyword phrases, utilize them on articles that you might have off somewhere, maybe through guest

Copyright ©2012 Fast Track Sites

blogs or article directories. Make sure you’ve got a few good high-PR web directories pointing to you. The main thing is to make sure that you’re getting links from authoritative websites, sites that really deal with your keywords. While other links do help, these ones help a lot more.

Once you’ve got your plan in place, it’s time to actually implement that plan. If you just leave your plan sitting around, it’s not going to do any good. So actually follow through, start implementing your plan stage by stage and once you’re done there, you’re ready to move onto the next step.

The next step is assessing—you want to take a look and every time you’re changing, it’s possible your competition is also changing, so you don’t want to just get tunnel vision and focus on just our plans. Stay with it, all the way through. You want to implement it, then assess how it’s doing—so has our competition changed? Are our keywords still valid? Is our product that we’re trying to sell even being utilized anymore? Do people still actually want this product? And basically, all-in-all, we just want to make sure that our plan is actually working, it’s still valid.

Moving on to the next step, should we repeat that same plan, or should we start over with a new plan—now, keep on going through that entire cycle. As I said, it’s a very time-intensive process. You’ve got to actually go out there, find those proper high-PR page authority sites to actually get those links back to you. Sometimes creating a plan without knowing much about how to do it can be difficult, or you might waste your time by doing something that you’re not really sure about. So the best bet is to talk to an actual SEO professional—SEO is constantly changing, so it’s best to constantly work with someone who’s constantly also learning as SEO is changing.