There are three main elements to a search engine optimization campaign. The research and planning, the on site optimization, and the off site promotion. I’m going to attempt to give a brief overview of each to explain what they are for. Please feel free to post questions or comments below.

Research and Planning

Many SEO campaigns have failed before even beginning because of insufficient research and planning. A good SEO campaign will begin research well before the first change is made to the website or the first link acquired. A great SEO campaign will continue research on a regular basis to keep up with changes in the industry and competition.

When doing research there are three main areas that we focus our attention on. Traffic stats and analytics for the existing website (if any), industry trends and best practices, and the top competitors for our targeted search spaces. We want to have a solid understanding of what is working, what needs improvement, and what works for our competitors as early in the process as possible.

On Site SEO

Search engines determine how to rank your website largely by reading the code on the page and following links. Ensuring that search engines can find your content and that the page loads correctly and quickly can greatly improve your rankings. More importantly it will improve your customers experience and result in better conversion rates and customer loyalty.

For this reason one of the main focuses of an SEO campaign is to optimize the website itself. This is done mostly by cleaning up the code, organizing the navigation and content structure, and writing original title and descriptions for each page. On site SEO also includes the creation or editing of original, high quality content. A website without original content that has been optimized first for your customers, and secondly for the search engines will have a hard time ranking.

Off Site SEO

Search engines use a lot of off site factors as indicators of trust and quality. In essence they view links from outside sources as “votes”. A large part of the SEO campaign will be spent trying to gather as many of these votes as possible. There are many different methods used to gather links but the most common include social media, article directories, gaining inclusion into high quality relevant directories, and press releases.

Even though there are many different options to explore not all of them are available or effective in all cases. That’s why it is so important to have already completed the initial research before beginning off site SEO. It is actually possible to accidentally incur penalties in the search engines by making mistakes or being overly aggressive at off site SEO.  Remember that slow and steady wins the race.

How They Work Together

Research, on site, and off site SEO are all required elements and all work together in a good SEO campaign. Through research competitive search keywords are discovered. The on site SEO then optimizes existing content, or creates new content targeting those keywords. Finally social media and link building from off site SEO are used to promote that content. Rinse and repeat, building up the rankings of the website over time and across multiple keywords.

I hope this has given you some basic information on the three different elements of a search engine optimization campaign. I know it was a pretty general overview but I plan to publish more in depth articles in the near future. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below and I’ll be sure to answer them. Thanks for reading.