Evidently there has been many changes and evolvements over the past 3 months to indicate that things are really happening at Google HQ. Our good friends MarketingSherpa, an SEO research firm, have produced their benchmarking report as to the different SEO factors, how difficult they are to implement, how long is spent on each element currently and what the overall impact is of each factor on the major search engines.

The findings are as follows:

The results are pretty clear, although content development is the most powerful factor when it comes to deciphering search engine rankings, it is also the element that requires the most work. A lot of these different factors are linked though, for example, internal linking structure ties in nicely with content development, content development ties in nicely with external link development and so on and so forth. What we need to really take away from this particular article though, is how we plan a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy properly.

Businesses can spend hours and hours of formulating a search marketing strategy and it could all be in vein. We have seen recently the emergence of businesses hooked on analytics, measuring and monitoring to better understand their markets and whilst we solely agree that this is important, we can only assume that too much time is being spent in the wrong areas.

Here's a simple guide to planning an effective SEO strategy:

1) Understand your market/demographic and understand how your customers will find you. Look at keywords and their search trending, look at competitors, gather analytical data, it is paramount that you plan this stage.

2) Onsite optimisation in line with your target key terms - look at site structure, landing pages for specific key terms, quality of landing pages, calls-to-action, meta tagging, alt tagging, internal linking structure and plan how you are going to continually develop and grow content (i.e blog, news, social media etc)

3) Get your creative hat on - get writing content that people are looking for, whether it's industry relevant news, how to lists and guides or 101 ways to... - whatever it may be, ensure you have a content development strategy with longevity and sustainability in mind, content will need be generated as frequently as possible with a solid internal linking infrastructure.

4) Get your links on - use your creative content to attract links. Once you have posted up some good, solid creative, put it on social networks, news sites, media sites, industry relevant forums or anywhere you believe you can reach your target demographic with your cherished content. This is absolutely essential in order to attract external links. Also look at other ways you can develop links, a really good list is here

Posted: 15/08/11 15:22