The 10 Week SEO Plan for Your Blog/Website

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So you've noticed that other blogs in your niche have a higher PageRank in Google than your own blog, even though you are the premier expert in your chosen field and/or offer the best and most original content.

What are you going to do about it? You're going to take back control of the search results, that's what!

You don't need to be proficient at SEO or hire a professional Search Engine Optimizer to make a difference to your search engine rankings. There are several easy steps you can take that can and will make an immediate difference to your blog´s/site's visibility.

Here's an easy to follow 10 Week SEO Plan that will quickly put your site on the path to higher rankings:

Week 1 - Verify Your Site With the Big 3 Search Engines

If you want to understand how search engines interact with your site and find potential issues before they impact your traffic, you really need to verify your site and sitemaps with the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) and check your stats regularly.

Start by registering your site with Google Webmaster Tools. This is easy. Simply create an account and verify your site by uploading a small piece of code to your server for Google to find. Then create a XML sitemap of all your site pages and upload it via your Webmaster Tools account.

The amount of information this gives you about how search engines interact with your site is more than mind-blowing. Once you've gone through this process, you'll be able to check:

- how many pages Google has indexed and how often

- what errors Googlebot found while indexing

- what keywords your pages are being found for

- how many incoming links each page has from external sources

- how many internal links each page has from other pages on your site

- how well your site is optimized for target keywords

- how fast your site loads

- how many broken links are on your site, where they point to and on what pages, etc.

It's a similar registration / reveal process with Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Week 2 - Research Your Target Keywords

It's easy to assume that because you write about „blue magnolias“, your potential visitors type „blue mganolias“ into Google to find your blog/website, right? But the truth is, you don't actually know what your customers are searching for unless you do a little research. They might be typing in „purple whatsits“. One of the biggest mistakes bloggers and website owners make with SEO is targeting the wrong keywords.

Start by creating a seed list of keywords. Basically, this is a brain dump of all the keywords and phrases you think your potential visitors might type into a search engine to find information and services like those you provide. You need to get inside the heads of your potential visitors/customers. Put yourself in their shoes for a minute and think what would YOU type into a search engine if you wanted to find a site like yours? Then pass that list around the workplace/school, to family, friends and acquaintances and get them to add the keywords *they* would use to find those same articles/services/products. Keep going until you've got at least 50 keywords/phrases. That's your search term seed list.

Now, take that list and enter it into an online keyword research tool such as Keyword Discovery, WordTracker or even the Google Keyword Tool. These tools show you how many searches each keyword/phrase attracts each day. Use this information to narrow down your choices. Don't bother with keywords that generate less than 20 searches per day. Look at the most popular keywords in your list and choose the ones that relate specifically to your site content. Revise, streamline, and revise some more to come up with your final list of target search terms.

Week 3 - Integrate Your Keywords Into Your Pages

Contrary to popular belief, sticking your keywords into your meta tags is NOT sufficient for Google to find your site a relevant match for related search queries. For a search engine to find a site relevant, it MUST find the keyword within the visible text on your pages and in link text pointing to your site.

Take your final streamlined keyword list and allocate your chosen keywords to the various pages of your site/posts of your blog. This is a pretty straightforward exercise. Usually the content of each page will tell you what keywords will be the easiest and most logical to integrate into the body text and other content.

Now, rewrite your content to incorporate your keywords naturally into your pages. Try not to repeat a keyword phrase more than 3 or 4 times in a single page. Re-write your page titles and META tags, alt tags and headings to include your new keywords. When you create new pages/posts, make sure you include logical keywords in your file names e.g. instead of www.mymagnoliasite.com/page42%$2.html try www.mymagnoliasite.com/white-magnolias.html.

Week 4 - Create Tailored Title and Meta Tags

How many sites have you been to where every page/post has the same META tags? That's a lost search opportuníty. Every page/post on your site should have a different Title and META Description tag, tailored to the content of each page/post. Take your new keywords and create optimized titles and tags for each page/post you want the search engines to index. This indicates to search engines AND visitors what each specific page/post is about.

Week 5 - Install and Utilize Google Analytics

Have you installed Google Analytics on your blog/site? If not, then do ít yesterday. Google Analytics is a free site statistics package that provides insights into your blog/website traffic and/or marketing effectiveness. You may already have access to a site metrics package courtesy of your hosting company or web designer, but I guarantee you that it won't be as powerful or easy to use as Google Analytics. The program lets you see and analyze your traffic data in new ways and you can learn how your visitors interact with your web site over a specified time period.

With benchmarking tools, you can find out whether your blog/site metrics under-perform or outperform those of your competitors and more accurately measure your blog´s/website's Return on Investment (ROI). Google Analytics synchronizes directly with Google AdWords and other PPC services too, so you can set conversion goals and track visitor pathways from the entry page right through to the exit/purchase receipt. Google Analytics features a wide range of graphical report options, enabling you to prepare web site performance reports for stakeholders right across your organization.

Week 6 - Add Fresh Content

What keeps a search engine coming back to your site? Fresh content. By adding new pages and information to your website on a regular basis, you're sending a signal to both search engines and visitors that you have lots to provide and they should come back regularly. The more content you have, the more entry points you are providing to visitors as a way of finding you in the search engines. Think of your blog/site as a reverse pyramid, where your additional content pages are providing more and more doorways to your site at the top level.

Week 7 - Revisit Your Internal Link Structure

A lot of webmasters spend too much time looking at external links pointing to their sites and forget about their internal link structure. The way you link between your own blog posts/site pages can have a huge impact on the search rank of those pages. This is because Google and other search engines are influenced by the keywords that are used in the links themselves. This *anchor text* tells search engines what the post/page is about.

Week 8 – Get Social

Use social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to publicize your site content. If you haven’t already established accounts for your Blog/website/business on these social networks, do so quickly. Then, every time you add a new blog post, make a product announcement, or publish a newsletter make sure you cross-post the content on these social sites. This will encourage more people to share your content and engage with your site, resulting in more traffic and more incoming links.

Week 9 – Build Incoming Links to Your Blog/Site

Speaking of incoming links (backlinks), these are crucial to your site’s ultimate performance in search engines. The number of external links pointing to a page is a major component of the ranking algorithm Google and other engines use to determine a page’s relevance against a search query.

If Page A has 5 links pointing to it using *beautiful white magnolias* as the anchor text in the links, while Page B has 50 similar links, it makes sense that Google will find Page B a more relevant match and rank it higher in the search results. Make sure your site is full of Page B’s. There is an exception to this though – the sites linking to yours need to be trusted by Google.

You need to ensure the links you obtain are from high quality sites and not spammy free-for-all link farms or else the links might do you more harm than good.

Publish a link policy and encourage external sites to link to you using anchor text of your choosing. Seek out high quality directories and submit your blog/site to suitable categories for your niche.

Week 10 – Monitor, Tweak, Test, Tweak

Nobody gets anywhere by standing still. It’s the same with your blog/website. You need to constantly monitor how it’s performing and how people are interacting with it before you can improve it. For this purpose, Google Analytics is your best friend. Set aside time in your weekly schedule to review your analytics and make note of how your SEO work is progressing. Make a note of any issues that need addressing. Plan changes to the site based on visitor activity and keyword search trends. Log into your Webmaster Tools accounts for the big 3 engines regularly to check for indexing issues and monitor how many pages from your sitemap each has indexed.

Follow these steps and I promise you’ll see results in just 10 weeks.

Good luck!