Before you do anything you need a plan!

At Praeparo we believe the effort put into planning an SEO or Internet Marketing strategy should be proportional to the size of your business.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about optimising a website to meet your businesses objectives. The planning stage consists of a number of steps:

1. Agree a set of objectives. For example a typical self catering cottage has no problem renting out for the main summer weeks but an objective could be to bring in 50% more out of season bookings. Note this objective must be measurable so that progress can be tracked.
2. Competitor research. Get a list of competitors that need to be tracked. It can be guaranteed that as soon as you start to do better your competitors will be looking to see how they can beat you. You can’t afford to sit back but must constantly be reviewing what you are doing.
3. Keyword research. Once you have an objective and an idea on the competition you must get a list of keywords to target. Keywords are the 2-3 word phrases people type into the search engines to bring back a set of results. The aim for each keyword is to be at the top or as near to the top as possible as the higher you are the more visitors you will get to your website. The art to keyword research is to get phrases that are achievable and will deliver on the objectives.
4. On-site optimisation. The website needs to be modified to match the objectives and keyword phrases selected. For a lot of keywords with low competition this may well be all you need to do.
5. Off-site optimisation. The more competitive a keyword phrase is, i.e. the more people trying to get to the top of search engine results, the more work you need to put in. Off-site optimisation is all about performing tasks away from your website that will help make your website look better to the search engines.
6. Review and Plan. Remember that the internet and your competitors are constantly changing so the strategy and plan need to be constantly reviewed and adapted to the ever changing environment.