“Where and how do I start my SEO Campaign from?”

We thought it would be a very good topic for our blog post & should help all our readers.

A couple of points to note before we start -

• We are assuming that you already have the domain name because finding a good domain name would be a separate topic of blog.
• This list is far from complete because there are still several other factors that affect your website position.

So, here are some of the most important steps that you can yourself take care of before going to any SEO company to manage your search engine marketing campaign.

1. Find your targeted keyword

The first and most important step is to determine what are the most important keywords for which you want your website to appear on search engines? You know your business more than anyone else. You know your target audience. So find out 10 phrases which you think that your prospective customers will search for.

It is much more complicated than it sounds. We just wrote about a simple tip on keyword research that a beginner should always do.

2. Set the title of your website pages right

After you have decided on your keywords, the next step is to set them up properly. The title of your web page is the very first thing that any search engine crawler will read and take as a factor to rank your website. Your homepage’s title should contain your targeted keyword. All the other pages of your website should have title related to the content of that respective page. For e.g., the title of the registration page should be “Registration”. Keep in mind that you are not promoting your “registration” page. The idea is to “set things right”.

3. Set up meta keywords and description

Though Google has said they do not read meta tags content but we still advise to put your targeted keywords in <meta name=”keywords”/> field and one line description of your website in <meta name=”description”/> field in your header tags. Many other search engines will still read them and Google won’t give you negative marks for that.

4. Unique content for the home page

Your website’s homepage should have a unique content describing your business. This introductory text should have the phrases that are in the title of the page. Experts say that you should use your targeted keyword 2-3 times in every 200 words so as to not get caught up for keyword stuffing. If possible, put your local business address and phone number on home page & contact us page to get noticed on “local business results” on Google.

5. Business Blog

Google loves to blog and so does the other search engines around. Having a business blog pays – and this is something you should always remember. Whatever business you have, you must write 1-2 blogs every week about your business. The articles can be about an industry news, a website update, a new recruit in your company – anything that relates in some way or the other to your business. It would be an icing on the cake, if you put these blogs on the homepage, just like what we have on KPMRS.

We recommend using wordpress because they are easy to set up and the come up with various SEO Plugins that help in optimizing your blog for search engine rankings.

6. Install traffic analyzer

Once your website is up, you would definitely want to monitor your traffic. Any analytics software will show you how many visitors come to your website daily, where are they coming from and which keywords do they use on search engines to get on to your website. These are the most important metrics.

We suggest using Google Analytics for 2 reasons -

1. It is free & provides everything you would want.
2. Our website discovery tool works very well with Google analytics to help you find the new keywords that bring you traffic. Read more about it on our previous blog post here.

7. Monitor your website rankings

• Of course you are just starting your campaign. You might not be in top 100 on Google but sooner or later if you do the right things at the right time, you will find yourself in top 10 for that elite group of your targeted keywords. We, at KPMRS, offer this service for free. You can register your website with your targeted keywords and we will monitor your rankings on daily basis. You can be rest assure to get notified by email as soon as your rank has changed for Google, Yahoo or Bing. This will even help you track the work done by whichever SEO company you have chosen for your campaign.

8. Setup business profiles on social media websites

Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious are some of the buzz words today in social media industry. Setting up your business profile on these & similar websites are must for a starter. Maintaining & optimizing them is again a different topic of discussion about which we will soon post here.

We hope that you found this list as a good starting point to help you in setting up your SEO Campaign. We also advise our clients to educate themselves by spending 30 minutes daily in reading latest news in the SEO world. You may not be professionals but you sure don’t want to appear dumb when you talk to a SEO Company. Official blogs of Google, Bing, & Yahoo are good starting point but there are hundreds of freelance bloggers that can provide really valuable information as well. A few ones that we love

• http://www.dailyseoblog.com
• http://www.seo-theory.com
• http://www.seomoz.org
• http://www.webmasterworld.com (Highly Recommended)

Well, we have finished our part. Time for you now to add more points which you think would be useful for a beginner in the SEO world. If you like reading this post on the KPMRS Blog, do subscribe to our feed!

Google says that it disregards the meta keyword tags in SE Rankings. Image Courtesy: wipeout44.com

So, is there a need to keep the “meta keywords” tag or should we start removing them? Einstein had famously said “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot!”

Lets see what bing has to say about “meta” tag on their webmaster blog? Rick DeJarnette from the Bing Webmaster Center Team writes

The <meta> tag’s keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low. Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content.

When creating keyword text, remember the following:

• Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the <title> and <meta> description tags), and even include a few, commonly seen typographical errors of primary keywords, just for good measure.
• Limit your keyword and key phrase text, separated by commas, to no more than 874 characters.
• Don’t repeat a keyword more than 4 times among the keywords and phrases in the listl

That leaves us in a fix. Google Vs Bing. Who should we go with?

Google, which has more than 65% of market share in the search industry.

OR

Bing, which was  recently reported as fastest growing search engine.

My personal opinion would be that you should keep meta keywords tag and populate a couple of your most targeted keywords while making sure that you DO NOT overstuff it. This means you are adding not more than 100 bytes of data in your web page which  will take less than few milliseconds to load. Plus Google never said that this will have negative impact so there is no harm. And since they left it open that their policies may change in future which means, if they do, you do not have to start filling in again. You will be already prepared. And at the same time, you are following the guidelines by Bing and making sure that your web page is optimized for that as well.

What do you think about this particular paradox? Share your thoughts with us. If you liked reading this post, do bookmark us and subscribe to our feed!