If your looking to get started with SEO but don’t know where to start, here’s a road map I’ve found works well for local businesses. The nice thing about this road map is that it starts simple and as you progress in your SEO efforts it expands to more complicated projects.In reality this SEO road map also veers into social media marketing as you’ll see.

The Simple SEO Road Map

1. Always start with keyword phrase research and on-page optimization of your home page. What this means is find the one to 3 keyword phrases which are most searched for in your niche and that incorporate the name of the nearest largest city or metro area. Then optimize your site with this keyword putting special emphasis on your homepage.
    
2. Next carry out a thorough link building campaign generating links to your site from blogs, articles, online social bookmarking sites, website directories, and even other local business websites. This will generate hundreds and sometimes thousands of links into your site. Make sure the links to your site contain your target keyword phrase. Remember, every link to your home page  is considered by search engines a vote for your site.
    
3. Get your site listed in the major online local directories, and yellow pages, such as Google Local, and Yelp.com. This will help your site appear in geographical search results, generate quality links to your site, and traffic.
    
4. If your product or service has a medium to large profit margin or a long and profitable lifetime value then consider pay-per-click advertising, particularly Google Adwords. You’ll want to setup a campaign and have a minimum budget of $1000 a month. The goal with PPC should be to spend some and make much more. If you’re spending and not recouping the costs then your PPC campaign needs optimization, your profit margins are too small, or it may simply be that PPC isn’t right for you. When it works however, boy does it work well!
    
5. After PPC consider a professional social media marketing campaign. This can be as simple as blogging and social bookmarking, to community building and viral video product. Some of this you can do yourself, but if you want a full blown campaign be ready to get some help. You can easily spend 10 hours a week just working your social media campaign. Once it’s rolling though it can bring new and residual business for years to come.
    
6. Eh? Let me know below if you have an idea of where you’d take it from here, or if you feel there’s a strategy that fits into this list that has worked great for your business.

It’s important to note that throughout all these campaigns you should be measuring and monitoring your results. Be sure to track your search engine optimization effort by reviewing your target keyword rankings monthly, and reviewing the amount and source of incoming traffic to your site from search engines and social media outlets, this will tell you how well your efforts are working and what if any adjustments may need to be made. 

SEO isn’t a one shot deal, and there are many different approaches, though good solid rankings can last a long time. Ongoing maintenance and strategy is strongly recommended so that you preserve the rankings you earn and strengthen them over time.

Tags: branding online, Online Marketing, seo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 12:52 am and is filed under SEO Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.