5 Steps to a Killer SEO Strategy

A killer SEO (search engine optimization) strategy does not happen after you build your website... it begins before you build your site.

Here are 5 crucial steps to a killer SEO play

1. Analyze the Market for Opportunities
You should not even build your website until you do a proper analysis of the market you're interested in breaking into. Some markets are easy to dominate and some markets are too hard to dominate without a huge budget, so be sure to analyze the market to find the keywords and key phrases you know you can generate rank for. Many website owners don't think of their SEO strategy until after they built their site and realize they're not attracting visitors. Save yourself some money and do it right from the beginning.

2. Design your SEO Strategy around the opportunities you've researched.
Once you understand the keywords and key phrases you've targeted as being vulnerable, design your SEO strategy to generate traffic for those phrases. Depending on the phrases, you must design landing pages specifically optimized for those phrases. Design your visible content and invisible content (take it easy- we're talking meta data here, not black hat SEO)to accumulate rank. This will obviously involve your main website, but and also may involve a series of other web 2.0 properties that will rank for the key phrases you've targeted.

3. Design a content acquisition strategy.
Your content acquisition must provide fresh, optimized content around the opportunities you've targeted. Content must be original, link-worthy and first class if you expect to attract visitors. If you don't have fresh content, your website may as well be a business card; it may be nice to look at, but no one will find it unless they're searching for your name, or they know the exact URL they're looking for.

4. Execute a link acquisition campaign.
Once you have great content, you need to develop links from other places on the web which point to your site. A combination of one-way and reciprocal links is important, but it is also important to have links from high quality sites which are relevant to your site and industry. (We're assuming you already have a solid internal linking strategy before you go out and develop back links).

5. Monitor your progress.
It's critical that you monitor your progress as your campaign unfolds. It's amazing to me that most SEO experts don't even know what page each key phrase is on as they expend their effots (and your money) on organic search engine optimization.

For more information on SEO and search engine marketing, you can go to Andrew Orlander and Rankdog.com.