SEO Basics - Clearing the View

In order to succeed in any online business you need to form a clear picture of what is your business goals and website purpose – what does your website offer? What is your target audience? What do you want them to do when they arrive at your site? And the last, but not the least - your ultimate success objectives.

When you answer those questions, you will also need to conduct keyword research to find out keywords your website audience is most likely to look for on your site and also perform the competitive analysis to estimate how much time it may take you to start dominate your niche and rip off the benefits of free organic traffic. But more on that in further articles.

Decide on Your Website’s Purpose

For many people websites is an extension of their offline activities whether these are pure hobbies or businesses. No matter what yours, you need to clearly define your website purpose – does it sell some products or services? Do you want to drive leads to your offline business? Or do you just want to share information and passion for a subject with your visitors? Or maybe you are looking for branding or building a community around your products and/or services?
 
Eventually it’s your business goals that determine your website purpose and how you setup your site. Here it’s vital to set a primary goal and maybe a few secondary goals (the fewer, the better) to incorporate your main business ambitions. Having a singular primary goal will help you stay focused on SEO campaign and avoid getting off track with having too many goals.

Define Your Target Audience

 Always start with narrow niches, build up a highly specific audience and work hard to serve this audience to the best of your ability. Once you reach success in that niche – you may go broader expanding the scope and embracing new directions.
 
The way to pinpoint your target audience is to relate them to your website goals. Narrow down the scope of your website to find specific things of interest on which you can compete – perhaps by choosing a specific area of a bigger niche and/or targeting local audience only – and endeavor to dominate it within originally planned time frame and budget.

What Does Your Site Offer?

 There are 3 important things to consider when setting up your site:
  • What information will it provide to your visitors?
  • How will it solve their problems?
  • What actions do you want your audience to take on each page?
 And most importantly – all these should tie-in nicely with your primary website goal. And although, strictly speaking, this is not a conventional SEO, you have to take these steps to ensure you website brings your profits.

Success Objectives

Success objectives can be different depending on your ambitions, finance and abilities. For example, in a year time you may wish to:
  • Achieve a certain number of hits on your website per day;
  • Get you site generate you a specific monthly income;
  • Reach page 1 ranking for so many of your primary and secondary keywords;
  • Create a community of a few hundred followers etc.
There can be other objectives as well and ideally you would need to perform keyword research and competition analysis to decide on exact list of your success objectives. However, a good starting point is just to concentrate on what achieving your primary goal would mean to you.

Tracking Results

The last, but not the least, procedure which should be in your arsenal of SEO weapons is tracking results – tracking your website traffic and search engine rankings at least on a monthly basis. If you are doing most of the things right – your traffic should grow and rankings steadily improve until they are high and stable. If that’s not happening after a few months – it’s a sign that you need to review your SEO strategies and/or your website goals.

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