SEO Advanced Strategy
What an SEO strategy is NOT:>Not a tactical plan>Not a project plan>Not an activity log
To begin with your SEO strategy should include a Best Practice implementation. This will start by looking over the entire site’s health.
Once you review completely you can access what gaps should be filled, what major elements of your site you may find lacking from SEO attention.
As I write this I am actually writing up my 2009 SEO/SEM strategy. I will share some of my thought process and dialogue what should or should not be included in a company wide strategy. This strategy will be delivered to various members of a department, most or all are not familiar with SEO/SEM at a very sophisticated level so steps must be taken to carefully outline what is and what is not important to focus on throughout the year.
Define what success means to the team, what are their expectations, generally speaking they are really very low, so as an only SEO, this is the part that makes our lives easiest. How do you work with your internal technical team? Do they understand what your SEO goals are, do they really care whether this strategy fits in with their own timetable for what they must accomplish throughout the year, this is the part that is a little more difficult to process for both the single SEO and the team.
Get beyond the Best Practices and move into the long term strategy. During your first year, providing your an in-house SEO, you have already delivered several Best Practice guides to many teams, marketing and technical, now your tasked with what happens next and ensure that everyone doesn’t forget the Best Practices of last year.
Once I have completed my strategy, I will share some of those important points that shouldn’t be overlooked in an annual strategy.
UPDATE: Sept 2009 – Your strategy is only as good as it’s implementation. I will re-define my idea of a strategy in a later post, this will include how to get development buy in and more thoughts from the in-house SEO.