With the sudden spurt in the number of SEO companies, there is a huge risk that there could be a dilution of how SEO should be and ought to be done. SEO can be done in a variety of methods, each with different results and so it is important that the right SEO strategy is developed in discussion with the business owner so that you understand what he needs and can plan a strategy around this requirement.
The first step in doing SEO for any website is to understand the keywords for the business behind the website. The entire SEO strategy will be based on this and the long term results for the website hinges a great deal on these keywords and hence the importance of this step cannot be overemphasized. Once the keywords have been arrived at, then the budget needs to be decided. The SEO strategy will be based on the budget that the business can afford. A large budget would mean that several paid strategies, like click ads, paid listings etc. can be adopted but if the budget is low, then the strategy should revolve around building the traffic organically. An endless budget is not possible as the SEO should, over time, show an increase in traffic and revenue as well so that the bottom line shows the utility of the SEO.
As pointed earlier, if the budget is high, then paid listings and ads can be posted on search engines and websites so that the site is promoted and these listings and ads need to be based on the keywords derived from step 1. Along with this, the site needs t o be promoted organically as well. This involves building the content of the site, all of which revolves around the keywords of the business. Search engines cannot read much of flash sites and the spiders can read only text. So, the text in the site, the alt text of images etc. should be optimized in such a manner that they are all stress the importance of the keywords of the site so that the spiders clearly identify and understand the keywords of the site. The site can also have blogs and articles, in other words, it needs to have as much text as possible, all tuned towards the keywords. This is one part of the job.
The next part is what is called link building or optimization. This is basically cross linking your site with other related sites or to sites that have high traffic or blogs/forums etc. so that the density and the importance of the links would force the search engine spiders to give higher weightage to your website than the other ones in your niche.
All the above steps will help to slowly improve the rankings of the website in the search listings. It has to be clearly understood that SEO is a long term process which takes a long time to implement and the results of SEO will also stick with the website for many years in the future.
