Analyze your current state

Before you start your SEO implementation, it is a good practice to analyze current state of your site content. Evaluate your goals and priorities. Determine your plan of attack. After you implement a solution do not expect immediate results. Don't be tempted to go straight for a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign such as Google AdWords to promote your site. As I pointed in the Introduction section, what determines your site's placement involves more than one factor.

"SEO Implementation Lifecycle"

Why links matter

PageRank is a value that Google gives to a page based on the number of links pointing to your site. So how do you get other sites to link (or backlink) to your site? You can try the following methods:

• Register with major search engines (Yahoo, OpenDirectory, MSN).
  
• Send press releases about your product or idea that generates free links.
  
• Hire an expert to write something positive about your product and publish in an industry newsletter, magazine or a local newspaper.
  
• Ask to be a featured or sponsored client in a major portal site.
• Ask employees to mention you and your products
• Make reciprocal link requests
• Mention your site in major Blogging sites, Yahoo Answers and Google Groups
• Respond to blogs or queries in Yahoo Answers (just don't over-do it)
• Syndicate your content through external RSS feeds to different sites
• Consider ad campaigns through Google AdWords

Re-engineer your site content

Here are a few basic things you can do to clean up your site and make it Search Engine friendly.

1. Site Hierarchy and text links

Most sites employ DHTML, Flash, Frames and other fancy objects to enhance the end user's experience. While these objects are great to captivate the users attention, Google and other search engines can't understand them and will have trouble interpreting them while crawling your sites. Google introduced the concept of Sitemap that enables Google to discover your site, structure and diagnose any potential problems. Sitemap is especially important if your site has a lot of dynamic content, is brand new, has a lot of archived pages that are not linked well.

Once you created your sitemap, you upload it to your web server's root directory. Use Google's WebMaster tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/) to add your new sitemap. Next time when Google spiders your site, it will index all the URL's it finds in the Sitemap.

To see the specific URLs included in the Google index, do a Google search for site:[yourdomain.com]


2. Use Targeted Keywords

Create a narrow targeted keywords list that you think identifies your site properly.
For example, one would taget new cars in india for a cars website, and tata nano price for a Tata Nano page on the website.
Now Once you identify the keywords, what do you do with them? One obvious thing to do is to add them inside the Meta Keywords tag. In addition, use the keywords generously throughout your page content. Search Engines love a site with fresh descriptive content filled with keywords. This means constantly updating your site with new, fresh content is vital to your overall SEO strategy.


How do you measure SEO?

Measuring your returns on SEO investments is crucial. But once you made the enhancements to your site, do not expect to see immediate results. It could take anywhere from a month to 3 months to see any significant impact on your traffic numbers (assuming you implemented the right SEO steps).

Use a Business Optimization tool like Google Analytics or Omniture to analyze visitors and traffic source data. On Google Analytics, you find a section on Traffic Sources. It provides insight into how visitors find your site, whether through
a) keyword search,
b) or backlinks or
c) people directly typing the site url.


Google Analytics also allows you to see other traffic variables such as
a) Absolute Unique Visitors
b) Page Views
c) Bounce Rates
d) Average Time Spent
In addition you can also set conversion goals to determine how many of those leads converted to an effective sale, which is a key way to measure ROI.Tracking in helps you evaluate the efforts of your marketing strategy whether it is a PPC campaign, banner ads or natural SEO. Tracking also allows you to gain visibility into your end user's behavior and time spent on each page, which allows you to make a decision on where to place ads.


Where to go from here?

After you implement the SEO techniques and realized the improvement in your site ranking, you can't expect to sit back and relax. You need to constantly monitor your ranking and your competitor's ranking and take appropriate steps to stay on top of the list. A continuous enhancement to optimization techniques, keywords tuning, site content, blog entries is necessary to keep your site rank higher in the search results. To outdo your competition, you have to keep your content fresh. This will not only bring new visitors to your site, but also keep the visitors returning to your site.

Some Useful links

Google WebMaster Tools - http://www.google.com/webmasters
Google Analytics               - http://www.google.com/analytics
Google AdWords               - http://adwords.google.com
Yahoo Answers                 - http://answers.yahoo.com