An SEO plan (also known as search engine optimization plan or search engine optimisation technique) is the procedure of strategising, setting up and subsequently implementing steps developed to boost search engine rankings on the World Wide Web. Simply put: a SEO plan is the method you follow when wishing to obtain more organic traffic to your website. Organic traffic is traffic that comes to a website without being paid for it – i.e. through a link on another website, search engine submission or free advertising. Pay-per-click advertising, search engine submission and article marketing are all forms of organic traffic – although not every form of organic traffic is necessarily ‘pay-per-click’ advertising, search engine submission and article marketing is usually a part of a wider SEO strategy.
Before executing a SEO plan a number of things should be determined. The aim of the plan is to produce quality results by ranking well for your target keyword or phrase. This is known as a SERP (search engine result page) and can be achieved in a variety of ways. One such way is to use popular keywords in your target language on the search engine results page. Another way is to rank well for long tail keyword phrases (i.e. words with fewer than three words).
It is also important to realise that search engine optimization does not stop at ranking well for keywords. To achieve organic traffic that is not paying, it is important to carefully craft your website so that people looking for information can find it. For example, many businesses create a wealth of information about their company but do not make clear and easy to understand pages about what they do. If a potential customer is looking for a blog, then the homepage needs to include information about what the business does, who they are and where they are located. If the potential customer is on the hunt for a contact form, then the web page that features the contact form needs to clearly state where that location is. Many businesses lose potential customers simply because they fail to address these basic needs.
If you really want to see your website rise to the top of the search engine results page, then one more advanced tactic for search engine optimization is to add a ‘spider’ to the site. A spider is a software program that inserts itself into the page and then monitors the code. It can identify problematic syntax and can remove these problems from your site. A Google search console is great for monitoring your progress in this respect.
One last advanced tactic for search engine optimization is to build lots of backlinks. The more links you have pointing at your website, the higher your search engine rankings will be. Of course, this comes at a cost; having lots of back links leading to your site is almost always a good thing, but too many links is not always a good thing. Backlinks from high PageRank sites tend to be much higher quality than links from low PageRank sites.
A final quick trick that should be considered in optimizing your website is to make sure that your target keyword appears as many times as possible in the text on your home page. Search engines, especially those like Google that base their search results exclusively on search intent, pay close attention to this number. That means if your target keyword appears 20 times in the heading and text on your home page, then you should aim to have that amount appear as often as possible throughout your content. This is a general rule that does not always hold true; if a particular search engine optimization technique is working for you, then it might not necessarily apply to your target keyword or to your website.