SEO Preliminary Preparation_SEO Notes 2

I. Technology Selection

SEO affects technology selection, for example, CMS may promote or hinder SEO strategies. Some platforms don't even allow setting different titles and description tags for different pages, some may generate thousands of duplicate content pages, for example, the same article can be accessed by date, by category, by author, etc. Some CMS let these different links point to the same article page, what search engines see is a large amount of duplicate content (different URLs, but same content), or some systems default to 302 (temporary) redirect. These could be catastrophic for website SEO.

In addition, website servers may also have similar problems, for example, IIS default redirect is 302, although 301 redirect can be set in IIS, but you must know this first and prepare in advance.

II. Market Segmentation

Another important factor is the attributes of the market we compete in, it can tell us how the overall competitive environment is, after doing some additional research, we can preliminarily understand how much competition there is in the SEO environment.

In some markets, organic search competition is very fierce, many well-known brands cannot rank at the top, but this doesn't mean giving up this market, instead we should choose keywords with lower competition that can bring high-quality visits for SEO.

III. How to Find High-Quality Links

Getting links from third-party websites is the most important part of SEO, because search engine ranking algorithms highly depend on link weight calculation.

One of the preliminary tasks of SEO brainstorming is to list as many places as possible where high-quality links can be obtained, and clarify what content to develop to encourage other high-quality websites to link over, pursuing a small number of relevant, high-quality links, rather than n low-quality links. Understanding this point can better build the overall content plan.

IV. Content Resources

The driving force of any large-scale link activity comes from the quality and quantity of content. If website content quality is average, and many other websites have similar information, it won't attract many links. However, if high-quality content can be provided, or there's a novel tool that everyone wants to use, it's more likely to get external links.

Before all SEO activities begin, we should review the current website content, and resources that can be used to create new content, then our target keywords and link building plan match to get the best results.

V. Consider Brand

In most cases, brand needs to be considered, there will be some restrictions, for example, publishing and promoting related articles on portal websites can bring considerable revenue, but the audience of these websites may not be suitable for certain brands, so we can't only consider the SEO effect of the solution, but also consider these limiting factors. Conversely, brand effect may also enhance the effect of some SEO strategies.

VI. Competition

SEO strategy may also be affected by competitor strategies, understanding what they're doing is also an important part of formulating SEO solutions and collecting business intelligence, you may encounter these situations:

• Competitors have discovered a series of unique, high-conversion-rate keywords

• Competitors have discovered a targeted, high-value link

• Competitors have already saturated a market segment, we should focus on other places

• Competitor strategies show weaknesses, providing us with opportunities to exploit

Understanding competitor strengths and weaknesses from an SEO perspective is also an important part of our SEO strategy design

VII. Confirm Website Development Process and Participants

Before any SEO activity begins, we need to be clear about 3 things:

• Who is the target audience?

• What message to convey?

• How is the message relevant?

Website design tools and programming languages can't tell us these things, marketing, advertising and public relations departments must set goals, SEO activities can be completed smoothly, because successful SEO requires the effort of the entire team.

SEO team should be cross-departmental and multidisciplinary, including team manager, technical team, creative team, and key stakeholders from marketing, advertising and public relations departments.

• Team manager needs to know who the target audience is, what does the marketing department know about the audience? How to find them quickly? What metrics do we use to track them? These will all affect SEO activity implementation.

• Advertising department needs to repeatedly think about what message they really want to convey, advertising has multiple purposes, but the core purpose is to drive people to implement a clear behavior.

• Public relations department needs to tell our story to the media, induce them to write articles and comments, what message do they need to convey? This information needs to be reflected in the content.

• Technical and creative teams are responsible for completing the project, marketing, advertising and public relations departments assign tasks to them, then integrate together.

After the project is launched, marketing department needs to feedback whether the target audience has been reached, advertising department feedback whether the information is clear, public relations department feedback whether the media likes what they see. Continuous feedback is very important, because whether the project is successful completely depends on whether we have achieved goals at various stages, so building good communication among team members is also important.

References

• "The Art of SEO"