There are two main goals for any Search Engine Optimization campaign. The first is Traffic; new traffic, returning traffic, and referral traffic. The other is Retention i.e. attracting the people who you are after, and holding their interest either for the Sale, or the Page Views. For each of these, we look to place ourselves in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) so that we will be noticed by the people we are looking for.

There is a very old marketing idea that suggests "the viewer doesn't matter, get your name out there as often as you can." This idea has some merit to it, but it doesn't do very well on the Internet, and certainly not a cost effective expenditure of our resources in the Search Engine Arena.

Both of our goals, thankfully, are achieved by the same efforts. These efforts are to create and maintain a web site which is honed to list in the SERPS to the searches which are most likely requested by "customers".

In these articles "Freelance SEO Writer", I'm going to approach the topic from the stand point of coming into a currently active, working web site, and improving Internet Presence and Sales.

As an SEO writer we need a few things:

• Current Key-word usage of the site
• Current Effectiveness of these Key-words
• Current Traffic reports
• Current Sources of Traffic
• Number of outside links into the site
• Words used in those links from the outside
• Cross-linking inside the web site
• Current Page Rank

Once we have this information, we can begin our work. There is no sense at all in starting to change anything on a web site until we have the answers to these questions.

It may be a bit difficult to get some of these answers. Such as the Current Sources of Traffic. The web site will need to be hooked up to some sort of Analytics program. If the web site is not currently collecting this information, it is relatively simple to set up (and free in most cases). We need to set up and collect the information for at least two weeks before we can seriously consider what should be changed and how.

Of course that doesn't mean that we are going to be sitting around on our duff waiting for a Hit Count to come in, we have plenty of things we need to consider, and several check lists to go through. Don't worry, we won't be bored.

Posted by Glenn Hefley in Freelance SEO Writer, Glenn's Desk