A lot of people like to dive into things without having a plan and strategy in place. SEO and Internet Marketing is no different. There are certain aspects of your web strategy that need to happen first before you can move forward with the other aspects. Depending on what it is, it can make or break your SEO and overall marketing efforts.
Start Spending Money/Resources on SEO Before Identifying Your Goals
Probably the most important and fundamental flaw you can have is to start optimizing your site without identifying your overall site/blog goals. You should be able to answer these questions before spending money and resources on your SEO strategy.
- Who are your primary readers/visitors?
- Where does your target audience live?
- What are your primary keywords?
- Who are the primary competitors?
- How will you delegate roles and responsibilities?
- How will you track your SEO efforts?
Focus on Content Creation Before Your Site is Indexable
Before you start spending lots of your time and resources creating awesome content, you need to make sure that content is properly getting indexed by the search engines. Regardless of how good your content is, if the search engines are not indexing it, you are significantly reducing the changes of your content being found.
- Use a search friendly navigation
- Inter-link your posts
- Submit a XML sitemap regularly
- Deep link your content
Building Links Before Creating Good Content
The foundation to building quality links is and always will be creating awesome content that people would want to link to. If you are trying to gain links to a site and the only thing people can find is “Buy Now”, why would someone link to you. Or if you are trying to build links by submitting to thousands of directories and dropping comments in forums, you are just build spammy and low-value links.
Advertisements Before Traffic
Without having traffic, there is no point in cluttering up your blog with lots of banners and advertisements that will just devalue your blog and its content. When your blog is first starting out, you should be focusing on doing everything you can to build credibility and authority. There is lots of debate about when is the appropriate time is to start adding advertisements to your site. Personally I think there will come a time during the life of your blog/site where people are reaching out to you for advice, asking about advertising opportunities, requesting that you guest blog on their site. Once those things start happening, you will have built the initial credibility with your audience and you can start bringing on advertisers.
Tell Success Stories Without Actually Doing Them First
Especially for SEO companies, if you are making up fake success stories and case studies to win business, your clients will quickly see the true colors of your company and fire you! If your product is suppose to fix a problem someone has, you will have nothing but a lot of angry people, if you don’t know for sure that it does what you say it does.
Newsletter Sign-Up Before Creating Free Content
Of course you can also add a newsletter sign-up to your site, however why should someone sign-up? If you create a free piece of content like a Whitepaper or downloadable Webinar that you can offer in exchange for a newsletter sign-up, you will be able to build a list much faster.
Quit Your Day Job Before Your Blog is Making Money
Before you quit your day job to pursue your true passions, make sure you are making a steady income. You should have established some steady income from multiple revenue streams. The reason why I say multiple revenue streams is because what if you are gaining all of your sales from one organic phrase in Google? Then Google decides to pull the rug out from under you and you are nowhere to be found. There goes your main source of income! If you have various ways of making money from your blog, you won’t have to depend on just one revenue stream.
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