If you’ve ever been handed a list of 100 keywords and been told, “I want these on Page 1,” you already know the importance of SEO strategy. How on earth are you going to do it? Aside from hiring an SEO company, you’re going to need an organized strategy — and lots of it.

1. Organize your keywords into themes: This is exactly what Google recommends with PPC campaigns, but the same principles of organization hold true. It’s much easier to handle three or four SEO campaigns versus 100 scattered keywords.

2. Sort by search volume: Let’s say you have four themes or campaigns, divided up neatly into 25 keywords each. Now you’ll want to sort them by search volume. From experience, it’s typically safe to assume that the higher the search volume, the more difficult a keyword is to get to Page 1.

3. Identify your core keywords: For each campaign, you’ll want to pick your core keywords. These are the big kahunas, the ones that will drive the most traffic to the site. We normally pick about two to three primary keywords to focus our efforts for content creation and linkbuilding. You want them to have enough search volume to warrant targeting them throughout the length of your campaign.

4. Identify your longtail keywords: You can do this by establishing a cutoff point for each campaign We typically use 1,000 searches per month and below as our criteria for longtail keywords, but this number will vary depending on your definitions and the search volume for your keywords.

5. Create content strategy: You’ll have to figure out how you’re going to target all four campaigns. Content is always a major player in this, but creating content targeting all these keywords will be tough. You’ll want to create an SEO editorial calendar and create categories that correspond to the four campaigns. For example, if your campaigns are targeting themes such as “birds,” “cats,” dogs,” and “horses,” you’ll want to create categories that match those. All the content that you create would fall in these categories and help target corresponding keywords.

6. Create linkbuilding strategy: Some linkbuilders are haphazard in pursuing links. It’s better to take a more organized approach in order to effectively handle potentially thousands of links for your site. You’ll want to take the industry research you’ve done, along with the keyword research, to figure out how to attack linkbuilding, whether it’s analyzing competitor links, conducting blogger outreach or submitting to directories. Read up on how to use editorial content as linkbait.

7. Monitor, monitor, monitor: This is probably one of the hardest things to do, especially if you have multiple campaigns. But now that you are organized and have an organized SEO strategy in place, it’ll be easier to keep track of progress. You can establish milestones and conduct assessments quarterly or biannually to restrategize if necessary.

Those are the basic steps to creating a good SEO strategy. Any other suggestions? I’ll be working on more detailed guides to each of these steps in the coming months. Feel free to add tips and review!