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!

Your business does not have to be the victim by default in the current economic upheaval. With the help of a smart SEO company, and by focusing on your marketing goals, any entrepreneur can lead their company through the confusion.

Our SEO company often hears the term “SEO a website” like SEO is something that is one size fits all, or a simple activity that will magically ensure a site is positioned on page one for relevant keywords.  Of course, any search engine optimization or online marketing specialists reading this post know that SEO is much more than that.

Our SEO company has come up with a few simple rules of online marketing; essentially, they are the ten commandments of search engine optimization.  Here they are without further ado:

Since the Bears had their first pre-season game last night, today’s “what would ____ do if they were an SEO?” (our SEO company’s regular Friday feature) post is focused on da coach himself, Chicago icon and football legend Mike Ditka.

Before our Chicago SEO firm or our Chicago web design company starts work on a project, we create a unique plan (every client and their search engine optimization and search engine marketing needs is different, after all) and define our goals. Besides getting our clients on page one of the search engines results, we also tailor our strategy to fit their market, because while there are some SEO techniques that apply to every campaign, every industry has its own idiosyncrasies. These unique elements are especially important to consider when working on off-site SEO, or search engine marketing.

The last post touched a little bit on local search, or ensuring that your location is part of your keywords and overall search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategy. However, there is much more to the local search market than that – it is one of the fastest growing areas of consumer search. People are starting to use search engines to discover not only what to buy (product reviews, information about various services, etc.), but where to buy it. Furthermore, consumers are getting much more specific about how they use search engines – they are using more targeted four or five word search strings instead of generalized one or two word queries. For example, Chicago SEO company as opposed to simply SEO company.

To discover how well your site is optimized for key local terms (and more), try our free SERP tracking tool.

The vast majority of publishers have some kind of editorial calendar to help them organize the new articles and content they produce on a regular schedule. Your website should be no different – since search engines favor fresh content, you’ll want to update it often. In fact, consistent updates are key part of the search engine optimization process.

However, coming up with topics to write about can be tough and writer’s block can strike at the most inopportune times, so coming up with a basic editorial calendar - a rough schedule that defines what you are going to cover at what time – is a great way to keep the content flowing and your SEO strategy on track. You should also try our free seo tool and SERP tracking tool to determine how well your current strategy is working.