Information without the knowledge and will to use it effectively is useless – if you cannot put it to use, you might as well not have it in the first place.

You are reading this book, so the ‘will’ is not an issue.

However, you still need a plan – and the best plan is one that is flexible yet detailed enough to guide you and allow you to customize it to your own needs.

This introduces / previews the rest of the blog post. There are 4 main phases of this plan.

Why 4 phases, and not 5 or 3? Maybe I like the number 4. Maybe it is because this is the system that works
best for me – and has continued to work for me as a basic template for my SEO campaigns over the last few
years. I am always tweaking it, and so should you. If you find it easier to split the ‘site launch’ phase into two
parts, do so. If you want to combine phases 2 and 3 (site optimization and site launch), do that too.

Customize, but make sure you do the necessary steps.

The rest of the post summarizes what you will be reading and doing in the rest of the entire blog. Skim through, and then get started with the next post.

A necessary (and not as boring as you might think) part of SEO.

I’ll admit, I’m not the sort of person who likes to over-elaborate or over-do the planning and research phase.

I follow the ‘ready-fire-aim’ school of thought, so my goal with every website is to just get started and fix things later.

However, there still is that ‘ready’ bit of the whole ready-fire-aim process, and there is some research that you will have to do in order to be ready to conquer your target niche.

But what is your target, really?

• Setting Goals
Understand your targets for the website and profile the ideal audience.

• Keyword Research
Once you know your topic (and have a feel for your audience), find out what keywords they are using.

• Competitive Analysis
Find out who your top competition is, and what they are doing in terms of SEO / online marketing.

This section will vary from project to project depending on whether you are working on a new website or an already established one.

• Keywords & Site Content
How to use your keywords, how to split them between pages and how to organize your website based on them. Using keywords, competitive analysis and site goals to write your site content.

• On-Page SEO
Optimizing your pages – title tags, meta tags, keyword usage and avoiding duplicate content.

• Site Architecture
How you organize your website’s pages (internal linking), search engine friendly site URLs and sitemaps usage.

• Link Building Basics
Basic principles behind effective link building, the types of links you will need and how to approach link building on a long-term, day-to-day basis.

• Site Launch Links
A comprehensive look at the type of links you need to procure during site launch to get your site crawled,
your internal pages indexed and your site according the trust and authority necessary to help your pages
get rankings in search engines.

Search marketing is a long-term, persistent commitment. It involves consistent content building, link building
and monitoring the success of the search campaign (site traffic and site rankings) to fine tune your activities.

• Link Sources
Where do you get links from? This chapter discusses more than 10 different major sources of links and
gives you strategies for finding more.

• Finding Link Partners
How you can use search engines to find potential link partners.

• Link Valuation
How to place a value on links, and how this can help your link building campaign.

• Link Worthy Content
What is link-worthy or quality content and how you can build a habit of creating link worthy content for your sites.

• Campaign Tracking
Using web analytics and search ranking data to refocus and target your link building / SEO campaign.
Let’s get started – you can read through the book in one go, or you can use the table of contents to directly
jump to any specific chapter in the book at any time.

Until next time! See you around ;-) ...