SEO Process

I thought it may be helpful to outline the process I tend to go through when working on a site from scratch.

Industry research
I find it easier to optimize a page if I understand the industry and the language it uses
Target audience research
This is identifying the people that I wish to drive to the website
Keyword research
Analysis of the best keywords to use based on industry research and target audience. Working out which keywords are competitive and which will be easily targeted
Competitor Research
Identifying the websites that are targeting and ranking for the keywords I am targeting
Identify linking community
Locating online forums within the industry that can gather links. as well as identifying as many different websites that links can be gathered from, identifying any tools that can be build to generate interest. The competitor research comes in handy here also. i.e. can I get links from competitors? Can I get links from those linking to competitors? Can I get a link to my competitor replaced by a link to me?
Information Archetecture
How the site will be structured around the keyword and seo strategy
Build it
Bearing in mind the on domain SEO factors
.htaccess file
Writing the .htaccess file is part of the build, however ensuring canonicalization is important enough to be mentioned seperately
robots.txt file
Compose the robots.txt file to ensure that search engines are not spidering duplicate content
Sitemap
Write scripts for auto generation of an xml sitemap. add the location to the robots txt file and upload to google webmaster tools
Link building
Embark on your link building strategy
Continued monitoring
Keeping an eye on analytics, monitoring information archecture to watch the flow of link juice throughout the site
Sphinn

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