Search Engine Optimization

Chapter 13. Best Practices: SEO That Works

SEO in the broadest sense works when you carefully consider and plan your campaign.

This means having a good understanding of:

• Your offering

• Your unique selling proposition

• Your competition

• The resources that can be used for your campaign

• Best SEO practices

This section will help you achieve clarity on these points, and provide a best practices SEO checklist.

Create an Elevator Pitch

A good way to begin planning your SEO campaign is to create an elevator pitch.

An elevator pitch is a one-or-two sentence “story” that makes your offering and target audience crystal clear. So named for something one could deliver between stops on an elevator, one of the most important aspects of the elevator pitch is its succinctness.

A good elevator pitch is dramatic, tells your story, and can be used for sales purposes. Most important, if your elevator pitch is right, you should be able to use it to understand the most important keywords to use from an SEO perspective.

Note

You can use your elevator pitch to generate meta information for your site.

Know Your Competition

Learn from your competition. Compile a provisional list of keywords and phrases you want to target with SEO. Then Google, Google, Google these keywords like crazy.

Examine the results of these searches carefully. On the one hand, the search results from your targeted keywords should be related to your offering. If there’s no connection—if the sites you come up with belong to completely different realms—then ...