Search Engine Optimization: For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3. Planning Your Search Engine Strategy

In This Chapter

• Avoiding problems with your Web designer

• Evaluating the competition

• Understanding the search tail

• The six search engine variables

• Planning your attack

There's much to find out about generating traffic from search engines, and sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees. As you discover in this book, there are page optimization and link strategies and index submissions and directory submissions and electronic press releases and blogs and this and that — it goes on and on. Before you jump right in, I need to discuss the big picture (to give you an idea of how all this fits together) and help you decide what you should do when (to help you plan your strategy). In this chapter, I show you how a search engine campaign works overall.

Don't Trust Your Web Designer

Warning

Let me start with a warning: Don't rely on your Web designer to manage your SEO project. In fact, I know that many of you are reading this book because you did just that, and have realized the error of your ways.

Here's one of the more egregious cases I've run across. The owner of a small e-commerce store came to me for help; he had paid a Web-design firm $5,000 to build his site, and before beginning he had asked them to make sure that the site was search engine-friendly. Unfortunately, that means different things to different people, and to the design firm it didn't mean much. The site they built definitely was not optimized for search engines. The owner ...