SEO campaign

First thing to do is to clearly define your business goals. Why are you doing a SEO campaign? What do you want to achieve? How to do it? What tools or services to use? Isn’t it better to hire a specialist or a company?
Try to write down these questions and expand them in a way that is most relevant to your web site or service. This article will try to clear the overall concept of a SEO campaign and find some answers.

Steps in doing our campaign:
First and one of the most important: keyword research.
The basic of all search engines are the keywords. Also main part in target advertising and Pay-per-click campaigns are the keywords. People enter keywords in search engines in order to get necessary information. Choose the keywords that will bring the right type of visitors in your website. There are two methods of approach in selecting keywords. First one is a broad approach. Imagine that you run an e-commerce web site. Here the most obvious keyword is “buy online”. Disadvantages of this keyword are apparent – very high competition and not targeting at all. Google will return millions results for this term. The effort for rank good for this keyword would be enormous and don’t worth it at all.
In other hand you can choose more relevant and describing term for your service or website. It will bring more exactly targeted traffic to your site and eventually more customers.
The basic tool to consider in this part of the campaign is Google keyword tool. Be careful to balance well between the popularity, relevance and competitiveness of your keywords.

On-Site optimization
Carefully review your site and map out a simple plan for basic changes. The first thing to consider here is the question - is the site search engine friendly? Avoid flash website without any html content. It may look cool but search engine crawlers are not friendly with the flash content. Also avoid using flash or javascript for web site navigation. Anchor is the best choice for a menu.
Website usability – consider that the main part in all this is the visitor. Make sure that every necessary part is easy to reach. Ensure enough time for planning site navigation and modules. Read different search engine guidelines and make your plans according to them. Pay special attention to the images – well described images can drive a lot new traffic through image searches.
Content
Content is the part that needs great attention. First thing is to check for and remove duplicate content. Avoid using duplicate content. Make a plan for regular updating and basic content suggestions.
Users Involvement
Plan a way to involve the visitors in your site growth. Polls, Competitions, Comments, Forum, User-created-content, Awards, Voting system can be weapons for this cause.

Off-Site optimization
Link building
Link building is the basic part of the off-site optimization. Search engines prefer and give more value to a natural linking. So give a reason to your visitors to link and promote your site.
Directory submission is a valuable way for link building, but using blindly won’t be in much use. Make a list of the best directories and plan dates for submitting. Consider to grow your links gradually, avoid automatic submissions and pay special attention to directories related to the search engines. Good thing to keep in mind that geographically related directories and listings can get you more targeted traffic than global services.
Article submission also deserves its time (but not much). Choosing few of the best article directories will add more value rather than spamming all the article directories over and over again.
Social bookmark and network services also need careful planning. Choose few more relevant to your niche and go for good rating in them. Selecting good content to share is very hard task. Ever wonder why some articles gets thousands votes and other hardly get less than ten? Good and spicy page can bring in a lot of visitors.

Search Engine Optimization campaign planning and realization is a time and effort consuming process but don’t forget that it is not the only way for promoting your site. Internet marketing is a lot broader field and the successful profit sits on the top of a selection of SEO, Pay-Per-Click, Affiliate and many other campaigns.