You might read the above and think – that’s not SEO!

And you would be right. That’s not traditional SEO.

But in the last couple of years, SEO has radically changed as more and more people realize that it is just one part of the process in building websites that make you money. It is still a separate skill set from web designing or copywriting, but you need to know elements from both of those sectors in order to have a website that brings in search engine traffic AND converts them properly.

After all – what good is free traffic if you have no way to put that to work into making you money?

We will do a more detailed conversion analysis later on, but for now I want you to make a list of:

• What information / pages / functionality your site will provide to its users?
• How does each item in the above list work towards fulfilling your website’s primary and secondary goals?
• What steps do you want your readers to take on these pages?

Once you have all that, it is time to review your website and see where you stand now as opposed to where you should be. If you do not have a site (and are building one), skip to the next section that talks about incorporating this advice into new sites.

Existing Site Analysis

Evaluate your website using the following checklist:

• Does it focus on your audience’s core problem? If not, why not, and what can you do to fix this?
• Does it provide users will all the necessary information? If not, why not, and what can you do to fix this?
• Does each page tie in with your primary / secondary goals? If not, then why is it there? Can you remove it and place the information on a more relevant page?
• Does each internal page have one clear objective? The main page and category pages usually have to ‘share’ attention, but internal pages can focus on and should have one main objective only.

Put yourself in the shoes of a random user, who has just landed on an internal page of your website from a search engine query.

What will you want them to do?

This will depend on the context and purpose of your website, but if you can adopt this mindset for every page, you can have a laser-focused website that not only brings in traffic but converts it as well.

Building a New Site

It is easier to build a new site from scratch focusing on conversion and good on-site SEO than it is to optimize
and improve an already existing website.

On the other hand, existing websites already have a set of backlinks pointing to them, so the link building efforts are definitely easier (plus you already have some search engine visibility).

Incidentally, a site redesign is an excellent time to focus on SEO – you can treat the project as a new website and do SEO, content writing and conversions right from the start.

Success Objectives and Tracking Progress

The flip side of setting goals is that you also need to set success markers and then track their progress.

For example, for a recent site I setup, my success objectives were (for 1 year):

• To reach 5,000 hits / day. The niche I’m working in has room for lots more, but that’s my bare minimum target.
• To reach $1,000 per month. I am using a combination of affiliate programs, direct ad sales and AdSense here.
• To hit page #1 for my main keywords, and top 5 for all second and third tier keywords.
• To build a community (forum) of at least 300-500 active members.

These are very achievable goals, and definitely on the low end of what I would expect to achieve in terms of traffic and revenue if I worked on the website fulltime.

How will you measure your success? For some items – such as AdSense revenue or keyword rankings, your goals could differ drastically based on how competitive your target niche is and how much traffic your keywords get every day. A #1 ranked site for a popular term could easily garner 10,000 hits a day – but then the competition would be equally tough.

You will probably need to do some keyword research and competition analysis before you can have a complete picture of your success objectives, but for now simply focus on completing a picture of what it would mean to accomplish your primary goal.

Once you have set your objectives, monitor them monthly (for traffic and search ranking numbers I will show you a few tools that you can use). Keep working hard at your website and if you see that you’re not making month-to-month progress (i.e. your traffic / rankings go stagnant), it would be time to do a review and figure out what you are doing wrong.

Until next time! See you around ;-) ... D7Y3FH3ZHPU4