1. Inception
2. Growth
3. Stabilisation, and
4. Decline

Wherever your site is within these stages dictates where you should spend your effort.

For example, if your site is in the Inception stage (like my blog), there is little point in going all out marketing it. If you do manage to drive traffic towards your site, that traffic isn’t going to get the experience you’re planning – and may well leave disappointed.

(Note: most commercial sites are finished with this stage before the public ever sees the site. It’s generally only those managed by individuals, in their spare time, that are ever visible before getting to the Growth stage.)

For my blog, this means I’m spending only a small handful of hours actively promoting it (as yet). Those hours are spent not madly trying to generate immediate traffic, but instead aiming for the long-term strategy.

I’ve joined a couple of communities (social networking – see my Site Promotions Methods Defined Post), and I’m engaging in low level link building. In particular, I’m:

• slowly building a following on Twitter by posting regular, useful tweets
• establishing myself in a blogging community called Blogcatalog by being reasonably active in discussions, and
• writing comments on related blogs (the comments link back to my site).

My focus in this stage has to be getting my content to a level that I’ll be happy with. I figure this will mean about thirty posts: enough to keep it interesting, and show the range and depth of knowledge I’m sharing.

When I get to the Growth phase (maybe in a month or two), I’ll switch focus. That isn’t to say I’ll stop posting, because I certainly won’t. But I will spend considerably more time promoting. As well as I’ll write Squiddoo lenses and look for guest posting opportunities, and maybe start a few discussions on Blogcatalog. But the real difference will be my approach to Twitter.

There are a few Twitter strategies that I’ll detail later that show significant potential. It’ll be really interesting to see how they go.

If your site is already in the Growth phase, you should be doing all you can to keep it there. I’ve listed what I’ll be doing, but there are many possibilities. Go nuts.

If your site is in the Stabilisation phase, it’s time to sit back and reassess. What has changed? Is it something you’re doing? Or a factor outside your control?

Take a look at your market, your competition, in fact anything in your website environment. Take a look at what you’re currently doing, and measure that against what you were doing six months ago. Assess as actively and realistically as you can what the impact of these environmental conditions – and any changes to your actions – might be on your site.

It’s now time to revisit your Content Strategy. Are you still acting in accordance with it? If so, is it going to be effective in the current environment?

If not, then you need to update it to reflect what’s currently happening.

If you don’t, your site will start to Decline – and the whole idea is to stop it before it gets to that point, and start another cycle.

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Search engine positioning includes both technical and non-technical aspects. The non-technical aspects fit squarely in the Content Strategy I’ve been talking about, and I’ll discuss them in detail in a later post. This post is about the technical things.

You can do the same with most websites, except for the free sites built on the back end of another organisation’s URL. I’ve set up a few websites using Drupal in the past, and you can certainly do it there. WordPress (yes, this is a WordPress site) makes many of them easy.

Most of the things I did were set and forget things that needed to be done only once. Such as:

1. I chose a blog theme that specifically mentioned it was optimised for SEO. Now, I don’t have the detailed technical knowledge to be able to see if they’re right, so I had to take their word for it. It’s also clean and, to my eyes, looks very good – so that’s an added bonus.
2. The default for WordPress is to give each new post a number, which it appends to the end of the URL. Google likes to see meaningful words in URLs, so I went into Settings and updated the Permalinks field. Now, each URL reflects the title of my blog (that’s the important bit) and the date it was published. I can also manually edit blog URLs if I feel it will help.
3. Next, I installed a plugin that automatically creates an XML sitemap (Google XML Sitemaps) that pings the major search engines every time I update a post. This makes it easier for them to index all my pages, so at least they know my posts exist. If the search engines don’t know my posts exists, they aren’t going to display them even if someone searches for my keywords and keyword phrases.
4. I then tried (and, I have to admit, failed) to install another plugin that automatically generates tags for each post. Because I couldn’t get it to work, I’m going to have to find another that does the same job – if I don’t want to have to add the tags manually (any suggestions as to what to use would be welcome.)
5. I also added the Add-to-Any plugin, which generates a button at the bottom of every post that gives anyone reading the opportunity to share my post on any social networking site they like. I’ll admit that this might not make my page any more important to Google, because most of these sites will be using the no-follow attribute – but the exposure sure can’t hurt.
6. I did two more things. One is fairly common. I set up a Google Analytics account, and made sure the appropriate code is appended to the bottom of each post. Not exactly an immediate optimisation technique, but it should give me good insight into where any traffic is coming from.
7. The other is less common. I set up a Tynt Tracer account, which not only traces any content that others might copy from my site, but also appends a link back to my site wherever that text is pasted. Instant PageRank points.

As the title of this post says, anyone can do these. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an old pro or a relative newcomer. None of them is difficult, and they can all add serious value to your site.

The next couple of posts will be about the other things I’m doing, including Keyword searches and site promotion. They should be up within the next few days.

But before I go into detail about what I’m doing exactly, a bit of background might help.

First, there isn’t much point of having a web page if no-one can find it – and there is an enormous number of web pages in the world. For example, if you do a search under “SEO”, Google will return around 186,000,000 results. How is it possible to get your site to make it into the first three pages of results?

Because the first three pages are where 99% of your audience will stop looking.

Basically, the factors that come into play are:

1. how high your page’s PageRank is, and
2. how closely the user’s search terms match the Keywords on your page.

It’s the interaction between the two that determine where your page appears on any list of search results.  (Oh, there is one thing I should mention, and that’s the percentage of searches controlled by Google. According to Hitwise.com, Google is currently the search engine of choice for around 73% of US searches, and significantly higher in other markets (over 80% in Canada, for example). Effectively, search engine optimisation therefore means optimising for Google.)

Here’s the important bit: if the keywords on your page match the keywords on your competitor’s page, your respective positions in any search results will be determined by the relative worth (PageRank), according to Google, of your page as a whole.

The opposite is true as well. If Google perceives both your webpage and your competitor’s website as being equally valuable (same PageRank), then it’s how closely the keywords on your page match the search terms that determine your respective positions in any search results.

The factors that will improve your page’s PageRank include:

• lots of links from other sites connecting to yours
• lots of links from related sites (sites discussing similar topics) connecting to yours
• links from sites with a high PageRank connecting with yours
• lots of unique, good-quality content
• frequently updated content
• the age of your site, and
• a good navigational structure which lets the majority of pages be indexed.

Knowing this is the first step to doing something about it. There are positive ways (often called the “white hat” approach) and there are devious ways (the “black hat” approach). I’ll no-doubt talk about this a bit later, but for now it’s enough to say that Google doesn’t like sites that use black hat techniques, and is very likely to respond negatively.

My content strategy includes using white hat techniques, and I’ll detail exactly the steps I’m taking over the next few posts. If you’re new to SEO, stay tuned. Some of the things I’m going to say may well change how you’re doing things.

Instead of just talking about the theory, I’m going to show you exactly what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and what the results are.

Of course, that’s going to open me up to a whole bucketful of criticism if things don’t go well – but the way I see it, if things don’t go well there ought to be very few people who notice. So that should all work out fine. 

To start with, that means I need to establish a baseline. So here it is.

I started this blog on October 9, 2009. At that time, my site statistics were:

• Visits: 34
• Pageviews: 503

I’m using the statistics package that comes with cpanel, because obviously Google Analytics hasn’t had time to kick in yet. So I expect every one of those 34 visits – and all pageviews – were from me.

Not surprisingly (given that there was virtually no content at the time), the number of referrals that came from searches on that day was precisely zero.

There is one other thing of note. I didn’t get this domain name specifically for this blog. I’ve had it for a number of years, and it’s generally been in use on one project or another. What that means is that I’ve given myself a kick-start. Instead of starting completely from scratch, my homepage has a starting PageRank of 3.

How much of a bonus this might prove, I don’t know. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Hopefully, as time passes, I’ll be able to show real, concrete gains in terms of absolute visitor numbers. I’ll also be able to let you see where people have come from, and what I did to encourage it all.

From this, I ought to be able to show you what worked and what did not – and it’ll be interesting to hear any comments.

Can’t wait to try some of the things I’m planning out. Kind of exciting, isn’t it?

Well, part of that strategy is expressed in the tagline at the top of the page: “Musings on Life, Business, and the Online World”. But that doesn’t really mean anything.

In part, what I want to do is talk about the process of not just creating a blog, but growing it into a successful, often-visited site that’s above all else, useful.

One of the key considerations is therefore How To Encourage Visitors to Visit.

Now, many people talk incessantly about Search Engine Optimisation. It’s a legitimate strategy, but it’s certainly not the only one – and, if you were to choose just one strategy,  it might not even be the best.

You see, optimising for Google is exactly that: optimising for an online application. It’s one step removed from optimising for people. I’m not saying that optimising for Google won’t attract people to a site. I’m just saying that there are other ways.

Let’s talk about Site Promotion. What is it? The art of promoting your site directly to people.

How do you do it? One way is by tapping in to established networks and letting them know you exist. Those networks might include Facebook groups or Twitter users or forums or community sites. The idea is to write interesting posts and get active, and pique people’s curiosity enough that they follow you back to your blog.

Another way is the tried and true: article submission. Either to a directory, or as a guest blogger, or to a specialist site that might actually pay you for an article.

Another way is also starting to emerge. There are informal networks of bloggers, linked through a third party, that share their posts on each others’ sites. It’s like advertising, but a bit different. The idea is that a blogger writes a post related to what you’ve written about, and a summary of that post appears in the sidebar next to your post. Your post also appears as a summary on someone else’s post. Your audience will naturally grow when people stumble across your site and find it interesting enough to linger. (If you want more information, check out this site.)

Yet another way is to get your posts submitted to a social bookmarking site like Digg or Delicious.

I’ve experimented with most of these in the past, and made good use of some of them within specific marketing campaigns. The question is, what’s right for this blogsite? What will be the most effective in the shortest time? After all, the goal of most sites (this one included) is to get noticed – and I’ve never done it for a blogsite before.

At the moment, I’m using a combination of Twitter and social bookmarking (see the Share/Save button down below?). I’m also about to reactivate an old profile in a couple of communities, and yes, I’m gonna do a bit of search engine optimisation as well (after all, it can’t hurt), but at this stage it’s all a bit experimental. I’ll keep what works and discard the rest, and who knows what might happen?

I’ll keep you posted. If anyone has any ideas, let me know. Write a comment and tell me about them.

If you’re dealing with a simple website, for example a blog or a personal site, your content strategy can be equally simple. For this blog, I didn’t even write it down – but I did consider a variety of things, including:

• is a blog the appropriate type of site?
• topics to be included
• writing style to use
• resources (is it just going to be me? If so, how much time am I going to spend on it?)
• intent (is it to sell? To drive traffic to my business? An online diary?)
• do I care about monetization?
• comment settings
• look and feel
• architecture
• publicity strategy (how am I going to advertise that this site exists?), and
• a bunch of other things.

I’m currently putting together a similar strategy as part of a contract for a major University. Their web presence is a good deal larger (32 000 pages according to Google Analytics), and involves considerable complexity. The strategy for them needs to account for this complexity – but essentially covers much the same points mentioned above.

So, why do I do these things? Why is it necessary?

Sure, it’s a stimulating intellectual excercise trying to squeeze all that complexity into your head, but there’s a much better reason than that. Simply put, your content strategy is the foundation upon which the future of your website depends.

It’s the coherent, consistent understanding of your website content, and what possibilities might be.

If you understand what your site’s key goals are, and how your content must be created, updated and guided to achieve those goals, then everything else should neatly fall into place.

If you don’t have a coherent, consistent understanding of your website, the website itself is likely to reflect that. It’ll be disorganised. It’ll lack focus. You won’t know from one day to the next what you ‘re doing with it.

We’ve all seen sites like this. Small business sites that have been created because the boss knows that a business must have a site these days – but that’s all. But if that business understood the possibilities, and had the appropriate content strategy in place to achieve those possibilities, who knows where it might lead?