SEO consultant firms are often brought in as the ‘hired gun’ to generate traffic to a site. Often times, we’re hired after the site is built and content is live.
If you’re going to take the time to generate quality content and archive it on your blog or website, it’s best to optimize the content for maximum exposure before the site is built. One way to do this is to optimize your site for search (i.e. SEO). A well-organized site is good for search engine ranking and for usability. The two go hand in hand.
Optimizing your content for search traffic begins with keyword research. Keywords are the building blocks of any good search strategy. This video talks about some foundational principles of keyword research.
http://youtu.be/Cfd2zz2kvxg
Activities that represent the best times to think about keywords and search strategy:
- Choosing a domain name
- Building or redesigning a website
- Deciding on content verticals to include in a site
- Creating new categories, URLs or navigation
- Writing a new blog post
- Naming an information resource (white paper, video, etc)
- Writing web copy