1. Goals.

Without specific goals in mind (in other words, a list of the exact traffic measurements and figures you’d like to achieve), effectively grasping quality SEO results is a misnomer.  Without goals, you might get there, or you might not…the thing is, you’ll never even know one way or the other.  The key to success is carrying out your optimization plans with focus and aim, through measurable and definable goals.

2. A Plan.

Yes, in order to be as SEO-friendly as possible, every website with this vital ambition in mind needs a plan to achieve the actual results they desire.  We make business plans when starting and growing our businesses, we use blueprints to build our homes—why not carefully craft a written game plan for SEO too?

3. Keywords.

Moving on from the conceptual things your website needs to succeed with SEO to the more tangible items used to carry out the plan, we definitely need to include keywords.  Every page of an SEO-friendly website is ideally optimized around just one or two unique keyword phrases.  This means the written content, the meta-data, the image tags, and so on.  Part of your SEO plan will be developing a list of targeted keyword phrases to utilize on your site (and defining where they’ll go).

4. Clean Web Structure.

Using squeaky-clean HTML/PHP/CSS coding (not Flash) is the way to go when creating a website structure that’s extraordinarily SEO-friendly.  Search engines really like to see attention to detail in the coding—this means being fully standards-compliant whenever possible.  Clean web structure serves two purposes with the search engines.  First, they’re able to crawl and index your site better because it is easy for their “robots” to understand.  And secondly, they know that if you pay attention to the details, you’re most likely offering a better quality site than your competitors that don’t follow this principle.

5. Great Content.

What do your visitors come to your site to see?  Content.  What do search engines help their users find?  Again, content.  Coincidence?  Not at all.  Provide great quality content—always go above and beyond and strive to make it perfect.  Be informative, yet different than the masses.  Offer your visitors what they’re looking for and over-deliver in every way with content.

6. Title Tags.

Moving on to the picky details of SEO, there’s one small technical detail that undoubtedly makes more of an impact than all the others combined.  Look at the very top left of your web browser’s window…okay, did you look yet…what does it say?  This is the page’s title tag—and it’s vital to a web page’s SEO-friendliness.  It should be brief, to the point, descriptive of the page’s content, and it should contain the page’s optimized keyword.  Search engines use this to understand your page and also to help them describe what your page is all about to their visitors.  If nothing else, be sure to get this one right.

7. Additional Meta-Data.

Other behind the scenes Meta-data like your page’s Meta-description, Meta-keywords, and image tags are often dismissed these days as being unnecessary.  This couldn’t be further from the truth—search engines today might not take this information verbatim, but it does help define the overall focus of your website’s pages.  It also helps with usability—which is another plus-factor when it comes to SEO-friendliness.  Don’t get spammy with Meta-data or “over-optimize” it, but do be sure to use it accurately for what it was intended for.

8. Balanced Link Profile.

For many SEO-spammers, achieving a great “PageRank” is viewed as the holy grail.  Ignore this strategy and instead focus on building a super high quality balanced link profile instead.  This means achieving a variety of natural incoming links (backlinks) to your site from a good cross-section of relevant authority sites when possible.  And the part that many forget is that it also means sharing a few outgoing links from your own site when they’re helpful to your visitors.  Search engines are smart enough to know that sites with a huge number of incoming links only—especially when they’re built really quickly—are suspicions and unnatural.  Being this is undesirable for sure, because search engines only want to share healthy, natural, organic quality sites with their visitors.

9. Great Navigation.

Having crystal clear navigation throughout your site is extremely important in order to be SEO-friendly.  Your visitors need to be able to make their way around your site with complete confidence.  But also an important factor, the search engine bots also need to be able to crawl your site with ease.  A great navigational structure will help you achieve both.  Also accurately listed under this category is including a search engine friendly sitemap within your website.

10. Activity.

What good is a perfectly SEO’d website if there’s just not any activity there?  Visitors want a vibrant, fresh website environment full of new and updated content (and the search engines know this).  Accordingly, the search engines do give favor to sites that are updated on a regular basis—sites that are full of activity.  One helpful way of achieving this, of course, is to include a blog section in your site.  Keep it professional…but keep it lively as well to look alive to the search engines.

Let’s be clear right from the start…building your new site to be compliant with all of the latest proven Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technologies is vital to your success drawing in targeted, free, organic traffic from the search engines.  Anything less than paying full attention to on-page and on-site SEO is negligent from a visitor-building perspective.

But There’s So Much More Than SEO Alone.

Great SEO, and an ideally optimized and architected website, will help your site prosper.  In a way, getting this right really does lay down a rock solid foundation to success.  It’s the foundation to build upon.  But this is just the beginning.

Also extremely important to attracting visitors is your content strategy.  Whether it’s your existing content—written and otherwise—or the new content that will work best with continual ongoing creation, your content is ultimately what draws visitors in.

Here’s the thing—the SEO just helps the search engines scour your content and helps the visitors find it.  Without great, relevant content, there’s really not much to optimize or for visitors to see.  And this kind of rules out “optimization” when there’s nothing on the site to optimize and organize in the first place!

So, What Makes Good Traffic-Driving Content Then?

First and foremost, quality traffic-driving content is created with a plan.  Some just write new content all the time with a scatter-shot approach—and they might even get lucky and have a few pieces of content that get picked up and highly ranked with the search engines.  But in the real world, the chances of this just “happening” are slim to none.

You’ve got to plan out your content development strategy to great depths in order to increase your chances of finding success by statistically dramatic results.  This involves doing in-depth keyword research to find hot topics to build around.  It involves planning out the categories of your website to be focused and helpful to your visitors.  And if you can stick to a niche with your topical focus…the tighter, the better.

There are countless resources available on the web regarding content planning and development.  Some systems out there cost money, some don’t.  The common thread here is that all too many “systems” promote spammy content development tactics—which in the long run will do you way more harm than good.

Once you’ve found the planning strategy that works for your website (and your style), it’s important to get on a regular schedule to keep the new content streaming to your site on a frequent basis.  One thing that search engines and human visitors alike tend to agree on is that stale, outdated content is simply not worth their time.  So, keep your website up to date and fresh.

Over deliver to your visitors and out-do your competition with your content.  The way most sites underperform these days in this department, it’s not all that hard to gain the edge.  You’ve just got to write so you become the most helpful resource there is on the web for your niche—if your visitors look at ten sites about your topic, you want to be the one out of ten that they bookmark and come back to.  It’s a lofty goal, but one that’s both very achievable and worth the effort.

How Do You Over Deliver This Way?

Well, chances are, you’re already an expert at your topic (your niche).  You’ve just got to find away to pass your knowledge along in order to attract the attention and trust of your visitors.  If you need help, you might start by searching for 10 or so of the most applicable search terms that fit your site.  Look at the sites within the first page search results (not necessarily the Wikipedia listings or Fortune 500 companies that show up—but the smaller companies, organizations, and personal resources that show up among them).  Ask yourself:

• What do they have in common?
• What kind of information are they providing for this search term?
• And most importantly, ask yourself, “How can I provide even better, more helpful information?”

If you do this, you’ll see right away that you can definitely create better content than so many of your competitors in the search engine listings.  In fact, it’s almost too easy!  And the best part is the fact that search engines and visitors alike absolutely love unique, home-grown content.  Think organically and try not to produce overly “corporate” content unless you must.

Follow these tactics, and in harmony with your website’s solid SEO foundation, your content will push you over the edge when it comes to driving organic traffic.  It really works!