The success of SEO lies in strategy. A successful SEO strategy can boost up your traffic whereas unplanned work can convert your profit into a loss. In the end, you would be empty-handed if your strategy is poor and baseless. The strategy should not be made on guess. It should be well designed by all significant analyses. Steps are:

Domain Name: Very First step of making an SEO strategy is to choose a domain name.

If you are brand conscious, you can choose any domain but it may take a bit higher time rather than SEO friendly/Keyword-based domain. Domain Name plays a great role in the success of SEO. A few years ago, TLDs mattered. But right now any TLD can be ranked because ranking now depends on your website’s structure and content. In India (On Google.co.in) I can see the .jp domain ranking on various keywords.

In the second step, you should take care of the URL structure and Loading time of the website.

Page load time should be lesser than your competitors. You can use Google’s PageSpeed and Yahoo’s YSlow browser plugin to analyze page load time and issues. These plugins suggest minimising javascript files and organising CSS files.

While loading a webpage, junk code should not be generated on execution. Unused CSS and javascript files should be deleted. Multiple levels and dynamic URLs should be avoided while developing a website. You should follow optimized URL structures.

The third step is to analyze your keywords to be targeted and analysis of your competitors.

Keyword research is the first and foremost task to initiate the SEO process. Search your potential keywords and target your content without thinking about their hotness and coldness. It is suggested that we should not target hot keywords as these keywords are difficult to get ranked. But it is also a fact that these only keywords make your SEO process successful. And for competitor analysis, you need to know what they are doing in SEO. ‘

Follow them by using “Google Alert”. Place your website where they are placing their own. Do what every they do best for their website but don’t repeat their mistake on your website. You need to just one step ahead to beat them on the Internet. Do not forget your users’ comfort.

The fourth step is defining and organizing SEO activities.

Set the on-page activities first. Onpage SEO is beam of ranking. If your on-page SEO is weak, you can’t achieve desired results. Put appropriate title and meta description with prominence and proximity. Your website should be internally linked with appropriate anchor text on its relevant URLs. Keywords should be placed in a prominent area in your content.

There should not be any grammatical error in your content and the whole content should be unique and fresh. Do not stop posting new content on your website with uniformity. And never change your meta tags and content of the ranked page. Although, you can update content but never ever try to change

Now turn to off-page activities. Start directory submission, article posting, blog submission, classified listing and forum participation. Keywords should be mapped before starting these activities. Unmapped keywords can spoil your efforts. You can do link building (Reciprocal or three-way linking).