This title is not stating the obvious, as I think many of the reader would assume. In SEO it is not uncommon to discover through light conversation with someone that a whole campaign or project was built around the “see what sticks” philosophy, and without dismissing the mere idea of success through careful monitoring and testing the notion that you build something to only later follow its (relative) success seems like a completely crazy thing to waste time on.
Planning is the first setp to Success
Have you ever watched Tiger Woods make a near perfect chip that ends on the tip of the cup and commented, “ah, that was just luck”, no it wasn’t. It was a result of many hours of playing, practicing and thinking about how a shot like that needs to be taken, and just to prove how much planning goes into it watch his famous Masters 2002 chip and his recent 18th hole British Open chip and see that it is consistent (if 7 years results can show anything I guess it would be consistency). Same thing goes for businesses, careful planning (and execution) is not the heart of the matter, it is the heart and the sole of it, in fact, it is everything with the exception of the executing functions.
So if you are an SEO or a business owner looking to get some more out of a site or a web page, your best shot at success would be to sit down with a pen and paper, and plan.
What would you plan? At the very first you should just set your goals and match some expectations, in the SEO world expectations refer almost exclusively to ranking and time, goals can be very fluid (from traffic to sales to branding force), the best practice here is different for SEO’s and business owners.
A business owner would probably turn to an expert for advice and execution of the plan, and because it is not up to the owner herself to get the results it would make sense if she would just focus on the simple “what” and “when” issues. What do you want to rank for, and how much time would you allow a SEO project to go on before it shows results.
More on the steps taken by both SEO experts and Business owners, in the next time.
