Many businesses owners focusing on SEO for the first time, especially those with limited budgets, can often find themselves caught like a deer in the headlights wondering just where and how to begin. SEO, even for smaller sites, can often be a big project, especially if you’re trying to run the business at the same time.
The question becomes, how many hours a week can you afford to invest (or pay for,) and what should you do first with the limited time on hand? There are several aspects to the SEO process and each one is important in it’s own right. It’s not always easy to say “do this first” until a site evaluation has been performed, as each site’s needs are different. But you have to start somewhere, right?
While I can’t put together a definitive path that you can use to work through your own SEO process, I will provide a general order of importance of different areas. This can be used as a guideline for analysis to determine where you do need to begin the optimization campaign.