Creating an SEO plan for your website is essential if you want to achieve success. These are not the 90’s and keyword stuffing doesn’t work, nor does the ever prominent "build it and they will come" routine. There are two reasons why you need to know what an SEO plan needs to have; the first one is so you can monitor the progress and SEO implementation by the SEO Company of your choice. Second is to know what to focus on if you are doing in-house SEO for your website.

You probably know that there are two sides to search engine optimization, on-page optimization and off-page optimization. That separates our SEO plan into two parts. There is a third part, it is about measuring the success and making changes to your SEO plan, but let’s focus on the first two parts, on-page SEO plan and off-page SEO plan.

On-Page SEO Plan

On-page SEO efforts revolves around making your website optimized for your chosen keywords, but also making your website user friendly and search engine friendly using many aspects that matter, like usability and navigation and of course quality of your content and site speed. Let’s look at the list, what your on-page SEO plan needs to have:

• Meta Tag, Title Tag and Meta description optimization

• Crafting search engine friendly URL’s

• Insuring link usability (removing broken links)

• Insuring browser compatibility and W3C validation

• Content and Image optimization

• HTML optimization

• Anchor text internal linking

• Optimization of H tags (H1, H2, H3…)

• Creating Google Sitemap

• Setting up 301 redirects

• Setting up Google Analytics

• Webmaster Setup

Quite a lot of things are needed for the first part of the SEO plan, but this may sound overwhelming but the fact is that these are mostly simply procedures that are the easiest and fastest part of the optimization. They sound overwhelming, but in reality that is just something SEO gurus want you to believe, most of the web designers today can do all of this for you, the only thing you need is a good SEO copywriter and you are all set for your on-page optimization. But off-page optimization is the longer part that will require an SEO specialist.

Off Page SEO Plan

Off-page optimization includes many things from link building to creating your web brand and increasing your web presence through social media and news. In fact, most SEO companies are including all aspects of search engine marketing into their SEO services, which is why a good off-page SEO plan needs to include:

• Social bookmarking

• Brand building

• Paid & free directory submission (only chosen directories like Yahoo & DMOZ)

• Article writing and article marketing

• Creating web 2.0 property profiles like Squidoo and HubPages

• Link wheel creation (make sure they know what they are doing)

• Blog commenting and forum posting

• Advanced link building

• Press release distribution

• Blog setup (Every new business needs to have a blog – read the stats)

• Social media marketing

• Traffic analysis and measures – creating a new strategy if needed

Every SEO company needs to provide you with a similar SEO plan, of course in more detail. Skip any company that will not keep you informed and report on their progress and the ones that don’t present you with their own SEO plan. Of course you can try to do your own search engine optimization; it’s all up to you.