If you want to succeed on-line you need a plan and this includes an SEO strategy. Planning how you are going to secure traffic to your website, including search traffic, is vital and this article will help you plan your SEO activities and ensure you make the best use of your time and budget.

It could be argued your SEO strategy should have been developed long before you built your website. However, many people, possibly most people, find themselves in the situation of having an under performing website that requires rescuing and that's what we are looking at here.

The first thing you need to do when developing a strategy for improving the performance of your website in the search engines is to develop a detailed understanding of the search landscape of your market. First of all you need to develop an understanding of what people are searching for and this means carrying out keyword research. Once you know this you need to develop an understanding of who your competition are and how strong their search rankings are.

Armed with this knowledge you can start to develop your strategy for moving up the rankings and securing more but importantly higher quality visitors, that is visitors who might actually buy what you are selling!It would be fairly safe to say the above is the starting point for pretty much all SEO projects. However, from here on in it's going to depend on the market you are in and the strength of your competition. The things that impact on how easy or difficult your task is relate in the main to the following:
1. How long has your competition been around? Google and the other search engines seem to give preference to long standing sites and if your website is new, specifically your domain name, you will struggle to compete with strong aged sites.
2. How much competition do you have? If you want to rank for a search phrase no other sites are competing for some well written content, a well optimized page and one or two links might be all you need.
3. Will your main site attract links? If your main site sells widgets and all its pages are simply product pages it's not very likely they will attract links. If this is the case you may need to create information pages or a blog to build your authority.

There's no simple answer to developing an SEO strategy but you must start by understanding what your market searches for and who your on-line competition are. From here you can plan the content your sites needs and how you are going to secure those all important links to establish your authority. E-telegence.com specializes in search engine optimization and is based in the UK, in Falkirk which is in Central Scotland.