Sample SEO proposal

Proposal for Search Engine Optimisation of the XXXXXXXX website
Prepared for XXXXXXXX
By Tom Humphries - Design Future
17/01/2009

Aims

The proposed work is intended to increase the organic (unpaid) visitors to XXXXXXXX

This will be done through optimisation of pages to increase their rankings in search results for relevant keywords. In addition, link building from other sources on the internet will be performed to increase the pagerank of the site and provide more routes for potential customers.

Phase One - 2 weeks with a total of 4 hours work

To start with it is important to assess how well the site is currently performing for organic traffic. To do this Google Analytics will be used to monitor the number of unique visitors from unpaid sources over a two week period. A daily average will be calculated and compared with the figure at the end of the final phase.

Analytics provides a much more comprehensive picture of visitors compared with other free statistics programs. As well as the number of unique visitors it will show what keywords people are using to find the site, details of the pages they browse, even which county they live in. It requires a small piece of code installed on each page which will be done at the start of the phase.

Phase Two - 2 weeks with a total of 16 hours work

In phase two the optimisation will concentrate on the pages themselves. This includes analysis of how the keywords are incorporated into the pages, and structural elements that effect the validation of pages. At this point some slight alterations in wording may be suggested. Any changes will be performed on an offline version of your site and can be approved by you before going live.

Research will be performed into the demand and competition of relevant keywords and phrases. The results of this analysis will effect how the optimisation is undertaken.

If there is insufficient content to achieve a good ranking for a keyword, some suggestions will be made about which areas could be expanded on.

Phase Three - 6 weeks with a total of 30 hours work

Phase three will concentrate mainly on external optimisation. This means obtaining incoming links from a variety of sources. Through a process of link building it is possible to increase the pagerank of the homepage, and internal pages of the site. Pagerank is a weighting system Google uses to measure the importance of a page. The algorithm used to determine pagerank for a given page is largely based on its number of incoming links.

The relevance of the linking page, its pagerank, the link text, and many other factors all have an effect on the links’ value. Finding good links takes time but will provide lasting benefits. No links from ‘bad neighbourhoods’ or paid links will be obtained as these can lead to penalties by search engines.

Search engines like to see steady organic increases in links. For this reason the link building will be spread out over the whole of phase three.

Phase Four - 2 weeks with a total of 4 hours work

The amount of organic traffic will be measured over a two week period. I will produce a report of the work carried out to show what effect the optimisation has had. This will include how the chosen keywords and phrases have performed, and what activity has been generated by backlinks.

The average unique visitors per day of the initial phase and end phase will be compared.

Brief Analysis of XXXXXXXX Vs Competitors

The homepage validation shows more errors compared with your competition. Valid code and an associated Document Type Declaration are preferred wherever possible. Search engines generally prefer valid code, and some users may experience difficulties accessing a site with invalid code. Most of the errors are concerned with the table layout which could be easily fixed. Others relate to the moving images.

The homepage pagerank is lower than the competition, this means for two pages coded exactly the same, the domain with the higher pagerank would achieve higher rankings. Pagerank is measured from 0 to 10 with very popular sites such as hotmail having PR 9. This can be increased with link building over time. Generally it takes many months for pagerank to move after changes.

The amount of pages in the Google index is lower than the other sites. This isn’t necessarily a problem if the pages are optimised properly. It does show that this may be an area for future work though. The more pages that are out there, the more chance there is of a search term leading your way.

The domain age is older than the competition which gives some benefit.

The number of backlinks is fewer compared with the competition. This number could be increased with link building to the homepage, and to internal pages within the site.