Like anything, to be successful you need to have a plan. Here are some of the benefits defining your plan will give you,

• You will know where to Start, what to do next and The End Goal.
• If you ever get distracted, by looking at your plan, you will automatically be pulled back on track. This also gives you confidence to explore new avenues, knowing you can easily come back to the main thread.
• A Plan is not necessarily fixed and therefor can act as an important repository for discoveries you make along the way. Also useful for making notes of ideas you have.
• As you will see, to be successful with the Search Engines you need to perform a task, monitor the results and then from that information improve that task. Having a Plan will help keep track of this.
• A Search Engine Strategy is a long term activity and only by having a plan can you hope to remember all the steps and information.

It's totally up to you how wish to record your plan, be it in a Text Files, Word Documents, HTML Page or even on good old fashioned paper. Choose whatever you are most comfortable with.

Ok, enough of the waffle, lets get right to it. Although your plan will be unique to you it should contain the following Sections. ( Add these to your plan NOW ).

• Products, Services or Subjects
• Keywords & Phrases
• Pages and URL's
• Submission Record
• Result Monitoring

Now whatever your web site is about you need to start by picking one aspect of it. If you sell a variety of Products for now just pick one. If you provide a variety of services just pick one. If your site neither sells a product or provides a service but is just about a particular subject then pick this subject.

Write the Title of the Product, Service or Subject under the "Products, Services or Subject" heading of your plan.

That's it for this step, it doesn't seem much but you are now ready for the next step,
"Researching Keywords and Phrases".

For an example plan click here to see the very plan we have for TrafficFile.com.