Give Yourself an SEO Boot Camp

Do you ever find that you don’t know or remember how you starting ranking well for certain keywords and keyphrases? Have you ever wished you had a guide of how you succeeded in one area of SEO so that you could follow the exact same steps on a current project?

I certainly have. In fact, I’m going through this right now.

You see, I have a site in the political niche that currently enjoys just under 5,000 unique visits per day. The site is about two years old, and has, I believe, broken into a high “trust” level with Google and other major search engines.

The two years I’ve spent on the site consisted of many errors, bad SEO choices, and downright naive practices. That being said, I’ve made minor tweaks that brought instance success and huge jumps in SERP’s for very competitive keywords.

The problem is that I don’t remember the entire process. I remember the basics, and I remember some of the easier changes I made, but I don’t remember a lot of what I did do, should have done, and should have avoided.

Last week I decided that I need to create a new website project, and then design a guide around it as it progresses. The purpose is two fold. First, I get to create a self-guide on the journey that will help me in future efforts. Secondly, I can blog the entire journey and help others, while also learning from others on how to improve.

So, here is the idea of my own personal SEO boot camp. Read along and let me know if this is a good idea, what I should change, what you would do, and what you think I should do differently.

SEO Boot Camp

-Niche and Domain
First, I want to find a niche that has a lot of traffic, but not a lot of well optimized sites ranking high in the SERP’s. Once I find a good niche, which I believe I have, I’ll want to start searching for a good domain name. The domain name should, of course, be relevant to the targeted keywords, and if possible, should contain all of the keywords as well. Using your site name and keywords in the domain are quite important, and I would argue this can help far more than most will admit.

-Documentation
Then, I want to set up a section on my own personal blog, or a blog where I follow SEO/Online Marketing, so that I can document the entire process, allowing friends and networks to collaborate, share, and learn from the effort.

-Early Stage
I wouldn’t really want to release the domain name right up front, or the niche for that matter, because someone might try and head off the SERP’s if the niche is attractive enough. Instead, I would just focus on the ideas and the set up process, along with the basic SEO steps taken early on in the project.

In my case, I think I’ll post a project update, along with data analytics, traffic stats, revenue, once a week for the first six to eight weeks. After the first two months, I’ll release a lot more details, which will hopefully open the project up for more input and collaboration.

The overall project should do several things. It will give my own blog a unique content boost because of all the extra topics to write about, it will give my readers a step-by-step walk through on setting up an SEO project from scratch, and it will give me an extra site, or “SEO sandbox” to test and build.

I think this is something I would love to see other bloggers and SEO’s do, and I think it will be a huge boost in my own SEO experience.

Is this something you would do? Is this something you think would benefit you as well as your site visitors?

Maybe this is something you haven’t thought about and might want to explore. Perhaps your own self hosted SEO Boot Camp is exactly what you need.

Thoughts?