SEO Strategy

The emphasis placed on links by Google over the last few years seems to have led many people to assume that you can “buy” ranking by acquiring inbound links without having properly focused content on the actual web pages being ranked.

Once you’ve done SEO for a while you realize how unrealistic it is to expect Google to give a high ranking to pages that don’t contain any useful information - links or no links - and especially when the keywords in question are fairly competitive.

I was reminded of this over the last week or so by two websites I was asked to evaluate. One was produced by a very credible business involved in relatively high end online activities. Their site was made completely in Flash and had virtually no identifying text, headlines, titles or other useful metadata. From the search engine point of view there was no way to tell what it was about. Consequently they did not even rank for their own domain name - which was also their primary keyword.

The other was similar, except in this case the site had no serious content, and much of it was “under construction.” A site like that is basically useless and doesn’t deserve to get ranking.

My advice in both cases: create some readable content, follow two or three of the most basic SEO rules and your problems will be solved. We’ll see if they take the advice.

Here’s another post by Loren Baker along the same lines: Don’t Sour Your Link Juice By Forgetting Basic SEO.

It is common practice to put the website navigation bar along the left side of each web page within a site. If you have done any web page building, and if you have reflected at all on the problems of SEO, you have probably recognized that a left nav bar may very well have a negative SEO impact.

Why? Because it is often the first thing read (after the header) by the SE spiders. Most of us who have done any SEO research have concluded that the content at the top of a page (main headline, first few paragraphs, first few links) establishes the theme of the page and tells the spiders what the page is about.

So we assume that most of our optimization efforts should be devoted to the text at the top of the page: put your desired keyword phrase in the main headline (h1), a number of times in the first couple of paragraphs or sentences, and possibly include it in an outbound link to another highly relevant page within your site.

But if you’ve got a navbar before your primary content (in the left column), then chances are you’ve got a bunch of different keywords and outbound links (to other pages in your site) that seriously dilute the focus of your page. This means that you are counting on your page title tag and headline in the header area to do all the heavy SEO lifting.

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Here’s the first step in creating and implementing an effective SEO strategy -  Do a preliminary keyword analysis to find the most potentially lucrative search terms.

A good search term is one that

1. gets some searches and
2. does not have a ton of competition.

Here are some tools you can use to find keywords like this:

1. Adword Analyzer
2. Google Trends
3. Google Adwords Keyword Analysis Tools
4. Microsoft Keyword Forcast Tool
5. Wordtracker

If you don’t want to do the analysis yourself, contact us for a <a href=”http://www.linknet-promotions.com/free-keyword-analysis.php” mce_href=”http://www.linknet-promotions.com/free-keyword-analysis.php”>Free Keyword Analysis</a> and we’ll suggest some keywords that are likely to work for you.

You don’t usually want to go after the most popular keywords because the competition will be fierce to get good Google ranking for these terms. Choose “long tail” terms - usually consisting of 3 or 4 words - that you have a chance of scoring well on and that will get you good ranking.

Remember, these are the kind of keywords you are looking for:

1. Keywords that get some searches and therefore can generate some traffic, and

2. Keywords that do not have a lot of competition - the fewer websites chasing ranking for them the better.

Once you find some good keywords, then you’re ready to go to town optimizing some webpages for them.

Aaron Wall’s SEOBook is packed full of SEO tips and SEO strategies. It is a massive 328 pages in downloadable ebook format, and is full of case studies which describe both his SEO successes and failures.

If you want a detailed introduction to SEO theory, SEO strategy, SEO techniques, and SEO best practices follow this link for more information about SEOBook.

This blog is called SEO Strategy and is about SEO Strategy. SEO is a group of techniques used to get better results and more traffic from search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo and others. This blog will discuss a range of SEO tactics and strategies aimed at “optimizing” search engine results.