SEO Strategy

Basic SEO Strategy and Techniques

The point of SEO is to influence the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN to send visitors to your website. In other words SEO Strategy is about generating traffic. Traffic is what SEO Strategy is all about.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) does this by helping you come up high in search results for your most important keyword phrases or search terms.

But is developing a successful SEO strategy a mysterious art that only a few gurus understand?

No. Getting good search engine ranking is not as difficult as you might think. And using an effective SEO strategy is really just common sense.

Thinking Like a Search Engine

The first step in creating a winning SEO strategy is to start thinking like a search engine. What that means is understanding that the search engines only read what is there on your pages. They do not read between the lines, or make connections between ideas, or draw subtle conclusions from the context of your content. Compared to the way humans think, search engines are really pretty dumb.

So thinking like a search engine means you have to clearly spell out what each page is about and try not to make them read between the lines. This is one of the most important SEO techniques you can employ.

Keywords, Search Terms, Tags

These terms - keywords, keyword phrases, search terms, tags - these are all used to indicate more or less the same thing - single words or groups of 3 or 4 words that capture the subject matter of your pages. Understanding the role of keyword phrases is extremely important when formulating an effective SEO strategy.

For instance, if a particular web page is about "big green widgets", the search engines will find that phrase being repeated a few times on the page and they will draw the conclusion that your page is about "big green widgets". That's what they will put in their database - "This page is about 'big green widgets'."

So when somebody does a search for "big green widgets" you page has a chance of coming up in the search results.

Creating an effective SEO strategy means you have to anticipate what search terms people will use when looking for your product or service and then use those terms when writing your text. "Optimizing" a page means focusing on a specific search term and then emphasizing it by repeating it a number of times on the page.

An SEO Strategy - 5 SEO Rules

We use these 5 SEO Rules as the basis of our SEO Strategy for clients:

1. We do a preliminary keyword analysis to find the most potentially lucrative search terms. These will not always be the terms that get the most searches because they may be overly competitive and much more difficult to get good ranking for. Choose search terms that you have a chance of getting good ranking for.
2. This keyword analysis lets us isolate 4 or 5 search terms (keyword phrases) that we have a chance of scoring well on and will generate traffic. This is what we call a "keyword group."
3. Then we encourage our clients to create tightly focused pages within their website(s) for each keyword phrase within their keyword group. They should make it very obvious what these pages are about. Each page should be focused on one keyword phrase and that term should be used several times and in all the most important places within the page. "Optimization" means focusing on a specific search term and repeating it several times within the page, along with closely related terms and different versions of the same term.
4. Assume that "more is better". If a competitor is doing better for a targeted search term, we recommend including even more focused content than he does. This does not mean using bogus content or just stuffing the text with keyword phrases. The search engines may be dumb, but they're not that dumb.
5. Once web page content is optimized we start building inbound links from external sites that reinforce each of the optimized pages. It is well known that links should support the content of your pages by reinforcing the focus on specific keyword phrases. For instance, if a page is about "big blue widgets", then inbound links from articles, blog posts, videos, audios, other websites that are talking about "big blue widgets" are the best kind of links to have. This is called "relevance" and it should be obvious why this is important.
   
   We have extensive link building experience and have access to hundreds of blog sites, article sites, video sites, and relevant websites of many different kinds where links can be placed on behalf of clients.

See our SEO and link building products for more information.