SEO 2.0

We’ve all used them; keyword suggestion tools. And that’s the problem. If you are basing your keyword strategy solely on these tools, then you’ll have the same keyword strategy everyone else does who is targeting your niche.

Keyword selection is single most important step in implementing a search engine optimization strategy… no, make that content strategy… no make that link building strategy. No, wait! Keyword selection is the single most important aspect of your website. Whatever your niche, the words you use are the key elements for which people find your site, stay on your site and purchase from your site.

Keyword Phrase Selection Best Practices:

• Focus on your site first: Don’t always search for keywords with high traffic and less competition alone. Always discriminate first on the relevance to your site, not potential traffic.

• Wag your “Long Tail”: Half of searches performed on Google are unique. What does this mean? It means that the keyword phrases suggestion tools, in a perfect world, are only accounting for half the available search phrases and, in reality, will be more like 20% effective. Also look at this from a competition angle. Wouldn’t you rather be optimizing your site for those unique searches rather than depend on the tools approximately 99% of other webmasters use? Develop a content strategy with the “Long Tail” in mind. A great free/paid service that will enable you to exploit this strategy to the max is HitTail.

• Anchor your Positions: Now that your content strategy is inline, use your keywords appropriately in your incoming links.

• Study your Successes and Fix your Failures: If you are not tracking the effectiveness of your site, your may as well be driving blind. You may get to where you eventually want to be if you are the luckiest person on the planet. However, the carnage your excursion will produce will likely sink you before you even get started.

• Don’t Screw Around: While writing articles specifically targeted to any of your search phrases, make sure it is compelling from a user’s point of view. Spammy text, thrown together because you’re too lazy to come up with something interesting, won’t add value for your user and will only make you look bad in the end.

• Sustain your Efforts: If you are playing to win; play to win every day. The sites that are ranking well don’t get there by accident or half-assed effort.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Link Building Strategies, Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.