I condensed my 2 years of SEO experience into this post to help you
to create a seo strategy from the beginning. This is going to be a
changing document as I will be updating it when my methods changed. If
you looking for seo tutorials for beginners, this article is NOT for
you. In writing this post, I am assuming a certain understanding of
technical SEO terms such as keywords, backlinks etc. If you have no idea
what does the above means, I suggest you read my upcoming SEO for
beginners' post that will touch on the very basic concepts in search
engine optimisation strategy.
Warning: this is going
to be long so it might take a while to finish reading the entire thing.
In case you need a breakdown, below is table of content for this post:
- SEO keyword strategy
- On page seo
- SEO linking building strategy
- SEO metrics for feedback
The four steps above represent the basis for any SEO campaign
that you are going to launch. Each step links to the other and it is
vital that they work together. In the past, I used to focus on 3 and
claim myself to the SEO authority among my friends. Haha. It was only
after reading
SEO theory by Michael Martinez
that I realise how backward I am. If you are like me, I suggest you
hop over to the site and see for yourself what kind of tools you have at
your disposal, whereby link building is only a small part of it.
1. SEO keyword strategy
When
you are developing seo strategy for a new site or old one, the first
thing is back to keyword search. In the past, this means going to google
keyword tool or some of your other favourite keyword tool software and
start punching in some seed keywords to find some terms that are
profitable and non competitive. I used to do that until I realise that
no keyword tool in the world can accurately decide on how competitive
the keywords will be.
In this section, we will talk about two important seo tips:
- how to pick keywords that have no competition
- how to gauge the competitiveness of a keyword space
If you know how to do the above well, you have a much easier time in getting targeted search traffic to your sites.
How to pick keywords that have no competition
The
best way to enter into uncompetitive niches is to know how to use
trends and the changing keyword space to spot emerging new keyword or
what Michael would call a query space. Google reports that about 20-25%
of searches are new. Hence, if you know how to use trends and the
changing query space to spot these new searches, you have practically no
competition. In fact, this is the seo keyword strategy that I used to
create an
adsense site that is making 1k per month.
So, let's take a look at how keyword trend analysis works.
New keywords emerge from a variety of sources.
- Seasonality: People search for stuff that ends with a date or
year. These categories range from holidays to reality shows to sports.
It is common to new searches such as best Christmas toys for 2011 or
black friday 2011 or american idol 2012. The addition of the time aspect
changes the keyword space and allows new sites to enter and dominate if
they did early enough. If you start optimising for christmas 2012 now,
you will have a great chance of ranking for some seasonal keywords when
next year rolls around.
- Events: Elections, disasters, affairs etc. Basically news
that sudden causes everyone to start searching different. In a niche
such as news when events are common, it holds great opportunity to spot
new keywords and dominate them. The traffic may or may not die off
depending on the decay rate of the news.
- New products or services: This is what I used to create the
1k. I basically spotted a market where new products are introduced
consistently. Not only that, some of these new products tend to be
featured on national TV, resulting in huge traffic spikes as well as an
increasing traffic for these new terms. This means that if you want
enter a market, know it well. Understand the process of when and how new
products are introduced. How often these new products are introduced
and do they receive any marketing exposure are key questions you should
factor in your analysis. No keyword software tool will tell you this.
- Evolving query space: I took the longest in realising this
after rereading Michael's blog a couple of times. How people search
changes over time. In fact, the more popular a keyword is, the more
likely new search terms will appear. This is because there are lots of
people interested in the term but are sick of seeing the same result
over and over again. This is when they will try new permutations of the
keyword to see what new results will be presented. This decay and rise
of query space is something that is not mentioned often in all the money
making blogs but understand and observing it is critical in your
keyword analysis.
As an example, this blog ranks for certain
"long tail keywords" terms. I think it is actually on page two for long
tail keywords. I decided to write more about this term when I noticed
that some SEO blogs started to focus on this. It was an evolution of the
term keyword and is something new that my site can tackle and possibly
dominate without backlinks. What I have done to enforce the relevance of
this blog for this term "longtail keywords" is to write an article on
it and repeating them like what I have done above. I am sure that if I
write more articles such as the one I have written called what are long tail keywords, this site will draw in more targeted traffic for this term.
After knowing how new keywords can come about, here are some
tools that you can use to help you spot them. The most obvious but often
underuse is your own analytics data. You need to learn how to track
keywords in google analytics to find these emerging keywords, especially
when you have an evolving query space. Not all site owners like to or
able to read google analytics data but they need to learn. Your own
analytics is a treasure trove waiting for you to uncover its richness.
The
simple way to do it is to pick certain high traffic pages that you site
might have and see what keyword terms are bringing you traffic. See how
often these new keywords emerge and whether they can form an upward
trend.
If your site is new and has no traffic, using a
free tool such as Google keywords trends tool is the next best thing.
Learn how to drill into the trend tool. Select a 90days or 1 year
timeline and start to drill into every category of your niche. Watch out
for 'breakout' terms as these indicate a growing sector that might not
be as competitive.
Your seo keyword strategy forms the
foundation of your entire seo campaign. Without them, you are building
on thin ice. I encourage you to spend more time here than anywhere else.
With the right keywords, you will find that you don't need to depend on
as many links as other people have told you. If you have a weak keyword
set, you will have no choice but to be drawn into a link competition.
It doesn't have to be this way. Link building is expensive and time
consuming. If you can have targeted traffic without backlinks, your seo
campaign will have a higher ROI. It all depends on what query space you
are entering into.
Before moving on to the next stage
of creating site structure and content, I like to touch a bit about how
to judge the competitiveness of your keywords.
How to gauge the competitiveness of a keyword space
Most
of the time, emerging or evolving keywords have little or no
competition. However, it is still prudent to do some keyword competitive
analysis. This is an open field that different people have different
ideas about. For backlink guys, they will stress on looking at the
backlink profile on the competitors using either yahoo backlinks or some
other backlink checker software. This is what I used to do but if you
are picking new keywords, this is totally unnecessary. Besides, there is
no backlink checker tool that is useful.
What you need
is to check whether there are sites that have started to optimise their
own sites for these new keywords. This can be done via search engine
operators.
- intitle tells you whether the keywords are located in the page title
- inurl tells you whether the keywords are used in the url
- inanchor tells you whether the competitor has started to invest in
link building. This will NOT tell you how many actual links have been
built
If you only find 1-2 sites that have all the above, it is quite
uncompetitive. Anything beyond 5 is going to require some serious work.
However, as I said before, there are many new terms being formed
everyday so you don't have to go into the link building game. It is up
to your keyword seo strategy to help you get those terms out.
2. On page SEO strategy
Once
you have determined your keyword set, you need to work on optimising
your onsite SEO. Contrary to popular beliefs, targeting a set of
uncompetitive keywords with good onsite optimisation is sufficient to
get you targeted traffic. No backlinks needed!
Why do onpage SEO
Onsite SEO helps your seo strategy by proving the following benefits:
- Help search engines to crawl and index your site: Many people have downplayed this part but I think it is important
especially if you are developing a seo strategy for a large website. In
such cases, you are more concern about whether the search engine can
crawl and index as much of your site as possible as oppose to your
search engine rankings for any keyword. In many cases, your pages are
not ranked not because it lacks links but simply because they have
not been indexed. In such cases, improving the crawl helps to
improve your index which can bring you more search engine traffic for a
larger variety of keywords.
- Internal links: Internal links do pass relevance to the
pages they point to. In fact, Michael suggested that search engines
trust internal links more than external links because the site owner
will be in the best position to know what keywords the pages should be
related to. That sounds logical although I have no evidence of its
validity. However, I do know that inner links do help to rank pages for
keywords that are not in competitive spaces. Good on page SEO will help
to maximise the use of internal links.
Now that we know why onsite seo is important, let's get to the
actual implementation of onsite seo. There are two basic things that we
have at your disposal to do this: (i) site structure and (ii) seo
content strategy.
Site structure for SEO
One
of the first thing you can do is to find the right site structure that
is right for the keywords. Most of the time, we use blog format but that
might not be the use in terms of onsite SEO. Your navigation, your
promotion links and your site organisation will not be the right
structure that will maximise your exposure to the search engines.
So,
when choosing a site structure, there are a few choices you can pick
from. The most common one is blog and is great for informational based
sites. Other options include
- forums for niches where discussions are important
- data based driven ecommerce stores for people selling physical products
- Q&A site
- A social network
- a mix of the above. You can be innovative and find ways to combine
certain things but do keep the code clean. There is a technical side to
site structure whereby the wrong codes can result in search engines not
indexing your page properly. This is not my area of expertise but I like
to give everyone a heads up on this.
Once the site structure has been decided, here is an onsite
optimization checklist that you can use to maximise the relevancy of
your site to the search engines. The checklist is no means complete as I
am only starting to learn how to do onsite seo after reading through
all the onsite seo tips given by Michael. If you want to learn from the
source, go and read his blog.
Onsite seo checklist
- seo friendly navigation: navigation are important part of
your inner link structure. Remember that your navigation links exist on
EVERY page. Therefore, the keywords used on your navigation effectively
passed the relevance to the pages they are pointing to. Every often, the
home page uses the keyword "home". This need not be the case. You can
always include your main keyword i.e. 'home of dog training guide' if
your main keyword is dog training guide.
Beside the keywords
used in the navigation, you should also consider what pages you want
these navigation links to point to. Ideally, these inner pages should be
hubs within your sites that connect to the rest of the pages of the
site. One good example is a sitemap. By nature a sitemap acts as a hub
for your content and feeding internal links to it help it to strength
other pages that it links to. So, one part of your navigation system can
point to the sitemap.
- create internal hubs: I have mentioned this above but to
explain more clearly, internal hubs can be pages that link to the rest
of the content in your site. For example, you can create an article
titled "top 20 post of mysite.com" where it can link to the 20 most
popular articles at your site. These internal hubs are not only useful
for internal linkage but they are great for your readers as well.
- promotional links: You can use some plugin to cross promote
relevant content across posts, similar to how Amazon recommends similar
product. It is great for both increased readership as well passing
internal links.
- meta tags, page titles, url: These are the normal stuff that other sites have advice.
Use keywords in your meta tags, page titles and url. If you used a
blogging platform, your article titles immediately become your url and
page titles.
- avoid overusing similar keywords in page titles: this is just
my hypothesis but letting your main keyword appear in all your page
titles via some wordpress plugins might be one negative factor in
Panda's algorithm. I am currently testing this by moving all main
keyword from all my page titles.
SEO content strategy
After mapping out your site
structure, it is time to plan out your content strategy, which is just
as important as your keyword research strategy. Content drives targeted
traffic. Without content, there is no basis to draw search engine
traffic from.
Content needs to valuable. I used to
think that purchased content is sufficient. Well, the recent panda just
proves otherwise. So, if you want to create quality that is appealing to
both search engines and human visitors, here are some ideas:
- Your own journals: Write down your own experience or
experiments for the keywords that you want to provide value to. For
example, I created a case study of how I took a site to 1k a month
within 6 months. Readers enjoy that because you are providing your
unique perspective of your own experiences.
- Interviews of experts in your field: If you want provide
interviews that help your readers learn from the leading experts in your
field, it is both useful and relevant.
- In depth tutorials: For certain niches such as design,
beauty, software etc, giving detailed tutorials are a great way to give
value for your readers. This article can be an example (I hope!) of a
detailed guide for anyone who wants to develop a seo strategy for their
website.
- Breaking news or insightful commentary: For people in the
news niche such as tech blogs, you can either to be the first to break
news or provide the most comprehensive analysis of popular events.
Although you can get with by repeating what the top sites have written,
readers will soon find them boring.
- Real product reviews: If you want to go into product niches,
best way is to buy the product and use it. Take lots of images and
videos and write about how the product really works. Nothing beats a
real hands on experience.
- Content strategy for small companies: For small business
owner who want to use SEO strategy, you can use the below as the basis
for insightful and relevant content for your customers:
- Company history: how, why, when you start the company is a good reason to be interesting and relevant
- Case studies: how real customers are using you
- Solve their problems: provide information that solves some of your
customers' problems in your market. For example, if you are a florist,
give ideas on what kind of unique gifts for valentine's day. If you are
an ebook software company, talk about how to organise, find and share
ebooks can be useful.
- Profile of people: the lives of yourself and your employees can make for interesting content.
- Events and functions: when you company has any marketing events, write about them. Use lots of images and videos as well.
Content can be a powerful to enforce the relevance of your site.
A good way to get new post ideas is to look at your stats and what
keywords are driving traffic. Take those keywords and plan some really
good content around them, using the ideas I have suggested above.
Nothing else, this will bring in lots of long tail traffic to your site.
How to do seo copywriting
Now, we get to
the actual writing of the content. With your keywords in place, your
site structure defined and your content ideas thought out, it is time to
write. Here are some seo copywriting tips or best practices that I
often used. You are free to innovate of course. There is nothing fixed
in stone for seo. You need to constantly change and evolve or be left
behind by others who are willing to do so.
- Keyword content targeting: For best results, target
each section of your article with a long tail keyword. Never mind the
traffic volume. Just use them rather than using your own way of writing
which might have zero search volume. I did this in every section of this
article. I used "choose keywords for your article" as this section's
heading before changing it to the currently used "keyword content
targeting". In such instances, you are not betting on any particular
long tail keywords. You just optimising the entire article so that there
is a chance that some of these long tail keywords will bear you some
traffic. For such longtails, I used google suggest rather google keyword
tools as the latter does not show you all the longtails which are
suitable for your particular message that a section of your article
might want to convey.
- Repeating keywords: This still carries a certain
weight in terms of relevance of your content. To avoid being spammy, you
need to write long copies so that the keywords you are targeting get
naturally repeated. For example, I have already repeated the keywords
"seo strategy" many many times because I need to. Of course, you cannot
write long copy by rambling. Each of your points needs careful
deliberation and planning so that it maximises the value of your user.
- Optimise each section for a keyword: It is ok for an article
to carry many different keywords but it is good practice to write in a
way such that each section targets a particular keyword. This is called
micro seo copywriting. I have demonstrated some of these seo techniques
in this article as well. The paragraph above, for instance, targets how
keyword repetition helps your seo strategy.
- Try different keywords: As I have mentioned in the keyword
section, the more popular a keyword is, the more permutations it will
have as people are sick of seeing the same results and are trying to see
alternatives. In the course of your writing, you can take advantage of
this by thinking and trying different keywords that say the same thing.
For example, how to make money online and how to earn money online means
the same thing but I am getting traction for the latter and not the
former. The former is competitive and tough to get in while the former
has more room for me to scrape some of this traffic off the search
engines. If you change the combination of your keywords through
different adjectives and verbs, you will be surprised to find some
unoccupied keyword space.
- Write seo content consistently: You will find that that
writing consistently for a long period of time will produce search
engine traffic even if you don't how to target keywords in your content.
When I started this blog in 2006, I know nothing of SEO and just write.
Now, I am getting search traffic for terms such as twitter startups,
ebook applications without intentionally targeting. Just goes to show
that consistently in producing content can yield search traffic. Using
seo content strategy just gives you better ROI and faster results.
3. SEO linking building strategy
Now
we get to everybody's favourite part of SEO strategy: linkbuilding or
link placement. Frankly, if you look at the amount of information before
this section, you will already know that SEO is more than link
building. I am NOT saying 10k of keyword anchored links will not get you
anywhere but it is not the only solution and far from the most cost
effective.
Why link building is important to seo
Building
links to your site has its place. Firstly, it helps to get new site
crawl and index which I mentioned above is important. If you are using
wordpress or blogspot, there is an automatic system that will ping the
blog servers for you when you published an article. This can help you to
get index without backlinks.
Secondly, backlinks can
give you anchor text relevance. This is the main reason why most SEO
engage in so much link building. It is an attempt to give the page the
links are pointing to relevance through the anchored keywords that are
being used in the links. However, building tonnes of high quality
content over a period of time can give you relevance as well. The latter
process might be longer but it is more cost effective as it helps to
bring in other longtail traffic while giving your site real value. The
backlinks might lose their value passing ability over time, especially
they come from those backlinking network or software tools. I have more
to say about whether all backlinks can help you to rank.
Thirdly,
getting links to your site can give you traffic and recognition. This
marketing aspect of getting links is actually the most important to me
nowadays. If my content is outstanding, I just need to let people know
about it. By placing links in places where my potential readers hang
out, it will drive them back to my site. They may become regular
readers. In fact, they might like the content so much that they give me
natural backlinks. This can only works if you follow section 2 of the
content strategy.
How to get backlinks to your site
Now
that you know why you need links to your site, the key is where to get
the ones that matter. This is where I will not reveal so much
information except to say that go for quality. 10 value passing links
are much better thousands of links that don't pass value.
Unfortunately,
there is no easy way to tell if a link can pass value. The complicated
way is this: if a page ranks for the keywords anchored in the link that
is pointing to it, even though the page itself does not contain the
keywords, then you can safely say that the anchor text has been passed
from the link. The easy way is to use your common sense and get your
links in popular sites that have both traffic and high keyword
authority.
That is all I have to say about your seo
linking strategy. If you want to know about how many links you should
get, how diverse should your link profile is and how varied your
anchored keywords are, I am no interest in these questions because they
are not relevant to me now. There are lots of seo blogs that talk about
such useless things if you want to read about them.
4. SEO metrics for feedback
One
of the least discussed SEO topics is SEO metrics. I am quite surprised
at how little information there is at measuring the success of your SEO
campaign. The most common types of seo metrics that people report is the
number of backlinks and rankings for certain keywords. That is not the
end objective of SEO. The point of doing a SEO strategy is to get more
targeted traffic to your website at the most cost effective ways. Or
else, there is no strategy. It is just slamming links and pretending to
do SEO.
What are the SEO metrics that matter
In
this section, I will be talking about some personal seo metrics that I
am tracking. Mind you, this is a new area for me as well and it will
probably be the most blogged about seo topic for the next few months in
my blog. Again, read Michael Martinez's SEO theory if you want to learn
more. I know nothing when compared to him.
- Emerging keyword dashboard: This is, hands down, my most
important SEO metric. I constantly look for new keywords in my analytics
data so that I can spot new areas to write and dominate. Currently,
there is no seo metrics tool (that I can know of) which can help to
track these new keywords. What I do is to look at my Google analytics
and dot down in an excel spreadsheet the new keywords that look
promising. It is primitive but it gets the job done. I am going to try
is Fraser Cain's keyword strategy tool.
It seems to be able to spot keywords that are non competitive and yet
relevant to my niche. In fact, I am going to do a 3 month case study on
whether this tool can help to improve aaronchua.com's search traffic.
Stay Tune! For those who want to check out how this tool works, click on
the banner below to see the demo videos:
- Search traffic growth: The next important thing is how much
your site is growing in terms of search engine traffic. Why you should
track this metric should be self explanatory.
- Cache rate: I am tracking how often search engines cache my
side. The more often my site is cached, the more crawling and indexing
my site will get. With new keywords, all you need is to ensure your site
is constantly being cache so that your content has a chance to rank. A
low cache rate might mean you need a couple of links to get your site
going. You should not need too many.
- % of site index: It is impossible to get 100% of your site
index if you have lots of articles. The goal is to get as many indexed
as possible. The more articles that are indexed, the higher the chance
of your site getting all the long tail traffic. Section 2 gives you some
ideas on how to improve this through hubs.
- Hubs to articles ratio: There should be some kind of ratios
between your hubs and the number of articles your site has. Besides a
sitemap, I can't think of a natural way for one hub to link to all
articles. This is why maintaining a ratio is important as you get to see
when you need to add another hub to strength your site's index and
crawl rate.
Conclusion
I hope the above makes it
easier (if not more confusing) on what is a proper seo strategy. It is
not always about getting more links. In fact, you might never need that
many backlinks if you think through your entire strategy. SEO strategy
is about an entire process of keyword research, content generation, site
structure, getting feedback and iterate.
When you are doing your seo strategy, you might not need
all the elements. In fact, you should experiment and come out with
something better. If you do, let me know and I will be more than happy
to share them here.
If you enjoy this article on how to develop a seo strategy, share it using the sharing buttons below, you lazy lot!
12:01
aaronchua
