Competitive Strategies

Low-Competitive vs. High-Competitive Sites Your chosen keyword space directly impacts the scope and what kind of SEO strategy you will need to implement for success. Websites that sell to a national or global market in a competitive industry need a different SEO strategy (and overall marketing strategy) than a site that caters to a local or regional market, or for a product in a niche category. For highly-competitive sites that target keyword phrases that are shorter, more generic, and that...

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SEO Monitoring and Tracking

Monitoring Your Site TrafficThis is a must-do activity. If you are not viewing and analyzing your site traffic and visitor statistics over time, you are essentially flying blind. This would be akin to a retail store not tracking how many customers come into their store, what they buy, and on which days.You should first take advantage of the free statistics or “stats” program that most Web hosting companies offer in their packages. These work by reading the contents of the server log file for your...

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Adopting a Natural Linking Mindset

Google favors sites that look like they were built and are managed as if the search engines didn’t exist. That means not doing anything that looks like you did it JUST for the sake of trying to game your rankings. In many cases, sites that complain of being penalized are simply no longer showing up highly on Google searches where they never really belonged in the first place.A slew of questionable link-building tactics that used to work great no longer do. Ever wonder why some really crappy, minimal-content,...

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Creating Content for Links

Writing Articles For Publication & SyndicationYou should consider creating timely one-page articles about a product or service that you offer. Something that addresses industry issues or solves a customer problem perhaps. People who spend time writing online articles find their material published and distributed all over the Web in short order.This is a sure-fire way to get links. Make sure you include a keyword-rich link back to your site at the bottom of the page. In this way, you control...

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Managing A Link Building Campaign

There are two main classes of links, one-way and reciprocal:One-way links. These include links in search directories, ezines, blogs, news sites and any other site that doesn’t request that you link back to that site. Google currently values one-way links more than two-way (reciprocal) links.Reciprocal (two-way links). These are links where a site links to you in exchange for you linking back to that site. Reciprocal linking has been abused in the past by everyone madly linking to each other, regardless...

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Submitting Your Site To Directories

Submitting your site to search directories should be your step in link-building. Many have an inexpensive one-time, lifetime listing cost. This is money well-spent and is the best way to get PageRank to new sites quickly. Although directories provide less traffic compared to search engines, the quality of that traffic can be better targeted as you are listed on a specific category.Search directories contain listings that are ordered under categories and sub-categories. Site listings are placed into...

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Domains And Subdomains

Multiple Domains – Is it Worth It?If your site contains more than one major subject – like baby diapers and garage door openers, you should consider splitting your site into multiple sites, one site per subject. This case is largely a no-brainer.If you have a site that has several related, but distinct groups of products or services, the case is not so clear-cut. You may be better off spending your time expanding the size of your main site and organizing it better.Should you decide to create more...

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Linking Your pages Toether

Before we continue, it is time to introduce the concept of Google PageRank (PR). PageRank is discussed in more detail later, but is introduced here in order to understand why it matters how you link pages on your website together.PageRank is a numeric value that Google places on how important a page is on the Web. PageRank is determined by how many incoming links there are that point to a page.Incoming links are links that point to a page from another page. Such links may be located on pages on...

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