Basic SEO Wisdom
This is a story about a poor guy with an inept domain that
wanted to build a site geared for a very competitive keyword and
his long, agonizing journey toward the true light of SEO wisdom.
Here's a little foundation for what I'm about to cover here. A
while back I bought a stupid domain name. It was one of those
fairly useless domain names that might have been good for maybe
selling cellphones or something. The thing is, though, I'm a
poor guy. I don't have time to taylor a site for cellphones with
the pitiful amount of money I have. This was my thinking not
long ago at least.
After sitting on this domain name forever I decided to put a
site up there and give myself to the study of SEO or search
engine optimization. It seemed like an interesting subject and I
knew to those that managed to learn SEO, marketing, and some web
design would fall infinite riches. It really sounded good to me.
So I went for the throat so to speak. More precisely I picked
out some search terms that I will probably never be able to get
traffic for in my lifetime. Smart I know. This had the grand
side effect of having the site sandboxed by Yahoo and Google
until pigs flew.
Recently they flew, however, and I've come out of the sandbox
altogether and hit face to face with a few SEO surprises. I did
manage to get a tiny trickle of traffic but not from the terms I
tried to get it from. After trying to optimize those pages for
the key terms I received traffic from I got more traffic. This
of course started me down a long road of speculation and hair
pulling.
After many a night of such I've come up with a few things that I
believe will give anyone the power to eventually pull traffic
off the net and covert it into a good decent living. I'll
probably write an ebook and make millions one of these days.
Optimize by the page Don't fall into the trap of focusing
totally on building this far flung and far reaching site that
will rule the world or make you millions instantly. Unless you
have lots of money you're going to need to work for your
traffic. Plan your site out carefully and make sure each page is
a precision crafted piece of art.
I love serverside scripting and dynamic websites but I've come
to realize there is a danger that people will overuse it. I know
I have. If your site is dynamically generted, make sure every
page isn't a total cookie cutter image of every other page. It's
good to have the same navigation and same general layout but
each page also needs to be special. Each page should have
careful, proven SEO techniques applied to maybe a single key
phrase.
Don't try to optimize one page for a handful of phrases. Just
focus on one phrase. Do your keyword research and, whatever you
do, don't haul off and pick a key phrase with 2 billion wealthy
competitors in Google. Pick something that can be attained and
can get you some traffic relatively fast. Select a phrase that
is as specific as possible to your particlar niche and still
gets a couple thousand or so searches per month from Yahoo.
Whatever you do, make sure that one web page has good, solid,
desirable content that is keyword rich and one of a kind. This
will help make it special. At the same time your content
obviously needs to lead the customer toward your intented goal
for monetizing your traffic.
Keep it simple I've found to my dismay that building a complex
web site with all the content management stuff and all the
database thrills isn't exactly what really gets the attention of
search engines. Weirdly enough this can be true for internet
surfers too. A nice, clean layout with very accessible content
and intuitive navigation will be recognized by both search
engines and surfers alike. If you can figure that part out
you've just pinned down about 90% of SEO in my opinion.
Engineer your site for your traffic When you start getting
search engine traffic to your site take a very close look at
what they are searching for. I assume you have some kind of
statistics program and can mostly see what search terms people
are using to get to your site. When someone comes in on a
keyword or phrase you haven't optimized for do a little
research. Does the page they are coming to need touched up to
include the search term or would this search term merit its own
search engine optimized page to handle the traffic.
Conclusion With every page you add you are gaining another
potentially valuable piece of internet real estate. If you're
doing your job right then eventaully each page should get its
own traffic and you should begin to attain your goals. Patience
and learning are the name of the SEO game.
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