SEO Sucks - Part One
I mean you have to understand the basics, but everything you need to know about SEO can be learned online for free in about 30 minutes. The rest of the SEO minefield sucks.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization should then become intuitive and certainly not calculated. There is no need to count the keywords in your post and reach a certain percentage, not to high, not to low.
“SEO is a hyped up strategy that was invented by internet marketing gurus to keep your hopes up, keep you dreaming and convince you that they have the secret you need.”
Getting good traffic from search engines, for free, is more about quality and work then it is about tricks and tactics.
You pick the article you want to write, do a bit of Googling and research, work out what your best target phrase should be, simply based on good traffic, forget competition. Just use the Google Keyword Tool type in the theme of your article, run the tool, switch to exact match and pick the 3-5 word phrase with the best traffic. Now just go back and write your article with that phrase in mind. Remember SEO sucks if your ‘trying’ to use it. It will destroy your article and make that suck also.
You don’t even have to use your target phrase exactly as is, just keep your article real and natural. But above all else, put some decent time into your article, research well, and compile the best article you can for that theme/phrase.
How much you use the phrase in the article depends purely on being real and keeping your article on topic at the same time. Lets say your keyword is ‘SEO Sucks’ avoid the temptation to stuff it in and over bold it, use it when its called for or sneak in an additional phrase like, I suck on SEO for a living or SEO probably works, its my writing that sucks.
Sure you include a few images, name the images based on your target phrase, bold the keyword sentences, use it in a header, use it in the title, use it in the url, use it in your image alt tags, but again, not exactly. You can also link out to a relevant and related article and link internally to a page on your site. But only if its needed and makes sense to do so. When SEO doesn’t suck it means it has become 100% intuitive.
Now… For the best thing you can do!
Better than SEO
Write 5 more articles on that topic and schedule them to be published on your site over time (hours, days, weeks), these articles can touch on aspects within the first article or they can take up different angles or just be part 1-5 of a series. Whats important is to have your target phrase (or a variation of) inside each article and have that phrase linking back internally to the original article.
Most people when they attempt to take out a key phrase and get ranked for it using SEO, simply try with one article and stop there. Write 5+ articles on that theme and your chances of beating the competition have improved 5-fold. You don’t have to out SEO them, just out write them with Quality and Quantity.
And finally, if your article is really worth getting traffic to - and by that I mean; A) its a bloody good article worth reading; B) it is surrounded by some form of monetization for you like, adsense, your ebook, your product, an affiliate product, an email list opt in, or your services - well, then its worth going the next step and making sure the article get its full potential of attention.
The final step is a combination of satellite sites, bookmarking site and syndication to dominate more real estate for the target keyphrase and also provide a few backlinks.
When I do this on my serious niche sites, it follows 3 ‘potential’ steps and I say ‘potential’ because sometimes step one is enough.
- Write The Article
I put one full day into creating a kick-ass article which is often split into parts for the purpose of internal linking. I do a regional specific recent Google news search, a Youtube recent video search and a Twitter search every day that I work on my niche site. A lot of my inspiration to write comes from there. I research my niche whether I am writing or not because its a passion and its what I would do online if I wasn’t into making money from it.
And when I have written the best possible article I can muster up in 4-8 hours I simply promote the article using a proven system that has now become a habit, almost automatic.
The next part of this article has been scheduled for tomorrow.
… See SEO Sucks part 2