SEO Techniques and Performance Optimization

SEO is a powerful tool when trying to get a website ranked. The fact is, all keywords are fair game, but you have to make that value judgment, do you really want to take on companies that own the keywords loans or mortgages? I learned this from the Ken Evoy Interview.  Some of these are blue chip publicly trading companies with millions of pounds at their disposal to employ some of the world’s best SEO basics minds and SEO teams who continually build back links and so on.

You’ve got to make the decision are you really prepared to take these companies on? Some of them do just own those keywords. So I think there definitely has to be a judgment call. That’s not to say all keywords are impossible. If you were absolutely determined that you wanted to rank number one for loans or mortgages or porn, huge traffic, huge volume keywords, you really have to decide how much time and money you’re prepared to put into it, because it’s going to be a great struggle.

It’s just a matter of identifying that. I look for, I suppose, what you’d say is that low hanging fruit. I go for the second tier to third tier type keywords. Sometimes I go for the long tail really model specific type keywords. Other times I’ll go for ones slightly more aggressive. The way I do it, when you think of a tiered structure of a website, on your home page, tier one is usually that slightly more competitive term. The tier two is slightly less competitive and then tier three is the really long tail words. It all feeds back up to that home page, especially if you get all your on page linking structure right.

Let’s consider why links are so absolutely crucial for SEO.

I deal with a lot of companies and I’m pitching for business. Some of the companies I’m dealing with will actually show me the proposals that my competitors have given them. These proposals will be realms of paper about why they need to optimize the alt text and get a keyword density of 2.57, and they need to rewrite the description tags and so on.

If you do a search in Google and you type in click here and notice Adobe is ranking number one, ranking for the term click here and yet there is apparently no on page SEO done on that, there’s no click here in the title tag, not in the keyword tag, it’s not in the description tag, it’s not mentioned once on the page, it’s not in the site map and so on. Then you realize the point for that term, that surely is because it’s got millions of links around the net pointing to it with the phrase click here. Links are essentially the life blood of SEO.

Links is where it’s at. As far as SEO is concerned, you can rank a website, even a Flash website, that doesn’t have any information that can be read on the site by the search engine. It’s purely based on the number of links and the Adobe example is a perfect example of that.

I don’t know of anyone doing any tests to verify this, but they say the classic 80-20 applies. 80% of your ranking factor comes from links, whereas 20% of your ranking factor comes from your on page optimization. Whether or not that’s true, the idea is, the most important component of any SEO campaign is the links. So I think it just comes back to the way that the Google search algorithm was designed.

It’s based on that academic research report theory and the idea that a research report gains weight in the eyes of the community the more people who are referencing it in their research reports. It’s like one big popularity contest online. It’s citation. The more times you’re cited, your research report gains weight in the community. The same sort of thing is happening online obviously. A citation is when someone links to you from their website. That’s when your website starts to gain a little bit of extra weight.

It’s all about having the right links. It’s also important that those links are saying the right thing when they link to you because you want to make sure you’re telling the search engines what it is that this particular website is about.



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