Search Engine Optimization

As mentioned in the introduction, search engine optimization is a highly manual trait, as most of the process comes down to link building, and you cant automate content creation, networking, link requests, link exchanges and link buying. There are tools that ease the process of link discovery, tracking of the emails, checking for the links in place, but the whole process needs human time and human creativity. Sure you can get some software that spams blog comments for you, another one for auto directory submissions, another one for harvesting emails and another one for sending and tracking link exchanges.

You wont get far with it. The power of automation tools, black hat hacks and software comes with using it in the right way, the white hat way. You wont find anywhere on how to use the tools, which tools are the best, and the most effective techniques because people who know them keep them a secret. Yes it all comes to down to links, content and branding, but if you are in an over saturated ultra competitive field, the “build content and links will come” approach pushed by the big G does not work. When link buys is business as usual for competitors, and aggressive techniques bombard link profiles, you have no choice but to do it as well, and do it better. Many tools help with this, but it is up to you to find them, recognize them, spend few hundred or thousand bucks testing them, and learning how to use them. The tools described in the previous posts are the basic public roster. Do your research and discover more link building tools.

Content is an essential part of SEO. “Content is king” is a term you will hear a lot, especially from Google’s Matt Cutts. When writing content, such as blog posts or regular articles, you may not always have the time nor the patience to do proper keyword research and add all the long tail keywords to the article. I know I don’t do it all the time, but as you put effort into it you will reap the rewards in the form of traffic. Up to 30% percent (or 10% – 40% can’t remember exactly) of all Google queries have never been searched on Google before. This means that although if your main target is that big juicy competitive phrase, a lot of traffic will come from long tail. If you look at analytics you will see that actually up to 50% -  60% of all the traffic comes through long tail, with the key phrases you could never think about!

So how do you capture all this long tail traffic? Well, you write the content, as much of it as possible, Google will do the rest. This article however, focuses on landing pages. Pages designed to rank on search results for specific terms (usually with at least few hundred – thousand exact searches according to the keyword tools) and pages designed to convert that traffic. Getting the traffic is apart of the equation. Getting that traffic to convert is another. You will find many companies that specialize on SEO, such as this one, and you will also find a lot of companies that specialize in conversion optimization. How do you convert the traffic is another article (in fact there are books), and we won’t describe here, but to give you the run down it involves: A/B and multivariate testing, persuasive copywriting, web usability and web design.