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Ascending the Pyramid: Building a successful SEO campaign
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques and strategies for building a website (or modifying an existing one) such that its pages will appear in the top, natural results of search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN, for relevant key phrases. If your website sells toy fire trucks, then, an SEO campaign might focus upon getting your website to rank #1 whenever you type "toy fire trucks" in a search engine.
Don't you have to pay for that?
Yes and no. SEO does not refer to paid listings, sometimes called "Sponsored Links," which usually appear in a designated section of the search results page. In those cases, the more you pay the more prominently your ad will appear. It is certainly one way to promote your website, and it is a strategy that has been successful for many people. However, this is entirely different from SEO.
SEO refers to the natural results, in which the search engine has ranked web pages according to relevancy. When you type "toy fire trucks," into Google, about six million results are returned. The first page has ten natural listings. The first web page that appears is one that Google's complex ranking algorithm has determined to be the most relevant for that phrase. The second result is the second most relevant, and so on.
Relevancy is determined by many factors, some known and others still kept secret by the engineers at Google and other companies. The two most important factors, however, are content and back-links. Web site content is the actual "text," or written material that composes the pages of your website. Back-links are all of the instances in which another website links to yours.
So how do I make my website #1 in the natural results?
SEO is not easy. Gaining a high ranking in the search engines is a long process that requires intense commitment and patience. No matter what the nature of the product or servce you are offering, the chances are good that there is a lot of competition out there. My personal rule of thumb is, if you want to rank #1, you must be #1. If you want to rank #1 for lawn mowers, writing one page or even fifty pages about lawn mowers, using all the right phrases with the correct "word density ratio" may not be sufficient to gain that ranking . You must, quite simply, make your website the most relevant, informative and entertaining on the web for that search phrase.
If you want to rank for "lawn mowers," you had better be prepared to "write the book" on lawn mowers, research everything you possibly can about the subject, the history as well as the future, and build a large following of people who agree that, when it comes to "lawn mowers," your website says it all.
Building a successful SEO campaign.
Having said this, attaining a high ranking for whatever search phrases best describe your website is a worthwhile goal, and one that will require planning and some method by which your progress can be measured. The one devised by informationarchitech for our clients (as well as our own websites) is called the "Key Term Pyramid."
To develop a "key term pyramid," and mark your progress, you are going to need two important tools that are staples of the SEO trade.
The first is a key term search tool. These are usually online programs that allow you to search the databases, or portions of the databases, used by major search engines that contain information about the phrases users are actually entering into the search boxes of Google, Yahoo or MSN. For example, if you enter "toy truck" into the Overture Inventory Keyword Selecto Tool, you might see the following results:
| Searches done in June 2006 | |
|---|---|
| Count | Search Term |
| 5985 | truck toy |
| 1601 | toy fire truck |
| 833 | toy garbage truck |
| 722 | hess toy truck |
| 479 | monster truck toy |
| 390 | toy dump truck |
| 353 | collectible toy truck |
These results give you some idea of the terms people are actually using when searching for toy fire trucks. You can see that "toy truck" is the most popular phrase, but "toy fire" and "toy garbage truck" are also often used, so you should gear your content towards those phrases as well. Generally speaking, the higher the "count" (which is really just a relative measure of the popularity of a term) the more difficult it will be to attain a high ranking for that phrase.
A key word search tool can be used to be used to construct the key word pyramid you will be using in your campaign.
The second tool you will need is one that helps you gauge your progress in the rankings. Googlerankings.com is probably the best one available. This website will allow you to check your websites ranking for any key phrase within the first 1000 results. Once you have familiarized yourself with these tools, you are ready to begin building your pyramid.
Building your key phrase pyramid
Let us suppose you have decided to start your own web design business. Incidently, this is probably one of the most competitve fields you could choose, but if that is your passion, this fact should not stop you. You decide that you want to eventually rank on the first page of Google for the term "web design." Given the competition, you should be prepared for years of work as you begin building the best, most informative and entertaining site on the Internet about "web design."
In the mean time, however, you have bills to pay, and you cannot wait around for a top ranking for the phrase "web design" before landing your first job. Instead, you should begin by targeting less competitive terms and work your way up.
A key phrase pyramid has your most desirable search phrase at the very top, in this case "web design." Beneath this top level are "secondary phrases." Secondary phrases contain your phrase plus one additional term. Beneath this level are the tertiary phrases, which contain your phrase plus two additional terms. You should build your pyramid as deep as the key phrase search tool can provide data.
You begin your campaign, then, by writing content and procuring links that point to your site using the key phrases at the bottom of the pyramid. For example, if I were trying to promote my own site, informationarchitech for the phrase "web site design company," it would be best to try to find sites that will exchange links with me, and point to my site in this way:
Informationarchitech - web site design company.
It would also be a good idea to write a number of pages that focus on this topic, and use this phrase about 2-3% of the time in the text.
Realistically speaking, however, even the phrase "web site design company" is highly competitive, and could probably use a pyramid of its own. One approach would be to add regional qualifiers. For example, our company is located in Lafayette, Louisiana. Lafayette Louisiana web site design company might be a good place to start, followed by Louisiana web site design company, etc.
You should create an excel spreadsheet containing a list of the terms you are working on, and check your rankings in Googlerankings.com weekly. There is something very encouraging about being able to see the results of your efforts, even if it means moving from position 500 to 490. Given the vast number of websites available, getting in the first 1,000 results can be an accomplishment in itself and is a much more encouraging start than being off the map completely.
If you or your company desires assistance in building and maintaining an SEO campaign, do not hesitate to contact us for a free quote on our SEO services.