Best SEO Strategy

[John Wesley]

Which is the better SEO strategy for a blog, choosing one or two keywords and trying to incorporate them into nearly every post, or posting on a wide variety of subjects and hoping to draw traffic from a wide range of keywords.

Obviously content is number one, but what is the best way to boost organic traffic?

[Jill]

Hey John,

There's never any reason to focus on the same keyword phrases on every page of your site (or blog post). At most, the search engines will only show 2 pages of your site for any search result.

You want to research the hundreds of keyword phrases related to what you offer and think about 3- 5 phrases for each page of your site (or blog).

Hope this helps!

Jill

[John Wesley]

Thanks Jill, that actually makes a lot of sense. I'll be sure to remember that when writing future posts.

[judge45]

Hey Jill,

Is machine based search like Google the answer. They have the market or most of it, but I think their service sucks a@#

Wikipedia are going to try later this year to do a people powered search like wiki for searching the web, but the market is sceptical of gaming, spam and bias.

Machines are faster than humans, but are about quantity, not quality, humans are better at quality, so wouldn't it make sense to bring to market a global human based resource for finding stuff totally reliant on humans.

I mean isn't that the whole web anyway, it's not machines, it's humans accessing other humans and their human knowledge.

Jeff

[tobyhede]

One of the insights the Google people had was in using links to rate content ... people create links and can evaluate content much better than a computer, so in a way Google already uses people to create it's search indexes.

Regarding keywords and your blog, you can find a number of Keyword analysis tools ... Google AdWords has some, and there are specialist tools as well.

I'd just concentrate on writing great content around your chosen topic areas. The rest should follow pretty naturally.

[Jill]

Machines are faster than humans, but are about quantity, not quality, humans are better at quality, so wouldn't it make sense to bring to market a global human based resource for finding stuff totally reliant on humans.

My opinion...

Been there done that. Wikepedia's new idea for an engine powered by people is nothing new. It's just a new twist on the directory. Directories have never been as good as search engines (again, imo) because you will never be getting a chance at finding EVERYTHING on your topic. Sure, you might get some good quality stuff, assuming the editors got around to adding it. But if you want everything (as I do) you need machines like Google.

Sometimes a human-edited directory suffices. But it definitely is not a substitute.

[Isis Kali]

SEO is one thing that I can't seem to get a grip on, no matter how much I read about it. It just seems so troublesome and overwhelming, especially when my focus is to write something solid that's not riddled with keywords. Gah! Any advice?

[MartialDev]

Originally Posted by Jill

There's never any reason to focus on the same keyword phrases on every page of your site (or blog post). At most, the search engines will only show 2 pages of your site for any search result.

I disagree. It depends on the specific keywords, the niche and your competition. The issue is not how many of your pages are shown, but whether they appear on page 1 or page 100 of the search results.

Search engines do not only count keywords; they also estimate things like relevance, quality and trustworthiness. These are calculated from the target page contents, and its host domain, and incoming and outgoing links, and more.

[Jill]

I disagree. It depends on the specific keywords, the niche and your competition. The issue is not how many of your pages are shown, but whether they appear on page 1 or page 100 of the search results.

I don't understand what you're disagreeing on. What I said doesn't contradict what you said.

Search engines index pages not sites. Therefore it doesn't help to have 100 pages all focused on the same keywords. You won't get any advantage from it.

That's all I said, and that's 100% true, which I can tell you from my 12 years doing SEO.

Search engines do not only count keywords; they also estimate things like relevance, quality and trustworthiness. These are calculated from the target page contents, and its host domain, and incoming and outgoing links, and more.

Correct.

[MartialDev]

Originally Posted by Jill

I don't understand what you're disagreeing on. What I said doesn't contradict what you said.

The gist of it is that if you are writing about sprockets, you are better served by links from other sprocket pages than from random pages.

[Jill]

Originally Posted by MartialDev

The gist of it is that if you are writing about sprockets, you are better served by links from other sprocket pages than from random pages.

One would think so, and of course that's good practice as you'll probably get more traffic that way.

But in reality, the search engines are far from being able to truly judge relevance that way. Therefore, pretty much all links are judged the same by them, and are weighted according to the overall popularity of the page in which the link is on.

In other words, a link from the New York Times home page, even if it's got nothing to do with what you sell/offer, is going to help your site in the rankings a lot more than one from joe shmoes blog emporium which nobody knows about, but happens to sell the same thing you do.

[John Wesley]

Very true. Now, if only I could get my blog on the NY Times.

[Dating Specialist]

Originally Posted by John Wesley

Very true. Now, if only I could get my blog on the NY Times.

me too...

Before that happens, or rather to make that happen, first let's continue to focus on generating great content and keep improving on it!

[Savage]

There's something to be said for creating a lot of content. This site probably has about a million words of original content (estimated as 500 articles x 2000 words each), and last month my logs show that it received search traffic from over 40,000 unique search terms -- that's individual search terms, not searches.

Some search terms are common phrases where I have top 10 rankings and receive hundreds or thousands of search visits per month (my #1 term delivered over 8000 visits last month). But most of those search terms are long or unusual phrases that were only searched on by one or two people, and they happened to score a match on one of my pages. No single search term is crucial by itself -- it's the long tail that matters. The top terms do bring in decent traffic, but it's not the end of the world if I lose my positions on them.

To rise in the ranks you also need people to link to your pages, especially with relevant keywords in their link text.

I find the strategy that works best for me is not to worry much about how the search engines work and focus on creating valuable content for human beings. That includes creating meaningful headlines to make it easy for people to find what they want instead of using clever or cutesy titles that make the site less usable. Since quality content is what the search engines ultimately want to serve up, I feel this strategy is fairly well aligned with their goals, so I expect that improvements to their algorithms are more likely to benefit me than hurt me.

To sum it up: The best way to rank high in the search engines is to create content that deserves to be there.

[Isis Kali]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

There's something to be said for creating a lot of content. This site probably has about a million words of original content (estimated as 500 articles x 2000 words each), and last month my logs show that it received search traffic from over 40,000 unique search terms -- that's individual search terms, not searches.

Some search terms are common phrases where I have top 10 rankings and receive hundreds or thousands of search visits per month (my #1 term delivered over 8000 visits last month). But most of those search terms are long or unusual phrases that were only searched on by one or two people, and they happened to score a match on one of my pages. No single search term is crucial by itself -- it's the long tail that matters. The top terms do bring in decent traffic, but it's not the end of the world if I lose my positions on them.

To rise in the ranks you also need people to link to your pages, especially with relevant keywords in their link text.

I find the strategy that works best for me is not to worry much about how the search engines work and focus on creating valuable content for human beings. That includes creating meaningful headlines to make it easy for people to find what they want instead of using clever or cutesy titles that make the site less usable. Since quality content is what the search engines ultimately want to serve up, I feel this strategy is fairly well aligned with their goals, so I expect that improvements to their algorithms are more likely to benefit me than hurt me.

To sum it up: The best way to rank high in the search engines is to create content that deserves to be there.

I agree. You'll make yourself crazy trying to keyword this and that, or get the perfect percentage of whatever. I'm getting my hits from a common phrase, and from site tags. People are also now searching for things like my name, or my blog titles. Plus, carnivals are so, so good! They really get you out there. Or...maybe I'm poo-pooing SEO because it drives me bonkers, heh.

[Ibanez]

Another important factor is patience. It takes time to get ranked up there for words or phrases.

But general SEO strategies are just....(no particular order)

1. Good quality links to your site
2. Good Content
3. Valid XHTML/CSS

[Leonard]

The best seo strategy really, is producing good quality content. Steve has stressed on this point umpteen times and has results to show for it. Remember that you are writing for people and not search engines, though it does not hurt to incorporate the keywords you are targeting in your title and post.

[dangerlarson]

Originally Posted by Jill

Hey John,

There's never any reason to focus on the same keyword phrases on every page of your site (or blog post). At most, the search engines will only show 2 pages of your site for any search result.

You want to research the hundreds of keyword phrases related to what you offer and think about 3- 5 phrases for each page of your site (or blog).

Hope this helps!

Jill

John,

If you meant, "focus on VARIATIONS of the same keywords" and your blog has a very limited niche then you could be successful. However, this would limit your growth.

Example: I have a site related to a sport which focused on two competing products. In each blog post I discussed various aspects of these two products. Due to perhaps some good timing, quality posts, and a tightly focused theme of the site, I rank right below one manufacturer of a product and above the manufacturer of the competing product for most related keywords.

However, those sites usually don't pull in a ton of money and do not have as defensible of a position as a larger site that covers a bit more ground.

[Jill]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

I find the strategy that works best for me is not to worry much about how the search engines work and focus on creating valuable content for human beings. That includes creating meaningful headlines to make it easy for people to find what they want instead of using clever or cutesy titles that make the site less usable. Since quality content is what the search engines ultimately want to serve up, I feel this strategy is fairly well aligned with their goals, so I expect that improvements to their algorithms are more likely to benefit me than hurt me.

Yep, definitely! That's the same strategy that has always worked for me and my site. It's a great business model as well for the type of conversions Steve wants to make.

However, for other types of businesses, there are plenty that don't necessarily need content for content's sake. Not every site has to be an informational site. For those sites and businesses, it's imperative to optimize for the specific keyword phrases people are using in the search engines when they're looking for those types of products and services.

Long tail is great as you don't have to optimize for them, you just create great content that naturally uses them. But for the more competitive phrases, you definitely do have to optimize for them, one way or another. (Good thing or I'd be out of a job!)

Originally Posted by Ibanez

But general SEO strategies are just....(no particular order)

1. Good quality links to your site
2. Good Content
3. Valid XHTML/CSS

Actually, #3 is a myth. As long as the search engines can find and index the information from your site, they don't give even the tiniest hoot as to whether the code is valid. This is a crazy myth that has been circulating for the past few years. Usually by those who create valid XHTML code as a service!