I want to give you a few more things to think about as you excel and grow in the craft of search engine marketing. If you are anything like me, you were hooked the first time you really made a difference to someone else's success. I soon realized that being able to help business owners to get results from these optimization methods and strategies could also be amazingly profitable. I found out that customers are your greatest resources and many of them are quite generous when you make an impact on their business. So the topic here is for those who want to profit from their skills (if you are not already doing very well and having an awesome time already).
It may seem like a strange thing to talk about but before I begin, I'll say this. There are many folks out there offering various SEO services and they are still not getting the profits that they would like to make. They are not REALLY profiting the way they might if they took a little different approach. The solutions that business owners need to really make a difference in the bottom line, require more than just bringing volumes of traffic to a site. You need targeted traffic mixed with a web strategy to compel response.
There's a reason not every chess piece moves the same way. Together, you can use the tactical advantages of a knight, a queen or a rook to execute your strategy. There are chess players that react to every move as it comes, playing the game at a purely tactical level. This is the way most of us start (and pretty much still the way I play). You don't think ahead to what the next move could be. Strategy plays no part. Each turn, you look at the board and make what appears to be the best move.
Now, if your heart is set on becoming a competitive chess player, you probably won't go too far with this tactical approach. At some point, you'll have to start playing the game at the strategic level. You will need to look at the big picture, and explore the possible impact of all your opponent's future moves.
In my opinion, search marketing is a game that's been played at the tactical level for the past 8 years. Strategy hasn't really been part of the game. That's going to have to change.
Keyword density. When it comes to SEO copywriting, this has to be one of the most talked about subjects. Why? Because keywords are the very foundation of search engine copywriting. Without keywords we wouldn't even have SEO copywriting. Because keywords (or more accurately, keyphrases) play such an important role in search engine copywriting, it might make sense that there are certain rules and regulations - certain formulas - that should be followed. It might make sense, but, I'm sorry to say, the mystery. the magic. is more like a myth.
I have a guess as to where these magic formulas come from. Someone brags to their friend that they got #1 ranking for a particular keyphrase. The friend studiously looks over the site and starts taking notes. "He used this phrase eight times in a 500-word piece of copy. He put the keywords in here and there and over here, too. That means you have to put keyphrases in these places and reach a keyword density of 1.6% in order to get a #1 ranking." Not so! Let me explain why keyword density formulas don't fly.
One of the challenges facing any new industry is creating a demand for and an awareness of the industry in the mind of the consumer. Since many Website owners have only a general idea of what search engine optimization (SEO) is and how it works, I've come up with an analogy from another industry that makes it easier to understand.
One-way link building is a great way to improve your link popularity and ranking in the search engines. One-way links are more difficult to obtain than traditional reciprocal links, but pay off in securing solid long-term search engine ranking results.
Robin Nobles was the very first person to develop a structured series of comprehensive courses and lessons which are recognized and approved by the US educational system for training people in search engine marketing skills. Robin Nobles celebrates her 6th year in the online Web training business with her ever popular SEO certification courses at http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.
Hattiesburg, MS (PRWEB) July 15, 2004 -- Today we bring you the 4th in a series of interviews conducted by Robin's business partner John Alexander, who is looking up some of Robin's very earliest online students and asking them about their recollections of what it was like building SEO skills way back in 1998 and how far they've come in the SEO industry since then.
Last year, we informed you about the start of Nutch, an open source search engine project that tries to compete with the major players in the search engines market. What has happened since then? It's time to take a look if the efforts to build an open source search engine have led to results.
One of my favorite subjects to teach on at our live SEO Mastery Workshops is that of keyword research and the behavior of a specific target audience using my all time favorite research tool, Wordtracker.
For those who have not heard of, Wordtracker it is a Web based service that will help you discover which keywords and phrases will be most effective for attracting the right audience to your Web site. Not only that, but the service also tells you how competitive your keywords are (or how many other competing Web pages have been optimized with those keywords in mind) plus how many people have actually searched for those keywords in the past within the last 60 days on the major search engines.
Wordtracker can be used for even more powerful things than just "researching keywords." I'll be revealing much more in the future about the impact of researching "visitor behavior" vs. keywords.
Sometimes questions will arise around the subject of gateway information pages or doorway pages. People have heard that "doorway pages" are BAD and some have stated that search engines "hate doorway pages".
For clarification on these type of issues, let's start by explaining some simple ground rules looking beyond the jargon and terminology.