Establish a Level of a Stability with your SEO Strategy - Essentials
(Page 3 of 5 )
Now that we’ve got that basic tenet out of the way let’s move on to a checklist of SEO essentials that will lend stability to your SEO campaign:
It’s all about links
Understand that the search engines are based on the interlinking structure of web pages. In laymen’s terms: It’s all about links. I’m not just talking about backlinks from other domains. The way that you interlink the pages of your own site is critical to your long term SEO success. Also, creating new pages of relevant content for your site (articles, tutorials, forum subpages) creates new relevant backlinks for your site. Although a link from an exterior domain is more influential than an interior domain link, search engines like Google do factor in the “votes” from the interior pages of your own site. This is why you’ll hear the wily old veterans in discussion forums ranting and raving about the importance of developing new pages of content for your site.
Relevance, Relevance, and more Relevance
Search engine robots are smart little critters. They’re like those pesky flying drones with the robotic dreadlocks from the movie “The Matrix”. They know what they’re looking for. Make sure that you gear your SEO strategy towards relevance. Focus on acquiring relevant backlinks from sites that contain lots of content. If your site is about frogs, a backlink from a site focusing on Puerto Rican tree frogs is way more influential than a link on an “animals” page on a “one size fits all” directory site. The only true exception to this rule is the DMOZ.org directory. It’s definitely worthwhile to get a link from that directory. I could get into the intricacies of getting accepted there, but we’ll get back to that battle at a later date.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…
Time and time again I’ll see folks spend countless hours, days, weeks, and months analyzing an obscure “on-page” optimization factor like the keyword density of the 4th image alt tag of a “contact us” page with the hopes of finding the magic formula for #1 rankings. On-page factors are important (kind of), but they will not make or break you in terms of SERPs. I know this because I happen to work for a fortune 500 company that operates a mega sports site affiliated with a major television network that received 100’s of thousands of visits per day from search engines with virtually NO ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION. Why did they rank so well? Because they had millions of backlinks and millions of pages of relevant content.
Make sure that you spend more time refining your link portfolio and you content, and less time tweaking on-page factors. Instead of messing with your H1 header all day, write a new page of content or make some link requests.
Next: On-page factors >>
More Search Optimization Articles
More By Hugo Guzman
