Yesterday, I started a series of posts on the importance of developing a strategy for SEO, today, this is the second installment.
Strategy is not only a plan to implement to receive the desired outcomes, but it must include the ability to remain flexible as adjustments to the market happen and insight to see these subtle changes as they happen and affect the market.
Believe it or not, you (or your website) cannot be everything to everyone.
This should be something that you can see. This is why there are many different search engines with different algorithms, if someone could provide everything that everyone wanted or needed, there would soon be someone that would make minor adjustments and replicate the idea of the originator. That is the beauty of a free market society (of which the Internet is apart of).
Unlike normal business, the Internet is much more nimble and can turn on a dime at any given time for any specific reason or no reason at all. How many SEOs do you think are scrambling to make adjustments to their linking plans after Wikipedia changed their practice to adding the “nofollow” to all outbound links?
Let’s start with the building blocks of SEO:
Link Popularity
Content and
Age
First step, who do you want to reach?
- You will need to find out the competition that is in the vertical you are trying to access.
When you have found out who you want to reach, you will have to find out how they find your competition.
Here are some important questions to answer about your competitors:
- What keywords do they use?
- What keywords does your competition rank for?
- Why do they rank for these keywords?
- What keywords does the competition not rank for?
- What linking practices do they use to increase their ranking?
– What directories are they listed in?
– What directories are they not listed in?
- What are they providing for their users?
- What are they not providing for their users?
- How much content are they publishing?
- How quickly are they publishing addition, relevant content?
- What SEM practices are they using?
Many of these questions will not be easy to answer, however, understanding each of these questions is paramount for understanding your competition.
So, we have covered why strategy is important in SEO, and we have covered what important analysis is required in understanding our competition and the people we want to reach.
Tomorrow, we will continue this with implementing our strategy and how to surpass the competition.
related posts >>
- Developing a Strategy for SEO
- Developing a Strategy for SEO part 3
- Keywords – What’s Brand Got To Do With It?
- Supplemental Results
- How to Win Links and Influence Webmasters
