This is a story about a poor guy with an inept domain that
wanted to build a site geared for a very competitive keyword
and his long, agonizing journey toward the true light of
SEO wisdom.
Here's a little foundation for what I'm about to cover here.
A while back I bought a stupid domain name. It was one of
those fairly useless domain names that might have been good
for maybe selling cellphones or something. The thing is,
though, I'm a poor guy. I don't have time to taylor a site
for cellphones with the pitiful amount of money I have. This
was my thinking not long ago at least.
After sitting on this domain name forever I decided to put
a site up there and give myself to the study of SEO or search
engine optimization. It seemed like an interesting subject
and I knew to those that managed to learn SEO, marketing,
and some web design would fall infinite riches. It really
sounded good to me.
So I went for the throat so to speak. More precisely I picked
out some search terms that I will probably never be able
to get traffic for in my lifetime. Smart I know. This had
the grand side effect of having the site sandboxed by Yahoo
and Google until pigs flew.
Recently they flew, however, and I've come out of the sandbox
altogether and hit face to face with a few SEO surprises.
I did manage to get a tiny trickle of traffic but not from
the terms I tried to get it from. After trying to optimize
those pages for the key terms I received traffic from I got
more traffic. This of course started me down a long road
of speculation and hair pulling.
After many a night of such I've come up with a few things
that I believe will give anyone the power to eventually pull
traffic off the net and covert it into a good decent living.
I'll probably write an ebook and make millions one of these
days.
Optimize by the page
Don't fall into the trap of focusing totally on building
this far flung and far reaching site that will rule the
world or make you millions instantly. Unless you have lots
of money you're going to need to work for your traffic.
Plan your site out carefully and make sure each page is
a precision crafted piece of art.
I love serverside scripting and dynamic websites but I've
come to realize there is a danger that people will overuse
these things. I know I have. If your site is dynamically
generated, make sure every page isn't a total cookie cutter
image of every other page. It's good to have the same navigation
and same general layout but each page also needs to be special.
Each page should have careful, proven SEO techniques applied
to maybe a single key phrase.
Don't try to optimize one page for a handful of phrases.
Just focus on one phrase. Do your keyword research and, whatever
you do, don't haul off and pick a key phrase with 2 billion
wealthy competitors in Google. Pick something that can be
attained and can get you some traffic relatively fast. Select
a phrase that is as specific as possible to your particlar
niche and still gets a couple thousand or so searches per
month from Yahoo.
Whatever you do, make sure that one web page has good, solid,
desirable content that is keyword rich and one of a kind.
This will help make it special. At the same time your content
obviously needs to lead the customer toward your intented
goal for monetizing your traffic.
Keep it simple
I've found to my dismay that building a complex web site
with all the content management stuff and all the database
thrills isn't exactly what really gets the attention of
search engines. Weirdly enough this can be true for internet
surfers too. A nice, clean layout with very accessible
content and intuitive navigation will be recognized by
both search engines and surfers alike. If you can figure
that part out you've just pinned down about 90% of SEO
in my opinion.
Engineer your site for your traffic
When you start getting search engine traffic to your site
take a very close look at what they are searching for.
I assume you have some kind of statistics program and can
mostly see what search terms people are using to get to
your site. When someone comes in on a keyword or phrase
you haven't optimized for do a little research. Does the
page they are coming to need touched up to include the
search term or would this search term merit its own search
engine optimized page to handle the traffic.
Conclusion
With every page you add you are gaining another potentially
valuable piece of internet real estate. If you're doing
your job right then eventaully each page should get its
own traffic and you should begin to attain your goals.
Patience and learning are the name of the SEO game.
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