SEO can seem like a long hard slog with little or no reward
at times. Your mind often racing, constantly thinking about
keyword phrases, H1 tags and links, as you lay trying to
catch a few winks. Six months down the line your SEO efforts
are nowhere to be seen, not even a trace, except in the redness
of what used to be the whites of your eyes. But what if,
it didn’t have to be this way. What if, there was a
method of seeing results sooner rather than later.
I still remember when I first set out on my path of SEO
enlightenment, vividly. If I knew some of things I know now,
it would have been a completely different journey and a much
shorter one to arrive at the place I’m at now (slightly
further up a never ending path). The sleepless nights as
my brain churned through the new chunks of information learnt
that day. The eureka moments when you learn the most simplistic
of things like anchor text and emphasising keywords with
bold tags. Learning how to perform keyword research was one
of the most enjoyable and undervalued aspects of SEO. And
did I mention the sleepless nights.
Anyway enough reminiscing and back to topic of this article.
The SEO snowball effect is a simple an analogy. Remember
those cartoons where a character would role down a snow covered
hill, gathering more snow and increasing in size until they
crashed into something like a tree. Well that is the SEO
snowball effect, minus the crash at the end (hopefully).
You see, if you drew a chart that measured the effort put
into SEO and the traffic it produces, you get something very
much similar to that snowball. At first the effort you put
in yields very little traffic if any at all. But putting
the same amount of effort in again results in slightly more
traffic, until further along the chart, the same amount of
effort yields a much greater output of traffic.
The problem with this, is the time it can take to see the
first initial traffic from your efforts. Many webmasters
will give up because of this, while others carry on but only
see little reward in the first year or so. However, there
is a way of optimising the initial stages of this snowball
and it all comes down to keyword selection.
In brief, many webmasters focus on keywords they believe
are worth the effort in terms of traffic and rightly so.
After all, what’s the point of chasing keywords that
no one uses or only have a very small number of impressions?
So we go after the big boys, the keywords with lots and lots
of traffic. But this contributes to the snowball effect because
the effort required to obtain a top hundred ranking can be
a lot on keywords with higher traffic levels. While the traffic
gained from being listed in position 67 will be insignificant.
So maybe there is a reason to gun for those keywords with
fewer impressions?
If you conduct you keyword research intelligently you should
be able to find quite a few keyword phrases with small amounts
of traffic but more importantly, phrases that contain your
main keywords. By optimising these phrases you are contributing
to the SEO of your main keywords, simply because the main
keyword is part of phrase. These lesser phrases in terms
of traffic are much easier to reach traffic generating results
and therefore can be done much quicker. Once you’re
happy with the rankings of that phrase, simply move onto
the next until all small traffic phrases are optimised. In
a lot of cases the combined traffic from sub-primary keyword
phrases can be more than the primary keyword it self, not
to mention more targeted.
When all sub-primary phrases are optimised, the chances
are your site will rank well for the primary keyword with
little or work left at all to get the top spot. The best
thing is you have targeted the best keywords but received
highly targeted traffic earlier in the campaign. Turning
the snowball effect from an annoying symptom into a competitive
advantage.
James Anderson is an SEO Consultant at Podium Solutions,
a web
design and internet marketing company based Manchester,
UK.
©2005 James Anderson. Author bio box, links and copyright
notice must be included in all reproductions of this article.
|
