Archive for September, 2009

Building textual content is important, but by itself, it’s not going to give you the boost in keyword ranking you desire.

Organizing your content in content silos is a powerful SEO technique, and combined with proper internal linking can be all that your site needs to rank for your primary keywords.

Links are important both internal and external. Internal links should use keyword-rich anchor text that point to your internal pages within the website. External links are the one-way inbound links from other web properties that point to your webpages.

Although, I can’t overemphasize the importance of lots & lots of content, that has hyperlinks embedded within the content that contain the keyword which you want to rank. Keyword-rich content is important. Don’t get hung up on keyword density. Just make sure you use a few primary keywords on the webpage. SEO Copywriting along with internal linking can be the secret sauce that’s needed to boost your position in the Search Engines to a top spot.

Now, come the links. The internal links should be directed to a “target URL”. The target url is the webpage you want to appear in the search results. The idea is to increase the internal link percent. In short, the internal link percent is the percentage of pages on the domain that link to the Target URL. Pick the page you want to rank, and start internal linking to that webpage using the chosen keyword. If it makes sense for usability, take advantage of the sidebar and footer for internal linking.

Fill your target url with keyword-rich content. It’s okay to link away from your site. Make use of keywords in anchor text, and make sure the outbound links are to “authoritative” sites within your topical neighborhood.

Create content silos that are tightly knitted together by keyword-rich internal linking. Ideally, ecommerce sites should use internal linking to knit together pages within a department, category, sub-category, sub-sub category, and product pages.

Bottomline, the internal linking affects keyword ranking, and contributes to strong content silos. Combined with a properly structured inbound-link campaign are extremely powerful SEO tactics.

Photo credit: bkwdayton

For larger well established sites that have alot of inbound links and are optimized pretty well, but aren’t ranking very well in the SERP’s for specific keywords, a small targeted link campaign might be all that’s needed to do the trick to get you ranked for those specific keywords.

The link campaign structure needs to be optimized with a social slant, especially with the newest algorithm update from Google, called Google Caffeine.

Overall “link power” is important. Assuming you have that already, your site might just need some fine-tuning using link building. By having an already existing large inbound link portfolio, this new campaign for link acquisition will look natural. Assuming there is already a ton of linkjuice coming from across a wide variety of websites, different countries, ISP’s, IP’s, etc, the small targeted link campaign will look natural, and is a small percentage of the total number of inbound links.

Since the overall “linkpower” of the site is very strong, we just need a small targeted campaign for fine tuning. That should provide a good “lift” for your keywords. Many of which can attain the top positions.

Budget:
Budgets will vary based on your keywords, and how competitive the search results are. Smaller budgets can accomplish the same goals, but will just take a little longer. What can be done with $7500 in 4 weeks, can also be done with $2000 over a few months. Pacing the steady placement of links over time is also important to give a natural appearance to the search engines (Google). Ideally, an ongoing monthly budget for link building should be established.

Targeting:
Stay very focused by targeting aprroximately 5 to 10 keywords.

Forecasts:
There are traffic forecasts, ranking forecasts, and revenue forecasts.

The forecasts are based on the Keyword Demand Matrix. Basically, we look at the current monthly search volume of the keywords, and then look at what your website is currently receiving in search traffic from those same keywords. The increase in percentage of “share of Traffic” could be 100% or more. Meaning, if you have 5% share of traffic, it could increase to 20% of traffic. Obviously, this has to be evaluated on a case-by-case scenario.

Trying to nail down a real number increase can be difficult. So, every site should be analyzed on it’s own. For example, in the music business, there are a whole lot more searches for Metallica than Sean Paul. So, it might be best to forecast based on percentage increases rather than real number increases. And, of course a Keyword Demand Matrix should be generated for each website/campaign.

Photo credit: Dougs2007