2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
9. 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.
10. I love serverside scripting and dynamic websites but I've
come to realize there is a danger that people will overuse
it. I know I have. If your site is dynamically generted, 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
14. 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.
16. 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.
18. 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.