SEO Marketing: Introduction

By James Atkinson, LLB

Before reading this series please see: How to Do Keyword Research.

The Keyword Competition Myth:

An online marketer’s most prevalent fear of keywords is that there is a very high level of competition for high rankings. Luckily, there is actually much less competition than there appears to be for any given keyword!

Remember, 99% of web sites do not use a silo structure or synergistically support their keywords! This is a huge advantage for you. (I'll show you how to construct silos in another series of articles.)

In fact, many pages that rank high in search engine results are not properly or intentionally optimized at all. They rank high in the engine results because the engines have found them to be “somewhat relevant” to the search. There being no other properly optimized pages these un-optimized pages then rank.

These sites do not present real competition for you.

In reality, you only have a relative handful of real competition for top 10 rankings, even on keywords that seem brutally competitive.

Social Prominence: the #1 Off-Page Rankings Factor

Excellent content is also the driving force in achieving social prominence. You attain social prominence when many users share your content on social networks.

Sharing your content can happen in a number of ways – it can be anything from linking to your content on a blog or forum to “Digging” your content (voting for your content and helping it achieve more visibility on Digg.com). Social prominence appears to have now largely replaced back links as the main off-page rankings factor the search engines care about.

Excellent content, used in conjunction with a well-executed social networking strategy, will lead people to share your content on the social networks.

Getting Indexed by the Search Engines

The best way to get your site into the search engines’ indexes is to let them find you naturally. They’ll then spider your site and add you to their indexes.

How Do You Write Expert Content?

What do you do if you’re not an expert? You must research the niche thoroughly so you do genuinely know what you’re talking about.

It’s also very important to do thorough keyword research - see Step 3 Internet Marketing Resources.

This is the foundation for correctly siloing your site and covering your themes authoritatively. For writing content generally: see below - The Process of Relationship Building.

SEO Marketing: Introduction > Back Links