Day 7: SEO - 2 Sites Launch - SEO Strategies Discussed

Written by Jaren Green | 11 March 2010

Two more Makeover sites are up and running. A surge of new content is on the way, but Action Profiles and TripleScoop are already making waves. Each has a unique search engine optimization strategy. The SEO strategies for all five participants are discussed below.

SEO Strategy 1: Please The People
The goal of the major search engines is to please their users by making it easy to find valuable things. Marketers that help search engines with this goal will succeed in getting traffic. Marketers who try to optimize for the sake of optimization will struggle, crash, and then burn.

For Action Profiles, we built a new sub-domain to be home base for content on competition results. That's the valuable part. People want to see their name in print. We used blogging software as a platform and made sure to categorize the posts by sport. That's the make-it-easy part. These efforts together line up with the goals of the major search engines.

Here is our list of where you want to place your keywords in order of importance:

• Domain Name
• Sub-domain
• URL Path
• Page Title
• Page Headline
• First Paragraph

There are other "good ideas" out there for the use of keywords, but at some point, you will cross the line. Think value and easy-to-find. Avoid SEO tactics that try to trick the search engines.

SEO Strategy 2: One Topic Per Page
Whenever possible, build a separate page for each product or variation or individual concept. Bits and pieces may seem to logically group together, but your pages will be more powerful from a search engine ranking perspective if you dedicate a whole page to each bit.

BEFORE                                                   AFTER
            

For TripleScoop Premium Market Research and Rocky Mountain Reserve we made sure each of their products had its own page. It was necessary to write a few extra paragraphs on each, but the effort was worth it.

SEO Strategy 3: Keyword Research
With all participants in the 10-Day Makeover, we started with keyword research. There are a number of research tools available on the web. For each site, we pulled a list of the top 100. While creating the content, we referred to the list to make sure our words matched the words that people use when they search for our topic.

SEO Strategy 4: Use Geographic Limiters
Both Affordable Printing and Private Title Loans sell within a finite geographic area most of the time. They can sell everywhere, but most of their clients are local. Most people are afraid to mention the city where they do business, because they don't want to lose business from other places.

On the other hand, geographic limiters are also picked up by the search engines and many, many searches include a geographic term. When you include geographic descriptions, it makes your business different from competitors outside your areas. Own up to your geography and own your geography.

MORE RESOURCES:

• Day 7: SEO Strategy Varies By Company Size
• Day 8: Trust Factors - Take The Website Trust Test