3 SEO Strategies (Not Tactics) To Make You Think
I wanted to write about bigger picture strategies - plans featuring big ideas - rather than tactics. What follows is a mix of such plans and big picture ideas that, while not quite tactics, don’t fit as strategy either. At the same time, I’m trying to be more concise, so this is shorter than other things I’ve been writing.
Mix different forces together to attack with different tactics. Use multiple sites in a niche to try and achieve serp domination, and have them feature different types of content, link sources and design/development. Do video, audio, user generated content, social media profiles; use blogs, wikis, articles, tools, image galleries; vary your link sources and networks. If all your sites’ best links come from one friendly blogger and their blog goes into decay, where does that leave you? Likewise if wikis get penalized for being easier to spam etc.
Build fortified cities. Develop a content network that has your site become an authority on very broad topics, and possibly thousands of them like Squidoo, or focus on a niche, like Gooruze (marketing). Copious distribution in the SERPs gets you regular readers who start their next search for info as kw+yourauthority’s name. As in “Istanbul Wikipedia” That’s a way of building defensible traffic (though the building block tactics could be copied a la Knol). You’ll be using this strategy to trade on your domain equity.
This can be reinforced with strategy 1, above, by building out horizontal sites to increase your presence in an industry, number of relationships, link equity, possibilities for topic diversity etc.
Flank the opponent, but leave them room to escape. In military parlance, flanking is the practice of attacking from the side. This is usually the enemy’s weak point, which is what we care about here. Research the people ranking in your niche thoroughly. Find out where they’re most vulnerable and work against those weaknesses. Some ideas:
- Lots of paid links. You can buy a review, pay bloggers to nofollow the links they sold to competitors or buy out the blogs whose links are passing the most value. There’s plenty of ways to work this, so if you can share others, do leave a comment!
- Unnatural anchor text profile. Differentiate yourself with greater variety by using n grams (for the more competitive work) and/or anchor text matrices (for you lazy bastards who can’t be bothered to find out what an n gram is until you’re forced to by better algorithms).
- Highly reliant on very few sources of links. Take a look at the link sources themselves. Are their own sites kosher? How are their own backlinks? Is there somethink sneaky? If you could eliminate 100+ of your competitors backlinks in one fell swoop, would you do it? With blogs (blogroll and friendly inpost linking) this is pretty common.
- Are they disregarding some of these tips on being discrete?
- And of course, if they’re doing a terrible job with their own content, outrank them for their brand name and/or produce better quality content that’ll make your site the linked-to authority.
However, you don’t want to take things to the point where the competiton will get desperate, because they can lash out in unexpected ways. You don’t want to see your site hacked, for instance, nor Googlebowled (where someone points lots of spam at a site in an effort to get it banned).
Aside: Diversify your tools, not just your implementation . I rely a lot on Aaron Wall’s FireFox plugin. Lucky for me, I just got SEOQuake (whose privacy policy is ironically ranking in a search for their name) and Dave Davis’ sexy global-local seo extension. I also use the StumbleUpon toolbar and various social media extensions and plugins.
Thoughts on these SEO strategies, as always, are more than welcome. And as always, do follow links go to the good commentators. Besides that, I encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed to get my most recent posts delivered to you.
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