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The first step in any seo campaign is to do some keyword research. There are many tools on the web to help with basic keyword research (including the free Google Keyword Research Tool and SEMRUSH). You can use these tools to quickly identify opportunities to get more traffic:

Getting a site to the top of Google eventually comes down to your text content on a page and external & internal link profile. All together, Google uses this analysis to determine whether your no1 in Google or number 32, or de-indexed. There’s no magic bullet.

At any one time, your site is under some sort of filters designed to keep spam sites out and deliver relevant results to human visitors. One filter may be kicking in keeping a page down in the serps, while another filter is pushing another page up. You might have poor content but excellent incoming links, or vice versa. Try and identify the reasons Google doesn’t link a particular page. Too few quality incoming links? Too many incoming links? No keyword rich text? Linking out to irrelevant sites? Too many ads? Affiliate links on every page of your site, found on a thousand other websites? Whatever, identify issues and fix them. Get on the wrong side of Google and your site might well be MANUALLY reviewed – so seo your site as if, one day, you will be geting that review.

The key to successful seo, I think, is persuading Google that your page is most relevant to any given search query. You do this by good unique keyword rich text content and getting “quality” links to that page. Next time your developing a page, consider what looks spammy to you is probably spammy to Google. Ask yourself which pages on your site are really necessary. Which links are necessary? Which pages are getting the “juice” or “heat“. Which pages would you ignore?

You can help a site along in any number of ways (including making sure your page titles and meta tags are unique) but be careful. Obvious evidence of ‘rank modifying’ is dangerous.

I prefer simple seo techniques, and ones that can be measured in some way. I don’t want to just rank for competitive terms, I want to understand the reason why I rank for these terms. Make a site relevant to both for success in organic listings and you might not ever need to get into the techy side of SEO like redirects and URL rewriting. Of course, to beat the competition in an industry where it’s difficult to attract quality links, you have to get more “technical” sometimes.

There are no hard and fast rules to long term seo success, other than developing quality websites with quality content and quality links pointing to it. You need to mix it up and learn from experience. Remember there are exceptions to nearly every rule, and you probably have little chance determining exactly why you rank in search engines. I’ve been doing it for over 10 years and everyday I’m trying to better understand Google, to learn more and learn from others’ experiences. It’s important not to obsess about the minute seo specifics unless you really have the time to do so!

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