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Anyone who has ever meddled with SEO has asked themselves a ubiquitous question, “How quickly can I rank for [insert keyword phrase here]? More and more, I’m finding the word “quickly” and “SEO” don’t belong in the same sentence.

We want to believe there’s a magic SEO tactic that, if used, will revolutionize our results. On the contrary, a sound, long-term strategy consisting of great content combined with long-term SEO will win out. Below are 6 tips for ensuring long-term SEO success.

1. Build links steadily, not suddenly: We’ve known for years that overly aggressive link building can trigger ranking penalties. If Google sees optimization happening too quickly, they may penalize you for what they consider unnatural link building practices. Even successful link-baiting campaigns can sometimes backfire, resulting in too many links in too short of time. In reality, the safest bet is slowly developing high quality links over a longer period of time.
2. Focus on long tail keywords first, then broaden your approach: Suppose you were trying to rank for the keyword “ipod”. With the competition you face, its unlikely you rank for this word anytime in the next 5 years, even with aggressive SEO. Rather than shooting for the stars and landing on the moon, consider taking a different approach. By starting out optimizing for your primary keyword in addition to a modifier (e.g. color ipod, ipod 60GB, etc), you’re more likely to rank in a reasonable amount of time. Since this modified keyword phrase contains your primary keyword (ipod), you will also slowly start gaining ground on your original target. In a way, you’re shooting for the moon with the intention of gradually working your way to the stars.
3. Diversify your Target Keyphrases: Sure, your top keywords may be performing well today, but what about a few years from now when your competitors catch up, Google changes their algorithm, or some other external factor pops up? Rather than keeping all your eggs in one basket, begin researching now what you’d like to rank for a year or two down the road.
4. Create landing pages before you need them: Ever get an idea for a new keyword, but don’t have time to build a page? You may not have the time to fully create and optimize a page at the time, but why not at least create the page, throw a few internal links at it, and come back and optimize it later? I’ve found that this strategy gets the clock ticking with Google, since they obviously place value on the age of the page itself. Even if you can’t get to it for 3 months, you’re better since the page has now been given time to age in the index.
5. Use Reactive vs. Proactive keyword research: Even the best keyword research will never yield perfect results. That keyword phrase that you thought would be easy to rank for sometimes ends up being more work that its worth. Or worse yet, once you are ranking you discover it isn’t converting to sales. A reactive SEO keyword research method would take a different approach. Rather than doing a perfect job of keyword research upfront, you analyze the traffic you are currently getting and re-optimize your pages accordingly. As I analyze the top keywords bringing traffic to my blog, I’ve realized 90% of the keywords I never intended on optimizing for, it just happened. But once I see it happening, I reoptimize the posts, adding some internal links and on-page tweaks.
6. Content first, SEO second: Yes, it sounds trite, but if you focus on your content good rankings will follow. Quite frequently, potential clients contact me and ask them to review their website, believing they have an SEO problem. On the contrary, they have a content or usability problem, and SEO is the last thing they should be paying for. It’s important to not get caught in an SEO tunnel vision mindset. SEO will help good companies be better. SEO will do nothing for sites that have nothing to offer in the first place.

SEO, earn from home earn from home, SEO

Far too often, SEOs spin their wheels obsessing about link building. (I myself included) It’s easy to forget that classic on page and site-wide SEO still works.

I was recently reminded of this. While working on a landing page on one of my sites, I carelessly left a link pointing to a page that was irrelevant to the actual anchor text in the link. In other words, the keywords in the anchor text had nothing to do with the actual text of the page. Despite this, Google quickly picked up the page for the target search phrase, replacing the page I intended to optimize for. Despite having at least a dozen good quality, keyword specific external links pointing to the page I intended to optimize, the other page now replaced it in the SERPs because the weight from the 1 internal link trumped all the external links.

This situation reminded me that good SEO starts on-site. In my opinion, you shouldn’t even start link building until you:

1. Build Several Internal Contextual Links: Search engines care immensely how webmasters categorize and label their own content. The best way to do this is with one time occurring links within a body of content. In my opinion, 1 relevant contextual link from your own site can be worth more than 10 good external links. In Sugarrae’s great link building interview, Andy Hagans recommends having at least 5 internal links to every landing page.
2. Mold Your PageRank Flow: SEO Fast Start has a great explanation of using the no-follow tag to sculpt your PageRank. Basically, the idea is to cap off the flow of PageRank using the no-follow tag to pages that are unimportant from a search point of view. For example, while your Privacy policy page may be important to customers already on the site, it’s probably getting little to no action from the SERPs. By capping off PageRank to pages like this, you will increase the relative importance of your product pages and product category pages.
3. Do On Page Optimization of your Landing Pages: Title tags, H1 tags, keyword rich content, alt tags, and even Meta tags should be optimized before worrying about external links.

Since many experts think effective link building tactics are going underground, I believe on page and site wide SEO will become increasingly important.

SEO, earn from home earn from home, SEO

Obtaining good quality backlinks without paying for them is becoming increasingly difficult. In this short post, I thought I’d share 3 link building tactics that have been working for me lately.

1. Hubpages: Hubpages is a community of articles, or “hubs” on various topics. Their unique system discourages spammers by slapping no-follow tags on outgoing links if your “hubscore” falls below 75. You can increase your hubscore by participating in forums, commenting on hubs, and most importantly, submitting high quality, completely original articles. It takes some work to maintain your hubscore, but the high quality links are worth the effort. I’ve seen some of my hubs picked up by Google in less than 2 hours.
2. Work.com: Work.com specializes in business related guides and tutorials. As long your guides are high quality and pass the approval process, they can contain as many followed links as you’d like. In addition, I’ve received decent traffic from the guides I’ve submitted so far.
3. Ebay Blogs: Who doesn’t want a link from ebay.com? Ebay blogs are a great way to showcase your ebay products, or just provide useful content to the ebay community. Links posted within your blog are followed, so the potential SEO benefit is huge. My first ebay post was indexed in less than a day.

SEO, earn from home earn from home, SEO