The Long Road To SEO Success

This blog is literally a baby, not even 2 months old yet, so I have no chance of ranking well for my targeted keywords no matter how hard I optimise and build links to my pages. It is for this reason that as search engine optimisers we need to build goals, steps on the ladder to success. When I am working on my own sites or the sites of my clients I always map out little baby steps that ultimately lead to the DADDY goal.

There are many ways you can do this, I have spoken to many people on this subject who all have different ways of measuring their progress along the path to greatness. You may wish to make inbound link goals, I don’t know say around 100 a month? You may want to track your rankings on keywords, starting with low competition and working your way up to the big guns.

I personally have another way of keeping my motivation up and tracking results. Don’t miss understand me here I am still a stickler for analytics tracking but I need something more than checking traffic, ranking and link stats to keep me moving forward and this is the way I do it.

I am hoping that you have already implemented keyword research on your site, if not check out the tutorials in the side panels.

Ok…. so we have our keywords, we have them separated into our main, file creating keywords and our long tail content writing keywords. What you need to do now is find out which ones have high competition and which ones have low competition. Make a list in the order of competitiveness.

Right at the start of any SEO campaign you should take the least competitive keyword and check out the sites that rank for it. What I like to do is check out the sites sitting at the bottom of the first page of the serps. Now you need to research a little, check out every aspect of the site from an SEO point of view, what are their tags? how is there content structured? Do they use many images, flash etc? how many links do they have? Are they anchored? where are they from?

These are the kind of things you need to be asking your self about the site as these are the sites you are going to attempt to beat. The less competitive the keywords the easier the sites will be to beat. You need to trump the competition on every aspect, structure, keyword prominence and linking. When you have beat the less competitive sites start making your way up the list.

Obviously the further you move up the harder the competition will become, however targeting the less competitive keywords will now have given you enough authority to give it a try.

There is one spanner to throw in the works and that is, domain age has a massive effect on your results. The age of the TLD (top level domain) gives a site added authority and it may only be a matter of waiting before you will see your site rise above them. Still, you have to keep going.

This one way to keep yourself motivated during an SEO campaign but use your imagination, SEO is a hard long road to take but the results at the end of it will make it all worthwhile. Even the best SEO’s in the world get tired and bored and impatient, so while they are flagging you push through and make some ground up.

Keep going,

Tim

Let me know how you keep yourself motivated!