So, you wanna be an SEO guru. Things change at a rapid pace online. As soon as Web 2.0 was here, talk of Web 3.0 ensued. SEO was dead and then no wait! It was alive and kicking, according to the pundits. There were black hat marketers, white hat marketers, grey hat seo and the Long Tail. Did you change hats at some point in a panic? Is keyword density really that important? Is content still king? One day it's PPC campaigns, another day it's organic ranking through blogging links and then articles. Aargh! How do I keep it all straight?
Today, it can be hard to keep up with the buzz words. Once you've optimized your website, you can find out a minute later that Google has changed the rules again. What do you do? If you get too wrapped up in all the rules and jargon of seo marketing, you will actually take your eye too far off the ball and lose business and page rank anyway.
First of all, content always has and always will be king. Writing strictly for SEO is not going to get you very far for very long. Trying too hard to “not” write for seo isn't going to get you very far either. If you're worried about overdoing it with your keyword density and don't use your keywords enough, you can end up with content that doesn't come across naturally. Good, organic content is going to help you in more ways than one. First, it's going to help you get real human traffic. Secondly, it'll get the Google and Yahoo spiders stopping by.
Keeping updated on how things work with the search engine spider bots is going to help you keep your website on either page one or page two. If you can't manage this on your own, hire a pro, enroll in a course or buy a book. If you are past page two for your target keywords, your target audience probably won't find you. You also need to focus on the Long Tail and target more than just the top three keywords.
If you get your audience visiting but don't offer them valuable content, they won't stay and won't click on their “checkout” button. You have to please the robots and the humans. If you overdo SEO you won't please the humans. You could also tick off the robots and get blacklisted. If you try to be an underachiever and ignore SEO, you could miss out and be stuck on page seven.
For those who have done a lot of seo articles, it's a great idea to stop writing seo articles for a while and focus on something else. Did you know that forum participation and blogging can be really effective at helping you with your PR? Diversify your seo strategy a little! Social book marking and tagging are another area of seo strategy that can truly help you bring up your readership and ranking of your site and increase your sales.