Archive for October, 2008

Retailers frequently tell us that the most frustrating aspect of SEO is the lack of control on outcomes. A business can follow all of the golden rules that are set out by best practices and engines alike but still receive random fluctuations within high value keyword targets.

The reasoning of these fluctuations are algorithm “shifts” that correlate to your current inbound links. When changes are conducted within Google’s engineering team, and the ramifications of those changes gets absorbed across different Google datacenters, your rankings will seem completely unreliable as multiple times a day they may change. It is not uncommon to see as a domain fluctuate within 2-4 SERP’s (Search Engine Rank Position) in one given day.

To some extent, this is inevitable. To expect a ranking to stay in a specific spot, especially within a high competition category, is foolish, and complacency will usually result in a loss in rankings.

To reduce this risk, your online marketing unit must stay proactive in link building and continue to build links to your domain from relevant topical content.

This last sentence is the one you want to remember from this post. Links from relevant topical content is what Google likes and rewards webmasters on!

By having websites that are tightly knit on topical areas, it is easier for the search giant to provide a more relevant experience to what the visitor is looking for, as they can more easily present content within inter-related websites.

So you know you need topical links, but you also know that just buying them is not a good practice. Where do you begin?

A great place to start is within the social media marketplace and by constructing a network of independent “social sharing” sites that interlink to each other and your domain.

Lets take for example you are trying to rank numerous products within the Baby products category. Your goal is to rank on a plethora of terms that include the phrase “baby” as well as many standalone terms that are going to be very competitive such as “stroller”.

After conducting your keyword research, you should have a targeted list of about 30-45 primary phrases that are on the short list of SEO targets. At this point you start creating webpages within social sharing sites, on the topics for which you are targeting.

What is a social sharing site? It is a new type of web property that is driven from user generated content. Sites like Squidoo.com, Hub Pages, and others that allow users to visit and create media rich webpages embedded with html content, video, rss feeds, and other tools.

As long as these pages are of high quality, and can be utilized as a trusted source of information for Google, these pages will provide value in outbound links. Here is an example of a example page that is targeting the PediPaws product.

http://www.squidoo.com/pedi-paws-trims-pets-nails

Notice the video, content and integrated posts from external sources. Also notice the one or two outbound links with targeted anchor text? These links were strategically included and provide great value to the targeted domain.

These links will also increase outbound value (i.e. pagerank) over time, as age and future content updates will help dramatically.

By creating a network of these types of sites, within a certain keyword theme, and interlinking these sites together, a business will have a powerful asset for search engine optimization.  These links will improve over time and leverage the authority of the core domain for which the page was published.

Of course this is going to take alot of fresh content, re-purposing content would be a waste of time.  By executing this strategy,  your online marketing metrics, in terms of incremental visits, will go up within the category.

Learn more about this tactic and Trinity’s SEO Services at our website.