Building websites to gather free, targeted search engine traffic can be a difficult task without a proper SEO strategy plan. Fortunately, the work itself is not hard to do once you learn the right techniques.
There are actually a lot of different SEO strategies that various people have created over the years, so how do you know which one is the best SEO strategy plan to choose?
The real secret of search engine optimization does not involve crazy tricks or automated software. The key is to simply build websites using unique content in a logical, structured manner.
Niche search targeting
The best way to build websites to gather free, targeted search engine traffic is to limit them to a specific subject or niche. By limiting the topics on a website, search engines are able to recognize that your website is specialized in a certain niche. When you only write about one particular niche on a website, it is possible to gain better search engine rankings with fewer pages.
Find out how many different pages exist on the internet for a particular subject. Then, find the number one search engine result for a keyword phrase in that niche and figure out how many pages that website has on the subject.
To truly make an impact on existing search engine rankings, it is important to be able to create enough pages to compete with the number one website. Just because a huge website is ranked #1 doesn’t mean that the website cannot be beat. It makes a big different whether a competing website only has one page or a thousand that related to the niche. In other words, you can often beat a large website if your website is more focused on the particular niche
For a variety of reasons, many people want to build large websites that cover the niche more broadly. The general authority sites are also a good way to build an online presence. However, those going this route need to be prepared to produce a lot of content for that site. When this approach is used, it is important to keep the site organized into different categories of related content. Furthermore, keep in mind that even an authority website cannot cover too many topics and must stay focused.
Planning site pages with keyword research
The Google Keyword Tool is very useful to take a website niche and turn it into a long list of related keyword phrases. These phrases can then be targeted on individual website pages.
Each website page should target a specific keyword phrase. A single page can target more than one phrase that is very similar, like a plural version of the page’s main keyword, but do not build more than one page on a website to target an extremely similar phrase.
Page topics can then be organized into various categories that may exist within a niche. This is how websites can be built in a structured manner that makes sense to both website visitors and search engines.
How to write search engine optimized content
Even the best SEO strategy plan can be worthless without some unique content to drive the search engine rankings. It’s not absolutely necessary to have 100% unique content on all pages of a website, but it is important to have some unique content on each page.
Automated content is popular among some internet marketers these days, but nearly all of this software fails to provide success on its own. Most automated content produced by software will be duplicate content that usually comes from 3rd party articles or product reviews. This is because automated software simply cannot generate unique content that will actually be helpful and make sense to website visitors.
Automated content should only be used sparingly on a website, and all pages should have some kind of unique content to avoid being dropped as duplicate content from search engines like Google. Nobody wants to spend hours or even days writing content for a new website, but people who dedicate themselves to this task are the ones that reap the rewards with top ten search engine rankings.
To get individual pages on a website ranked for particular keyword phrases, those phrases need to be found within the content of the pages.
In addition to using a keyword phrase in the content of a page, there are a number of other places that a search engine will look for that keyword phrase, relational keyword phrases or even pieces of the phrase.
Although it’s important to use the targeted keyword phrase in some of these particular places on a page, it is in addition vital to remember that placing the phrase in all of these areas on every single page of a website can result in the site getting flagged for keyword spam. With this SEO strategy plan, it can also be extremely helpful to use the keyword phrase naturally, which includes using a few variations of the same phrase. The most important places for keywords are in the following locations:
- Page Title
- Page URL Address
- Page Header Tags (H1, H2, etc.)
- First Sentence or Paragraph on the Page
- Last Sentence or Paragraph on the Page
- Anchor Text (Internal & External Links)
- Image URL Addresses
- Image ALT Tag Text
- Special HTML Markup Tags (Bold, Italics, Underline, etc.)
- Page Title, URL & Content of Pages Linking to your Site
With all of the above concentrated on on-page SEO, it will also be important to consider the following off-page SEO strategies.
