Organic Search Marketing Simplified
We all want more traffic to our sites, this is a given. We also know that increasing our rank in the search engines (Google especially) will result in more traffic right? Right!
Here's the problem: We have very little control over how high we rank in the search engines for a given keyword! The algorithms change all the time! Why spend countless hours on achieving a high ranking for one particular keyword, or set of keywords if you could easily lose those rankings tomorrow? I think there are better ways to spend my time that would bring better results, which is why I stopped handling my "search engine marketing" this way a long time ago.
So what is my strategy? I simply make sure my URL's are search engine friendly by making sure the title of my post is included in the URL itself. Check out the URL for this post as an example. It is "Search Engine Marketing Simplified – True Web Presence. In order to do this in WordPress you have to go to Settings > Permalinks and select Custom Structure and input /%category%/%postname%/ in the field provided. After I have that set-up, I simply forget about trying to please search engines all together! That's right... I put search engines out of my mind completely!
So what do I focus on? Publishing the best content I can possibly publish. That's it.
It has worked well for me over at my music blog/record store. Every month I get traffic from over 300 different keywords and that continues to grow the more I blog. I'm found under keywords I never even thought to target intentionally. I even rank in the top 3 for the keyword "punk blog" without even trying! You can expect different results depending on which market you're in.
Obviously the kind of music on my blog is not mainstream, and I could get more traffic by blogging about more mainstream artists but that's not what I care about on that site. It's my hobby, and I only care to talk about music I'm passionate about there. Regardless, the strategy I'm applying is still working! So well that I decided to apply the same strategy to TrueWebPresence.com, so be sure to follow us here to see updates on our traffic and such.
Another point to keep in mind is that when you simply focus on publishing quality content your bound to please more human beings, which is way more important than pleasing some computer algorithm. Why? Because human beings are known to share things like wild fire, it's called word of mouth. This is the direction the Internet is heading with social sites like Facebook and Stumbleupon becoming increasingly popular and vital to a websites operations.
Also, remember... what business is Google in? They're in the business of providing relevant, quality content in their search results. So as long as you're providing that quality, it's Google's job to find you, and even if they don't it's their loss. You will officially be taking the high road, and you will no longer need to depend on the search engines for traffic, for you appeal to a force far greater... human beings.
So you should ask yourself, if you lost all your search engine traffic tomorrow, how big of an impact would that make on your business/website? If the answer is "a lot"... then maybe you should rethink your content/traffic strategy.
Here's the problem: We have very little control over how high we rank in the search engines for a given keyword! The algorithms change all the time! Why spend countless hours on achieving a high ranking for one particular keyword, or set of keywords if you could easily lose those rankings tomorrow? I think there are better ways to spend my time that would bring better results, which is why I stopped handling my "search engine marketing" this way a long time ago.
So what is my strategy? I simply make sure my URL's are search engine friendly by making sure the title of my post is included in the URL itself. Check out the URL for this post as an example. It is "Search Engine Marketing Simplified – True Web Presence. In order to do this in WordPress you have to go to Settings > Permalinks and select Custom Structure and input /%category%/%postname%/ in the field provided. After I have that set-up, I simply forget about trying to please search engines all together! That's right... I put search engines out of my mind completely!
So what do I focus on? Publishing the best content I can possibly publish. That's it.
It has worked well for me over at my music blog/record store. Every month I get traffic from over 300 different keywords and that continues to grow the more I blog. I'm found under keywords I never even thought to target intentionally. I even rank in the top 3 for the keyword "punk blog" without even trying! You can expect different results depending on which market you're in.
Obviously the kind of music on my blog is not mainstream, and I could get more traffic by blogging about more mainstream artists but that's not what I care about on that site. It's my hobby, and I only care to talk about music I'm passionate about there. Regardless, the strategy I'm applying is still working! So well that I decided to apply the same strategy to TrueWebPresence.com, so be sure to follow us here to see updates on our traffic and such.
Another point to keep in mind is that when you simply focus on publishing quality content your bound to please more human beings, which is way more important than pleasing some computer algorithm. Why? Because human beings are known to share things like wild fire, it's called word of mouth. This is the direction the Internet is heading with social sites like Facebook and Stumbleupon becoming increasingly popular and vital to a websites operations.
Also, remember... what business is Google in? They're in the business of providing relevant, quality content in their search results. So as long as you're providing that quality, it's Google's job to find you, and even if they don't it's their loss. You will officially be taking the high road, and you will no longer need to depend on the search engines for traffic, for you appeal to a force far greater... human beings.
So you should ask yourself, if you lost all your search engine traffic tomorrow, how big of an impact would that make on your business/website? If the answer is "a lot"... then maybe you should rethink your content/traffic strategy.