Not So Easy SEO

In the last post I talked about how to choose good keywords for your site in order to have a better chance at showing up in the top of search engines, but what happens when all of your keywords are monsters?

What do I mean by “Monster Keywords?” A Monster Keyword is a very broad word that has a lot of competition. For example terms like Sex, Poker, Search, Cars, etc. The one I want to examine today is Linux.

Anybody who’s dabbled in SEO knows that unless you’re already a major player in one of the above industries, (or willing to do some dirty tricks) you’re not going to easily rank in the first page of Google for these words. If you’ve read my last post, you’ll know why you shouldn’t rank for them. But that’s ok!

Sticking with the linux theme, let’s look at a random site. Since it’s new and local, (and I don’t have any ties to it) I’ll pick the Wayne State University Linux Users Group. How on earth does one SEO a site like this?

Sure you could stuff some keywords in there, but that wouldn’t really help users would it? For a site like this we’re going to need to do a little more than just proper keyword analysis. The trick to SEOing a site like this is all about generating traffic. Yup, I’m talking linkbait. So what can the WSULUG do?

To start, I’d start trading some links with other sites. In this case though, I wouldn’t care at all about PageRank. I’d be more interested in links that will bring me actual visitors. But wait.. They’re not selling anything, why do they want visitors? For the linkbait…

While all that link building is going on, I’d start writing some useful articles. To find topics, we can use our copy of “Good Keywords” or just head over to overture. We see that people are searching for stuff like “how to use tx file”, “how to configure samba”, “how to use command line text editors”, “how to burn a cd”, and “how to open a word file in linux”. These would be a good start. In fact, one of the crucial things missing from the WSULUG site (and most of the web in general) is a good clear concise guide for newbies. That’d be a great place to start.

So if you’re a small site trying to capture big keywords, my advice is to start small. Don’t worry about capturing the “wayne state linux” type stuff… you should have that anyway. Find a niche, create something useful in that niche, and wait for the links to come your way.

Remember SEO isn’t about getting to #1 in Google or Yahoo, it’s about getting more targeted visitors to your website.

September 26th, 2006