professional seo -...

Professional SEO - 1

Professional SEO

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Video Transcription

To get started let’s just take a moment to clarify the Six Basic Steps of SEO. This will give us a

framework to compare and contrast what regular business owners do to what the pros do.

So here we go, here are the Six Basic Steps of SEO:

The first step, is Market Research. This usually involves using a tool like Market Samurai to find

keywords that have a good balance of traffic, commercial value, and acceptable levels of

competition.

Step two is to build a website. Clearly you can’t rank in the search engines if you don’t have a

site to rank.

The third step is on-page optimization. Which means optimizing the content and navigation of

your site.

The fourth step is content creation. The higher the quality and the more relevant this content is

to the keywords you’re targeting, the better.

Step five, which is probably the most important and often overlooked step, is building backlinks.


And the sixth and final step is tracking results. This involves keeping track of the search

engines your site is ranking in and the keywords it’s ranking for.

So that’s it in a nutshell. These are the Six Basic Steps of SEO.

Now let’s take a look at each of these steps in more detail and compare what a regular

business owner does to what the SEO pros do.

Regular Business Owner & The Pros

To do this, I’d first like to introduce you to a regular online business owner - Maree who owns a

small website in the craft niche.

Next I’d like to introduce you to Dave - who runs a professional SEO company and is one of the

experts we’ve been grilling over the last 18 months.

Let’s now take a look at each of the Six Steps of SEO and compare Maree’s approach to that of

the SEO pros.


Step 1: Market Research

We’ll begin with Market Research:

Market Research - Regular Business Owner

While many people still skip this step completely, Maree understands the importance of Market

Research, so she uses Market Samurai to identify three keywords that are relevant to her site,

have good traffic potential, high commercial value and an acceptable amount of competition.


have good traffic potential, high commercial value and an acceptable amount of competition.

Maree keeps these keywords in mind when she registers her domain and creates content for

her site, but that’s about as far as her market research goes.

Market Research - Professional Approach

The SEO Pros on the other hand go much further.

Sure, they do Keyword Research. In fact, most of the people we interviewed use Market

Samurai as their primary Keyword Research tool and they follow a very similar process.

First they find promising keywords that have great traffic, and good commercial value.

But then they also spend a lot of time assessing the competition for these keywords.


Reverse Engineer Competitor Link Network

To do this, they take a look at the number one ranking website for a keyword, and then use

Market Samurai or a similar tool to reverse-engineer the strength and number of the site’s

backlinks.


Example Analysis

For example, they might discover that the top ranking site for the keyword they’re interested in

has 15 Pagerank 6 links, 9 Pagerank 5 links, 12 Pagerank 4 links, 45 pagerank 3 links, 267

Pagerank 2 Links, 423 Pagerank 1 links, and 507 Pagerank 0 links.

Why did they do this?

To work out how many backlinks THEY need to build to outrank the top site!


Compare Expenses to Projected Revenue

The pros understand that if they can create a site that contains more good quality content and

has more high quality backlinks, then they will eventually outrank their competitors and achieve

the number one spot in the search engine rankings.

However, they also understand that creating a site that will out rank the current number one can

be an expensive exercise. Therefore the SEO pros need to be 100% sure of the commercial

value of their target keywords.

Since they are prepared to sink tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into link-building if

that’s what’s required, they have to be absolutely sure that they will make money from that

keyword once they reach the number one spot.


Paid Test

So how do they do this? They do what the vast majority of regular Internet marketers never do.

They test the keyword FIRST with paid traffic. That’s right. They use pay-per-click methods like

adwords and buy a stack of traffic, send it through to their offer, and make sure that the traffic

converts using the exact offer they are looking to promote.


Insurance against failure

They often spend thousands of dollars testing a keyword, but the way the Pros look at it, is that

money spent on Pay per click is the cheapest form of insurance against failure that they can

buy.


True Traffic Values

They also learn something else by testing. It allows them to measure the TRUE traffic for a

keyword. You see, Google Traffic data is good. It’s the best data that’s available today. But for

many reasons, sometimes it can be inaccurate, or just plain misleading! The SEO experts need

to be 100% sure that they know the TRUE traffic values for a keyword before they are ready to

invest any serious money into it. And buying PAID traffic is the fastest and easiest way to get

this information.


Simple Financial Decision

When they have this data they are then able to make a simple financial decision. Does the

upside outweigh the downside?

The list of their competitor’s backlinks tell them what kind of link network they will need to build

to secure the number 1 spot. They understand how many links they need and how strong those

links need to be.

This translates directly into how much money they will have to spend to build those links. As

long as the expense of doing this is far less than the financial upside projected by their paid

traffic test, then they will move forward on a project.


Leverage

Some of the experts love to do this market research themselves because they enjoy it. Others,

once they’ve identified the general market, employ a market research team of 3-6 people who

repeat this process over and over, until they find a keyword that meets all the criteria.


Summary

So just to clarify, the Professional approach to keyword research is to:

(1) Identify high traffic keywords that have high commercial value.

(2) Reverse engineer the site that is currently number one in the search engines to work out

how much it will cost to build a site that can secure the number one spot.

(3) Use pay per click traffic to determine the conversion rates of the product you are looking to

promote.

(4) Only move ahead if the profit potential significantly outweighs the projected expenses.


Step 2: Creating a Website

Let’s now take a look at the second step of SEO which is Creating a Website.

Creating a Website - Regular Business Owner

When it came to creating a website, Maree elected to use Wordpress. While she was not very

technical, she followed the instructions and asked her son for help when she got a bit stuck.

Within a weekend, Maree had set up her site and was able to start blogging.


Creating a Website - Professional Approach

So what do the pros do?

The process of building a web-site for the SEO experts is not all that different from the average

person. Most of the experts we spoke to still use Wordpress as the core platform for all their

websites. What is different however is the scale at which they operate.

The experts have many, many projects on the go, and as you’ll learn, they often need to create

dozens of new sites as part of their back-link building strategy


Website Development Teams

So instead of building the sites themselves like Maree, the pros have several teams dedicated

to building web-sites (about 2-4 teams on average, with about 3-6 people in each team)

These teams consist of professional Graphic Designers, and Web Developers who work

full-time building new sites. For sites that are going to be the focus of their link-building they

often spend a lot of time and money developing a polished, high-quality site.


Step 3: On-page Optimization

OK, next, we’ll take a look at the third step of SEO – On Page Optimization.

On-page optimization - Regular Business Owner

After attending an Internet Marketing seminar, Maree learnt that optimizing her content and

navigation could help improve the rank of her website. She therefore changed the title tags on

many of her posts, improved her navigation, increased her internal links, and made sure she


many of her posts, improved her navigation, increased her internal links, and made sure she

included the keywords she was targeting in her content and blog post tags.

On-page optimization - Professional Approach

Interestingly, the Experts approach to on-page optimization is virtually identical to Marees. They

don’t spend hours working on this stuff. Instead, they just make sure they cover the basics. They

check that their keywords are in their title tags, optimize their internal navigation, and make

sure that their target keyword is in their content and tags.


Scale

The major difference between Maree's approach and the approach of Dave and his friends is

again one of scale. Most of the web-developers in their website building teams are trained up

to perform on-page optimization, as is anyone who develops content for the site.

This means that every post on every website is optimized for specific keyword phrases and is a

strategic step forward to creating a site filled with good quality, keyword specific content that will

rank well in the search engines.


Step 4: Content Creation

Now let’s look at the fourth step of SEO which is Content Creation and once again contrast

Maree’s approach to the Pro’s approach.


Content Creation - Regular Business Owner

When it comes to creating content, Maree’s approach is to sit down each Thursday night and try

and write a good quality article for her readers. Using this approach, Maree produces on

average about four articles a month.


Content Creation - Professional Approach

In contrast to Maree’s approach, each of the SEO professionals we spoke to has an incredibly

elaborate content-creation system, capable of generating literally thousands of unique pieces

of content per month.

You’ll see why this is so important when we discuss backlinks, but it’s really worth studying

exactly how the SEO experts generate content.


3 Key Principles

The central principle of content creation all the pros subscribe to is “do it once, apply massive

leverage, and waste nothing”.


Content Creation Example

Here’s a typical example of how the pros create content.

It usually begins with a product.

To create a product they often deliver a seminar which is then recorded. Alternatively they

might hire an outside topic expert and interview them or pay them to give a seminar.


From Seminar to Product

The pros then transform the seminar recording into a series of DVDs, workbooks, manuals,

audio CDs and downloadable multimedia files.


Leveraged Content Creation

At the same time, small parts of the core product are re-written to become high quality articles

about the subject matter.

These articles then have slides and images added to them, and are turned into a slideshow,

which is then recorded to produce a YouTube video representing the same content. Finally the

audio track is extracted to create a stand-alone piece of audio content that can be used as a

podcast.

Every single piece of content gets turned into articles, videos, and audio files. The very best

material gets used as web-site content. The rest is saved to use for link-building which we’ll talk

about in a moment.


More Leverage With Teams

Many of the SEO experts outsource the entire product, web-site content, and article creation

process. In fact they often have multiple product development teams, consisting of project

managers, writers, and video editors.

On top of that all the SEO experts also have multiple dedicated article-writing teams, producing

article after article of keyword-optimized content, to be used in their link-building strategy.


Step 5 - Building Backlinks

OK, Let’s now look at the all important fifth step of SEO – Building Backlinks.

Building Backlinks - Regular Business Owner

After spending a bit of time online, Maree came to realize the importance of getting links from

other sites to her own.


To create some backlinks she tried a few techniques such as making comments on other

peoples blogs, responding to questions in forums, social bookmarking, social networking and

submitting articles to article directories.

Like most people, however, Maree found this process very tedious and gave up on it after

building just a handful of links.

Building Backlinks - Professional Approach

The SEO Professionals approach to backlinks is very, very different.

Where most people build links themselves, the Experts have teams, often dozens of people

working full-time day-in, day-out building links.

They do social bookmarking, often having dedicated teams using software that can socially

bookmark every single page that they publish on the web. They do this to help quickly get these

pages indexed on the right keywords, and also to make sure that these pages get every chance

of remaining in Google’s index.

The pros also do blog commenting. They have teams dedicated to doing nothing else but

commenting on blogs to get good quality links.


They do forum posting. Once again, dedicated teams posting on forums to get back links.

They use social media like Facebook and Twitter to get both traffic and links to their most

important pages.

They also use web2.0 sites like squidoo, weebly and many others to take the content they’ve

created, and create networks of interlinked web2.0 pages called “link wheels” that they can

then use to pass authority through to their main site.

They buy ads and links on other people’s sites not just for the traffic value, but also for the

search engine value of the high page rank link that gets created.

They buy existing domain names which already have high pagerank and existing links, and

expand those websites with more articles and content. They then interlink these high authority

blogs, and point them through to their main site.

The SEO experts also build large networks of blogs around topics related to their market,

interlink them, and then link one or two of them back to their main site.

They take copies of the hundreds of articles that they had created, and get their teams to submit

these articles manually to high quality article directories.

They take all the videos that they had created, and syndicate them to the video publishing sites

such as youtube and vimeo using video syndication services.

They write press releases about their site, and use PR services to syndicate these documents

to obtain both links and traffic.

And if they are an authority in a particular market, they use guest blogging to get traffic and high

quality links from popular blogs.

As if that wasn’t enough, perhaps the most leveraged of their link-building systems is using

Article Syndication networks. One common pattern across all the experts we spoke to was that

article syndication really was the back-bone of their link-building strategy.


Article Syndication

Lets take a closer look at how article syndication works.

The basic principle underlying article syndication is that you create a good quality article and

then submit it to an article syndication network.

The syndication network then makes your article available to other website owners who are

looking for content for their sites.

When these website owners publish your article on their websites, they include a link back to

your website. So in effect, you are trading content for links.


Benefits of syndication

This is extremely powerful because it’s a white-hat, permission based system.

Many of the link-building methods available today such as blog commenting are often abused

by people who post up spam comments just to try and sneak in a backlink.

Article Syndication however, is very different. It’s permission based, transparent, and there are

literally millions of places that will happily let you swap your content for backlinks every day of

the week.

It’s win, win. The website owners get good quality content and you get links.

And from a search engine optimization viewpoint, it just works. It’s actually one of the oldest

and most reliable link-building methods and is used by every single one of the experts we

spoke to.

And the best-bit is that with the exponential growth of the Internet over the last few years, there

are now more and more sites that need content, and are happy to exchange links in order to

get it. It’s a link-building system that actually gets easier the more competitive the web gets!


Article Directories

If you haven’t heard a lot about Article Syndication before, it’s important to understand that

there are two different kinds of syndication networks available:

The first are Article Directories.

These are sites where you post your article and make it available to others. Web-site owners

who are looking for content, can then search these article directories to find articles relevant to

their market, they then take a copy of your article, and republish it on their website. You get a

link from the article directory itself, and you also get additional backlinks each time a web site

owner decides to republish your article.


Blog Networks

The second kind of syndication network that are becoming popular with the SEO experts are

Blog Networks.

These are networks of thousands of blogs, either individually owned, or collectively owned by a

single service.

You submit an article, and then a copy of your article gets distributed to each blog in the

network. Depending on the network, these articles may be automatically published, or they may

be submitted for review first and need to be approved by the site owner.

The better networks allow individual website owners to indicate the keywords and categories

that they’re interested in receiving content from.


Article Syndication - Regular Business Owner

OK, now let's take a look at how regular business owners and the SEO pros make use of these

syndication networks.

Recently, Maree listened to an interesting webinar about article marketing and as a result she

submitted a few articles to one of the main online article directories.

But that's pretty much the extent of her article syndication efforts.


Article Syndication - Professional Approach

In stark contrast to Maree, Dave and his SEO Expert friends employ one or more dedicated

teams of article writers who write and syndicate articles day after day.

They also subscribe to dozens of article directories and blog syndication networks.

Their teams use these syndication networks to distribute content to thousands of directories

and blogs around the world.

Which over time, results in the creation of tens of thousands of backlinks


Cost of Backlink Creation

Of course, access to multiple directories and subscriptions to syndication services cost a lot of

money.

The SEO pros spend thousands of dollars each month in subscription fees and pay tens of

thousands of dollars a month to their dedicated teams to make it all happen. But that's what it

takes to generate tens of thousands of backlinks.


Don't Stop!

There is one more aspect to the backlink strategy that SEO professionals apply that most

regular business owners do not, which is that they never stop link-building.

Even when they’ve got a number one ranking and they’re well ahead of their nearest

competitor, they continue to invest in a generating more and more good quality links.

This not only helps them to continue to stay ahead of newcomers in their markets, but also

avoids the situation in which the backlinks to their site suddenly stop.

The SEO pros know that a sudden stop in link-building is not wise, and may signal to the

search engines that their websites are not as important as they were, which could negatively

impact their rankings.


Step 6: Tracking Results

And finally let’s take a look at the sixth step of SEO – Tracking Results.

Tracking Results - Regular Business Owner

When it comes to tracking the performance of her website, Maree’s approach is pretty simple.

Every now and then, she simply types each of her target keywords into a search engine, and

tries to find out where her site is ranking for that keyword. Because this is a manual and time


tries to find out where her site is ranking for that keyword. Because this is a manual and time

consuming process she tends not to do this very often.

Tracking Results - Professional Approach

The SEO professionals on the other hand are a lot more systematic about how they track the

performance of their web properties.

First they use a tracking service. This might be the Rank Tracker module in Market Samurai or

another similar service.

They also make use of an analytics package such as Google Analytics to monitor the traffic to

their site and work out what new keywords they are ranking for.


How the Pros use Google Analytics

And here's one of the most powerful ways that the Pros use Google Analytics.

First they find and track any new keywords they are ranking for. If these new keywords produce

good traffic and good conversions, they then aggressively target these keywords in the content

creation and link building activities.

This improves their rank for these keywords and leads to rankings for other related keywords

which means they can start the process all over again.

This process allows the Pros to work with the search engines and determine how best to focus

their efforts moving forward.


Conclusion

Well, that brings us to the end of our comparison of how regular business owners and the SEO

professionals approach the 6 basic steps of SEO.

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