I have been reading again. I keep getting drawn to these SEO articles and posts where a totally different mindset is at work.
An article I read today exemplifies the growing divide between the number crunching algorithm chasers and people like us who write content with heart.
On one side you have thousands and thousands of people trying to rigorously reverse engineer an impossibly complex algorithm for ranking websites.
On the other you have the rest of us. People writing content and providing goods and services for niches by driving traffic with basic optimization that you can learn from free information and casual, regular reading to keep up on the basics.
What we do is optimize the way Google says to do it in their terms of service. Optimize content for your visitors. Meaning, write content that visitors seek out and connect with on a level deeper than the SEO firms care to talk about.
This takes creativity and thinking. Not number crunching keyword density and funky little equations like mass + keywords + linking = success.
Rather than think about their visitors, SEO geeks think in terms of mathematical analysis. Which might be fine if humans weren’t involved.
Most SEO tips and discussion leave out a critical part of the equation when it comes to visitor optimization:Â emotion.
You may be a blogger or an ecommerce store owner, but people choosing whether to read your stuff or buy your products do so largely based upon psychological factors induced (or not) by your copy.
Leaving out this fact when optimizing your site means you are extremely likely to leave out on page factors for optimization that trigger long tail search results for your niche.
If you aren’t thinking on a deeper level about your visitors and connecting with them (through your content) on that deeper level, you are leaving out a huge chunk of traffic and search results.
My competitors rank over me with terms like “internet marketing” and “website promotion.” Yet I get as much or more traffic than most of them for all the other terms people are more specifically searching for.
Think about how you search. If you want to learn about building an optin list, do you type in “internet marketing” or “building an optin list?”
Let’s put it another way. Who would you rather have on your site if you sold, say, dog sunglasses? Someone who came to you from the engines using the keyword term “dogs?” Or someone who came to your site through the search term “dog sunglasses reviews?”
The people coming to your site from a top ten listing for “dogs” will do nothing more than eat up your bandwidth if you site is about such a niche product like dog sunglasses.
You’ll make some sales, but you will have a bandwidth bill that has to be paid for with your earnings.
I would rather have a visitor from a search term like “successful blog promotion and linking” than I would from a term like “internet marketing.”
The former gets far less searches, but the latter is far too vague to generate quality visitors.
Getting in the top ten in Google is not just a pissing match to see who is better at crunching algorithms. It is a business.
The long tail phrases, not single words or the most popular two word combo in your niche that you pick are crucial and they often come out of writing content directly to your market as if you were writing them a personal letter.
This is why I urge people to simply think critically about their niche and develop content from the heart. With forethought, passion for the topic, and a desire to be helpful rather than #1 on the engines for vanity key phrases, you will see surges of traffic from listings you would have never seen in your last keyword research report.
Because humans don’t search the way keyword analysis often indicates when they are passionately and urgently looking for specific things.
My keyword phrases that I get so much traffic from never come out in keyword reports. They are too specific and there are too many words.
Yet people find me, scores and scores of people every day, through phrases like “get more myspace friends” and “advertise with social bookmarking.”
If all you do is crunch the numbers and look at your site’s keyword density for the words you THINK are important to your market, you are definitely, absolutely missing out on a ton of traffic that is searching for your content on totally different, longer, more obscure search terms that can only come to light when you simply write good, thoughtful content.
So beware the SEO firm or guru that takes the clinical approach to optimization. That approach is dead, completely, as a worthwhile tool in today’s marketing environment.
Some people would do well to get their “noses out of the books” and get into the larger discussion going on around them in their niche. Doing so will eventually show incredible traffic surges when people can finally find you with terms they are actually using to search rather than the vanity terms that general, non-converting people are using to search.
Final thought:Â If there are 20,000 sites looking to score a top ten result for “internet marketing” (there are way more than that) and each website owner checks the top ten results just once a week, the search results that are reported by your favorite keyword tracking service the next month are going to be off by exactly 80,000 searches!
Think about that. Those aren’t your customers who are searching for your content – they are your competitors simply checking in to do some number crunching and reverse engineer the sites in the top ten so they can try to beat them mathematically.
Our sites, optimized for real humans with real content developed with human hands and minds, will beat and ARE beating the vast majority of those kinds of SEO’d sites every day of the week in sheer quality, targeted traffic.