The Answer to Last Month's Riddle and (More Importantly) to a Lot of SEO Problems:

Well, if you have been reading, I had a riddle last month for this month's subject line: "What has links but does not bind; what has keys but is never locked." The answer is good content, which solves a host of SEO problems if you have been following my previous articles – meaning a plan has been adopted for search terms, site structure and title tags.

Simply put, the traditional SEO ideal is to have good copy that incorporates KEYwords (a.k.a. search terms). Once visitors start to find you for the keywords, the good content will persuade them to provide LINKS to your website - which will persuade Google to rank the site higher on the results page, and so on. That's the idea. Yes, there are other factors that you need, but if you just use the main keyword in the heading, the title tag and the fresh unique body copy, it will work to some extent.

Unfortunately, as with many ideals, a harsher reality tends to intrude. The "extent" that the ideal SEO plan will work to might be a ranking of 30 that provides four visitors/year for your main keyword. Back in the day (2004 or so), anyone optimizing would tend to get a great ranking for their top keywords since nobody else was really trying. But now there is often competition for most of the search terms that show up in the Google keyword tool.

So what's a poor neophyte SEO marketer supposed to do? The perhaps surprising answer is more good content. The current secret of SEO is that most searches are for terms no one knows about – not even Google! 20% of all searches are entirely new to the Google index – never been used before! (Might be 40%, I don't remember, and neither of us really needs to know, other than that it is a mighty big number of search terms when you consider how many searches they get.)

For companies with some top rankings for their major search term, if they look at their website traffic data, they will most likely see they get more traffic from search terms that they never envisioned in quantities of 1, 2 or 3 clicks a month. The important thing to remember is that often these search terms, the ones that lead to more business, are searches that include the main terms - combined with other terms. What is more important? A clickthrough for "widgets", "green widgets", "green widgets in stock", or "large carton of green widgets in stock". Longer search terms often indicate a higher level of intention whereas a term like "widgets" is often filled with people who want to know what a widget is and other low-level reasons.

So how do you capture these unknown search terms? Write about troubleshooting, like "widget won't work". Write about industry standards. (Categories like these are also useful to generate links.) Write to include multiple search terms in close association, like "green and red widgets". Think about keywords that would indicate someone needing to make a purchase. Write about anything that is interesting to your customers. You don't even have to post it on your own website. If you can post it on another website with a link back to your website – there's a great relevant link that Google will value more highly than many dozens of directory links. This whole "content concept" is one of the motivations for blogs. It is content that you don't have to write completely, or subjects that don't necessarily fit neatly into a nice business website.

Finally, one other piece of advice: Don't bury this good content. Typically you will want it to match up with search terms in the calling pages, often from the second level pages, since Google does not really search too deep on many websites – usually only 3 levels. You don't necessarily have control when posting to a blog and you need to be careful the blog is not negating the link back to your site for the highest level of value. On the other hand, even a domain name listing without a link provides some value.

Next Month: MORE ON LINKS (and MORON LINKS)

To see if SEO is right for your business, contact Jeb at jblair@praxisagency.com.