Knowing SEO is powerful for your site because it teaches you how to create content that people are already searching for. In Phase 1 we (Fernando and Zach Olsen of By Data Be Driven) took you through all the research you need to do to determine the best keywords for your niche, assess your competition and get your site set up for analysis. Now we’re going to create content, network and build backlinks that bring the right people to your site so your spaceship can blast beyond the earthly reaches of gravity.

Content is King

More content means more potential stuff the search engine spiders can pick up and index giving your site more ways to be found. This is where it’s smart to have a blog as part of your site. Write about every aspect of your business using every detail as a different post – like “How to Unscrew the Wignut Off Of a Class B #234 Widget” – not many people search for this specific of a thing, but for those who do, you’ll be at the top of the search results and give the person exactly what they we’re looking for – what a great way to start off a relationship with a potential customer! All these posts individually won’t pick up much traffic since they are very specific, but together they can be a significant source of new readers. Writing content specifically for SEO requires a different mindset. Rather than using creative titles that establish your unique voice it’s important to think about how someone would search for this content and then give it a title that someone would use in a search. The Keyword Research you did in Phase 1 should have given you a whole host of search terms you can use to brainstorm new articles.

A couple tools for getting ideas on what to write about:  http://labs.wordtracker.com/keyword-questions/ This will help you find questions to answer relating to your most important keywords. http://answers.yahoo.com/ Use Yahoo! Answers to find questions to answer. Any post that starts with “How To” is usually a good one, especially if no one has answered it before.

Building Backlinks

Some people email other sites asking for links. I think that’s kind of weird. In Phase 1 we told you about Backlinkwatch, and Yahoo Site Explorer, two sites you can use to determine where sites similar to yours are getting their backlinks from. Now it’s time to get your own backlinks by doing what your competition does and then finding a way to top them. For example, if your competition gets a lot of backlinks by posting comments on specific sites, you can do the same and then you can find other people who have left comments on those sites who also have blogs and comment on their blogs.

People talk a lot about link bait where you write stuff that people would want to link to. Do a search for link bait and you will find a myriad of articles on the subject that all say pretty much the same thing: write stuff that’s interesting, don’t rehash content, make it original. But the real key to link bait is writing things that other people can profit by linking to. People write blogs for a number of reasons: to demonstrate expertise in their field, to earn passive income from ad and affiliate sales or to share their passion with the world. If linking to your content helps them achieve their goals, you have link bait.

The other great way to get quality backlinks is guest posting. Fernando has gotten a lot of traffic from guestposts he did for The Denver Egotist like “It’s Hard to Sing When You Can’t Breathe” and “The Denver Egotist is Perestroika”.  Guest posting works in reverse as well. When you invite a blogger to write a guest post on your site there’s a good chance they’ll link to it so their readers have a chance to read it.

Monitoring

Setting up google alerts is a good idea for your brand and keywords that are important to you. With Google Reader I subscribe to the feed option in Google Alerts so that my email doesn’t become swamped with alerts. You can also subscribe to tweets containing your keywords just like Google Alerts http://search.twitter.com/. This will give you news to write about and posts to comment on.

The Long Haul

Building search engine traffic takes time and the people who are successful at it are the people who are persistent. The key to search engine success is doing quality research (find out what keywords people are searching with, find out who ranks highly for these keywords, find out what they’re doing to rank highly) and then finding a way to be better than the people who rank ahead of you. Read their articles and take note of information they haven’t included or angles they haven’t explored. See if there is a way you can make your content more readable, more accessible, more sharable than theirs. And learn how to think like your audience by using the tools we covered in Phase 1 to understand their search habits.

And remember, the whole point of learning SEO is to empower you to create a site that keeps your passion alive and helps you build a career you love. I’ve written a step by step guide called Build a Life Changing Website that I hope will change advertising by unleashing the creative energy of advertising and design professionals on the world.

Once again, this post was co-written with the incomparable Zach Olsen of By Data Be Driven. If this just whet your SEO appetite and you want to really dive in, Zach covers the subject in exquisite detail on his blog.

Faithfully,

Fernando

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