Article Bucket

The success of your website depends mostly on you content. This is the case both for your human visitors as well as the Google robots. You want to have content that is relevant to keywords that people are searching for. However, trying to smash 100 keywords onto one page doesn’t work.

You must have many pages that revolve around only one keyword each, using the keywords sprinkled nicely throughout your content in a natural way. And don’t forget to add them in headlines (with the correct h1 tags), in the subheadings, and in bold italicized, and underlined font.

Stop! With all this technical mumbo-jumbo that we’ve been going over, you may be feeling overwhelmed and wondering if you can handle all of this. The answer is an emphatic YES. You just need to take things in little bite-sized chunks.

Through all of this, you may have lost sight on what you’re trying to do. It’s very simple. You’re trying to get as much exposure as possible to your product or service through your website.

You need human eyes.

This is called traffic. Much like if you had a store or office on a main street of town you would get foot traffic. However, the web is much different because now you’re not stuck on one corner, or worse sandwiched between two competing stores.

You get to move around to exactly where the people are, and put yourself (through your website) right in front of their face, and what’s best…for FREE! So now, we must begin to think of keywords as our sales force.

The trick is to find out exactly what these people want by their keywords. We then want to build as many pages as we can around all of these different keywords, so that these pages have the chance of being placed highly in the SERPs.

Google takes the number of pages that your site has into consideration and basses some importance on that. They favor those sites that have one hundred or more pages of solid content, optimized in the ways we stated before.

You don’t want to ignore the phrases that are searched fewer times because those could very well be your most profitable pages. The reason being that other people will usually ignore these keywords going for the ones with most searches.

This decreases your competition enormously for these words, and these will rank higher in the SERPs bringing you consistent web traffic. The power is in the numbers. Are you worried about writing? Not everyone is a writer nor do they like to write.

If you do like to write, just start writing articles around your keywords. They don’t have to be long articles or go into too much depth. They only need to be around 300-400 words.

You do want to have some valuable tidbits of info for free in your articles. Mostly however you’ll want to use the “problem, agitate, and solution” formula that leads them to your product or service.

If writing just isn’t your thing then the best thing to do is to have somebody else write for you. Hire a ghostwriter. This is someone who will write all the content for you, giving you rights to take all credit for it. This is someone who will write all the content for you, giving you rights to take all credit for it. This makes you look like the expert in your field, when really all you’re doing is sitting back and letting somebody else do the work.

Go to Elance.com or Guru.com and post a project stating that you want “optimized article” written and you’ll very quickly get bids from people eager to write your articles for you.

Another option you have is to use Articles Directories. The better known is at EzineArticles and Goarticles . You are free to use these articles - however you must keep the authors resource box intact at the bottom.

This does create two problems that you must aware of, however. It has the chance of getting your page penalized for having duplicate content, and it leads the visitor away from your website from their resource box. People who don’t like to write often use Public Domain material. This is material whose copyright has expired, and is therefore free to use without crediting the author.

There are many laws that go along with this, and it’s best to be cautious when using this content. However, many fortunes have been made on and off the Internetby using Public Domain Material.

Having good navigation on your site is essential for high placement in the SERPs. You want people to be able to get around your site with ease, because once it becomes the slightest bit difficult or annoying, they will leave in a blink of the eye.

Here’s something you should keep in mind: always count on your secondary pages - pages other than your homepage - to be found first since you’ve optimized each page successfully around relevant keywords.

You’ll want to make sure that it’s as easy to get to other pages on your website from secondary pages as it is from your homepage. Your homepage will likely be an overview of your site usually utilizing your main keywords, which unfortunately are usually the competitive.

For this reason your secondary pages will likely rank higher in the SERPs and therefore deliver you the most web traffic. Be excruciating careful that you have a good navigational system or else you’ll lose a ton of traffic that could have been directed to the pages that make you money.

What’s makes a good navigational system?

• One that is clear and easy to follow
• The one that brings you directly to the page you want. You don’t want your visitor to ever have to follow several links to get to the page they want. Always think “One click away”.
• One without broken links. You’ll lose visitors very quickly by having dead links. Test them and test them often. Here’s a free tools that will help you test broken links as well as other things on your site: sitereportcard.com

So you now know that having good solid content, optimized by placing your keywords strategically, is the key to successful SEO. You also want to have as many pages available for your prospects to come across as possible. Furthermore, you want them to be able to get from page to page of your site, without any frustration.

Keeping customers in mind is paramount. You want to keep them at your site for as long as possible - plus you want them to want to come back often. This indeed will give you the best chance of profit from your site.

The SEO industry continues to thrive and more and more SEO managers are only working with outsourced, overseas providers or contract labor.

In the two major IT recessions I have lived through, thousands of highly skilled workers were sent to the unemployment office. In fact, rather than hire a skilled unemployed IT worker, Microsoft’s Bill Gates asked Congress to increase the number of B-1 visas so that his company could hire more foreign nationals and save money. Other companies marched in line with Microsoft and did the same.

With a move to seek cheaper labor overseas, companies are turning to directory submissions in India, copywriting in the Philippines and other writing tasks that find their way to the cheaper market in parts of Europe and Asia.

Companies that are now depending on SEO departments consisting of from 5 to 15 people will further look to cut costs and manpower. Though many SEO departments are considered a profitable link to a company, CEOs and the Board of Directors they are responsible to seem to care more about the price of their stock than the impact of laying off a few SEO writers and how that impact will affect the writers’ families.

Today the SEO industry is flying high and there are more jobs being created than can be filled by experienced SEO technicians. As specialization, which has already showed signs of creeping into the industry, becomes even more prevalent, it will help to create jobs for those who want it.

I believe that the demand for the SEO service industry will peak around 2011 - 2013. This means that there will be real SEO service bureaus which will help small businesses to achieve search and social media visibility.

The problem comes when businesses feel the need to cut back. The growing trend for SEO optimization writers and technicians will eventually peak and when this happens the need for SEO specialists will disappear from the job market so it’s important to take a closer look at the jobs we do and how they may be bundled with other skills.

Currently the SEO industry is heading for more specialization, creating niche jobs in the short term but with costs continuing to rise, companies are looking for creative ways to manage and reduce their costs.

Here are some of the newer long-term types of specialists that are currently developing in the sub-SEO industry:

Trends Analyst - A trends analyst needs to go beyond just looking at search trends to looking at active business intelligence, current consumer sentiment and gauge marketing patterns. The goal is to project these new trends before they appear on the market…the more accurate these projections are the more necessary this person will be. Companies that take the time and effort to train and hire these analysts will certainly see an improvement in their search and online marketing performance. Companies such as large retailers and manufacturers along with large agencies will benefit from recruiting and developing trends analysts.

Feature Copywriter - A feature copywriter is really an online journalist who is responsible for writing news and feature stories and blog articles. The stories and articles they write are used on general purpose web sites, entertainment and news sites. But the feature copywriter’s skills can also be handy for corporate web sites where the company provides information like corporate histories, executive profiles, and also stories about the company’s functions and projects. Because this is a research-intensive position, it is best to fill it with writers who are creative, independent workers and self-motivated.

Landing Page Copywriter - Mostly used for pay-per-click advertising, they can also find use landing pages in organic SEO. The strong landing page copywriter understands A/B testing and is able to put together strong sets of reports. They can also be trained to become trends analysts.

Ad Copywriter - Ad copywriters must be able to work beyond the pay-per-click networks and master different copy formats and A/B testing along with regional results analysis and targeted keyword placements. Ad copywriters must be able to manage local search listings and niche directory listings.

Meta Copywriter - It is still important to be able to create good titles, meta descriptions and page URLs for organic search results. The meta copywriter should be able to do much more such as organizing a copywriting team in an effort to build a massive website. Here the meta copywriter would serve as both a section editor and copy manager with the responsibility of breaking down job tasks and handing out assignments. A meta copywriter should be able to work with all types of copywriters and does not have to be a senior copywriter.

Today’s SEO technicians, while doubling up as meta copywriters, must also be able to assume responsibilities for non-copy tasks such as:

Link Specialists - Must understand link theory not only in asking other sites for links but in developing link networks for both internal navigation and external link promotion. It is important for link specialists to have a good understanding of A/B testing and scalability in testing. This is a person who is able to notice and predict trends and would also be a perfect candidate to become a trends analyst. This is a research-intensive position that focuses on crawlability, indexing rates and all things link-related.

Optimization Analyst - A person who can perform on-page optimization with their eyes closed. Must have the ability to look at a web site and almost instantaneously list what can be improved. They should also be able to look at a link profile and determine which links are helping and which ones are not. Of course, they must have the ability to assess the relative competitiveness of a query space.

The optimization analyst is another candidate to move into a trends analyst position and perform quality control for the rest of the team.

The SEO manager should be able to do everything an optimization analyst must do.

I’ve sought to outline positions that can be developed into independent service models. Each of these positions can be outsourced with several of them having already been developed for outsourcing by various firms.

If your job is shaping you into a specialist, the best thing you can do is to create opportunities for professional growth from your current position into other areas of specialization. Once you’ve done this, you’ll have all the tools your company needs to promote you to an SEO Specialist or Search Strategist.

As the industry continues to grow and develop, make sure you’re not left behind because you can’t specialize when it’s deemed necessary but also make sure that your skill has not been lost to attrition because of your improved abilities.