You’re not an SEO copywriter until you’re ready to take a serious shot at hypercompetitive keywords like “SEO”, “pizza”, and “Britney Spears”. Whether anyone thinks you have a snowball’s chance of ranking for SEO, pizza, and Britney Spears is irrelevant. The point is that your task is to write copy that can rank for SEO, pizza, and Britney Spears.
You can plug any hypercompetitive keywords into that list, the rules remain the same: until you make a serious attempt to manipulate search results by building very relevant copy for hyperompetitive keywords like SEO, pizza, and Britney Spears, you’re not qualified to express an opinion on a professional level on whether it can be done.
What separates the real search engine optimizers from the link baiters and the link builders — the people who are too scared to do some real search engine optimization because they really don’t know how to do it — is that you won’t back down from the impossible challenge just because the keywords are hypercompetitive. Links always have something to do with search engine optimization. They are only 1/3 of what you need. Copy is 1/2 of what you need (yes, copy is more important than links in search engine optimization). The other 1/6 of what you need for search engine optimization is an SEO strategy.
If your strategy is to write such compelling copy that everyone on Earth links to your “SEO, pizza, and Britney Spears” post, you don’t have an SEO strategy. That’s a link baiting strategy and link baiting is not search engine optimization.
If your strategy is to build thousands of links that point back to your post with anchor text of “SEO, pizza, and Britney Spears”, you don’t have an SEO strategy. That’s a link building strategy and link building is not search engine optimization.
SEO, Pizza, and Britney Spears
People are afraid to try to do something with content any more. They run around the Web sharing ideas about how to buid links, where to get links, and they spend half their time whining about lost rankings, failure to rank, lack of good linking resources, etc.
It’s been said before: this ain’t rocket science. But why do people insist on making it so hard for themselves?
SEO begins with content
Content is the core and foundation of every search engine optimization campaign. You can have all the links in the world, 1,000 top rankings for various queries, and tons of Toolbar PR but if you don’t have copy you haven’t optimized anything. Linking to an empty page (and it’s been done) just to show people can grab number 1 and build up a high Toolbar PR is a waste of effort.
That’s how you prove that any inefficient model can be made to produce some result if you apply it on a large enough scale.
SEO needs a strategy
Your goal should not be to displace the Official Britney Spears Site in queries for “Britney Spears”. Your goal should be to make your content relevant to “Britney Spears” because people will search for Britney Spears content, not just for Britney Spears. The difference between “Britney Spears” and Britney Spears content is that Britney Spears is actually relevant to more than just her name.
SEO for Pizza
Pizza Hut dominates the “pizza” query. You don’t need to rank first for pizza in order to optimize for pizza. Anyone typing in a search for pizza has a pretty good idea of what they’re going to find. But people will search for pizza content in different ways. If you have to rank well for “pizza”, then you need to optimize for pizza.
Optimization is not just about bolding all your references to pizza, or italicizing pizza at every opportunity, or “quoting pizza”, or underlining pizz. How many headers and titles you stuff pizza into isn’t optimization, either.
Search engine optimization is about SEO, Pizza, and Britney Spears
It’s not about the keywords: it’s about the topics. Keywords change. Query results change. People change what they are looking for. But I’m not talking about Local Search, Long Tail Search, or any specific category of search. I’m not talking about defining a market. I’m not talking about defining a query.
Search engine optimization begins with content and you have to build content that is relevant to the topic. You can link to the content, other people can link to the content, and you can link about the content (as can other people). But the content needs to be relevant to the queries it ranks for. Irrelevant copy, no matter how highly placed in search results, is not relevant to a query.
What is your SEO strategy for ‘SEO’?
If you were charged today with ranking well for “SEO”, how would you do it? Simply repeating it on a page 100 times is a shot in the dark. Bolding, italicizing, quoting, and underlining it won’t guarantee you results. Including it in headers and the title tag and page URL won’t guarantee you results, either.
Nor will links. People are already trying to rank first for “SEO” through links.
If you cannot rank for “SEO” with on-page repetition and off-page repetition, then why is anyone else ranking? That is the paradox of strategic SEO. You commit SEO suicide as soon as you tell yourself, “Hey, other people are hammering this term, so I might as well not try”.
Worse, you kill yourself if you only settle for second or third page results. Your SEO strategy needs to look at more than just what seems to be realistic. It has to look at the commitment you have agreed to meet.
What is your SEO strategy for ‘pizza’
Pizza Hut many not always dominate the keyword “pizza”. Someone may one day hire an SEO who gets the job done for another pizza company. Maybe Little Caesar’s Pizza will one day rank first for “Pizza” just because someone thought it would be worth trying.
Put yourself in that SEO’s position, however. Is “pizza” all there is to optimizing for pizza? Are 10 Web pages all that are worth looking at for the concept of pizza?
There is no SEO for ‘Britney Spears’
The point of this exercise is not to optimize for “Britney Spears”. If you start checking the queries for SEO, pizza, and Britney Spears to see if this blog post appears in them any time in the future, you’ve missed what I am driving at.
SEO is about the topic, stupid!
You have to create copy about the topic. You have to create content about the topic. You have to create useful, meaningful, relevant collections of words about the topic. It’s the topic that matters, not the keywords.
It’s the topic that you build content and links for, not the keywords.
It’s the topic you bait links for, not the keywords.
Keywords are irrelevant.
That’s why this post is about “SEO, pizza, and Britney Spears”.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
cdelrio 07.06.07 at 6:02 pm
Well done Micheal! You now rank for “seo pizza” and several other combinations of seo, pizza, Britney, and spears.
My question is are you trying to be transparent, or are you are you confident that no sees “the magic”?
Michael Martinez 07.06.07 at 6:44 pm
Actually, the transparency of the keywords was supposed to be the illusion. That is, the whole post was leading up to the punch line: it’s the topic that matters more than the keywords. I knew I’d grab some secondary combos with the post. There’s a lot of wide open territory surrounding those keywords (though maybe not for long, now).
You must log in to post a comment.