Four advanced SEO practices

As I have pointed out myself, many people are disappointed in the SEO conferences because you cannot learn the “real” hardcore stuff from the presentations. SEO conferences nonetheless serve useful purposes because those presentations help people who are just learning about search optimization understand the basic principles and see just how much is actually going on in the world of search.

Even so, there comes a point where you ask: “Is that all there is? Is there nothing more?” (Star Trek fans should recognize the reference.)

If you search for “advanced seo tips and techniques” or something similar you’ll find humiliatingly simple suggestions like distributing articles and press releases, translating pages into other languages, etc. “Content is king” is not advanced SEO. That’s a concept for beginners. Here are some more advanced concepts.

Hoard content for future use – Hog your content like the plague is coming and you’ll never be able to produce new content again because all your hired help will be dying off. You can never have too much original content lying around waiting for publication. Advanced bloggers have figured this out. Many spammers have not. If you take all your content and publish it now you have nothing to work with tomorrow. RSS feeds may be cheap but they are easily filtered out.

Storing content for those lean, dry months when you don’t have anything useful to say to your visitors is a way to keep your site fresh and push out your indexable inventory at a predictable rate. It’s a trick that magazines and newspapers have used for over 100 years with their print editions. Even television series producers hold back scripts, script ideas, and “clips” shows to buy time in case of strikes, production schedule crunches, and budget cuts. Web site operators don’t think about scheduling inventory for publication down the road but I do.

Furthermore, if you hoard inventory you’re only one or two steps away from another advanced concept: a production schedule. Many an ecommerce site updates its online inventory often, and if these sites are not working with productioin schedules they should be. If you know the 15-20 days in the calendar when your company offers “storewide” sales or whatever, you can plan accordingly and update your burgeoning inventory of promotional content. It’s not enough that you employ boilerplate text and CMS templates. Think about how you can anticipate new idiomatic trends and capitalize on them in your promotional language.

If no one knows who you are, distributing your content is a quick, easy method for getting your name (and your brand) out in front of a lot of people quickly, but there is relatively little search optimization value in distributing content these days. The value-passing links don’t come as easily as they once did. People like me, who occasionally reuse distributed content in a thoughtful, editorially-reviewed process, are very, very picky about the free content we select. Most free distribution articles are so badly written, so self-promotional, and so uninteresting they serve no useful purpose except to demonstrate how clueless their authors are.

It’s better to save up a stockpile of content so that you always have something to work with. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, publishing content on a schedule makes a lot of sense for many reasons. You can gradually develop a new theme section without feeling pressure and rushing through the tasks. If you let your articles sit and age a little you’ll be able to come back to them with a different perspective and catch mistakes that could be critical.

Create Web sites instead of profiles – Everyone has jumped on the social media bandwagon these days but too many SEOs and would-be SEOs take the lazy, greedy approach. They slap out social media profiles for the sake of pointing links at their cheap, sleazy, schlocky content. Most social media links don’t pass nearly as much value as rumor and myth would lead us to believe. Why is that?

Because you have to receive link value in order to pass it. Just creating a profile page and dropping links to your badly written blog posts doesn’t provide you nearly as much value as creating a Web site that people think of as a useful resource. Just because your “web site” happens to be a social media profile doesn’t mean it can’t be well-conceived and useful to other people. Rather than trying to reach the top slots on DIGG and SPHINN you should be creating a resource that people look for when they visit DIGG and SPHINN.

Some social media sites provide you with more opportunities for creativity than others, but you don’t want to jump on MySpace and Facebook unless you have the marketing clout to create interest in pages that will otherwise fade into the framework of millions of other pages. Where you want to create Web sites is on social media sites that provide the opportunities that most of their users don’t take advantage of. Think about it: you’ll capture more attention by being the first user on super-social-media-site.com to create a really unique and interesting profile than by being the 10,000,000th user on MySpace to try it (and MySpace sucks anyway — everything is canned and all the pages look the same).

If you place personal value in your social media profiles, so that you craft them into high quality resources, you’ll be less likely to abuse them with spammy links. REAL search engine optimization is an engineering process, not a link building process. You’re engineering Web sites to perform specific tasks and functions, and you achieve more with useful resources than with mass-produced crap.

The time to create a specialty custom profile is BEFORE everyone else catches on to the value of specialty profiles.

Read the news – Leveraging interest in news stories is a secret to advanced search optimization that you seldom hear about. If you blog on a regular basis and you can draw a connection (even a far-fetched if reasonable one) between a new event and your content, do it. People will be searching for interesting content connected with the news event and if your blog appears in blog search engines or is part of large blog networks, the chances of capturing new audience attention skyrocket when you tie in to the news.

But you can’t just throw up promotional muck (which is what most people in the SEO industry tend to do when they learn about a new technique). Be thoughtful and passionate. If you are promoting content you should do so like it will be the defining content of your career. For example, if all people ever remember me for is huckleberries and huckleberry products I’m good with that. I love huckleberries and I enjoyed creating a site about huckleberry products, providers, and related information. I hope more people develop a taste for huckleberries (which reminds me, I need to add Tillamook Ice Cream to my list of huckleberry products).

When you create a bridge between hot topics and your content, you need to make sure the bridge is attractive, interesting, and useful to someone. Not everyone will cross the bridge but the better constructed that bridge is the more people that WILL cross it. Remember, search engine optimization is an engineering process.

You won’t get it right the first time or every time, but let the SEO method guide you. Experiment, evaluate, and adjust. There will always be more news that your content is relevant to. Just be patient and practice when it makes sense to.

Bridging content is definitely an advanced SEO tactic because it takes real skill and intuition — which you can develop over time — as well as a style that is professional and engaging. You don’t have to create link bait so much as traffic bait to achieve a great end result.

Shoot for the second position – If you see a query has gone hot and some spammy superstar is using his widget-bait to goof up the search results, don’t try to outrank him immediately. Put in just enough effort to get into the top five search results. If the leaders of the pack are doing anything snarky (and they often are) many of them will eventually be caught. You can capitalize on their greed and stupidity by positioning sites just below theirs, waiting for the inevitable to happen.

And if they manage to avoid tripping any penalties or filters, well, you’re only chasing the long-tail anyway. Getting into the top five results for a long-tail query is always a good thing. It’s cream. Take it whenever you can get it and be happy with that.

The more long-tail keywords you can gain top ten or top five position for, the more valuable your Web site becomes to the Web community in general. People will see it more often and begin associating it with either spam or value (the spam association only occurs if they click through and see a lot of garbage or advertising).

Optimizing for the long tail is not nearly as hard as it seems like. It’s a gradual, methodical process. You’re an engineer who is building out a large network of visibility. Not a large network of sites, but a large network of visibility.

That is what the long tail is all about. That is what separates an advanced SEO from the beginners.