In a competitive SEO environment you’ll eventually exhaust your fundamentals because there are only four fundamental principles of search engine optimization:
- Keyword research
- Content organization
- Search visibility
- Linking relationships
When you’re learning to do keyword research, you want to understand the fundamental principles of keyword analysis and research. You need to identify and understand the appropriate market. You need to identify and analyze your competitors’ keyword strategies (and that doesn’t mean looking at their keywords meta tags).
You need to have a firm grasp of content theory in order to manage your content organization effectively. You want to combine good HTML sitemap design with solid duplicate content management structures. In fact, your SEO strategy needs to focus on leveraging content for search because without the content you have nothing.
Building effective search visibility requires that you use appropriate techniques for your content. Different content types and presentation formats have different search visibility requirements. You can employ as many techniques for building search referrals as possible, as long as you match your techniques to what your content is about and what it looks like.
Linking is important to search engine optimization only because it drives the crawling process. It’s not important to SEO because of PageRank or link anchor text — it’s just that most SEOs make linking the most important aspect of their SEO campaigns. Search engine optimization nonetheless requires a clear understanding of the fundamental principles of link analysis as well as the fundamental principles of off-site SEO. To be effective at link analysis you should be completely familiar with things you should know about link analysis.
Bring these four processes together and you have the basic functionality of every successful SEO campaign, but there is so much more that can be done and which — in some cases — must be done in order to achieve search engine optimization success. Once you’ve mastered the basics you can begin to learn the more advanced stuff.
For example, you can break out the Four Fundamental Principles of SEO this way for the advanced optimization process:
- Keyword Research
- Trends analysis
- Log analysis
- Query analysis
- Site Design
- Choice of structure
- Content sourcing
- Navigational methods
- Link Placement
- Foundation or Anchor linking
- Cross-promotional linking
- Infusion linking
- Metrics
- Measuring query space dynamics
- Measuring competitive density
- Measuring SERP saturation
- Measuring return-on-investment
It could be argued that measuring ROI is important for the beginning SEO, too, but I think complex ROI measurements are only achievable through advanced analysis. When you’re working with staggered implementation schedules, multiple query spaces, and you are targeting saturation goals you need to spend more time looking at what success (and failure) may be costing you. That’s pretty advanced stuff.
The beginner or inexpert SEO should be looking for keyword ideas that are more easily achievable. You’ll investigate existing, active queries and try to find niches that are not yet heavily competitive. In advanced search engine optimization your keyword research has to be more forward-looking. You need to understand whether you’re dealing with seasonal queries, event-driven queries, product/service-driven queries, aging queries, or new queries. In fact, good keyword research focuses on identifying potential new query spaces (and your referral logs are a great resource for this). The sooner you get into a query space, the more time you have to establish your dominance before other SEOs begin to invade it.
But you cannot base advanced keyword research solely on trends analysis. You have to understand how queries themselves work. Why do some seasonal queries work so well year after year and why do some seasonal queries fade after only 2 or 3 sales seasons? And what turns an event-driven query into a constant informational query? How do query spaces evolve, age, and spawn new query spaces? You can’t just look at the queries — you have to also look at the content that satisfies those queries.
If you know the market demographics you’re going after, you’ll almost always know what kind of site design you’ll need to work with in advance. Blogs don’t satisfy all needs. Nor do forums. Nor do directories. Nor do database-driven eCommerce sites. Nonetheless, when you’re marching into new territory at the advanced level you have to know what works best for each market. People in their 20s respond differently to Web content from people in their 50s. Women look for different types of content from men. Some people want more news, more technology, more relationships, more opinions, more facts, more graphics, etc.
Optimizing these different types of content goes well beyond putting the keywords in title and Hx header text. It extends far beyond getting as many links as you possibly can. You need to know in advance where the content comes from, how it will be delivered, whether it will age well. You need to be sure you have the right navigational structures to bind the content together. Before anyone creates a Web site, the advanced SEO has to have templates indelibly etched in his mind that require only minor tweaking (or maybe some serious major redesign, but you know this BEFORE the work starts).
Link placement for an advanced SEO technician should be more like art than science. Beginner search engine optimization specialists play link-by-numbers, painting in the canvas wherever their favorite SEO blogger or guru tells them to. Advanced SEO specialists don’t have time for that kind of inefficient linking. Link placement is critical to moving the campaign forward.
Your foundation linking (the anchor-passing links most SEOs seek) needs to be minimal. In advanced search engine optimization the links come by themselves and they provide you with new ideas for keywords and queries. You strategically place anchor text to help build search visibility and plant query seeds in people’s minds for a very brief time and then you move on to focusing on crawling. The crawling is more important than the anchor text in advanced SEO because you achieve relevance mostly through content in advanced search engine optimization.
Nonetheless, since you’re building a site you want to make sure you pick the right content for cross-promotion from the very beginning. You can go back and revise your cross-promotional links at any time, but helping people learn about all the value your site provides as quickly as possible is preferrable. Introduce them to everything without overwhelming them. Plan a tour through your site using cross-promotional links. Feature all your showcase content in your cross-promotional lattice-work of internal links.
Infusion linking is serious stuff. Most people don’t get many opportunities for infusion linking. Infusion linking can drive a lot of traffic, or it can pass a lot of PageRank, or it can create a lot of visibility. Infusion linking works very simply. Call it the CNN Effect because it’s just like getting a link on the home page of CNN, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. Infusion is about obtaining an incredibly powerful link and it has absolutely nothing to do with anchor text.
Infusion linking is most easily achieved when your site (or business) is profiled by a key influencer in the news media or blogosphere. It happens rarely and I don’t know of any SEOs who publicly discuss how you engage in this type of linking. You CAN buy infusion links but they are not cheap. You’re more likely to get an infusion link by building a relationship with an influencer, nurturing his interest in what you’re doing until he’s convinced it’s worth promoting.
Good content helps tremendously with obtaining infusion links, but don’t confuse good content with link bait. Link bait does not draw infusion links.
I have discussed what it takes to build a query space in the past. You need to be able to determine how competitive a query space may be before you start to build or invade it. The advanced SEO should know a little bit about SERPology, the psychology of search optimization because managing a query space includes managing the psychological factors that impact search.
I’ve written a fair amount about metrics but there is more that could be said, so I’ll leave the rest of the advanced metrics topic for the future.
Nonetheless, if you combine this outline with four advanced SEO practices you should begin to see how advanced SEO is more about establishing your leadership before there are any leaders and less about cool tricks and geewhiz tactics.
Every beginner SEO should look down the road and see where they want to be. If you focus on these goals your long-term search engine optimization success will be more certain. That isn’t to say there is a method for always winning. You’re going to lose some SERPs to your competitors. You’re going to be closed out of some SERPs. Advanced SEO doesn’t concern itself with getting into any particular query space. Rather, it focuses on bringing in as much achievable search referral traffic in as short amount of time as possible.
And, of course, that requires a lot of hard work and preparation before you start optimizing.
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