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SEO Backup Plans For Beginners

Posted by Michael Martinez on September 10, 2007 in SEO Theory

I always have a backup plan. I never assume that whatever I’m doing today will work for any particular site. But backup plans can be less efficient than first round plans. A backup plan calls for patience and flexibility.

When you have a network of Web sites to work with backup plans may be as simple as sprinkling a few judicious links in places you normally wouldn’t put them. But not only is that inefficient it’s risky, at least in that it may dilute the user experience. And if it’s not good for your visitors, you have to ask yourself if it’s good for search engine optimization.

In my book a temporary solution is no solution at all. I’d rather not have to come up with a backup plan when the first plan fails. I have had SEO campaigns roll into plans F and G before they succeed. If you assume the best possible results should appear within a month, then waiting six or seven months to get results is not a good idea.

You should look at search engine optimization as a series of rolling actions that you stop once you achieve success. That is, you start out with a first-round plan, put that into motion, and then put together your second-round plan. You should be finishing the implementation of your second-round plan by the time the first-round plan should be bearing fruit.

In other words, each search engine optimization plan should require no more than about 2 weeks to develop and implement. Then you should wait 2 weeks to see if there is any movement on the plan’s actions in the search results.

A rolling sequence of SEO plans calls for you to implement 2 plans in the first month. In a perfect world you can devise 2 SEO plans per campaign per month and roll them out without any hitches. In large-scale search engine optimization it doesn’t always work out that way. So you have to be flexible and not fly into a panic just because you cannot meet the 2-week deadline. If you have to develop a 3-week schedule, then develop a 3-week schedule.

But what constitutes an SEO plan? It ain’t link buying, link swapping, or link begging. Links are part of the plan but if all you’re planning is to get links you plan pretty much sucks from the outset.

Let’s look at an SEO program for a hypothetical Web site. This will be a perfect campaign for illustrative purposes. We have complete control over the site and we’re implementing search engine optimization from the start of the design phase. So that means we’ll build a site around some solid keyword research, map out a flexible page hierarchy that allows for content growth, and implement an internal link navigation system that:

1. Is easy for people to understand and use
2. Easy for crawlers to index
3. Passes a lot of value
4. Incorporates redundancy to minimize how much people have to hit the BACK button and to help crawlers find the most important pages

But that is not an SEO plan. An SEO plan has to build upon the foundation you create with a well-optimized Web site. An SEO plan is designed and executed independently of a site’s initial design.

Think of an SEO plan as an additional layer of optimization that can only be applied after a site has been indexed. If you’ve done your job well in the design phase the site will start generating search referrals within a month or so. You need to look at the query strings in those search referrals and determine which ones are most important (through additional keyword research).

Having chosen a set of worthwhile queries you need to either tweak existing content or add content. You could do both. Whatever you decide, that is the basis of your SEO plan. An SEO plan always begins with modifying or adding content to a Web site.

Once you decide how to rearrange or expand the content you need to think about creating appropriate visibility for the content. You may already have a linking program in place. Let’s say you do. That linking program needs to keep going just as it is. Your SEO plan has to incorporate its own linking strategy. The SEO plan has to get just a few links (no more than 3 to 5 value-passing links) to the newly rearranged or added content.

Those 3 to 5 links can come from any source as long as they pass value. Your first choice for links should be the Web site you’re optimizing but you need some variety. 1 to 2 links in each SEO plan should be external links. Now, don’t go reaching for your social media profiles just yet. I said these links need to pass value and most social media profiles do not pass value.

Remember that there is only one way to determine if a link passes value: you see unique anchor text pass from the linking page to the destination page. Toolbar PR, Yahoo! backlink reports, prices in link broker inventories, and other measures of “value” won’t tell you if a link on a page will give you what you want: crawling, indexing, a little PageRank, and some anchor text.

You need to build an inventory of pages that pass value through their links. You only do that through trial and error. You may have to do some link building for those pages. By creating pages that are deemed valuable in search indexes you shorten the cycle of link building, but don’t expect a smorgasboard of autogenerated link spam sites to work for you (not for very long).

Your goal should not be to buy your way to the top of search results through links. Your goal should be to get optimized content crawled, indexed, and associated with some value. You don’t need much value. You just want to know that a search engine’s algorithm is willing to pass some anchor text. That tells you a lot about the state of a Web page.

But that is your SEO plan: you add or modify content and point a few unique links to that content.

It should take you about 2 weeks to figure out what the content needs to be optimized for, how to optimize it, get the changes or additions in place, and to sprinkle a few links across the Web.

As soon as you finish that plan you need to put another plan into place. It should not focus on the same keywords. Rather, do new query research based on referrals and figure out where else you can build or modify content. Why? Remember the SEO Method: Experiment, Evaluate, Adjust.

Just because you think your site might have the potential to gain a lot of traffic from the first set of secondary queries doesn’t mean it will. You may find you hit the top of the search results and get nothing more. If you don’t grow traffic by optimizing for queries that people have used to find your content, your SEO plan has failed.

That is why you need to keep rolling out new plans. After 2 or 3 months you’ll see a pattern of growth in search engine referrals. By that time you’ll already have seen where your initial optimization is weak and you’ll probably have begun thinking about how to strengthen it. Few people hit the top of their targeted search results with a new Web site. It takes a lot of experience and careful planning and execution to do the job right.

So think of your SEO plans as seeds you sow on the Web, looking for growth that benefits both you and the searching community. Your best results occur where people find what they are looking for in your content. You don’t need to overwhelm them in the SERPs like a spammer. You just want to create content that has both value and visibility.

Now, a successful SEO plan doesn’t have to generate thousands of referrals right away. All you’re looking for is growth. If you chose to optimize a query that averages 2 referrals a day, then increasing your average to 3 referrals a day is a measure of success. Search engine optimization improves your results. It doesn’t guarantee specific levels of success.

The most important reason why you want to roll out 3 to 4 SEO plans in sequence is that it will keep you busy long enough for you to ignore your initial search results. All too often peopel obsess over slow starts. Some SEO plans work best when executed six to twelve months in advance of their optimum seasons. Some SEO plans that seem to fail initially may benefit from unexpected interest in query topics years down the road.

If you invest 3 months in executing SEO plans for each campaign, you’ll give your initial SEO efforts time to bear fruit without making unnecessary changes. You’ll also be expanding your options as you develop new plans and focus on secondary queries that may, in time, surpass your original targeted queries in potential traffic value.

It’s difficult to predict searcher query patterns, but the best place to find insight into what people want to know is your search referral data. As you compile query data over an extended period of time you’ll see seasonal patterns emerge and you’ll begin to compare what people search for with what you know about news events, advertising, product placements in entertainment media, and other stimuli for the topics your Web content is relevant to.

But that’s a topic for another article.