How to beat Wikipedia to the top of Google...and CNN, the BBC, USA Today, ABC News... by Mark Nunney, 26 August 2009
With permanent search engine optimization (SEO) you can secure and defend the keywords you are successful for and find new keyword niches to target. Mark Nunney explains why SEO never stops and how you can use this to beat the toughest of competition.
Key points
- Your competition won't stop optimizing.
- Your priorities will change.
- There are always new keyword niches to find.
- Look for the keywords of the future, including personalities, products, shows and ideas.
The competition will never stop optimizing
Inbound links from other sites to yours are a crucial part of optimizing your site for search engines (SEO). The more competitive a keyword is, the more important inbound links are for achieving success.
You can be sure that your competitors will never stop increasing their own inbound links.
Therefore, even if you currently dominate search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target keywords, either continue link building or eventually get beaten. As a wise man once said: you are never more vulnerable than at the peak of your success.
There are always new keywords and niches to find
The universe of all searches in any market is vast and you will never find all the keywords and keyword niches that you might exploit. So it’s always worth looking for more.
New keywords to target emerge all the time as, for example, new products and new ideas become popular. Using Wordtracker, you can dig ’deep’ and ‘wide’ for new keywords to target.
Dig Wide for new keywords using Wordtracker’s Related Keywords Tool (the Orange Tool) which looks for, well, keywords related to the ‘seed’ word you enter. For example, if you have a sports injury site, you might enter sports injury. See the first 18 of 300 results on the following image:
Dig Deep for new keywords using Wordtracker’s Keywords Tool (the Blue Tool) which looks for keywords containing the ‘seed’ word you enter. For example, on that same sports injury site, you might enter sports medicine, a keyword I found from the Related Keyword Tool search shown above. See the first 12 of 987 results – all keywords containing sports medicine - on the following image:
Each time you do a Wordtracker search you aren’t just finding keywords to use in your content, you’re staying in touch with the zeitgeist of your industry and its niches.
You’ll see new phrases emerge and get popular - write content for them and get to the top before your competitors do.
Priorities always change
Your SEO strategy should prioritize the most lucrative of your target keywords. But your priorities – and therefore your SEO strategy - will change as response rates, marketing material, prices, product ranges, stock levels and fashions change. Each shift in priorities needs more keyword research to find appropriate target keywords.
Some ways to stay ahead of your competition with permanent SEO
Here is a list of specific jobs you can make part of your process of permanent SEO:
Set up your favorite feed reader and Twitter to show you all stories containing your most important seed keywords.
If you see anything interesting, write a quick article about it. As an amalgamator of the best and most interesting news, you’ll be providing a service to your readers.
Always have Wordtracker open and enter any relevant words to find more keywords to use in your copy. I now use SEO Blogger for this – it’s a firefox add-on that you can use for keyword research without leaving your browser window. Any keywords I find with SEO Blogger that I like, I move to the Wordtracker Keywords Tool for deeper research; and to save.
Just as important as the pages you write are the categories you allocate your pages to. Those category pages will become filled with lots of relevant articles and will be a treasure trove for those interested in the subjects.
If you see anything worth a more detailed article, write it and optimize it.
Once a week revisit your main niches' seed words. Put them into the Wordtracker Keywords Tool and check out not just if you’ve missed anything, but if the relative importance of your usual suspects has changed. Edit your site content accordingly. This is easier with a subscription to Wordtracker because you can save your target niche’s seed words in a List and then manage and develop the List over time.
Look for news about product launches and future events, shows and competitions. Find the keywords in those stories and put them into Wordtracker. Even if the number of searches shown is small, create content ready for increases in popularity. Make sure that content contains other keywords that will be used with the main target keywords.
Personalities can become popular overnight, but if you’ve spotted that young talent in an earlier news story you can have a page ready for the searches that will follow their time in the limelight.
Here’s a good example from a sports injuries site:
Encouraged by some success for searches related to Tiger Woods' knee injury, during the Beijing Olympics Sports Injury Bulletin created a new Olympics injuries category. They wrote articles for athletes with injuries who were expected to make the news. One example being Serena Williams' knee injury and the following grab shows the site coming No.1 on Google for a search with Serena Williams injury.
That Serena Williams page still delivers traffic and it will deliver a lot more when Serena’s injury makes the news again.
Beats Wikipedia too … and CNN, the BBC, USA Today and ABC News
Interestingly, if you search for Serena WiIliams injury, you’ll see that Little Guy Sports Injury Bulletin beats pages from Big Guys including wikipedia.org, encyclopedia.com, cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, usatoday.com, and abcnews. Which is nice. See the following image of the relevant Google results page:
With permanent search engine optimization (SEO) you can secure and defend the keywords you are successful for and find new keyword niches to target.
More Kick-Ass keyword tactics from Aaron Wall
You can find many more money-making keyword strategies in Aaron Wall's book: 50 Kick Ass Keyword Strategies.
What do you think about this article and using permanent SEO to stay ahead of your competition, find new keywords and beat the competition?
Use the comments form below to share your thoughts and ask questions about this article.
About Mark Nunney
Mark Nunney (@marknunney) has been a successful professional SEO since 2000 and is CEO of The Website Marketing Company, although (apart from the link in this sentence) he's never optimized their website! He also publishes ThinkingManagers.com, the business management website which he optimized a bit a long time ago. With Wordtracker he is committed to teaching 'SEO for profit in the real world'. You can follow Mark Nunney's SEO on Twitter.
12 comments
I agree with Mark. It is possble to compete for highly competitive keyword phrased. But not by accident. All the pieces of the SEO puzzle must be in place. For example As of today 8/27/09 our site: www.ReviewResorts.com is listed Page #1 - Listing #1 for "Hawaii Resort Reviews" - Very cool huh?
I have also determined that links in Twitter tweets that are short enough to be shown as the true url address and not the tinyurl abreviation help SEO. These Tweets tend appear in Google SERP as an inbound link from your followers Twitter pages. So keep Tweeting!
George
George: great work on Hawaii Resort Reviews. Very cool, yep.
That's one of the reasons why you should choose what you love or even if you have succeeded in bringing in the quick results, it won't last.
The more sites I build the more I understand this. Time is ultra precious and instead of spending it into whatever randomly comes in your mind or whatever others are doing and you can't help being tempted to do a similar one, you should focus it on things you really care in the long term. Or it simply won't last.
This was quiet an interesting read. First thing I did was to go and create a new filter on my TweetDeck for "school management software". Very useful indeed!
As for creating a growing set of back-links, what do you think of creating and publishing articles on the web? On sites like Ezine.com and all that.
Anne
Hey Mark,
That's a great post! Really really interesting! But you know what I think knowing what the SEs does still remains a mystry except for those who actually wrote the algorithm.
Just one question. How important do you think the website age factors in for getting a good rank in SEs?
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the great post. If you compare between a press release and say a paid directory like Yahoo. Which one do you think is a better option for SEO and why?
Regards,
Samapti
Nice article. I thought you were going to tell us to write an article to submit to Wikipedia. I was searching my keywords in Wiki one day and for many of them I was told I could write a page about my keyword. Never had time to do it yet though.
Thanks for this great article Mark! I tend to be lazy and forget that SEO never stops. Forgetting SEO means losing to the competition. And thanks for the very handy SEO Blogger, there's really no excuse at all for these lapses.
Great info. Incoming links are huge...tough to generate, but you will have very positive results once they are in place; just make sure others are linking to you via the keywords you are targeting. i.e.: "click here" links are pointless.
As for Wikipedia...use it to your advantage by posting a link to your information within an existing Wikipedia article that competes with your topic. Not easy and not always a long-term fix but it can help in the short-term (at least it has for me). "SEO never stops" is a good theme for a "link-to" campaign such as this.
Blogger is a good link source too...if you are targeting Google rankings.
The "Serena Williams Injury" query demonstrates how high domains with keywords can rank. The number one ranking result for "serena williams injury" comes from sportsINJURYbulletin.com. None of the other listed domains have the 'injury' keyword in the domain.
Also, it's obvious that SportsInjuryBulletin.com is going to be highly relevant when it comes to sports and injuries...and Google likes that.
Diego: keywords in domain is a factor, certainly.
But, unless it is an exact match or close, it's not that big a factory. As you point out for our example, none of the other listed domains have 'injury' in the domain. The other domains with 'injury' are nowhere to be seen.
An inurl search at G reveals over 2 million pages with 'injury' in their URL.
Do you have any advice for those of us web designers who are trying to get a new site optimized, especially when it's in a new field? For example, I mostly do sites for churches and fashion stores, but I recently got a job doing a site for a welding business. It's going to be really hard to do this and to stay on top of the changes when it's only one site of many, and the rest are all very similar to one another. Does that make sense?