The SEO Catch 22
There is a ton of information on SEO strategies and SEO tricks. As with everything else in life, some of the advice offered is great, some pretty awful whilst some advice sounds good but may just put you into a SEO catch 22.
One piece advice I often hear relates to keywords. Investigating the search engines to see which keywords are hot and capitalising on them. This is fine. Some keywords are hot and run hot for a long period of time. Other keywords are hot, but they are only hot for a short period of time. There can be a real catch 22 using hot keywords.
The first problem I see with ‘hot’ keywords and SEO is that everyone else has jumped on those hot keywords and they are pumping their content to get maximum return. It can be very hard to get to the top of the rankings with a hot keyword when there are 20 or 30 million+ articles addressing those keywords.
The second problem is that if the ‘hot’ keyword only has a short life, you may have missed the boat. By the time you have optimised your site the ‘heat’ has gone out of that keyword. You may end up on top of the search results for that keyword, but no one is searching for it now.
The fine art of SEO is either being able to predict which keywords will become hot at sometime in the future, or being able to create a hot keyword.
Prediction is difficult. For every keyword you predict correctly, there will probably be twenty or more that you get wrong. That is a lot of SEO work for nothing.
Being able to create a hot keyword is not necessarily that difficult, particularly for the bigger companies. In fact one area that does produce hot but short lived keywords is the music industry. If a top artist released an album with the title “Scotland For Ever”, then that could become a hot keyword very quickly before dieing off just as quickly (anyone know any top musos about to release albums soon?).
For your average business looking to develop a strong presence on the web then your SEO work needs to concentrate on the who, what, where and why of your business.
Who - are you
What - do you do - what do you sell
Where - are you
Why - should I visit your site
Develop keywords in these areas and, whilst you may not be on top of the search engines for the hot keywords, you may be on the front page for keywords related to the who, what, where and why. This will bring traffic that is targeted - they are there because you have what they want.
You will find with this type of SEO campaign your traffic is may not be in the millions, however I would much rather a conversion of 10-20% of a hundred visitors than 0.0001% of a million who have arrived and found you don’t have what they want.
Hot keywords and SEO are fine if you want ‘fly by’ traffic - well planned and well designed SEO targeted keywords will produce ‘fly buy’ traffic - Don’t get caught in the SEO Catch 22.
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