3 Critical SEO Fundamentals

Coming to you from the Island of Kauai in Hawaii this week 🙂 I’m looking at a local site from a village where I’m staying. Some of the SEO they are doing is great but there are some fundamentals they are not doing which means they are missing out on a lot of traffic.

1. Choose the right Keyphrases

Sounds simple right? If you get this wrong you are simply leaving money on the table. In the case of the site I look at in today’s video I’d say they are missing out on hundreds of visits per day. This is not just from one keyphrase but from a series of what we call stem phrases.  For instance when I did the ranking exercise for SEO consultant Melbourne in a previous post I now also rank for a bunch of phrases I was not targeting.  See the image below for phrases I now get traffic for but did not target.

That is a list out of Google webmaster tools. By writing content around one single phrase I now rank for a whole bunch, some obviously entirely useless to me.

2. Don’t worry about your brand ranking

Google wants and needs to rank you for your brand. You should not need to do a lot of work around ranking for it. As long as your site is crawlable and performs well for the user, Google will work out that you are the authority for your brand. Get your brand out of your page titles unless your brand is also your main keyphrase.

3. Have a content plan

Even if you do get your initial keyword selection wrong you can fix it by creating more content. That’s why it’s important to have a content creation strategy. It allows you to create content that is good for the user but focussed around a group of key phrases like I did for SEO consultant. The more content you create the greater your traffic from Google will be because you will rank for more keywords.

If the ziplining goes well today and the helicopter flight tomorrow goes ok… I’ll see you back in Melbourne next week.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.