How To Succeed in SEO By Doing What Everyone Else Hates Doing
By Anna Johnson on January 19th, 2010A recent article in Search Engine Watch by Eric Enge highlights what many Internet marketers and entrepreneurs instinctively know: success goes to those who are willing to do the grunt work i.e. by doing what everyone else hates and therefore doesn’t do.
That’s certainly the case when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Keyword research and even optimizing webpages are all very well, but when it comes to really increasing your search engine rankings – especially for competitive terms – the rewards go to those who do the ‘hard’ stuff.
Fortunately, ‘hard’ doesn’t mean intellectually difficult. What it does mean is ‘roll your sleeves up and put in the hours’.
According to Eric Enge, there are two areas in particular where search engine optimizers willing to put in hard work will benefit: direct request link building and high volume content generation.
As the name suggests, direct request link building is all about approaching other websites and asking them to link to your site. This typically involves identifying who is linking to the sites ranking above you in the search engines, finding out who to contact at those sites, and then getting in touch with them.
Unfortunately, sending them a cookie-cutter email and just asking for a link doesn’t really fly these days. You may need to call them and/or provide a much more compelling reason for them to link to you. For example, you might need to offer them something substantial in return (and not just a link).
But, as Eric says, your competitors probably aren’t doing this, which is why you should do it. Furthermore, you can still approach the task intelligently by focusing on the most authoritative sites that are most likely to give you links.
Generating a high volume of content can also be a hugely arduous task.
Remember, we’re not talking about stuffing your site with articles and other content that is duplicated elsewhere. While there is no duplicate content ‘penalty’ as such, the search engines simply won’t give you a high ranking for repeating what tons of other sites are already saying.
What we ARE talking about is generating loads of unique content that covers every conceivable keyword. You are essentially effecting a long-tail strategy: having lots of webpages that each attract just a handful of visitors.
Again, however, there is a ‘smart’ way of generating lots of content. As Eric Enge suggests, you can hire people to write or otherwise produce content for you. Not all of this content will yield substantive SEO benefits but the more content you produce, the more likely that a portion of it will attract the search engine spiders, visitors and backlinks.
