ELWsoftware.com

SEO is often misrepresented in people’s minds.  Cutting Edge SEO tricks should forget about the “junk SEO” and focus on what your site needs!

Search engine optimization is about being there when your customers are searching!

1. Search results are all ads!  Even if you aren’t paying for your site to show up where it does, it is still an ad.  The goal is the same:  Get the searcher to visit your site!
2. People often tell me that their site is #1 in search results for some query.  The query they mention is always something that nobody ever searches!  You need to get visits to your site for queries related to your product.
3. What are your customers looking for?  Do they find you when they look?  More importantly:  Do they find you first when they look?

Search engine optimization is advertising, with the help of a computer!

1. A computer scientist like the ones at ELWsoftware.com can tell you what it will take to get your site higher in search engine rankings.  The real question is whether being higher in search rankings is worth the effort.
2. If getting your site higher in search rankings is worth the effort, you should do it!  There really isn’t any mystery in SEO, and there aren’t any secrets.
3. Be prepared for the fact that being higher in search rankings won’t increase your business as much as you hope.  Doesn’t life suck?

Search engine optimization is very similar to a chain letter.  In a chain letter your goal is to get people to send you money.  The trouble is that everybody involved wants to get the money too.  For every person silly enough to participate, there are hundreds who won’t do anything!  That is why search engine optimization should be more about visibility!  If searchers are truly looking to spend money, they will spend it on the best option.  More often than not this won’t be the #1 search result.  It will most likely be the most memorable page they find among many they see!

Cutting-edge SEO means looking at the entire search process!

1. Searchers search for multiple key phrases related to what they are looking for.
2. Being higher in search results makes you more visible, but no more likely to be chosen for the purchase.
3. Being found for more than one of these searches doesn’t increase your probability of success.  People only go to your site once while they are looking.
4. What you want is to be remembered.  Not in the mind, but in the search!  You want the customer to open your site in a separate tab, so it is still there when they are making a decision.  You want the customer to bookmark your site, so they can make a decision later.

Don’t worry that a site above yours in search engine rankings has more inbound links, or more keywords, or a better domain name!  If your site is visible, but has what the customer is really looking for, you will be the #1 Choice.

The SEO Trick for today is to generate useful content every day.  I know, an SEO telling you to generate useful content is like a doctor telling you to exercise.  There must be a pill you can take instead, right?  Yes, of course there is an SEO pill you can take, and it is called automatically generated article spam.  It probably doesn’t work quite as well as magic weight-loss remedies.  There are certain stages your website can be in, and I call it the ELW visibility scale:

1. Non-existent.  You own the domain, and when you go there the page says “coming soon” or “under construction” or some other phrase that people think will get visitors to check again later.  They won’t.
2. Bad. Your site has the minimum information necessary, but that doesn’t really help you.  At this point people only find your site if they know your web address.  Hopefully, you didn’t choose a terribly long or hard to remember domain name.
3. Accidental.  You have your website the way you want it, but the only way to find it on a search engine is to type some phrase unique to you.  Maybe you are a law firm and your page title is the last names of all the partners.  (Yeah, lots of them do that.)  I call this state accidental because you are completely relying on people searching specifically for you.  Every other visitor is an accident.
4. Static.  Your website is designed well, and people find it through search engines if they are persistent enough.  There are generally only a few improvements to your on-page content that will make your page better for search engines visibility.  Maybe you even have some meta keywords and description tags filled.  At this stage, you might be thinking that the black-hat software to generate links might actually be worth a try.  It isn’t.  Most websites that need SEO are in this category, and it is sometimes a hopeless place to be.  The real world equivalent to this state is a person who has tried every diet, and is now considering surgery, or is going to give up and quit.
5. Measuring.  If you start measuring the traffic to your site adequately, you know what is really going on.  Surveillance isn’t reserved for big companies like Google and Yahoo.  You absolutely need to know what kind of visitors are coming to your site if you want it to improve.  Luckily, ELW makes excellent tracking software, so this problem is solved for you if you desire.  When you measure, you might actually find out that people are finding your site using search phrases you didn’t expect.  Now you can target your SEO efforts!
6. Spam target!  If your tracking software shows that most of your visitors are search engine bots and spammers, you are making progress.  Spam can actually be an indicator that your site is gaining visibility.  Spammers need to find your site too!  If spammers can’t find your site, nobody can.  These guys show up first because they are persistent.  Watch your inbox for real visitors among the spam.
7. Content generator!  Once you are a spam target, you can be sure that there is no real technical visibility problem.  What remains is to differentiate yourself so that more of the desired visitors arrive.  This really does mean producing new content on a semi-regular basis.  If visitors learn that your site will be the same every time they visit, they are less likely to return.  You should be writing articles while seriously considering SEO at this point.  Every new search phrase on your site is a new bunch of potential visitors.
8. Specialized spam target!  When your site starts getting spam related to what you sell, you are getting good.  Spammers are now using you to make themselves look better! This is the case with many blogs and blog comments.  A link from you, even in blog comments, looks like a good deal.  This probably means that your SEO-focused articles are working as they should.
9. Human.  You get a few humans leaving real comments on your blog.  It can take a while to get real human beings to read what you write.  There is just so much information out there.  Luckily, 99% of web users aren’t generating ANY useful content.  At this stage you need to be careful that your articles are useful.  Humans don’t just scan content and throw it on a pile like search engines do!
10. Useful content generator!  People regularly read your content because they found it useful the last time.  If your readers get into the habit of checking your site daily, it can only be because you published useful content daily.  Excellent work.

Yes, I decided to make the ELW visibility scale an even 10, but there is far more you can do with your website beyond #10.  If you can get the rest of the world to generate useful content for you, you need another visibility scale altogether.  Maybe tomorrow!