The main point of SEO is to attract the right visitors to a site. Understanding what kind of web visitors the website needs is paramount.
Keyword selection is the starting point of the process. Google’s Keyword Tool is an excellent resource. Google’s accuracy and helpful suggestions show exactly what the measurable size of the existing Internet market is.
Once you have developed a shortlist of keywords that best describe the site’s offerings, you can start estimating the competition. Plug in the keywords and you can see who is in the competitive set that is already taking advantage of the Internet market.
There are dozens of factors as to why those top three sites are listed in the search engines. To measure keyword density of websites, I like to use the SearchWho.com search spider utility. It lists the meta-tags as well as the main content of a webpage. The utility gives percentages of the top reoccurring words on the page. This helps in writing your own content to be competitive.
I like to think of the content as the shape of a page. The horsepower and strength of the page is in the back-links. A strong page has a wide variety of relevant links from other sites. Directory listings, blogs, videos, twitters, press releases, and similar sites are a few of the good sources of links.
Researching your competitors’ back-links is a good starting point in developing you own link campaign. Thorough research will show you not only where the competition is strong, but also where they are missing opportunities. A competitor that is mostly blog propelled can be outranked with a combination of blogs, videos, and a healthy dose of directory listings.
In the end it all boils down to beating the competition in getting your message across. The essence of Internet Marketing is no different than the Origins of the Internet. The ARPA Net was designed for military communications. The relationship of the Commanders and subordinates were serviced. This is the wired essence of communication and relationships.
Every webpage is there to communicate a message. Those reading the message are participating in a relationship with the writer. The skill of the writer sets the tone and pace of the relationship. It’s a social science to deliver that marketing message across the Internet.
Search engines are one of main vehicles of delivering the messages and building relationships. The search engines have taken it upon themselves to deliver relevant messages to the search query requester. They spider the Internet, measure the content of pages, and put them into a database for future use. That’s all the search engines do. That’s the math part of Internet Marketing.
The math is a minor consideration. The math is always changing and being refined. Yes, there is a mathematical reason why the first ranked page is delivered as most relevant. But the strength and relevance of message is paramount.