Tactical Execution

There’s a lot of talk these days about how to attract more people to your website.  Heck, I spend a lot of time talking about that myself.  I even host the hugely popular Internet Traffic Carnival every Tuesday!  But the conversation often leaves out an important part of the equation.  It leaves out all the structural elements you can add to your website to make it more search engine friendly.

The first thing you want to make sure of is the URL format you’re using on your site.  Take a look at the permalink of this post.  It includes all the words in my post title.  This is such a simple detail but is incredibly important.  It even motivated me to move my entire website over from Joomla to WordPress back in March 2008.  The words you use in your title are powerful keywords and you want them to be included in your URL.

Next, you need to identify the keywords you’d like to target.  Once you’ve decided on a few phrases, you need to start building your site around those phrases.  As an example, I wanted to target the phrase ‘Internet Marketing Services’ so I built 68 new pages on my website, all about Internet Marketing Services.  I did that by creating separate landing pages for every local municipality along with that phrase.  I also created a similar landing page for every single state, again including the keyword phrase in the title.

Having all these pages caters directly to the search engines.  They see all these URLs and index my site accordingly.  It also dramatically increases the odds that my page will pop up when someone searches for that particular phrase.  Will my site come up for every single state?  Of course not.  But it will come up for a bunch of them and I expect it will measurably increase my traffic once the search engines have cached all my changes.

The last thing I did was include a paragraph at the bottom of each page stating that Tactical Execution is located in Walnut Creek, California, in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area.  This text, along with all the links pointing to those pages, also increases the density of keywords while magnifying the exposure of my most valuable keyword phrases – the ones in my own location.

You will also notice that each page has unique content and the images also have keyword-rich names.  In fact, I even optimized the ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags for each image.  The end results is a series of nicely optimized pages that push my site higher on the search engines for the exact keyword phrase I’m targeting.

It’s important to realize that anyone can do these sorts of things.  Yes, it’s a lot of work.  It takes a lot of time.  But it’s an opportunity open to everyone.  And it works particularly well for businesses where you can add a locality to the keyword phrase.  By doing this, you dramatically reduce the competition you’ll be facing, making it a lot easier to get to the top.  These are all structural elements that play an important role in internet marketing.  Give it a try and see how your Google ranking changes.

As of December 2007, Technorati was following over 112 million blogs.  112 million!!  There’s no question that blogs are quickly dwarfing the rest of the internet and the search engines are consistently ranking them higher because of (1) their volume of relevant content, (2) their ongoing flow of new and fresh content and (3) the incredible link structure characteristic of the blogosphere.  But the fact remains that most people who blog don’t really do it “correctly” or at a minimum, could be blogging more effectively.  If you’re a blogger, here’s a process you can follow that will massively expand the reach of your posts.

First things first.  I highly recommend you find the top bloggers in your field and subscribe to their feed.  Select a reader (like Google Reader) and add all your subscriptions.  Technorati is a great place to find the top bloggers in any particular field.  Google is another.  Do some research and find about a dozen bloggers you like and respect.  Okay; having done that, let’s get to the process.

Obviously, it begins with your idea.  You’ve decided what you’d like to blog about.  That’s step number one.

Before you write your blog …

• Check your reader to see if the other bloggers you follow are talking about the same thing.
• Put a few keywords into Google to find other resources you can link to in your post.
• Put the same keywords into Technorati to see if anyone else is discussing the same topic.

Writing your post …

• In the blogosphere, outbound links = currency.
• Constantly link to other bloggers and valuable resources in your post.
• You want your blog to be a single portal to ALL the resources that exist on your topic.

After you publish your new post …

• Write an email to the bloggers you linked to, letting them know and giving them a link.
• Bookmark your new post on Delicious, DIGG and StumbleUpon (among others).
• Submit your blog post to any relevant carnival on Blog Carnival (do this once each month).

Taking these simple steps will ensure your blog post gets nicely integrated into the ongoing conversation that defines today’s blogosphere.  You want to engage in the conversation.  Conversations are markets.  If you want to access a market, participate in a conversation.  Blogging is one of the best ways to do that but you have to let the world know you exist.  The steps above will dramatically accelerate that process.

The last thing to keep in mind is that you can get far more traffic from referral websites (other blogs) than you can from search engines.  Once you’ve linked out to a lot of popular blogs and some of them have linked back to you, you can quickly grow your traffic as part of their audiences become aware of you.  That’s the game.  Find the bloggers in your field and engage in their conversation.  You might be surprised how quickly it can all take shape.

Edith Yeung is a good example of this.  She grew her blog from zero to over 1000 visitors per day in under 10 months by using some of the steps I’ve outlined above and the vast majority of her traffic comes from referral websites (other blogs) and social bookmarking platforms like StumbleUpon.  Give it a try.  Done properly, it can completely change your business in less than a year!