The Marketing Viking

Just an update:

If you’ve been following my posts on my SEO coaching, you might be wondering why everything has gone so quiet.

 The reason is simple, I’ve been taking the keyword analysis techniques and coming up with words for my pages.

The guidelines I’ve been given is that I should have at least 400 words per page and each page should have roughly 5% keywords i.e. 20+ words per page.

With 14 pages required for my site, that’s 5,600+ words and 280+ keywords.

So, it’s taking time!   

So far, I have 4 complete pages online, with another 10 to go.

However, my homepage was indexed last night (without any links going to it as far as I know), so I thought I’d check some rankings this morning.

I’m nowhere for my primary phrase, but I’m #8 out of 2,090,000 for one of my other keywords.

That’s one page, no inbound links and a domain that’s only 15 days old: #8 out of 2,090,000.

I’m pretty happy with this and finally seeing some results has pushed up my enthusiasm.

Although I understand the approach Rob is teaching me and it makes sense to me and it’s clear why it should work … SEO still seems like voodoo to me.     

As strange as it seems, I’m hoping that this SEO project is going to run into problems and that I’ll have to refine my site over and over.

This is because it just feels too easy right now and, if it ends up taking more skill than I’ve used so far, it’ll “make more sense”. 

Steve

I mentioned in a recent post that I’m now receiving SEO coaching. I’ve had a few questions about it, so I thought I’d post an update.

First, I should point something out: I’ve always been an SEO failure. I’ve never really “gotten it”. Most of my attempts at SEO have failed and, on the occasions my sites have jumped up the rankings, I’ve had no idea why and I didn’t know how to replicate that success.

So, Rob (my coach) is taking me right back to step 1.

In the last week, he’s been going over the basics of the “silo” approach he uses and has been teaching me how to do keyword analysis.

And, I have to say, it’s unglamorous grunt work.

However, Rob’s way - which is a series of ingenious “how to look behind the curtain” techniques that help me see how Google evaluates content in my niche - makes a lot sense and I’m starting to realise how certain sites are able to outperform the competition without loads of links and without any “visible” on-page SEO.   

Steve

From today, I’m receiving coaching from an SEO coach called Rob Schweitzer.

This may surprise some of you as I’ve made a number of scathing remarks about the SEO industry.

 However, I’ve always made a point to say I think there are two groups of SEOs:

(1) Those who are exploiting short-term loopholes and weaknesses in the Google algorithm to boost sites by artificial and underhand means (usually link manipulation to make the site look “popular”).

(2) The white-hat guys who’ve figured out what content google wants and know how to make their content look “high quality”.

IMO, the first group of SEOs are headed for disaster (and taking their clients over the cliff with them), the second group are the ones whose work is going to ride the algo changes and stay around a long time.

In this group, I’d include people like Dan Thies and, from what I’ve seen so far, Rob Schweitzer.

I plan to write more about my progress and the results I get with the site I’m going to be optimising.

However, if you’d like to learn about Rob’s approach, feel free to visit his site. When you’re there, make a point of downloading Charles Heflin’s ‘The Master Plan Primer’. It’s a free PDF that describes the ethical approach to SEO that I’ll be learning over the next few months.

Steve