SEO - Reactive or Proactive?
A part of Search Engine Optimisation that is rarely discussed is the need for proactive optimisation of sites and content rather than reactive optimisation. You may have never though of SEO in these terms but let me break it down a bit for you so that you get the picture of what I am talking about:
Reactionary Search Engine Optimisation:
Building Links
Creating a sound html site
submitting sitemaps
ensuring link structure is sound
regsitration with directories
Proactive SEO:
Concentrating on what will be important tomorrow, next week or next year.
But I haven’t got a crystal ball, so how do I do it? You might be asking yourself - well, its not impossible to predict whats happening tomorrow for a wide host of things. For example, if tomorrow’s Sunday you could predict that you might have a lie in, if tomorrow were Tuesday you might have a meeting. This is proactive predictions of what will take place tomorrow.
Now, there are some problems, particularly to Search Engine Optimisation that will arise here. Firstly, who cares what your doing tomorrow (to be blunt!) and secondly how can you predict things that other people would be interested in, in advance?
Well its not as impossible as may seem. To give an example: I have the site wsop2008satellites.com now, I registered this site several years ago (along with 2009,2010 and so on) as I knew then that this would be an important search term in the future. At the moment I get about 300 uv per day from google organic traffic, so it has been a success. Now this strategy can be ported to all sorts of ideas, for instance the 2012 olympics, you can bet your ar*e that this will be a busy search term in about 4 years, so why not start on the site now?
There is also another way to predict trends, or atleast to react to them much much quicker, and that would be by taking a look at Google Trends. This covers the highest ranked searches in the last 24hours, updated every 20 minutes, but also has historical data as to the average amount of searches going back about five years. An experiment would be to play about with various keyword combinations to see what traffic you get off google for having them in your website or blog, that are currently experiencing high search volume. A good pointer here is to ignore common searches like “restaurant reviews” as its fair to say that there are about a hundred million other webpages that are far more established than your page that cover this subject already. A better idea is to concentrate on “unusual” keyword combinations. For example, right now (15.12BST) these are popular terms: “Seth Tobias”, ” missing canoeist”, “eric the midget webcam”, “I am legend ending”. It will be interesting to see how many hits I get off these in such an underdeveloped (from an SEO p.o.v.) blog.
Anyway, Im off for my calimocho again,
Buenas Tardes Muchachos!
MM
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