These ancient Chinese texts contain lessons for anybody wanting to create effective search engine optimization

Perhaps the most applicable passage I’ve read in the translations from Sun Tzu’s  texts on the ‘Art of War’ is the following:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.  If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

How does that apply to SEO Tips? Well, obviously your enemy is your competitors and you need to know something about their strategy and their capabilities to effectively compete with them and you need to know your own capabilities and weaknesses – hence you can bring in expertise to help you in areas you are weak in.

But in SEO, there is another party that you have to know, the judge and adjudicator, Google. Completely impartial until you make a move, Google can be your friend or your enemy and as an enemy, it can take you out of the battle completely. It always amazes me the number of SEO experts around who do not know the Google Webmaster’s Guidelines.

Do you know specifically what techniques are going to make Google your enemy and get your site penalized? Find out. Seek out an alliance with Google and you will prosper.  Sun Tzu says: “We cannot enter into alliances until we are acquainted with the designs of our neighbors.”

Make it your business to become acquainted with the designs of Google now.

What you do off-site with SEO, such as Directory linking, link exchange or even web 2.0 linking will have absolutely no impact on your Search Engine ranking  if your website is not optimized for the keywords you are trying to rank in.

Sounds absurd, but this is a common scenario:  A great set of keywords is identified for a client to rank in. Of course it is a generic phrase that gets some searches, let’s say it is ‘mountain bike accessories’ and the client’s site is about one particular mountain bike accessory called the ‘Warburton testicle protector’ which stops you falling forward on to the frame when you hit a bump. Now the url is testicleprotector.com and the <h1> header is “Warburton Testicle Protector” and so is the page title.

So our SEO guns go out and do a truckload of linking etc. without effect. Because Google wants to rank pages about Mountain Bike Accessories under the keywords ‘mountain bike accessories’ and the Google bot has no idea that the Warburton Testicle Protector is a mountain bike accessory. You need to let it know.

Opinions will vary throughout the SEO community about what Google likes or doesn’t like with on-site SEO, but what I have personally seen work best is URL,  <h1> Title and document title in that order. I have seen a site disappear from Google results simply because a company artist decided graphical headings would look better than ugly HTML <h1> headings.

OK, so does Warburton go out and register mountainbikeaccessories.com? and change his whole website? That would be better, but as a second best option, he could make a page called mountain-bike-accessories.html and optimize that one. The rest is easier, <title> tag or document title should be ‘keywords – company’ or ‘keywords – product’ always keywords first, as should the <h1> header.

And it’s amazing the number of developers who don’t use the <h1> tags, given their importance in the process. They create their own css style called “heading” or “pagehead” – If they have done this to your website, point out to them politely that they could take that same styling and apply it to the <H1> tag, allowing you to do some on-site SEO.

So again, good SEO starts with

1. keyword research and if you are not sure how to go about this, find a good SEO company to help you.
2. Next test these keywords with a PPC campaign to see if they really produce inquiries. Here, I would really suggest you have an experienced Adwords management consultant involved to minimize your click costs.
3. On-site SEO. Tell Google (and the others) what your site is about – especially in terms of what people are searching for.
4. Tell the world about it – directories, link exchanges, web 2.0

If you’re ever in doubt about whether to do something or not, ask yourself  ”is this easy to cheat?” and  ”if Google is trying to find the most relevant sites, would this be important?” and be guided by the answer. Remember, Google’s survival depends on returning the most relevant results for searches and catching out the cheats.

What are the right keywords for an SEO campaign?

That is the million dollar question and the answer is as much a business strategy as an SEO one.

It would be very ambitious to target top level keywords for your business – for instance if you are a business advisor, you will find the keywords ‘business advisor’ very hard indeed to do well in.  So what keywords do you target? To find that answer, you have to take a look at your business and your expertise – perhaps the type of clients you attract and the type of clients you want.

For instance, if you spent the early part of your working career in the automotive industry and your contacts and clients are in that industry, should you add the keyword automotive to the mix? Or do you think those clients are a pain in the ass and your passion is to help people starting a hairdressing salon – well that is a good starting point, but perhaps you should first do an analysis of the demand in that sector….

Next, you have to research your chosen keywords to discover if anybody is even searching it – It would be an absolute disaster to throw thousands of dollars at this and months of your time only to find you are number 1 in Google and the traffic to your website has not increased at all. This is where you probably should enlist the help of a good SEO company. But beware, there are many around who will be happy to rank you in non-performing keywords, because competition is much lighter there and it is easy to achieve results.

Here it is always better to test your chosen keywords for performance and some others too, with a Pay Per Click campaign with a good Adwords management team. Here you will find some surprises – for instance, who would have thought that the keywords with the highest conversion rate for a fence manufacturer and installation company would be ‘fencing materials’ -It seems that many people searching for fencing materials decide they would rather have an installed fence when they begin to search.

You have no way of knowing that without doing an Adwords or PPC campaign, so if you don’t test the keywords first, but simply launch into a lengthy SEO campaign, you could miss your best business opportunity.

Selecting the right keywords for your SEO campaign is not something you do with an automated program. It is also not something you simply leave to your “SEO guru”. The inquiries and ultimately clients you attract in the future will be largely due to the keywords you choose now.

Choose Carefully

I really worry about having standard one-size-fits-all “SEO Packs” for clients – because Search Engine Optimization is not a product, it’s a competition and the results you get depend on so many factors, it’s not funny. There is no real deliverable in SEO – the result you want is to beat some other people and get to the front page of the search engines at their expense.

The best analogy I can think of is competitive running. Not every runner can come in the top ten in any competition – of the thousands who compete, there are just ten – and in fact with SEO it’s even worse, one competitor can have five of those ten spots, or all ten.

You could think of generic keywords as being the Olympics – score the gold in ‘websites’ or ‘SEO’ or ‘business advisor’ or whatever is the main generic keyword in your business. And like the Olympics, the competition is tough and it takes some real commitment to get to the top or even in the top ten.

But then there are a whole bunch of regional championships, more specific keyword phrases “SEO company in California”, “Web design, Sydney”, “How to choose the right web design company” and so on. You have far more chance of making it in these competitions – often they are dominated by last years winners who are resting on their laurels and sometimes you’ll find winners who didn’t even know they were in the race – They just stumbled onto the field and were running to get away from the stampede.

And often the more targeted keywords bring good quality traffic with a much higher proportion of buyers than generic keywords.

So having a one-size-fits-all SEO pack is like assigning the same caliber trainers and giving the same training program to olympic competitors as you are to regional ones and allowing them to expect good results. The SEO work that clients need really depends on the race they are in and the competition they are up against.

So the best thing clients can get, is a good assessment from an SEO company followed by a pay per click campaign with good adwords management by an experienced campaign manager to identify the best performing keywords for a long term investment in time.