Okay, smartass. Most of your advise hammers on about how important it is to have content – so why do I see pages with virtually no content and no obvious keyword placing rank well in the search engines?
Relax.
First of all, in case you haven’t heard it enough, content is king. But other factors still play a significant part, and if present in large enough a volume, can actually overtake the importance of content (under certain limited circumstances).
Brands such as Hilton and Mariott will naturally rank high for keywords related to hotels. They don’t need to have a lot of content on their homepage: their brand is so strong that millions who discuss hotels actually link to pages on their site. If everyone is telling the search engines that www.mariott.com is about hotels, then Mariott has to do very little effort to convince the search engines it might have something to do with the hospitality industry. McDonalds and Burger King don’t have to shout out loud that they are a burger joint, they have tons and tons of websites doing that for them and pointing pages with hamburger related content to them.
Let’s face it, well known brands are talked about a lot. Some portal sites even rank high because they capitalize on thousands of bloggers who misspell the link to www.domino.com (they meant to link to www.dominos.com).
Big brands have two advantages: 1. they often don’t have much competition. Really big brands only have 1 major competitor. For Coke it is Pepsi, for Google it’s Yahoo (MSN comes far, far behind with 1% market share), for Intel it is AMD. And quite often, we know that the fight is won by one of them (Microsoft’s main competitor for the personal computer is Apple, but with 3% share, it is unlikely it will ever over take Microsoft). Only a major shift in technology or a brand fiasco could topple the leaders in their markets. So competing in the search engines is relatively easy for these brands.
Content is still king for them: they still need to convince the buyer that they have the superior product. But they might have the luxury to do it in a far more visual manner than textual.
Not for smaller companies. Why does PC world have such an elaborate content site? Because they need to work harder to rank in the search engines. They do not have the same volume of back links, and rely more on the quality of their content and the ease with which the search engines can pick it up.
With most companies, that is the position you will find yourselves in. Your first duty will be building strong content, then device a link building strategy that will ensure that you become less and less reliant on the content alone. That’s just smart thinking.
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Here is a comment (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/boston-pubcon-2006-day-1/#comment-22227) from Matt Cutts of Google dated April 18, 2006 on his blog:
IP delivery: delivering results to users based on IP address. Cloaking: showing different pages to users than to search engines.
IP delivery includes things like "users from Britain get sent to the co.uk, users from France get sent to the .fr". This is fine-even Google does this.
It's when you do something *special* or out-of-the-ordinary for Googlebo...
We have been told that IP delivery would be the right SEO strategy by our consultant. But when I looked this up, I found out that his suggestion is actually an illegal strategy called IP cloaking?
What should I do?...
The "best" keyword depends on the following main factors:
1.) The amount of traffic it will generate.
2.) The difficulty of attaining a top ranking.
3.) The profitability of that keyword.
In this answer I will address each point and give recommendations on tools to use to help you in your assessment.
The Amount of Traffic it Will Generate
Often people choose keywords based on how popular they think they may be. Mostly it is based on "real world" factors rather then fact which is readily availa...
You should place your keywords in the following positions:
• Title tag.
• H1 and H2.
• In paragraphs and general text on the site.
• In STRONG tags: Keyword
• In the file names of the web document: www.domain.com/keyword.html
• ALT description attributes on image tags:
• TITLE attributes on anchor tags:
• SUMMARY attributes on tables:
• In the file names of images: ...
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