in SEO by Jeffrey_Smith

When your SEO tactic hits a brick wall and you see other sites casually occupying positions above yours with ease; instead of getting flustered, simply delve deeper into the root causes behind the guise and not just react to the effects of a well orchestrated plan. By determining which optimization method is pulling the strings of relevance in search engines, you can craft a suitable counter to overcome competitors and set your own ranking tactics into play.

Which Strings are Your Competitors Pulling in Search Engines?

Which Strings are Your Competitors Pulling in Search Engines?

In many ways SEO is like a game of chess. You have to switch up your game plan based on who you’re up against and different strategies are required to overcome the different types of optimization you’re competing with.

In a word of causes and effects, you can fight phantoms (like a blind puppet) or initiate elaborate strategies (like a puppet master) to orchestrate a series of competitive keyword victories online to determine who acquires a dominant search engine position.

Just like styles make the fight and the rules are the same (8 squares by 8 squares with predetermined rules for each piece), the possibilities are endless as the game progresses.

The only difference between chess and SEO is that  there are only 10 spots in search engines for any given keyword or key phrase combination, and based on how well optimized your site is for each one determines how search engines rank them as preferred destinations for its users.

For example, each website has an ideal method which will provide optimal results. When you determine what that method is and apply it, you have to measure how it fares against the optimization efforts of competitors and the scrutiny of search engine algorithms.

Ten of the Most Common SEO Tactics are:

  1. Thousands of sku’s (stock kept units) for ecommerce or products with themed titles.
  2. Flat site architecture and links to the homepage and critical landing pages.
  3. Lean pages with higher quantities of staggered inbound links from other sites.
  4. A vast authority site with deep categories, themes, silos and multiple topics.
  5. Redirects from other sites or pages within your website to a consolidated page or folder.
  6. A combination static website / blog to provide stability and frequent updates.
  7. An RSS based feed aggregator combined with unique content to emulate hub status.
  8. The Wikipedia style internal link consolidation method in tandem with selective deep links.
  9. The grandfather effect, aging as a result of domain authority.
  10. Press releases, media and trusted links.

As you can see above, these are but a few different play book type SEO tactics that can yield top ranking positions. SEO is not as easy as it seems. Sure, anyone can do it, but only those who understand the various layers required appeasing the 200+ metrics that search engines assess are capable of creating consistent top 10 rankings.

Which SEO Method Are You Applying?

Just like someone can use multiple paths and arrive at the same destination, SEO tactics, methods and implementation also falls under this category of events. It’s not always easy to discern which method your competitors are using to produce their respective rankings, but similarly, you can use multiple tactics to produce a series of rankings for multiple keywords in your website.

Top 10 SEO Tactic Elaborated:

SEO Method #1: Dynamically Generated All In Title Theming

Is very popular for ecommerce sites with thousands of sku’s (stock kept units/products) for that produce themed titles and pages based on dynamically generated data. This is common for sites with multiple pages appearing for an umbrella like theme. For example, if your website is about shoes, and your categories are flats, pumps, stiletto or sports, the site theme is still shoes.

Therefore, you could potentially combine the pages titles and meta data with any of the categories mentioned above without penalizing the pages.

The main consideration is having enough unique content to stand apart from the crowd which means either controlling what pages get indexed and pass link flow or using each to sculpt link flow with internal links.

By shifting the title tag, use of contextual links and footer links (with enough content on each product page) you could devour massive segments of keywords pertaining to any of the said categories.

SEO Method#2: Using Flat Site Architecture to Consolidate Link Flow

Using flat site architecture and links to the homepage and critical landing pages. This is the most common default for most shopping carts since it consolidates the most robust type of shared ranking factor in the folder with the most ranking power (the root folder of your domain).

Every time you add a subfolder, sub domain, category or segment to a website, that means you have to provide a sufficient amount of ranking factor either from (a) within the website or (b) from other websites via inbound deep links to provide prominence in search engines.

SEO Method#3: Concentrating Link Equity Across Fewer Pages

Lean pages with higher quantities of staggered inbound links from other sites. This means you choose a keyword, build a stable base of pages such as 20-50 pages of content, then build a higher percentage of inbound links to your core pages only. This functions like a beacon and is a great strategy for root phrases or single or double word competitive rankings.

SEO Method #4: Developing a Robust Authority Site

Developing authority sites takes time, but they are virtually unmatched when mature and contain thousands of content rich pages which all contain hundreds of potential rankings per page. Any two words from any optimized page can return a search query (despite the competitiveness of the keyword). Don’t believe us, just look at how Wikipedia dominates search results as a result of authority status.

SEO Method #5: Using Redirects Optimized Internal Pages or Aged Domains

Online properties sometimes lapse and their registration expires and theses properties have aged backlinks supporting them. This is why people acquire aged domains and redirect them to existing website or pages to add their inherent potency.

Redirects can also be used from cultivating popular internal pages within a website and then redirecting them to a home page or landing page (to pass along the rankings) or make a page with sparse topical content rank for the legacy on page and off page factors for the previously optimized page.

SEO Method #6: Creating an SEO Beacon for Static Pages

Static pages do not share as much link flow with other page and horde it for themselves, which means for more competitive keywords, a landing page close to the root folder is one ideal method for producing a long-term ranking.

When static pages are linked to from dynamic pages or blog posts within the same site, you can produce surges of link flow to give those static pages a boost in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

SEO Method #7: RSS Scrapers and SERP Hijacking

Often you see blogs harvesting RSS feeds from various sites from around the web. Aside from annoying the hell out of the authors who spent their time creating that content, what is the motive of scrapper sites?

Some of such sites are all based on affiliate offers or products or monetize traffic from SERP hijacking (ranking for your keywords and / or posts) with the ultimate objective of gaining enough authority to branch out in a niche after the crawl frequency has established their site as a hub. Remember he who is crawled faster can gain more traffic, and depending on their offer can harvest conversion.

Although it is not a long-term strategy, many still put blogs on auto-pilot to aggregate content and then either redirect the authority they gain (to a homepage or product page) and then promote their own distinct products and services (on the content creators dime).

Definitely a questionable tactic for those morally challenged types. I wouldn’t expect this to pass value for too long after duplicate content filters determine who wrote what first and assign the proper degree of relevance.

SEO Method #8: Using Consolidated Absolute Internal Links

Internal links when harvested properly can yield fantastic results. If the links are absolute (using the entire URL vs. relative site based links such as ../page.html) then those links that contain keyword-rich anchor text can elevate a page within a website with a fraction of inbound links from other sites.

SEO Method #9: Aging Layered Content to Gain Search Engine Trust

Over time each page in a website that has been online long enough can gain a significant degree of trust. That trust can be leveraged by linking from that page to a new page, or just by the virtue of its existence can get your foot in the door for competitive rankings.

Authority is the basis of all rankings, the more you have, the less persuasion required to surpass sites without it. Just consider each page as a time released asset that can be re-harvested time and time again as time progresses.

SEO Method #10: The Power of the Press and Syndication

Even though this is often overlooked as a viable SEO tactic, acquiring editorial links from Press Releases can oftentimes get your site in the spotlight for webmasters from authoritative site to link to you.

Don’t expect much link flow from the press release service site itself, but it’s the individuals the press release influences and which of those individuals decides to link to your site that matter.

Associated press feeds can also get aggregated into do-follow blogs, social media, or other syndicated sources.  Link quality trumps link quantity frequently, so, this method can be used with any of the other tactics above to add an additional layer of SEO to existing metrics in progress. 

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About Jeffrey_Smith

In 2006, Jeffrey Smith founded SEO Design Solutions (An SEO Provider who now develops SEO Software for WordPress).

Jeffrey has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and marketing strategies to increase rankings, revenue and reach.

6 thoughts on “SEO Cause and Effect: Who is Pulling the Strings?
  1. Passim says:

    Excellent post.
    Just one question about method 5, first half, the redirect. Say you buy a 10 years old domain, so any link from url would benefit from the age factor; if instead you make a redirect to a new page, and then create a link from that new page; so now there is no age yet for that url; or does the age factor flow to the new page as well as page rank?
    In other word do we lose the age with a redirect?
    Thanks

  2. Depends on if the PR was wiped from the domain when you activated the hosting. If it still has link flow and or backlinks passing value, then you are better off building that domain up and cultivating backlinks over time contextually from the content rather than just redirecting. However, if you redirect from one domain to another, I have seen the rankings/effects wear off after about 4 months (unless they are topically related). Just a matter of preference at this juncture.

  3. Very interesting post some tips r really nice

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