Online Business, Internet Marketing & Related Topics
Every entrepreneur or manager knows how important it is to implement long term strategies for different aspects of their business, like marketing, branding and so on. However many still neglect strategy implementation for web business projects. The reason is because of the technical aspect of internet business. If you want to get things right, you’ll need to combine both technical as well as commercial parts. One option is to hire professionals (like search engine optimizers and online business consultants) to do the job, another is to read this article and learn at least the basics yourself.
Starting an internet business project, be it an affiliate product selling page, or a 
blog that’s supposed to attract a lot of traffic is a combination of many connected aspects like online marketing, branding, advertising, copy writing and seo.
You can imagine the importance that long term search engine visibility has for the continuation of blog revenue and readership. Serious web professionals know that planning ahead as far as possible in regard of search engine visibility can be crucial to success of their project.
It’s been a while since I started studying the subject of search engine optimization. I’ve read many advices from forum members, comments on blogs and quite a few books on it. I’ve never really read anything about building a long term seo strategy though. Maybe the reason is because there is no universally applicable optimization strategy and because every project is different. This also makes the subject quite hard to write about.
What I’ve tried to do in this article is take the subject (long term seo strategy building) and explain it from a theoretical ideal situation outward. The example in this article built around this theoretical ideal, so in reality, the situation might be a little different. Nonetheless, understanding the methodologies and the reasons behind them is very valuable if you want to learn how to think of your own search engine optimization strategies. Because, again, this is vital if you want to succeed online. Aside from that, another good thing is that this article will show you the mindset that you need as a web entrepreneur in order to make your online business venture successful.
This post is built out of 4 different parts. In these parts I am going to show you how to build an optimal keyword attack formula for your blog. Because the example is about a blog this post as it is, is very interesting to bloggers who are planning on generating revenue (making money) from their blogs. However, with a little thought, the procedure can be modified to facilitate other things such as affiliate product landing pages. I will add a little paragraph on this subject too to get you started.
So take a deep breath …
Part 1 gave you an introduction on why implementing an seo strategy with an optimal keyword attack formula is important and how long term search engine rankings are crucial to the success of your online business venture.
This part will explain how to actually put together an optimal keyword attack formula for your blog. Remember that part one described the different ‘variables’ that are a part of the concept ? Here’s the process that I have thought up in order to integrated these into a usable formula ?
Here’s an overview of the steps of the process :
Hopefully I’ve added enough explanation for things to become clear, so here goes.
Step #1 - describe the main idea or topic of your blog very clearly
In order to make the right choices of keywords later on in the procedure you need to have a clear picture of the blog that you are starting. The way that your topic is defined in the off line world, may not be exactly the same as it is defined in the online world. In the online world your topics and attention points are represented by keyword phrases.
These are the terms that users look for in search engines. Selecting the most relevant ones to your blog idea and topic(s) is an important part of the procedure you are about to go through.
While describing your blog’s main idea, it’s good to cover all activities that you’re planning on taking in order to make the project a success. If you have thought of a creative marketing or branding strategy, then you should describe it. The same goes for attack strategies towards competitors. The reason for this is because your marketing and branding strategies can be closely related to your seo strategy. As I explained in part 1, bad search engine visibility can result in ineffective marketing, while good search engine ranking helps you get the most out of it.
It’s in this phase that you should write down all your creative ideas about how you think you are going to reach your goals. If you want create a blog that sells products through affiliate programs, then you should think about how you are going to sell these products. Are you going to write reviews ? Are you going to attract targeted visitors through smart content writing, or are you going set up pay per click campaigns that send potential customers to your product review pages ?
The trick is to plan ahead , because if you take this plan with you into this process, you’ll make different decisions and the outcome of your optimal keyword attack formula will be accordingly ! Good preparation is half the work !
After going through part 2 and the keyword research you now should have constructed a main blog title out of primary keyword phrases. You should also have selected the keyword phrases that you believe are optimally related to your main blog topic, and also optimally related to each other.
The best thing in all of this is that you’ve automatically chosen the correct keywords for yourself to facilitate the your goals. Maybe you’ve selected a certain keyword phrase to represent a topic and you are planning to use that topic only as an ‘entry point’ in order to flow a reader to a different place on your blog. You wouldn’t have been able to to make the right decisions if you wouldn’t have written a mission statement or a as I like to call it, an online business plan.
As far as the keyword phrases that you selected go, the combination of keywords that you’ve selected out of the lists most probably includes some hard to rank for keywords and some medium hard keywords. Most of the time the highly competitive keywords are used in the main blog title. This is ok because we are laying the foundation, or building a ‘frame work’ that will suit our long term aims in regard of search engine placement. Remember that even though these keywords are hard to rank for now, there are ways of benefiting from those keywords right now (remember how we talked about ‘flowing’ your reader through the internal topical network from a long tail post to a competitive keyword article ?).
Another note on long tail keywords and why we haven’t played with them now
Long tail keywords have been excluded from this procedure at this point in time because it’s better to focus on them during the phase of content writing. It’s not a good idea to put long tail keyword phrases as our main blog or idea title because they won’t umbrella many other related keywords (that represent your topics). This is the reason why working backward, going from competitive phrases (main title) down to medium and easier (categories and content) is the correct order.
Where is the ‘formula’ that you promised me ?
What we’ve done so far is try to include as many ‘variables’ that we believe are relevant to the success of our blog and made them a part of the reason why we choose certain keyword phrases. In other words, we have been putting together a combination of keywords into an ‘optimal formula’ which we believe will maximize the chance for our success.
Every combination of keywords will be different based on the idea that you have for your blog, according to the mission statement you’ve written (what your goals are) and according to the selections that you’ve made based on your own capabilities (knowledge of topics for instance).
Your formula started building itself from the beginning, when you decided to put your ideas and goals into description. This is one of the most vital parts of starting any project. Be it a blog, or web business venture in any form. A ship without a sailer isn’t headed anywhere, but with your mission statement in hand, you’ve forced yourself to be clear with yourself and have a reason to choose topics that you choose, in the correct order.
The same idea goes for the keyword research process. You started it with a clear goal. You’ve dissected that idea into niches and correctly selected them while trying to think about everything. In the process you’ve built your optimal keyword attack formula. Just because we didn’t write it down on a board like in math class doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.
It’s time to set up and structure our blog according to the formula that you’ve built !
After reading part 3 you should know how your blog is structured according to your selection of keywords. Keep in mind that you’ve selected the combination of keywords based on the goals that you described in your online business plan. Now it’s time to start focusing on those goals. Depending on your aim, you’re going to have to write content for your blog.
Content is what attracts visitors. More important then just having content on your blog however, is having the correct content. This kind of content that is designed to facilitate your goals.
Basically you need to write articles with a plan in mind. I will give you an example of this further on in this post.You may notice that this article keeps discussing the strategic level of search engine optimization. It doesn’t really go into how to use the wordtracker’s features in order to do basic keyword research. This is because I don’t intend to write a wordtracker user guide. And on the other hand, signing up for a free wordtracker trial account means that they’ll give you a free keyword basics email course 
This final part of the article is going to show you how to turn a creative idea for reaching your blog’s goal into content. In this case it will be an example of channeling traffic between articles on your blog in order to achieve a certain thing (maybe selling affiliate products, or something else). Understanding how serious online business entrepreneurs approach their job can be valuable for you when the times comes that you’re going to start your own web business project.
First, let’s get started with some explaining about smart content writing, followed up by our example !
