A few years ago, Lisa Gutowski wrote a great post on Examiner which talked about the pareto principle . The idea behind this principle is that 80% of your results come from 20% of your activity. Before this idea became a highly recognizable principle, Vilfredo Pareto observed the following:
...in 1906, 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. He developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. (Taken from Wikipedia)
With bit of analysis, you can see this principle rampant in both your life and business. Today I want to share with you the way Vilfredo Pareto would likely do SEO. Let's begin.
Proper URL Structure
Most CMS platforms will take whatever you insert into the Title of your post and create the URL for you. These long URL's are not search or user friendly. While having the keyword in the URL isn't a huge ranking factor, it won't hurt you to create your own. Each post you write should be focused around a central idea or keyword. Take your desired keyword and include it into the link.
In the following example, I'm trying to rank for the keyword 'proper URL structure':
www.MyDomain.com/proper-url-structure
A word of advice - don't go back and change the URL's of your other posts. By doing so, you will lose traffic and create lots of 404 errors.
Picking keywords to rank for
There isn't really a sweet spot for keywords; however, I've found that the range of 400 and 1,000 seems to do the trick quite nicely. More and more marketers are going after long tail keywords. The real key is to analyze your competition and see how competitive they are.
Make sure you're looking at ESPM, or exact searches per month. Targeted traffic is the name of the game. Broad match keywords tend to send you un-targeted traffic.
Develop a habit of deeplinking to your older content
Everytime you write an article, develop the habit of linking to 2 other articles that you've written. This is great for two reasons. First, search engines will index those links; second, you're getting additional exposure if someone jacks your content along with your links and puts that on their site.
When deeplinking to your older content, make sure you're linking to articles and using the keywords in the anchor text. Do not use the same keyword over and over. In fact, you should use variations and keep track of those keywords in a document of some kind on your computer.
Where else should you put your desired keyword?
Notice that I'm keeping it simple, hence the 20%/Pareto concept. Put your keyword in the URL, H3 tag, and once in the body of the article.
Use Google Analytics to scoop up extra traffic & rankings
I don't recommend the habit of logging into your Google Analytics every day, as it's a time suck. I do recommend checking in at least once a month. This will allow your account to accumulate data for you to make new decisions upon. Underneath Traffic Sources, you'll want to click on Search and then Organic. This will show you how people found your site via search engines and keywords.
Your next step is to then open up Google Chrome and select incognito browsing. This will allow you to see the search engines without having to clear your cache and cookies. Enter in the keywords found in Analytics and see where you rank. If you're on the first page, then you can boost the ranking just by linking to that post on outside sources and through deeplinking.
Conclusion
If Vilfredo Pareto was both alive and an internet marketer, then I believe he would follow such steps. This truly is a way to achieve better rankings by utilizing the 80/20 principle he discovered. It should't take you much time to apply these suggestions.
via Examiner National Edition Gadgets & Tech Channel Articles http://www.examiner.com/article/how-would-vilfredo-pareto-do-seo?cid=roadrunner