What is the Shotgun / Sniper Approach to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
So I am finally back in the office after spending the last few weeks dealing with some health issues. And I am finally ready to clarify my thoughts on the Shotgun/Sniper approach to SEO. Basically it's a pretty easy concept, you optimize a Web site initially for all keywords that it is relevant to (Shotgun), and once you have SEO foundation in place, you hone in on the most important keywords (Sniper). This may seem like a pretty obvious methodology for a lot of people but as always with SEO, the devil is in the details.
At lot of SEO practitioners start an SEO project by limiting the words they want to optimize for to say 10 or 20 and really just focus in on those words. The problem with that thinking is two fold.
I have heard it said that you should only really target two or three keyword phrases per page. That is a fairly myopic point of view in my opinion. I have clients that have hundreds of top 10 listings for their homepage or category pages because of their inherent values and the fact that they are actually relevant for all those keywords. When I am optimizing a site, I like to take a fairly big lens (50 to 100 keyword phrases or more) and apply optimization for those keywords throughout the site wherever appropriate. If the content of the page that I am optimizing doesn't match up that well or at all with the keyword phrases in my "lens", I return to KeywordDiscovery to find appropriate keyword phrases for the content that is there. Some of you may like WordTracker or even Wordze and you may use those if you prefer to. It always amazes me when I see SEOs who try to too hard to optimize pages for keywords that are just not relevant. And of course, all that does is get you into trouble in the long run. This "Shotgun" phase includes creating long, descriptive page titles that are keyword focused, making sure that as many of the potential keywords that are relevant to the content of the page appear on the page and not limiting to the optimization effort to a handful of highly competitive keywords.
Once you have the initial optimization in place, meaning that you have unique Page Titles and Meta data for all pages, you have optimized the content, you have optimized your internal linking structure and you have addressed any technical issues that might be causing indexing problems or duplicate content, you are almost ready to begin the Sniper phase of your SEO efforts. But first, wait a couple weeks to make sure for all the initial changes (Shotgun phase) you made to your site are reflected in Google's index. Use this time to thoroughly QA all the work you did in the Shotgun phase.
Now that the Shotgun phase is over, it's time to start focusing in on improving individual keyword phrases. It seems natural that your first step in the sniper approach to SEO is to look at where your rankings are for your keywords and start with those that need just a little improvement to break into the top 5. But first, what's even more important, is to check your web analytics data to see which keywords you might be getting traffic from that have the highest conversion rate for your site. These are the keyword phrases to focus on first in the sniper phase. Followed then by keywords that are close to ranking high which you believe also have the highest propensity for conversion. Often times, you might rank well for a long tail keyword phrase that is converting very well for you that was not defined in your initial keyword list. It's vital to keep track of these words and add them to the list that you monitor.
In terms of how you actually go about the "Sniper" phase of optimization, it starts with taking a second look at all the things that you did in the Shotgun phase (especially internal link optimization) to see if there is anything else you can do to further optimize for the keyword phrases that you have now identified for the Sniper phase. From there, external link building becomes the primary tool for the SEO Sniper phase.
It's no secret that links play a HUGE role in the Google ranking algorithm as well as the other major search engines. Therefore, to be ranked well for a particular keyword phrase, it is essential to have links that with that keyword phrase, pointing at the Web page that you want to get ranked. It is also important that the pages that give you those links be relevant to the keywords as well. So in other words, if you want to be #1 for Dog Food, you need to have a lot of text links that have the phrase "Dog Food" in them point at your site, and those links should primarily be from pages about Dogs or Dog Food. Now this isn't a tutorial about link building but what I am getting at is that how you identify sites that you want to acquire links from makes a big difference on how effective those links are at driving rankings. A couple suggestions would be to look in the top 100 of Google, Yahoo and MSN for the keyword your sniping (and any other related permutations) for potential link partners. If you have a blog, do the same in Technorati to find some great blogs you might be able to interact with and get a link. Any related DMOZ categories are good places to look for potential link partners. Essential you need to find sites that are trusted and have authority for the keyword phrase you are sniping, and then you need to find creative ways to market yourself to those sites to get the links you want. That is the Sniper phase in a nutshell.
To a lot of people, this may seem pretty basic, but I think the mindset and the way you approach SEO with this methodology could be valuable for a lot of SEO people who maybe don't have a consistent approach to every SEO project. I hope everyone finds it useful or at least thought-provoking. It's great to be back. Have a great week!
The Sniper Cat image is known to be originally created by Nicholas Fennelly.
The Shotgun SEO Approach
At lot of SEO practitioners start an SEO project by limiting the words they want to optimize for to say 10 or 20 and really just focus in on those words. The problem with that thinking is two fold.
- First, it unnecessarily limits the amount of long tail keywords you target and...
- Two, you don't know what keyword phrases the search engines are going to list your site for until you optimize, so why limit yourself.
I have heard it said that you should only really target two or three keyword phrases per page. That is a fairly myopic point of view in my opinion. I have clients that have hundreds of top 10 listings for their homepage or category pages because of their inherent values and the fact that they are actually relevant for all those keywords. When I am optimizing a site, I like to take a fairly big lens (50 to 100 keyword phrases or more) and apply optimization for those keywords throughout the site wherever appropriate. If the content of the page that I am optimizing doesn't match up that well or at all with the keyword phrases in my "lens", I return to KeywordDiscovery to find appropriate keyword phrases for the content that is there. Some of you may like WordTracker or even Wordze and you may use those if you prefer to. It always amazes me when I see SEOs who try to too hard to optimize pages for keywords that are just not relevant. And of course, all that does is get you into trouble in the long run. This "Shotgun" phase includes creating long, descriptive page titles that are keyword focused, making sure that as many of the potential keywords that are relevant to the content of the page appear on the page and not limiting to the optimization effort to a handful of highly competitive keywords.
Once you have the initial optimization in place, meaning that you have unique Page Titles and Meta data for all pages, you have optimized the content, you have optimized your internal linking structure and you have addressed any technical issues that might be causing indexing problems or duplicate content, you are almost ready to begin the Sniper phase of your SEO efforts. But first, wait a couple weeks to make sure for all the initial changes (Shotgun phase) you made to your site are reflected in Google's index. Use this time to thoroughly QA all the work you did in the Shotgun phase.
The Sniper SEO Approach
Now that the Shotgun phase is over, it's time to start focusing in on improving individual keyword phrases. It seems natural that your first step in the sniper approach to SEO is to look at where your rankings are for your keywords and start with those that need just a little improvement to break into the top 5. But first, what's even more important, is to check your web analytics data to see which keywords you might be getting traffic from that have the highest conversion rate for your site. These are the keyword phrases to focus on first in the sniper phase. Followed then by keywords that are close to ranking high which you believe also have the highest propensity for conversion. Often times, you might rank well for a long tail keyword phrase that is converting very well for you that was not defined in your initial keyword list. It's vital to keep track of these words and add them to the list that you monitor.In terms of how you actually go about the "Sniper" phase of optimization, it starts with taking a second look at all the things that you did in the Shotgun phase (especially internal link optimization) to see if there is anything else you can do to further optimize for the keyword phrases that you have now identified for the Sniper phase. From there, external link building becomes the primary tool for the SEO Sniper phase.
It's no secret that links play a HUGE role in the Google ranking algorithm as well as the other major search engines. Therefore, to be ranked well for a particular keyword phrase, it is essential to have links that with that keyword phrase, pointing at the Web page that you want to get ranked. It is also important that the pages that give you those links be relevant to the keywords as well. So in other words, if you want to be #1 for Dog Food, you need to have a lot of text links that have the phrase "Dog Food" in them point at your site, and those links should primarily be from pages about Dogs or Dog Food. Now this isn't a tutorial about link building but what I am getting at is that how you identify sites that you want to acquire links from makes a big difference on how effective those links are at driving rankings. A couple suggestions would be to look in the top 100 of Google, Yahoo and MSN for the keyword your sniping (and any other related permutations) for potential link partners. If you have a blog, do the same in Technorati to find some great blogs you might be able to interact with and get a link. Any related DMOZ categories are good places to look for potential link partners. Essential you need to find sites that are trusted and have authority for the keyword phrase you are sniping, and then you need to find creative ways to market yourself to those sites to get the links you want. That is the Sniper phase in a nutshell.
To a lot of people, this may seem pretty basic, but I think the mindset and the way you approach SEO with this methodology could be valuable for a lot of SEO people who maybe don't have a consistent approach to every SEO project. I hope everyone finds it useful or at least thought-provoking. It's great to be back. Have a great week!
The Sniper Cat image is known to be originally created by Nicholas Fennelly.
posted by Catfish at
8:42 AM
4 Comments - Add comments
