Chapter 3
Planning Your Search-Engine
Strategy
In This Chapter
Avoiding problems with your Web designer
Evaluating the competition
Understanding the search tail
The six search engine variables
Planning your attack
T
here’s lot to discover about generating traffic from the search engines,
and sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. As you discover in
this book, there’s page optimization and link strategies and index submissions
and directory submissions and electronic press releases and blogs and this
and that . . . it goes on and on. Before you jump right in, I need to discuss
the big picture, to give you an idea of how all this fits together and help you
decide what you should do when . . . to help you plan your strategy. In this
chapter I show you how a search-engine campaign works overall.
Don’t Trust Your Web Designer
Let me start with a warning: Don’t rely on your Web designer to manage your
SEO project. In fact, I know that many of you are reading this book because
you did just that, and have realized the error of your ways.
Last week I consulted with the owner of a small e-commerce store. He’d just
paid a Web-design firm $5,000 to build his site, and before beginning he had
asked them to make sure the site was “search-engine friendly." Unfortunately,
that means different things to different people, and to the design firm it didn’t
mean much. The site they built definitely was not optimized for the search
engines. The owner asked the firm what it was planning to do about the search
engines. They told him it would cost him $5,000.
