SEO: The Book of 5 SEO Rings – Overcoming the Biggest Obstacles To SEO Success With The Ancient Wisdom of Dr. Naveel
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Written By Dr. Naveel | July 24, 2008 | Share This
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A great samurai warrior named Miyamoto Musashi wrote a book around 1645 on winning battles. The book was divided into five rings (scrolls) that dealt with different aspects of winning in combat. The teachings were applicable to any size engagement – from one-on-one to thousands. Just like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Musashi’s book is an ideal military book with a business strategy application. Well, I may not be writing a book, but I am writing a blog post. I’m going to show you how to win the single largest battle in any SEO engagement - implementation.
Some companies have spent thousands of dollars on SEO only to see no results. Why? The SEO recommendations were not or could not be acted upon because they didn’t follow the lessons of the Five Rings. The Five SEO Rings will help make sure your next SEO initiative is a winning one.
1) The Expectation Ring
SEO is different than most other forms of online marketing – and paid search in particular. With paid search you can expect near instantaneous search result listings with relatively minimal effort. Paid search is great to generate search engine presence quickly.
SEO on the other hand is more of a holistic process. It can take weeks for search engines to pick up on the changes that you have made to your website. Additionally for many large organizations, getting SEO changes implemented can be a lengthy internal process in itself. While with paid search you can bid at certain levels to secure a specific ad position - no such guarantee exists in organic search. Finally, with paid search you can bid on as many keywords are you want. With SEO, the amount of keywords you will realistically rank for is limited by your website content.
Despite these caveats the reward for doing SEO right is substantial – high quality, long lasting and free web traffic. A realistic expectation of SEO results, timing and work required is the foundation of any successful campaign, and the key to The Expectation Ring.
2) The Interest Ring
That which is not understood will not hold anyone’s attention for long. The promise of this high quality, long lasting free web traffic is very exciting for a large organization – at first. Then comes the eye-glazing yawn inducing SEO vendor jargon of 301 redirects, robot.txt files, page rank sculpting, asynchronous JavaScript and XML . A clear road map and plan is needed to keep the organization interested and engaged. Everyone needs to know to what has been accomplished, what is to be accomplished ahead and what their role in the process is. One of the things we do at Reprise Media is to meet with our clients on a weekly basis to ensure continuity — everyone is on the same page. For a sometimes nebulous concept like SEO ongoing attention, engagement and clarity are the key elements to mastering the Interest Ring.
3. The Buy-In Ring
People don’t like extra work. People really don’t like extra work when it appears to be in conflict with what they’ve been doing already. Usability professionals can bristle at being asked to change a user interface for a search engine. After all, their primary concern is the user experience. Developers can get testy about having to modify their code for a search engine. Their focus is performance, scalability and security. Online editors feel constrained by having to write differently for search engines. They want to write for people. In all of these situations good SEO actually helps achieve the goals of each of these constituents.
Elements that enhance visitor usability like breadcrumb trails are also good for SEO (more on this in my next post). Similarly, eliminating excess CSS and Javascript from page code improves website performance and SEO results. And as I pointed out in a previous post, writing for the web can make your content more attractive to search engines as well as to readers. SEO is not diametrically opposed to the goals of other departments in your organization. The key is to educate these departments on how SEO is mutually beneficial to them. Only then will you have mastered The Buy-In Ring.
4. The Customization Ring
The secret to losing weight is pretty simple – eat less, exercise more. Now, we all know that to be the case but hardly anyone would call the previous statement an actual weight loss plan. A plan would have to consist of a personalized approach that takes into account variables like lifestyle, physical limitations, dietary restrictions, etc. Unfortunately, some SEO agency deliverables fall into the “eat less exercise more” category with sage advice like “use keywords in your title tag”. Generalized “best practices” are not going to help you move the needle significantly on organic search traffic.
Further, just about every general SEO “best practice” can be learned about on the web for free. The key questions to ask is how do “best practices” apply to your organization, how do you incorporate them, and how do you build on them? What are the technical limitations of the website / content management system? What does the publishing workflow look like in your organization? What are the design elements that are not under your control? What upcoming offline marketing initiatives can be capitalized on from an SEO perspective? Just a few of the questions that need to be asked in order to truly understand what can realistically and effectively be implemented for your organization. When you’ve answered this you will be ready to customize your SEO program to your organization’s specific needs, and you will have mastered The Customization Ring.
5. The Measurement Ring
The only question I’m asked more often than whether I accept health insurance is how do you measure SEO ROI? Well, there are a number of ways. At a basic level, you should at least be tracking overall organic search traffic, the number of keywords (keyword diversity) referring traffic and rankings for important keywords (although the importance of ranking continues to diminish as search results become more personalized).
The next level involves defining what you want your organic search traffic to do. What are the KPIs (key performance indicators) within your organization? Is it a certain number of pageviews? Signups for a newsletter? Online Purchases? Whatever the case may be, it is important to be able to track and measure the performance of the engagement. You can use your data to then make further SEO enhancements with greater knowledge. Once you have mastered The Measurement Ring, then truly, you will have evolved from an SEO grasshopper to an SEO Master.
Topics: Dr. Naveel, Reprise Media, SEO, Search: How-To |
Thanks so much for your interesting post. It helps put things in perspective. I love both PPC and Organic. I think having both is the perfect combination. SEO is a lot of work.. I wish my customers would understand the process.
All they say is.. I want to be on the first page of Google!
Thanks again.