Why is SEO Like Chess?

Chess is known as the ‘game of kings’. To win, you need to have good understanding of the rules, a clear strategy, and a number of methods to get to the winning position and capture the king, beating your adversaries. In SEO, you have the same need to think long term if you hope to achieve your aims.

At the heart of your SEO, you need to know which are the decisive moves to take to get you to the front page, to boost your sales, and increase awareness about your brand. Some SEO strategies come and go, and some stick around forever. Much like the best chess grandmaster, the best SEO strategist knows all the winning moves.

So what are the long term strategies that SEO managers need to know about?

Centralised Control – One person should have a comprehensive view of the total SEO strategy for a site. This way, everything can be managed more successfully, with planning, strategies, and tactics all working together to boost a site’s SEO profile.

Think Big

Big picture thinking is what’s needed in chess and SEO. Vanity goals shouldn’t be the focus of your campaign. Ultimately, the job of SEO is to boost the brand and to not do anything too risky.

Think Human, not Spider

SEO changes come from human behaviour – both positive and negative. Google makes edits to the algorithm to make it easier for users to find what they want and also to put a stop to shady behaviour. Black hat SEO is obvious, so even if the changes haven’t been made yet to stop one form of bad behaviour, you can guarantee that it will soon come, with Google penalising those that decided to use dodgy tactics.

Think about the decline of guest blogging with people paying for links and PageRank sculpting. Short term tactics don’t work.

Build Brand Reputation

Building your brand up in the eyes of professionals is what Google really want to see. Becoming an expert in your field, creating high quality content, and using legitimate tactics is what you need to do.

Some ways to build reputation include:

• Web directories
  
• Press releases
  
• Infographics
  
• Social media
  
• Content marketing

Before you accuse us of trying to get you to use bad tactics, think about how each of these can be used legitimately. For example, web directories can be used in a dodgy way and could get your site penalised, but likewise, when used properly they can be a good brand boosting reputation tool. They need to be human edited and high quality – actual humans would actually use the site to find something. If they’re niche too that’s even better.

Create a Reason to be Linked To

Authenticity cannot be faked. If you want to boost your SEO, you need to create content that people want to link to. Users are the key, so if you are appealing to them, then Google will take notice. SEO intelligence can be built into any website strategy as long as everyone knows what the end goals are and how to achieve them legitimately -by thinking of users’ needs first.

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