The SEO Cheatsheet – Building an Authoritative Brand
SEO used to be pretty easy, a small handful of tactics such as finding the right keyword, putting that keyword in a few spots on your webpage, get some links, done. This has changed. With the advent of social media and its encroaching weight as a marker used in search ranking algorithms, traditional, old-school SEO just doesn’t cut it any more. Creating an authoritative website for its respective keywords has become much more of an ongoing, uphill battle.
Targeting the proper keywords and accumulating links is still a big part of the process, however, building a brand and developing authority goes way beyond finding keywords and putting them onto a webpage and getting a thousand links from any ole’ website.
We have Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, You Tube, and now Google+ as vehicles for developing an “authoritative” entity, and no matter what your product or service is, there are a thousand others competing for that top spot in the search results pages and you can be sure they are utilizing every tool and tactic available to get there.
Whether you consider yourself social or not, search engines are now usling Likes, Shares and Re-Tweets and Google Plus’ as metrics to calculate authority and determine placement in the results for keyword searches. There’s no way around it. Even if you are an established brick-and-mortar company you may not lose your brand authority but a keyword is a keyword and a link are still the major online monetary medium.
Folks will tell you that it is possible for anyone to “follow the rules” and build an authoritative site, and well, they are sort of right depending on what set of rules you may be talking about. SEO is still keywords and links but now you have to do the tweet thing, get liked, +’d, linkedIn and whatever else there is. Unless you are on the long-long-tail end of it, you will never be able to compete online with giants who seem to be able to operate above the law.
The SEO Cheatsheet
To get a little perspective, have a look at The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors, a very informative infographic from Search Engine Land. It is a SEO cheatsheet that outlines ranking factors and the tasks involved in addressing them. Keyword research and links just don’t cut it any more. Good luck stuffing this under your sleeve 
Tags: internet SEO, seo
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