1. Visibility
2. Content Organization
3. Keyword Research
4. Links
Successful search engine optimization buids or enhances visibility, manages content organization, promotes ongoing keyword research, and incorporates links into its strategy.
If you’re not thinking about all four aspects of search engine optimization, you’re not engaging in intermediate-level SEO.
Visibility is the most difficult principle to master for many people because it cannot easily be measured. You can define a metric. For example, you can say you have achieved visibility when your site hits the top ten results for one or more queries.
Content organization was once considered to be the most important aspect of search engine optimization. Unfortunately for many Webmasters, link bombing tactics became easy and popular, and today’s Web is littered with the damage that link bombing has inflicted on Internet Marketing.
If you cannot optimize content (and that includes organizing it), you are not ready for intermediate SEO.
Keyword research never ends. I think most SEOs who have been around for a few years understand that but it’s hard to persuade clients that they should re-evaluate their keyword choices. Clients never change their vocabularies, but intermediate SEOs absolutely must update their query vocabularies or they’ll lose track of the markets they deal with.
Links are the baby food of search engine optimization. Anyone can get links. The difference between a Journeyman SEO and an Apprentice SEO is measured not in the quantity of the links but in their quality. One Intermediate SEO link should be worth 10, maybe 100 Apprentice SEO links. Spammers rarely move beyond Apprentice Level linking. Since they deal in volume they don’t need to.
Sadly, most SEOs are so obsessed with linkage they never move beyond Apprentice Level linking either. If you’re spending most of your time getting links you’re doing it wrong (unless you’re in one of a handful of competitive queries). SEO link obsession is not only stupid, it’s self-destructive. We can thank spammers and white hat SEOs alike for the Google Supplemental Index. Had it not been for all the link building tips and techniques people have shared on blogs and forums through the years we wouldn’t have ever heard of Google Supplemental Hell.
