It is funny how the faster Google evolves, the slower many bloggers want to adapt to Google's changes. I can understand where they are coming from. Change is a very scary thing. Moreover, it is very easy to get stuck in one's ways especially when the old ways seem so easy and produce so much result with very little efforts. Let us face it. Keyword Sniping used to work beautifully in the past. It is so easy to get tricked into a sense of complacency with keyword sniping.
How Does Keyword Sniping Work?
You find keywords that are related to your blog's main keyword targets. Your blog's main keyword targets are the keywords that you make your money from. You make your money from either collecting the E-mail addresses of the people that are looking for that term, so you can E-mail them offers later or you make money by triggering AdSense ads that are keyed toward those keywords. AdSense bloggers tend to select AdSense niches that pay a lot of money per click.
Regardless of how you monetize your keywords, keyword sniping is fairly uniform. You take the related keywords, you filter them based on their exact match search volume monthly and you correlate that with how many other pages exist in Google's index that are targeted to that keyword. At the end of this process, you end up with keywords that have decent search volumes but have little competition. You then write blog posts around these keywords by mentioning the keyword in the title, mentioning a related keyword in the meta description and then repeating the keyword a certain number of times in the body and also related keywords as subheadings. You also bold certain related keywords to capture the theme of your real keyword target. After you have made these blog posts, you then build backlinks to those posts using your target and related keywords with varying degrees of anchor text randomization. This is classic keyword sniping.
Before Penguin update, this worked like a charm. Whatever it is that you are promoting, as long as it has low level of competition and it has a decent search volume, you are ensured to have many small streams of traffic which add up to a large river. Keyword sniping is not so hot nowadays after Penguin. It still works in certain circumstances, but it is not as hot as before. The truth is Penguin is a warning shot for bloggers to stop basing their posts on keywords. Bloggers should be blogging. Blogging means informing your readers, building your brand, communicating, establishing a discussion, and forming a relationship with your users. It is not about cheap tricks like keyword sniping. That is why Penguin is not only saving the Internet from crappy content but is also saving blogging by cutting down on keyword sniping.
Also Check :
How To Recover from the Recent Google Penguin Penalization
5 Types of Links to Avoid after Google Penguin Update
Why Stop Writing Blog Posts Based on Keywords?
Search Engines Now Focus More on Social Metrics
The key problem that you encounter when you are writing for Google and not for people is that people constitute social media. It is people's interactions that form the bedrock of social media. If you are not writing for people and writing just for search engine robots, then your target audiences are not tweeting about your posts, they are not sharing your stuff on Facebook, and they are not bookmarking you. There is a disconnect in the eyes of Google in regard to your absence of social media footprint and your high rankings on Google index based on your backlinks and your on-page content. This disconnect results in one thing and one thing only after Panda and Penguin--penalization.
Google is using social media signals as a way to gauge how credible real people find your content. You are not going to be credible with people if you write for Google's robot and not for flesh and blood people. One key way you are doing this is if you are just writing your blog post based on keywords. The blog post does not make any sense. It is really gibberish. It is filled with grammar issues. This is easy to detect and label garbage. However, even if you spent some time actually retaining an expert writer for copywriting services, this might not be enough. If the content is not engaging and if it does not address serious questions that are in the minds of the readers, then it is very shallow content. You are certainly in serious danger of being penalized because of its low quality.
Also Check :
How Social Media Sites are Affecting SEO Ranking
7 Reasons Why Social Media is More Important Than SEO
Which Social Media Site is the Best for SEO (Infographic)
Not in Step with Google's Brand Philosophy
Over the past several few years, Google's Eric Schmidt, its head honcho, has been telegraphing to the media on several occasions about the importance of brand. It is as if he is a broken record. It is always brand, brand and brand. I do not think he is just wasting his time nor trying to blow smoke in people's back sides. There is something funky going on behind Google. However damaging Panda and Penguin maybe to many web master's rankings, we have not seen anything yet. If Google actually goes forward with its brand-based approach to search engine ranking, we are going to be standing on the threshold of a brave new world in search technology.
A brand-based ranking system< is just going to blow away so many websites. Sadly, if you are blogging based primarily on keywords, you are missing the memo on Google's upcoming brand-based ranking philosophy. The key here is each and every post in your blog is a form of branding. Either it moves your brand forward or it erodes it. There are no two ways about it. There is no middle ground. When it comes to blogging, you are either going forward or you are stagnating and dying. There is no middle ground. When you are filling your website with blog posts that are merely involved in keyword sniping, you are not creating a brand because it is not very readable. Even if it is readable, no amount of excellent website copywriting can get around the fact that it is shallow content. Branding involves engagement. It involves a two-way dialogue with your target audience. There is no dialogue when you are filling your blog with keyword sniping posts.
No User Loyalty
There are many blog farmers and page rank farmers on the Internet. Let us not lie to ourselves. There are many guys and gals who build blog networks with one goal in mind, which is to sell backlinks. It is a sad reality. Many people would like to keep it hush-hush and under covers, but it is the truth. If the recent de-indexing of some of the most notorious text link schemes on the Internet are not enough to wake you up to this reality, I do not know what will. Blog farming and page rank farming are no longer going to cut it.
Google has been militant about the power of quality content and the power of branding. The recent updates are not exactly there yet to enforce this repeatedly mentioned philosophy, but we are going to get there sooner rather than later, especially considering how fast Google has been evolving lately. Keyword-sniping blog posts do not establish an emotional or personal rapport with users. It has no interest in building a community. Blogs that are filled mostly with just keyword sniping posts or posts aimed intently at just building backlinks are really in danger of being totally decimated by future Google updates. They have no community. They have no interest in building a community. This is the key problem that you have to address.
You stop writing for Google and start writing for people. Find out what your users are interested in. Address questions that drove them to your blog in the first place. Forget about putting keywords in your blog post's titles or repeating the keywords a certain amount of time. Keywords do not matter. People do.
The Bottom Line about Keyword Sniping
By taking care of your blog's visitors and giving them the experience and the content they have been looking for, you are ensuring that your blog and your online properties will have a higher chance of increasing the traffic in the future. The old tricks no longer work. Short-term thinking no longer pays off. It is all about having a plan and all about paying attention to and caring for your website visitors.
This guest post was written by Chris Walker, an SEO copywriter on WebmasterLabor.com who specializes in user-focused traffic strategies. He says "Target keywords, you have traffic for a short period of time. Target people, you will have traffic forever." You can contact him by visiting the http://scr.im/chriswalker