By Cade Lee

Search Engine Optimization is much more than just optimizing for the first page of Google. If you have read through our previous posts than you already understand this concept. As a matter of fact when I go to review my monthly analytics a good 26% to 30% of my traffic comes from other sources than the search engines. Granted a good 54.44% of the traffic we obtain comes from search engines but I definitely would not want to give up 26%! In order to get the referral traffic we are exposed through various social networks online as well as several different social bookmarking sites. The whole goal of Guerrilla SEO or Guerilla search engine marketing is to bring traffic to your site without blaring a direct commercial for your services or product.

A good example of Guerilla SEO tactics would be marketing through article marketing to the major article repositories like Ezine Articles. By obtaining an “Expert Author” status you are allowing Ezine Articles to publish your content which in turn allows other users to use your content as long as they post the article “as is” with the links in the resources box. Those links of course (you are usually allowed to links within the resource box) are directed to your website or URL. By establishing yourself as an Expert Author you are accomplishing two things. First you are establishing yourself as a credible source for your service or product and secondly you are not directly selling your services. In this “shared planet” paradigm it is almost forbidden to come right out and ask for business. So by giving you information away without any expectation of reciprocity you are showing your dedication to your profession and opinion on the matter that you are writing about. A good example of this would be an article that I most recently published on SEO vs. PPC vs. Social Networking. This article has generated a fair amount of hits already (100 views in the last 60 days). I know that is not groundbreaking; however, if I have 20 of these articles generating the same amount of interest as this article than the math is pretty easy, I would be looking at 2,000 views on my articles every month! The conversion of that traffic is at about 2% meaning that I am getting almost 2% of the viewers of this article clicking through to my site, so that is an additional 40 visitors that I am obtaining. If you search for “SEO vs. PPC vs. Social Networking” you will see that my article is at the top of the rankings for this search term. There are not enough searches for this search term to obtain any kind of data from Google, at the same time obtaining that number one page rank for the search term took little or no effort at all. This is a small added bonus for the article; most of the traffic definitely comes through the article repositories.

Review your competitors “SEO Strategy“, you are usually able to determine which of the links your competition has working for them. You can find your competitors highest page rank link by simply visiting www.seochat.com and going to their “PageRank Search” Page. Once you are on the page rank search page simply type in your competitor’s site www.yourcompetitor.com, select to sort the results by page rank and change the results to show 100 listings per page. Now you have a list of links that your competitor shows up on in order of importance. From here all you need do is copy your competition’s actions on these pages. You can post on a comment section, offer a link exchange or even work on a strategic alliance with some of the webmasters from these pages. The possibilities are sincerely unlimited.

If we use our site as an example, for the keyword “Denver SEO” today’s top player is a site www.denver seo.net, who has most recently obtained a #1 listing in Google for the search term. I can see the various directories that this site has been submitted to and start listing my site for the anchor text “Denver SEO” just as my competitor has done. By doing this and then adding more links to my site I will be able to create more popularity for my domain and get ahead in the rankings!

So what are you waiting for, find out your competitors blueprint to SEO now!