SEO is not all about backlinks you know. You might find it hard to believe (I know I do) but SEO is really about the following processes, (rather than just backlinks):

• keyword research
• content writing and site management
• backlinks
• analytics and feedback

While there are SEO blogs and forums that celebrates only backlinks, it is undermining the other three tools that a webmaster can use to promote their site in the search engines.

Our goal is targeted traffic. Rankings is only ONE way to achieve this. My preference is to go for long tails that has little to no competition. Even within the confine of long tail keywords, I don’t target everything under the sun. Some long tails such as how to make money online, is actually competitive. I only target long tails that come from a new query space or keyword space.

Google has said that 20-25% of all searches are new. That is an amazing stat! It means every single day, you can choose to target something that has very little competition, if you know how to do proper keyword research. You can rank these long tails without any backlinks. This brings me back to my earlier point that link building is not the do or die thing that most SEO companies claimed.

If you have been doing keyword research long enough, you will realise this: the more popular a keyword is, the more permutations it will have. One reason is because people are sick of getting the same choices at the result page and they will try to change their search terms to find new sites. This represents opportunity for a smart webmaster to take advantage of.

However, to be able to do this well, you need to spend time and effort in knowing your query space well. Most SEO unfortunately spend too much time thinking about or getting backlinks and too little time in other things.  If you want to practice a different type of SEO, start thinking outside of backlinks. Once you do that, you are actually 90% ahead of others.

As an experiment, I going to use a keyword tool that I like called keyword strategy which helps me to find all sorts of long tails. I am going to apply these longtails to this blog and see if traffic increases (all without doing any backlinks). This will be a six month experiment and I will update the results once every 2 weeks. Please follow the blog if you are keen to see if this works!