Some people will tell you to look up other sites who have keyword positions you want to rank for and check what content they have in bold, how many sites are linked to them, which words have H1 or H2 headers, etc. And they’re not wrong. Monitoring what your competition is doing is important – up to a point.

Here’s where relying on that theory alone may put you in a worse position than you started in.

Tomorrow, literally tomorrow, any of the search engines may choose to update their search algorithms, or the way they rank sites. And if the way you beat the other site in ranking is what gave you a more secure position today – tomorrow, a change in the search engines could have you sorted back to the bottom of the pile. Some people are experiencing this now as Google goes through another update.

This brings us back to the theory of working with the search engines instead of trying to one-up them.

Instead of chasing algorithms, and needing to tweak your site dramatically with every update, you can balance your do-it-yourself search engine optimization efforts with a slant towards two factors that out last any foreseeable change in the way they work.

Continue to fill several content deficits with your blog content, and get very well linked.

You’ve heard that content is king before, I’m sure. But for a blog focusing on content deficits, why is this especially true?

With the proper blog software, each of your blog posts will generate its own page, and thus, you’re effectively building a resource on the subject of your blog over time.

Let’s look at a quick example.

Imagine for a moment that you’re primarily blogging about a service you provide, such as a realtor would. You may want to target the term Maryland real estate, but the research you’ve done tells you that the term is harder to get.

However, the specific market you cater to, Frederick, a city in Maryland, has some relatively easier terms. So you call your blog some variation of Frederick, Maryland Real Estate. (We’ll go over more real estate specific strategies in an upcoming article later on this week.)

With this strategy, since those keywords also appear in the harder keyphrase term, after you begin to blog on the topic, using terms from the secondary keyword group, you have a better chance of ranking for the harder term, and thus, widening your audience.

To do this, you’ll want to make sure your keywords appear in several of the following areas:

• in the title

• in the description

• in your posts

• in your post titles

• in the name of the links to individual posts

• in the text that links your posts

Now, if you update at least several times a week, to a blog whose content resides on your own server, and take care to have substantial content relevant to the terms you want to rank for, you’ll find that getting the desired attention from search engines is a far easier task.

As an added bonus, if you’re well-linked, particularly within the theme of your site, when your rankings fluctuate a few positions, you’ll still get decent traffic. So how can you get well-linked?

We’ll get into that in part four of this series. You’ll find more detail about how to find content deficits in the free excerpt Lucrative Keywords for Lucrative Traffic [pdf].

In the next part, we’ll also go over getting spidered quickly, and making sure the search engines can “see” all your links. To get those updates, you can subscribe to this resource via RSS, Atom, KlipFolio or MyST Smart Channels using the links at the top of the page, or at the front of the site if you prefer email.