Building an SEO Strategy for the Google Ranking Era
A 2001 build guide written for a search landscape where Google's link-based ranking is now the thing every strategy has to be built around.
The strategy that worked in 1999 doesn’t quite hold up anymore. Google is now the engine most businesses have to plan around first, and its link-based ranking changes what “optimized” means. Here’s how to build a strategy for where things stand today.
Start with keyword research, not guesswork. Tools like WordTracker (launched in 1998 and now in wider use) let you see actual search volume and related phrases instead of guessing which words your customers type. Spend real time here before writing a single page. The keywords you pick shape your site structure, your page titles and your link outreach for months to come, so getting them wrong is expensive to unwind later.
Build pages around single, specific topics. A page trying to rank for ten unrelated phrases usually ranks for none of them well. Give each important product or service its own page, written specifically around the handful of phrases a customer would use to find it, with a clear title tag and a first paragraph that states plainly what the page is about.
Treat link building as a core task, not an afterthought. Because Google weighs inbound links so heavily, the sites winning ground in 2001 are the ones actively earning links, not just waiting for them. Reach out to industry sites, trade associations and partners for genuine links, and consider writing something worth linking to, a useful resource page or a piece of original research, rather than just asking for a favor.
Get listed in the two directories that still carry real weight. The Open Directory Project and Yahoo’s directory both feed listings to other engines and portals, so a solid listing in either one has an outsized effect. Yahoo’s submission process for commercial sites can take real review time, so budget for that delay rather than assuming instant results.
Clean up anything that looks like a shortcut. Google’s spam team has gotten noticeably better at spotting hidden text, keyword stuffing and doorway pages built purely to rank rather than to be read. If your site (or your previous agency) used any of these tactics, strip them out now. A short-term ranking bump from a trick that gets caught later isn’t worth the risk of a manual penalty.
Set up basic tracking before you need it. At minimum, watch your referrer logs for which engines are sending traffic and which keywords they used to get there. A handful of businesses have started using early rank-tracking tools to check position for target phrases weekly, which beats refreshing a search results page by hand.
Review and adjust on a quarterly rhythm. Google updates its index and its ranking approach on a rolling basis (webmasters have started calling the periodic reshuffling of results the “Google Dance”), so a strategy built once in January and left untouched all year will drift out of date. Revisit your target keywords, your top pages and your backlink profile every few months and adjust.
A strategy built this way takes longer to show results than the submit-everywhere approach of a couple years ago. But it’s built on the same signal Google itself is built on, genuine relevance and genuine links, which makes it far less likely to be undone by the next round of algorithm changes.
