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From a marketer’s point of view there are two kinds of search engine optimization: keyword-based optimization and query-based optimization. Most people in the SEO industry pursue keyword-based optimization. It’s easier to learn keyword-based optimization and there are plenty of tools out there to play with. Query-based optimization, however, offers greater efficiencies.

In fact, query-based optimization is better described as query space marketing because you move beyond basic keyword research and suggestion and take your SEO to a higher level. Nonetheless, you can bring some of your keyword-based SEO vocabulary along with you when you move up to query space marketing.

Keyword Research – Keyword research for query-based marketing is more fluid than traditional keyword research.

You’re looking for query spaces, either to develop or to invade. Invading a query space just means you’ve decided to throw your hat into the ring with other people who are already competing for a specific vertical. A vertical may have more than one query space (in fact, topic verticals have very hierarchical structures so they almost always have more than one query space).

When existing query spaces have been optimized they have very well-defined content. The Web sites populating these query spaces may be dominated by fewer than 10 sites (more competitive query spaces usually have from 30 to 50 serious contenders). A query space with relatively little well-defined content probably has relatively little traffic. Don’t let that deter you.

Invading an existing low-traffic query space makes it easier to create something worth talking about. Since there are already a few people interested in the topic, once they find your great new site they’ll spread the word to their friends and neighbors. In other words, true linkbait thrives on low-traffic query spaces. It obtains some credibility from being created for an underoptimized market.

But I think there is more fun and challenge in building a query space. It’s essentially market-building but if you find there is relevant content for a query that hasn’t been staked out by other marketers you can define the queries you want to optimize for. The previously existing content will guide you in selecting your topics, sub-topics, and lead keywords.

A lead keyword is the hook that brings people in. You use content created for that lead keyword to introduce people to other keywords that they will eventually search for.

Mining the rich content you find in unoptimized query spaces helps you establish on-page relevance quickly. You can also turn those “sleeping competitors” into allies by creating hubs that help them realize more traffic. Eventually, some of them should see what you’re doing and link back to you.

Keyword Suggestion – Keyword suggestion for query-based marketing is as easy as making up a new word or expression.

Of course, you have to come up with something catchy, something that rings (or sings). Something people will remember and associate with the query space. Sometimes it is easier to find an expression that someone else has coined, which despite its natural appeal has fallen flat, and then you just make a fuss over their expression.

I wish I could say this works like a charm but your execution of the strategy may fall flat, too. Still, if someone else has done the creative work but failed to market the idea, you may be able to pick up where they left off and accomplish what they did not.

Keyword suggestion for query-based marketing needs to focus on the phrase or word itself. People will search for a specific reference and once they are satisfied they’ll move on to other things — but you may be able to satisfy their curiosity and lead them through a segue to your own purpose. Regrettably, a lot of Web spammers use the segue technique, but so do many legitimate marketers.

The keyword suggestion for query-based marketing identifies expressions that people think are cute and then creates a buzz around them. For example, suppose you visit a Web forum where someone has embedded in their signature a quote from a new movie. If you search on the expression you may find that no one has optimized for it. Ask yourself, “Can I create anything relevant for this expression that moves my marketing plan forward?”

Ringtone spammers need not raise their hands.

Keyword SEO – Keyword SEO is not dead. In fact, some people would say it’s just getting its second wind.

However, keyword SEO is not very efficient because it doesn’t address the complex needs of large content sites. For example, etailers with thousands of items in stock have limited time to implement on-page SEO for keywords related to their products. Most of them probably don’t hope to capture many links for their products, either. In this market the keyword-based approach to SEO takes a long time.

You can supplement keyword SEO with query-based marketing, building value and new search audiences for Web sites that can be leveraged to drive traffic to the primary site. Does that sound like microsite marketing? Hey, all this stuff can work together.

The point of this article is not to persuade people to give up on keyword based SEO. Rather, it’s to help you see where you can go next when you’re ready to take things to the next level.

Here is a simple link-building plan for your internal links. The plan assumes you’ll be creating an intermediate to large content site (more than 25 pages) that will grow over time.

Step 1: Design The Site

Under no circumstances should you design your navigation first. Create the site and add the navigation later. Why? Because you need to customize the navigation to fit the needs of the site.

Good site navigation for large and growing sites helps people find new content fast and important content all the time. Believe it or not, you can NOT achieve these goals with a single navigation system.

Step 2: Set The Pace For Growth

Sure, your bes friend is getting married, your kids are going to college, you Dad is retiring next month, you have a high school reunion coming up, etc., etc. So what? Create a schedule for when you’ll add content to the site and use it to stay on track. Don’t carve the schedule in stone. Just put it in a spreadsheet, a word processing document, an email to yourself — someplace where you won’t ignore it but where it’s easily replaced or updated when the right time comes.

Knowing at what pace you’ll add content to a site for the next 6-12 months helps you design good internal links and plan a robust but flexible navigation. I say “robust” but really what you want is a lean navigation system that just functions as if it is robust.

Step 3: Add The First Navigation Layer

This is your core navigation system, usually implemented in a menu bar (sometimes it’s embedded in a script or widget but these don’t help your cause). The links need to be static HTML links. You can use embedded images but if you do be sure to include image titles (for usability/accessibility) and ALT= text (for anchor).

Your internal links need to be reasonably and logically descriptive, informative, and useful. If you want to use them to reinforce relevance for specific keywords, do so, but be sure the right page comes up in a site search after the site is fully indexed.

Relevance should be built through on-page factors: titles, meta descriptions, Hx headers, multiple keyword occurrences in indexable text, emphasis of keywords in reasonable amounts, and page names. If you’re building relevance in your pages through link anchor text you’re doing it wrong.

Your first navigation layer should be available on every page of the site. It should at the very least take your visitors to these pages: site root URL, Contact, “About Us”, and HTML site map. You can include other destinations but they need to be at least as important as these pages. And don’t you dare put “rel=’nofollow’” on any of these links.

Step 4: Create Your Link Warehouse(s)

This is really your second navigation layer. A link warehouse is a page where you temporarily place links for the sake of introducing people to your deep content. Many Web sites use their root URL page as their link warehouse, setting aside some or all of their front page content space for links (coupled with little blurbs) pointing deeper into the site. You can profile your latest blog post, your sale information, new feature articles, and recently updated product and information pages in your link warehouse(s).

How many links should a link warehouse include? I would not include more than 40-50, and that is the top end of my personal preference range. However, some link warehouses include up to 2-300 links. It depends on how comfortable you feel with providing that kind of variety.

Your link warehouse(s) should never have more than a fraction of the number of links embedded on any HTML sitemap page. If you have a 10-page sitemap and each sitemap page includes only 50 links you probably should limit yourself to putting no more than 10 links on a link warehouse page. Why? Because the link warehouse page should be focused on what is special, important, most recently updated, created, etc.

Set boundaries and respect them.

You may not need many link warehouse pages. In fact, most sites get by with just one. If your site includes 10s of thousands or even millions of pages of content, it’s okay to have a lot of link warehouses (in fact, Amazon is a perfect example of a site that uses a large number of link warehouses).

Step 5: Create Secondary Navigation Layers Where Needed

Many large content sites divide their pages into logical hierarchies. Don’t get hung up on theming or siloing content. All you need to understand is that each logical section within the hierarchy needs to include its own navigation layer. Visitors should be able to reach the very topmost pages on the site, the parent of the current section, sibling pages in the current section, and any children from the current page.

Step 6: Create Tertiary Navigation Layers Across The Site

A tertiary navigation layer might be an internal banner network, a widget with featured links, hard-coded embedded cross-promotional ads, or micro-directory link lists (such as are used for “Related Posts”, “Hot Topics”, “Recent Articles”, “More Articles In This Category”, “More Articles By This Author”, etc.).

Tertiary navigation can (and should, in my opinion) be tied to topic not location or site structure. The tertiary navigation CAN and SHOULD help build relevance through linking, but remember that the link anchor text works for the linking page too, not just the destination page. Use tertiary navigation layers wisely and efficiently.

Links should never get in the visitor’s way. Links should be there for the visitor’s convenience. They should be clear and obvious and their placement should make as much sense as possible.

Step 7: Embed Cross-Navigational Or Cross-Promotional Llinks In Copy

As you add copy to your site (or update old copy), be sure you know have an easily accessible list of older URLs to draw from to embed as links in your new pages. These embedded links help draw people further into your site and provide the spiders with yet one more pathway for discovering (and rediscovering) content.

Follow these steps and you’ll find your internal links do very well for you, your visitors, and the search engines. And here are a few rules to abide by when placing links on your pages.

• Never use “rel=’nofollow’” for content you create on your own site. If you link to yourself, always trust yourself.
• Autoembed “rel=’nofollow’” on links you allow other people to create on your pages. If you want to implement a “dofollow” policy that is fine, but be aware that unscrupulous SEOs share lists of “dofollow” sites for link spamming.
• Use concise descriptive text. Link anchor text should not overwhelm the visitor.
• Create X links per page. I prefer a minimum of three internal links per page. Some people insist on more. Use this rule in moderation.
• Leave links in the warehouse for 1-3 weeks. You want the links to be visible for a reasonable length of time to ensure they are crawled at least once. It’s okay to leave special links in a warehouse longer than 3 weeks.
• Kill sprawl before it gets too big. If you find yourself adding too much content to one section, don’t hesitate to create a new section. If you wait too long, restructuring all that content and navigation becomes tedious.

Doorway pages versus microsite – What an interesting concept. In fact, when I saw this expression in one of our search referral reports I actually said, “Hm”. I mean, it’s not like I’ve ever written anything on the topic. But now is the time to do so.

So let’s start out by defining doorway pages. A doorway page is a keyword-specific page used to achieve a high ranking in a search result for the sake of passing traffic through to another destination. Some doorway pages use redirection (referred to as cloaking) and some doorway pages just provide you with a link.

The basic doorway page is very plain, usually contains only a little text, and may be over-optimized. Say you want to rank for “discount widgets”. So your page title is “discount widgets”, you have a meta description that says something like “Stop here for all your discount widget needs. Our discount widgets come with a 1-year, money-back guarantee”, and you use an H1 header on the page that says “Discount widgets”.

If you really want to beat the term to death you include 1-2 paragraphs that use “discount” and “widget” in as many ways as possible, and to cap it all off your page uses “discount widgets” in the domain and/or page URL (I’ve seen doorway pages that look like example.com/example).

Somewhere on the page is a link or script that takes visitors to the real destination, maybe a legitimate discount widget distributor or maybe just a SpamAd site or maybe it’s a malware honeypot page trapping people.

Doorway pages are ugly, brutally efficient, and a clear sign of trouble. I don’t recommend you use them. I do recommend you consider using content-rich doorways whenever you have sufficient content to focus on different keywords that are all relevant to the same product or service. It’s risky to cloak and content-rich doorways don’t need to cloak because they use the same template and navigation as the desired destination page.

The most common mistake people make with content-rich doorways is they use text templates and just swap out keywords. I don’t recommend that as it’s inefficient (for search visibility and optimization). If you’re creating content-rich doorway pages, make them all unique. Use the full power of the page to establish relevance to as many logically useful expressions as possible. Go to town.

Content-rich doorway pages free you up to make your sales pitch in as many languages, dialogues, and jargons as you can. You can work in regional idiom, generational idiom, cultural idiom, and other special expressions that some demographics are more likely to use.

The whole point of using a doorway page is to zoom in on a very specific keyword or expression. The point of a content-rich doorway is to zoom in on a very specific keyword by supporting it with many relevant, related words and expressions. Content-rich doorways should be informative, entertaining, or both. They need to be compelling.

Microsites should be handled differently. Whereas a content-rich doorway acts as an entry point, a microsite needs to be a destination. The microsite needs to fulfill a specific function. You can include content-rich doorway pages on microsites but the microsites have to do something other than just bring people in for the sake of sending them elsewhere (that would be a doorway domain).

Here’s a question: How do you tell the difference between a microsite and, say, a small SpamAd site (SpamAd = MFA, made-for-advertising)?

Answer: The microsite promotes a child brand, which means there is a parent brand, and I have rarely found a microsite that carries advertising for unrelated brands. Some non-governmental organizations may create microsites that carry sponsored advertising.

Hence, a microsite serves two purposes: first, it fosters a child brand and provides unique, robust value for that brand that you cannot create on the parent brand’s main site. Second, the microsite needs to provide some support to the parent brand so that the brand relationship is clear and strong.

Some companies have experimented with detached microsites. I’m not a big fan of that kind of marketing, as each child brand really needs a much more robust marketing campaign to support it.

If it were up to me, I would prefer to use microsites rather than (content-rich) doorway pages, but if there is only one brand to support then the (content-rich) doorway pages make more sense than using microsites.

Danny Sullivan made a big fuss about the resurgence of the “miserable failure” link bomb after President Obama’s Web team unwittingly refused it despite Google’s defusing attempt. However, like the first time around (when it took Google 4 years to fix the problem), both Danny and Google have ignored the related “failure in the white house” and “white house failure” queries.

This is what comes of making optimization decisions on the basis of keywords rather than query spaces. A query space consists of all the queries related to a specific topic AND the Web documents that are relevant to that query. The solution that Google implemented, and which Danny Sullivan asked Google to reinstate, was keyword-based when, in fact, it should have been query space-based.

At the very least, Google should fix the “failure in the white house” and “white house failure” queries.

This blog post is part of my attempt to at least provide some explanation for what people see in those queries (which are currently low traffic). I’m not going to beat “failure in the white house” and “white house failure” to death in too many places, but I’ll try to position a couple of blog posts on the front page so that people searching on those queries will understand why they see President Barack Obama listed first.

My other white house failure post is on a personal blog that is not endorsed or otherwise sanctioned by Visible Technologies. Technically, I should have nofollowed that link but then it wouldn’t pass anchor text….

Okay, so I’ve said in the past that Google could fix this problem by preventing ALL links from passing anchor text. Since that isn’t likely to happen any time soon, here is an idea you can implement in your search engine optimization: use large anchor expressions.

Why would you want to do that? It goes back to an old keywords meta tag technique called power keyword optimization. Let’s say you want to rank for “great widgets”, “amazing great widgets”, and “great widgets store”. Instead of stuffing all three expressions into your keywords meta tag you would instead go with “amazing great widgets store”, which covered all three expressions — thus leaving room in your meta tag for additional expressions that were also relevant to the page.

Your link anchor text can pass complex expressions to destinations and the search engines will index the words in those complex expressions with the destination documents. You get the same effect (which is why so links using “miserable failure” were able to influence so many other queries). If you can influence several queries with just two words in your anchor text, think of how many queries you can influence with 5 words, or 10.

Now, keep in mind that there is a limit to how many words look natural in anchor text. That limit may be flexible depending on context.

I’m not aware of any search engine guidelines against using complex expressions in anchor text. I’ve been doing this for years.

Just keep in mind that as more SEOs catch on to this trick, it will become abused and the search engines may have to take some preventive or punitive measures to decay the impact of complex anchor text on search results.