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There are many articles across SEO blogs and forums that share “SEO strategies”, sometimes multiple “strategies”. For some reason the pundits behind these strategy guides have decided that they have to list ten things you can or should do for your search engine optimization strategy. I have yet to find any list of 5 or 10 “SEO strategies” that actually outlines or explains strategies. All they are listing are tactics or methods, and those are not strategies.

Through 11 years of reading and writing about search engine optimization, I cannot think of a single article that I would hold up as a realistic description of an SEO strategy. The odds are pretty good that more than one person out there has published an SEO strategy without realizing what it was. Trust me, we’d all be referring to that manifesto if it was a good one. It would rank first for “SEO strategy” on all the search engines rather than the various articles that rank first on today’s search engines.

Shari Thurow did write one of those high-ranked articles for Clickz in 2006. I’ve always trusted Shari’s advice and that article was pretty good. But it doesn’t lay out a complete SEO strategy because it omits details (she was, after all, writing about the foundation of a successful SEO strategy).

There are many successful SEO strategies. I would be willing to bet heavy money that most of those strategies have not been written out or elaborated in any organized, detailed manner by anyone, anywhere. We mostly do SEO by the feel of our guts and the seats of our pants — and that is what makes SEO more Art than Science.

I have provided an outline for how to write an SEO strategy document but there I did not provide any examples of SEO strategies. The problem for people like me and Shari is that anything we provide in the way of detail will be misinterpreted — not by everyone, but by someone, probably too many someones. There is no one strategy you can use to solve everyone’s SEO needs.

A strategy is a well-defined action plan that establishes what the goal is and what means will be used to realize that goal. It’s important to note that I said “well-defined”. It’s not enough to say “I am going to create good content and obtain links to that content”. Nor is it even sufficient to write a detailed outline of the content and a list of the places where you will seek links.

Those are two out of many important steps you have to include in a real strategy. For example, you have to include keyword research in your strategy and most people acknowledge they have to do keyword research up front but keyword research doesn’t end at the beginning. It has to be a continual process. Furthermore, you have to define how you will do your keyword research. Do yourself a favor, though, and resist the temptation to draw up lists of keyword research tools. That’s a very limiting approach to keyword research.

The best SEO strategy you can define is the one you can execute. Understanding that is more important than knowing what every online guru would tell you if you had a private pathway into their own methods and resources. I can do things you cannot do. You can do things I cannot do. Your strategy has to be defined according to what you can do, not according to what I can do.

That’s the problem with looking online for the best SEO strategy. You can take other people’s ideas and try to adapt them to your needs and your capabilities — you should be doing that anyway — but in the end there is only one person who can provide your best SEO strategy. And don’t you just hate the articles that lead up to the inevitable conclusion of you?

So I won’t end on that note. I’ll provide you with an example of an SEO strategy that is relatively simple. This is a strategy that has worked well for me on many occasions but I don’t always use it.

1. Pick a query no one is optimizing for
2. Find the best content relevant to that query
3. Create content about the best content relevant to the query
4. Optimize the newly created content
5. Publish the newly created content
6. Stimulate new search interest in the query
7. Monitor search referrals for new queries that you can grow into

I call this strategy “Seeding a Search Result”. Here is a breakdown of the points.

Pick a query no one is optimizing for – This has to be a real query that people search on. It’s going to be a relatively unmonetized query. There can be PPC ads for it but there does not have to be. It’s a query that is deemed too low volume by your potential competitors to be worth their time. How do you know no one is optimizing for a query? Look at the search results. If the query expression does not occur in any titles or page names, odds are pretty good no one is optimizing for it. If you cannot find many sites linking with those keywords to other sites, you can conclude the SEO community has not paid any attention to the query.

Find the best content relevant to the query – There are two reasons to do this. First, you need to understand what people are finding. If you understand what the query is about, you can judge what it takes to satisfy their need. Maybe some of that content hits the nail on the head but in many queries the available content is only partially satisfying. So knowing what people will find you are empowered to create something that is more informative and more helpful than anything else they are finding.

Create content about the best content relevant to the query – You want to create and control the best resource for the query. That’s a two-pronged attack plan. You want to create the best content and you want to create the best resource. This way you ensure people are most likely to find your content for that query.

Optimize the newly created content – It might seem like this part goes without saying but you want a “well-defined” strategy. Include all the obvious steps on your checklist. And note that this does not include any link building.

Publish the newly created content – This is where you do some link building (but only after you actually publish the content and clean up any mistakes you overlooked). You should not need much. If you chose your query well, this will be like taking candy from a baby. And the neat thing is that that baby is usually professional SEOs and highly experienced search competitors who just didn’t pay attention to this low-traffic query.

Stimulate new search interest in the query – You do this very subtly with respect to the SEO community. That is, don’t tell them about it. Don’t use this campaign as an example in your next link bait article on your SEO blog. Don’t brag about it on Twitter, in your favorite SEO forum, or at any conferences. The Keep Your Mouth Shut Principle must be strictly adhered to.

You can advertise this query in many ways — just be sure to do it where other people with knowledge of search engine optimization are unlikely to pay attention to it. Furthermore, don’t confuse advertising your site with advertising your query.

Monitor search referrals for new queries you can grow into – You cannot possibly anticipate every natural query that people will use to find content like yours. Odds are pretty good that as interest in your query grows people will start to find your content for similar queries. Maybe they’ll change the word order or substitute a word. And maybe they’ll start elaborating on the core concept and look for stuff you didn’t think about.

The point of the strategy is to keep a low profile, capitalize on other people’s oversights, and build traffic gradually in a query where by the time your competitors realize what you are doing your natural link profile will outperform their artificial link profiles. Once a query becomes competitive people start throwing links at it. You may have to do some link building down the road to secure your position but you don’t have to do much link building to begin with.

This is NOT a universal SEO strategy. This is just one example of an SEO strategy. It doesn’t work in every situation. It does work in many situations. But there are many other search optimization strategies one can employ, particularly for highly competitive queries.

The next time you search for what the “best SEO strategy” is, keep in mind that you won’t find it. No one has ever published the best SEO strategy. At best, some people may have unwittingly published their SEO strategies but in the end the best SEO strategy for you is the one you don’t share with other people.