Buddhism includes many traditions, practices, and beliefs based mainly on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha or “the awakened one.” In simple terms, the Buddha aimed to enlighten those willing to open their minds and hearts to his wisdom by letting go of worldly desires and ignorance. This involves understanding Dependent Origination and the Four Noble Truths, ultimately leading to the Noble Eightfold Path and achieving Nirvana. For some, this journey can take a lifetime and demands serious commitment, offering the reward of complete self-mastery and profound freedom of the soul.
Your SEO content strategy is no different. Serious SEO professionals (those who aren’t just in a marketing firm churning out content because their law degree didn’t work out) have a strong desire to blend the art and science of the field with the core elements that drive our very existence. They will research, discuss, test their ideas, and keep digging until they discover insights from the ideal realm of search—a well-crafted collection of words that signals you’re on your path to SEO success.
Dependent Origination – The Initial Application of Content Optimization
According to Buddhist philosophy, all things emanate in dependence upon multiple conditions and causes—Dependent Origination. Your website’s content plays into this on a very general level: according to multiple experts, your content accounts for 70 percent of SEO. Therefore, we can agree it is the king of your SEO’s chess strategy, and the platform supporting your dependent origination working in pure harmony with the other vital factors that will allow you to arise. These other devices include your technical, tactical, social and reporting accouterments. In order for your content to be a driving force to optimized enlightenment your technical strategy must compliment the content, as should your social campaigns and the other corners of your SEO blueprint.
Here is an example: let’s say your optimizing your webpage for the H1 key phrase “Chicago springboard diving lessons”, and your entire website has a sitemap of local pages optimized according to city and key phrase. In order for the site to rank well as a whole, most of the juice must flow to your homepage, and all local key phrases must support the organic boost you are striving for. Here is a freebie: take a secondary key phrase that “is like” your primary, pepper your home page with it, and create a URL constructed of the two split key phrases with the local area. It may look like this:
www.chicagodivingclub/springboard-diving-lessons-platform-diving-lessons-chicago/
This URL may be a tad lengthy, but the sustenance is there for the sake of illustration. The H1 key phrase is in bed with a secondary phrase that is heavily searched and, joined together, they will send light to the Google algorithm telling it that it is a relevant search option, and your content will let Google know it is high-quality and authoritative. Then your social strategy will play from these phrases to draw traffic and generate leads while the content is the grand nucleus that works together with all the factors and that qualifies these strategies with original, well-written authoritative content. So how do we be authentic with our text, and how do we approach it with divine reverence and respect?
The 4 Noble Truths of Content
In Buddhism the 4 Noble Truths bare the recognition of craving and its cessation, and the road that leads to the cessation of the craving. All too often an SEO professional will do a little competitive research and slap up the same content strategy while tweaking the structure, mixing up the language, and using the same key words and textual benefits. This method is quick, efficient, and costs little to implement from the standpoint of manpower and monetary expense. But it is lazy, soulless, and eventually (as the hummingbird update has proven) Google will get wise to it. In the 4 Noble Truths this is “dukkha”—it is clinging to the eventual fact that your content will get old, Google will see through it, and physical and mental struggling will reveal itself in your Authority Labs report.
So how do we open our souls to let go of the attachment that gives in to the “easy way out” and the temporary one? We become human. By that I mean we construct our content the way your average human being would approach the search engines with a query—through mobile search behavior. According to ‘Forbes’ the percentage of smartphone users was at 56% in 2013 having gone up by 36% in the last two previous years. This translates to the fact that more people access the Internet on their mobile devices than on their desktops, and the percentage is growing. In other words, most searches are asked by voice command on Android and iPhone devices in the form of a question.
I will not give away my exact content strategy (which saw my firm’s struggling client websites improve by over 70 percent a few months after it was applied), but I will say if you want to find enlightenment in your SEO’s content strategy then release the desire to give in to the covetous black hat tactic of pseudo-plagiarism and instead get in touch with your human voice, the souls around you, and discover how the masses would phrase a query centered around your company’s products and services. Then construct that content to compliment it, to feed it light by lending an authenticity that shrouds your copy in powerful acronyms, and let the raw, pure product of your labor emanate while the cessation of dukkha heralds pure SEO enlightenment and a strong organic placement.
Evolution
In Buddhism the soul is always addressing the big questions and embarking on journeys as it evolves through means of suffering, opening, and enlightenment. Your content strategy will also make the pilgrimage to enlightenment and in doing so it will falter, so don’t be discouraged when the organic placement is not what you were hoping for. Remember, the content must be crafted to mimic mobile search behavior, and it must be authoritative in its message. Use authoritative back links to compliment the references you might make in your copy to give it that boost, play with link and keyword placement, and look at your content as a body that the search spiders crawl: where will they go first? Let the art and science of SEO speak to your content, and enjoy the amazing journey you have ahead of you that will, with much dedication, result in optimized peace and enlightenment.
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