The System
The tiered system relies heavily on research to be effective; the idea behind the system is to rank for lesser competitive keywords and phrases to increase exposure, leading to greater rankings for competitive keywords in the long run based on exposure and links.
This system takes time to work but gives your website a much better chance of keeping within rankings in the long term based on a deep set structure, and placement of keywords.
Phase 1
Phase 1 of the tiered system is all about research especially competitor research, as they say your closest competitor is not always who you think. So do tons of research, by tons I mean search high and low to see what your competition ranks for.
Use Google daily to build up an idea of how content they post creates fluctuations in rankings, this is often under used or not taken into consideration. The average SEO thinks a bit of content and tons of crude links will help their campaign but the reality is it will hurt it.
Set your goals and objectives out clearly, know what you want to rank for and find out the competition level for each keyword or term. Once you know this you are in the perfect position to start making decisions on a hierarchy of keywords.
The best way I have found is to group them, I have 6 groups of words that I want to rank for. I use groups to cluster the competition for those words.
Group 1
Group 1 is made up of the most competitive keywords. These must appear within the title and description and be included within the body text.
Group 2
Group 2 is made up of the competitive terms I can possibly rank for immediately based on quality content and headings.
Group 3
Group 3 is any phrases I want to rank for. This is most important as these will usually be a mixture of group 1 and 2 in a phrase i.e. ‘web design in the West Midlands’. I say this is most important as it will help with sentence structuring.
Group 4
Any words that have a semi competitive value, usually descriptive words which can give your site a boost with long string search terms i.e. ‘affordable web design in the West Midlands’.
Group 5
Non competitive words, of which can be deployed within your sentences and possibly meta descriptions. It’s key to identify one or two good words which add value to text.
Group 6
Long non competitive strings, these are probably your best chances when starting out as you can easily rank for a non competitive string.
When you have worked out your groups, it’s time to put the tiered system into action. It may seem like a lot of work to find out all that information but within a few hours you can get to the top of Google for some search terms which will always hold value. Over time due to increased exposure you have a much higher chance of ranking for your main keywords in group 1.
Phase 2
Putting it into practice is easy:
- Go to your home page if you have one
- Create a text document for each section shown on your page or web design
- Start writing quality text to describe your activities
- Include text from all the groups but focus on groups 3 – 6
- Use this text on your site
- Include text from groups 1 and 2 within headings
- Use text from groups 3 – 6 in all other headings
- Text from group 1 and 2 should be used in page titles and meta descriptions
- Use some quality words from groups 3 -6 in your meta description
- When creating page permalinks use group 3
Make sure you are not stuffing keywords and are writing with structured sentences. The results will usually come quick for certain terms. I had a site index a page within an hour and was #1 in Google for the terms I used by using this system.
Please note this system is my own and I have used it for years and produced real result for pages with no links at all.