In another blog I defined what I see as the difference between SEO Strategy and SEO Tactics. With this post I want to give a bit more insight into the types of SEO Strategy that you can use to support your business strategy.

Offensive Seo strategies:

Offensive Strategies are when you directly attack your competitors. These can be designed to destroy something they own/have or to take key serp positions that they have.  This is the most common sorts of SEO Strategy and often the most costly to all parties concerned.  Examples of the types of things you would do in this is negative SEO or launching keyword targeted pages in an effort to take keyword serps.

Defensive Seo strategies:

Defensive Seo Strategies are designed to defend a position you already hold, this is all about creating barriers to entry for new entrants in the market and ensuring that your position is such that attacking you would take excessive resources.  Its particularly useful to use defensive tactics on the web as its so easy on the web for someone to pick an easier target if you have good enough defense strategies.  Typically people will use PageRank as a key defensive strategy i.e. if you get a PageRank 7 or above most people will leave you alone.

Flanking Seo strategies:

These are my favourites, strategies that your enemy think are of no real threat or significance until the last minute and then its to late for them to react in time to save themselves.  An example of this might be something like launching social network in your niche but not focusing on the really critical areas of the niche while gaining some hidden advantage.

For example if your in the toy industry (kids are watching thunder birds while I write this), if you launch a social network for toy designers everyone will see this as a threat, but if you launch a social network for Admin staff in the toy industry it will not be seen as anywhere near the same level of threat as long as you do a good job of positioning it  in a non threatening way.  Then focus on quietly getting the Personal Assistants and secretaries to all senior executives in the toy industry press / media companies on the social network and get to know them personally, once achieved you now have a direct route to get any Press Releases directly into the hands of all the people who can give you those invaluable industry links.

Guerrilla Seo strategies:

Typically Guerrilla SEO strategies involve launching lots of small sites targeting specific keywords while hiding who's really behind them.  The web is the perfect ground for this type of strategy, SEO's can hide behind a myriad of techniques to hide what they are doing and who they are doing it for, this tactic is perfect for really well disciplined SEO's who can play the longer strategy game and can be used to hurt sites as much as help your own.  Often when doing this and targeting critical keywords you might think about using AdSense (use a different account than normal) and doing some purposefully bad designs to make it seem as disparate and incongruous as possible and have less chance of being detected i.e. don't make them all the same!!!!!

Deterrence Seo Strategies:

Deterrence SEO strategies are primarily negative in some form although its not essential, but in essence you are trying to scare your competitors into leaving you alone.  This type of strategy is quite close to Defensive SEO strategies in what they are doing, except what you do in defensive is build walls that can survive an attack however deterrence strategies do not have to deal with this.  There only aim is to put fear in the minds of others about what you are capable of doing, David Naylor is one of the best I have seen in the SEO industry at this, he has created an impression such that you think that he has the capability and willingness to go to whatever lengths are necessary should you cross him.  An extremely effective and simple Deterrence strategy is to get a well known SEO black/Grey hat to reference you on there blog giving the impression they are protecting you or just straight hire them not to do any work but to tell people you are working with them.  Of course you always have the option to actually go out of your way to destroy a site and let it be known (or more likely suspected) that you did it thus building a reputation for being ruthless.

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