How to improve your SEO Startegy using Military Principles

26 Feb

Posted by: admin in: Blog Promotion, Seo

I recently read an interesting post on Tim Ferris Blog: Napolean on News and Information Management. It is a post about some of Napoleon’s quotes about managing information, and prioritizing tasks. It was really interesting because I was starting to ask myself a lot of questions after reading it. Maybe you’ll ask how come it is related to SEO? Actually it isn’t. But for every thing you try to achieve you need a strategy. SEO is no different than any other thing.

That’s why in this post I will try to apply “military” principles to practical SEO. First of all lets’ establish very clear what we want to achieve through. Lets define SEO as a set of actions we are going to perform in order to achieve the best results we can get based on what resourced we have. By resources we can understand our time, money or other people’s time and money which can be used in a seo campaign. The results of course should be increased number of visitors and better positions in search engines.

The way you select the techniques and prioritize your tasks will bring(or not) crowds of visitors on your sites. Looking for different information about all kind of strategies on Wikipedia I came to this a set of millitary principles:

Army’s United States Army Field Manual (FM-3-0) of Military Operations (sections 4-32 to 4-39) are:

Objective (Direct every military operation towards a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective)
Offensive (Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative)
Mass (Concentrate combat power at the decisive place and time)
Economy of Force (Allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts)
Maneuver (Place the enemy in a disadvantageous position through the flexible application of combat power)
Unity of Command (For every objective, ensure unity of effort under one responsible commander)
Security (Never permit the enemy to acquire an unexpected advantage)
Surprise (Strike the enemy at a time, at a place, or in a manner for which he is unprepared)
Simplicity (Prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and clear, concise orders to ensure thorough understanding)

I think most of the points are relevant as well for SEO tactics:

You need to define an clear and attainable objective. Don’t confuse the objectives with the means to achieve it.
Concentrate the “combat power” at the decisive place and time. Have you lost your time submitting your site to useless directories? Did you lost your time focusing on more than one thing with minimum benefits from each of them instead of doing one very well?
Economy of Force: Have you lost too much time on insignificant jobs that could be avoided or commissioned to less expert people?
Unity of Command: Did you concentrated all the efforts to an accountable person?
Simplicity: How clear are your plans. Do you know every momnet what you have to do?

I think the millitary strategy principles mentioned can be applied with success to any domain, especially to SEO.