In 2005 I coined the phrase Kaizen SEO, which refers to a philosophy I picked up while working in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s.
Kaizen is a Japanese manufacturing philosophy that means “continuous incremental improvement.” What differentiated Japanese manufacturing from Western manufacturing during the Japanese growth years when they seemed unstoppable, was the belief that changes needed to be made continually and in small steps. Rather than making large changes in their product designs and manufacturing techniques, they encouraged employees at all levels to submit recommendations for any and all changes to manufacturing, materials and production techniques that improved the product quality, improved the production efficiency, or reduced the costs. The best ideas were then incorporated into the product production on a continuing basis.
The Kaizen SEO approach is essentially the same in that it encourages site owners to look at their site every morning and come up with at least one new way to make the site better. This may be an improvement in the design, a more organized menu system, the addition of new and more attractive images, improvements to content, or anything that helps drive new visitors and business.
Matt Cutts, one of the leading Google Quality Engineers, recently made a video where he talks about the Katamari Technique (about 3 minutes into the video) and how web sites can compete with black hat web sites by “starting out with a small area, and you build, and you build, and you build, and your resources and your authority and your reputation just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.” He is, of course, referring to your web site and using white hat SEO techniques. He is talking about making continual changes to expand the site with good quality articles and information until it takes over the rank positions dominated by sites that cheat using black hat methodology.
The key to the Katamari Technique is to use continual incremental improvements to build a site into an authority site for your industry. Keep in mind that Google does not care who you are or what you do. Their ranking algorithms are focused on finding the best informational content to satisfy a user’s search. This means you should be writing the best quality articles in your industry and doing so on a continual basis.
Take a look at your web site every morning and come up with a new topic to write about, or some way to improve your web site. Implement your ideas and watch your targeted traffic and business grow. If you cannot do it every day, then pick a day when you can and do something good for your web site and your visitors at least once per week.