Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
The SEO Pyramid has been floating around online for quite some time now. It’s just a little pyramid that’s essentially a website/SEO promotion strategy:
For best results, you should start at the bottom of the pyramid and work your way up to the top. First, you should start with your website content. If you want your website to succeed in the long run, good SEO isn’t enough. You need high-quality content that keeps visitors engaged.
The very fundamental of search engine optimization is site structure, which brings me to the next part of the pyramid. Site content and structure actually go hand in hand. Your site needs to be structured to accommodate your content. The basic structure most SEOs use is called an SEO Silo.
“Siloing” your site’s content can be explained in one word: categorization. You just need to create a minimum of four categories for your site’s content and have at least four posts under each category. On the homepage of your site, you should display the categories in the navigation bar.
This way, the link juice going to your homepage will be evenly distributed throughout your site. Very simple structure, use it wisely and make sure all of your content is up to scratch. Next, you need to make sure your site has no crawl errors, like 404 errors and others alike.
To find out if your site has any crawl errors, use Google Webmaster Tools (works, checked as of 2024). After you’ve sorted your site structure and content quality, you need to focus on your on-page optimization. This means keyword optimization, ensuring proper use of header tags, meta titles, descriptions, and LSI.
Internal linking is also important. Go through your site’s content and strategically link certain phrases to your other posts and pages. Internal linking helps distribute your site’s PageRank evenly and keeps visitors on your site.
Once you’ve fully optimized your content for your chosen keywords, it’s time to start link building. Some SEOs recommend social media before link building; I say a bit of both.
Content-based link building is a good way to start a campaign. This means writing, spinning, and distributing unique versions of content onto hundreds or thousands of relevant websites linking back to your own.
You can build content-based links through article marketing, web 2.0’s, guest blogging, press release submissions, and blog networks. They all work well, but press releases are highly effective for new link-building campaigns. Press releases justify any sudden influx of backlinks.
When you submit a PR, the search engines believe your site is about to become very popular, so the sudden influx of links from other strategies seems normal. If you don’t start with a few press releases, Google gets suspicious. You have to justify your backlinks.
The search engines always ask why you’re suddenly getting thousands of links. A new website that has never been mentioned anywhere on the web wouldn’t naturally attract 3000 backlinks. But, if you submit PRs and get people talking about your site on social platforms, your links will look natural.
Lastly is the social aspect. If you want your website to succeed beyond expectations, you need to build a community. A community of people who share your site’s content regularly. In order to build a real community, you need to start a blog on the end of your domain.
If that’s not feasible, there are other options. First, encourage social sharing by displaying social buttons on your website. At a minimum, display a Facebook Like, Tweet, and Google Plus One button.
Displaying those buttons and asking visitors to use them will increase your social traffic, presence, and search engine rankings. Besides buttons, use social media! Build a Facebook fan page, have a dedicated Twitter and Google Plus account.
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →Encourage your visitors to follow you on Twitter, add you on Google Plus, or like your fan page. Doing so captures your subscribers, much like list building.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, questions, and comments below.
Samuel J.
This is an incredibly informative post! The SEO Pyramid Strategy you’ve outlined makes so much sense, especially how content quality and structure are the foundation. I’m excited to start implementing this on my website. Thanks, David!
Amira K.
I’m a bit skeptical about the press release strategy. How can we be sure that a sudden influx of backlinks won’t raise a red flag with Google? Is there any recent data or case studies that support this method? Would love to see some evidence to back it up.
Ravi M.
This post is packed with so much useful info! Just curious—when it comes to internal linking, is there an optimal number of internal links per post, or does it depend on the post length? Thanks for sharing your insights!
Elena P.
While the SEO Pyramid Strategy seems sound, I think there’s a bit more nuance needed when it comes to keyword optimization, especially with the recent changes in Google’s algorithms. Relying too heavily on keyword density might lead to penalties. What are your thoughts?
Lucas V.
Great post, David! I’ve been following your blog for years, and it’s always refreshing to see actionable strategies like this. How have you been lately? Let’s catch up soon, maybe at the next conference. Keep up the amazing work!
Mariana F.
I had a similar issue with site structure a few months ago. After siloing my content and fixing some crawl errors, I saw an immediate boost in traffic. This strategy really works, especially when combined with good content marketing. Thanks for confirming what I’ve experienced!
Tom R.
If you’re looking for a tool to help with press release submissions, I’d recommend checking out PRWeb, eReleases, or PR Newswire. They offer great platforms for distributing content-based links. Thanks again, David, for this solid strategy!
Leah N.
I really appreciate the breakdown of the SEO Pyramid Strategy. The emphasis on starting with good content and building a community resonates with me. I’ve learned a lot from this post and will definitely be sharing it with my team. Thanks for the insights!
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Sixteen posts minimum before the structure even works. I could spend two months planning that calendar and ship nothing.
Sorry if this is a silly question, Davey, but does the silo actually need all sixteen posts live at launch, or can you build the categories out slowly while the site is already up and running?
Google Plus has been gone for years, which dates this a bit, but the deeper issue is the assumption that everyone wants to run four social accounts and ask strangers to follow them. I built an audience through writing alone and have never needed a fan page to do it.
The press release logic here needs unpacking. The claim is that a PR ‘justifies’ a sudden spike in backlinks to search engines, but that assumes Google’s algorithms weight press release timing as a causal signal, and I’ve never seen that mechanism documented anywhere, only asserted.
Twenty-two years in insurance taught me that justifying a spike to an internal auditor and justifying a spike to Google’s algorithm are the same move dressed up differently, and neither one is actually explaining anything, it’s just managing appearances until nobody asks a follow-up question. Raj is right that nobody in this piece explains the actual mechanism, which is exactly what happened every time compliance asked why a region suddenly hit its targets. Somebody produced a story that sounded plausible, everyone nodded, and the underlying number never got investigated properly. If a strategy depends on the reviewer being satisfied rather than the thing being true, that’s not SEO, that’s just corporate reporting with extra keywords.
Half of the ‘content-based link building’ list is just: spin it, drop it, repeat. I automated exactly that part months ago.