Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
This is part four of The Ultimate Website Marketing Checklist, for part three click here.
7. Promote Content Via SEO
SEO is a lot more complex than social media. If you really want to get into SEO, I strongly advise you to read up on what’s happened in the past 10 years with Google’s algorithm and link building. You can learn a lot from the SEO category of this blog.
The rules of SEO change all the time. What’s acceptable today may not be acceptable tomorrow. With that said, SEO is one of the best traffic sources, it’s free and recurring. You just have to rank your blog posts for their respective keywords. There are two sides to SEO, on-page and off-page.
I already covered some basic on-page SEO, it’s really not that important. Off-page SEO is what will push your content from page 23 to page one to number one. Off-page SEO can be broken down into two parts: link building and popularity.
The popularity aspect is how popular your content is. Google measures popularity by the number of backlinks/quality of backlinks as well as social signals like Facebook likes, Tweets, Retweets, G +1’s, and bookmarks.
Over the past two years, link building has evolved. Two years ago, more links would mean higher rankings. Now, less is generally more, as long as the links are high quality. So what you want is dozens, if not hundreds, of other sites linking to all of your content, as well as readers sharing it via social networks.
The easiest way to build links is to build the links yourself, artificially. Of course, that’s black hat SEO, but it’s perfectly acceptable if you do it right. The second thing you should do is syndicate all of your content onto social networks and other social platforms.
If you want to go the super high-quality link route, guest blogging is the best way to do it for free. Here’s the checklist:
- Setup content to syndicate via Onlywire.com and LinksAlpha.com (These two platforms allow you to automatically syndicate your latest content onto hundreds of social sites — they result in hordes of free traffic and backlinks).
- Guest post on 5-10 blogs per month (Guest blogging is the best strategy for getting super relevant, high page rank backlinks; read The Ultimate Guide To Excellent Guest Blogging).
- Regularly leave comments on the top 10 blogs in your niche (read The Ultimate Blog Comment Marketing Strategy).
- Join the top 10 most popular forums in your niche, and start contributing 5-10 posts per day between them (forum marketing is a powerful way of driving traffic and gaining backlinks — link to your site via your forum signature).
- Write and submit relevant articles to high page rank article directories linking to your site via the author bio.
- Submit a monthly Press Release about your site/company.
- Create 10-100 Web2.0 sites per month using unique content (hubpages.com/Wordpress.com/Squidoo.com/etc).
- Purchase high page rank domains, host them on separate C class IPs, and build mini-sites linking to your own (this is the most powerful link-building strategy).
The problem with link building is that once you start, you can’t stop. If you start building 50 links a day, gradually increase to 250 links/day, and then drop to nothing, you can quickly get penalized. As long as you start small — building 2-20 links a day — and slowly increase the velocity, you’ll be safe. The next vital rule is anchor text.
Anchor text is the text, word, or phrase you use to link to a page. Whatever text is used as anchor text, Google will give you a direct boost for. It’s been common SEO knowledge for years, and SEOs have taken serious advantage of it. They’d use 100% exact match anchor text, meaning they’d use the keywords they wanted to rank for 100% of the time for anchor text when building links.
Obviously, this looks completely unnatural. Off-page SEO is all about creating a natural link profile. When someone links to a site about credit repair, they’re not going to use “credit repair” as anchor text the whole time. They might use terms like “credit repair site,” “credit repair blog,” “credit repair information,” “www.domain.com,” and more general terms like “click here,” “here,” or “website.”
Use a wide variety of anchor text. A solid guideline is exact match anchor text 20% of the time (e.g., credit repair, repair credit), related anchor text 30% of the time (e.g., best credit repair, credit repair site), long tail anchor text 30% of the time (e.g., best credit repair site, the best credit repair service), and generic anchor text 20% of the time (e.g., click here, website, the credit repair site, link, page, etc.). Gradually increasing link velocity and using a natural selection of anchor text will slowly but surely boost your search engine rankings.
===> Click Here To Continue To The Final Part Five
Comments
Jake
This is a great guide! I’ve been struggling with off-page SEO and your tips on guest blogging and link building really helped me out. Looking forward to implementing these strategies on my own site. Thanks!
Alex
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 →This post really resonates with me! I’ve been following a similar strategy, but I had no idea about using Web2.0s. Can’t wait to try it out. Thanks for sharing!
Sophia
I’m skeptical about the results you mentioned with guest blogging. Do you have any examples or proof that this really works? I’d love to see some case studies.
Michael
Quick question: When you talk about anchor text variety, should I be using my main keyword more often or focus on the longer tail keywords?
Chris
I think the approach on content syndication might be a bit outdated. Social media strategies have evolved a lot since this was written. What do you think about focusing more on influencer collaborations instead?
Emily
Daniel
This reminds me of when I first started my SEO journey. I faced the same problem with link building and struggled to keep up with the pace. Your tips on gradually increasing the number of links make total sense!
Linda
If anyone’s looking for more tools to boost their SEO game, I’d also recommend checking out Ahrefs and Moz. They’ve been really useful for analyzing backlinks and finding new opportunities. Great post!
George
I’ve learned so much from this post! The breakdown of anchor text types was eye-opening. I’m going to apply this to my site right away. Thank you for such valuable insights!
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Come do the work with people who show up
Not another course you finish alone and forget. A community that is there the next morning, and the one after that. Free, forever. About a minute to join, then come do the first challenge with us.
Join the community, free →
Look, ‘black hat but perfectly acceptable if you do it right’ isn’t advice. It’s a hedge dressed up with an anchor-text percentage formula so the risk looks like a science.
Marla’s right about the hedge, but the anchor text math is what got me — 20/30/30/20, like a recipe for scones. Nothing about a ratio you’ve written down in advance ends up looking natural.
None of this applies if your niche is ‘feed store in a town of four thousand.’ Guest posting on 5-10 blogs a month, joining the top 10 forums — what forums? The other feed store owners I know don’t have blogs, they have a truck and a cell phone. The only piece of this that would survive translation is finding the two or three people locally who already talk to everyone, and that’s not SEO, that’s just knowing your town.
Sorry if this is a silly question, Lonnie, but I run into the same thing except mine is more that I don’t fully understand half these terms yet, like what ‘link velocity’ actually means in practice, and I keep wondering if I’m supposed to be building all these links myself by hand or if there’s some tool for it, and honestly this section made me feel like I started six months too late to catch up.
I am wondering very much how this advice would translate for a market like mine, where the local forums and directories the post recommends do not really exist in the same form as in America. Building links on English-language Web2.0 sites such as these, is this even relevant if the customers I am selling to do not read English at all? Also the guest blogging idea, five to ten blogs each month, this assumes there is a large community of blogs in my niche writing in my own language, which for cosmetics distribution in my country is not really the case — there are perhaps three or four serious ones. I would be very grateful for guidance on this, since the checklist seems to assume an audience and an internet that I do not quite have.