I can’t emphasize more how important it is for your brand to be searchable. Most people find products and services today through search and particularly search on a mobile device. So if you are not on the first page of Google Search result page (SERPs), you are losing potential leads and businesses.
SEO or search engine optimisation can get very technical very quickly. Some people stay clear of it while others tried, invested in it and ultimately gave up.
I am here to share some techniques that have proven to work.
- Write killer title and description tags by learning from ads
More click through, more traffic means better ranking on SERPs and better ranking gets you more click through and traffic. It is a cycle that you will want to get into. Question is how. The quick and easy way is to copy from adwords ads. Someone has already done the necessary research and A/B testings to derive a list of competitive keywords that you see in ads. Those keywords are proven to work so if you start using them in our title and description tags instead, they are going turn them into click magnets.
Let’s say you want to publish a post that you want people interested in “bicycle helmets” to click on.
Take a look a look at the adwords ads for that keyword:
The keywords that I can harvest from these ads are:
- safety
- bike
- affordable
- range
- delivery
So now if you are to write a compelling title and description tag, they should contain some of these keywords.
2. Harvest dead links on wikipedia
When Wikipedia editor finds a dead link, he doesn’t immediately delete it. Instead he will just add a footnote to indicate that it is a dead link, hoping that other editors and contributors will fix the error. That foot note is your entry into this simple trick.
First do a simple search for a related topic on wikipedia + “dead link”
Once you are on the page, do a quick page search for the word “dead” and that should bring up a highlight that will point you the link you want.
Great, now what you have to do is to recreate the dead resource on your site and replace that dead link in Wikipedia to point to your site.
But the link on wikipedia is a nofollow link and may not contribute much to your SEO. A similar method would be to look for outdated links on other websites. The same principles applies but require you to search outside of wikipedia. Brands that have recently changed names, migrated to a new URL or have shutdown are quick targets to apply this trick.
Websites that point to them will find their links outdated. You may want to reach out to them to give them a friendly heads-up and introduce your up-to-date resources at your site.
3. Write content that provides value
There are no shortage of content online but most of them are focus on self promotion and sales that doesn’t really benefit you as a reader or consumer. Therefore you don’t share them and don’t link to them.
If you have content like this on your website, you may want to consider rewriting them for the sake of SEO. So what kind of content should you create? Content that help solve problems. For example, if you are a baker, you may want to consider providing tips that can help make that perfect cake every time. Such content will of course take more time and effort to create compared to a typical promotion and because you are the subject matter expert in your field, you are sure to have certain monopoly on the topics you pick.
When you share such valuable content on social media or targeted user forums, you will see more people sharing it and more people linking to it.
4. Link to authority sites
Google do evaluate your site to see if you are an information hub. This is determined by the quality and relevancy of your page outbound links.
This algorithm that Google added is more than a decade old but it still works. As it is, pages that only link to their own content score lower than pages that links to other helpful resources.
And the figure below shows the clear correlation between outbound links and Google ranking.
5. Update and republish old posts
This last one is quite straight forward. We are all busy and getting us to sit down to write articles and posts is tough on busy days and weeks. So what is the next best thing? Update an old post with new information and content.
Some content are evergreen and is applicable at all times but some are more perishable and requires timely updates. Take a good look at the content you have created over the years and see if some of them will benefit from a quick update.
Since you have updated your posts, you should also go the extra step of re-promoting them again. Share it social media and to your communities to inform them that you have just updated a popular piece of work.
These are just some quick tips for busy folks who want to skip the technobabble and go straight to doing some optimisation. Try them out and let me know how it works out for you.