When it comes to ranking your website on Google, many small business owners and bloggers are easily overwhelmed with the vast amount of information they’re told. In this post, I break down my 7 years of experience in helping website owners grow their search engine presence, into 3 simple categories.
Links
Backlinks have and will continue to be the dominant factor for a very long time. They are the number 1 ranking factor and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise. While many backlink strategies have died off, the fundamentals still apply. For example, tiered link building continues to be just as powerful as it’s always been. Links from high quality, reputable sources like .edu websites hold plenty of strength. Doing manual outreach has proven more worthwhile than ever, due to the strictness of Google updates on black hat link building over the past half decade.
Content
High quality content is what breeds not only happy customers, but also links. If you write a 3,000 word blog post and offer real value, you’ll likely attract links naturally from other blog posts. In addition to natural link building, the more content you have, the more keywords you’ll be mentioning. This allows you to attract hundreds or even thousands of extra visitors via long tail keywords. Of course Google always preaches high quality, lengthy content to increase user satisfaction, but as you can see, there are other reasons to create high quality content, other than to just listen to google
Click-through Rate
As Google moves towards user interaction and other user feedback signals, factors like click-through rate (CTR) have heavily come into play on Google, just like they have on YouTube. Moz first proved the results of increasing organic by moving one of his sites from #7 to #1 in less that 3 hours, right before our eyes. In the spring, Larry Kim, cofounder of WordStream, also published his analysis of the effect of SERP CTR in a blog post on the SEO giant’s blog. He found that bots and fake clicks have no real effect on the SERPs, but rather real clicks from residential IP addresses certain had an effect. As with any other SEO finding, companies bloomed to fill the market demand. SerpClix for example is a crowd searching platform where clickers can earn small amounts of money and buyers can raise their CTR.
SEO will never stop evolving but by following these 3 categories of SEO promotion, you keep your website on top of the latest trends and ensure you get your fair slice of traffic from Google.