This is a guest blog contribution from Matt Ganzak, founder of EliteGurus.com and BuildNetworkPlus.com.
Content marketing and SEO is getting more difficult. Each day, there are thousands of new domains purchased and thousands of new websites going online.
Most new bloggers and content writers will get started with their site, staying active for a couple months, and then reality hits them. No traffic to their articles. The time does not seem worth the effort.
Content Marketing can be FRUSTRATING!
In an effort to remove outdated and irrelevant search results, Google has been updating their systems over the years with a series of updates. The latest Google update, Penguin, was said to lower the ranks for websites that have poor quality links and also took into consideration the relevancy.
This was the push some businesses and bloggers needed to find a better way to build quality SEO.
Today’s Content Marketing Strategy for SEO
According to Google, the best way to get quality rankings is to follow this guide:
1) Post quality content that gets shared
2) Have social widgets easy to access
3) Use Google Plus profiles for authors
4) Use Google Plus Pages for sites
5) Guest blog on other sites to earn link backs
6) Do not buy links
7) Setup your web pages targeting keywords
8) But do not over optimize
In a nutshell, there is no shortcut to boosting your organic traffic, so just put out the quality content and they will come. Well, this strategy is causing newbie bloggers to get frustrated.
So what is the solution?
I have been teaching my clients to build networks within their niche industry, and share each other’s articles. This is a strategy that will build your organic SEO naturally as all the sites work together to grow traffic. Many bloggers choose to be loners and just focus on “their audience” but realistically, today’s Google Algorithm stacks the cards against these loners.
Fact is, you need to reach out and make new friends. Connect on the social networks, and reshare each other’s content. Then also guest blog on each other’s sites and even send newsletter’s to each other’s lists. If you build small niche teams and work together, Google will build your PageRank and Domain Authority as your sites grow together.
Copyright Yuri Arcurs – Fotolia.com
This strategy does not create overnight success, and can be rather time consuming. But Google will index their community with excellent authority and continue to do so as her network grows.
Steps to creating your Network
The first step is to decide on your niche market, and do not stray from it! If you confuse Google by having so many different industries, Google will not index you with high relevance for your target industry. Choose and stay the course.
Next, determine who your competitors are in your vertical. You can do this with a Google search for your keywords. And I always like to check Alexa.com rankings to get a look at their traffic score.
After that, choose relevant keywords with high search volume but low competition. I suggest picking 4-7 keywords to target. If you choose more, you can spread your site too thin which will lower your keyword density for your target keywords.
Lastly, find out where your niche industry peers hang out. This can literally mean go to networking events in person, or meetup groups. Take business cards! But you will also want to find online communities dedicated to your niche. Get in, get involved and start networking together.
Personally, I have been doing this sort of networking for the past year and my group has been growing. If you would like to join, I would be more than happy to chat and put up guest posts on any of my websites.
So let’s all work together to improve our PageRank and Domain Authority to grow our readership together. Content Marketing and SEO has become a team effort. I look forward to meeting each and everyone one of you.
Matt has been working in marketing for the past 12 years. He is an innovator of new ideas and has been training businesses on building their online presence. He specializes in Website Development, SEO, blogging, PPC, media buying and monetization strategy. Connect with Matt on EliteGurus.com, and be sure to check out his WordPress hosting (DollarWebsiteClub.com).
Hey, this was a really great list, gonna implement some of these ideas to my blog, thanks!
Thank you Alvin, be sure to connect up on social networks so you can share your site with my readers.
Hai Matt
And also to work more in On Page – Seo – Bread Crimping.
Thanks for sharing these amazing tips. Good SEO is very important for a blog and I will use this post to improve my blog’s search engine optimization.
Thank you David! Be sure to connect up on social networks and share your site with me.
I am in search of methods to improve traffic to my blog. I am going to explore your strategy. Thank you.
Hey Chris, I took a look at your site and noticed that you need to improve your SEO onsite. For example, your article title is Keiser M3 Plus Indoor Cycle Review, but I do not see this keyword anywhere else on your article. You need to improve your keyword density. Then you need to go offsite and blog linking back to this page using Keiser M3 Plus Indoor Cycle Review as your HREF tag. Then add ALT tags to images and interlink articles on site using this keyword Keiser M3 Plus Indoor Cycle Review. Here are some more tips on how to do this, or you can email me and we can chat http://elitegurus.com/seo-search-engine-optimization-how-to-rank-keywords/
Thank you Matt
Excellent advice with extremely useful information!
Thank you Drexel!
SEO is such a hard slug…. I am still getting my head around it many years later. Great points though :)
Thanks Tahila, keep at it! Focus on 1 page on your site at a time. Eventually you will score page 1.
Awesome post, I have tried to optimise all these tips on my travel blog by trying to create quality content, keywords. Great Post
Thanks for the kind comment. Try to focus more on your keyword research, pick keywords to target with high search volume and low competition. I suggest WordTracker.com as your keyword research tool.
Matt, SEO is getting more difficult day by day, as you say so. I aggree with the solution you proposed, but it’s a long term work. I also believe that Google is “pushing” its social network, so social presence is and will be necessary.
I have been making network of my own .. And i have good results.. Although trying new techniques will never harm your blog authority .. Let me know Matt if i can be in your network list.
Thanks Jaspal, connect with me through my social networks EliteGurus.com.
Can’t Google can also term the work together strategy as link exchanges? (guest blogging on each other’s blog). I am not sure about this
Good one Mellisa. Good should consider that soon!!
Mellisa, the point is that there is no silver-bullet to successful SEO and any shortcut that you can think of today might be blocked later. Point being, sure you can link exchange but if the site that you are link exchanging with gets blacklisted by Google, then the links to your site might hurt you. That being said, the best way to build quality SEO is to build quality relationships and share articles / readers.
Great post!
I am a UAE based e-commerce business owner and I am planning to upgrade my website. Will implement your ideas on my website blog.
Thanks.
I could give you a writeup on how to improve your SEO, cause right now your site is not setup properly. Focus on the keywords you are targeting.
Great Tips for SEO sir. I will follow it for sure thanks fori t:)
Thank you for reading. Be sure to share this article too.
I’ve still yet to get over 1,000 unique visitors to my blog and it has been live for over 6 months. But hey, I really don’t care because I’m in it for the long run!
Hey Dionne, connect up with me. I train people on how to get their traffic up and you need help with your onsite optimization. In the last 30 days, I have had over 100k impressions on brand new sites. The key is the keyword research and onsite SEO. Then building a network of sites that connect together.
This was a great article, thanks for sharing!
Thank you!
I have mostly had bad experience when buying links or viewers or followers. 90% of all of them are usually spam or forced links.
Buying links is a horrible idea. Earn your links.
I must say, as a lot as I enjoyed reading what you had to say, I couldn’t help but lose interest after a while. Its as if you had a wonderful grasp on the subject matter, but you forgot to include your readers. Perhaps you should think about this from far more than one angle. Or maybe you shouldn’t generalist so considerably. Its better if you think about what others may have to say instead of just going for a gut reaction to the subject. Think about adjusting your own believed process and giving others who may read this the benefit of the doubt.
Selling links is not the way to go. Sell SEO services. I see that you are trying to sell links. Quality Content is always the best way to build traffic.
Thanks for sharing some important points about increasing SEO. Keyword research is one of the most important factors because without readers, a blog would be lost in the huge Internet space. There is no doubt that SEO brings life to a blog, although it must be ethical.
You are correct, SEO is so important. You can spend thousands in PPC or you can grow organic traffic for time spent. The choice is yours. I choose free traffic over paid any day!
This is quite new for me that now Google will also check relevance of the source where from we are getting a back link. For techies it may be not a big issue but for those bloggers who have different type of niche will face a big problem because other than a few hot niche there are very few blogs on other niche to get huge number of back links from there.
Relevance is the key. A great service to check your links is http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
It is not easy SEO now a days.with regular update of Panda and penguin, it is not easy to get organic traffic from Google. Google wants some fresh and unique content for readers,if we write quality content which can’t be fine anywhere else then Google will increase your Ranking automatically.
I love idea you have mentioned.
Keep Sharing like this kind of article, this is beneficial.
Thank you! Hope to connect with you on social networks to share tactics EliteGurus.com
Thank you! Let’s connect on social networks to share tactics EliteGurus.com
Sounds great! Building network and working together may lead good result. Thanks for the nice tip!
Thank you for reading!
Something really important for anyone who got hit by the Google latest updates. Some of my blogs including FERNANDO BIZ started to experience a drastic traffic reduction and now started to slowly pickup. So the importance of team work connecting with other bloggers and expanding the network is the key to success.
Thanks for the remind and great tips for all the bloggers.
Hope to connect with you Fernando. You have a great site.
Thanks for the SEO tips. After doing everything possible I think one SEO Tips most people forget is Patience. You surely can’t get there over night. Once again thanks for the tips.
Very true! Definitely a good tip. Patience is the key!
Interesting article. I agree with the central idea that if a few content marketers work together as part of a network, you will probably grow your use base faster. I would like to learn more about HOW EXACTLY to go about doing that.
It’s nice post! As far as my experience concerned that we can do better SEO with our content instead of using useless backlinks! You know about the google updates and whenever it comes, it destroys a lot of sites! Using pure and real content is the first part of SEO because if we have a good content and original content then we don’t have any need of building backlinks and doing extra work! Google is always here to give good rank to original things!
Sharing on social media sites is a good thing because the more people know about a website, the more website becomes famous!
Thanks.
Quality content is even more important than ever. I try to write relevant, thoughtful blogs.
Thanks for the comment and for reading. Be sure to share with your network.
Excellent post. I think SEO is content marketing and if you are not going to write unique content then you can not get traffic on your website.
SEO is all about writing and producing unique content.
Thanks for the list.
Saif
Google will continue to change the rules of SEO. One thing that hasnt changed: Quality, consistent content gets noticed. That being said, what you do with that content can enhance your SEO. Guest blogging is even more important now. And having guest bloggers will increase your exposure to Google.
New google strategies are really proving it very difficult to get listed into search engines and to eshtablish a successful blog. thanx for the Info.
Nice tips. I’ve been doing white hat SEO, but the results are so slow. Really need to leverage the help of social media.
Great advice, but one thing I’ve noticed is that until you build enough traffic organically on your own, your peers in your niche won’t see you as peers. There’s a certain critical mass where people start taking you seriously.
The post was awesome. Thank you for sharing. I do agree that Google is constantly changing the rules of SEO. Understanding the changes are very important!
Excellent advice, Matt. I plan to begin immediately. May I guest for you?
It is not easy SEO now a days.with
regular update of Panda and penguin, it is
not easy to get organic traffic from
Google. Google wants some fresh and
unique content for readers,if we write
quality content which can’t be fine
anywhere else then Google will increase
your Ranking automatically.
I love idea you have mentioned.
thank your artical
u also doing a blog “fonezoom” plz visit it
This is a great post, thanks for sharing it with us! You’ve got some very strong ideas!
Matt,
Good job on this article. I did check out http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ and I quite frankly never realized all that you have been telling me until now. This was a powerful blog post that sheds light on so many issues.
I guess what I learned is that if you have a niche or industry or expertise, you have to work real hard at truly being high quality about that topic and associate yourself online with all things pertaining to that niche or expertise. It sounds basic, and maybe people do not like it, but in reality it makes much sense to me now after seeing the links to my site and reading this post.
So I guess if you have many linking to you and they are not in your niche you have to ask them to remove the links or is that okay? In other words, if people link to you and you do not do business with them or know anything about them should you contact them and tell them to take the links to your site down?
I can see how people really will want to be careful about links to their site now and I never thought about that before, but it makes sense.
Again, thanks for all you are doing for all of us!
Thanks,
Linda
Thanks bro, great article :)
You’re right matt, without teamwork and connections we can’t win this awesome business. I made a video on my about page to invite new writers, am new to blogging world and there are lots of things to learn.. Thanks again for the great tips.
We all agree that content is the king in today SEO strategies. But using the content in right way is also a different strategy. Visit Bluebit Systems to know how to use content in your website.
Great Article.I thought Scoopit, Digg, stumbleupon – will also helpful for to promote our content.