The Art of Driving Targeted Traffic To Your Website (SEO)

The best part?

Everything here applies to SEO in 2019.

(In other words: you don’t need to worry about reading out of date stuff)

So without further ado, let’s get started

Why Is SEO Important?

In short: search is a BIG source of traffic.

you know that Search engine algorithms are super complicated.

 It’s not easy, especially since Google’s search engine uses more than 200 ranking factors. And, Google isn’t going to just tell us how they rank sites.

What you’re reading now is one of the biggest data-driven in search optimization

In fact, here’s a breakdown of where most website traffic originates:

As you can see, nearly 60% of all traffic on the web starts with a Google search. And if you add together traffic from other popular search engines (like Bing, Yahoo, and YouTube), 70.6% of all traffic originates from a search engine.

Let’s illustrate the importance of SEO with an example…

Let’s say that you run a party supply company. According to Google, 110,000 people search for “party supplies” every single month.

Considering that first result in Google gets around 20% of all clicks, that’s 22,000 visitors to your website each month if you show up at the top.

But let’s quantify that – how much are those visitors worth?

The average advertiser for that search phrase spends about 1 dollar per click. Which means that the web traffic of 22,000 visitors is worth roughly $22,000 a month.

nd that’s just for that search phrase. If your site is SEO-friendly, then you can rank for hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of different keywords.

In other industries, like real estate or insurance, the value of search engine traffic is significantly higher.

For example, advertisers are paying over $45 per click on the search phrase “auto insurance price quotes.”

Here's what you'll find in this SEO guide

Ever heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? It's a theory of psychology that prioritizes the most fundamental human needs (like air, water, and physical safety) over more advanced needs (like esteem and social belonging). The theory is that you can't achieve the needs at the top without ensuring the more fundamental needs are met first. Love doesn't matter if you don't have food.

Our founder, Rand Fishkin, made a similar pyramid to explain the way folks should go about SEO, and we've affectionately dubbed it "Mozlow's hierarchy of SEO needs."

Here's what it looks like:

Is SEO difficult?

Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others index websites to create an order based on various ranking algorithms. Can we identify these algorithms? Yes and no.

Google uses more than 200 ranking factors. Though we know many of them: quality content, backlinks, or technical things such as site speed, there are many of them kept as a secret.

Of course, you don’t need to know all the factors to rank with your website. To understand what SEO is all about, imagine a bowl of soup. There are three important aspects:

1. The bowl represents the technical stuff behind the website (technical and on-page SEO) – without proper bowl, the soup would spill all over the table.
2. The soup represents the content of your website – it is the most important part. Bad content = no rankings, it is that simple.
3. The seasoning represents the quality backlinks increasing the authority of your website – the last ingredient to make your SEO soup perfect.

Basic terms vocabulary

• On-page vs. off-page SEO
• White hat vs. black hat vs. grey hat SEO

On-page vs. off-page SEO

Doing On-page (on-site) SEO means optimizing your website to affect the organic search results. It’s everything you can do on the website – from content optimization through technical aspects:

• meta tags
• headings
• URL structure
• images optimization
• content
• structured data
• website size and speed

… and many others. We deal with them in the 3rd chapter.

Off-page (off-site) SEO covers all activities you can do to improve the website SEO authority through getting backlinks from other websites. There are many ways to get them:

• email outreach
• guest blogging
• submissions
• social media efforts
• cooperation with influencers
• writing valuable content, so people would love to link to your website

White hat vs. black hat vs. grey hat SEO

Black hats vs. white hats have their origin in Western movies. It’s like bad guys vs. good guys. But don’t take these words too seriously. Opinions on both SEO approaches tend to differ.

How search engines work

Search engines consist of three main ingredients:

1. Crawling
2. Indexing
3. Picking the results

The process goes like this:

Crawling

Crawling or spidering means scanning the website, its sections, content, keywords, headings, hyperlinks, images by thousands of small bots. Any data that can be found on the website is crawled.

Crawlers detect all hypertext links on a website that point to other websites.Then they parse those pages for new links over and over again. Bots crawl the whole internet regularly to update the data.

Indexing

Once the website is crawled, the indexing takes place. Imagine the index as a gigantic catalog or a library full of websites from all over the world. It usually takes some time for a website to be indexed. From our experience, it’s from 1 to 10 days.

Share Triggers That Make Blog Posts Go Viral

hare triggers are what make the difference between blog posts that fizzle out quickly and blog posts that travel the web for months on end, generating social interaction, traffic, and backlinks.

1. Write Listicles

Listicles are one of the most powerful share triggers in the blogosphere.

The word listicle is a combination of ‘list’ and ‘article’ - a listicle is simply an article written as a list.

Critics don’t like listicles – they regard them as a new phenomenon that’s dumbing down the way we read and write.

But the listicle has a long and venerable tradition – remember the 10 Commandments?

And in any case, listicles are hugely popular. BuzzFeed built its business almost entirely on listicles and was getting about 70 million US readers a month in 2017.

Noah Kagan analyzed 100 million articles and found that list posts came only second to Infographics as the most shared content on the web:

Why so popular?

Listicles appeal to the way the brain processes and organizes information.

We have a natural human tendency to divide the world up into categories. And that’s exactly what listicles do.

They place small bites of information into a structure that can be easily digested.

With the explosive growth of the Internet, we’re now flooded with information like never before. Most people simply feel overwhelmed.

One way we deal with this overload is through inspectional reading. That’s where you scan an article before making a commitment to read it.

Listicles are ideal for inspectional readers – you can quickly see exactly what you’re going to get. And that allows you to make a quick decision whether to commit to reading the whole thing.

2. Ask For Shares

You may think it’s cheeky or even rude to ask for shares.

But as the old saying goes, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get”.

Or, as the apostle James said: “Ye have not because ye ask not” (James 4:2).

It’s fine to ask for shares if you think you’ve written a great article.

When I send my latest blog post out to my email list, I always ask my readers to share it if they found it useful.

You can also ask people to share at the end of your article.

3. Make It Easy To Share

This is the most obvious of all share triggers - make it easy to share.

Here are three things you can do to make your blog posts easier to share:

4. Get Influencers Involved

If you implement only one of the share triggers in this article, this is the one.

Influencers have a compounding effect on the number of shares your article gets.

So, how do you get Influencers involved?

Well, you can reach out to them.

But before making your move spend a few days or even a few weeks commenting on their posts and sharing their content. That way you’ll be getting on their radar.

You’ll also be invoking the reciprocity principle (see Point #8).

But even more effective is getting Influencers involved in the creation of your blog post.

What do I mean by that?

Influencer roundup posts are a perfect example.

But there are two other ways to get Influencers involved

Infographic for SEO

Infographics are amazing!

Besides being one of the best ways to explain a complicated topic with ease, they make information come alive.

Maybe that’s why “infographics are ‘liked’ and shared on social media 3x more than any other type of content.”

And the concept of relaying information through visuals is nothing new.

If you think about it, cave paintings and hieroglyphics dating back to 30,000 BC accomplished the same thing.

They were far less sophisticated but demonstrate just how hard-wired we are when it comes to visual information.

So it’s easy to see why infographics have become so ingrained in content marketing.

And like with any piece of content you create, you’ll want it to be SEO friendly.

But here’s the thing.

Doing SEO for an infographic demands a slightly different approach than the one you would use for a conventional blog post.

In this post, I explain the most vital components of infographic SEO to ensure yours gets proper visibility in the SERPs.

The biggest hurdle

Let me start by saying infographics are technically just images.

They are typically saved in image formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc.

Of course, they’re much more robust and contain far more information than a regular image, but that’s how Google views them.

This is important to know because Google can’t “read” images like it can text-based content such as a blog post.

Fortunately, there are several other elements that you can optimize.

Start with keyword research

You won’t be able to take advantage of keywords in the actual body of an infographic, but there are a few areas where you can insert keywords.

That’s why you’ll still want to do some keyword research to identify a primary keyword phrase as well as a couple of secondary phrases to target.

Let’s say I was planning on creating an infographic about productivity hacks.

A quick search on the Google Keyword Planner shows me that “productivity hacks” is low competition, which is good.

backlink in SEO

Backlinks are external links to your website. They show the transition from one site to another or from one page to another. They help to index your website's pages correctly. Backlinks are an essential part of SEOprocess. They help search bots to crawl your site and rank it correctly to its content.

Why are backlinks important?

Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a "vote of confidence" from one site to another.

In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. If many sites link to the same webpage or website, search engines can infer that content is worth linking to, and therefore also worth surfacing on a SERP. So, earning these backlinks can have a positive effect on a site's ranking position or search visibility.

Earning and giving backlinks

Earning backlinks is an essential component of off-site SEO. The process of obtaining these links is known as link earning or link building.

Some backlinks are inherently more valuable than others. Followed backlinks from trustworthy, popular, high-authority sites are considered the most desirable backlinks to earn, while backlinks from low-authority, potentially spammy sites are typically at the other end of the spectrum. Whether or not a link is followed (i.e. whether a site owner specifically instructs search engines to pass, or not pass, link equity) is certainly relevant, but don't entirely discount the value of nofollow links. Even just being mentioned on high-quality websites can give your brand a boost.

Just as some backlinks you earn are more valuable than others, links you create to other sites also differ in value. When linking out to an external site, the choices you make regarding the page from which you link the anchor text you use, whether you choose to follow or nofollow the link, and any other meta tags associated with the linking page can have a heavy impact on the value you confer.

How to Build Links and Traffic from Link Roundups

hink about all of the hard work you put into creating your content. Don’t let all of that hard work go to waste.

Rather than just sitting back and hoping that it drives traffic to your website, you can use your best content to build backlinks via link roundups.

Link roundups need to be part of your overall link building strategy. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this tactic, I’ll explain why this will be so beneficial for your brand.

Let’s start with the basics. What’s a link roundup?

Simply put, these are weekly, daily, or monthly curated lists of the best content in a particular industry. The reason why this is a dream for anyone building links is because the sole purpose of these pages it to link out to other websites. This means those sites are more than willing to share links.

Here’s an example of what a link roundup looks like from Big Apple Media

Find link roundups

Now that you have content that’s worthy of being shared, it’s time to find websites in your niche that post link roundups.

This is going to to take a bit of manual effort on your end, so it’s important that you find a way to stay organized. I suggest using a spreadsheet to keep track of everything.

Pitch your content

Once you have your list of websites that have active link roundups, it’s time for you to contact them and pitch your content.

It’s crucial that you document all of the communication to stay organized. The last thing you want to do is send duplicate messages to the same site or forget to reach out to someone altogether.

The best way to make sure your pitch is heard is by finding the appropriate contact information for the site. Here’s one called Robb Digital Marketing that we found earlier with our initial Google search.

Link Bait

What Is Link Bait?

Link Bait (also called “linkbait”) is the process of creating content designed to attract backlinks. Common types of Link Bait content include controversial content, data, guides and newsworthy pieces.

Why Does Link Bait work?

Link Bait works because it’s designed to to do ONE thing: build backlinks.

I’ll explain:

The vast majority of content attracts virtually zero links.

(Yup, that includes “high quality content”).

I’ll explain:

What makes a good piece of “linkbait”?

If you’ve read the book “Contagious” by Jonah Berger, you may be familiar with the concept of “share triggers”

These same principles also lead people to link to content.

So, according to the book, people tend to share/link to things that:

1. Help make them look good (or help back up their own point/narrative);
2. Make them feel some kind of emotion (e.g. anger, awe, happiness/laughter, etc.);
3. Attach themselves to “top of mind” stories and current events (this is how “newsjacking” works);
4. Offer practical value/utility (e.g. something genuinely useful, something that serves as a good reference on a particular topic, like a study);
5. Have already been shared/linked to by many others (yes…people generally follow the crowd).

Now I’d like to hear from you:

What do you think of this SEO?

Have you tried any of SEO techniques before? What results did you get and how long did it take to see them?

Maybe you have a question about The that topic?

Either way, let me know by leaving a comment below right now.