Does Google count your inbound links, your social shares, or your use of keywords? No, it hasn’t done this since it installed the Google Hummingbird update. Nowadays Google uses big data gathered from the use of its search engine, from Google Chrome users, YouTube, Google AdSense, and Google Ads to determine which websites are the most popular.
Your SEO campaign needs to focus around 5 percent of its effort on on-page SEO (the technical stuff) and 95 percent on making each page as popular as possible. Here is how you make your pages as popular as possible.
Making just a single page popular enough to rank highly on Google (consistently) is a lot of hard work. This article will concentrate on how you make a single page rank up the search engine results so that you may dominate the web. Once you have the fires burning for one page, you can start work on elevating your other most important pages too.
You have to ask yourself, “What am I going to do to make this page popular?” Ask yourself, “What am I going to do today, tomorrow, and every week for the foreseeable future to keep this page as popular as I can?”
Dominating with SEO is not just about lighting a fire. It is about keeping that fire blazing for as long as you can, which is why you need a successful SEO campaign.
This article is way too short to go into detail on the many ways you can stimulate social media interest. The fact is that even something as small as daily Twitter posts may be enough to keep the fires of your website's popularity burning. Still, the more you do, the more you get out of it.
Are there forums and niche websites where your target audience congregates? Some examples are:
Identify relevant niche sites and use them to your advantage.
If you only use one Google product, and nobody would blame you for using none, then the Google Search Console is the most important. It is the one that tells you if you have web page errors that are making it difficult for Google to crawl or index your pages.
None of the tips in this article are useful if search engines cannot read your website.
People who are passionate about ranking up their website through the search engine results should have guest posts as part of their link building strategy. Google doesn't award points for posting from high authority websites. It also does not penalize guest posts from new and unpopular websites (those days have gone).
What you have to ask yourself is, “Why would I bother guest posting and linking from an unpopular or poor quality website?” After all, it is not likely to send you much traffic and it is unlikely to rank up itself and become popular. Its unpopularity/poor-quality will probably result in it being shut down in a few months or years.
Big brands and blue-chip companies can hire people to sit there all day promoting their web pages and making them more popular. Even if you are a moderate spender, you cannot rely on paid methods to prop up your search engine optimization campaign forever. That is why you need to use free methods to promote your website as well as paid methods.
Free methods include:
How you conduct this side of your business is up to you, but many companies form tight allegiances with other businesses in a way that helps them promote their websites. There are building supplies companies that partner up with employee-liability insurance companies, and there are catering companies that partner up with all sorts from schools to prisons.
Cross promoting each other’s websites in such cases is one of the perks.
Again, Google, Bing and other search engines are not rewarding PPC advertisers with an extra SEO benefit, but SEO benefits do come as a side effect (a byproduct).
For example, your PPC ads may be the only way that you can target and speak directly to your core consumer, and such exposure may turn your ad clickers into dedicated fans of your website. At that point, your new fans will share your content on social media, will recommend you to friends, and so forth.
All these make your website more popular and your search engine ranking status rises.
Take the example of little Joe Nobody who creates a website with very few viewers but comes up with a bit of technical ingenuity that fixes a problem in a PC game that has gone unpatched for years.
He posts it on his website, and suddenly, the programmer and gaming community are linking to his page from forums, Q&A sites, games cheat sites, and so forth. Fellow bloggers start begging for reciprocal links.
All of this wasn't part of Joe’s SEO campaign plan, but this new-found interest powers his page to the top of the Google search engine results, and the rest of his website is elevated through somewhat of a halo effect.
If you are dedicated to your SEO campaign and you keep stoking the fire over months and even years, then it does become easier because your viewers/customers/supporters start to do the work for you.
They start sharing links to your website on their blogs, they start mentioning you in forums, and they share your content on social media. Will your effort pay off? Yes! Even the worst content can be shunted to the top of the search engine results if the webmaster is dedicated enough to making it popular.
SEO and content marketing rules change all the time, which is why there are so many contradicting statements and articles online. If you want to keep your finger on the pulse of all SEO matters, marketing matters, and social media matters, then keep up with our SEO guide blog posts.
