The beautiful part about search engine optimization is that the core strategies never change, those being producing high-quality content and generating high-quality links.
There are tons of ways to produce low-quality content and generate low-quality links, but Google is getting better and better at detecting that garbage. Your safest investment for SEO in 2015 is your time.
It really comes down to the amount of time you (or your SEO agency) puts into your SEO campaign. The more time you put into your content and link “outreach” efforts, the better your rankings will be. Simple as that! Stop spending time on these quick ranking solutions! They won’t last!
High-Quality Content
What is high-quality content? The best content comes from the expert themselves. Usually the person responsible for the results of your service or product. If you’re working for a Dentist office, then the dentist would write the highest quality content.
If you manufacture widgets, the inventor of the widget would write the highest quality content. These people have the closest relationship with the product or service and typically know the most about it over anyone else in your company.
There isn’t enough time in the day
Often the professional or inventor is too busy to take time to write a few hundred-word blog post or write a new page on the website, this is definitely understandable. Almost every employee inside the company is an expert in their specific part of the business, I guarantee they have something of value they could contribute to the website.
Now maybe everyone in the company is just too darn busy for writing content on the website. Happens all the time. At this point, many people turn to outsource their content writing service, which can be an awesome experience or a huge failure. Here’s what to look out for:
- Is the company or person writing your content using perfect grammar and punctuation?
- Do they have a normal sentence structure? Or does it sound like English is their second language?
- Are they able to do research on a topic and present coherent and accurate descriptions on that topic?
- Are they writing content that you yourself would find interesting?
- Are they using SEO best practices? (ie. sub-headings, usage of bold and italics, lists, images, etc.)
- If they are using images, do they have the copyright for those images? (Worst thing ever is receiving a Getty Image violation letter… get ready for fork out $1,000 bucks!)
- Do they represent your brand in the way you want?
Google loves high-quality content. Give them a bunch of it and they’ll reward you accordingly.
Link Outreach (instead of old school link building)
SEO’s used to be all about link building… used to be all about link building. There’s a huge difference between link building and what we like to call link outreach. Link building was something that was often done incorrectly, causing tons and tons of spammy links to be created pointing back to your website. Google. Hates. That. Don’t do it! Link building is dead, and if you or your SEO agency is still doing it… tell them to stop yesterday!
Link outreach explained
Link outreach is a completely different ball game. The process for a successful link outreach campaign can be a huge time investment for what may appear like a small reward (1 “measly” link, vs link building and creating thousands of links). But I promise it is time well spent! One high-quality link is worth, say, 1-2 thousand of those old school crappy links that everyone used to get. There are numerous ways of doing link outreach, some more effective than others.
My preferred method for doing outreach
Typically one of the best ways to do link outreach is to start by creating some very high-quality content, the kind of content someone can learn from, engage with, laugh at, or cry about. The kind of content they’re going to want to share with their friends. After you have the content figured out (sometimes easier said than done), now comes the outreach. Using something as simple as a Google search, start looking around for people that may be interested in the same topic.
After you’ve found a couple of people, find some piece of contact info (ie. Email or Social Media) and send them a quick note saying something like, “Hello Frank, I see you’re interested in the research surrounding Presbyopia. We recently wrote about the same topic and thought you might find it interesting.”
Communication is king
You would obviously tailor the email to your specific niche, and maybe make it a little more human-sounding so that it doesn’t sound like you’re just copying and pasting the same email over and over again to as many people as you can. The more it can feel like a normal interaction, the better. Not everyone will respond, but the ones who do and decide to share or reference your content will be super valuable links.
In Summary
It really is this simple: content and links. The only hard part about it is finding the time to do it. Once you commit to the time it will take to do SEO correctly, no one will outrank you in Google, Yahoo, Bing, or even that crazy DuckDuckGo. Dare you to prove me different.
Have your take in the comments below.