If you’re a blogger and you want to get as many people as possible to read your content, then the chances are that you will have done at least some research on SEO.
In doing this, you will likely have discovered that there are huge amounts of information out there on this subject and a lot of it is contradictory! Knowing where to start can be a massive headache and sometimes it can feel as though you stand no chance of ever getting a complete knowledge.
But here’s the thing: a lot of that information is misguided and it is one of the biggest issues that holds a lot of bloggers back.
What’s more important than consuming all that information is to focus on just the good information – just the accurate information that is relevant to creating a great blog. And when we do that, we realize that actually, it is a lot easier than you probably think.
The Mistake
Mistaken or misguided SEO is all about trying to hack Google. It’s all about trying to trick Google into thinking your site is a top authority, by building specific links and by posting keywords. It’s highly technical because it is based on algorithms and ‘systems’ thinking.
And sometimes this works! But then Google gets wind of whatever new technique is all the rage, it plugs that loophole and the related site gets penalized.
So how about instead focussing on the same thing that Google is focussed on: the user. Stop writing ‘for’ the search engines and write ‘for’ the readers. When you do this, you are doing what Google wants you to do. Google wants to provide useful and entertaining information for its users. And if you get this right, then eventually
Google is going to reward you with future updates.
The Most Important Trick
Write well then and write long, high quality blog posts. If you do this, then you will get people to your site naturally and they will link to your site because they want to share the excellent content they are seeing. Great start!
But at the same time, you also do need to build those links. And the thing we do need to take from SEO strategies is that the best links are the ones that come from the most highly regarding websites.
These sites are invariably the ones that Google trusts – and if you want to see which sites Google trusts you can just take a look at the sites it features in its news section. Other popular sites are those that have a .edu TLD or a .gov. Finally, big brands will also invariably be trusted by Google.
If you can get links from those sites, they will boost the credibility of your site by a huge margin. But if you can’t? Then you need to get links from sites that have links from those sites. In other words: you need to think of this like a game of degrees of separation!
And that really is everything you need to know about getting SEO right!