Ranking websites requires lots of complex knowledge and link building skills.
Or does it…?
If you’re a blogger or a small business owner who can’t afford professional SEO services or spend hours on SEO, this is what you need:
Content and connections.
Here’s your two step audit for moving your site forward:
Only Big Sites Get Natural Links
Sites with exceptional content get links and recognition. You don’t need tons of traffic already to get the ball rolling you just need the right attention.
As I said in a recent post, I could have this exact same post published on a more popular site and it would get more Tweets, links, etc. However, I can still get a lot of that attention by getting this post in-front of the right people.
What happens next? You keep doing this ^ over and over. Then you end up with more day-to-day traffic and all that exceptional content gets links without as much outreach.
I need to get a little harsh now…
Take a good long look at your content. Is it really good? Is it the best?
I don’t want to frustrate anyone here, but I think it’s funny when I see someone on a forum complaining because they got hit with Panda or don’t get natural links and they have great content.
Then I find out they buy their articles for $5 a piece *___*
If you have a webpage you’re trying to rank #1 in Google, look at what the top 10 results are. REALLY look at them. Is your page the best and most useful result? If not, change that and be positive you have the best content.
If your webpage is truly much more helpful to searchers than all the others it will make ranking much easier. Your page will have better on-page analytics like time on site and bounce rate. Not to mention, other webmasters constantly go to Google and pick a top result when they need a page to link to and yours might be an easy choice. There ya go, natural links.
Growing a site only gets easier in time, but it requires a strong backbone of killer content.
Great Content Isn’t Enough
As I stated earlier, great content will eventually get recognized, but it doesn’t make sense to sit back and wait. If you have an awesome website that people will like, share it with them.
Once again, the content is the critical part here, but the second part is the connections.
Who do you know?
Getting bloggers and other webmasters to share your content is a shot in the dark without any initial contact. If you don’t already, put aside some of your time to comment on other blogs and Tweet other people’s work. Maybe write a guest post or give some other contribution.
Most people reciprocate nice deeds.
To summarize, here’s the two step audit:
1) Is my content awesome?
Is it better than the top results for its keyword? Can I make it better?
2) Who do I know?
Do I have industry friends to share my content? Who should I know?
With great content and connections, all you need is a basic understanding of SEO to become a real contender in the SERPs. And heck, you can learn the basics of SEO for free right now with my SEO course 🙂
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