4 SEO Tips And Tricks That Are EVERGREEN
Every five minutes there are a new set of SEO best practices and new SEO tricks. Those new SEO tips and tricks almost always get saturated or outright banned.
So how can I sit here and say, “The SEO tips and tricks I’m going to teach you will work indefinitely?”
Is it because I have ultimate SEO guru powers? Possibly, but that’s unlikely.
A technique can only be saturated if people a) know about it and b) put in the work.
Most SEO techniques that work don’t fall into either of those two camps. That’s because, luckily for you, most people are looking for the easy out – the easy SEO tips and tricks that mean they don’t have to do any work.
They want to rank a site with three articles that they’ve simply rewritten from someone else. They want to rank a site by buying backlinks. Or they think that their site is going to rank because they’ve stumbled on some weird SEO trick like having an exact keyword density of 2.34% and writing the keyword backwards in the image’s alt text or something.
Luckily for you, the process of writing SEO content is quite straightforward and most SEO strategy is down not to the SEO itself but in how you write and structure your site.
Let’s get to it.
1. Write Tons of Content
It’s a lot easier to do authority site SEO when you have a thousand articles to work with than it is to get SEO results with a ten page niche website.
The reason is simple: search engine algorithms love internal linking, providing it’s not stupid and overdone.
When you have 1,000 articles on your site, writing a new article and linking to it is easy. You write your new article, and then do a Google search for every time you’ve mentioned the primary keyword on your site before.
By doing this, you can have 20+ internal links with the right keyword anchor text pointing towards your article with no effort whatsoever.
You can’t do this without having content. I wrote back in the very first article on this site that SEO didn’t matter. I’ll clarify now: Get the content first and then worry about SEO after. SEO does matter, but without a base of content to work from, you’re limiting yourself.
2. Group Keywords
Something I learned from building niche sites is that you can write a lot of content about similar information and it won’t harm your site.
Now, if you use a tool like Yoast’s SEO plugin, then you’ll know that you shouldn’t try and rank different pages for the same keyword.
But you’ll want to write about similar topics across your site. You aren’t going to write about completely different topics all the time, after all. So you need to learn about keyword grouping.
Let’s say you have a main page you want to direct people to. If you’re a web designer, then it might be “Web Design In London.”
That’s your main keyword. You can follow all the best on-page SEO practices in order to make the page do well for that keyword. You might even want to put in a lot of secondary keywords.
After you’ve done your research, keep your SEO software open. You’re going to see which secondary keywords you can write other articles around. This is keyword grouping.
So you might have your main article “Web Design in London.”
Then have a second article; “What to look for in a web designer.”
Then a third: “How much does a web designer in London cost?”
All of these are different keywords.
3. It’s ALL About Structure
When most people think about SEO, they think about silly little things like image anchor text and stuff.
Here’s the real truth of the matter: SEO Tips and tricks and hacks are useless when compared to structuring your site correctly.
Think about some of the big SEO ranking factors:
- Time on site
- Bounce Rate
- Relevance (Decided by several factors, but mostly the above)
- Pages viewed per session
- Click-through rate
Those things are affected more by your site structure than anything else.
If you use direct marketing principles and the idea of funnelling people from one place to the next – that is, you structure your site correctly – then you’ll never have to worry about your time on site. Same thing with your bounce rate: your bounce rate will be low if you’re able to direct a person from one page to the next. This is done by having the proper site structure and a basic understanding of pushing people down the funnel.
This approach is much more effective than stuffing SEO keywords and hoping for the best.
4. Build A Community
If you want to dramatically improve your site’s SEO performance, then understand your website is not an island.
In other words, there’s only so much you can do to improve your site’s SEO on your own. It needs backlinks, multiple people visiting it and spending time on your site. Also, there’s only so much you can do before you’ll get penalised by search engines if you do it alone. Things like:
- Building a lot of backlinks
- Spamming social media
- Commenting on thousands of blogs
- Using SEO software
- Writing low quality guest posts for blog networks (those black hat SEO tips, in other words)
All of those things are totally obvious and work against you not just for SEO but for social reasons as well.
If you build a community of 1000 people, then among that community you’ll have a natural activity that surpasses anything you can do alone. If you had 1000 people who all linked your articles to Reddit and Twitter every so often, your site would gain in popularity exponentially.
On the other hand if you tried to spam 1,000 links to Twitter and Reddit endlessly, you’d get banned or be looked at as a spammer.
Building a community around your site can be as easy as, “Please share your thoughts in the comment section” or doing a weekly blog round up with other guys in your niche.
Final Thoughts
I wrote way back that SEO doesn’t matter. Whilst that’s a bit of an exaggeration, most SEO stuff is long term strategy approach stuff that isn’t really what an SEO guru would call SEO anyway.
It’s not about SEO tips and tricks, but about building a strong website – and more importantly – building a website based on direct marketing principles. Principles like:
- Grabbing your reader’s attention with a good headline and lead-in
- Writing content that appeals to a desire
- Providing a strong call to action (Keep them on your site unless you’ve got a better plan)
- Making people feel as though they’re a valued member of your audience that you’re speaking directly to
Now all of those things are effective, noble and good SEO practice. If you build your site based on the above tips and techniques, then not only will it perform well in the search engines, but it’ll also be profitable and provide a great resource for your readers.
Considering that’s literally what the Search engines are trying to establish with their algorithms, it’s all win-win all the way down.