What i have learnt from 8 years of SEO

SEO has become more smarter and complicated nowadays. Gone are the days when you just needed to add several keywords in your blog post, build every kind of links and gain top rankings for your respective web pages. I should say SEO has become more harder nowadays and at the same easier for the master-heads. For a beginner, it might take you a whole lot of time and investments to rank your posts especially if your blog falls in a high competition niche; which shouldn’t make you despair either because you still stand that chance.

So many ranking factors determine your rankings on SERPs nowadays. Previously, Google Page Rank took the most weight but rather got ruled out a few years ago hence, what you need now is trust flow, high Domain Authority score, a high Page Authority coupled with other ranking factors. However, Backlinks are a still huge sign of trust in the SEO world but could cost your blog if built the wrong way. When i first saw websites getting hit by a Google Penguin update, i vowed never to build any links for my blogs but rather gain them naturally. This meant hard work for me and till now, i always had to try and present outstanding information worth sharing to my readers and maybe hope to get links for my blog.

There is nothing much sweeter in the SEO world than gaining authoritative links naturally. This is more like a huge free gift for your hard work but it doesn’t often come the easy way.

At the time of writing this article, Tutorial FAQ has only 23 backlinks of which 20 of those are nofollow BUT i still manage to gather at least 700 unique views (Organic Traffic) for my blog each and every other day. The number seems quite low for now but will definitely keep increasing as i get more backlinks for my blog. I do not have to be worried about any Penguin update either.

So how do some of my blogs survive with almost no backlinks? I have always believed so much in Keyword research. I target low competition keywords for most of my blog posts so that i don’t have to worry about out-competing the big dogs in the industry right away. And besides, my posts get on the first page of search results for the targeted keywords within a short period of time which is quite awesome because i expect them to bring in a certain amount of traffic to my site daily. These same posts eventually begin to rank for other keywords (even high competition keywords with time) which means more targeted traffic for my blogs.

So what am i trying to say? SEO could seem more easier for you than you think if only you get your keyword research game right. Tools link Semrush, Long Tail Pro or Google Adwords Keyword Planner could help you extract a number of low competition long tail keywords for your blog posts.

Still, it is useless to add a lot of keywords in your blog posts. The SEO game has changed and targeting your preferred keyword once in the title is actually enough to get the work done considering your site structure and backlink profile are strong.

For those that want to burst into the scene, Link building is key BUT i suggest you stay away from it if you are less knowledgeable about it. Focusing on writing quality content, proper keyword research, email marketing, social marketing and building an online community should get you off on the right foot.

On-page SEO is king too. Knowing how to optimize your posts for SEO (basic onpage SEO) should also be at your finger tips always.

So what really matters?

It’s high time you thought out of the box and started looking at your blog as a business if at all you are blogging for a living. A business needs customers, requires a lot of consistency and hard work plus marketing to get potential customers. Think of getting readers for your blog from day one through email marketing, social media engagement, guest posting and forum participation.

I have also seen many writing posts mainly to drive traffic to their respective blogs irrespective of the topic they are writing about. It is quite daring to land on a highly searched keyword and not write a piece for it.

The main thing is writing content that you think will provide value to your readers. Focus on building a brand because traffic will eventually come after.

Does adding many keywords in a post still work?

Stuffing your posts with keywords is way old-school. Ever since google added Latent Semantic Indexing to their algo, it has become pretty much easier to target multiple keywords in a post. A post about cheap SEO tools can also rank for inexpensive SEO tools, affordable SEO tools, best SEO tools and so on without these exact keyword phrases targeted in the post content.

Target your keyword once in a post title, write appealing meta descriptions that use them as a call to action and above all, write content that is extremely useful to people. There are billions of web pages on the internet today and millions of people are always out there looking for useful content. If your content is useful and informative, you will definitely gain trust of readers who wont hesitate to click on your web pages the next time they key in other search phrases. These same readers will go ahead and recommended your blog to others and within no time you will start gaining backlinks naturally.

Do not approach SEO aggressively or rather be hungry for it. Just do your keyword research right, be patient and of course love what you are doing. You want to start any successful business on the internet today? Build a brand and the rest will always follow. Building a brand takes a lot of time and efforts but is definitely worth it in the end.

Of course you have other options for increasing your sites traffic but they mainly revolve around investing heavily in marketing, writing quality articles that solve problems or rather popularizing yourself on the internet.

How do you approach your SEO? Do you publish posts and start building links for them immediately or rather give them time to rank? Me i chose to gain links naturally and i can tell it is working out fine for me.