SEO Tips and Tricks

Have you ever wondered how websites get on the first page of Google and at the top of the Google listings no-less within the first 5 spots?

It is amazing how on my down time when just searching the internet for the lack of anything better to do, the little SEO gold mines that are revealed to the watchful eye. The million dollar question people ask is how do I get my website on page one and in the top spots?

Not only have I been asked this a thousand times, but there is a million searches for this question on Google. In this article I will share but a few useful SEO Tips and Tricks that if applied will help to increase (in-time) Visibility - Presence and Relevance.

Note: these 5 steps alone do not guarantee a #1 page Google listing. BUT, they are 5 steps to take to help you on your way.

SEO Tips and Tricks

#1 - Backlinks

Everyone wants to be relevant. How do we get relevance? When others (websites and people) say we are relevant. When checking the scripting code that we put on our websites from Quantcast I came across their top sites. Anyone that is anyone gets their website listed on this search engine. You can tell this by the list found here: https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites

When your (non-relevant) website is linked to by relevant websites, those website (if they are quality) will start to push you up the ranks. It takes time, money and patience to build a natural (organic) back link strategy that will start working for you. It can take 9-12 months of daily hard work to start seeing the results of your efforts. If done correctly, the results last despite the search engine algorithm updates that have cost people millions of dollars, their businesses and livelihood. This little SEO Tip, this little SEO nugget shows you the top 100 sites that you could attempt to get back links from. Looking at the list, we have at least 30 of these websites linking to us. We have more work to do.

SEO Optimization Tips

#2 - Social Sharing

As I mentioned before relevance is everything. You can be very relevant and still have a low page rank and make 6+ figures a year. We had a page rank of 7 and we are down to a PR3 (because of the algorithm updates and some unnatural strategies we have completely obliterated from our tactics sheet), yet our business has increased by almost 300%. I digress. Relevance. Yes, ok back on track. We have been working with social sharing (like buttons, tweet this, linked in etc) since they all came out. We have tested and tested the best place to put these social share icons. What we have found is 1) ADD THEM TO YOUR SITE - I can not scream that loud enough. Why are you not relevant? Because no one is sharing your pages to their social networks which (if they do) says unequivocally and automatically that they thought your content was relevant. The more people that share and engage with your content (web-pages) the more relevant those pages become. 2) the best place to put what we call the "Social Share Bar" is right underneath your main menu bar, floating on the left hand side of your website or at the very bottom of an article. These are the top three spots. In-case you would like to know what a social share bar looks like, look below.

SEO Website Optimization Tips

#3 - Opengraph Tags and Google Rich Snippets

To compliment SEO Tip #2, you must add opengraph tags and Google rich snippets to your website. This does several things. 1) it allows you to control what people share about your particular web page when they hit that "social share button" we mentioned above. You control the image that is shared as well as the message you want to convey about the pages that are being shared. 2) It tells the search engines what type of content makes up your website. This allows for better placement within the search engines for your content when the search engines know exactly the type of content you are displaying on your page.

Here is an example of once you have installed and configured your open graph tags and then someone hits the "facebook share button" of what is being shared. We created the graphic and control the message.

SEO Web Page Tips

#4 - 5 Star Ranks

More and more around the web we are seeing the 5 Star Rank Voting System. This adds a great visual aspect and gets used quite a bit. We have seen how pages with the 5 star vote or similar ranking widget has been indexing better within the search engines then similar pages without. Why? Because again, someone had to click it and that made it relevant to them. The more your page is liked, shared, ranked and commented on, the more relevance that page gets. For example, if you like this page, at the end of the article you can rate this blog entry with a star vote. Below, you can see how a star rating makes the listing stand out more on the Google page search return results.

SEO Backlink Tips

#5 - Directory Listings

This final SEO tip could help you out a lot. Like SEO tip #1, an often unknown back link source are directories that are in your niche. Those directories carry a lot of weight with Google. If you can get listed within one or several, the directories should give you an extra leg up in your rankings.

We have come to the end of our top 5 SEO Tips. I hope you have enjoyed. If you have any questions, or if you need any help implementing any of these SEO Tips and Tricks, please do not hesitate to comment below or contact us. Enjoy!