The Go-To Guide for Successful SEO

What's the use of doing brilliant web craft if nobody can find your work?

In this guide, I will explain what SEO is, how it works, and also share some tips and tricks that SEO experts usually keep to themselves. I will try to keep it so that both beginners & advanced SEOs can benefit from my thoughts & ideas.

SEO Basics

First things first. How does SEO work?

Take a look at authoritative sites/apps today, like Instagram, Bloomberg, dailymotion etc. What do they all have in common? Amongst other things, they all have a bunch of other sites linking to them and there is always a buzz about them on social media.

So the formula is easy.. If you want Google to rank you higher in your industry/niche, it basically all comes down to getting authority to your site.

But how do we get this authority?

When trying to learn about SEO, everywhere you turn you get the same answer: BUILD GREAT CONTENT!

And sure, you can build great content and hope it'll create a buzz, but you can also take concrete & measurable action to speed up the process.

I am talking about getting powerful websites to link to your site.
One way is to create amazing content that brings value to other people in your niche. Create amazing content other blogs and powerful websites might want to refer to, and send a few links to your website.

Is there no other way?

Disclaimer: Be extremely careful! If you don't know what you are doing you might end up getting your website slapped by Google.

With that said, there is a darker path to go.
You could buy powerful domains from domain auctions, build related content on these sites, and create links from there to your own website.

It is, however, rather time-consuming to identify and scan websites for high authority. Also, the majority of sites sold on auctions are spammy domains that would do more harm than good. But if you dig deep enough, you can undeniably find powerful websites. There are also great tools out there that can make this process easier.

Ah, I think I get it!

Now you might wonder, Is it enough to just send high authority links to your site?

The thing is, if you just send authority links to your site, you are not mimicking the successful sites out there.

All successful websites have one thing in common: there is always a buzz about them in social media.

So in Google's eyes, it makes no sense if you only get powerful links to your site and there is no activity about your site in social media. No shares, no likes etc. So in order to make the strategy trustworthy, the dots need to be connected.

How do I get social signals?

One way is to create content that brings value to your visitors. Another way is to buy social signals online. It all depends on what goals you have with your site and what strategy you want to embody. Any method works if your only goal is to create trustworthiness in Google's eyes. And if you are buying domains, don't forget to create social accounts for them (Facebook, Google+ and Youtube is enough) and send social signals to those sites as well.

Optimizing your website for SEO

I can't stress enough the importance of making sure your on-page SEO is on point.

First of all, make sure your website is readable by the crawlers or your content simply does not exist. Also, make sure you update the website regularly. You can't have a two-year-old post as your latest post and expect good rankings.

Another thing to keep in mind is to make sure your posts link back to the page you want the strongest authority, most likely this is your homepage. This is important because if someone links to one of your posts, you want to make sure the "link juice" does not go to waste on that single post. You want to forward the authority to your page of interest.

And as much as you can stay, away from extremely large images and unnecessary plugins that massively slow down the load time of your website. Because if the site takes too long to load, you are basically being nonchalant to your visitors and completely neglecting the user experience. You can test your website performance with Google's PageSpeed Insights.

Psychology behind rankings

Basically what is all comes down to is authority. The stepping stones are:

• Have optimized on-page SEO
• Make sure you get enough social signals
• Keyword research using Google's adwords key planner
• Identifying, scanning and buying authoritative domains (alternatively buying PR links)
• Write related content, send authority links to your site
• Build citations for keyword diversity (only have your brand keyword or website URL as anchor text on these)

Keeping up to date

Subscribe to blogs like Google webmaster blog, Moz, Search engine land and make sure you follow me on twitter & facebook for the latest SEO updates & ideas.

I am not going to lie, and this might discourage you but it takes a lot of time and energy to become a successful SEO. However, it's worth the rewards. And feel free to reach out to me if there is anything you are wondering. Good luck!