One of the easiest ways to get new pages on your site to quickly rank well for the targeted search phrase is to have a strong website.
If wikipedia adds a new wiki entry, it will almost automatically hit the front page of Google within a few minutes. The same with a lot of powerful websites. The reason for this is that the main purpose of the search engines is to serve up the most relevant and useful results to the people doing the searching.
It all comes down to trust – when you searched for information on food poisoning, which article would you prefer to read:
- A medical doctor with 30 years of practice, who has treated thousands of food poisoning cases
- A medical researcher who spent the last 10 years researching food poisoning & has developed a remedy for it
- A wholistic nutritionist with 20 years field experience
- etc
I’d probably prefer the medical researcher. The search engines would likely agree with me and serve that too. Why? Most likely, that researcher has published several well researched papers on the subject. A lot of people are probably talking about and linking to those papers (particularly if they’re published on his or the research centre’s website). Everything that the little machines at Google & Bing see is people saying the medical researcher can help people looking for food poisoning related information.
Think about that and apply it to your business. There’s three parts to this strong site…
Well Researched & Written Articles
To start with, you need to know what you’re talking about. There’s no fake it til you make it here. Take your time, research your subject material and write articles that help people.
Link to well researched articles, if appropriate. This will help your readers and the search engines will realise that you’ve taken the time to research and link to strong authority sites. It’s kind of like saying “so Mr Search Engine Spider, I’d like to introduce you to my friend Robert Kiyosaki. Robert, we were just talking about personal finance and your name came up…” If you did that at a conference, imagine how much your authority would rise in the eyes of the person playing the part of Search Engine Spider!
The way you write is important. You need to find your unique style and voice. This will help people identify with you and understand your topic a little better. No one wants to read boring, dry writing. Spice it up a little. Break grammatical rules. Be more conversational in your writing. But keep it highly useful.
People Talking About The Articles
The best articles are helpful ones that people interested in the subject naturally share. You don’t need to even ask. They share it because one of their friends is also interested and would get a lot out of it.
You can help the process by simply asking people to share your articles (feel free to share this one or any of the others on this site!). But make it easy for them to share it the way they want to. Have social buttons for the major networks on each page. If your site is run on wordpress, I recommend the plugin Sexy Bookmarks. No, it’s not as edgy as it sounds. You can see it in action on this site.
Go and share your articles on social media sites. Get it in front of a larger crowd. If you’re proud of your work, share it! Others will thank you for it. There’s so much information being produced every day that it can be tough to get through to the people looking for what you’re writing about. But the persistence is worth it.
Always provide a RSS feed for your sites. Encourage people who find your writing to be useful to subscribe to your feed, whether by email or in, say their Google Feed Reader. Feel free to subscribe to the posts on this site by going to http://feeds.feedburner.com/SEOPerth :)
People Linking To The Articles
You can start the process of building links to every article you write. If your writing is helpful, people will naturally reference your work. The stronger your site is, the higher your individual posts will rank for the terms you’ve targeted them towards. You do target the majority of your articles to search terms, right?
It becomes an endlessly strengthening cycle: Because your posts are ranked high in the search engines, people doing research for their articles reference (and link to) your articles, which strengthens your site, which causes your site to be stronger overall, which in turn makes your posts (both new and old) rank higher, etc.
You’ll need to do a lot of work at the beginning to strengthen your site, but do you think sites like Copyblogger or Problogger need to do much of their own link building to strengthen their site? Not likely. As you saw then, I just gave them gratuitous links simply because I’ve subscribed to them, read them often and know that anyone reading this article will benefit from reading those two sites. They have a track record of highly useful articles and deserve the strong sites they have.
So how will you take this and apply it to your business?
Hi, nice site and article. I’m on the lookout for fellow Aussie SEO professional who are regularly blogging, and you’ve been added to my list.
I like to receive new post notification via email, and have just subscribed to your feedburner feed. You should consider adding a link to the RSS feed in your navigation or sidebar. I didn’t think I was going to be able to subscribe until I found this article. Also check out the plugin for WordPress “Subscribe2”, it allows you to add a subscribe widget to your sidebar which allows visitors to easily sign up to receive new post notifications.
One last thing, a direct link to your blog from you homepage or in your main navigation would make the site a lot more user friendly.