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How to Get Rankings FAST!! (My SEO Blueprint) (20)

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I'm new to the forum and have gotten a lot of value from many members so I wanted to give back by offering some of my "SEO secrets". I've been doing SEO for the past 5 years and managed the SEO department for an internet marketing agency up until a few months when I quit to pursue affiliate marketing full-time. Over the years of talking with other SEO experts and testing myself I've developed my own "blueprint" to get rankings fast. I'm just going to be focusing on "on-page" SEO since link building is who another animal. While you may have heard of some of these tips I guarantee you haven't heard of all of them...

Code/Structure
Make sure your website uses HTML 5 semantic elements properly (<header>, <article>, <footer>, and other relevant elements)
Make sure your website uses schema.org markup.
Add rel=author (aka Google Authorship) to the webpage.
Make sure it loads FAST. (aim for 1 second, 2 seconds max)
Make sure it is a simple as possible (no excessive links, images, or unnecessary pages)

Optimization
Use target keyword in title tag at the very beginning
Write a meta description that has the target keyword, unique selling points, and a call to action. It's not a ranking factor but it still has a huge influence on your CTR (just like any ad copy).
Use target keyword in the <h1> tag

Content
Write or have someone else write ~1000+ words of content (the more the better) but don't publish it yet! Make sure to use the exact keyword phrase around once every 100-150 words. Use variations of the keyword as well. (ie. if targeting "discount laptops" then use "online discount laptops", "discounted laptops", "laptops at a discount", etc)
IMPORTANT: Publish the first 100-150 words of content to the page and continue to add 100-150 words every 3 days until the all the content is on the page. This triggers Google's "freshness" factor which inflates your rankings.

The thought behind it
Google has been pushing webmasters to use the latest advancements in search (authorship, schema.org, html, etc). The approach above makes sure you have the latest markup languages in place which many people believe might be a ranking factor (correlation studies suggest so). Having a fast webpage improves user experience and is also a ranking factor. Having a well written meta description + authorship/schema markup can drastically increase your CTR since your listing will stand out. Google uses click-through data as a ranking factor and a high CTR can influence your rankings. Slowly seeding content every few days will keep the crawlers coming back to your website and trigger the freshness factor which boosts rankings. It's difficult to know which specific factors have the most impact on rankings but I've found that the combination of all these factors gets you pretty awesome results.

Enjoy!

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Hey man,

nice to see somebody who seems to be into SEO. Though I must admit I disagree with some of your statements, if you're up for a discussion, shoot me your view on those:

Make sure it loads FAST. If possible no external CSS or JS calls. (mine usually load around 0.5 seconds)
Unless you're excluding stylesheet .css files which are hosted on your own server and called from the html, I disagree. Basically, do you recommend to put all css stylings into the main html file? Loading times are important, but a 0.5 seconds loading time is pretty tough to achieve if you have a 'real' site - it also depends on the connection/location your visitors come from. From my experience, loading time in SEO is important, but not nearly as crucial as in paid.

Make sure it is a simple as possible (no excessive links or pages)
Content is king - always was and always will be. By 'keeping your site simple' you loss a shitload of content possibilities along with a lot of interlinking power which you need content (therefore pages) for. I agree not to have hundreds of links in your main navigation bar, but hundreds of pages in a sub section and well structured will never hurt if they're unique.

Use target keyword in title tag as the very beginning
I strongly disagree. Doesn't read too well in most of the cases, looks unnatural. This isn't crucial for ranking at all. Go through competitive SERPs and you'll find the majority of sites does not have the keyword as the first word in their title. While it can be good to have it in the title, it should read naturally. Build sites for humans, not for crawlers.

Use target keyword as the <h1> tag
I never used a keyword as H1 tag alone. It's unnatural. Again, think what's more natural. Given you have a site about payday loans in New York, your H1 would be 'Payday Loans in New York'. I would go for 'Useful tips for Payday Loans in New York' or something similar that still includes your KW, but isn't only the 'KW'.

Content
There are much better ways than drip 150-200 words of content into a page. Set up a solid article of 600+ words. Your aim for 1k words is perfectly fine. But for 'freshness' factor, it's much better to hire someone and get up a blog section, even if it's just interlinked by 1 link that's site wide placed. You can generate new content as well by adding comments to your article, having a dynamic widget showing your most recent content or other techniques. Freshness of content isn't defined by a single page, it's defined by the whole site activity. Dripping a new blog post every day or two has more more influence than updating existing pages with a 150 words.

In your 'exact keyword phrase' example, there's no need to include your exact match keyword every 100 words. If your article is on topic, you'll include it often enough. Again, create content for visitors, not for crawlers. With that being said, this is a factor opinions differ on heavily, especially since I personally have had sites ranking for keywords not even including the exact match but being well interlinked and having a lot of related keywords on the page.

Google uses click-through data as a ranking factor and a high CTR can influence your rankings.
In theory, yes. In real world, no. Again, browse the most competitive niches and check if all sites use analytics / webmaster tools. Enough sites do not. Bounce rate CAN have influence on your rankings, but you'll be able to rank without analytics too. In fact, I'd prefer not to use analytics since you're giving them even more data then they already have. I got sites ranking for 2+ years without any drops not using GA but clicky. The statement about google using CTR as a ranking factor is likely to be true, but there's no proof.

All in all you got a couple of points covered, but are missing a lot. Social activity, backlinks, interlinking are just some to name a few. To describe this as a blueprint is kinda ambitious in my opinion, since you lack a huge amount of topics.

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Great posts from both of you - good to see some discussion of SEO on STM!

You've reminded me of one minor technical tip on the speed improvement front: consider using a CMS (Content Management System) which can spit out static HTML pages. I've heard good things about Jekyll, and a friend of mine uses the ancient Movable Type to great effect.

Every time I've tested, static HTML has kicked the living shit out of any content management system in terms of time to page render. And I'm good at setting up caching for dynamic CMSes.

( Plus, the scalability is unbeatable. Nginx serving an entirely static site can cheerfully serve a million pages a month off a 512Mb VPS. )

This is an approach I've been using for one of my film sites, and it works very well. Don't know about the SEO effects yet, but the user experience of having a site that loads in .2 sec on a good day is pretty significant on its own.

Incidentally, I'd also strongly agree about using rel=author. It can be a pretty significant CTR boost on its own, I've found.

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How do you guys approach rel=author on affiliate sites?

Do you setup fake G+ profiles and seed them to appear authentic?

As much as I'd love to piggyback my blog influence, doing so on the sites that I actually build would be a nuclear scale catastrophe. So I'm a fan of lots of pen names. Is that the best setup?

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If you have a lot of sites in the same niche, you can use one author for several sites. There's nothing wrong with 1 profile per site, though it's a bit more work to manage and maintain everything. Best bet would be to hire a VA to do this all for around 400-500$ / month (yes, you can get them for $250 too, but trust me, the 200$ extra are worth it).

Another option, depending on your portfolio of sites, is to use several G+ profiles for specific posts / sections only making it look like the persons are posting on several projects. This looks legit to both, the profile and the sites, since the profiles look like being an 'expert' in the niche while the sites have user generated content put on.

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I got round this by hiring a good content writer and asking if it was ok if the content was linked to their G+ profile.

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This is one of the correlation vs causation issues for me. Personally I don't think it's critical but I have noticed when I internalize CSS/JS calls that I tend to rank pretty well. It could be because it improves site speed since fewer files need to be loaded or it could just be a correlation from my observations. As mentioned in the bottom of my post, there is no way to know for sure which of these specific factors are helping the most. However, Google (Matt Cutts) has stated that pageload speed is a ranking factor.

I probably should've clarified "excessive" but essentially you should only have important pages that are quality and are targeting a keyword. For example if you have a Wordpress site you wouldn't want to have many too many links tag/archive/paginated pages. The goal here is to try and only have links to your most important pages. If you look into the original PageRank patent/algorithm, it divides pagerank by the # of links on a page, multiplies that number by an unknown "buffer" coefficient, and then adds that value to the linked to page. Basically you don't want to have a bunch of unnecessary pages absorbing pagerank that could be going to your target pages.

Just type a competitive keyword like "las vegas hotels" and you'll see why i recommend this. Google uses 100's of factors in it's algorithm so it's diffcult to know the exact impact of each variable, however i've found having the keyword at the beginning of the title tag improves your rankings more often than not. Many sites don't do this and can rank just fine but again, correlation vs causation. With so many variables who's to say that if they added the keyword to the beginning of the title tag they wouldn't get a rank improvement? I do agree that it should look natural to improve your CTR. If I'm targetting "laptop reviews" my title tag might be "Laptop Reviews - Everything You Need to Know Before Buying".

Whether or note the h1 tag is even a ranking factor is still debated but I like to have it in there because it can't hurt. Personally I don't think Google is even using h1 tags anymore since their ability to understand content is so advanced. Of all the suggestions I provided I would say this one probably has the most wiggle room. At the very least include the keyword in the H1 but if possible place it at the beginning.

The freshness update that was released in late november of 2011 mainly looked at fresh on a page level. Meaning that the impact of fresh content will only affect the page that receives the content. The patent shows that there is a lot of math involved but basically the more frequently a page is changing and the larger the change, the larger the rank increase. Just because you add fresh content like a new blog post doesn't mean that your homepage/other pages are going to increase in rankings. I definitely agree the adding comments are a great way to get a freshness boost since it's a scalable way to continuously add content but I disagree that dripping a new blog post will affect the freshness of other pages on the website. This is mainly because the patent google has on freshness specifically discusses the impact on a page by page level.

As for keyword usage, your are absolutely correct. There is no perfect keyword density to improve rankings but many people new to SEO get confused if you say "use it naturally" so i like to provide a general guideline. I would argue that including the keyword at least once is extremely important. Sure you can rank well if you have a shit ton of links going to the page and other social signals, but having the keyword only helps. I've never seen a case when including the keyword to the content didn't increase/maintain rankings. Basically it's VERY unlikely that you will lose rankings if you include the target keyword in the copy. You can do this and still create quality content for visitors that will attract social shares, links, etc.

I highly disagree here. Google has patents indicating they are using usage data (CTR of a website in SERPS, % of people bouncing back, etc) as a ranking factor. Whether or not you have webmaster tools/analytics installed is irrelevant. Google can tell if a user clicks on a listing and hits the back button since they sent the visitor and the visitor returned from the same page. Also, Google knows if many users go to your webpage from Google and don't return.This is what's referred to as the "long click" and can positively influence rankings since the searcher likely found the page helpful/relevant to the query.

I agree, like I said in the intro paragraph this is an on-page blueprint. Getting social activity, backlinks, etc would be a whole another guide. I just wanted to share a few factors that have greatly helped me to rank sites but are not widely known in the SEO community.

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You're paying too much attention to patents. Patents are one thing, they're not ment to give out information on how to rank. Putting a CSS stylesheet into your code is about the worst thing you can do, big sites easily have hundreds of lines of CSS stylesheets. You want to put that all in the html? Again, check the sources in competitive niches.

You're listening too much to what Matt Cutts says. You're referring to patents from 2011. In my opinion, your approach is just wrong in here. What google tells and what they actually use to determine rankings is a whole different story. Talking about bounce rate and CTRs, those can be a factor. We don't know in how far they can get this data for users without Google Chrome, saying it's irrelevant if you got analytics installed or not is just plain wrong.

Food for thought: think about your 'important pages' theory. Google rewards content since ages. A client of mine has put 60 articles in an interlinked section only on a money site and increased his rankings by 40 spots over 2 weeks with no other link building. Could be coincidence, but the point I'm referring to is a different story: the point of providing 'valuable' SERPs is to provide the user with information. A lot of useful information. You won't be able to achieve this by only important pages. The thing is to look natural. Do natural sites link to only one page? Normally not. They have lots of related outbound links.

Again, you pay too much attention to what Google officially releases. SEO isn't a 'know' game. It's a test game. Basically what all SEOs are doing is guessing. The one guessing better (and testing more), will succeed. Taking everything Google releases for granted is a sure way to fail.

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Agree to disagree. Google and other search engines use 100's of factors in their algorithm, many of which Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc haven't confirmed. It's nearly impossible to test/reverse engineer their algorithms so all we have to go off of is observations and trail and error. What I shared is based off my own testing and observations and has worked well for me and will likely work well for others. Exactly how Google is reacting to each factor is unknown but incorporating the factors i've pointed out will very likely increase rankings/traffic.

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great to see some SEO discussions taking place on here.

Google authorship is definitely something to add. I create a quick G+ account, add a trustworthy looking pic, do a few things to the profile to make it legit then buy a few hundred circle followers. The click through rate skyrockets.

What I am thinking though is that authorship will be a major ranking factor soon. Authors will have their own author rank (similar to pagerank) with content they have authored ranking better than normal content.

I generally do churn and burn sites with multiple sites targeting the same SERPS, so I dont really want to be using the same authorship on all my sites. However the importance of author rank in the future is definitely something to think about.

My idea is to start creating some powerful authorship profiles with plenty of quality articles. I am sure these will be gold in the near future.

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could you elaborate on this?

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Register, fill out the profile, post some updates, connect with people in your niche, comment on related topics. Basically everything a real user would do.

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Yep this.

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Lot's of good questions about rel author and Google+. Here's a really good case study that has some insights into the power of rel author: http://www.jeffalytics.com/google-pl...ch-authorship/

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Hi thanks.
I asked because I saw some websites in google ranking with fake stock-photos, even Google Image-search found the stock-photos and they weren't connected or update.
So I was a bit puzzled after mine didn't show up. But after adding also publisher-markup (maybe coincidence) everything is fine.

So even connecting with people etc. is not important, but probably recommendable.

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It is definitely worth the trouble I think. Authorship is pretty new and you just know google will be clamping down on it as its too good for us affiliates. So its best to take a moderatly safer approach as its quick and easy to do.

Also, I buy 300 or so circle followers. The number of followers you have appears next to your photo in the SERP. This also helps for clickthrough. authenticity and conversions.

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WOW nice one man! SEO has become so much more complicated then it was when I first started 3-4 years ago haha!

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Want to chime in here on the CTR, bounce rate & page speed items. In a niche which is highly competitive (voucher codes/coupons) the on-site factors are so important because everyone is basically publishing the same content. Just look at a few websites in the UK who offer vouches codes and you know what I mean. So, when you're fighting competitors which basically have the same content, there are just a few things you can improve:
- Backlink profile
- Social profiles
- Onsite optimisation

I only want to talk about the onsite SEO here and what I've seen from experience. My website was the first in the niche in various countries to use something called "Varnish", it's a caching system which outputs static html pages (caurmen talked about this before). It literally reduced the loading time to just 0.3s which was a pretty big improvement. We saw this improvement in rankings as well, we went up on basically all keywords just by adding this. Page speed has become a very important ranking factor and my idea is this is due to the % of mobile users that keep increasing. Google wants the best experience for their users, so if your site can give that on all devices, they'll be more than happy to reward you (not even talking about responsiveness, this is a no brainer and a must have for anyone nowadays).

CTR & Bounce rate: pattents or what not, fact is it is a ranking factor nowadays. We've seen a direct correlation between decreasing the bounce rate and increasing rankings. Also, to increase CTR's in SERP's use characters like "✓" in your <meta> tag to make you stand out. In Google Webmaster Tools you can see how much impressions your result got for certain keywords, make use of this. Is your CTR too low? Test with different <meta>'s. Got a winner? Rinse and repeat for others.

Again, these are my observations from a highly competitive market where everyone has the same content & site structure.

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My best friend owns an SEO agency and also contracts in the industry (he's got various clients). This is superb advice. You need to get the simple things right.

Even if you don't use Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, Google can find out the bounce rate by measuring the time until the user's next interaction with the Google Search results (which means they have left your site). Of course there are users that CTRL-click (open in new tab) many results at once, but Google factors this in as well.

One tip I can share is you should serve much smaller image files to Google/bots (the bots responsible for determining your ranking) so the page loads even quicker for them (200kb page turns into 65kb with heavy image compression). You are keeping the images visible and everything even for the bots, because images are valuable content, and your on-page score remains solid.

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Hey guys,

Noticed there hasn't been an update in here for a few years, I am just wondering what are you guy's currently seeing that works when it comes to On-page & Off page SEO factors?

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