High search engine rankings are something that every blogger craves for. Even in this world of social media, nothing can beat the quality of organic traffic. It is much targeted and the visitors have a definite requirement in mind, which makes it easy to convert such traffic.
That is why it is so important to optimize your blogs from a search engine perspective.
But wait!
There are around 200 factors controlling the search engine rankings in Google. Are you paying full attention to them?
I am sure that know about basic on-page SEO and linkbuilding. There are plenty of tools to help you in linkbuilding (I use Ahrefs regularly).
But is that all? Aren?t you missing out on a lot of other factors?
I think so.
In fact, there are plenty of factors that we overlook. While it is not possible to control all 200 factors, there are some that we are simply unaware of. As a result of this lack of knowledge, we miss out on some easy to apply tactics that can be of great help to a blog?s SEO.
In this post, I am going to explain (and reinforce) some of these lesser known ideas and tell you how to derive full SEO benefit using these tactics.
Ready?
Write attractive headlines to get higher click through rates
Idea: Higher click through rates in SERPs (Search engine result pages) provide boost to your rankings. The reverse is also true.
How a particular result performs in the SERPs has an important effect on its subsequent rankings. Suppose you are ranking in #1 for your target keyword. But still, people are not clicking on your link. This sends a wrong message to the search engines. The algorithm will interpret that your blog is not relevant enough.
As a result, your rankings will go down. On the other hand, if your blog is ranked low, but still, more people are clicking on it, then the algorithm will attach more value to you blog and your rankings will rise.
So you must improve your click through rates. The easiest way to get more clicks is to write attractive headlines. In fact, most people read the headlines only. Your headline should persuades the user in clicking it (to reach your blog post).
Use power words, use numbers, stir controversies, make claims: these are a few of the many things you can do to make your links more clickable. Next time, make sure you write an attractive title rather than a bland one.
Also write a meaningful meta description. This description often appears in the SERPs and will potentially play a role in attracting the user. Doing these things will boost your CTR, and in turn, your rankings.
You can check the CTRs from Google Analytics. Start writing clickable headlines and monitor the change. Find out which type of headlines work best in your niche.
Use images links to improve SERPs
Idea: Alt tags of images provide keyword benefits and also add to backlink diversity
Everyone knows about text links. Anchor text used in the text links affect the rankings for that keyword as well as related ones.
But did you ever consider that image links can also boost your rankings for your chosen keywords?
Yes they can. Images use alt tags, which tells the search engine bots about the content of that image. When you use an image to link to a particular post, the alt tag of that image will serve as the keyword.
So, start building image backlinks. Images are a nice way to interlink your posts. Moreover, image based links add diversity to your backlinks repertoire.
One easy way to get image based backlinks is to offer a free infographic for others to use on their blogs. Simply ask them to provide an image backlink (through the infographic) to your original post.
Link out to trustworthy blogs
Idea: High quality articles are supposed to link to high quality sources
Backlinks are, in essence, a form of voting. If your blog is good, it is expected to get lots of votes.
At the same time, a good blog is expected to vote for other good blogs! That is why outbound links are so important. By linking out to useful and credible sources, you not only ensure the satisfaction of your readers, but also the favor of the search engines.
Do not link out to crappy, low quality resources. Provide backlinks to high quality and helpful resources only. It is easy to do and will raise your blog?s value in the eyes of the search engine.
Maintain healthy dofollow to nofollow ratio
Idea: Excess nofollow backlinks suggest that your blog is not trustworthy.
A nofollow tag is basically used to indicate that a certain backlink is not towards a trusted source. As such, getting too many nofollow backlinks can be a bad thing. In the initial days of a blog, nofollow backlinks will be predominant. Most of your links will be from nofollow blog comments.
But as a blog ages, it is expected to gain more dofollow links. You can easily check the number of dofollow and nofollow backlinks using Ahref. At the time of writing, my blog is few months old and has 20% dofollow backlinks. A couple of months back it was only 5%. On the other hand, an established blog like Problogger has 91% dofollow backlinks.
My suggestion is to avoid getting excessive nofollow backlinks. Major culprits are forum profile backlinks, nofollowed footer and blogroll links, and crappy Web 2.0 backlinks. Do not acquire such links as they do no good.
Some bloggers cannot resist the urge of buying thousands of cheap automated backlinks. Avoid this at all cost. Such backlinks provide zero value. They unnecessarily inflate the nofollow backlinks count, which can only harm your rankings.
Instead, concentrate on getting dofollow backlinks. Writing guest posts (like this one) is one great way to do it.
Stretch your contents longer
Idea: High quality contents are usually comprehensive in nature
Various studies have shown that longer contents rank better in Google. You may argue that you can provide high quality content in a concise manner, but the algorithms won?t listen. So, it is a good idea to write longer posts.
Unique content (the post and comments) to repeat content (header, sidebar and footer text) ratio should be high. Try to write in depth content. If you feel that you are ending up adding fluff to your content, there are alternatives.
One great way to ensure more unique content is to get more comments on you blog posts. Comments not only increase content length but they also introduce new long tail keywords, which can further help in getting organic traffic.
These are the simple tips that I urge every blogger to follow. These tips are very easy to follow. But sadly, these are often overlooked due to the hype around things. Be smart.
Try out these tips and see your rankings improve.
If you have any questions or want to discuss anything, feel free to leave a comment.
I do agree that dofollow & nofollow ratio should be maintained, otherwise, google may give penalty.
Awesome blog having valuable content. The post you share is very helpful for bloggers.No doubt seo Blogger websites is the great source of online traffic.
Firstly i want to thanks Dailyblogtips for such a great content. You’re right. I agree with your points of view because they take important roles of SEO in 2015. Any SEO campaign won’t be successful if you can’t get enough ROI. Many people doing SEO in my country forget linking to authority resources in their niche. And their content have low CTR. What a pity!
Thanks for this post. You said here to write longer posts. I suggest to write 700-800 word contents because if you will write long content then your readers may be bored to read your content. Write content and try to give major information there. Share your knowledge through your blog. So no need to think about long content or short content.
Hi
These two are the most important points. Write quality stuff and make it attractive with the headlines. That’s the core concept of blogging. Glad you got it.
to image images heading properly is also a seo factor i agree with your point hence we should utilize this.
Does Google really give you a time window to go from a higher nofollow to dofollow backlink ratio? Any idea of what that window is and how much it affects your page ranking? Our site is about a year and a half old, and our ratio is still kind of high, so I was wondering how much time Google factors into its algorithm. Anyway, great blog post. Thank you for your SEO wisdom.
Hi Ben
TO be frank, I do not have a definitive idea of the time frame. But logically speaking, a decent site should get some dofollow backlinks after 1 year. Highly skewed NF/DF ratio would suggest either (1) spammy nofollow links (2) very few dofollow links. Try to get some dofollow links and do not use automated link blasts. That is what I would suggest.
Valid pointers.
I have experienced this. Long posts with quality content optimised well for SEO along with images and comments have helped may of my posts to rank higher in Google SERPS.
I agree with all points, all points are the important and useful.
As content is the king, so rich and healthy content with images will get perform better. Thanks for sharing this knowledge with us.
Hi daily bloggers,
Thanks for sharing with us – fellow bloggers your helpful SEO tips. Luckily I do most of the listed tips. I’d still like to use the opportunity to ask you a qustion – so would appreciate an honest answer. I got a couple of blogs that I run – two of them are in rather competitive niche but having keywords with big search numbers, and one of my blogs is really in a niche where there is almost no competition but ofcourse much fewer monthly searches for the main keywords. So based on your experience where should I concentrate my focus – trying to get on the first page of google for the low-competition niche, or keep writing great content and building backlinks for the higher-competitive niche? I am having quite a dilemma – so any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you guys and keep up the great work!
Cheers
Adam
Hi Adam
Thanks for your question.
Focusing on low competition niches worked well a few years back. Build a lot of micro-sites targeted to specific low competition keywords > Rinse and repeat. But it does not work any more, atleast, not to a profitable level. Now, even for a low competition niche, you need to spend significant amount of time to produce content and do promotion. Even after you hit the first page, a single blog is going to produce peanuts. So the return on investment is low.
I would suggest you to focus on high competition niche. You don’t need to dominate the main keyword. If you have lots of content, you will draw enough traffic through long tail keywords. This + quality will ensure the growth of your blog/site.
Most importantly: Start building the email list early. Loyal followers will share content and in turn, build links for you.
I hope that helped. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Yes, I have personally experience that longer content rank better in search engines. I have always been advocating for creating in-depth content.
Thanks.
I really liked this post. I already implement a lot of these techniques already. Images as alt links is a good idea though! Blogging more quality content and more networking will ultamatly lead to success, time will tell!
Hi Justin
Image links with alt tags do work. I have improved my rankings using this strategy. Try it out.
I beg to differ,
1. Images in a piece of content won’t make the page rank higher in Google. Images are not a ranking factor, Google will never rank Site#A higher than Site#B simply because Site#A has an image.
Alt tags, title and description on an image helps the image rank well in Google Image Search, that’s all.
2. Google will never rank a website simply because it is linking to other websites. Your on-page SEO is yours, you have the right to do whatever and linking to other sites is not a ranking factor.
3. Nofollow links are just a waste of time, energy and money. Don’t bother with Nofollow links, it’s just a myth, your theory has never been proven.
If that was true then I would just send my competition a lot of Nofollow links to their site and outrank them. Focus on creating Dofollow, it’s not true that you need the right balance.
4. For the comment above, the number of words on a piece of content is not a ranking factor. Go to Google and search “Miserable Failure”, you’ll find an about(.)com page in the search results that has got no text, it only has an image.
That proves that the number of words is not a ranking factor or else you would only find websites with long content when you search on Google.
Hello Gugulethu
Thanks for sharing your opinion. Please read the whole post. I think you read the headlines only and got the wrong message. Here is my reply.
1) Alt tag of image based links helps SERPS itself. I have tested this myself. I will let you know when I publish the case study. I am not saying that presence of an image would improve rankings. What I said was that an image based link improves ranking of the page linked to, not the page containing the image.
2) On page SEO is obviously a factor, and that included outbound links. Linking to bad neighborhood is a bad sign, linking to quality sites is a good sign. Commonsense, actually. No, this is not going to help you rank on its own, but this is a factor. Rankings depend on a lot of factors, not just incoming links.
3) I never said that building nofollow links would boost SERPs. I said that a healthy balance is naturally expected. So do not focus on solely nofollow links like blog comments. I quote myself from the post “My suggestion is to avoid getting excessive nofollow backlinks.”. I am not sure what you are complaining about.
4) Miserable failure is hardly a competitive keyword. Longer contents get more links, hence better ranks. Simple. Obviously there are exceptions where a piece of short content may be preferred and get tons of links. But they are exceptions.
Again, Thanks for your comment. I suspect you just read the headlines. I hope I have been able to clarify your doubts.
Regards
Neil
I am agree with Neil,
-use of image alt tag really works. Image and video also help to hold readers eye and good for decreasing bounce rate.
-On page is obvious but quality backlink is still working.
– Nofollow and Dofollow ratio is only for balance. Nofollow has no other purpose.
-As I know the rank of Miserable failure is a result of using anchor text.
SEO trend is always changing
[ Smiles ] For starters, writing headlines that captures the reader’s attention is, highly recommended.
Google Panda will penalize a blogger for writing “thin” content (which are articles that are less than 250 words).
Longer articles would definitely give a blogger a better chance of their posts showing up in the Search Engine Results Pages.
Hi
These two are the most important points. Write quality stuff and make it attractive with the headlines. That’s the core concept of blogging. Glad you got it.
Neil