Having worked in the digital marketing and SEO fields for the past years, I have witnessed the internet’s unpredicted growth and development. Through this, a thorough grasp of how businesses and even people with personal websites may get more out of their online presence has been developed.
Read on to gain knowledge of the best and worst practices when it comes to SEO.
You may significantly improve your chances of ranking highly and seeing the kinds of responses you want from your target audience by paying attention to a few straightforward recommendations.
These strategies aim to enhance the amount of natural exposure your website can receive and bring traffic to it without the help of search engines, though I can’t guarantee that they will land your website in the top spot.
What Is Natural Exposure?
Naturally exposed content is what happens when consumers share your website or its content. Create a link for every time your material is shared if you wrote it correctly.
Currently, it is more important that your content be shared than how exactly this individual posts it. This means that regardless of whether your material is reposted on a blog or linked to on social media, you are still bringing visitors to your website. Following these social cues, search engines begin to ask themselves why content from you is being shared.
The major objectives of natural exposure include being found and drawing more attention to your website.
White Hat Strategies To Increase Your Website’s Social Visibility
- Social Media: Put Your Attention Towards Increasing Brand Awareness, Create A Community, and Engage And Communicate With Your Fans
- Having an active social media presence provides benefits beyond search engine optimisation, even if social media may not have a major impact on your website’s SEO. Building relationships with your fans and followers on social media should take precedence over always enhancing your SEO friendliness.
This means sharing relevant information and providing interesting, unique content that reflects your brand or encapsulates your soul. In a similar vein, you ought to talk about recent developments in the areas that both you and your audience find interesting.
What relevance does that have to marketing, though? High levels of continuous engagement and growth may be attained by making sure that your followers interact with content through your coverage and by keeping them interested with your brand. Along with sharing your material, they will give you the crucial backlinks to your website, which may greatly enhance your authority in the field, increase monthly views, and entice interested users to stay on your site for much longer.
These are all fantastic benefits, but when taken as a package, they can help your website become more authoritative for specific search terms, which will raise its overall search engine ranks.
You can choose from a wide variety of social media platforms, some of which are specific to the type of content you share. For written material, the three primary sites you should use are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Expand the Visibility of Your Content by Submitting It to Reputable Websites Worldwide
You can share and distribute your content in a number of ways. These websites usually draw a lot of traffic because they are dependable sources of excellent content that offers guidance, covers current events, and offers useful and current information.
You are essentially building backlinks to your website by submitting your material to these websites, which might further help to broaden your audience. The four most popular websites for sharing content are Mashable, Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon. Even though these websites can be quite helpful, it’s usually worthwhile to identify websites that concentrate on subjects that are related to your website.
You must provide material that is entirely pertinent to your goods, services, or community in order to get the most out of these kinds of websites, but you must also make an effort to reach as many people as possible. Additionally keep in mind that users first use these websites to kill time rather than perusing goods or services.
The main strategy for writing articles of this type is to steer clear of personal product endorsements and self-promotion in favour of discussing news that is pertinent to the business and emerging trends. Since the majority of the material on these websites is presented as click-bait, you must make sure that yours is too.
Build Connections & Use A Blog To Get The Best Outcomes
In the past, starting a corporate blog has been seen as both a good and a bad thing. However, in my opinion, there are several reasons why your website has to have a blog of some kind. Nevertheless, there are still black hat blogging strategies in use today that can harm your online reputation in a number of ways.
Verifying a website
Using Alexa is a simple method to verify one of these websites. To put it simply, Alexa is a traffic estimator and can be a very helpful tool for determining the quality of a website. All you have to do is copy and paste the website address into Alexa’s search bar, and it will provide site analytics.
The amount of traffic that the website receives from your nation of origin and its Alexa rank—the lower the number, the better—are two of the most important metrics to check. Majestic can also be used to determine the website’s level of trustworthiness. Majestic offers two key metrics that are worth taking into account; the higher these are, the better the website. The Citation Flow and the Trust Flow are these.
Once you’ve found potential partners, it’s best to get in contact with them right soon. Tell them why you would like to be featured on their website and how often you would like to participate, in a straightforward and honest manner.
It is imperative to diligently search for and adhere to any site-specific regulations. Some might even have whole systems set up.
Using white hat blogging
It’s difficult to get your content published on reputable white hat blogs and blogging platforms.
Due to their unwavering commitment to providing only high-quality material, black hat websites are often chosen by businesses as a last resort or just because they are simpler to maintain than white hat websites. Sure, it can be challenging to get your content on white-hat websites, but you can be sure that the effort will eventually pay off in terms of marketing and SEO.
If you just search for guest post acceptance websites on Google, you should have no trouble finding them.
You should personally verify these high-ranking websites and have faith in your own judgement when it comes to where you want your content to be seen, as not all of them will be excellent.
Using Black Hat Blogging
Writing blog posts for websites that accept any kind of content is known as “black hat blogging.” These can usually be identified by the small fee they ask to post your work, which sets them apart from quality content sites. Another great way to spot these suspicious websites is to look through their last 10 blog entries. If they are all full of links to other websites, they are probably black hat sites.
Sometimes it’s easy to determine the purpose of a website by analysing its content; for instance, you can tell if the blog articles lack a clear theme or if the content reads more like a sales pitch.
Using Relevant Content To Draw In Relevant Customers, Press Releases And Article Distribution
Follow SEO Best Practices for Press Releases
Thousands of various indicators are used by search engines such as Google and Bing to evaluate a web page’s authority and relevancy. It can be challenging enough to write and publish a quality press release without having to consider all of these ranking variables. Give yourself a head start by incorporating these SEO best practices into your publication strategy.
- Focus on the initial 250 words. Like the headline, search engines find the most value in the content that appears towards the top of the press release. When deciding which search phrases are most relevant, search engines presume that the content found at the beginning of an article is the most significant.
- A headline’s first five to seven words are the most important. Press releases with words that match or are similar in intent to the first five to seven words of the headline will be given preference by search engines. To have the biggest impact, try placing your most important information towards the top of the headline.
- Increase the amount of multimedia to increase search traffic. Make use of images, videos, infographics, and other multimedia to increase your visibility in image and news searches. Keep in mind that in order to fully utilise this advantage, multimedia files must be named with relevant keywords.
- Conduct research on keywords. You can find out how frequently people search for words or phrases that you can include in your press releases by using keyword tools like Google Trends. If you had to pick between utilising one of those terms, “press release” would make your content more relevant to those searches because it is searched more than ten times more frequently than “news release.”
Best Practices For PR/Article Distribution
From my perspective, you should be actively seeking out and cultivating connections with news outlets that are pertinent to your field. If your content doesn’t promote itself, as many as 60% of them should be delighted to share excellent content with their audience. The only times you can publicly market yourself are when your article or PR is about a new technology or product, or when you wish to openly discuss a project you recently won or finished.
Once more, you must confirm that the PR/Article sites you have selected have the appropriate source of traffic. One of the key objectives of a content marketing strategy is to draw in visitors. Keep in mind, though, that when you do this, your website’s search engine rankings will rise.
Video Content – Hook Your Customers
Consumers are consuming content at an increasing rate as they proceed through the conversion process, and I anticipate that this tendency will continue. Why? To start with, the typical human attention span is currently thought to be 8 seconds; in comparison, goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds.
In light of this, video appears to be the most effective content medium for attracting clients. Videos have a hook that other types of content find difficult to match, making them more significant than ever when used for social media advertising and engagement.
As many as 64% of interested customers will decide to purchase a product after watching a video about it, so websites that recognise the potential impact of video on their customers can stand out from the competition and connect with their customers in new and innovative ways.
Should your video material be of sufficient quality, there is a possibility that it will become viral, thereby increasing brand awareness among your audience and potentially boosting your revenue.
Key Ways To Make The Most Of Video Content Marketing
a. Create A Video Distribution Strategy
You run the danger of putting a lot of effort into making a film that no one will watch if you don’t think about an efficient approach to share it with interested persons. A strong distribution plan should concentrate on a number of social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and even YouTube.
b. Develop A Video Creation Strategy
You can make sure that you do have a story that you can work within by making sure your entire company has a consistent plan. It’s important to always keep in mind the various kinds of video content you can produce, ranging from straightforward six-second Vines to Instagram segments, animated GIFs, and comprehensive, long-form videos.
c. Use Your Video To Tell A Narrative
Always remember to consider your motivations when producing video content. There isn’t much value in developing something if you’re only doing it because it’s “trending.” You can use your video creation to support your entire business narrative and identity, though, if you integrate it into your broader business story.
Building Citations – Localizing Your Business
When it comes to company listings, a citation is essentially just a fancy term. Establish a Google Places account and make sure it is confirmed as the first step in this process. Make sure that the information on your business matches what you have entered into your Google Places account by adding it to many internet directories, including Yell, 118, and their rivals. This data will contain the name and address of your business.
The descriptions you provide for each website must be as unique as possible. Adding citations to your website is a great way to get it to appear in Google’s local search results for your company.
The inclusion of a backlink to your website is only one benefit of this method.
Image Distribution – Engaging An Audience With Visual Content
These days, whether a person is working or just having leisure time, technology drives everything they do. You should be aware that consumers respond to visual content far more effectively. Widely shared photographs have the potential to attract new clients more than any other form of media.
A vast array of prospective clients can be drawn to your website through the use of two important digital marketing techniques: picture distribution and image marketing. One can utilise various picture distribution platforms, especially social media ones, that can significantly boost client interaction.
Image Distribution – Engaging An Audience With Visual Content
Making sure the material is both relevant and offers a positive user experience is known as on-page optimisation. Many companies used to approach it as simple keyword stuffing, meaning they would mention their keywords as much as possible in the content. This practice of overusing a target keyword in on-page material with the goal of ranking for that keyword is known as “keyword stuffing.” Google lists keyword stuffing in its spam policy and views it as a spam tactic.
This efficiently prevents keyword stuffing, which typically leads to content that is of inferior quality for the reader.
Avoid using this term more than once or twice in the content itself, as well as in any other headers. You should still use keywords in the page’s Meta Title, Meta Description, and H1, even though you may be using fewer of them in your content. As a general rule, I’d advise utilising one keyword for every three hundred words at most. However, this may vary depending on how extensive your material is.
When crafting or editing content, bear in mind that your keyword will most likely appear in the navigation and other areas of your page.
You can find them by just searching for lexical terms that Google believes to be identical.
Additionally, by searching for relevant synonyms in a traditional thesaurus or on thesaurus.com, you can find additional lexical phrases rapidly. Using your judgment, you should decide whether a phrase fits your topic or not, because some phrases can make it look “spun” and forced.
What is spun content?
“content spinning,” also referred to as “article spinning,” is the practice of altering someone else’s material to make it appear original. Article spinning replaces words, phrases, and sentences with other ones to give the material the appearance of being unique to search engine crawlers and website viewers.
An algorithm that maintains the article’s structure while replacing some terms with synonyms has replaced the original content. This is typically a dishonest tactic that produces noticeably subpar content compared to well-researched original works written by authors who are sincere about their subject matter.
Using Instagram for Businesses?
Depending on your company, Instagram could be the ideal platform for posting pictures of “behind the scenes” material. Individuals and prospective clients will value the additional personality and connect with the genuine, approachable side of your company – the human side.
Instagram offers a business the opportunity to interact with a global audience, making it a very advantageous tool. Instagram might be the greatest choice for you if you’re having problems establishing a connection with any demographic other than your target market.
Since 2010, Instagram has become the main social networking platform for visual and graphic material. In 2014, this website saw over 200 million regular users who uploaded their own images, commented on others, and—most importantly—interacted with one another.
Instagram is comparable to every other social media network in that it is meant to be used for connection and interaction, even though it may have a different format. In light of this, you must make sure that, in terms of management, you handle it similarly. You must continue to interact with users on the platform by answering their queries and comments.
Some Final Thoughts
You may develop a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that covers every facet of your organisation by taking into account these straightforward ideas and keeping in mind to interact with potential clients.
Above all, remember the human side of your company. This is the kind of material that can truly establish your brand identity in the eyes of potential customers and produce a significant amount of engagement.
These tactics have helped me in the past and continue to help me now, but it’s critical that you identify an online marketing strategy that works for your company. Before choosing your favourite and most fulfilling social networking platform, I’d suggest trying out a number of different ones and a variety of various types.
You run the risk of having your entire search engine ranking banished if you attempt to cross the boundaries between black, grey, or white hat SEO. Being banned from Google can cause a sharp decline in website traffic and revenue, as it is a major source of organic traffic for websites.