Positioning tricks

TRICKS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE'S POSITIONING WITH CONTENT We say natural positioning when what we are looking for are tricks to position. Natural positioning is improving by taking care of content. There are people who search for natural SEO positioning, but they are also looking to do it through tricks, and not naturally. As my dear grandmother would say, we want “egg, little bird and nest”, and that cannot be. SEO is generating quality content that arouses interest, with a website that solves a problem or need, oriented to the way the user searches for that specific information and indexable by search engines. That is SEO. If you are looking for shortcuts to rank first on Google, I'll give you a clue: There aren't any. Or rather, there are few, not so effective, ephemeral, that pose a significant risk to your website and that generally take more work than doing it by generating value. And if you want to generate value, content is going to be your main ally in this mission. If you are still determined to look for quick methods that may or may not work, you are already late in searching Google for “SEO black hat”, “link exchange”, “blog networks”, “free articles and press releases” and things like that, because this post is not about that, it is about techniques that will work this week and next, that will make you grow sustainably and that will never ever make you receive a penalty. 1. Know your user The first thing is to know who you are targeting. Every audience consumes information differently. For example, this post could be called “Content marketing tactics for SEO”, but it would be aimed at a smaller and more specialized audience and the advice given would be different. To find out what people are looking for you can use Google's search autocomplete tool, Google Keyword Tool and Google Trends. Not everything is given to you by a tool. If you have a website about cats, it will suggest similar searches: cat videos, cat websites, cat photos or it can even go to synonyms like felines, or give you interesting ideas. But perhaps you haven't detected important niches such as “videos to cheer you up” or “videos for when you're sad”. Your content solves needs, find out what they are, what forms they can take, and create specific content. In short: Discover what needs you satisfy, how they are searched for, what competition you have and become the brand they would want to see. You can help yourself by creating personas to make it easier to personalize content for the different types of users you may have. 2. Have a plan Content must be planned. You must have a clear and numerical objective -never exclusively SEO-, a specific audience and a bunch of ideas and desire to try. If you don't plan your content with an editorial calendar, varying formats, specifying what type of user each piece of content is aimed at and focused on getting them to perform a specific action on their visit (give you an email, read more posts, follow you on twitter…) it will be difficult to know if you are doing well or badly and you will depend only on your intuition to move forward. 3. Use your blog Your blog is not only a great tool for creating content that attracts Google by itself achieving posts with great natural positioning, but it allows you to: Generate links: If you generate easy-to-share content, people will share it, links included, which benefits the domain as a whole. It's not all about the post being good, it also helps that your blog is a reliable and reputable source. Create relationships: It's as simple as linking to third-party pages. Millions of people are generating very valid content on different topics, and surely one of them has created a resource that complements your post perfectly: link to it. Then, if you want, mention them on twitter, let them know you are talking about them and that they know you. Reinforce your brand: Take care of the aesthetic aspect of your blog, that it reinforces the identity of your company or your own, use the sidebars, the header and the footer to meet your branding objectives, and take care of aspects such as the color palette, images, that all elements are translated… 4. Friends even in hell Let's not fool ourselves, getting quality links is a matter of relationships. Not only having a large group of friends and acquaintances in the online world -that too- but knowing how to make an impact on the person we are addressing so that they want to follow us, link to us, become our friend. As always, make yourself seen at events, beers, breakfasts and any other excuse where bloggers or people from your niche get together. It will allow you to put a face to people, build relationships, and this leads to everything else. 5. Deep dive into Social Networks Natural positioning depends largely on the impact you get on Social Networks, mainly because it allows you to establish relationships, it is a positioning factor in itself, confirms the link profile and gives you visibility and branding. Keep in mind that you are not going to get links if nobody knows about you, and if your content does not have a brand that is safe to link to. And don't stay on Twitter and Facebook: Networks like Slideshare, Google+ or Instagram can be very useful, depending on which sectors and which brands, and tools like menéame, scoop.it or bitácoras can be a way to gain a remnant of traffic and links. Even niche blogs and forums can be great tools, although they require more research, they will get you visibility in your specific target and will be fundamental to capture your first followers. Don't forget them. 6. Create joint initiatives Does what you do like? Try combining it with what others do. Alloys are stronger. It could be working on a static page about all the influencers in a sector in blog Spain, or one from an adjacent niche to yours with a similar theme. For example, if you talk about Social Media, why not collaborate with 5 friends to create a tumblr with the screw-ups of different brands in Social Media, or a WordPress with the most obvious paid tweets? It will give you visibility outside your blog, page and social media, and will allow you to break out of the routine to experiment with new things. 7. Reserve the best content for others If you are going to create content, reward those that will have the most visibility. If you look for blogs and media in which to participate sporadically -guest blogging- try to have a greater reach than your platform, or to reach a niche that you couldn't reach otherwise. Then, reserve the best content for them. If on your blog you can reach 1,000 people, and on another 10,000, make an effort on the one that will give you more visibility. 8. Respect branding as an SEO tool Branding is fundamental in SEO. If nobody knows you, nobody is going to search for your brand, remember that SEO traffic for terms with your brand name is also natural positioning. Having a strong brand will not only make people search for you more, but will turn you into a reliable source and increase the click-through rate of your results and the chances of being shared and linked, that is, SEO benefit everywhere. 9. Video, video, video Visual content is the most consumed on the Internet, and video is king. It doesn't matter if you use Instagram video or upload videos of your products to youtube, you have to continuously try formats that increase your visibility. Mainly, because videos have a very easy time ranking well by themselves in very competitive searches, and because video reinforces textual content like a post and generates much more branding, authority and trust. Screenshot 2013 08 01 at 09.18.25 15 tricks to improve your website's positioning with content An example I love are MOZ's Whiteboard Fridays. 10. Change format There is no single winning format. Each type of target usually has one or two favorite formats, but even so the same person can consume content in many ways. For example, on weekends you watch youtube videos with your friends, on the way to work you read an e-book, at work you usually consume interesting articles for your profession, when you get home you look at facebook -eminently visual- and twitter -eminently textual- and before going to bed you laugh for a while with Instagram, Pinteres and Vine. And if you use so many formats, your audience does too. Work different content formats, and test which ones work with your audience: Is it publishing a comic strip from time to time? Are they videos? Are they impactful images? Or is text the best, so you focus on posts, whitepapers, e-books and studies? Varying the format will allow you to reach new audiences, retain those who already read you and consolidate your content strategy by discovering what works and what doesn't, and your natural positioning will grow enormously once you hit the mark. 11. Let users help you Users are the best way to generate content without you having to do it directly: It has to be managed, and it requires time and dedication, but it gives impressive results. Comments: Comments on blogs and, above all, on products, provide invaluable SEO value by adding related semantic content. Blog: If you have very loyal users eager to talk about a topic, why not let them create their own blogs? They will be generating indexable content for search engines and capturing long tail traffic while you retain them. Forum: For pages with a large community a forum can be a winning strategy. Pages like Enfemenino rank wonderfully in a large number of topics thanks to a very large very active community that is constantly raising doubts, offering solutions, and generating discussion topics. Questions and answers: If you don't want to manage a forum but want to allow community activity, you can accept the submission of questions and answer them yourself, as long as you are a source with authority on a topic. After all, an important percentage of searches on Google consist of questions. Ambassadors: If you have users who are truly in love with you, participate in everything you do and are absolutely loyal, look for ways to reward them and allow them to fulfill their role as retainers. From sending them content before officially launching it so they can make it viral to giving them products or mentioning them on social media 12. Create your own images If you can, use your own images and use a Creative Commons license so they can be used with attribution. Seriously, it is impossible to find good images on some topics, and ranking first in Google Images for the concept of a post can mean that several bloggers link to you for the image credits, which is the best they have found to illustrate their text. 13. Think about the domain Force yourself to think holistically: natural positioning is no longer about the content on one page, but about the domain as a whole. If you create a post about unicorns on a blog dedicated to Death Methal, it will be much harder for it to rank well than that same post on a children's theme blog, no matter how good the content is and how good its page-level metrics are. This doesn't mean you have to talk about a single topic, but it serves to make you aware of what your strengths and weaknesses are. 14.Work your personal brand Even if you invest in your blog's brand, your own brand is also important. Invest in yourself, because perhaps tomorrow your blog will change, your job will change or you will even be in another industry and be interested in other topics, so blog that make that reputation converge in you. Giving yourself visibility in your publications, turning readers into twitter followers, subscribers, or using your reputation to increase your network of contacts are the best ways to become a brand by yourself and make any future initiative more relevant. 15.Find a good balance between quality and quantity Everyone will tell you quality over quantity, and they are right, but there are many occasions when the high-quality content you can generate will not have enough impact, and therefore it is not worth dedicating too much time to it. If you don't have contacts, SEO traffic or links yet, it is advisable to focus on quick and easy content to make. Never mediocre, but don't try to paint the Sistine Chapel in every post, because nobody is going to read you. If you focus on long tail keywords, generating relationships, asking for a couple of links here and there, and interspersing some exceptional posts in guest blogging, in a few months you can have greater capacity, and you should tend towards higher quality posts even if it means lowering the quantity. Contact us