5 Contemporary Strategies That Help Improve Your Rankings

Improving your rankings isn’t as easy as it used to be. As businesses became a lot of invested in SEO,
search ranking algorithms have grown smarter and a lot of sophisticated. The result's that a lot of
techniques that used to be acceptable are currently considered gray-hat or black-hat — and in some
cases, can even earn you a traffic-throttling Google penalty.

Still, the challenge remains: we need links, we want traffic, and we need rankings. How can we achieve
this in a moral manner? Luckily, there are still powerful white-hat ways you can leverage to boost rankings.
Here are five of the best that we at E2M use successfully to this day.

1.Guest posts

Guest posting has been contested territory a few times. Back in 2014, Google’s then-head of web spam,
Matt Cutts advised that guest posting was increasingly ineffective at building links. If you’re doing tons of
guest posting, he warned, “you’re hanging out with some really bad company.”

It’s simple to check why guest posting has returned under fire in recent years. After all, guest blogs used
to be an extremely simple way to get backlinks — perhaps a bit too simple. All too usually, the standard
guest post is 500 words long, includes no links to sources (other than the author’s own website) and
presents no thoughtful commentary or new insight. I’m not saying you can’t have a worthy 500-word post.
Of course, you can. But the bulk of guest bloggers aren’t looking at readers’ issues. They don’t care whether
you derive worth from the post or not. They care about obtaining a link, and they’ve nailed the absolute
bare minimum required to achieve that end. That drags the “guest blogger” into the mud. But it also gives
you an opportunity.

Rather than concentrate on acquiring links, guest blogging can help with SEO ranking in other, less direct ways.
By consistently posting excellent, in-depth content on relevant blogs, you’ll drive up authority and get more
social shares, along with signs of quality that Google takes seriously. You’re also a lot of likely to induce
actual traffic to your web site from high-quality content — that is what link building is meant to be about
anyway. Stuffing low-quality posts with links to your web site — or paid third-party links — is also a issue
of the past. But guest blogging remains a strong tool to increase authority and search visibility.

2. Infographics

Infographics are a strong method of obtaining a point across quickly and intuitively. That’s one reason
why they’re so popular. But they’re also an effective method of obtaining high-quality backlinks quickly.

The trick to getting that to happen is within the embed code. After you create your infographic, you can
use a tool like the Seige Media Embed Code Generator to build the code. This is the code that folks who
need to post your infographic to their own website can use.

So include a request to link back to your web site, and build it simply by bundling exactly the URL you want
them to use into the infographic’s embed code. That way, they can’t avoid seeing it. Sure, some people
will ignore it, but most of the people can attribute your infographic when they post it — and build the attribution
a hyperlink back to your web site. Bingo!

To get your infographic in front of a lot of people, use infographic publishers (Visual.ly is one). Most will
want a 70-or-so-word description of the infographic; then they’ll store it, and when different content marketers
and bloggers need a graphic, they’ll be a lot of possibilities to search out yours. The free infographic publisher
landscape changes quite quickly, so to make positive you’re not putting your content on dead sites.

Want some extra juice? On those sites, you can look for infographics on a similar subject as yours, then
reach out to users who have accessed those infographics and ask if they’d be interested in yours. Our annual
infographic on Google’s algorithm updates (now in its fourth year) was picked up by entrepreneur, Social
Media nowadays, promoting Land and more!

3.Personal blogs of the CEO & other employees

Blogging lets you connect with your readers. Most blogs are written in a casual, conversational style that’s an extended method from what you’d see in a newspaper or magazine. And that’s true of professional blogs, too.

Using personal blogs at work — the CEO’s blog, as an example — will be the way to get content that feels natural and personal. These people can blog about their own interests, and those interests are bound to overlap with the company’s targeting.

Blogs like this also are a way to offer specific insights because certain employees will recognize things nobody else on your team knows. Suddenly, readers in a similar position at alternative firms suddenly have a reason to read this content.

Personal professional blogs can be done in one of two ways. You can provide a multi-voice blog on your company web site, either as posts within the larger company blog or as separate sections with their own visual branding. Or you can have team members blog on their own domains and occasionally refer back to the corporate blog once it’s applicable.

4. Beat the champ

How do you become the champ? By beating hundreds of could-have-been-a-contenders? No. You have to seize the top spot from the person who’s already there.

You can do the same issue with link building and SEO content marketing. Look at the content that’s already performing well in your vertical. Find a bit of content that a) you think is awesome, and b) is performing well in organic search. Drop the URL into the usual suspects — like Ahrefs or Open web site explorer — and see which websites are linking to it. Download all the linking sites into a spreadsheet.

Then, pick the post apart.

Would it work better if it were longer? If you’re viewing the “10 best ways to get a lot of traffic along with your blog,” maybe you should write the 20 best ways or the 100 best ways.

Would it work better if it were a lot of detailed? Maybe do a similar number of ways but in crazy, inch-by-inch detail.

Remember that content is content. Your content doesn’t have to be a blog post. It can be an infographic, or a YouTube video, or a Vine. It could be a stand-alone resource page. But that’s solely going to be a winner for you if you’re obtaining your content seen. Once you’ve created your super-link-worthy content, you have to reach out to the right people.

All too usually, reaching out to people is a stab in the dark. “You can be interested in one thing on these lines… ” yea, but most likely not. The success rate of those attempts is often very low.

But you already have the lowdown on the people who would be interested in content like this. Remember once you used Ahrefs, Open web site explorer or the tool of your choice to verify who was linking to the content you just improved upon? Check the spreadsheet you put along earlier, and so do a fast sanity check. Pages that don’t be, like article directories and forums (Yes, they still exist) can go.

What are you left with? A list of people who are actually very likely to be interested in your content.

5. Giving Interviews

CXOs and different staff are nice subjects for interviews. Everyone else has to produce content, too, and the word of someone within the field (especially an expert) is price a lot. So if you’re a high-level company spokesperson or a very knowledgeable subject matter expert, you’re likely to be approached more often than you’d truly prefer.

You can’t take up a suggestion for an interview and sit there like a stereotypical used car salesperson, hard-selling your own product. But you can sell your brand.

When you’re before the camera, or on the page, you are your brand. If you’re confident, insightful and open, viewers relate. Remember, even in B2B, the buying decision isn’t created by extremely sophisticated algorithms. You’re still selling to human beings.

Viewers or readers need to see you as somebody who understands the issues they’re trying to resolve. That’s partly competence and part a hard-to-define “she gets it” issue.

Interviews also provide the chance to speak directly concerning your company’s offerings. You can mention new initiatives, updates, new product or ventures. Talking about these in interviews gets them exposure. Add a link to the interview text if you’re being interviewed by email, or spell the address move into a video interview.

Recently, my colleague, Rohan Ayyar, who is alert to a lot about remote work best practices from his project management days, was interviewed along with totally different specialists by the guys at Proofhub, from that he managed to get a link to our executive branding service, Preceptist, all the while keeping it relevant and non-promotional. See what I mean?

Conclusion

It’s still possible to boost your rankings with careful strategy. Increasingly, it’s about leveraging content marketing
to improve linkability. That can be done by targeted reach, by encouraging social sharing or by the content itself to
encourage linking. But it all helps drive up the ranking. Opinions expressed during this article are those
of the guest author and not essentially search engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.