In Google We Trust
I Have to Build Trust With Who-gle?
Yes. Essentially it is the same as with any other relationship, especially if the ultimate goal is to be in charge. Trust is most certainly the pathway to Google’s heart, if there ever was such a thing. And by leveraging this understanding of trust, you can succeed with SEO — as long as you play by Google’s rules.
There are plenty of dimensions to Google’s trust, but to take a real-world scenario for a moment, let’s briefly look at the plight of landing your first job after graduating from college. Remember? Being new to your career, you naturally faced some bias. How can you expect to be hired when you have no track record? This is somewhat of a Catch-22, isn’t it? In order to start and grow in your career, you need experience, but in order to get experience, you need to show experience for quite some time, with a proven work history. Clearly, in the beginning, the odds are stacked up against us. But eventually, there is a SEO break-through.
Content is King
Quality trumps quantity every single time. Don’t focus on spinning articles or re-tweets every day, rather focus on creating quality content that delivers plenty of value for your readers, say every week. That’s what Google cares about — quality. Like this blog you’re reading, it is the “anchor content” located on my website that I will use to market on authority sites such as LinkedIn.com, Medium.com, Twitter and other highly-trafficked destinations on the web, linking back to my website. You can outrank sites that have far more age and authority due to the underlying quality of your content. Engagement levels count, so the longer visitors spend reading your content, the stronger those all-important quality ranking signals are sent to Google. Good SEO.
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
But not too many. Google wants content made for humans, not an obvious effort to rank by repeating the same words or exact phrasing. Google knows the difference. You have to work at this, or hire someone who is willing to work at it for you. The goal is to have your content sound natural and organic, and not have to force keywords. But you also want to ensure that similar phrases to your primary keyword appear enough times.
Get Mobile Ready
I feel like a repeating parrot about this, but building your website so it can be read easily across all mobile devices is a must. Mobile searches are now outpacing desktop searches, and Google is furiously focused on mobile. Ensuring that you’re conforming to Google’s wishes must become a reality. Mobile devices have become so important in our lives, you simply can’t overlook mobile usability when thinking about SEO.
Link Juice
Links to your site will happen naturally over time, and eventually drive you up the SEO ladder. It might take a very long time, but they’ll eventually come. However, to make faster progress and speed things up, you’ll want to take initiative yourself and create links to your website. Content writing on external, high-quality authority sites that link to your website content, delivers enormous amounts of powerful link juice. Focus on the content, but also focus on the links. Not low-quality links; high-quality authority links from amazing content. Like with any other success story this process takes hard work, consistency, and patience. It is time well invested as this strategy will help you rocket your site to the top of Google’s SERPs.