Do you want to know the best SEO tricks from online marketing gurus?
I’m talking Neil Patel, Brian Dean, Robbie Richards, Ramsay Taplin and Bryan Harris!
And I’m going to reveal these experts’ secrets and tricks in this article!
I analyzed the most shared and highest-traffic articles to discover the secrets of their success.
Apply these simple SEO tips for the fast growth of your own blog or website!
Bonus: Download the free spreadsheet with the results of a full analysis of TOP 5 SEO marketing experts from A to Z. You’ll be able to use these strategies fast and independently in your promotion.
If you want to know and get hints from competitors, read the Semrush Free Trial Guide for quick wins.
I know you are in a hurry, so here are the main findings from my research:
The Best SEO Tricks:
- Optimize and compress images in exchange for a faster loading time. Use Photoshop, or tools such as TinyPNG, ImageOptim, Kraken.
- Test different hosting providers and choose the fastest one. Find out where your competitors place their sites and compare the loading speed. (WebhostingHero and Pingdom will help you.)
- Write a unique CTA in headlines and in the title tag of your page. Pay attention to your competitors’ headlines when you get the results of typing keywords in the search engine. You will also understand what types of posts are the most popular.
- Describe your meta description with a call to action. It is best to limit it to 117 characters so that mobile phone users can see your full description.
- Optimize your content for long tail and other relevant queries. Analyze the content of your competitors’ pages on your queries, including what words they use. You must use all the words that are relevant to the user’s question, and what he or she (and a search engine) should expect to find on your page. A comprehensive answer will always be rewarded.
- Create high-quality, well-researched content with data and explanatory images. It won’t be easy to make your way through content marketing if you write short features. In this niche, the length of posts is very important, and each one ought to add up to a minimum of 4,000 words. Update your content so that it always remains fresh and topical. Have a look at how Robbie Richards updates his articles:
- Lead the user wisely. Keep your goals in mind when you write each post. If your goal is to sell something, create a sales tunnel, and try even the most absurd options. Sometimes success comes from where you expect it the least.
- Check your posts for any broken links from time to time. (Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the best helper!) Neither the user nor the search engine likes malfunctioning links. We access them and find ourselves face-to-face with a 404 error page, which means we will likely leave the page forever. It is essential that you customize your 404 page.
- An internal link is still a link! Do not write your posts just like that, without taking a second look. You should always have the internal structure of your blog right before your eyes. Each new post is a part, an item in your promotional strategy. Reinforce and nourish these posts with other articles, by offering internal links to the posts that are useful for you and your readers.
- Use outbound links! Do not be afraid to refer to other bloggers or influencers in your niche. Help people find the answers to their questions right on your page. This will be the first step toward building a mutually beneficial relationship.
- Don’t get too relaxed with the promotion of your posts. As far as I am aware, backlinks are still quite relevant! Even if you’ve become an expert, and your blog has a huge traffic ranking, you need to keep building partnerships with other bloggers, giving interviews, commenting on other posts in the thematic groups and communities on LinkedIn, GrowthHackers. This is business, and the rules are the same throughout. You need the team, and you definitely need assistants.
- Focus only on functioning traffic sources. Do not deplete your energy by doing everything at once. Find out where your target audience is and play off of that.
- Invest money in your future. Paid and custom images, the set of SEO tools — you have to pay for everything, and that is absolutely normal. Everything will pay off when people start paying you!
- Analyze and measure everything. As Brian Dean said,
Always start by studying the strategies of the topic experts in your niche! - Be yourself. We love individuality and idealize experts, but these are the same people who were just beginning their careers some time ago. Make mistakes and move forward, and know that hard work will always be rewarded, no matter what obstacles you face. Come up with your own SEO tricks, like Brian Dean and his legendary Skyscraper Technique.
Those people, whose posts we read on a near daily basis, reveal the intricacies of their skills. Their posts are filled with helpful pieces of SEO tips!
Related Content: Beginner’s Guide to Properly Using Rel Tags To Improve Your Site’s Rankings
Just these TOP 5 SEO marketing experts alone have 636 blog posts. On average, each post consists of more than 4,000 words!!! That means you can read one post in just 18 minutes. However, it takes more than 190 hours of reading ALONE to learn these 5 experts’ SEO tricks in their entirety!
So what should we do when there is simply too much information?
I’m the same kind of person you are. I mean, look at how much information exists on the Internet, and how fast the world moves today.
More than 2 million blog posts are written each day. What strategy should we use to stand out? What exactly should we concentrate on to get high-quality traffic? My answer is to analyze the best people and their material!
That’s why, after brushing up my knowledge — which is, OH MY GOD, 16 years old already — I’m sharing experts’ SEO tricks with you. Experts use these strategies in their blogs every single day.
The easy SEO tricks of TOP experts you’ll be learning >>
- The Best on-page SEO tricks used by SEO marketing gurus
- What should you know about the strategy of a perfectly optimized blog?
- Best SEO techniques for generating the right content
- Principal rules of writing titles for blog posts
- How online marketing experts write header tags (H1-H3)
- Even Neil Patel and Bryan Harris forget (maybe even on purpose) about meta description
- Fast advice: how to select and use keywords on the page for SEO
- How about tags (STRONG, EM, LI)?
- How to set up an internal link structure
- Use outbound links in your blogs
- How many images to use in articles and how to optimize them
- SEO-friendly URL — is it necessary?
- 404 error page — why we forget about CTA
- Give your blog the fastest hosting possible
- How much content you need to maximize visitation
- Use only great off-page SEO tricks
- Conclusion: How to use these SEO tricks and tips
I’ve conducted a thorough analysis of experts’ blogs to collect detailed information and crack their tricks.
- How to steal and borrow content and strategies in an appropriate way!
The Best On-Page SEO Secrets Used by Content Marketing Gurus
I kicked off my SEO analysis by searching the influencers’ most popular pages, that which is shared by social media users, as well as the most visited pages by means of tools like Buzzsumo and Ahrefs.
As a result, I’ve composed a list of these posts, including their homepages. I’ve gained as much data as possible (pertaining to the length of posts, backlinks and outbound links; internal links and anchors, and how they are shared on social networks; titles and headlines, the number of images, content upgrades, popups, CTA, target keywords, loading speed, experts’ hosting providers, technical errors, age of pages, sources of traffic and other data), which allowed me to understand why their blogs are so popular.
To make the results as precise as possible, step-by-step, I used more manual methods, examining each one of these pages in turn. In my opinion, at the moment, there’s no convenient and 100% effective SEO tool, which would be an indispensable aid in the analysis.
Patience and thoroughness are an analyst’s greatest tools. 🙂
These are the SEO tricks and secrets I’ve learned:
What should you know about a perfectly optimized blog?
It doesn’t take a lot of time to get a lot of traffic. Most experts’ blogs are just a couple of years old.
>> Robbie Richards – 07/07/2014
>> Ramsay Taplin – 08/08/2010
>> Bryan Harris – 10/21/2013
>> Brian Dean – 12/21/2012
>> Neil Patel – 09/30/2014
* date of publication of first blog post
For example, Neil Patel’s blog is visited by more than 400,000 users every month — he surpassed his goal! Also, backlinko.com by Brian Dean recently exceeded 100k unique visitors in a month!
The main rule of successful blogs really is 80% promotion, 20% content creation. This rule, first expressed by Derek Halpern, is a heated topic nowadays more than ever before. When you become as successful a blogger as Brian Dean, the rule becomes about 50/50. In his words, on average, the composition of an excellent post takes him 15-20 hours.
SEO tips from the king of backlinks, Brian Dean, is divided into three important stages:
Now I’ll shed some light on the first stage.
Search for the right keywords: Your traffic ranking directly depends on the keywords for which you optimize your article. If you select them in the wrong way, don’t expect traffic. If you choose highly competitive keywords, you will be fighting against the giants for your place on search pages, which is inevitably a losing situation. Assess the power of your blog objectively, as well as the weight and content of each page.
You can start selecting keywords from Google Keyword Planner (don’t forget GKP hack from Brian Dean, and insert not only seed keywords, but also any other websites and competitors’ pages — Wikipedia, Pinterest, Quora), keywordtool.io, kwfinder.com.
For beginner bloggers, it’s very efficient to follow advice and select long tail queries. You have a chance at standing out if you write topical and useful material.
The simplest recommendation for competition assessment is downloading MozBar and taking a look at how strong your competitors are.
To delve deeper into the process, you’ll need professional SEO analysis. You can’t do without it if you’d like to blog as your main source of incomes — in fact, your business demands it!
So, what SEO tips do our experts choose?
Robbie Richards wrote his first blog post in July 2014, and after just 18 posts, he’s teaching others how to reach over 200,000 site views per month.
How did he reach 305,745 views?
He chose the perfect strategy to promote his blog:
- Gorgeous evergreen content
- Long-form blog posts
- Effective SEO optimization of pages given all the latest trends
- Promotion of his posts
Let’s dig further into the topic and learn how Robbie Richards and other online experts optimize their pages.
Unrivaled practices to create the best content:
Content creation is long and difficult work, but when you know exactly what you’re doing, like Robbie Richards, you’ll get this kind of post, more than 5,000 words long and containing 85 images.
104 comments and 7,7k shares!
Excellent!
This post contains affiliate links, so we can only imagine the income Robbie gets from this one alone.
Carry on!
Let’s quickly examine, in detail, the main tricks of on-page SEO, using the example of these experts’ 5 most-shared articles.
SEO Trick #1: Main rules of writing a title for a blog post:
Never, ever forget the most important on-page SEO factor — your title tag!
1. The Title tag of all experts’ posts, in general, consists of 56 characters.
2. It has a descriptive character. You’ll clearly understand what you’ll find inside.
3. Almost always, it contains statistics, numbers, data or a list. For example:
- Content Marketing Case Study: How To Increase Traffic 272% In 30 Days (Without Spending A Penny)
- A 44-Point Checklist for Starting a Quality Blog
- 21 Actionable SEO Techniques You Can Use Right Now
- 21 Resources For Mastering Online Marketing
4. And of course, the keywords for which the blog post is optimized.
5. The position of keywords isn’t quite as important, but still try to place them toward the beginning.
6. In the majority of posts, the title duplicates H1. Only Brian Dean and Robbie Richards have certain posts that deviate from this strategy.
Like:
- How To Promote Your Blog Posts To Get 19,011 Social Shares (TITLE) >> (H1) How To Promote Your Blog Posts To Get 19,011 Social Shares (Without Spending A Penny) by Robbie Richards
- Google Keyword Planner – No-Nonsense Guide to Finding Awesome Keywords (TITLE) >> (H1) Chapter 2: How to Use the Google Keyword Planner
and
- Viral Marketing Case Study: 17,584 Visitors In One Day (TITLE) >> (H1) Viral Marketing Case Study: How a Brand New Blog Generated 17,584 Visitors In One Day by Brian Dean
In these cases, a shorter title was necessary, since Google cuts a part of it from the search results. Plus it’s more useful in CTR (when the user can read your title in full, he will be able to understand its meaning sooner and will want to follow the link to your website).
SEO Trick #2: How online marketing experts write header tags (H1-H3) for SEO
In most posts, the headline H1 is the same as the title, with an average length of 55 similar characters.
That’s why it’s very easy to understand the main keywords when you analyze the SEO of your competition.
how to launch an online course
how to rank in google
start a blog
On experts’ pages, it is located on the visible part of the screen, set off in large print and color in the general style of the blog.
All headlines attract attention, making you want to know what’s coming next.
Don’t forget the main rules of writing headlines:
- Appeal to others’ sense of curiosity!
- Appeal to the emotions, preferably via statistical data.
- Use numbers and How To’s!
You just click on their article in Google search results and start looking through the subheads.
What concerns other subheads — H2, H3, H4 — is that they are also used, and so I recommend using them as well. It will make the reading process easier, especially for scanners.
Robbie Richards doesn’t use H2 in his articles (only in the list of posts!).
On the other hand, Richards actively uses H3, like in his famous post 16 Explosive Content Promotion Strategies (H3 is used 18 times throughout the blog post.)
SEO Trick #3: Even Neil Patel and Bryan Harris forget (perhaps intentionally) about Meta Description
Of course, according to MOZ, you know that the optimal text length in meta description shouldn’t exceed 155 characters.
The majority of bloggers follow this rule, no matter what country they’re in. Anyway, we shouldn’t forget that we all use our mobile phones or tablets. In the US, according to the latest statistics internet usage from mobile phones exceeds internet usage via personal computers by 9%. Each day, we use our phones for almost 3 hours as a means of accessing digital media.
That’s why, if you want a mobile user to see your complete description in Google search results, don’t exceed 117 characters in meta description.
On average, the length of experts’ meta description is roughly 120 characters.
Brian Dean and Ramsay Taplin are well aware of this meta description secret, since they both have such descriptions, the length of which does not exceed 113 characters.
SEO Trick #4: The easy way to select and use keywords
You know how important it is nowadays to write excellent content and optimize blog posts for SEO.
How can we do even better? What should we pay attention to and prioritize?
The answer is keyword research!
Let’s see how Ramsay Taplin does it with his blog.
But first, let’s open his article Revealed: 19 Things to Know Before You Start a Blog.
According to the data from Ahrefs, this page attracts the most visitors. So what’s the secret?
Let’s examine it by looking at the keywords on the page: What phrases has Ramsay selected and used, and how has he emphasized them in the content?
TOP keywords that attract the most traffic to this page:
start a blog
starting a blog
how to blog
blogging sites
The times of repeatedly typing an exact combination of the keywords in the content have passed. I didn’t find these repetitions of the same keyword on a single page I examined. It’s simply not necessary anymore.
Nowadays related and synonymous LSI keywords rule.
Google has learned to interpret page content — its gist — by means of closely-related words or synonyms that are relevant to page title in question.
That’s why, first of all, it’s very important to understand the user’s intention when he types his query into Google: What words he will use and, most importantly, what answer he wants to get.
You can find the phrase “start a blog” just 6 times in the content of this post (an exact match!). And that’s within the 3,841 words of the article!
But single words, like “start (starting)“, have been mentioned 44 times already.
And “blog (blogging)” is repeated 200 times (including in the comments)!
Take a look for yourself!
Maybe you’ll ask: He used these words so many times, so why wasn’t he filtered by Google to show up first in the search listings?
The answer is simple.
Ramsay Taplin didn’t use exact matches of his main keywords repeatedly; rather, he used the words that are absolutely necessary when it comes to giving a full answer.
The word “blog (blogging, blogger)” repeats 200 times
post – 78
site – 46
start (starting) – 44
great – 36
content – 31
best – 17
His blog is influential (5 years and 896 root domains refer to it from 30,225 backlinks) and relevant, and on this exact page the user gets a real answer to the question of how to start a blog.
Neil Patel, in turn, is the king of long tail keywords.
In his post about Improving Your Google Rankings, you will hardly find any exact matches for keywords.
Nevertheless, you’ll see a lot of relevant words, such as:
The word link(s) repeats 202 times
site – 185
keyword(s) – 129
rank (ranking) – 113
google – 104
search – 92
post(s) – 91
article – 80
content – 78
blog – 78
seo – 63
check – 45
improve (improving) – 43
website – 37
guide – 32
anchor text – 30
traffic – 28
research – 26
increase – 26
link building – 18
penalized – 17
google ranking – 15
penalty – 13
penalties – 6
And indeed, how is it possible to decipher improving positions on Google without using words such as links, SEO, keywords, link building and Google penalty.
After spending dozens of hours on the analysis of my favorite content marketing specialists’ posts, I can see that nowadays it’s very important to select keywords as thoroughly as possible. Keywords are an integral part of the first positions during the searching process, and in terms of directing traffic to your favorite blogs.
My advice: First determine your main keywords, and then type them into Google. Analyze the top 3 search results with any keywords density tool or Chrome extension, like SEOquake This will be enough to form a list of relevant keywords and synonyms. Traffic on long tail keywords, furthermore, won’t be slow to arrive. I’m just begging you not to forget your task: to give a comprehensive answer to the user.
SEO Trick #5: What about tags STRONG, EM, LI?
In order to attract user attention, every blogger uses bold fonts, italics or a list with bullet points. Although they has not been a ranking factor for quite some time, some keywords can still be found in these tags. That’s how you highlight the information you want to reach the reader. Robbie Richards, Ramsay Taplin, Bryan Harris, Brian Dean and Neil Patel are not exceptions.
Ten years ago, a number of SEO specialists set off keywords in bold type, inserting them in almost every sentence. And it worked! But now we live in 2015, and the rules have since changed. Thank God for that!
In his epic post Bryan Harris 113 times emphasized words with tags strong, 20 em, 40 li. His intention was unrelated to the importance of keywords, but rather to make users more comfortable as they read his substantial article.
The eyes intuitively capture and process the information that has been set off.
As opposed to headings and subheadings, setting off in tags has a purely visual effect, and it helps the reader pay better attention to the key moments.
SEO Trick #6: How to set up an internal link structure
There’s a great program for analyzing sites called Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It gives users the opportunity to check their blogs for broken links, external and internal links, pages that don’t exist anymore and redirects, defining Title, H1 and a number of other features.
There’s a little trick to this strategy, which I learned rather unexpectedly for myself, as soon as I started taking a look at it. I’d like to emphasize that I still don’t know all the features of this program. There is, I will say, a limit for scanning: 500 URLs. Sometimes that isn’t enough, even if the blog has 220 articles, like Ramsay Taplin’s. The scripts are indexed, as well as many other elements.
If your goal is to learn the internal link structure of the site, you can load a list of necessary pages. (I didn’t notice any limitations on these.)
In order to identify which pages Ramsay Taplin placed internal links to specific blog posts, you need to do the following:
- Select List (found in the Mode menu)
- Press the button Upload List
- Copy links to all blog post pages in advance
- Press Pаste in the open menu
- Select OK
And that’s it!
Page scanning and all data collection will begin.
Then you should choose the page you need. For example www.blogtyrant.com/best-blog-host/, and select Inlinks in the lower window.
As a result, you’ll get the list of all pages that refer to this post — with anchors too.
In my opinion, people pay very little attention to the significance of internal links.
This is likely due to the fact that the link, whether it is internal or external, remains a link throughout. Its task is to point out the importance of the information to which it refers, which is hidden behind it.
In any case of rivalry, the correct internal interlinking can easily improve your position on Google.
According to the research conducted by Matthew Barby the percentage of exact keyword matches in anchors does not exceed 1.1%, or 20.86% of partial matches.
The same statistics can be applied to your internal link placement strategy.
Dilute them, or place them on phrases that have a particular meaning or context.
Above all else, be useful to the user.
The benefits of internal links are obvious, both for User and Google.
On the screenshot with the anchors, you’ll notice a frequent repetition of the phrase “blog hosting” — 10 times, to be precise! There are a lot of other variants of this phrase too. In total, Ramsay Taplin refers to the post “Blog Hosting Review” on 41 pages of his blog, with 32 unique anchors.
For the keywords blog hosting, this page is the second to appear on Google search results. Pretty cool, right?
It also has 211 backlinks from 28 root domains, and is beloved on social networks.
All online SEO experts’ key posts will have similar results.
Have a look:
Pay attention to the sidebars.
It’s a very powerful tool to improve the weight of your pages, so use it carefully.
Most experts use sidebars to promote the pages they want to attract the most attention to, like ultra-interesting posts that have generated a lot of buzz.
Bryan Harris, however, stopped using the sidebar not too long ago. He conducted an experiment, and without a sidebar, the indexes of his conversions increased by 26%.
It’s up to you to decide whether to use the sidebar and the links to your key posts. After all, everybody has their own goals.
SEO Trick #7: Use outbound links
In the past, bloggers were afraid of incorporating links to other sites in their blogs. They thought doing so would redirect people from their content.
Judging from my SEO experience, this was absolutely true. Multilayer systems of PageRank computation were created, like this one:
But the calculations and fear of losing weight is no longer topical. Google changed its ranking algorithms a long time ago.
Now a link to a different site is associated with redirecting the user to another related site, where he or she can find more information regarding the same topic. It’s a very logical system! Google understands it well.
After a detailed analysis of top modern online expert blogs I came to the conclusion that you should incorporate links in your blog, and a lot of them at that. Of course, it plays a significant role in the promotion strategy. Later on they might contact those they’ve mention in the article, which often leads to backlinks and sharing.
The difference in the number of internal links versus external ones in blog posts is substantial.
Just look at this:
I think it’s high time for every blogger to place links to other sites on his or her blog. That’s how we help people access the information they need.
Trust me, they will remember your blog regardless. They’ll value it even more than they would without those outside links.
In general, Neil Patel places 91 outbound links in his posts.
Robbie Richards >> 50
Ramsay Taplin >> 30
Brian Dean >> 19
Bryan Harris >> 12
*data is based on the analysis of top popular pages, with the exception of non-standard posts.
That’s terrific!
SEO Trick #8: How many images to use and how to optimize them
In the digital era, where so much information flashes before our eyes, you’ve got to stand out somehow. Among the best ways to do so is by adding images to your posts.
Many people are already aware of this trick, and use it on a larger scale. Slides, infographics, animated images and videos are frequently used.
Yes, visual information is perceived as an asset to bloggers, according to research conducted by the Optimal Targeting blog.
Our content marketing experts know this secret. They are armed and ready for battle.
It’s pretty hard work, and often bloggers turn to freelancers or virtual assistants find and properly insert images in their articles. But if you are a beginner blogger, start with canva.com.
Canva is an obligatory tool that absolutely must be in your arsenal.
In their posts, these marketing kings use so many images and screenshots that sometimes it seems impossible to spend as much time as they do on their projects. They are worth it, though, and are sure to pay off in the long run.
In his articles, Neil Patel often uses a paid stock image as his main picture. Take a look at this, for example:
Ramsay Taplin prefers images from the photostock Dreamstime.
He invests his money in this kind of content, which is the right thing to do.
The better the image, the more likely your post will stand out on social media. It’ll be sure to gather more likes and retweets than ever before!
Let’s see how many images our experts use (and in what format), and how they optimize them in their posts.
As you can see, there are loads of images in the content. Most of them are in PNG format, which you can learn more about here.
Unfortunately, even experts forget to optimize and compress their images from time to time, although they recommend doing exactly that in many of their articles.
For example, look at this page:
or
Among SEO experts, one of the most popular SEO tips regarding image optimization is naming the file and signing in ALT tag.
Out of 5 experts, only Brian Dean follows this rule consistently, with almost every image.
Let’s open the HTML code for one of his recent posts SEO Campaign Case Study: 1,117 Social Shares and 15% More Organic Traffic (In 2 Weeks) and see.
Dean not only describes the image in ALT tag, but also uses keywords in the file name.
It’s a great practice! It will certainly bear its fruit in the form of minimal image traffic. Besides, it informs the search engine what the page is about.
The following is much more common:
Not so good, Patel! The name of the file is simply imageXXX and alt is empty. You will not get the crops in traffic in such a way.
SEO Trick #9: SEO Friendly URL. Is it necessary?
The URL of your page is part of the puzzle in response to the visitor. One of the first things people see in the search results are your title, description and URL.
Together all these characteristics influence user behavior and the desire to click. The higher the CTR is, the more you benefit from Google. If other parameters are equal, your page will rank higher up in the search results.
Rand Fishkin wrote an excellent article called 15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs. Be sure to read it!
First and foremost, take care of the user, along with the readability of your URL. Google will appreciate it.
Let’s see how the experts are doing with URLs:
At the moment, everyone uses the master key when forming a URL…
…except for Neil Patel, whose URL is generated automatically based on the name of the post and the date of publication.
URLs typically consist of 3 to 5 words, which keeps them short and readable.
SEO Trick #10: 404 error page. Why do we forget about CTA?
How many broken links or pages do you have even though they no longer exist?
Do you know that people make misprints when they give links to you?
All this leads people to your 404 page. What do they see there? Normally this:
This means that the page in question is nowhere to be found. The user will likely leave your blog — maybe for good.
When you see the following…
…you are likely to want to download this free eBook, which will result in your subscribing to Bryan Harris. It is no less important than your About page on your blog. Many people forget about it, and experts are no exception.
Indirectly, but this page also affects your page ranking in the search results. After all, behavioral factors have always existed.
It is possible to find 404 error pages on your blog with the help of any option:
- Google Analytics. Go to Behavior → Site Content → Content Drilldown and look for “404” in the search
- Google Search Console. Go to Crawl → Crawl Errors
- Use the program Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Enter your URL and find in the table Status Code, go to the tab Response Codes.
- Identifying which page has a broken link is very easy. Just find the tab Inlinks in the lower window.
- BrokenLinkCheck. This is an excellent and free tool to find broken links.. You can also find broken links on the websites to which you give links.
SEO Trick #11: Use the fastest hosting
You may have read the article How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line from Kissmetrics. In case you haven’t, take a quick look, and then come back here.
Speed.
Is it still a factor nowadays?
Internet provider speeds have grown enormously in recent years. Just a few years ago, they seemed a fairytale, but now fast internet speed has become a reality.
But really, you shouldn’t relax with your blog. Our lives have quickened over the years too. Now we do not wait, for anything; we tear the web apart to access information, valuing every moment.
You type the query into Google, open several sites quickly, look them through, scan the headlines and then…
If your content has not loaded in its entirety, users are most likely waiting on great images and styles, background and icons, menus and the sidebar. What will we do about this, you and I? Most users would leave the site.
Ideally, it shouldn’t take more than 2 seconds for you page to load!
There are many tips on how to improve the loading speed of your pages, as well as a number of plugins.
I’ll tell you what hosting experts tend to use.
What host to choose for your blog?
A blogger’s choice of host affects a number of factors: How quick the response is, where it is located, what software is installed on it, and more.
Many companies claim to be the best, saying that they offer the fastest hosts for SEOing your WordPress blog. But is that really so?
My advice: Check the main keywords in Google search results and find competitors. Make a list of them, and check what their loading speed is via pingdom here. And to find out what hosts they use, check them out here.
Do you want to know which hosts the best bloggers use, and what their loading speed should be?
You should take into account that these pages are huge, 4,000 words on average, and with dozens of pictures!
The best loading speed around for blog posts rests with Brian Dean.
How did he manage to accomplish this?
The answer is here https://www.linode.com, and in Cloudflare CDN.
In contrast to other experts, Brian Dean has a virtual cloud server with SSD drives that are configured for his needs. The advantage by no means a standard set of installed software.
If you know a programmer or system administrator with the knowledge on how to configure the server and all corresponding security measures, turn to him or her.
Otherwise, find one yourself, and pay him or her to install the necessary software on the server according to your needs!
This will help you achieve a fantastic loading speed. It’ll be a great investment in your future.
SEO Trick #12: How much content do you need
The personal experience of Neil Patel shows that posts longer than 1,500 words get 68% more tweets and 22% more likes on Facebook.
Ramsay Taplin also wondered whether it is better to write long posts and came to the conclusion that it is crucial that the content adds value, and that it’s not worth chasing the perfect length.
I agree.
HOWEVER, studying his 6 pages shows clear dependency.
If you read a lot of content marketing bloggers like I do, then you are bound to come across some advice on using long form content.
It is mentioned in numerous posts that there should be more than 2,000 words per post.
This image with the statistics from serpIQ was used in articles by almost everyone who spoke about the ideal length of a blog post. However, this article was written three years ago!!!
I studied the most-shared and highest-traffic pages from the content experts themselves to determine the ideal length of an article.
They are the ones shared the most often on social networks, and they rank highest in the search.
Here are the results:
Honestly, I did not expect to see such figures.
If you are involved in internet marketing and want to compete with Robbie Richards and Neil Patel, then you obviously should play by these rules.
The average length of the blog posts I analyzed is over 4,000 words per post!!!
WOW!
Personally, I appreciate extensive articles that cover a topic in its entirety. Each time I get a newsletter from my favorite experts, I read it with immense pleasure. After all, there will be knowledge and experience necessary for us bloggers to achieve our goals.
Should I write dozens of posts per month to be as successful as these experts are?
No, definitely not.
Brian Dean and Robbie Richards are perfect examples.
There are 32 posts and 9 detailed guides on keyword research and link building on Backlinko. Brian Dean’s first post was published in late December 2012. It turns out he published just 1 post per month on his blog.
And Robbie Richards, with only 15 posts, found success in just one year.
Neil Patel did the same, a genius of content writing performance. In one of his blogs he published 112 long posts over the course of 14 months. This resulted in 123,867 visitors in October.
SEO Trick #13: Use only great off-page SEO
You have written an excellent article, selected keywords, pressed publish in your blog and…
Nothing.
Nothing will happen if you do not pay attention to off-page SEO.
What does SEO success consist of? What should you prioritize?
In SEO, off-page optimization implies work with external factors that have an impact on your blog, or on a particular page.
You can — and should — control them, especially when you have just started your blog. It is important to spend PLENTY of time on your technique.
The purpose of off-page SEO is to get links to your information. When you see stunning content, in any niche, it will accumulate links from other websites, or people will share the content via social networks. It must be noted, however, that this does not happen by itself.
Promotion should be controlled and direct.
I’ll tell you about some of the SEO techniques that are often used by the experts nowadays, and about the techniques these experts used at the beginning of their careers.
SEO Trick #14: How many backlinks do you need
They are necessary.
You cannot go without them.
Remember this, and always keep this thought in your head each time you write a post. Do not let the thought that you have already written the best article, that readers will love you and that you will rank high in the search engine, lead you astray.
No.
This will not happen unless you are already an influencer, with a large base of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of visitors.
Let’s see how many external links there are to our experts’ most popular pages:
These numbers of inbound links are HUGE.
Yes, they are well-known people in the world of internet marketing. People give most links themselves. In fact, in doing so they boost their own authority, at least in the eyes of the reader. And yet, these people do a lot of work to promote their posts.
Guest posts, infographics, connections with other influencers via email, partnership via social networks, and the search for people who are interested in the topic at hand, and communicating with them through a variety of sources — this may sound like a lot of work, but it’s what experts do on a daily basis.
My advice: If you’re at the very beginning of the road to success, start with an SEO analysis of your competitors. Just steal their links! Try to locate there. Currently there are countless tools that can help you, including SEMrush, Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs and Buzzsumo. You do not have to buy the paid versions. The data they will give you for free will be enough to compile a list of interested people with whom you should get in touch.
SEO Trick #15: Activity on the social media and its importance
Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Pinterest accounts are a must.
In which social networks should you be the most active if you are involved in internet marketing?
* data is based on the statistics of top expert blog post shares
Let’s open our experts’ social networking pages — those from which they get the most shares.
Now let’s examine the winners:
#1 Twitter
Internet marketing specialists love Twitter! On average, their content gets retweeted twice as much as they receive Likes on Facebook. If you’re looking for online marketing specialists, they are all on Twitter, and they’re very active.
And yes, the traffic from Twitter is much less than from your email list.
If you are a beginner and, just like me, you are going to climb the Mt. Olympus of internet marketing, you ought to pay special attention to this source of traffic. Twitter is ideal for networking, and communicating in general.
It’s easy to find influencers and experts in any niche, by using the tools on Followerwonk or Klout.
In my opinion, the principle of Twitter is perfect: People can get in touch with one another easily and fast.
And Twitter’s character limit accommodates the pace of modern life in the best way possible. Rushing along, running and reading on the go — what could be more convenient than just 140 characters?
Do you want to write more? Write a personal message, where the limit is 10,000 characters.
Twitter, I love you!
#2 Facebook
Aside from Neil Patel, none of the top 5 experts pays much attention to his Facebook page.
Most of Patel’s Facebook content consists of inspirational quotes.
Furthermore, I have checked that photos, and not posts, reach the bulk of your audience on Facebook. People share photos more willingly, and they Like and comment on them more often than they would a simple post.
I suppose that since the traffic from this social network is minimal, and that it doesn’t have any outstanding results in the internet marketing niche, the development is given less time. Perhaps the key to this difficult lock has yet to be found, which means that you and I have a real chance of occupying this niche.
In other areas, including entertainment, Facebook is an extremely effective tool. However, that has yet to be the case for internet marketing.
Does the number of Likes directly influence your post ranking in Google?
It has a minimal effect for SEO, but a huge effect as part of a behavioral factor — if your blog is really visited, and your articles read.
SEO Trick #16: Partnership relations: you are not the only one on the internet
To be successful, you must know people in the right places. They, and they alone, will promote your blog and your brand.
Let’s take a look at how Brian Dean takes advantage of this method. Recently, he held a workshop with SumoMe, in the format of a webinar.
I’m pretty sure that nearly all the 1,000 webinar participants have used the link to the landing page.
Brian Dean didn’t stop there, as he gave an interview to Pat Flynn about backlinking.
It’s all part of promotion and SEO, as links, and behavioral factors only increase from such collaboration.
SEO Trick #17: Guest posts: all experts take advantage of this
When I was doing research on where they were published, I was surprised to find out how much Neil Patel writes.
You cannot even imagine how much!
That was what made me hesitate a bit. I wondered whether he really wrote all those articles himself.
Does Neil Patel cheat?
In April 2015, he wrote that he publishes about 100 guest posts per year, which striking in and of itself.
I probed a little further and looked at Buzzsumo, removing his other blogs from the results.
Buzzsumo found about 500 guest posts for Neil Patel.
And they all were published within a year!
My advice: I can only say one thing — once the king of content writes so many guest posts, it really means something. Do not think that Google disapproves of guest posts. Google is against user fraud and manipulation of link weight values. If your site is relevant to your blog, and your guest posts adds value for the reader, there will be no negative consequences. Let’s see how often other experts use guest posts in their off-page SEO.
Robbie Richards >> 5х
Ramsay Taplin >> 30х
Bryan Harris >> 10х
Brian Dean >> 50х
Neil Patel >> 300х???
Where do they place them?
I got a pretty big list of guest posts — you can download it here (no email required*).
The main sites in which experts in online marketing publish their guest posts are as follows:
I hope this list will be useful for you.
Links to their blogs will be in a brief biography section at the bottom of the page, just like you see here:
Conclusion: How to use these SEO tricks and tips
In order to rank high in search engines, and to get a lot of organic traffic, you must observe the rules of search engine optimization — both the game and the business.
You should listen to expert advice, test their strategies yourself and constantly learn new things.
My name is Michael Pozdnev, and I’ve done my best to reveal all SEO tricks of five SEO marketing experts. All it took was a thorough analysis of their blogs.
It took me more than 60 hours to perform this SEO analysis:
And now it’s your turn.
The sooner you start implementing these tips, the sooner you’ll see results!
I put all the data in an Excel spreadsheet, which you can download and use. There you will find all the details and SEO tricks of the most successful content marketing experts: what type of posts are the most popular in the niche of online marketing, and how long posts should be to get a significant amount of backlinks, sharings and comments; expert contact details, their mistakes, loading speed, how to choose keywords for your article, selecting the best headings possible and the secrets of on-page optimization these experts have used in their most popular posts.
You can use all this data when promoting your own blog or site! Click here to access your SEO research results immediately.
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