Pin me, please 😉
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.
Pin me, please 😉
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!
Pin me, please 😉
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.
Wow, thanks for including me in the article Michael! Honored to be featured alongside some of the people I look up to and have learned a lot from over the past few years.
Crazy amount of work went into this. I’ll need to grab a coffee and dive in. I want to go back through some of my older content and start optimizing now 🙂
Cheers!
Thank you, Robbie. I think everyone will agree that your work is amazing.
You, Ramsay and others inspired me to start this blog. With a lot of experience in marketing, I’m a beginner blogger. And you are right! I’ve spent quite some time to create this article, but the experience is priceless.
Thanks for the support!
” King of content – Neil Patel ” what a writing style you have!
If he is content king, you are the minister of content.
Awesome info graphics.
Post is too long so I have read the info graphics and pintrest and landed on your blog.
Yes Now I also want to be a blogger.
Cheers Nekraj
Thanks, Nekraj. Let’s become the best bloggers!
Thanks so much for doing this. You’ve got some really good insights here – a lot of them I hadn’t considered at all to be honest.
Going to have a big read of it today and see if I can make any improvements to my site.
Nice work!
Ramsay
Thank You, Ramsay! This is my 1st blog post.
You are one of my heroes.
You can always improve because some things can slow down the progress.
I really learned a lot from you, reading your articles and doing this analysis.
Hopefully, my work will be useful
I have just started taking blogging more serious and this is just mind-blowing! (Got linked here through the fb page of blogtyrant.)
This is probably one of the most detailed and comprehensive posts on blogging I’ve ever read.
This is definitely one of those gems, everyone should read.
I really like the dept of your research and immediately installed a 404 plugin to get people redirected.
And I’ll definitely be re-reading this post a few times.
Thanks for the awesome recommendations.
Kind regards,
Rich
Rich, thanks a lot for the positive comment.
I did my best to write this post as detailed as I could to help bloggers with understanding the techniques, used by experts. Following the rules is very important if someone wants to succeed.
There is nothing better for SEO, than using the same tricks that are used by gurus.
Great info. Lucky me I came across your site by
chance (stumbleupon). I’ve saved as a favorite for later!
Thank you! I hope you’ll read the article later and will use the tips and tricks to promote your website
Hi Michael,
Great post, I’ve shared it with many peers. One minor comment on::
“The average length of the blog posts I analyzed is over 4,000 words per post!!!”
Do keep in mind that these blog posts usually get hundreds of comments 😉
I would like to send you an email, is this the correct one?
Hello Raul,
thanks for the comment, yes it’s a correct email
Hey Michael,
This post is ridiculous – in a good way!
There’s so much analysis I’m gonna have to bookmark it and come back from time to time to brush up on all of it. I can only imagine how long it took to put all of this together. Great work!
Shared it on twitter.
Keep it up
-Travis
Hello Travis,
Thanks!!! You’re awesome!
It took me more than 90 hours 🙂
Wow, amazing explained. you really did great work. .
Thanks for stopping by! Much appreciated.
Hi Michael,
Wow man, just wow. This post is incredible, the work you put into compiling this and the tremendous value you provide here.
You mention great points and I am definitely going to take my time to go through them and start implementing them on my site.
Again thank you so much for writing this post, I am going to share this for sure!
Regards,
Joep
Thank you so much for your feedback and sharing. I really appreciate your support!
I tried to analyze as much information as possible in order to get these data. I hope many people will get a clear idea of which SEO basics are better to apply. After all, experts have already worked their way up and it’s ok if we steal a bit some of their secrets.
Hi Michael
Actually I found your blog by the outreach email you sent to me, so I came in and is attracted by the great value content.
By the way, could you guys do the SEO service? I am busying in the business every day, I don’t have rich time in the website promoting. You can send me a personal email at: frankouyang1@gmail.com. 🙂
Hello Frank!
Thank you!
I hope I will be able to help you with my advice through the articles.
Unfortunately, at the moment I don’t have free time at all, I’m totally focused on this blog. But I am very pleased that you asked me.
Mike,
You have covered so much of insights in this post and you earned my extra vote on the presentation. Kudos 🙂
Thank you Naveen! Much appreciated.
Hi, Michael!
Thanks for this truly scientific post, it is really insightful. I am now trying to break grounds with my new blog – http://www.scimax.biz which was originally meant to be a marketplace. But at the time being I do not have enough time to build an e-commerce (as it takes a lot of off-line back office work), so I simply started a blog about non-IT startups and practical innovations. However, having analyzed your post I see how far I am from now from the goal as my blog is virtually non-visible at the moment.
I would appreciate if you could give a simple action advice for this beginning stage of blogging experience – does it make sense to develop my blog as a second-priority service of the marketplace service website, or, it is better to put my blog at the front page and make it the key of the website? Because I will surely not be able to keep up with marketing both sides properly…. Thanks in advance for suggestions.
Thank you for such a feedback to my post! I am really glad to hear it.
You asked a very interesting question about priorities. In my opinion you have to concentrate on something you like most of all. If it is blogging, then choose it and make it on the front page. If it is the marketplace, then you are to organize and consider the sales funnel from the visitor of your blog to the buyer. In both cases, try to get subscribers’ emails.
We all are pushed for time, so it’s better not to waste our time doing something we do not like.
…WOW. This is a freaking incredible post! I’m going to have to grab more coffee now and get to work! 😀
Wess, glad you liked it. Hope it helps!
That is a phenomenal post; and your first!? Some brilliant insights here. Particularly useful is the list of guest posts in Excel, which I’ve just downloaded. I know how much work goes into posts like this, so, thanks! Best, Dave
Thank you David. It is very pleasant for me to read such feedback about my work. It took me plenty of time, but every minute was worth the results.
Yes, this is my first post. I have more than 15 years of experience in SEO and website creation, but now I decided to take up blogging. I want to be able to help others as well as ask for help 🙂
Hi Micheal
That was a phenomenal job. The guys you chose are blogging masters for sure. I’ve tried my best to learn from them but you’ve really broken it down.
I’m going to have to spend an afternoon re-reading your post and taking notes.
Can’t wait to see what you come up with next.
Clement
Thank you so much for such feedback on my work! This is very cool and pleasant. Yes, in my opinion, these bloggers are the best in the internet marketing. I wanted to find out how they arranged everything and share this information with others. My next post will be about SEO audit. I will be very grateful if you subscribe to my updates. I hope we will be able to help each other!
Oh wow such a great post. But the portions like backlinks and social media that attracts me more
Gaurav, glad you found the article helpful.
This is one of the best articles about SEO which I have ever read. It’s really helpful and explains every aspect of important stuff in optimization for search engines. Thank you a lot 😉
Hey Marko,
Thank you! That’s cool, I really appreciate it!
hey .Michael
this is very very insightful post . I can’t wait the next post
thanks ,Michael
Thanks for your feedback on my work. I tried very hard to make this post as good as possible. Nowadays it is very important to know the technical aspects of SEO. The best thing we can do is to look to experts.
Great job, Michael!
Thank you! I’m very pleased to hear it from you.
I have to admit, when you initially told me about this post I was a bit sceptical at first. After reading your entire post I’m ever glad I read it.
The amount of detailed analysis you’ve done, the research and the sheer work put into this one post is absolutely incredible. There’s not any other way to put it. I think I’m going to share this on twitter. It’s truly worth reading.
A sincere Thank You!
Thank you so much! I’m very flattered with such a feedback on my work. This is my first post and I tried very hard to make it as good as possible. If you are big on blogging in the sphere of internet marketing, it is important to know the rules by which this market plays. The analysis gave me a clear picture of what is happening, what key points gurus use. I’m going to apply the same key points I discovered during the analysis. Therefore, these SEO tips will be useful for many other bloggers and marketing specialists.
I am very glad that now I have one more friend 🙂 Thanks for your support! You can count on my help.
Very Detailed
I came to your blog from backlinko post comment of yours.
and i am lucky that i found it today as your post is really very detailed and contained great amount of knowledge to grab ,i am half way yet will read it all
keep posting Michael
Yes, I have added my observations to Brian’s study. I think they will be helpful to anyone who reads him. That’s great that you visited my blog! And thank you for your kind words about my work. Become my subscriber and my friend 🙂
Michael, first, let me thank you for all the hours you invested on this. High quality value all the way through. Not only do you get value behind the experts that have shaped our industry, the fine details and insights all gathered in one piece is amazing. I’ll be sharing this to my network, really high quality Michael. You covered it all! Amazing.
Thanks, Richard!
I was happy to find out that you liked my work.
This is the first post in my life. It took me plenty of time to prepare for it, to conduct the research and so on. It is very useful to have the information on how the best experts use SEO at hand. Who else can we learn from and snoop on, if not from them? Having done this work on the analysis, I realized how to promote my blog in the best way. I think my observations will be useful for any blogger in any niche.
Thanks again!
Great insights Michael, You have shown what experts are missing ex like image optimization, page speed etc.. Really a great work 🙂
Deepak, thanks for your comment! Yes, we all make mistakes, it’s fine. On the plus side we have a possibility to correct them when we know about them.
Hey Michael,
This was a fantastic post with a lot of good insights. I follow almost all of these guys/blogs mentioned and I can still walk away with a lot of good action items for my company’s blog.
Awesome work!
Thanks Emil! I’m very glad that we got acquainted. Just like you, I follow every new article of these great experts. Where else can you get knowledge, if not from the best ones? We just have to remember to apply it 🙂
Hey Michael, your email brought me here! 🙂
Long content to read but totally worth it! I really learned a lot from this post and I’m looking forward to your next great one.
I’m very glad that I got in touch with you, Jeric! I hope we will be able to help each other. Thank you for your positive words about my article. It was hard to create it, but it was worth it! Don’t forget that you can send me your articles or questions. I shall do everything in my power!
Wow – that’s a real lot of insight in a single post, there’s lots of lessons to be learned from these experts.
One thing I tend to find a bit of issue with though when we look at the “celebs” of the online world is this. They’ve already got a heck of a reputation and lots of clout – so they’re bound to attract an audience (and backlinks) with anything they do.
The mere mortals like us on the other hand – our job is much harder unfortunately. We still have to build the awesome content, the reputation, and then get people to give us backlinks.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying, life comes a bit easier when you’re popular already.
Davis, thank you for the interesting thoughts!
Yes, I agree that it’s much more difficult for us. Therefore it is very important to begin building relationships with other bloggers. This support can help to get more links and sharings. Moreover, it is received from ordinary people, not celebrities. This process is much more complicated and time-consuming, but I think the result is bound to be. I’m applying this method to get new friends right now. I’ve already achieved some results. If you’re interested, I’m publishing the article on how to get traffic, new friends and links soon.
Hi Michael,
for sure – I’d love to work with you on future articles. Feel free to reach out to me, you’ve got my details.
David
Ok, David!
A great article containing a lot of SEO tips that anyone could implement.
The one that will most likely change what I do would be about limiting meta descriptions to 117 characters now. Since so much data has shown that mobile traffic has overtaken desktop in the past year mobile becomes a bigger factor for SEO each day.
Thanks, Anthony, I am also sure that my tips can help any website or blog to get the most out of your SEO. Indeed, nowadays there are a lot of mobile users and we need to be prepared for them 🙂
I didn’t realize how many blogs were written daily! Thanks for putting blog writing into perspective and thanks for the great post.
Indeed, a huge number of articles are written every day. It’s still possible to achieve good results with ordinary content in many niches. In the niche of online marketing there should be something more serious and interesting.
Hey Michael,
Superb post here.
This thing is gigantic . I’m speechless. I can only imagine how much time you put into this. Which makes me appreciate it more because it’s THAT good.
That stat about Neil and those guest posts are astonishing. I have no idea how he finds time of write all that. But that’s constant promition and brand building.
Really great job with this post. I need to implement some of these tricks. Definitely.
– Andrew
Thank you, Andrew, for your feedback. Yes, I spent a lot of time for analysis. I really wanted to understand SEO tricks used by the best online marketing specialists myself, and share this information with other marketing specialists, bloggers.
I think Neil has the team as it is physically impossible to create so many masterpieces. Conducting research for the article, finding images, formatting, inserting into WordPress – it takes me a tremendous amount of time. Gaining some experience, I hope to increase my speed and to find assistants.
Feel free to contact me when needed!
This is one of the comprehensive and informative blog post, really great details and insight. Keep up the good work 🙂
Thanks, Mazhar!
It is one of the greatest blog on seo optimization I have ever read..It give all the basic fact of optimization protocol..Better seo practice will definitely leads to better result..
Hi Michael,
And awesome post indeed.
I came to know about your blog via Backlinko’s share!
The blog design is smooth and awesome. Thanks for sharing this info!
~ Ahmad
I tried my best to do this blog awesome 🙂 Thanks, Muhammad!
Hi Michael,
what a nice article. Best article I have ever read. You have includes all the things about SEO optimization. It’s like a book on SEO optimization. you have elaborated it amazingly.
I would like to say thank you for sharing such a great areat article..
Thanks alot
Naveen
I’ve tried very hard, Naveen! I’m glad that you appreciated my work. It’s always necessary to take the best from the best people. I put a lot of effort to this article, and I’m very pleased to know that it’s useful.
Hi Michael!
I’m glad I found your blog and this post. I realize now that there is an entirely different approach to writing articles. Thank you – excellent job! I will be happy to learn something new from your new materials
I’m trying very hard to do my best! I looked through your blog and noticed that you’re a Genesis developer, so I’ve got a couple of questions for you, could you please contact me via email?
Just… Amazing great article. I didn’t know your blog, but now I’m a fan!
Thx Michael
I’m glad that you found my blog! I’ll be writing equally amazing articles. Thank you for becoming my subscriber. Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask!
Such a nice information. It will helpful for me to improve my ranking and to build more backlinks on my website.
Thanks
Great post, as we know there is a lot of information about this and i m so glad find this reading ,, many thanks for Michael.
Hi Michael,
I”m so impressed with your article that I’ve written an email to you thanking you for it!
Thank you so much for inviting me to read it!
Thanks, Charles! Feel free to reach out if you have any specific questions!
Wow, you put a lot of time into that one Michael. Not only good information, but laid out perfectly. This is definitely the direction SEO is heading, great job.
I really good article with a lot of information. I found the advices about how to optimize images and the 15 SEO tricks really useful.
Very useful SEO tricks. Thank you so much for putting them all together here. Will apply some on my site.
cheers!
Thanks, Andrew! Let me know if I can help you out with anything
Michael – I’m sure you’ve spend many hours to compile this post having so many facts and figures. Much appreciated !
It is really helpful article specially because you’ve included big guns such as Neil Patel, Ramsay etc.
Thanks and keep up the good work.
Sunil Singh
PS: Hope they don’t mind you’re revealing their strategies. Haha ! JK.
Yes, Sunil, I spent more than 60 hours, but it was worth it. Look at the results of my four posts 🙂 They weren’t opposed, they even thanked me as I had managed to find the mistakes that they could correct.
Hey Michael,
I love this post… In fact I just love your blogging style in general. Extremely data-driven and packed full of visuals.
Your long-tail keyword breakdown of Ramsay’s blog post is epic, but also kind of confronting because there is so much more I could be doing in this space. I wish I could think like this!
Cheers,
Will B
It’s very pleasant for me, Will! Sometimes it seems to me that the posts I create are too lengthy, and nobody’s gonna read them 🙂
Hey Michael,
Jeez man. Your posts are insane! In a good way 😉
Excuse me while I spend the next month trying to adopt the strategies you presented.
Hey Ayodeji, thanks for the kind words! I’m so happy 🙂
Awesome Tricks 😀
I just Love your Blog 🙂
Hi Ali, thanks for stopping by!
Amazing words are explained by you,We getting a nice explanation about seo experts with their tricks of seo and present our blog with hosting tips are nice to read
Wow – thanks for the incredibly comprehensive post. Always good to take idea from the people who’ve actually seen success. I liked your emphasis on making sure to answer the readers questions naturally instead of just focusing on keyword stuffing.
Hey, Eden, you’re absolutely right, and thanks for the kind words!
Thanks for sharing this awesome article with us.
Very long & informative post. You shared really great details and insights.
You’re welcome 🙂 Glad you enjoyed the post.
Thanks for this, very helpful indeed!, keep it up
Great Trick, Loved it as It’s very helpful for me.
Thanks, Iwannabeblogger!
Great post!
What tools do you use as a content writer? To catch traffic, I mean, you have to do basic keyword research of sorts to know what search trends and articles doing better than others? How do you do list of Search suggestion, etc.? Pick headings and titles? I’ve been using auto suggest tools to generate ideas for my next piece of content (sg.serpstat.com) and used “questions only” filters to see what questions users put into Google. But when my content is ready (passed copyscape.com and everything) what tactics should I follow and SEO steps take to reach maximum exposure?
Thank you.
I use Google Docs, Evernote, and Grammarly.
In keyword research, the most important are to evaluate the difficulty level of promotion and competitors’ authority. For this, I use KWFinder and MozBar. The tactics of promotion depend on your competitors, it’s important first to analyze how they got into Google TOP 10 and evaluate your possibilities.
It’s important to be honest with yourself when you answer such questions as: Will you be able to get backlinks, shares? How? Is your article better than other articles in TOP 10?
Success in SEO is the best content on the topic you picked and quality backlinks to it from other resources with high authority level.
Hey Michael,
Very effective. Informative blog for me. Thanks for contacting these SEO Experts. I believe that it is very important to monitor analytics in order to identify the top performing posts in terms of organic traffic. As a search engine coach, I always suggest people to see SEO as a marketing process apart from the technical aspects.
Learned a lot from this. Keep sharing .Bookmarked! Great, actionable tips
Have a great week ahead. Happy Blogging 🙂
Thanks, Pavitra!
I appreciate the disparate prospectives represented. With SEO everyone seems to have a different perspective which is actually a good thing as you are able to in this case better understand another professional opinion on the mechanics of SEO which in the end makes us all better.
Thanks for your comment. I agree with your opinion.
That Just Awesome Content You Wrote There Just Love The Way you explain all in infographics. Very long & informative post. Best Really great details and insights. Thanks You Soo Much, (Y)
I’m glad that you like it, Sara! Don’t forget sometimes to use these tips 🙂
wow.. great share ,, love it, keep sharing
Thanks for the feedback – much appreciated!
What an Informative Epic Post with sensitive Info Graphics. This got me refreshing my niched-blog. Thanks, But I have got a question to ask.
If I change my Targeted Country in Google Search Console from initial to International, will this hurt my Blog Ranking in the changed country??? Thanks.
What impact does social media have on SEO. Can you stack the social properties to get more power to the main website?
I believe that there is no direct impact.
Michael, it’s my first comment in you’r blog. Thes tricks are the key to improve our SEO, thank you. Keep roll-on!
Hi Micheal,
This was the best SEO tips I have read till now in 2017…just want to ask how much time you took to write this article? you have really written a very well researched article….keep posting such helpful post…Thanks for sharing..!!
Arvind
more than 60 hours of research and 40 to writing 🙂
Seriously, Awesome post. As of now as a blogger, I am following SEO that the only WordPress is suggesting.However, SEO can be applied can be applied in much broader way. Thanks for explaining each and everything in detail. We will follow the same and share our results soon.
Thanks, Ustav! Sure, let me know how it goes. But SEO is a long-term game 🙂
Hi Michael
Just a quick one.
How in the first place you got such a topic idea?
I mean there are so many topics to choose and you know nowadays its damn hard to blog about interesting topic.c(Like this post) Competition is fierce.
And how long roughly does it take to network(your bff commenter technique) before you outreach to Promote This amazing post?I mean the preparation time.
Last one.
I always see a lot of value packed data driven images or sources in those top notch content..Is there a tool or like search operator command for finding them?Like statistics,pie charts,graphs etc.Example say I blog about obesity and like to draw a reliable source of demographics to back up my statement.
To me this post is a yummy recipe for blogging.
And you are a Creative Chef.
Look forward to your next sumptuous treat.
Yeah it’s all about whipping a good delicious meal but your guests will never know how much prep and efforts you have put into it .
Salute!
I wanted to get noticed instantly.
The best way is to do something useful to more authoritative bloggers.
Because my strength is SEO, I decided to analyze some experts’ blogs. In order to find their secrets and maybe some mistakes that I can report to them.
After that, I did my keyword research to find the top keywords for this post.
But I overestimated myself a bit because the competitors with the query “seo tricks” are very powerful and it’s very hard for a new blog to compete against them.
For six months I was trying to get noticed by the experts.
BFF commenter technique didn’t require much time. I was finding interesting articles written by commenters and sharing them on Twitter. After one week I was sending my outreach emails.
Unfortunately, I don’t know such a resource with statistics. For the last 2.5 years, I’ve been saving all interesting data in Evernote and then rechecking the data that suits me when writing a new blog post.
I really like the formula 60:40 for content writing, thanks for sharing. I need to change my mind set now!
Hey , I Am an Event Blogger. Those tips above are focused on long term blogs or websites. Can you suggest tips or tricks more focused on event blogging?
Sorry, Chakradhar, but I can’t help. I’m focusing only on strategies for a long term blogs.
Ok . Thank you for your time.
Hi Michael, a nofollow link from authority site and a dofollow link from low authority site which will give more ranking? I’m building links from mixed sites but not getting desired results.
A dofollow link is always winning and bring the best results.
Brian Dean of Backlinko is the best. He is one to find the broken link building methods which helped millions of SEO experts in ranking their clients’ websites. Not only this the amount of time & effort he puts on while doing a case study of any topic is enormous. I am a true follower of his work and always learn latest trends in this industry from him. Thanks for sharing.
Yes, I also love him. 🙂
Those Tips Are Simply Amazing, And Very Helpful For Newbie’s.
Regards.
Aqib.
Glad you liked it, Aqib. Do not forget to act!
This post is enough to learn a lot. You have done a great job by putting an effort in gathering the great lines by the most influencing bloggers. It’s Brian Dean when it comes to link building and it’s Neil Patel when it comes to Writing, Love :D.
Great work Michael!
I just started to learn about SEO, so I’m reading every article which helps me to improve my knowledge and skills. You’ve merged all the basic and advance SEO tricks and experts views in this article.
Thank you very much for sharing this.
Hi Michael,
This post is really wow thanks for sharing every information in detail with the report. This article made to learn all SEO tips basic to advance thanks again.
This post is enough to learn a lot that is best all time
Thanks, Pradip! I will conduct a new investigation soon.
Amazing article. I found your article more interesting and useful as a tool which could help me explore the SEO field. Thank you very much for sharing.
You’re welcome, Hogan!
Unfortunately, there are too few in-depth articles on the Internet. I tried not only to carry out analysis but also to give SEO advice to my reader.
Hey Michael is this your first post ? or you written somewhere before ? you write very well .
thank you for such a great post .
Nishant
Yes, this is my first post, Nishant. I did not write anywhere else. But I read a lot!
Michael,
Awesome article man! What I learned most here is to keep researching your competitors and find out whats working and then just do that – you don’t need to re-invent the wheel so to speak. I’m also going to need the backlinks like you said – part of the business even if you are the expert. You studying the best marketers out there and then passing that information on to us – I’m very thankful I found and read this. Thanks
Thanks, Alexander! This study took a lot of time, but it was worth it.
Hi,
Glad to read these amazing tips of SEO. I was also looking for SEO Tips some day back and ultimately find it on your blog.
The tips are valuable and more helpful for newbies and expert in blogging field.
I would also recommend this article and tips with friends.
Appreciate your great work.
Keep it up and Thanks for sharing
Well done Michael! Well described each point. Yes internal links are also links and we have the full control of choosing anchor text and make it do-follow. We have shared your article to our student on Facebook Group. I am sure they will love it.
Thank you!
You are absolutely right.
Very many marketers and bloggers do not use the power of internal links. I see blogs every day with hundreds of articles but without the correct link structure. This is a missed opportunity for them to get more Google traffic 🙁
Thank you for sharing this valuable SEO tricks. No matter whether beginners or professionals, everyone should learn these SEO tricks. Really very useful blog.
Thanks. Please keep sharing.
I believe that every person related to the Internet must know the search engine optimization.
All great advice. But there is one or three thing that I noticed that is a little different in your articles compared to Neil:
1. He is using custom-made clip art and infographics.
2. He puts himself in images and that creates more connection with readers.
3. He has amazing writers that use content reading very appealing to an eye by using gripping subheadings. Fewer words and more emphasis is more engaging.
Hope it helps 🙂
Thanks, Emil! I hope your advice will help not only me but also my readers.
Thank you very much Michael.
This is very interesting. I think am the person who has benefited most than any other. Well recently I developed a lot of interest in blogging. I am doing intensive research to understand concept of blog post above all how to write successful post that can indeed go viral. Am wondering how you make it. How?
Help me. Am young and I need to do it.
I haven’t made any post yet. But I have sample drafts. If only I could send you one must drafts and you give me comments and guidance were necessary. I will be glad.
Thank you
I read a lot and learn a lot.
Before I wrote my first post, I read articles from other bloggers for more than a year.
Although I wrote only five articles on this blog, you can notice that I’m pretty good at it. The point is that I do not hurry with the creation of new posts.
Read my tutorial on how to write the first blog post. If you follow all my steps, then you will have an excellent post.
Thanks Michael for writing such a good article in the form of tips for seo of a website. It is not clear how many ways a seo can be possible to viral a Domain or URL. People always try direct method but most of time these trick don’t works for SEO. Your tips are helpful for the person to make good website optimization for me and my websites or blog. This content is so valuable and surely unique that people are happy and really helpful for them. any pressure from your side, neither in the form of request nor hint or reminder in any ways.
Thanks
hey michael
what a tips, reading your article very slowly, and i did noted some to put it to my website soon
best regard, Dhani
Thanks, Dhani! If you apply at least some of my SEO tips, you will undoubtedly notice improvements to your site.
I need some advice, . How do you ensure that your headline is catchy and at the same contain the focus keywords? For example, if my focus keywords are, “how to build an email list” how do I make it into a catchy headline?
While I know all about the SEO stuff: SEO title, focus keywords etc, my challenge is writing catchy headlines that contain all the focus keywords.
Thanks in advance!
You can find the swipe file of headlines on the Internet. But I would start my own and save all the headlines in it that seem interesting to me.
Nailed it.
Seriously, I’ve never seen this kind of detailed Article. Really Appreciating.
I have a Question too, Please tell me is it really necessary for seo to have 4000 words in a post. I am asking because I always work according to an own post format where I mostly create a post containing 400-500 words.
Thanks, Rajat!
No, it’s not necessary. Always check how many words your competitors have written. And strive to write no less, not forgetting about the value, of course.
What a post! And very similar to how I approach SEO. Copy what the smartest people in the industry are doing. For me, Neil Patel is still at the top but will definitely look into these other guys.
Thanks, Jack! I would rather say: don’t copy but study.
Yes, Neil is definitely a successful businessman. But I wouldn’t use his approach. Don’t forget that he is a multi-millionaire and therefore can create so much quality content. Ordinary people, like you and me, have much fewer resources.
What an amazing article, love the tips and SEO hacks! great job!
It’s great that you liked it! Thanks, Lex.
That’s an wonderful article! Internal links still matters more because you can interlink your blog posts to your own domain which in turn improves the domain authority of the website. These expert tricks will surely help us out while doing SEO for our own business.
I love that! Thanks, Naveen.
Wow, Great information you share with me. Internal linking is very important for SEO factors. I like your blog. Thanks!
Yes, this is a significant factor that you can influence. Always create a descriptive anchor as possible.
Right, Neil is definitely a successful businessman. But I wouldn’t use his approach. Don’t forget that he is a multi-millionaire and therefore can create so much quality content. Ordinary people, like you and me, have much fewer resources.
I agree with you. But you can learn a lot from him. Especially the creation of in-depth, well-researched articles.
I recently attended a Google event in indore….. Marketing expert said that do the work only to get the traffic only, and guest blogging is the effective off page technique to bring the traffic on site……..
Let me disagree with this expert. Guest posts are not the best source of traffic. The best option is your online friends. I would say that they are better suited for building your brand, but no more. One person cannot write many good posts. And thanks to friends, to whom you help, you can get more fame and traffic as a result.
This is brilliant! It really is important to check every aspect (may it be small or big factor) of the blog just to ensure that the blog is highly optimized. Another thing, I totally agree that CTAs are vital. CTAs don’t serve their purpose if they’re trashy. Anyways, thanks for all these info. Cheers!
Thank you for such a wonderful comment, Karen! With calls to action, the main thing is not to overdo it.
Hi Mike, First off Kudos for being so responsive in your comments thread. There are often some good nuggets of information provided by informed readers.
The 4000 word count seems a little arbitrary, since what we are really trying to do is inform a reader as succinctly as possible. Some topics are able to do this in far less than 4000 words, while other more complex subjects might take nothing short of a full book.
The other stat you pointed out 2,334,250 blog article written today.. WOW!! I can’t but help wonder how many of these are just junky little articles used as filler content, due to the fact that Google needs fresh content to maintain ranking of sites.
Your Thoughts?
I love the comments and commenters 🙂
You correctly noticed. I encourage that before you create new content, you learn what the average volume of words in the best articles of your niche.
Unfortunately, 99% of these posts are nonsense.
Thank you so much, I’m going to take time and study this article again.
Always glad to help a good person! Thanks for the comment, Acha.
Perhaps this article will seem complicated, but even if you use at least one SEO trick, the results of your blog improve significantly.
I was looking for such an article and I have ended up here! The way you have presented it is really amazing! Thank you very much for sharing.
Thanks, Stella! It is not necessary to immediately apply all the tips. These SEO tricks can be quite difficult to implement, so it’s important not to hurry, but to study search engine optimization gradually.
i have never seen this type of article whole the information in single post thanks for sharing this type of info
This type of article is called epic content. For myself, I came up with a name—detailed blogging. When you write in as much detail as possible, to make life easier for the reader.
Hi Michael,
Your post really results oriented, I must say well researched & a detailed post.
Frankly I appreciate your blogger name as I’m also looking for the better name, can you help me, It will more appreciable for me
Hi Elyza,
Figure out a blog name is a challenging task. I like two solutions. When you use words in your domain, who you want to become. Or for whom your blog.
Amazing article. I found your article more interesting and useful as a tool which could help me explore the SEO field. Thank you very much for sharing.
Haha, an excellent comparison 🙂 SEO is a fascinating journey, where success depends on your own experiences and experiments.
Hi Michael,
The most detailed article about SEO ever! Thanks
Thanks, Mihovil! It is always helpful to know the rules of the game.
Thanks for sharing the Experts secret formula. Really helpful blog. Looking for more blogs like this for you.
Thanks, Stephen! In blogging, like any other business, it is sometimes useful to spy on experts. You can learn a lot.
wow.. This is an incredible article.. and lots of comments because of it. You really did your research well! Massive Knowledge given here! Keep up the fantastic content Michael!
Thanks, Adam! I will try very hard to continue in the same spirit.
Thank you so much for awesome SEO tricks.
You’re welcome, Sharjeel!
Hi Michael,
Thank you for compiling this copy from all the experts at one place. I must say that I feel more educated about SEO after reading this article.
I always wondered what is the correct number of images to be used for in one blog post. Though I never use paid images from shutterstock or any other paid image website for that matter. I try to create my original piece using any free online service.
As for PageSpeed score, I did that for my blog yesterday only and I was able to improve it from 54 to 91.
I have bookmarked your blog and will stay updated.
Thanks
Regards
Vineet Saxena
You have achieved excellent results with PageSpeed!
A small hint: to find out approximately how many words to write, how many images to use, open the first ten Google results for your keyword and manually calculate. It will be a good starting point!