SEO isn’t rocket science. Definitely not. But it also isn’t child’s play. If you want to be successful with your SEO strategy, you need to play the “long game” and put value ahead of anything else. Here are 3 key ingredients you should be sure you include in your SEO recipe for best results…
Special Ingredient #1 – Blogging
The is the most common ingredient I see missing from small business website “recipes.” Not including blogging in your SEO recipe is like leaving out the baking soda in your favorite chocolate chip cookies recipe — it just doesn’t work!
Blogging is what gives your website authority and significance. Blogging is how Google knows your website is providing value to visitors. Blogging is like oxygen to your SEO strategy — without a blog, you will just suffocate in the search engines.
Plus, in order to be successful with Social Media Marketing, you’re going to need blog posts. More on that next…
Special Ingredient #2 – Social Media
If you’ve read Robert Cialdini’s classic book Influence, you already know how important “social proofing” is to your marketing success. If you haven’t read Cialdini’s book, you should go buy it right now.
In the early days of SEO, Google used Link Building as a form of social proofing. Get lots of links to your website and you could provide the social proofing Google was looking for to validate the importance of your website. Each link was like a vote, and the site with the most votes would win the SEO rankings game.
Pretty simple, right?
It was, until SEO Link Building Services exploded and turned a “link” into an overproliferated meaningless nothing.
Today, social media serves the same purpose and provides a much more rigorous evaluation of your website. Sure, it’s still possible to game the system with social media but it’s far more difficult and there are lots more “checks and balances” than ever existed with link building.
Special Ingredient #3 – Landing Pages
The icing on the cake in my SEO formula is the landing page. To succeed with SEO, you need one “SEO Landing Page” for basically every target keyword phrase in your SEO keywords list. Just be sure you combine your “strongly related” keywords into one landing page. There’s no reason to crowd your website for semantically-related but unnecessary landing pages.
To be effective, your landing pages should have at least 1,000 words of high-quality copywriting. This does NOT mean hiring an “SEO Content Writer” from a foreign land to write your content for half-a-penny per word.
You need strong landing page copy that’s first and foremost intended for your prospects and website visitors and only then for your SEO strategy. For best results with SEO, always always ALWAYS put readers ahead of search engine robots.
