Search engines are continuously evolving, which means that marketers must be on toes to keep up. SEO has proven to have a better ROI than outbound lead-generation techniques like cold calling. Below, we offer a list of SEO techniques that you should employ in 2015 for better marketing success:
- Build awesome content
Even though you shouldn’t create content to earn links, you should create content that will earn links. Until now, links are the biggest factor that determine search engine ranking. With the changing requirements for proper links acquisition, you want to attract links from high authority and related sites to improve ranking.
Also, referral traffic can lead to greater brand awareness as well as conversions and sales. But first, you must have credible, relevant content that readers would want to spread around.
- Co-citation linking
If your website/page is placed next to a competitor’s website/page in search results, this sends the message to search engines that the two of you are working in related niches. If you want to earn co-citation links perform a search for the ‘top 10’ or ’10 best’ items in your niche. If your business isn’t included in the list, contact the publisher and request to be added with appropriate justification for why you should be included, and a relevant link.
- Editorial linking
These are the most powerful links for SEO since they are drawn from authority publications related to your business’s niche. You can also get editorial links from thought leadership guest posting on third party authority sites. The first point comes in handy here: you still must offer content so great that people will share it with their audiences.
You can also write guest posts for authority sites within your niche. Ensure that the content is high quality, factual and relevant since these posts are subjected to heavy scrutiny prior to publishing. You can also use interviews where you are allowed to add links to your site and content in your responses.
- Broken link-building
This is also an effective and white hat strategy where you identify broken links in related third-party sites and offer to help them fix this in order to provide better usefulness to users and readers. Your content, however, must be high quality enough and relevant to the content that was ‘lost’.
Simply identify where broken links exist, then contact the webmaster to let them know it exists, offering your site/page as an alternative. The site should be within your niche.
- Reclaiming links
In link reclamation, you identify broken links that were directed to your own site. You then contact the publisher/webmaster to fix them. For instance, if there’s a site mentioning your site with no link, you can request for a link there. Also identify sites/pages where your posts/images/other content has been used without attribution, and request for links in those places.
Essentially, more than correcting pages that have moved, it’s about identifying places where you deserve to have a link and requesting for it to be added. To make it easier, you can set up a Google Alert which will send you an email every time your brand/business is mentioned. You can then follow it to check whether a link to your site is also included.
Conclusion
With these effective techniques, you can improve your quality link volume and eventually make an impact on your organic rankings and traffic generation.
