How to move your site forward without an SEO agency

DIY SEO strategy

OK lets cut to the chase, there is more duplicate bull-droppings about SEO than even teenage sex. 
The reason is simple, a very dumb algorithm dreamed up by bunch of schoolboys based on their fresher year induction lecture about citations and choosing quality sources and changed very little since apart from an auction engine. Add to that billions of dollars at stake for the one (hopefully you) who can outsmart this little script spider and get your recipe for “who cares what” on page one position one.

P1P1 that’s the name of this secret mission

Ok special agent De Pipedream, let’s talk about the rules:
1.  Just in case you needed to be told, I included this key rule, you have to have a proposition people will actually search for in large numbers and then you will have to convert them, but that’s a whole different training course. So let’s summarise this paragraph again: 
Nice attractive site high quality content, smart layout and subject matter that people really want to find and consume

  1. Rule number one. Back-links.
  2. Rule number two Back-links. You get the picture . .

Ok,  there is another rule;

  1. High quality back-links only, nothing with low DA/ PR nothing on a page alongside of dozens of backlinks, not lots of backlinks from the same domain and ideally there should be a noticeable degree of context as in they are from sites that might conceivably link to you without being paid to do so.

Now for the plan of action

As you always suspected, sometimes I make them up as I go along.
5. Rule number five, never believe what any blogger or SEO blogger especially tells you online, especially if there is a link or a CTA included somewhere. He is just writing for Google and there is no way most of those guys will give away their trade secrets and contacts  

The one Google would like you to believe

Here is the most commonly offered advice and it is nothing less than a crime to give this advice to someone starting off a blog or web business.
Write great content that they will love and they will come to you and link to you.
The likelihood of this working is roughly equal to your chances of falling into a hole in the park only to find it full of lost Aztec Gold Treasure. Just do yourself a huge favour and forget this one.

The idea that get blogged at you most in 2018/20

Create great content, then reach out to great sites and ask them to give you a link.
Let me tell you right now, if you have a DA15 or maybe 25 fledgling blog or website with a trickle of visitors, it generally matters little how great your content is, you will almost never acquire a link from an influential site with maybe DA70 or 80 and big visitor numbers.  Think about it. If you could just get to that position, you could sell any amount of advertising, sell links and all sort of revenue producing activities, why would you even consider opening an email from an unknown site and giving them a dofollow link (one that gives away some of your link juice)?

It does happen on occasion, but it is rare and you will give up long before you gain enough links to move the needle at all for your ranking and visitors.

Build a Private Blog Network (PBN)

Decide how many links you want, buy expired domains with age and maybe some DA left and register them again. Host them all at different IP addresses but in the geography where your site is. Cloak your ownership of them in case someone comes snooping.

Now build a big attractive website on each with loads of good content containing all the right keywords naturally. Get them re-indexed and point them at your site,
Now for each of these build a dozen or two more big sites, each pointing at your original(tier1) sites.  When you have build a big network of sites all linked together, you then get some back-links for them and do some social posting and other techniques to get them ranked high on Google.
If you don’t get caught and there are many tripwires waiting for you, then you will have a nice list of high quality backlinks that you are totally in control of.
I didn’t mention how much work all of that is. One word; Huge!
Even cheating and spinning data or copying sites as many do, it is still a huge amount of work and very risky. There is nothing cheap about running a PBN.  I am not recommending it, but I wanted you to know.

Purchase links

There are any places you can go to come into contact with people offering to sell back-links.
Now there was a time when having 15000 back-links would probably rank you above a site with 12000 back-links, but those days are long gone.
Today it is all about quality. Thee are many measuring algorithms out there, none perfect, but each a useful indicator. Domain authority, Page Rank, Moz rank,  Citation flow, Trust flow and many more. When a site rates highly on one they often rate highly on all. Ultimately rank comes form trust and from traffic.
Trust is guessed from a wide range of things form SSL to citations and of course back-links, traffic even has to be guessed unless your site is using GA.
If you do find these sources of good links for sale and you satisfy yourself they are not from PBNs with spun data and they have a high ratings and don’t have links to half the internet, then you will pay upwards of £100 per month per link. After a week most PBN owners will move your link to an overpopulated inner page, so be careful.
If they are cheaper there’s a reason. If you can’t see it that’s because you don’t yet know where to look.
If you get caught buying or selling, all your previous work is down the drain, so be careful, you have been warned.

Web2 and Social Media sites

There not enough of these to get to page one for “miracle new  free face-lift”, however if you are willing to apply yourself and don’t cheat, you an make a good gain without spending any money or running the risk of penalties. These sites wont earn you much rank unless you build a genuine body of posts on each site and engage with a suitable audience. Most pros will also then promote their new sites via social media to get it noticed by Google. Then you can get a very nice boost, but again it is no free and not even cheap unless you have a lot of spare time.
There are a few people who have done very well out of treating these Web2 properties like a PBN and linking them together to build semantic silos with cross linking to create centres of influence that attract Google and then transfer tier influence to your main site.
Just like with the original PBN, if things go wrong, you hopefully can cut loose the tier one site and get rid of the issues, though its not always so simple.

Promoting your site via social media

For beginners this can be a useful way to make gains without any risks. In principal you forget about rank and focus on audience. Ideally you need a product management approach, by which I mean that you develop your value propositions draft, then audience segments and personas. Now you test your hypothesis by engaging them and make the inevitable adjustments until you are addressing an engaged audience with a proposition they find valuable.

Now you find more similar audiences by simply using the logic and start engaging them on social media by tracking conversations, joining groups and all the usual suspects.
Email and social media Groups and Fan pages are critical for keeping your audience engaged and convincing them to share your content and help you build the audience is a key strategy.

If you build some traction and there is potential winner, now you head for a crowd funding platform and get yourself round of funding, then give me a call 0844 884 2310.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *