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9 Ways To Build High-Authority Backlinks To Your Site

July 25, 2017 By The Upward Media Team Leave a Comment

Have you ever wondered why you’re always behind your competitors in Google Search rankings despite regularly publishing content that’s MUCH superior in quality?

There can be many reasons.

But most of the times, it’s because the results ranking higher than yours have more backlinks from relevant and high authority sites.

One of the core objectives of Google Search is to show high-quality, useful and relevant search results to its users.

When another website links to a URL on your site or blog, Google considers this as a vote of confidence in the usefulness of your content.

If the site linking to you is a well-established authority in your industry, this vote becomes much more valuable.

To rank higher than your competitors, you need to get more backlinks (votes of confidence) from other high-authority sites in your niche.

According to a study of more than 2 million keywords by Ahrefs, backlinks have the highest impact on a page’s search engine ranking

In simple words, the more backlinks you have, the higher you’ll rank.

Sounds simple, right?

But building backlinks to your site and persuading others to link to your content isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to acquire links that can help them rank higher for their target keywords.

But if you have the time and expertise, there are ways you can build genuine white-hat backlinks without spending a fortune.

In this post, we show you how.

1. Use Guest Blogging for Brand Awareness and Backlinks

Guest blogging is one of the most popular ways to build high-authority backlinks to your site and create more awareness about you brand.

The links acquired through guest blogging are usually more valuable when they’re placed in the body of your content, not the author bio.

But to build such links, you need to write top-notch content that meets the publication standards of that blog.

You can find guest-blogging opportunities in every niche by simply searching Google. For example, here are a few queries you can use.

“[Your niche] + write for us”

“[Your niche] + contribute”

“[Your niche] + guest author”

“[Your niche] + guest blogging guidelines”

“[Your niche] + editorial guidelines”

“[Your niche] + guest post”

And just in case you’ve come across this warning by Matt Cutts (Google’s former head of web spam) about guest blogging and wondering if it’s still a safe approach, relax!

Matt was referring to low-quality, copied and spammy guest posts that are written for the sole purpose of link building.

You’ve got nothing to worry about if your guest posts are unique, genuinely useful and link back to your site in a natural way.

If you’re not sure how to differentiate between the two, contact us for help.

2. Publish Stats Round-Ups and Data Heavy Posts

Adding numbers, data and research to your content makes it look more credible and authentic.

It also helps you acquire backlinks from different blogs who link to your resource as a reference for their data.

So, whenever you’re making an argument in your content or sharing tips, try backing them up with numbers and data.

Another approach is to create a data round-up post which lists all the relevant stats about your industry.

People love reading, sharing and linking to such posts

You can find an unlimited supply of data and research on sites like Statista and Pew Research. Simply search for your relevant topic, take snapshots of the graphs on these sites and add them to your posts (with a link to the original study).

3. Publish Detailed Case Studies

If you have a product or a service that has served your clients well, consider publishing a detailed case study on how it helped them.

Compare the before and after scenarios of your clients, share the problems they had when they came to you, and how you resolved them.

Instead of being too product-focused in your case study, try to focus on the problem of your client and the solution that you provided.

Bloggers and authors on different sites love to quote case studies as examples to back their claims.

4. Use infographics to Build Links

Infographics are still among the most popular forms of content and attract a lot of social shares and backlinks.

OkDork and Sumo analyzed more than 100 million online articles and found that the ones with infographics had the highest number of shares

There are a couple of ways you can use infographics to get backlinks:

a. Find a popular topic related to your niche, gather stats and other relevant facts and turn them into an infographic using a free tool like Canva or Visual.ly.

Once your infographic is ready, publish it on your site and offer it to other sites that have covered that topic in their posts.

If your infographic has value, most blogs would gladly take your offer and give you a backlink to the original source of the infographic.

b. The other approach is to create a site-specific infographic for the bigger blogs. For example, if you want to get a backlink from a leading blog in your niche, find the most popular post on that blog, turn it into an infographic and offer it to the editor in return for a backlink.

This strategy certainly requires more effort and resources, but it has a high success rate.

5. Publish a Unique Study or Survey

If you have a large customer base, an email or a social media group, you can run your own surveys and use the findings to create a detailed blog post.

Survey results always generate interest among people and result in dozens, sometimes hundreds, of backlinks.

For example, here’s a popular survey published by ClearVoice which shared insights on the costs of online content

If you don’t have a large subscriber base yourself, you can hire third-party service providers to survey your target audience and share the results with you.

It’s a small investment that can result in priceless backlinks and referral traffic.

6. Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

There’s nothing wrong with helping out someone for free.

But here, we’re referring to HARO, a platform where journalists seek expert opinions for their stories.

You can sign up as a source on HARO and answer different questions put forward by professional journalists working for various magazines and publications (very high authority)

If a journalist finds value in your answer, he can quote you in his story along with a backlink to your site.

7. Use the Broken Link Building Strategy

Ever heard of the broken link building strategy?

It’s a slightly advanced method used by expert marketers to take advantage of the links that point to outdated resources that no longer exist.

Every day thousands of new websites pop-up.

But thousands of sites go offline forever as well.

And when that happens, all links pointing to those sites become useless.

If you can find such links on your target sites, you can take advantage of this opportunity by creating a similar or better resource on your own site and offering it as a replacement to the previously linked site.

Most blog owners would gladly accept it.

To find broken links, you can use a tool like Ahrefs.

For example, I searched Entrepreneur.com on Ahrefs and clicked on the Broken Links section under the Outgoing Links heading

The free version gives us up to 20 results.

These are the pages on Entreprenur.com that link to outside resources that no longer exist.

If you want a backlink, you can create your own resource for any one of these links and offer it to Entreprneur.com as a replacement.

You can replicate this process for any website in your niche.

8. Claim Your Unlinked Brand Mentions

Do you monitor your brand name on the web?

Doing so might help you find unlinked mentions of your brand name.

If you find any such mentions, you can simply reach out to the site owner and request them to add your link.

A simple monitoring system can be set up using Google Alerts

Create alerts for your main URL, brand name any variations of your name that people might use.

As soon as Google indexes a page with your name, you’ll be notified via email.

9. Partner With Authors on Famous Blogs

Getting featured on sites like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc etc. is hard work.

But what if an author from one of these sites joins your team and features your brand in his content?

Smart approach, right?

You can use this approach on any multi-author site in your niche.

All you have to do is to identify the right author and create a win-win scenario with them.

This can happen in a number of ways

You can give them free access to your product and ask them to share their honest review about it.
You can ask offer them a place on your marketing team
You can share valuable data with them that they can feature in their content.
Or any other way you can help them make their content better.

If you can get one or two authors in your team from every leading blog in your industry, you can get backlinks and exposure much more quickly

If you’re not sure how to do it, contact us for more guidance and help.

The Take Away

Getting backlinks to your site is undoubtedly a resource-consuming process both in terms of time and money.

But it is the backbone of any SEO strategy without which getting higher rankings is very difficult.

If you can consistently create high-quality and link-worthy content, and then apply some of the techniques shared in this post, there’s a good chance you’ll get backlinks from your target sites.

How To Find Proven Content Ideas That Generate Traffic, Backlinks and Social Shares

June 13, 2017 By The Upward Media Team Leave a Comment

“Content marketing and blogging used to be competitive a few years ago. Now, it’s an absolute war!”

That comment, overheard at a recent marketing conference, underscores the huge content marketing challenges and frustrations we now face every day.

Around 84.3 million new blog posts are published every month by sites using WordPress (a platform that powers nearly 28% of the internet.)

And as the graph clearly reflects, that number is still on the rise and shows no signs of slowing down.

If your only counter strategy is to create more content on a daily basis, you’ve already lost.

As a small business with limited resources, do you honestly believe you can compete with the bigger publishers churning out dozens of new articles every day?

There’s still hope though.

You can’t beat the bigger players in terms of publishing frequency.

But you can take the smarter route and create content topics guaranteed to attract lots of visitors, backlinks and social shares.

Using this approach, you can reduce your publishing frequency (and the associated costs) and focus on creating better quality content without exhausting yourself.

Sounds enticing?

In this post, Upward Media will show you exactly how to find engaging content ideas for your blog.

1. Get Content Ideas from Google Search

Google has answers for most questions.

And since we’re trying to come up with ideas that have a higher probability of generating traffic, why not start our search from the search giant itself.

There are several ways you can use Google Search to quickly get an idea of a topic’s popularity

– Google Autocomplete

When you start typing a query in Google’s search box, it shows you several other closely related search terms.

These searches don’t pop up randomly.

They’re generated based on the other frequent and popular searches related to your search.

In simple words, these are the topics people are looking for.

And you can use them to get an idea of what your audience wants.

For example, if your company offers weight loss products and you’re looking to generate content ideas for your blog, the snapshot above should serve as a guideline.

– Google Trends

Google Trends is a goldmine for marketers and bloggers. It gives you a clear picture of what people are searching for on the web.

You can enter a topic or a keyword and it’ll tell you if people are interested in it.

For example, here’s what we found when we searched the last 90-day trend for the term “Content marketing”

It also gives you a list of related topics and keywords that people interested in “Content Marketing” are searching for.

You can generate dozens of blogging ides from Google Trends in no time.

– Google Related Searches

Google shows related search queries at the bottom of every search page

You can use these to understand what your audience wants to learn, and tailor your content accordingly.

2. Learn from Your Competitors’ Most Popular Posts

Why reinvent the wheel when your competitor’s have already done the hard work for you?

You can find lots of great content ideas just by analyzing the most popular and successful content of your competitors.

Most blogs have a “Most Popular Posts” section where you can find the posts with the highest number of comments or the most traffic

Find 4-5 competing blogs and analyze the top 10 posts on each of them.

If you’re not sure who your competitors are, you can use SEMRush to find them

For example, we got this list when we searched for Quicksprout.com (a popular content marketing blog) on SEMRush

You can expand this list to view up to 10 results in the free version of SEMRush.

But that’s more than enough.

You’ll have a list of 40-50 titles that are proven to work well.

You can use this information in several ways.

You could analyze the most popular posts and create a MUCH improved post on the same topic. For example, if a post shares 21 tips on something, you can create an article that shares 35 tips. Read the comments at the end of the post to see if people are asking any other specific questions that the post doesn’t answer
You could use the popular topics to get an idea of what your audience really wants to learn about and then create titles based on your understanding.
You can break down the popular posts into separate and much more detailed posts. For example, if a post shares 10 methods to something, you can break it down and create 10 separate posts explaining each method in much more detail.

Competitor analysis is one of my favorite ways to find blogging ideas because it works on a proven formula.

3. Use Quora To Find Questions No One’s Answering

Quora is a great place to find popular topics for blog posts. There are thousands of discussion threads on Quora where people ask questions related to almost everything under the sky.

Simply search your industry/niche on Quora and look for the questions with the highest engagement (most number of answers and upvotes)

These are the topics that generate the highest interest in your target audience.

You can also analyze the answers for the most popular questions to understand the kind of content your target audience likes.

You can gather all this information, add more value and publish on your blog.

4. Find the Most Frequently Shared and Linked Content

One of the best ways to come up with proven topics is by finding the posts that already have a lot of social media shares and backlinks.

You can do this manually by searching Twitter and Facebook with your main keyword and see which posts come up at the top.

Most blogs also display the number of social shares on a blog post which can be used to get an idea of its popularity.

However, doing this manually is a time-consuming process. Save time by using tools like BuzzSumo and Ahrefs.

Both tools not only show you the most popular blog posts on a topic in terms of social shares, but also show you the posts with the most number of backlinks

You can’t do this manually

For example, we searched for “content marketing tips” on Ahrefs which gave us a list of the most popular posts on this topic

We then sorted the list by the number of referring domains, which gave us the posts with the most number of backlinks.

When a post has a higher number of backlinks (along with a lot social shares) it’s a strong indicator of its quality and shows that people found it useful.

You can list down all such posts in a separate sheet, analyze them one by one and see how you can create an improved version of that content.

It also gives you a strong understanding of the kind of titles that are popular with your target audience.

5. Unveil Hidden Gems Using Amazon

Amazon is the world’s largest eCommere website. But it also has the biggest collect of eBooks on the web.

In fact, some of the most popular books ever published were all listed on Amazon first.

Once again this is a goldmine if you’re looking for blogging ideas.

Go to the category related to your industry in the books section of Amazon, search for one of your main keywords and sort the results by the most number of reviews.

This will show you the most popular books related to your industry.

You can use this information in two ways

Look at the titles of the books and read their descriptions to understand what they’re about. This can alone give you lots of blog post ideas.
Read the reviews under each book to understand why the readers liked the book. Also look at the negative reviews to identify the things that the author failed to address.

Note down everything in a separate sheet and use these insights to come up with titles that not only give the readers what they want but also make up for the knowledge gap left by the author.

6. Hack Topics With Udemy

Have you heard of Udemy?

It’s one of the world’s largest collections of video tutorials on hundreds of topics.

Choose the category that’s most relevant to your industry and look for the most popular courses in it.

For example, we searched for productivity courses and sorted the results by popularity.

Just looking at the list of courses and their titles will give you lot of insights about the topics you can write on.

But Udemy gives you more.

It requires every course to be broken down into smaller chapters and modules. The list of modules for every video is displayed on the course enrollment page.

For example, here’s a snapshot of the outline for one of the courses:

Are you getting any pointers from this?

Each of these headlines can be converted into separate blog posts.

And since it’s an extremely popular course, you know that each of these points will resonate well with your target audience.

You can find even more detailed course outlines for some of the other courses on Udemy.

The Take Away

There’s so much data and content available on the web that you really don’t need any guesswork when coming up with new ideas for your blog.

You only need to look around, find the content that’s already performing well and create a more valuable and useful version on your blog.

This way you’ll not only deliver more value to your audience but also save valuable resources for your company.

Video Content Marketing: 7 Ways to Power Your Marketing Strategy With Video Content

May 11, 2017 By The Upward Media Team Leave a Comment

Are you camera shy?

If you’re like many people, your answer would be yes.

And that’s a worrying sign.

Because most marketers think video content is the future of online marketing.

Source: Visual.ly

So if you’re not prepared to make videos a regular part of your content marketing strategy, you’re missing out on a huge marketing and branding opportunity, and might even become completely irrelevant in a few years.

But we don’t want that to happen.

So here are a few ideas by Upward Media to help you integrate videos in your content strategy.

1. Use Videos in Your Blog Posts To Improve SEO

You already know that producing high quality, in-depth and actionable content is necessary for creating a loyal subscriber base and improving your search rankings.

Most of your competitors know it as well.

In fact, many of them may even be creating such content.

So how do you get ahead of them?

By adding videos to every piece of content you publish.

A relevant video not only adds more variety to your content, but also keeps your readers engaged longer.

For example, Bryan Harris, a leading marketing and blogger, regular adds videos to his posts.

Studies show that adding a video to a page increases its probability of making it to Google’s first page by 53x.

That’s because video has a direct impact on two key SEO metrics – time on site and bounce rate.

When you embed a video in a blog post, the time your readers spend watching it on your site contributes to your average time on site metric.

And when they stay longer, they’re likely to explore other content on your site as well which reduces the bounce rate.

Improvement in both these metrics tells Google that your page is valuable for the readers.

As a result, your rankings rise.

So even if you can’t create your own original videos, find a relevant one from YouTube and embed it in your blog post.

2. Generate Qualified Leads Faster With Videos

One of the key objectives of any content marketing activity is to get more people on your subscriber list who can be matured and converted into paying customers.

Videos do a fantastic job at this.

You can use video courses as lead magnets to get more subscribers on your landing pages. This works well because video courses have a much higher perceived value as compared to an email course or a PDF eBook.

Or you could do a free webinar or Facebook Live video session, teach your audience something for free and then ask them to sign up to your list by offering a more comprehensive lead magnet like an eBook or a course.

Videos are equally effective when you’re looking to generate leads from your sales landing pages. Peep Laja, a conversion specialist, saw a 45% increase in conversion rate when he added a video to his sales landing page.

In short, videos do a fantastic job at convincing new visitors and complete strangers to sign up to your list and buy your products.

3. Create More Engaging Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing is among the most profitable online marketing channels. According to Email Monday, every $1 invested in email marketing has the potential to return you $38.

But the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns depends on two things

The number of people who actually open your email (Open Rate)
The number people who click the links in your email (Click through rate)

A low open rate or CTR means your emails aren’t engaging your subscribers enough to make them take action.

Once again, videos solve this problem better than any other content type.

According to SyndaCast, just using the word “video” in your email subject line can increase open rates by 19%, increase CTR by 65% and reduce the unsubscribe rate by 26%.

Source: SyndaCast

According to another study by QuickSprout, the CTR of your email campaigns increases by 200%-300% when you include a video in your emails.

Source: QuickSprout

Videos won’t play in your email, of course.

Instead, you’d need to use a snapshot of your video, place it in the email body, and link it to the URL of the video on YouTube or your own website.

4. Strengthen Your Brand Image With Facebook Live

Looking your customers right in the eye, face to face and live – there’s no better way to build trust online.

Seriously.

Most people are camera shy and keep their content limited to blog posts, articles and social media posts (all text and images)

But as Facebook Live has proved over the last 2 years, if you leave your comfort zone, face the camera and talk to your audience live, the rewards are immense.

There are other live streaming services as well, but the sheer size of Facebook’s user base makes it a much more tempting platform for marketers.

Facebook currently has more than 1.86 billion monthly active users worldwide. According to certain estimates, Facebook Live videos get more than 10 billion daily views.

Going live on Facebook regularly and sharing your knowledge directly with your audience makes you much more credible and trustworthy as compared to someone who shares text content only.

5. Create Anticipation for Your Content

Marketers are using live video streaming in several innovative ways.

But one of our personal favorites is how some marketers create anticipation for their upcoming content with live streaming, recorded videos and webinars.

For example, Kim Garst, a leading social media marketer, usually goes live on Facebook to discuss some of the content of her upcoming blog post.

She’d share 2 or 3 really good tips from her new post that would get the audience interested, and then ask them to read the post on her blog for more.

This simple technique works so well because of the interest generated by the video tips.

6. Host Live Q&A Sessions

An even smarter approach is to go live on Facebook or Periscope and discuss the topic of your upcoming post with your audience.

But instead of just sharing tips and content, invite your audience to ask questions related to that topic. Encourage discussion, share tips and even ask questions to your audience.

This approach has two benefits.

It helps you engage with your audience on a regular basis and build a stronger relationship with them.
It allows you to crowdsource new ideas for your content.

Once you complete the live session you can list down all the questions your audience asked, and expand them into a complete blog post. You can even embed the recording of your live video when you publish the post.

7. Take Your Audience Backstage

There’s an emerging trend among startups and even established brands of being transparent about their business operations.

Companies like Buffer, Groove and Shopify have a history of sharing videos of their employee work spaces, office meetings and product development procedures.

For example, this video on Shopify’s Facebook Page shares how Shopify employees have fun while working there. It has more than 85 thousand views.

Taking your audience backstage and showing them how you work strengthens your brand image and makes you more trustworthy.

The Take Away

There’s no doubt that the volume of video content on the web is only going to increase in the coming months and years. It may even replace text content completely. But even if that’s not the case, you still need to seriously consider making videos a part of your content marketing strategy and take advantage from this global marketing trend.

On-Page SEO Tips – How to Perfectly Optimize Your Content for Google’s First Page

April 19, 2017 By The Upward Media Team 3 Comments

That’s the dream, isn’t it?

Making it to the top spot in Google’s search results and watching thousands of visitors gatecrash your website.

Sadly, though, it remains a dream for most businesses because they never really understand what they need to do to rank for their target keywords.

If you’re one of them, things are about to change for you.

Because in this post we’re going to show you exactly how to optimize your website pages and blog articles, and claim your share from Google’s unlimited traffic supply using proven on-page SEO techniques.

What is On-Page SEO?

A comprehensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy has three main components – On-Page, Off-Page, and Technical

Source: QuickSprout

Technical and Off-Page SEO have a huge role in determining your search engine rankings. But your work starts from getting the on-page elements of your SEO strategy in place.

So it’s important that you understand exactly how to go about optimizing your content.

If that sounds intimidating, don’t worry. We’re here to simplify everything for you:

1. Optimize Your Articles for Topics, Not Keywords

Google has become much better at understanding your content and how well it serves the needs of its searchers. To get the top ranking, you don’t need to stuff your content with high-traffic keywords anymore.

Instead, you need to create well-rounded content that is optimized around topics, not keywords. This means if your content is relevant to a particular search query, Google will rank it even if you’ve not used the exact keyword used by the searcher

Don’t get us wrong, keyword research is still very important, but in a different way.

Now, instead of focusing on a single keyword, you need to use one primary keyword and a group of closely related keywords in your content to rank for your target keyword.

These are also known as LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) or, in simpler words, synonyms of your main keyword.

You can find LSI keywords in Google’s related searches:

… or by using a free tool like LSI Graph which gives you dozens of related keywords for your primary keyword.

Since keyword research is a detailed topic, we strongly recommend that you read Brian Dean’s keyword research guide to know exactly how to choose the right group of keywords to optimize your content.

Learning this is important because everything you’re going to do after this depends on the accuracy of your keyword research.

2. Use Search Engine Friendly URLs

Now that you’ve chosen a primary keyword (along with a few LSI keywords), you need to start using it on your page, starting with your page URL.

Using your main keyword in the URL is not as important as it used to be, but it still has some role in determining your ranking.

If you’re using WordPress, go to the permalinks section from your site’s admin dashboard:

In the permalinks settings, change your default URL structure to keyword based URLs (also called SEO friendly URLs):

Now, when you’ll publish a new post, the title of your post will be used as its URL.

But to avoid long URLs, change it before publishing a new post and try to limit it to 3 keywords.

Using SEO friendly URLs is one of the fundamentals of on-page SEO that many business websites surprisingly ignore.

3. Start the Post Title with Your Keyword

Starting the title of your page with your target keyword is important for two reasons:

It tells Google what your page is about
It catches the reader’s eye immediately and increases your chances of getting more clicks.

For example, when we searched the keyword “weight loss tips,” we found these top results that immediately caught our attention:

According to the Co-Schedule Headline Analyzer, most readers are likely to read the first and the last words of your title. Which makes it important to use your main keyword early.

4. Use Your Target Keyword in the First 100 Words

Several studies have shown that using your target keyword in the first few paragraphs of your content can help you rank higher.

For example, Ahrefs analyzed more than 2 million search results and found that 80% of the top ranking results had their target keyword in the first 100 words of the page.

Source: Ahrefs Keyword Study

But as we mentioned earlier, Google understands what you content is about and wants you to think about your readers first so try to feature your keyword in a natural way.

Don’t compromise user experience just to feature your keyword.

5. Use Your Keyword in H1 and H2 Tags

The title of your page should include your target keyword, we’ve already talked about that.

But it should also be wrapped in an H1 tag to make it more prominent.

WordPress uses the h1 tag for post titles by default, so you don’t have to worry about it if you’re a WordPress user.

Also ensure that all your sub-headings use the H2 tags and at least one sub-heading has your primary keyword in it.

You could also use one or two LSI keywords in other sub-headings on the page.

6. Use Images and Videos in Your Content

Using images, snapshots, memes, GIFs and videos in your content makes it much more engaging and interesting for your readers.

It keeps them hooked to your content, makes them stay longer on your site and, as a result, increases your average time on site (a key ranking factor).

But that’s not all:

Including images in your content gives you an additional traffic source from Google Image search. But to take advantage, make sure the title, the description and the alt-text of your image contains your main keywords.

For example, in the snapshot above, look how the target keyword “guest blogging tips” is used in the image file name, title, description and alt-text.

As for videos, a study by Convince & Convert shows that adding a video to your content can increase the chances of making it to Google’s first page by 53x

It’s great if you have your own video content to embed in your posts. But if you don’t, just find a relevant video from YouTube and include it in your blog post to give additional value to your readers.

7. Nail the Introduction to Increase Content Consumption

Did you know that most internet users never read more than 50% of an article? And even the other 50% don’t really read content, they skim through it.

This is exactly why the introductory paragraph of your post is SO important.

If you can capture your reader’s attention in the first few seconds after he lands on your page, you can keep him ’til the end.

In SEO terms, this is important because if readers don’t stay on your site for long and bounce back right away, it’s a strong signal to Google that your page isn’t relevant enough for that search query.

As a result, your ranking will fall.

So ditch the long, boring and formal introductions you may have learned in school.

Get straight to the point and let the reader know exactly how you’re going to answer his questions.

This post from SmartBlogger is a great example:

Look how the title and the first few lines of the post are closely connected and give the reader a clear idea of what the post is about.

8. Create Long, In-depth and Well-Researched Content

The days of cheap, thin and poorly research 500 word articles ranking on Google’s first page are long gone.

As a business you have to take a clear stand:

Either stay away from content marketing completely.

Or, if you think it’s worth investing in (which it certainly is), then create long, in-depth and well-researched content that goes well beyond the 1500 word mark (ideally somewhere between 2000-3000 words)

There are several studies to prove that longer content tends to rank higher.

Source: SerpIQ

This chart from a study by SerpIQ shows that the average word count of the top 10 search results is well over 2000 words.

It also makes sense because longer content tends to rank for more long-tail and LSI keywords as compared to shorter posts.

9. Use Relevant Internal and External Links

Linking to relevant existing content on your site is one of the best ways to keep your older content alive and improve the ranking of your internal pages.

A strong interlinking structure allows Google bots to crawl deep into your site and index your content more frequently.

Try using 4-5 relevant internal links in every new blog post you publish (without compromising on user experience, of course)

External links are also important for your rankings, but you need to be more careful with them:

Linking to reliable, authoritative and high-quality articles and resources makes your content more credible. On the other hand, linking to spam websites or low-quality content, you’re in danger of a Google penalty yourself.

So whenever you’re unsure about the credibility of an external resource, use a nofollow tag with the link.

10. Optimize for Social Media and Encourage Sharing

Social signals play an important role in determining your search ranking. Google considers them votes of confidence for a piece of content

So encourage your readers to share your content by adding social media sharing buttons to your site (we recommend Sumo), and optimize your articles for social media by using social media meta tags.

The Take Away

On-Page SEO is all about creating relevant and useful content, which helps your readers take action, while using the keywords and terminologies people are searching for. If you can get this balance right, making it to Google’s first page for your target keywords will become much easier.

7 Outdated SEO Practices You Need To Quit Right Now

March 24, 2017 By The Upward Media Team 3 Comments

It’s a no-brainer that we live in an increasingly fast-paced world—especially the online version.

Everything from our buying preferences and purchasing habits to the way we consume knowledge and interact with friends has changed dramatically over the last few years.

Why should SEO be any different?

Some of Google’s algorithm updates in the last few years have completely changed the way SEO works. Many SEO techniques that were best practices five years ago are now considered spam and may even result in Google penalties.

Like everything else in life, your SEO strategy needs to evolve with time.

If it hasn’t, you’re probably doing more damage to your business than you think.

Here’s a quick look at some of the most common but outdated SEO practices that many businesses still use.

1. Using Keyword-Rich Anchor Text

Using the exact keyword you want your site to rank for as the clickable text (called “anchor text”) for your internal links and backlinks is one of the oldest SEO techniques.

The majority of (outdated) SEO strategies still use it.

And to be fair, it worked well until Google came down hard on over-optimized anchor text in its Penguin update in 2012.

Now, if an overwhelming majority of your links has your target keyword as the anchor text, you’re in dangerous territory.

So why doesn’t Google like keyword-rich anchor text? What’s so bad about it?

Google wants webmasters to focus on the user experience as much as on content. The search engine wants to see natural anchor text that doesn’t disrupt the user experience.

Source: Matt Cutts Blog – Former Head of Webspam at Google

So what’s the right way forward?

Keyword-rich anchor text isn’t completely dead.

If you keep it in the right proportion, it can still be used. You should aim to keep anchor text that exactly matches your keyword (e.g., Digital marketing company, SEO services, weight-loss tips) at 2%–3% of your total link profile. That means you need to mix it up with other types of anchor text.

Here are a few examples:

Branded Anchors – The majority of your anchor text should include your brand name (e.g., Upward Media, UpwardMedia, UpwardMedia.com)
Naked URLs – Frequently use plain old URLs (e.g., http://www.upwardmedia.com) instead of dressing them up with words or phrases
Anchor Phrases – Use your target keyword as a part of a longer anchor phrase

Generic Anchors – Use keyword-free phrases like “Read this,” “Click here,” “This article,” etc.

When choosing the anchor text for your links, make sure it fits naturally within the context of your content and doesn’t look out of place.

2. Using Exact Match Domain Names for Your Sites

This is another common practice you should avoid for several reasons.

But first, you need to understand what exact match domains (EMD) are.

An EMD is a target keyword turned into a domain name. For example, if your target keyword is “Comfortable Night Suits for Men” an EMD would be “ComfortableNightSuitsForMen.com.”

Are EMDs effective in helping you rank for your target keyword? To an extent, yes (although it’s risky).

Will we use them for our business or our clients? Never.

Here’s why: An exact match domain might help you rank for your target keyword, but it’s not a long-term strategy.

First, an EMD is always under the threat of a Google penalty for over-targeting a keyword.

Second, EMDs rarely get backlinks from high-authority sites and reliable publications because they don’t look credible.

Think about it: How often have you seen sites like CNN or Entrepreneur link to a domain like ”BuyCheapKidsClothing.com”?

Imagine that we used “HireDigitalMarketingServices.com” instead of UpwardMedia.com as my domain name. Would you even be reading this blog?

Google is big on brands because brands are credible, consistent and trustworthy.

Source: Business.com

So instead of trying to secure that perfect keyword domain you’ve been after for so long, focus on building your brand image and use a brand name for your domain that’s easy to remember and doesn’t look suspicious.

3. Targeting Keywords Rather Than Topics in Your Content

Remember when you first asked your marketing agency what SEO was? They probably told you something like this:

“Making it to the top 10 search results on a high-traffic keyword by creating content that repeatedly mentions that keyword.”

Well, let’s just say things have changed.

Stuffing your content with high-traffic keywords won’t rank you anymore. Instead, it’s likely to get you penalized.

Google has become much smarter. It doesn’t need to see your target keyword a billion times in the title, the description and the body of your content.

Thanks to RankBrain, an artificial intelligence search algorithm, Google can now evaluate and rank search results based on search context and topical relevance, meaning it can understand the context of different search queries and return more accurate results.

So instead of worrying about useless metrics like keyword density, start writing useful content with natural variations of your primary target keyword (and other related keywords) throughout your content.

4. Building Backlinks From Irrelevant Guest Blogging and Low-Quality Sites

Google considers backlinks from other websites as votes of confidence.

But contrary to what your SEO agency tells you, not every backlink is good for your site.

Google not only counts the number of backlinks pointing to your site but also evaluates the quality of those links.

In more precise terms, quality refers to the relevance of that site to yours, the reputation and trust profile of the linking site, and the context in which the link has been used.

Backlinks from irrelevant, dubious and poor-quality websites often result in Google penalties—this includes the common link-building methods like cheap directory submissions, press releases, forum posts and comment spamming.

Guest blogging is one of my favorite branding techniques. It helps you reach new audiences and builds your image as a market expert.

But it’s not a safe link-building strategy, especially when you target irrelevant sites (which most SEO agencies do).

Just think about it. Does it make sense for a local car wash company to get backlinks from health and nutrition blogs?

But that’s how guest blogging is still being used by many SEO agencies. They get you backlinks from irrelevant and poor-quality sites and charge you thousands of dollars.

Stay away from them.

The only safe and secure way to get high-authority backlinks is by creating detailed and useful content that is worthy of a link. When you create such content, you can reach out to relevant blogs and websites, tell them about your content and request a backlink.

5. Linking to Low-Quality Content and Dubious Sites

Linking to relevant content on other websites is a recommended SEO practice—for example, linking to a detailed study in order to back up your argument, or linking to the source of some data you share.

That’s all fine.

But associating yourself with irrelevant or low-quality sites that have been involved in SEO malpractice or even penalized by Google is flirting with danger.

A safer approach is to take a good look at a website before linking to it. If you’re not sure about it, either find a different source or add a no-follow tag to the link.

6. Publishing New Content Frequently To Rank Higher

In an ideal world, there’s nothing wrong with publishing new content every day or even multiple times a day.

Big media publications like BuzzFeed, Mashable, etc., publish dozens of new article every day. They can publish frequently without compromising the quality of their content since they have huge budgets and hundreds of writers working for them.

If you can manage to do that too, skip this point.

Most small businesses, however, don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in content every month. So they turn to cheap writers who can give them thin, 500-word articles every day.

Big mistake!

Publishing frequently by compromising the quality and usefulness of your content is foolish.

Instead of hiring cheap writers to give you 30 posts a month, hire one professional subject expert to give you one absolutely epic piece of content every month.

Thirty shoddy articles won’t help you get any high-authority backlinks—even if you do manage to pick up a few links, your posts won’t remain in the top 10 search results for long when people don’t find the content useful and press the back button as soon as they land on your site.

An epic piece of content, on the other hand, will help you secure hundreds of backlinks, engage readers for a longer period and build your brand image as an expert.

CoSchedule experimented with this by increasing their weekly blog posts from two to three. The change resulted in almost 2,000 more page views, but significantly reduced audience engagement and social shares.

Source: CoSchedule Blog

Brian Dean, one of the biggest influencers in the SEO niche, has less than two dozen articles on his blog and goes without publishing new content for months. But when he does publish, he gets thousands of visitors, backlinks and social shares.

Try to strike the right balance with your available resources.

7. Using Fake Social Signals To Boost Ranking

Social signals definitely have an impact on your search results.

If your social profiles are followed by thousands of people, your content is shared frequently and your brand is often mentioned on social media, Google considers that a good indication that your content is useful.

Using fake social media followers or cheap social blasting services does exactly the opposite. It hurts your brand image and does nothing positive for your search rankings.

Source: Quick Sprout

Google is smarter than you think. It can easily distinguish genuine social media engagement from fake social signals.

In fact, if you frequently use fake social blasting services to generate initial momentum for your content, don’t be surprised if you get a manual penalty.

The Takeaway

Google is evolving its search algorithms all the time, which is why SEO never remains the same for too long. Staying up-to-date on SEO trends is crucial to ensure that your site is not involved in any outdated practices that are now considered violations of Google’s search guidelines. Failing to keep up will not only result in wasted time and money, but also damage your search rankings and online brand image permanently.