To win in the search engines you need to do more than just SEO. Here's a simple idea to get your website performing better in search results.
Well, you may have heard somewhere along the line that content is King. What that effectively means that if you want your website to do well in the search engine, you need to be creating regular content in the form of blog posts, articles, case studies, customer testimonials and stuff.
This short video explains and also talks you through the basics of a content sharing strategy:
TRANSCRIPT
Every single time you make a content item like a blog post, you get extra points in the search engines for certain key phrases on that particular blog post or article and on your website as a whole.
However, that is not the whole picture because whilst content might be King, content sharing is most definitely it's Queen. And the two go hand in hand, kind of like an actual King and Queen.
So how does this help you win in the search engines?
Well, if you can imagine having blog posts on your website and every single time you do it, Google comes and takes a look and sees more content.
And with every bit of new content your website gets a few more points in the search engines.
But there's a lot you can do to aid this process to win in the search engines and the bulk of it is all around content sharing.
In other words, sharing your content out on social media and encouraging others to do the same.
Now, first things first, let's clarify.
You should always be writing your content for your audience and not just for the search engines. Google will spot if you're trying to game the system and they'll penalise your website in the search rankings.
But either way, when you've created a new content item you certainly need to be sharing it out yourself. You can share that out on your own social media. You can tag a handful of people if you think it's particularly applicable to them, particularly on LinkedIn, and encourage them to spread the word too
And then you can also email that content items out to your list, especially if it's useful stuff.
Now, all of my content is designed to help people, so make sure that whatever you're sharing is designed to provide some kind of value to your audience.
That's what I do in the Smashing Self-Employment community. I share the most useful content that I've got going on with my audience on email.
Google sees the content and the sharing activity
Now, the cool thing about this is that Google will see your content every time you write something and publish it on your website.
But they also see the activity that goes on around it. And all of that activity is pointing back into your website.
And all of your online activity needs to point back to your website in some way. It's the only online channel that you truly own, but Google will spot the activity.
If it brings traffic back to your website as a result of your sharing, then it will give Google a good indicator that this content item or this blog post or article is popular.
And as a result, because of the additional traffic, you get additional points in the search rankings.
So the search engines that pay little attention to social media, but if that social media drives traffic to your website, they're definitely paying attention to this.
Re-sharing is a smart move
Now, another thing that you can do is to make sure that you re-share your post out to your social media on a periodic basis.
You don't need to share it just once you can do it again in a couple of weeks (or months) time.
Every time I publish a blog post I share it out on the day, but then I always then share it again a few weeks later because you will likely hit different people at different times.
Only a few people will see it today. But a different group of people will likely see it on social media in a couple of weeks time, because we all tend to look at social media at different times.
Even better is that even if they saw it on the day it was published it's highly likely that they won't remember because that's the nature of social media. It goes by so quickly.
So share your post or your content again and again.
Making content sharing a little bit easier using technology.
The first thing I urge you to do is to have a sharing plugin on your website. This enables people to if they read a blog post to share it out with their social media.
There's a couple of examples here.
I use a plugin on my website called Monarch, which is pretty cool.
It enables me to put up some good looking sharing buttons so people can share it on their social media.
When you do share it on social media, you can request that people share it out.
Whenever I make a video. I always ask people to share it out far and wide, and the same goes on my podcast.
The idea is to encourage people to share on your behalf.
The more people who share, the more links you get back to your website.
And if those links develop traffic the search engines will definitely be paying attention to that.
So whichever website software you're using there's loads of plugins to help you share your content.
I also use a plugin on my website called 'Revive old posts' It's a free WordPress plugin and it shares out a content item at random from my blog post archive.
You can select the frequency so it can go out daily every two days every 2 hours if you really wanted to.
But the idea behind it is to use the technology to automatically share out your content for you again.
I'm a big fan of automation, and that's a great tool right there, and it's free if you've got a WordPress website.
Social scheduling is useful too
Another big thing to me is using. I use a software called OneUp. It's a website where I can schedule out my social media from one location This means I don't need login to each one individually.
So if I share an item now then I can schedule it to be shared again next week and the week after if I want to.
And again, it's using the tools to work that little bit smarter. It's called www.oneupapp.io. I like it. It's not expensive, but it enables me to manage my social media posting from one place in one go.
It means that I don't have to worry about what I'm doing. I can get it all done in a single batch, typically on Thursday morning. That means I can get it all done and it just takes care of all the work for me.
So there we have it. Remember, content is King. You won't win in the search engines if you don't have any content.
To win in the search engines I recommend that you write content on your website on a regular (ideally weekly) basis.
This could be articles, comments, opinion pieces, case studies, customer testimonials, how to's and all sorts of useful stuff.
But remember that content needs to be shared out.
Use tools to encourage other people to do the same and remember to keep sharing it on a periodic basis as well
It works. So go ahead and do it.
Want more on winning in the search engines? Check out :
Here’s why blogging is good for marketing (blog post and video)
How to get found in local search - quick SEO tip for your website (YouTube video)