My name is Dave Sinick and I run an SEO company out in San Diego, California. So Michael wanted me to write a post today to talk to you guys about the “missing link” when it comes to getting more traffic from your site (from your already existing content, and from all future content).
If you’ve been struggling to get search engine traffic to your blog, then this post might just be the “missing link” to getting more visitors.
Here’s the deal. When it comes to getting traffic to your site, content is king, right?
Well, not completely.
To me, content is more like the foundation on which you build your house. Without good content, like a house without a foundation, your blog will collapse (and fail).
And Google loves good content. Google WANTS to give you free traffic to your content. They WANT their users to find good content when they search for it, because when they find your good content – they are like “man, Google really did a good job here, I will use them again for all of my searches” which allows Google to retain a customer, and generate more advertising revenue.
The thing is, if you set up your content improperly, Google won’t understand what keywords you’re trying to rank your site for — and you won’t get the search engine traffic that they want to give you.
You could have the best content in the world that would bring people back to your blog over and over again, but no one would ever see it.
So we understand that A) Content is important and B) Google wants it’s users to find your best content — and funnel traffic to you.
However…this is where most people mess up. They take the “if you build it, they will come” approach to getting traffic – and forget about On-site SEO.
“On-Site SEO, you say? Isn’t that completely worthless now? Doesn’t google not care about that stuff anymore?”
Well, random guy who I just made up to make a point, in fact, Google still very much cares about your on-site SEO. Proper on-site SEO is the foundation to any real SEO campaign — and without it, you will find yourself stonewalled when you try to rank for keywords. Without proper on-site SEO, you make ranking for keywords 10 times harder than it should be.
It’s like buying a car without an engine. You’ll push your foot as hard as you can on the gas pedal, but no matter what, your car is not going anywhere. All the links in the world won’t make your site rank without certain proper on-page factors.
In fact, it’s crazy to think that you would write ANY content online and then not optimize it properly for the search engines. That’s like Google handing you a check for thousands of dollars and you saying “nah, I’m good.”
Now when I talk about on-page SEO, I’m not referring to stuffing your blog posts with keywords, or making spammy content, or anything along those lines. I’m not talking about stuff that takes a lot of time, either.
The truth is, On-page SEO is something that:
- Doesn’t take a lot of time to setup
- Doesn’t require any real technical knowledge
- Can be used inside of your content without appearing spammy
- Google WANTS you to do properly
- Can be systemized for all future content, and
- It’s benefits will last as long as your site is up
And plain and simply: it works.
Just look at some of the keywords that we’ve helped Michael rank for (In just 30 days):
Make Money Blogging:
James Schramko:
And that’s just a sampling of the keywords we’re helping him with. Most of these rankings occurred just from changing parts of Michael’s content (his on-site SEO), and they allowed our linkbuilding efforts to be infinitely more effective. It literally took us 30 days to get him on the first page for “Make Money Blogging” — a keyword that gets 10,000 EXACT searches a month.
And we’ve replicated these results on some of our own sites as well:
So you can see that these on-site SEO techniques can dramatically help increase your rankings, and increase the effect of linkbuilding.
“So, where can I learn more?”
Well, we actually just released a program called The WordPress SEO Blueprint in which my business partner (Tom Lambert) and myself go through everything we do and have done to get our WordPress sites ranking at the top of the search engines. And to sweeten the deal, we’re also offering the first 50 people who order a free on-site SEO report in which we go through your site and tell you everything that you need to fix to get your blog ranking as soon as possible.
So check it out – and let us know if you have any questions in the comments section!