Vitaliy Gershfeld

Comments, shares and likes, in that order. That’s what I’ve come to learn regarding SEO and how it improves when you have those 3 social signals happening on your website.

Don’t know what social signals are? Let me explain:

A big part of SEO these days is search engines seeing if your website gets a positive response from readers. How does a search engine which uses spiders, bots (non human) and complex algorithms know if you have a high value website? 

Well one of the ways they do is they analyze certain social signals that occur when there are visitors on your site. I’ve said this before on previous posts I’ve done, but basically to repeat…

Google has tracking metrics in which is analyzes how a visitor views your site. It records how long they stay, bounce rates, exit rates and other investigative like metrics which produce a score for your site, that score being how high quality it is, in it’s content and overall affect on readers.

Note: Those things on their own can actually viewed as their own, separate social signals too.

And if you need proof that all this complex stuff is being recorded by Google, all you need to do is install Google Analytics, and it’ll tell you this same information I just explained.

How does it collect all of that? Well that’s Google for you and the point is that…they know.

So now that we understand this, how can we use social signals for SEO?

Well, in it’s ideal form, the big 3 I stated can do the following:

1) Comments on the site signal to Google that your site is getting worthy enough attention from readers.

A site without comments is valued less than one with them. It’s a VERY important ranking factor.

Comments are also considered to be content and if you know anything about SEO, you’ll know that content on a website is what produces rankings, authority and growth or organic rankings. This means…

More comments equates to more SEO authority.

2) Shares are also a huge thing.

If you can produce content that not only gets people to read it, but share it, that’s also a huge thing for Google. When they see sharing going on, they see content that is more popular and that means it’s much more worth to rank that type of content higher.

Think about a popular individual vs one who isn’t. Generally speaking, the popular individual is the one who gets taken more seriously while the other, who is unknown is not. You can absolutely think of websites with shares to be the same thing.

3) Likes are also another form of social signals.

The very fact that someone who visits your site, clicks that like button is a big deal to Google. It’s also a form of authority, in that if someone visits your page and sees that a particular article has a lot of likes, they are more likely to read that article because it has public appraise. 

In short, having all 3 of these things going on within your website show both people visiting it and search engines analyzing it that your website is a valuable website.

How do you increase the odds that these 3 things go on?

There’s a few simple tips:

Make sure the comment box on your website is easy to leave comments within. Some pages make it tough or they have some sort of filter (capcha) going on where people need to fill out a whole bunch of stuff to post the comment. 

Don’t make it hard for them to do. The only thing is, keep an anti spam filter on your website so not everyone can just leave whatever, otherwise your website can fall prey to spam and malware infections and see a drop in it’s rankings (negative SEO).

Add like and share buttons on the site itself. There’s simple plugins such as “social plug” that you can add for free to your website that show social network buttons on every article you put up, making it easy for someone reading and visiting it to click that like button and share it with their network of friends. 

That’s basically it.

The other part (the hard part) is incentivizing people to actually engage in comment on your content. That is determined by what kind of content you write and it’s a topic I’ll cover later.

The final thing…there’s levels to these 3 things.

Despite the fact that these 3 social signals have positive influence on SEO, they don’t always have the same value.

For example…

-Why should a comment that is only 5 words get more value than one that is 100? 

-Why should a 1,000 likes that don’t lead to anything positive (no shares, no reads, no engagement) have value over 10 likes that generate comments and shares of their own? 

-Why should a 100 shares that also don’t lead to any engagement have any value either? 

These examples I just gave basically showcase how social signals themselves have layers to them and the better the quality of the comment, the share, the like, the more SEO value it will carry.

It’s a very good thing that this exists because if all these things didn’t have their own level/rating, people would abuse them. This actually did happen. Here’s an example:

• People purchased comments.
• People purchased tons of likes.
• People purchased and asked others to share.

This often caused bad sites that faked it to make high SEO rankings and that wasn’t fair. Luckily, with the advancement of Google and it’s algorithms, the value of each of those things made trying to fake it, useless.

This means for example that:

A person who buys 10,000 likes from any service or source (they are scams, don’t buy that stuff), but gets nothing out of them (meaning no comments or reader engagement) may as well have 0 value out of it. They don’t mean anything! Also this brings up the question of backlinks. Here’s all you need to know about backlinks.

I have a whole article on likes, shares and the other things here. It’ll help you understand the different levels and structure your content so that you get the high value social signals, not the cheap, fake and useless ones. 

99% no. This has been a debate that Google’s own leaders have settled in which they were also asked the question on if RSS feeds help improve a website’s SEO.

And they basically confirmed what I just said. Here is the proof:

The link to that image can be found here, but let me put this in context…

A person asked the same question I’m addressing in this article, on Twitter to one of Google’s top webmasters, John Mueller. Although he was asking about these things in regards to news websites, the answer John gave him can be applied to pretty much any website out there, new site or not.

He shortly said “No”. But he didn’t really follow up with a “why”. Don’t worry though, that’s what I’m going to.

What are RSS feeds? Why are they useful?

RSS feeds are basically a code you install on your website to show the latest news reports on whatever you choose to show reports on. The purpose of these things is to show that there is activity going on in your site and basically another way of sharing content with your readers, that they can click on.

Suppose I have a political website and I install RSS feeds to show a particular news source displaying their latest stories. These stories would pop up on my website.

I would “want” to do this because it would show my audience more things that they can read, such as headlines and be know what’s going on.

Why people mistakenly think this helps SEO (because it once did):

• The first reason is that there’s fake experts pushing that lie still.
• But the other reason is that they actually did once work.

In my estimate, about 10 years ago, if you had a small website, and had RSS feeds installed on it, that you would get higher rankings from Google. This worked back then, because these things basically showed that your website was being active and updating the content on it, and thus this activity was interpreted by Google as being a good thing, thus it gave the site better rankings.

However, this very rapidly changed, to the point that RSS feeds today really have no more impact on rankings. Today that “updating” method is no longer done through RSS feeds but through frequently posting content and optimizing it these ways.

But back to the topic of RSS feeds and why they don’t work anymore. Here’s what happened:

Because people figured out that adding them to their websites helped their ranking, many of them started doing it and of those websites, many started producing lower level content of their own (the incentive was just not there).

Because anyone could add RSS feeds to their site, that didn’t really raise the uniqueness and content value of their page. Thus the value of the having them on your site died down (with regards to rankings).

Why should a website that produces low quality content, but has RSS feeds be of greater value than one which produces high quality content and does or doesn’t use them? The difference maker is in the site and it’s content.

This is one of the reasons why if you visit most blog websites today, you will not really see these things going on anymore. You will instead see the site/blog (if they are good) creating most if not all of their own content and letting the readers enjoy that.

And this is basically the arena Google has set up.

So are RSS feeds completely useless now? Mostly.

As an SEO expert, while I personally do not exactly recommend putting these things on your site, there’s still a little bit of value in doing so. 

For one, having this on your website MAY (not always) increase the reading times of users on your website. The reading/viewing time of a person on your website IS a ranking metric.

But even in this regard, I still wouldn’t recommend it. I just see no reason to add these things to your site when content creation is the real difference maker. Let’s take that political site example I used…

If content creation is the true way to get better SEO rankings, then…

Instead of using using RSS to display the latest political stories, set up Google alerts for politics, pick the the best stories and write your own content on your site for those stories.

What’ll happen is, you’ll get your blog/site ranked for those TRENDING stories and get a much higher amount of traffic for it.

You will be using these stories to create your content, grow your site and thus since this is exactly what Google wishes to see, you’ll have better SEO results from doing so. In my personal opinion, this is the MUCH smarter way to improve your site’s rankings, than to rely on the other, near dead methods.

Now I hope you understand that even though I used the political topic as an example, you don’t need to only rely on that subject. If your blog or website is based on a different subject, just use this strategy in the same manner and/or just rely on finding more topics to blog/write about.

One final thing: Beware of bad SEO experts.

In my time learning about this topic, I’ve come across many fake and outdated experts who claim to know about ranking websites organically. In fact, many of these experts would still be pitching a dead strategy like using RSS feeds.

Now I’m not saying my advice is the golden one to go for and I would endorse that you question my advice on this website, but I am at least providing proof of my claim (the twitter screenshot above). And I also recently posted an article on SEO not being dead and provided 5 of my personal sites to prove it so. That’s the kind of evidence you should look for in experts who talk about rankings.

Look for that sort of evidence before you take advice from experts. There are still a bunch of dead SEO methods still being promoted today (backlinks are a good example) and people are losing their time on them. 

At best, if you’re going to get advice from anyone, do it from Google themselves. They have a great webmaster blog set up where they talk about the very same things I discuss here, so as long as you follow their tips there (and they do give them), you will be doing SEO the right way.

I just happen to be one of the people who follows that advice and makes it easier to understand for anyone getting into SEO.

Let’s say you run an ad on Google Adwords and get 1,000 clicks to your website from it. Will those same clicks help with that same website’s SEO? Will it’s organic rankings rise? 

The most direct answer is…NO. But there is more to this whole topic than you think.

Because while on the front end, using PPC networks such as Google Adwords to get clicks has no impact on organic rankings…

There are actually a few things you can do with that same paid traffic on the back end to get an SEO boost. 

How is that possible? Well let me explain from the beginning…

In order to get to the part where you CAN use PPC traffic to improve SEO rankings, you first need to understand how Google works in this whole regard…

The fact of the matter is that Google is designed to distinguish what kind of traffic your website gets.

If it’s paid traffic, the value of that click or visitor towards organic rankings is 0. Why?

Well because if it had value, then anyone could just pay to get high rankings and the ranking system Google has evolved to today would become irrelevant.

If it’s organic traffic (such as if someone found that page through searching it up on Google), then there’s a whole different set of parameters in play.

Here’s an example. When it comes to Adwords, this is what Google looks for:

-It looks at your ad (how relevant is it to the page you’re going to link it to?).

-It looks at your ad text (how relevant is the ad text to the title and page?).

-It looks at your overall page to determine how relevant it is to the ad. 

-It looks at the list of keywords you use for the ad (Are they relevant to the ad, the page? Are they broad, exact or phrase?).

And as a result, it comes up with what is known as…a quality score, which is on a 1-10 scale.

Yet even if you get every single piece of this right, no clicks that you accumulate from running this type of ad will positively (or negatively) impact your site organically. 

Now when it comes to SEO, here is what Google looks for:

Now a lot of this sounds the same as it does in the Adwords part, but it’s still a whole different department. And by the way, even if you get and do everything right for SEO, then hop onto Adwords and try to set up an ad, having good SEO history will not impact how Adwords looks at your site, it’ll just have to go through the other department I talked about above.

But again, there’s a separation in classification here because they don’t want abuse happening. And that is actually is how it should be. 

Ok, so how can we use Adwords (PPC) to help improve our SEO?

So there’s a “backdoor” list of things you can do to make this actually work. While again, getting clicks from PPC has no impact on organic rankings (directly), that same PPC traffic can actually do stuff on your site that would later provide a positive effect on organic rankings.

Here’s 3 examples:

1) A person clicks on your site through a PPC you created.

They then bookmark the page and return to it at a later time and continue reading and enjoying the site. Now that same visitor no longer counts as a PPC visitor and whatever positive things they do on the site will help the site’s organic rankings improve.

2) Suppose you received a 1,000 clicks to your PPC ad…

And collected an email list of 500 people out of it. Then you use that list and link them back to your content you put up on the site.

Again, this is an example of a person/people coming in as a 0 value organic visit, but then returning through another method (email linking) and then doing positive things to help the organic rankings improve. In this example, it would be a good backlink with a lot of link equity potential.

3) Suppose a PPC visitor came to the site, enjoyed the content, and then shared it with a friend/s…

Via email or social media. Then people who would look at that link, click it and have a positive experience on your site would also help it’s SEO improve.

However, this one varies. Whether it’s a social like or just a form of sharing, what the end users do with those links is what determines if it’ll have a positive outcome. 

Basically if someone shares my link with 1,000 friends, but none of those friends of theirs actually read my content or click on the link, then it’s value is 0 and thus I would get no organic ranking benefit out of it.

But if those 1,000 friends or a large portion of them did click the link and enjoyed the content, then it would help the SEO of the site. Learn more here. 

The core thing going on in all these circumstances:

The central thing going on is what happens if the initial (0 SEO value) PPC visitor comes back or brings back other people (through sharing the site) and so long as that action brings back the PPC visitor and others, and as long as those people do positive things on your website, it will then have weight on it’s organic rankings.

By positive things, I’m basically talking about comments, more shares, long stay times, bookmarks, more returns, things which are basically important ranking factors ect…

It really all comes down to this:

• As long as it’s not a PPC visit.
• And as long as there’s actions being taken by the visitor that show the website is of high value…

Then there’s organic points being given to the site.

Now the thing about this whole subject is that it’s easy to get carried away and try to spend some PPC cash on ads to try and get away with this stuff, but I would not spend your money on this.

PPC ads in general are set up to convert visitors almost immediately and if that isn’t your goal as an advertiser, you probably shouldn’t be engaging in it, since it’ll cost you a lot. Plus add to this whole thing that Google Adwords doesn’t exactly approve every single ad/website you try to run through it and you have a difficult plan to get away with.

This isn’t to say you can’t do it though.

If you have the experience and the ad money to spend, it’s worth a try, but like I said, with PPC traffic your aim is to get traffic to convert, buy or opt in immediately.

But this is a website that’s made to talk about organic rankings, not PPC. If you have questions on PPC, you’re very welcome to ask them. I’ve used it for years.

The meta description is simple to understand. It’s the first paragraph of content you have on any of your pages or posts in your WordPress site (or any other platform).

It’s also that which gets shown on Google. That’s what it is.

An example:

When this page for example inevitably gets ranked on Google, the very first paragraph I just wrote above will be what Google shows. That’ll be the meta description.

Here’s another example:

Here is an article I wrote on another site I’m doing SEO on. Notice how the first paragraph is exactly copied and shown on Google when my page shows up, this is the meta description in action:

Now as easy as it is to understand what the meta description is, it’s a whole other story if you want to use it correctly, for say, SEO, because if you do (and I would hope you do to get more traffic), there’s smart ways to do it and don’t worry, it doesn’t really require a lot of knowledge, but I do find most people just don’t know about this stuff or if they do, they don’t do it correctly, so let’s make sure you’re doing this right:

Here’s 3 simple tips to maximize your meta description for SEO:

1) Start with the meta title. Use a low competition keyword.

Before you even get to writing your first paragraph, which you already know is the meta description, you have to start with a title.

Generally, my advice as an SEO expert is to try and find and then use a low competition keyword, within your title. I have some personal tips on doing this correctly which I’ve written about here. If you have problems coming up with titles, that article will help you a lot.

If you are having a hard time finding low competition keywords, there’s 2 great, beginner friendly, free tools you can use in order to find them quickly:

First is the “Keywords Everywhere” tool. It’s a little annoying to install, but once you do, it’s easy to use:

Second is Jaaxy, which is free to try (costs later to use, but is worth it) with and later on more usable than Keywords Everywhere:

Either way, with these 2 options, you will have immediate competition and traffic numbers given to you so you can intelligently pick out which keyword is better to target in your title and content. 

One more thing I want to say is that the title should be under 60 characters. I have recently noticed a trend where titles under that range get better rankings. 

2) With a keyword used in the title, use it again in the meta description. 

Your first paragraph should absolutely include your keyword as it did in the title, once.

What will happen is that when this gets picked up by Google (how to speed up the indexing process) and people see it, the keyword they look for (which is what you are already using), it will be bold in the title AND in the snippet it shows. 

That bold appearance is easier to see and increase click through ratings. This leads to more visits and better rankings. So absolutely make sure you follow this step. 

Here’s an example of how important this is:

3) Try to keep the paragraph short.

2-3 short sentences should be more than enough. If you wish to write more, let that be in the next paragraph or further down. What this does is it makes your article more marketable when people see it on Google.

If they see a short paragraph and a good title, they are more likely to click it (the sight of a clear, short answer is more attractive to them). 

As an example, consider my title in this particular article. I asked a question, correct? Well what did I do in the first paragraph?

I immediately answered that question, and followed it up with examples, to keep the reader, reading. Try to use this too.

This type of strategy will ensure that you will not only get people to click and read your article, but that they will want to continue reading it and for SEO, that is an imperative thing to have. In fact, I use these same tips not just for the first paragraph but also for much of the content I produce. It’s a great SEO optimization tip (here are others).

These are all little, yet useful rankings tips I’ve picked up, that work and you are more than welcome to use them too 🙂

And that’s really it. This is exactly what I do as an SEO guy to make sure I’m utilizing the meta description to it’s full potential and as you can see, it’s truly simple.

Now here’s a question that comes up very often:

There’s many people, that run WordPress websites who install SEO plugins such as Yoast or the All in One tool. What these tools do is they add layers of add on features to every single post and page you create and they include boxes where you can actually enter a separate meta title and description. 

Here is an example:

Now the question I most often get asked (and it was a question I once had too), was if it’s really necessary to fill those boxes in. The short answer is no, it isn’t necessary, meaning you can literally ignore it and leave it blank.

If you need a good reasoning for why, then I have an entire article I wrote regarding that where I basically point out that filling those boxes in has very little to no impact on your rankings in Google and other search engines, and that’s because Google is already looking at your actual title and the first paragraph itself within the actual article, not what you put into those boxes. 

It’ll get ranked regardless, whether or not you input something into those boxes or not, and being that I’ve done well without filling those boxes in, I say, don’t even worry about it. 

And furthermore, in that same article, I not only cite my own sources, but other experts who basically say and practice the same thing (and they know more than I do).

So all this being said, you now know not just what a meta description is, how it’s used in WordPress sites, but also how to maximally leverage it. Enjoy!

I used to despise the Google dance, but with all the experience and knowledge I’ve attained in SEO since then, it has made me appreciate it, for how brilliant of a system it is.

This is the game changer in SEO and it allows anyone who starts a new site to grow and defeat existing, big sites basically. You’re going to understand this more and more as you read this article and appreciate it too afterwards. 

Most importantly, because of all the knowledge I’ve gathered, I’ve understood how to use this very system to improve my SEO rankings and I will teach you to do the same stuff for your site.

This article is for people:

• Who don’t understand why this bouncing of your site is happening.
• Who need to know how to break the dance and solidify higher rankings. 
• Who are frustrated by the Google dance and can’t get any high rankings because of it (it’s actually not because of that but is because of other factors).

After you read this article, you will reignite your SEO efforts and truly succeed.

New to the term “Google Dance”? No worries, here’s what you need to know:

The Google dance is basically a “filtration” process that happens every time a new page or blog post is published on ANY website, in the world.

That filtration process is basically a period where that new page or blog post “bounces” around Google’s search results.

Here is an example:

Here’s another example. in which I published a post on one of my other websites and through using a special keyword tool, I was able to track it’s rankings. Look at how they bounce all around day after day:

The following keyword I was seeking to rank for started in the first page position, climbed, then dropped, stagnated and then lowly rose back up again. This is honestly not a big deal, because most of this bouncing was happening on the first page, but most people don’t experience this, that high up in rankings (but I’ll show you how to get there below).

I know how frustrating that can seem, but believe me on this…

If you are seeking to rank in Google, your site and the content you publish HAS to go through this thing (and it’s OK). It also has to go through the Google sandbox, which is also a brilliant SEO process.

Why the Google Dance is a brilliant invention:

Let me give you a very simple analogy that explains why this system HAS to exist:

-Let’s imagine a person who is doing SEO for his site. His name is Bob.

-Bob publishes an article on his blog titled “how to lose weight by eating veggies”. He wants to have that article rank on the first page or at least on the first 10 search results (that’s still the first page). Anyone who gets into SEO does so for that purpose:

To rank on the first page, that’s where the money is at.

-Google comes along, crawls, picks up Bob’s article and begins ranking it for that very same title.

-However, in this circumstance, there’s other people (let’s say 20 other bloggers) with their own versions of this same title and article, also competing to hit that first page ranking, aka people competing against Bob.

-How does Google decide which of the 21 (the 20 competitors + Bob all writing about the same stuff) gets the first spot and how the other 20 are organized in it’s search result?

Simple…

It runs them ALL through it’s dance system. 

Each blog will have it’s OWN turn in that it’ll rank high for the said keyword I mentioned, then it’ll lose that position and another blog will then occupy that spot. 

But is it just a turn taking process in the end or is there more? Oh there’s more and this is where there’s really GREAT news for you…

Revealing the secret inner workings of Google’s ranking algorithm:

Remember, it’s not just a turn taking game. Google is bouncing around all of those 21 blogs with intent in mind and here is that intent:

It wants to know which of those 21 blogs has the best content worth ranking high and gets the BEST feedback from the people who see it, click it, read it and more.

The blog which gets the best numbers is the one which gets the best result and sees the LEAST amount of dancing going on. And in my experience, having these 10 factors is what will give you those best numbers.

Let me explain:

-Let’s say out of those 21 blogs, 11 of them have horrible content. So when they get bounced around Google and people see them and click on them, they don’t stay around the site and leave it quickly.

Google RECORDS that info and the feedback to it is that those 11 blogs are NOT worthy of getting ranked high, therefore, they get pushed to the back of the line.

You see, the fact is, there is tracking an analytical data collection happening behind the scenes by this program. It’s happening on your site, it’s happening when people land on it and all of this is mixed and reported back to Google, which lets them know if you have high quality content or not.

-What remains is the other 10 blogs, and let’s say they all have good content and people click it, and stick around, reading the actual blog. 

-Google records that and determines those 10 blogs deserve higher rankings so it’ll place them on the first page.

-But then there’s still competition going on. Yes those 10 blogs get the first page, but there’s still 10 positions. How does each of those blogs get organized in those 10 spots? Which get ranked higher? Which get ranked lower?

-Well Google just runs these 10 blogs through the same process.

-It’ll bounce those blogs around, but this time it’ll be in HIGHER positions (because they were already determined to be higher tier) and then based on the feedback those 10 blogs will get from people, Google will then organize those 10 blogs in the right order, where the ones with the best numbers/feedback from visitors will result in those blogs getting the higher positions. 

This is why the dance exists and why again, I say it’s brilliant.

Another reason to appreciate it:

• Have you ever started a blog that was in a very competitive market? 
• Have you ever thought that perhaps there’s too much competition and you can’t even get onto the first page?

Well if this is the case, then understand that the dance is here for help you. You can absolutely start a new blog and eventually beat out top 10 ranked blogs/pages through this process. In fact, I prove that with at least 5 sites of mine here.

Think about it this way…

My site is focused on SEO.

SEO is a VERY competitive market. There’s millions of blogs and articles all competing within it. 

And considering this site is still new, why would I ever enter this market if I didn’t have a chance to beat the existing competition? I wouldn’t.

But because I know about the brilliance of the dance and how important content is for SEO, I can do it (and I will do it). In fact, I am already ranking for some awesome search terms and it’s still very early on in my website’s history, so these initial results are promising.

This system is designed to create a FAIR playing field. It’s what gives incentive for people with blogs to write great content.

The 3 tiers of the Google dance (And why you want to be in tier 3):

Tier 1: 

When you have a new website and publish new content, it will generally see a much higher rate of bouncing around the search results when it seeks to rank on Google.

You will see rankings appear on page 20 or even further down. I’ve had rankings appear as low as page 10 (100th or lower search results).

This is OK. 

But in this tier, people usually experience the most frustration and confusion, mainly because they don’t understand the SEO game and the dance, and expect first page rankings immediately.

This will NOT happen for tier 1 sites, it’ll only happen if you seek to rank for a keyword no one searches (but what’s the point then right?).

But once again, this is totally normal, OK and you should not get discouraged by your SEO efforts in this stage, you simply have to upgrade your website to tier 2 and here’s how you do it:

Tier 2:

After about a few months, if you are growing your website through content creation and publishing it actively, you will see a few things happen:

1) The bouncing around will happen in a less crazy way. Instead of bouncing around page 20 and further down, you will now be bouncing around page 3, 4 and 5.

Granted, it’s still far from page 1, but it’s already an improvement because it shows that your site is gaining in it’s SEO growth.

2) You will notice the previous articles you wrote that were positioned on page 20, start to see a good rise too. So if you’re currently in a spot where your old content just isn’t gaining in the rankings, publishing new content on the site and even linking it back to the old content that isn’t doing too well will absolutely help.

Tier 3: 

Tier 3 is a position where your website has MAJOR authority with Google and when you publish new content, you’ll generally see page 1, 2 and 3 rankings almost immediately (well maybe a few hours or days).

And you will also see LESS turmoil when the dance happens. It will still happen, don’t get me wrong, but it’ll happen within the confines of the first 3 pages of search results, that’s a lot more stable than before, believe me!

And this shows that you’re already SO much further up the ladder than before and those rankings WILL grow. In other words, the closer you land to page 1 after publishing, the more it shows how valued your website is with Google.

And again, older content will also grow with it. Think of it as a chain. Each piece of it is old content you have and as the authority of the site grows, the chain rises, pulling the rest of the pieces up.

This is where you want your website to get to. Once it does, it won’t bounce around as much as it would in tier’s 2 and 3.

But here’s a warning about tier 3:

Sure this is where you get the major traffic and money but don’t get lazy. These top spots, while great to occupy are always in danger of being outranked if there’s new competition doing the same things you did to get there.

To ensure that you have the best chances of remaining in those spots and don’t get outranked…

Here’s 7 tips on staying in tier 3:

Not only will those 7 tips help you maintain high rankings and stay in tier 3, but it’s also the same process you should be taken to go from tier 1 levels, to tier 2 and eventually reach that tier 3 status.

The more of the 7 things you, the faster you’ll get to that tier and the less of a dance you’ll experience in the process. I have also updated this process to include 15 major tips that’ll help you there.

There is however 1 more factor in play here which determines the speed:

The niche and keyword competition of that niche plays a huge role the speed at which you can get from tier 1 to 3. Someone whose website is involved in writing about competitive topics like…saving for retirement will likely see a much longer “wait time” to go from tier 1 to 3.

This is because there’s a much wider audience here and naturally because there’s money to be made, you can believe lots of other people are also blogging about it and you have to contend with them.

You’ll still reach tier 3 in topics like these if you follow the 7 tips, but it’ll take longer because there’s so many more other websites scrambling for that high authority status. Just know this beforehand.

On the other hand, someone whose website is involved in something like mountain bike accessories will likely through the 7 tips jump from tier 1 to 3 quite quickly, in arguably a few months and this analogy would apply to any other low competition niche too.

2 last helpful tips to speed up the tier rise:

1) Follow those 7 tips and REALLY focus on that content production. Make sure to use tools like fetch as Google each time you add new content.

2) Once again, do not fret about the dance, I find people in the tier 1 stages of their site get too caught up with being frustrated by it, losing focus, losing motivation and this affects their work and really doing the 7 things they should be focusing on.

Ignore the dance if nothing else, know that it’s there, that it’s there to help you, and that through the 7 tips, you’ll get danced all the way to top tier rankings.