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Most people don’t know what dofollow links are (or how important they are for SEO), but I’ll show how to use them the right way and make you an expert quickly.

The funny thing is that this subject kind of handles itself because if you own a blog and do any sort of SEO for it, you really don’t need to worry about this, and you’re going to quickly see this…

What is a dofollow link (DFL)?

It is ANY regular link (no editing involved) you create on your site or blog that points to another page, internal (within your site) or external (to another site). For example…

• If I create a link to another blog post on this site (internal linking).
• If I create a link to an external site like Google, a specific YouTube video, basically any site that goes outside mine…

Then it’ll count and be a DFL. You or I literally do not need to do anything other than create the link on our blog or site and point to the another site or blog post and it’ll already carry that DFL label.

It is only when we want to create nofollows that we have to do some editing, but that’s another topic, with it’s own logic, circumstances and explanation which I covered the other day here. But that’s also an issue you will possibly never have to worry about either.

What makes DFL’s so important for SEO?

For any site that is doing SEO, it is constantly getting “crawled” by Google spiders (as well as other search engine spiders). These things examine your site, your blog, the content on it and in the context of this particular subject, they will examine the DFLs you have on your site.

• They will examine the DFLs you created that point to other pages and blogs on the site (internal).
• They will examine the DFLs you created that point to pages, sites and blogs OUTSIDE your own site (external). 

Then what will happen is, since these things are going to have the DFL attached to it, the spiders will crawl the pages that you are pointing to and examine those too.

Quite literally, the term “Do. Follow” is a command to the search engine spiders to follow the DFL you created to the page, blog post or site.

And this command is also in HTML form, so the regular reader doesn’t see this, nor will they ever know it in most cases.

There are great advantages to this for SEO:

1) If you are internally pointing to other pages on your site, and they are getting crawled, that will help increase the ranking of THOSE pages too. This strategy literally gets you more exposure on Google, because more pages are being crawled, thus more pages are being ranked and therefore, more potential eyes will now see the site on Google and be drawn to it.

It also helps your visitor’s experience grow, which itself also carries SEO weight. 

Just imagine someone landing on your site but without proper linking strategies, not really being able to get a good tour or experience of it. With good internal DFLs, they can explore your site better and this will not only help their experience improve, but it’ll also show Google that you care about giving your visitors a better experience. 

In fact, just take my SEO site and see how many DFLs I’ve included on this very page and frankly on most of the other pages I have on this site (browse my blog here).

This allows the person reading one of my pages to be able to click through and read the other/s and it also allows Google’s spiders to crawl those other pages too and boost my rankings up.

ANY blogger who is doing SEO should ALSO be doing this in a similar way that I am. Notice that throughout this article, I am not providing DFLs just anywhere, but in specific areas.

2) If you are externally pointing to other pages, sites and blogs outside your website, and as long as those places are good, high value sites, the Google spiders will crawl those places too, award them more SEO points and you will also get credit for pointing to them.

Take the same user who lands on your site, but now change up the viewing experience from seeing more of your site, to seeing other, good sites that improve their browsing experience.

The only downside here is that they would likely leave your site in the process, but at the same time, Google does like it when you do this, because it shows that you aren’t being greedy and are trying to give your viewers the best experience.

Some people use this strategy to point to affiliate promotions, while others use it to point to sites that do not compensate them in anyway, and for SEO, if you do the latter, you will be rewarded more for it.

Also with regards to traffic leaving the site, a good SEO tip I can offer you is to make sure your external links have the option of opening “in a new window”.

What will happen when this is set is that when people click on whichever outside site you’re pointing to, they will at least still have YOUR site’s window open to return back to.

If you don’t have this set, then what will happen is, when people leave your page, they will likely never come back to it, at least in this instance, there’s a chance, they’ll keep your window open and return.

3) If other sites are pointing to you, then this is also a good way to gather more SEO points and this last part is actually where we have to talk about backlinking because the whole premise behind it is that by getting dofollow’s from other sites to yours, you can grow your ranking on Google.

This is not really true anymore because the actual SEO value of this stuff varies a lot. Fortunately, I took a lot of time to explain that here and you will truly understand when this strategy works and when it doesn’t.

Basically, just because a blog or site points it’s visitors to yours doesn’t guarantee a higher ranking on Google. It MIGHT if the circumstances are right, and like I said, that article will explain those circumstances in detail.

Do I really need to worry about whether I’m making DFLs or not?

In most cases and I literally mean like 99% of them, don’t even bother worrying about this and just as I said at the very top, this handles itself.

It’s just that a lot of people like to dig deep into SEO subjects and there’s many people and blogs that like to get into microscopic details of it, and that can actually confuse and scare people, and DFL are a subject of SEO that gets that reaction in my experience.

I just wanted to give you an in-depth explanation on this whole dofollow topic so you understand it better, but at the same time don’t end up complicating it. Just remember…

Every regular link you create is already a DFL.

The ONLY time/s you would need to turn a regular DFL into a nofollow one would be in the following circumstances I explained here. Basically, any duplicate pages or questionable pages you point to, just read that article and you’ll see what I mean.

But if you’re doing SEO, you’re going to want to point to other pages on your site and to other sites outside of yours and that itself will already be a DFL which you’ll want to have up anyway.

Let me also admit to something:

In the many years I’ve done SEO and made websites, NOT ONCE have I ever made a nofollow link, not on this site, not on any, ever. I just don’t see the point in it, and I just make regular ones (which are already DFLs) because those actually carry the SEO value, which is what I want.

You will also likely find yourself using the same strategy if you own a blog or site and are doing SEO. So in the end, I wouldn’t even concern yourself with if a link is a DFL or a nofollow one. Just link in a way that makes your content better to read and that is what will help with the SEO of the site.

I don’t worry about using nofollow links on any SEO focused site I run. The reason is that if you look at how this has all evolved, it’s value has downgraded.

This happens to be a topic where I know for a fact that many other SEO people will probably disagree with me but I’m going to make a strong case. First, let me explain the details of this particular thing, it’s history with regards to rankings and then explain why I say it has little value…

What is a nofollow link?

It’s basically a link (pointing to) you put within the content of your site (anchor text for instance), that goes to another site, but you don’t want Google spiders to “follow” it, crawl the other site, and give the other site SEO value.

I’ll explain in a moment the logic behind that strategy, but first…

Here is an example:

Say for instance, I’m talking about SEO on a page like this, and I decide to externally point to a Wikipedia page (just like that) that talks about it too. That’s actually an excellent way to do what is known as off page SEO, but that’s not the point.

By default, the link I just provided to Wikipedia above will send people to the site and will be count as a dofollow (it’s just a default thing, I don’t have to anything). So once Google scans my page and sees the pointing to the Wikipedia page, they are going to crawl it.

As a result, Wikipedia will get an extra backlink point from my site because of that. 

However, if I were to edit the same Wikipedia link, and add a “nofollow” to it, then Wikipedia would not get any extra points from me, because naturally, I just said I don’t want Google to crawl that. 

What’s the logic behind using and not using nofollow anyway?

There’s a few circumstances to consider in which this makes sense to use:

1) Say you have a landing page with a lot of affiliate links on it.

Typically, if you do too much of this on a landing page, it looks more like spam to Google and seeing that, they may not want to rank your landing page high. By updating the same affiliate links on the landing page and making them “nofollow”, you can TECHNICALLY omit the negative SEO effects because Google will not count them and see them as spam. 

2) Perhaps the site you’re pointing to is of poor quality or has malware & other bad things on it.

Not that you would ever want to do this if you were doing SEO, but people mistakenly or purposely still do it. This situation occurs in cases where people try to promote programs on their site that point to pages like torrent sites or low quality affiliate pages that may have spam, pop ups, malware and other bad things. 

Without adding a nofollow to these things, Google may see your page as a poor third party site trying to promote bad sites as well, and thus they may penalize you for that.

And frankly, I am totally for that, why would you want to send people to sites that harm them or their laptops and phones? In that case, your site SHOULD be punished.

But in any case, people who practice this, in an attempt to omit this scenario, make those links to the bad sites, nofollow ones, and thus Google TECHNICALLY (I will be explaining why I keep capitalizing this word shortly) won’t hold your site accountable for sending traffic there.

3) You have duplicate pages and posts on your site that you do not want Google to see.

Pretty much any serious site that does SEO needs to have at least a privacy policy and/or affiliate disclosure page where they explain if and how they are compensated. It’s normal policy and in some cases, it’s law. 

But these particular pages have their own protocol in that there’s a certain, suggested way they be set up and people simply auto generate them from free sources or copy them from other sites and fill in the blanks such as their site name and other things.

Basically, all that legal jargon is duplicated by many people, across many sites and duplicate content is something that you should NEVER allow Google to index or crawl, thus…

You should make the privacy policy, affiliate disclosure page and ANY page where you have duplicate content not possible to get crawled or indexed by Google. 

And second, to avoid any problems, just don’t point any page on your site to those pages that are duplicated.

But if you decide to do it (again, I strongly suggest against it), make them nofollows.

Now I want to explain why those 3 points matter very little…

So pretty much every point I made about the value of using nofollow, in reality, has very little value today and it goes back to the main point I was making earlier. 

The reason I even put them up was because there’s still many people say these same things and make the same exact case for using this stuff on your site. I just wanted to list them as well because I am about to explain why their uses actually have very little uses…

Here’s the main reason why there’s little value in all of this:

If you look at Google and how they are judging this particular thing (their official policy on this), you will see the following:

Google says they generally respect when someone creates a nofollow link, but the keyword is “generally” and they may have situations where they don’t honor that from what I understood and it totally makes sense. Here’s why:

If you look at my first point about a landing page using too many affiliate promotions, even if you make them all nofollow, Google can still count them as the opposite and punish you for it. This is probably because there’s more to consider here, such as the value of the page being lower if you try to spam promotions on it.

If you look at the second point about pointing to poor quality sites, once again, they may choose to count that you’re sending traffic to bad sites and punish your site for it. And why not? You’re not making the internet safer with this practice, so your site should be punished, despite you trying to hedge against that Google penalty.

And finally, for the last point, you may choose to send traffic to duplicated pages (I advise not doing it), and think you’re safe from a penalty, but Google can still choose to count that against you. 

So what’s the safest approach to all of this? 3 tips:

1) Stop worrying about whether you should make a link a nofollow or not. If you’re going to send traffic to external pages, make sure those pages are high quality, period.

I would never send my traffic to a site which has the potential to hack them or give them malware. I would however be 100% confident in sending my traffic to truly safe pages like Wikipedia and in regards to affiliate programs, I’d make sure those affiliate programs are legitimate before sending my traffic there.

2) For the affiliate thing, just don’t spam your site or landing pages with them, it’s really not that hard. 

3) And once again, for pages that are duplicated (privacy policy, affiliate disclosure, ect…), just DON’T send traffic there, leave those pages up on your site so they can be clearly be seen, by both your visitors and Google, but don’t point people to them across your other existing pages.

And for extra safety, make the duplicate pages themselves unable to be indexed by Google. I simply use the All in One SEO plugin which allows all of my pages and posts to have these boxes show up that stop Google from indexing them:

In the end, because Google ultimately decides if they want to honor your request to give a link you provide value or not (in spite of you labeling it a nofollow or not), you are best off not even worrying about it (this is why I said technically in caps earlier) and making sure you aren’t doing anything bad to begin with.

In that case, you won’t even have to worry about any of this stuff which is why I will say it again, this whole thing has lost most of it’s SEO value.

There are big differences between SEO and SEM and I have seen many people incorrectly assume both terms are the same. They are related, but not the same.

Here’s all you really need to know:

• SEO is a term used to describe ranking and marketing on a specific search engine. 
• SEM is a term used to describe multiple or ALL the ways you do can market on every search engine there is as a WHOLE. 

It’s sort of like saying an athlete who knows one sport, vs an athlete who knows multiple sports.

Here is an example of SEM:

How many search engines do you know exist?

Most would probably be able to name at least 3 and Google would be one of them. Well there happen to be more than 3 and social media sites like Facebook also technically count as search engines because you can look up different things in their search bar, besides people. 

Whatever the case is, there are many, and on each of them exists it’s own way that one can market sites on them. You can try to rank organically on each of these search engine and you can even create ads to also do the same thing.

Well SEM basically encompasses numerous and even all the ways you can market on every single search engine that’s out there so when someone says they are an “expert” in this field, assume that they know multiple ways to market on different search engines. 

Here’s specific examples:

An SEM expert could be someone who knows…

Adwords, Adsense, Bing marketing, social media marketing, ect…

These are all different platforms across different search engines and each has their own marketing techniques. I am an SEM expert because I know about marketing in different ways across different search engines and methods.

With SEO, it’s a very specific branch of SEM:

With this topic, you’re limited to pretty much marketing websites organically on the 3 main search engines, and Google is the main one. But the good news is that properly using SEO on Google will itself automatically help with that same stuff on other search engines. See an example.

Now that’s not a bad thing at all, considering how HUGE of an industry this is and how much money can be made from it if you understand it.

My experiences with people who have done both things.

It’s very hard to become an expert in these particular topics and I have read, spoken to and listened to the advice of people in both fields, and I have to say that most of the time, the experts aren’t really experts.

When I read what they write, or what they say through a video or in person, I can tell just by the text or words, how experienced the individual is and based on the experiences I’ve had, maybe about 20% of all people who say they are experts in one or both fields, and actually be that…

Usually the people who aren’t good, will VERY broadly explain what they do and frankly, being that are supposed to be”marketers”, you’d think they’d know how to relay their job titles in a way that was more attractive but they don’t…

A simple quiz for you: Can you tell which is SEO and which is SEM? 

I’m going to give you 10 different scenarios and the idea is simple, just respond with whether the scenario is related to one topic or the other…

1) A person says they make websites and rank them organically on Google.

What would you say the person does here? If you say it’s either one or the other, you’d be right, but specifically, it’s SEO.

2) A person makes websites and then markets them on Google Adwords. 

This would be an example of SEM then. Anything with ads and paying for them on search engines would also count as this.

3) A person runs ads on social media sites like Facebook.

This isn’t Google anymore, so what would the answer be? It would still be SEM because there is paid online advertising going on, despite it being on a social media site.

4) A person tries to rank sites organically on Bing.

This would most definitely be SEO and the keyword there is “organically”. As long as you see that word and it’s in relation to search engines, that answer will always apply.

5) A person tries to rank organically on DuckDuckGo.

If you’ve never heard of this place, it’s also a search engine. It’s not gigantic, but it has a growing number of users because it doesn’t track them while giving them the same kinds of searching experiences and results Google would.

Either way, if someone were to market on this search engine, it would also be the same answer as #4.

6) A person tries to market on Yahoo (organically).

You saw that keyword again, so you should already know what form of marketing it is (same as #4, and #5).

7) A person creates an organic social media account (a fan page).

This is a trick question and the answer is that it’s SEM because there’s literally no organic search engine marketing going on here. It’s a social media account and usually people who have these will use paid advertising to drive people to it to grow the page.

8) A person runs Google Adsense on their site.

In this example, the answer is NEITHER. Why? Because you’re literally not marketing in ANYWAY on a search engine, you’re marketing on your website, which is completely different.

9) A person gathers emails on their site.

Same exact answer as #8 (neither), because again, the marketing is WITHIN the website, not on a search engine.

10) A person sends emails to their subscribers, across Gmail, Hotmail, ect…

Again, this is an example of neither, but the only difference is that it’s not within a search engine or within one’s site, it’s on email platforms, which count as neither, but that too has it’s own marketing strategies.

So many options, where should someone start?

With all the various ways one can market online, it’s easy to be at a crossroads in choosing where to start. I personally began with marketing on a popular site (not a search engine), but then later moved into doing SEO more seriously and I recommend it be the starting point for most people. 

If you can learn how to market organically on say a search engine like Google, then the great news is that the results you have trickle across other search engines and give you more results that way, being that Google is #1.

You’re welcome to ask me where the best place to start would be if you’re considering getting into it 🙂

In just about 100% of cases, making a one page website will not result in great SEO rankings on Google. There are however, extremely rare cases where it can work.

And I’ll explain it all. The most major reason why this simply won’t happen anymore is because SEO has grown and evolved to a point where these types of websites will just not cut it anymore.

Even if it’s optimized as best as it can be for SEO (here are 10 optimization tips), then without other pages to boost it and other factors, it won’t mean or rank for anything that would bring you traffic.

Now I may get some old school SEO people reading this article who haven’t exactly been keeping up with the updates Google has been consistently putting up for years, asking me about an old strategy that used to work for this topic and that basically came down to doing this:

• Create an EMD domain targeting a keyword.
• Create a single page targeting that keyword. 
• Sending “link juice” through the form of backlinks.

That actually had merit many years ago and believe me, many people took notice and action of that. But…

Would that work today? No. 

Here’s what would work today:

That’s already a requirement that many people “cannot” meet and this is actually a big reason why so many people who used to do SEO the simple way back then, have opted out and said it’s dead. And while that’s not true, what is true is that it’s just too difficult for them to meet these new requirements.

I honestly don’t think it’s a problem, and have evolved my efforts so I meet those demands and thus, I have succeeded in SEO as a result (ask me your questions). The fact that most people can’t do the above things, to me signals laziness and from all the excuses I’ve heard from people, it usually falls under that term. 

Now I want to clear up a point which is, if you go the single page route, you WILL actually rank, perhaps for several keywords even, but that is only a few parameters out of many that needs to be met if you wish to get better rankings and that’s what you need to understand about this subject.

What about the rare cases? What did you mean specifically?

There are 3 situations in which it is possible for this formula to “still work”, but there’s a catch to each one as you’ll see:

One of them involves doing this…

If you can somehow find one or more people who own their own authority sites and have a major following, and are willing to link back to you (or let you do a guest post for them), perhaps for money or maybe if you’re friendly, then that action can actually lead to better SEO results.

However, that strategy has a very short term success period because if you’re in this business, the only reason you’d want to rank high on Google would be for a keyword that can get you loads of traffic.

And if that’s the case, then you can bet that there will constantly be new competition you’d have to contend with and eventually, if your site doesn’t update and follow the strategies above, you WILL be overtaken and drowned out by other competitors who ARE doing the things I mentioned. It is 100% inevitable.

It’s a lost cause in the long run, and that’s considering you even make this strategy work, even for a little. 

The other thing is…

Creating a page for a keyword that isn’t popular or even known about at all. Typically this happens when you create a business and then make a domain name that is that business. 

Should the domain name be something unusual, then odds are a simple one page site WILL rank high, for the keyword which is your domain and business name, but unless that business has name recognition and popularity, it’s a safe bet that nobody will ever Google it.

Now there is an add on to consider which is if that site and business gains recognition from online and offline sources, then people will start to Google it and will find it, and in that case, you will have a successfully ranking 1 page website, but only for that keyword.

And the final thing is…

Newly popular topics and products. These come out all the time and in rare circumstances, if there aren’t people or promoters hearing about it until it’s release, you may have a small opening in time to make a one page promotion and rank for that topic or product VERY briefly before the competition comes in and overtakes your rankings.

The reason this would work at first is because if all the perfect circumstances are met (that is highly unlikely), there will literally be a few or no pages competing against you and with an open field, you’ll easily rank on Google. 

But that small time gap will ALWAYS vanish quickly if the topic or product is popular enough, because it WILL attract bloggers, promoters, and others and you will be outranked rather quickly. 

My advice is NOT to wait around for these scenarios to happen, because they are rare and even if you do manage to see an opportunity, as long as you try playing the SEO game through this limited approach, you WILL lose and very quickly.

In these 3 rare scenarios, each has their own catch.

-The first requires that you have the friendship or connections with people who have successful sites of their own, but even that formula runs dry quickly.

-The second can go both ways, in that you may start ranking for a low or 0 value keyword (a business name), but the success rate still depends on marketing that business such that it gets attention on Google, so you will STILL need to work to get to that point.

-And finally, in the last example (instance) or finding a topic that’s popular without competition, you have a very small time frame to make this work AND you also need to understand that this scenario is itself VERY rare.

So basically everything points back to the tips I said earlier about ranking well. You just can’t be lazy anymore with this subject, you need to do it right.

There are at least 10 things you can optimize right now on every blog post you have, and get better SEO results from in the process. I’ll show you how.

Here is actually the list of things I’ll be suggesting you do:

If you want, you’re welcome to go ahead and apply them right now, but you need to be smart about it and if you’re not experienced enough, read through this whole page please so you know how to intelligently apply these tips.

The reason you even want to do this is, is because you can improve your existing rankings quite easily in the process. Imagine your site only getting about 10% of the potential traffic it could be getting, organically.

Any Google result that is on page 2 and down will get 95% LESS traffic than a post ranked on the first page. 

That is the reality most bloggers face today and I was part of that majority. 

90% of all that hard work results in…no results happening. 

That’s how my story goes and it actually is how most stories for bloggers go, even though most don’t even realize it until they start studying SEO and grab their heads in shock of how much they could have done differently to literally get several times more traffic, higher ranked results and more.

I’ll tell you the 10 ways to optimize your blog for SEO very shortly, but you need to read this story and make sure it doesn’t take you as long as it took me to make the corrections:

It has only been a few years since I “mastered SEO” from the point of view that when I create posts, I know how to maximize the effect of it so that Google loves it, that it ranks it well, and that the audience it brings in to view it, also loves it, thus maximizing every angle.

But the amount of NEW content I’ve written since that I passed that “mastery” period has not come close to the amount of OLD content I’ve had up already that hasn’t been optimized.

I’m only going to use 1 website for reference to describe this point, but basically, I have about 90% of my content on that site NOT optimized for SEO correctly, while the other 10% are.

Care to take a guess as to which of that content ranks better? Obviously, the latter 10%.

But what happens to the other 90%? Do I just drop it? Or do I optimize it? 

This is where you probably find yourself today if you’re reading this and the answer is that you should carefully select which posts need optimization, then make anywhere from 1 to 10 of the corrections that I’ll be listing here. 

Which ones you should choose to improve upon, is something I will be showing you, but the older your site is, and the more blogs it has, the more picky you will have to be about which specific ones you’ll want to choose and fix.

The reason being is that SEO optimization itself for every post you write can add up to a lot of time spent on it and the more of it you choose to correct, the more time it’ll take away from you writing, fresh, new posts that are already optimized for SEO (so you won’t have to correct it later) and it’s the fresh content you’ll want to prioritize moving forward.

So basically, if you find yourself in a situation where you have 100’s of posts that need optimization, select a doable number you know you can fix in a few days time, say a dozen, get it done, write new content, go back and correct another dozen later (days and even weeks later, do it at a pace you know you can do it at), because if you try to tackle that all at once, you’re going to really waste a lot of time focusing on what is essentially a secondary priority, your first should be fresh, SEO optimized content. 

Getting started: Which posts should I optimize and which should I drop? 

There’s a lot of ways to approach this, but what I prefer is doing this optimization process after getting through these 3 stages:

First stage:

Only get involved in this whole thing if you have at least 50-100 posts on your site, that site is at least 6 or more months old and you’re not getting at least 100+ organic visitors a day.

If your site is new (under half a year) and you have LESS than 50-100 posts, your site will naturally NOT have a lot of high rankings because it is still new and filtering through the Google dance.

In any case, people who are in the first category, apply the coming 1-10 optimization tips after the second stage, for the selected blogs which need fixing. 

If you are in the second category, just skip past stages 2 and 3, and apply the 10 tips for any new posts you write on your site.

Second stage: 

Again, if you’re reading this part, you are the person whose blog has 50-100+ posts, over 6 months of age for it and it’s not getting high rankings. Ok? Let’s go:

Next thing you’re going to want to do is separate is classify your existing posts into 2 categories:

Category one (good): The ones which are ranking high, and by that I mean 1st page Google results ONLY.

Category two (bad): Here you will isolate the ones which are not getting good rankings and those will be the targets for optimization. Anything page 2, 3 and under (or basically anything that isn’t page 1) is the target here.

Here’s how to do this:

You need to use Google Webmaster Tools for this, run a 90 day ranking report and see which keywords get the most traffic and highest ranking positions. Those are going to be your good ones that you will omit from optimization (since they are already doing good, don’t touch them). 

In regards to directions, follow this guide (use the old Webmaster Tools console, because the new one hasn’t updated to help with this):

1) Open up a Webmaster Tools account and make sure you have a verified site on it (otherwise, stage 2 is useless).

2) In your account, go to “Search Analytics” then make sure you have the following things checked and showing (I’m using one my blogs as an example):

This will filter out ranking results and display from the highest ranking to the lowest ranking, which keywords and the position those keywords are ranking for. 

All you want to do is take every single 1st page position you have (anything 10 and under is considered page 1 rankings), cross reference those keywords to the blog posts they are associated for and omit them from this whole operation.

Basically this step helps you identify which blogs are good and that you want to leave alone. You can choose to optimize them, but if they are already ranking well, then improving them may cause them to get re-ranked and that may actually cause a lag time as well as it to disappear for a period from it’s existing high ranking, you don’t want that…

Third stage:

Now that you’ve classified the good and bad ranking blog posts, it’s time to look at only the bad ones, as those will be the ones we will be optimizing in the coming 10 options.

Here, you’ll want to divide up the bad ones into 2 categories as well:

Category 1: Bad blog posts which are targeting an important keyword and have good content. Focus on these.

Category 2: Bad blog posts which AREN’T targeting any particular keyword and their content isn’t really that good. Focus on these ONLY when you finish optimizing the first category blog posts.

Now you’ve just cut your workload even less, and are focusing on the ones which are bad, but that can turn good and get better, higher rankings.

Now we are finally ready to start using the 10 options, let’s go:

1) Improve & edit the title of the bad blog post.

Very often people write WAY too much in their title, target a bad, high competition keyword or worse, no keyword at all. Correct these 3 things and that may in fact raise rankings.

Here are the goals for this step:

For character counts, you may want to use this site (I do). Titles with under 60 characters fit into Google’s search better and they DO prioritize titles with under that many characters over ones that are over that amount.

If you’re having more trouble with titles, read about meta titles and making them shine. So yeah, take this info, find bad ranking posts with long titles and make the changes.

2) Do not touch the permalink (easy tip).

Existing blog posts you have will have their own permalink. Even if you make changes to the title, do NOT touch the permalink.

This is one of the easiest things people get wrong. They change the URL of their blog post AFTER it’s been indexed in Google and changing it to something new will make 404 errors. I have gotten MANY messages from people who have had lower Google rankings from making this mistake.

Again, to avoid this problem altogether, do NOT touch the permalink, even if your new title doesn’t match it, just leave it alone.

3) If your meta description is too long, fix it these ways:

Like the title in #1 which is can be too long and needs corrections, the same applies to your meta description which for a lack of a better term is just the first paragraph on your blog post. The longer it is, the worse it looks on Google, so keeping it shorter gets the message across, Google likes it and it raises rankings.

• Keep it to under 160 characters.
• Include your updated keyword anywhere within those 160 characters.

Again, use the character site I linked to before.

4) Alt text images, absolutely include them.

Look at the very first image (the 10 tips) I used above. Right click it, and guess what you’ll see…

The alt text of that image will be the very same keyword I targeted in my title and in my meta description. Do this for at least one of your images (use an image and use the keyword to title that image).

5) Internal links. A must.

Many posts lack proper linking strategies. They simply either:

• Link no where.
• Link to something like a promotion and nothing else.
• Or they link to other blogs you’ve written that are not relevant to be linked to.

While the SEO issues from those 3 things generally aren’t bad, proper internal linking strategies only help to raise your blog’s rankings and here are 2 intelligent way to use them:

6) External links. Also a must.

Hogging all those links to just your site or promotion simply isn’t good enough anymore for higher SEO rankings. You are going to want to share some of your site’s value by linking to outside sites which you have no association with, but are helpful for your readers to click through, read and learn from.

Keep it to about under 5 external links or less per 1,000 words. I did it about 3 times on this blog by the way.

7) More content (words) is always a bonus for SEO. 

As I said above in the image, 1,500 words. You will probably notice the blog that you see rank least well, generally correlate with those posts having not too much content. Fix that.

8) H3 tags (or large sub headings) maintain reader attention. Even consider using H2’s.

Imagine you read through this blog and it didn’t have any H3 headings, and all the text was the same size. Even if I included good images, I assure you, you’d probably be bored from reading this post 20 seconds in.

But because I’ve been properly and intelligently using H3 tags like labeling each of the 10 tips, your attention probably got your eyes this far into this article, which means I did it right. Well that’s what you need to do too.

In doing so, you extend reading time on your content for any reader and this acts as a positive SEO influence. And in some cases, when you truly want to make a big point in your article, I’d even recommend you make that an H2, not an H3. 

9) Keep paragraphs short, it makes it easier for readers. 

Much like with H3 tags, having gigantic page long paragraphs is tough to read. Our eyes tend to jump ahead while reading text as a way of seeing “how much is left”, and if we see more and more text with no finish, it creates a drain effect on our mind and makes reading further, harder.

Keeping your paragraphs shorter will make the mind recognize that a paragraph is about to finish and inspire the person to do it, then move into the next paragraph, which should also be short.

Again, this all extends reading times for blogs, which you already know affects SEO in excellent ways.

10) After all is said and done, update the post date, and do a URL inspect with Webmaster Tools.

Every time a new blog post is updated, head over to Webmaster Tools and let it “URL inspect” your new post (how to do it). This will speed up the re analyzing of your updated posts and show Google you’ve made improvements to it. Do NOT forget to update the post date. 

For example, when I first wrote this post, the date was in November of 2018 but I did go back and optimized it the ways I indicated in this post, and when I did, I changed the date to 6/15/19, before doing a URL inspection.

In fact, I’m currently doing this on an old site I have. 

Those are your 10 tips, before you get to work though…

Know that through these optimization tips, you will see improvement and you will be able to track it through Google Webmaster Tools. However, even if everything is done “perfectly”:

Aside from this, keep your focus post optimization on making fresh content and already implementing these 10 things so you won’t have to go back to fix it later.

Additionally, you should make sure your site is mobile friendly and you should try social media sharing for added benefits, because the points from these 2 things will add to your SEO results.

Final important notes: This is how to SEO optimize your website & articles. 

Although the focus of this post was on blogs, I hope that it’s already understood that…

• Doing this across all your blog posts = you optimizing your website for SEO. 
• And also articles are blogs or pages anyway, so you can definitely be applying these 10 tips and you’ll still be getting the most SEO results out of them as a whole.

Update: More optimization tips.

While these 10 rock, I have an updated list, which includes them and additional ones you should read here if you wish to improve your rankings.