Helping Hand SEO

Metadata is basically the first thing search engines see when they enter your site. The better you can set this up, the better your SEO rankings will be.

And despite having a seemingly complex and even intimidating phrase (metadata, wow, sounds complex), it’s actually VERY simple. The easiest way to explain this is:

When Google or any search engine enters your site, there’s “initial things” they first look at and this is basically the metadata. They use this information they find to determine how they should rank your page and again, properly setting this up (it’s actually easy, you’ll see) will provide a great SEO boost.

There’s 3 parts to metadata (2 of them are really important):

1) The title.

On a scale of 1-10, I’d say this is a 10 in terms of how important it is. I’ll explain further why this is so and will help you set it up right.

2) The description.

Also on the same 1-10 scale, I’d give this a 9 or even a 10.

3) Tags. 

These are “keywords” you input within your site, it’s blog posts and pages that tell search engines which terms you want them to rank you for. On the same scale, this is actually the least important and I don’t even bother with it, so I give it a 1, even though you can use this, I just find that it produces no results (I’ll show you).

1) Getting the meta title right…

In order for a search engine to know WHAT keyword/s you wish to rank under, you need to let them know that in the title. The title gives search engines an initial preview of what your page is about.

Think about yourself going into a supermarket and looking for canned goods. How would you find it? Well besides asking a worker there for help, the FIRST thing you’d do is look for an aisle and the titles in the aisle, obviously seeing which one says the term “canned goods”.

This is the most direct way to look at meta titles and how search engines view your site the second they land on it. The first thing is the title.

But in regards to how this work in this circumstance, think about it this way…

Any search you do on search engines involves you typing up a keyword and the results you get will show pages WITH that keyword in just about every single site you see. 

For example:

 

In this case, I looked up the term “SEO for beginners” and the results I got had that phrase mentioned in one way or another in the title of the page. So how do you use it to your advantage? Here’s how:

These 3 steps will help you, but for more specifics on titles, read this article to see how to do it even better.

2) Getting the meta description right…

The very next thing search engines will look for after they see your title is the description and the description is literally the first few sentences of your page or blog post, something I recommend you keep short and the reason why is because you want a short, but good description to be able to fit into the snippet bar when search engines rank your page. 

Long descriptions tend to do worse, while short, relevant ones do better. Additionally, including the same keyword you used in the title, within the description at least once is also highly recommended because it appears bold in search engine results and that makes it easier to spot.

For example:

In the following search I did on Google, notice that the snippet (the description) bolds parts of my keyword search. From an eye point of view, I’d be better able to see it and click on it and this is why you WANT to have the title or at least parts of it used in the description.

3) Why meta tags don’t really matter…

Just to remind you, in this following metadata, all you’re doing is labeling which keywords you want search engines to rank your page or post for. While this sounds like a great thing that you would WANT to have set up, the reality is that it holds very little value, if any…

This is the least important of the 3 metadata’s because despite setting this up, no matter how properly you do it, it won’t really be honored by search engines, they’ll instead determine the right keywords to rank your site for and that is more determined by the title and description.

I’ve seen this happen again and again where posts I’ve created were ranked due to their title and description, and without adding any tags into those posts. See the SEO case study on this.

Also if this strategy were actually useful, you’d have every blogger spamming their posts with tags to get ranked for the highest searched keywords. But this doesn’t happen because there’s a filter by search engines to see if the tags you put in are worth to get you ranked for those tags (keywords).

An additional ranking metric: Content.

Content isn’t part of the 3 main metadatas, but it holds very valuable importance in SEO. If you have 10 different sites all properly labeling their titles and descriptions well, the site which gets the better ranking will the one which has the better content.

Content itself is actually the heart of SEO success because it provides search engines feedback on how much people like your site. A site which has good content on it generally has the following things:

A very good example of this is looking at this article. If you landed on this page and ONLY saw a google title and description, it wouldn’t really serve too much value.

Plus considering that the goal of content is to help people understand answers to topics, it makes sense to write more than just a good title and description. That ALL has to be accompanied by great content.

Just think about the first impressions analogy I said in the beginning. That matters, but there’s nothing beyond that, the impression falls apart.

The same thing can be said for SEO. You can set up the “perfect” metadata for your page but if it is NOT accompanied by great content, the value of that page drops.

In the end, to get get SEO success from metadata, do this:

• Focus on creating a good title whilst using a keyword people often type up in search engines.
• Create a good, short description so that gets more views from browsers on search engines.
• Create great content to accompany all of this.

Repeat these same 3 steps in ANY blog post or article you write. The more frequently you do this, the better your site will do in SEO.

There are 2 awesome ways you can get truly, high quality backlinks to your website and incredible SEO results from it. I will show you how to set this up.

Now with every topic of SEO and backlinking that I write about, I almost always have to put into context what qualifies as a high quality backlink.

In essence, it’s really a natural link that brings in tons of relevant traffic to your site or a particular page on the site and that traffic engages POSITIVELY with your content by doing these sorts of things:

Now for even deeper reasons why this is important, here is one of my most important articles on this subject and I can tell you that it’s helped a ton of people understand the subject of backlinks in a way that helps them get the right, high quality ones.

With this mindset in place, let’s get to the main point of this article, which is the 2 methods:

Here is a basic summary of them:

1) Create an authority site and this will inevitably lead you to get requests and connections from other authority site owners. They will offer you options to share their content with you and your content with them and this will produce high quality backlinks for both parties.

2) Again, create an authority site, but build an email list or some sort of social following in order to build a community of people who love and follow your content. Then each time you share that content with them, they will mass like it and submit their comments to it, boosting the rankings of that content you produce much faster. 

The quality backlink in this method is the act of sharing your new content on social networks and through it driving your social traffic (that you created through your authority site) back to the new content you made.

The good news is, you can do both methods and they are almost entirely insured to ONLY bring in high quality traffic from the backlinks you produce, which as explained already brings in a number of VERY positive SEO benefits.

Why method 1 works:

1) No authority site is ever going to send your page traffic unless it too is an authority. I run multiple authority sites in different topics and regularly get requests to exchange content (quality backlinks) with other people who also run their own authority sites.

They see that I’m legit so they don’t mind sharing their traffic with me and in return, asking me to do the same thing.

2) People with similar topics in their authority sites sends relevant traffic to one another. That traffic is more likely to do the positive things I talked about on your site to help it’s rankings. Remember, it’s what the traffic does that determines the value of the backlink. The more positive things they do, the better the value.

3) Your authority can grow from this exchange if you can give the traffic coming into your site reason to read your content and further grow your reputation.

Why method 2 works:

1) When your site gets good, relevant traffic and even signs up to your newsletter or social media page, that shows they are already highly engaged with your work.

So they are more likely to do the same positive things in the future when you create new content and share it with them. They are more likely to travel back to your site again and again through the links you give them and act more positively to give that link more value.

2) With a highly engaged audience (your fans), comes comments, shares and all the positive attributes I mentioned. Imagine having a 1,000 fans click on a new post you made and let them know about.

A 1,000 of them come into the site (through the backlink), leave 100’s of comments (all of which are content) and give that page a huge SEO boost. Comments are also a highly beneficial way to gain better rankings.

2) This method can be repeated an unlimited amount of times.

Before method 1 and 2 can work, start with this:

Create an authority site.

You need to put in the time to create and grow this type of page to later on benefit from the perks of both methods. Here are some key points for creating an authority site:

Let me get deeper into these 5 tips and explain a few important points:

First, the better focused your blog is on a specific problem, the more engaged the audience is which comes into it. This makes it easier to engage with that audience and get them to follow your page.

Second, frequently blogging, especially when the site is new is a must. I suggested posts, but here is a good explanation on how frequently you should be doing it.

Third, the more content you create, plus the more engaged the audience is that reads it, makes it better for SEO and rankings in every way.

Fourth, the sandbox. An authority site doesn’t really get labeled as that until it is OUT of the sandbox, a several month long period where your rankings are held back by Google on purpose. To get out of it faster, read this article. 

One very important question and topic comes up with the sandbox and backlinks and that is, if you get high quality ones, will it speed up the rate at which your site gets out of the sandbox?

The answer is yes, but there’s still at least a 3-4 month lag for your site to get out of that sandbox, and it doesn’t matter it gets high quality backlinks or not, it still needs to wait out this period.

Fifth and final, the moment your site exists the sandbox is when the decent traffic numbers will start coming in (and snowballing into greater numbers). It is during this period that you should start to at least focus on method 2 and collect a portion of that traffic in an email list or at least a fan page on social media so that they can be used to help your site in the future.

How this 5 tips can work on a real website:

I have seen countless blogs operate with this approach and reach immense success in the process. By taking the time to grow into an authority site, then leveraging that authority to collect a fan base, they then use that fan base to boost their site’s SEO rankings consistently and become a viral blog in many cases.

This process itself makes the blog very popular, bringing it many offers from other similar sites to share content with one another (method 1) and bringing even more healthy, quality backlinks to it.

Notice how both these methods have NOTHING in common with buying toxic links or bribing people into sharing theirs with you (these are myths and bad ones). This is one of the most legit ways to get the best possible ones and experience some truly white hat and amazing SEO results from.

A site that does successfully in SEO has many traits, and one of them is high domain authority. Let me explain what this is and how to get your site to that level.

Domain authority is basically a term used to evaluate the ranking potential of a website.

If you go to Google and look up this topic, you’ll likely find an article at the top by Moz, which basically says that it grades the domain authority of a site on a metric scale, from 1 all the way up to 100, and the higher that number is for your site, the better rankings it’ll have. 

Now Moz has it’s own list of qualifications to reach that number (here is a link), but I personally don’t really follow that, nor do I buy their tools to help me out with this stuff. I know how to get to that number on my own through years of making my own sites that have reached that point.

I find that my approach is far easier to understand and more pragmatic. Really, all I do is follow some basic SEO trends and the rest is taken care of. I prefer that over tons and tons of simple and complex bullet points that many programs tell you that you need to follow to get those high rankings. It’s just too complex in my opinion.

Let me explain it this way: 

If the scale is set at 1-100, the goal would obviously be for your site is to get closer to that 100 number right? Well I’ll show you how to do that in this article.

There are 5 components of high domain authority (100):

Here are the 5:

• 1) It needs to be out of the Google Sandbox.
• 2) It needs to be have a lot of content and I would say a good start is 50 articles.
• 3) These 50 articles EACH need to have these 10 simple optimization tips.
• 4) The site needs to be at least 6 months old.
• 5) There needs to be a consistent flow of new content coming in to keep it growing it’s domain authority.

Now if any of these 5 components confuse you, don’t worry, I’ll be detailing each of them coming up, but I can tell you that they will be simple to understand as you read their details, and while at first they may be hard to implement, overtime, you’ll find this becomes easy.

As a result as you implement them on your site, it’s domain authority will grow and the higher it grows and gets closer to that 100 number, the better rankings it’ll start to get and the more organic traffic it’ll bring in.

And like I said, I personally have more than 1 site to prove that this works and I will be giving you some examples of them as well.

By the way: Page authority is pretty much the same thing as domain authority.

These 2 terms are pretty synonymous and odds are you’ll hear one or both used separately, but they are the same thing.

Let’s break down each component:

1) It needs to be out of the Google sandbox.

What exactly is that?

Well it’s explained here, but in summary, it’s a “hold” that Google has over new sites in that for a number of months, they won’t let new sites rank high on their search engine, until that hold is lifted. That hold is the Google Sandbox in essence. 

Once it is lifted and the article linked above explains how to get out of this hold, that is an important metric for domain authority because the content it has and will produce will now be able to rank high on Google. 

2) 50 articles, aim for this.

I think every site owner/blogger needs to set this initial goal when they start. 50 articles on a site is really a good measure of IF that site has a lot of content. 

Posting a few blog posts a week, over a period of several months will get you to this goal and I have also found that around the time many of my blogs hit 50 and above articles, that’s when I start to see the site come out of the sandbox.

3) Each article should be SEO optimized. 

If the second component was a bit broad, this next tip should help you figure out exactly what your site’s articles and blogs need to perform better on Google.

Writing content is easy, but writing SEO optimized content is a different story. Writing a daily blog about your day doesn’t really get you traffic, writing a daily blog about a particular topic that is interesting to masses, is, and to add to that, optimizing that blog that Google can get that article out to the right audience and get your blog a lot of traffic is just as important.

So read these 10 optimization tips and know this:

Even though 10 might sound like a lot, with practice, you will be able to plug these 10 things into each of your blog posts on autopilot and know that your articles are performing at their peak so your efforts aren’t wasted.

You should be applying these 10 optimization tips into the 50 or more articles I listed as a good starting point, in order for them to rank better.

4) The age of the site is important. Give it 6 months.

With SEO, the age of a site has merit.

Usually after 6 months is when the site is unofficially out of the Google sandbox. But I said in the article that talks about the sandbox, you shouldn’t just sit around and not do anything on the site. 

You should be growing it during that period, because it will produce better rankings at the end of it. A person who grows their site will see tremendous growth after 6 months vs one that doesn’t do anything with their site, that sits around and waits (they won’t see anything).

5) Consistently growing the blog is key.

• Suppose you reach the 50 article point.
• Suppose you optimize it as I indicated.
• Suppose you wait the 6 months to step out of the sandbox.

You will generally start seeing results (more organic traffic), and that is a sign that your site’s domain authority has grown. But what happens after this period? 

Do you just stop and enjoy the results? No, do not make this mistake!

A site that passes through the above bullet points is a rare one and it will be a valuable site, whether you wish to sell it or make money from it, but you shouldn’t stop there, because I promise you, that site WILL depreciate, in rankings, traffic and everything if you just stop. Sometimes it’ll happen quickly and most of the time, it’ll happen slowly. 

Let me say this:

As of right now, after publishing THIS specific article, I have reached 46 articles in total. Very close to the 50.

But I am telling you this: Even after I reach 50, I’ll still keep writing. Blogging consistently keeps the blog growing (here is why).

Not to mention the fact that once your site actually passes the first major point, why wouldn’t you want to use the new perks of the domain authority it has to grow the site through targeting new keywords and ranking for other terms to get more traffic and make more money?

Plus growing it further helps it reach new levels of rankings, traffic and money generation. If you can hit 50 articles, and wait out the 6 months to finally get into that trust period with Google, everything you did before that will now rank better and anything new you create (content) will also rank better.

You will literally have all the SEO doors open to you to grow your site and have it reach new levels and every new work you put in after passing that first period will not have to go through that same waiting period.

• You will see faster results.
• You will see faster rankings.
• You will see faster and more traffic.
• You will make MORE money through SEO as a result of this (here’s a number of options).

These 5 components checked off = greater domain authority.

Like I have said, I have had and still have sites that have these particular components checked off so I have seen and still see what following them brings (all the benefits just stated above).

Where to start, knowing all of this:

You’ve got to start with your first site and grow it from day 1. You don’t need to post every single day but investing the time into these 5 components will truly reward that site with better rankings later, that is how SEO works and knowing this, you have to decide if SEO is worth it to you.

It certainly is for me and this is my business, which is why I have become an expert in it (ask me questions here). Thanks for reading my article on domain authority! 

The skill to know how to drive traffic to a site through SEO is a skill that can make you a lot of money. I’ll be showing you 5 real case studies that show how much this skill pays.

I will also be showing you HOW you can start earning from this and this is a skill you can learn to grow your own online business or do it for someone else, through actual work or even consulting and get them to pay you big.

To really explain how important this skill is, let me give you some numbers that’ll explain the potential:

A business operates without SEO, here’s how it turns out:

Let’s take a ski shop that intelligently places itself near a ski mountain.

Seasonally that place is going to get a lot of customers passing through. Let’s just say it’ll get 10,000 visitors during peak season and during that season, it’ll make $100,000.

Not bad at all! But it happens only during that season, as many mountain areas go through different seasons and rarely do people flock to a ski shop when it’s warm out.

Now let’s take that same ski shop and add in the following…

The same business adds in SEO. Here’s how that changes things…

The owner knows SEO or hires someone who does.

A site is created advertising the business and now through proper steps, it now reaches over 1,000,000 people, nationally and YEARLY. Through proper reach and marketing, that business now doesn’t have to wait till peak season hits. It can advertise to anyone who seeks ski gear, worldwide, year wide. 

As a result, the money it made before the site was up (Over $1 million), now pales in comparison to what it now makes with the extra reach to online customers and all the new sales it makes to people worldwide to people who would otherwise never know about or visit the shop, but because it has reach (through SEO) online, it can now do that.

And this isn’t an isolated story. Yes it is anecdotal for example sake’s, but believe me, it’s very realistic because the 5 case studies I’m going to be giving you will be showing that. 

5 real case studies:

1) First, allow me to cite my own.

It’s a local case study where I helped a business rake hundreds of extra leads a month and this was only because I helped optimize their website to show for very important keywords on Google. 

Not only did they get these extra leads, but they also got them for free, since SEO traffic is free traffic. With no added cost to their online marketing, this business was able to grow by a large margin.

However, because this was my first run in with helping a local business, I didn’t actually charge them for this, and it only took me a few hours to actually do all the work necessary to make these results happen.

However, the reputation I would have with the business owner would reach years ahead and after that successful experience, I would get more businesses reaching out to me, through word of mouth about how happy my original customer was.

Looking back, I could have easily made a few extra $1,000 a month and even a few $100 from consultations where I would explain how I would raise their site’s rankings on Google and get them more traffic.

Because I possessed the skill of knowing how to create, optimize and rank sites organically, I used this skill to market myself to the business. You can read more details about this specific case study and the steps I took in that link.

2) Time to cite a local SEO expert.

This is a man (Jay) I talk to quite a bit and he runs an agency where he does SEO work for businesses as well as SEM work in general.

Because of word of mouth and the success he gets his clients, his popularity is wide spread and he has no shortage of clients to work with.

The way he operates is that people who visit his site (here it is), go through a questionnaire where they identify what they need done for their business. After this is completed, a call is scheduled between the business person and Jay where they discuss what the business goals are and how Jay can help.

As far as I know it, Jay has a number of ways he makes money through his SEO skill…

One of those ways is that he explains how he can get a said business to rank for a particular keyword on page 1 and how once the results are there, he gets paid according to the popularity of the keyword, each month.

The more popular the keyword and the better the ranking, and the maintenance of that ranking (because they do bounce around), the more he gets paid, even $1,000’s a month.

Jay also provides reports and other sets up for the business he works with for additional costs. But with the example of the ski shop I mentioned, believe me, a business WILL pay a lot of money if it means multiplying the profits.

As a result, Jay makes a “Very healthy” amount from JUST this and he also runs his own independent site where he also earns from (also through SEO).

3) Niel Patel, an SEO success story.

If you don’t know who Niel is, he’s basically Jay but way more popular. The man understands SEO and practices it successfully on his blog in a way that gets his immense reach. His own name is basically his brand and he gets upwards of 30,000 visitors to his site DAILY.

Like Jay, Niel also provides consultations to clients who reach out to him (and I imagine it’s 1,000’s of people ready to pay him) and also charges an X amount for his services, which I imagine pay him pretty well.

It’s not out of the question to assume that Niel has made millions doing what he does. And he truly provides a great frame for how a person who knows SEO can make great money with it.

4) Independent affiliate sites.

SEO work can be applied beyond just helping businesses, a person with SEO knowledge can easily apply that to their own personal site and grow it. 

Through the free traffic that person gets, he or she can do affiliate marketing and make great money on their site.

Let me use myself again since this is one case study which I am a perfect fit for. Here is how I do it:

Now obviously comparing my particular site to someone like Niel Patel is not in the same realm. The man gets a 100x more visits than I do, but I still manage to produce a great income from the numbers I get. Here are the numbers for that site:

I said it before, SEO pays. If I did client work like Jay or Niel do, I’d be making $100,000’s yearly. I just dislike working with business clients and prefer to do my own freelance work.

5) Independent sites that offer consultations or services. 

The very knowledge you possess in any major subject of interest is something that can pay you big money. Mix that knowledge in with SEO and you can REALLY make a lot of money. Here’s some actual examples:

These 5 case studies offer a plethora of ways you can do this too.

Whether it’s the countless businesses out there that need SEO advice and help or whether it’s the countless ways you can create your own independent site, sell products or market your skill to a niche audience like I just showed above, here are the CORE components you need:

The actual SEO skill is the first thing necessary. Every single case study here stems from the core which is the person who makes the money from it KNOWS how SEO works. 

When you know how ranking works, how free traffic works, how to generate it, how to optimize it, there’s countless ways you can go about it.

• You can work for yourself, make your own site, and get your own free traffic.
• You can do the exact same thing, but just help clients do that and they’ll pay you to help them.

There is a rule I follow for how often I post a new blog on my sites and it ranges from once a day to several times a week. This generally gets good SEO results.

Quite honestly, the best answer to this blog title’s question is: More often = better.

More specifically, I have a list of 5 scenarios when it comes to frequency of blogging and here they are:

For better/best SEO results, you will want to stick to the top 3 when it comes to creating new blogs. Anything below that (4 and 5), and you are risking your rankings tanking, especially the last circumstance. 

Why is posting frequency so important for SEO?

This is a question I see a lot, and there’s many people who have good rankings with their site wonder why they need to keep writing more, while they are on that high wave, and why not just leave the page alone, since they think the rankings will stay. 

There’s a number of answers that encapsulate why…

Well the first answer to this question is that Google happens to consider your frequency of writing new content as being one of the more important ways it classifies your site. It’s actually a major SEO trend and has been for a long time.

You will notice (and you are welcome to look this up on Google search) that pages that rank highest, for the most competitive keyword terms are those that not only have a lot of existing blog posts, but also create new ones very frequently. There is a reason they are ranked that high and the frequency of creating new is one of those reasons. 

Authority sites and blogs for that matter have many important traits, and frequency of content creation is one of them. 

The truth is, as your blog grows (and it has to if it seeks to improve it’s SEO), you will want Google to visit it as often as possible (here’s how to do it) and see that you are not only writing new posts consistently, but also optimizing them in these ways.

10 critical points to understand why posting frequency matters for SEO:

You write a blog post, and target a keyword.

Once it’s published, you let Google know about it by fetching it (you can also leave it alone, publish it and let Google find it on it’s own, but fetching is the fastest way to get this process done).

Google sees you created new content and called them over to crawl it, and naturally, it’ll do it, and then, they’ll index it. Great, what’s next?

Well then that blog will go through a Google dance and likely rank for numerous keywords. You want this to happen, because the more keywords that it shows up for, the more exposure it gets.

Now you’ll want to replicate that and write a new post, target a new keyword and repeat the whole process over again and thus have your site show up for even more keywords.

The more you repeat this, the more Google will visit your page, and the more it’ll rank it for more and more keywords. 

The more keywords it ranks for (and again, each new blog you create is meant to target different ones), the more exposure your site gets. This leads to more organic (SEO) traffic.

Overtime, the authority of your website will be growing and this authority rise, will actually RAISE your previous blogs higher in the search engines (as well as make new ones you create and publish hit higher positions on Google when you publish them), and this can literally cause your traffic to multiply.

Another thing to REALLY understand is that most high rankings do NOT happen instantly. Not unless your site is already a massive authority site.

Most of the time, what you post today, will only really rank high after a few months, so investing into frequently writing new blogs now, grows your site later and then when it hits the high authority, your new posts will now step in front of the line (meaning against competition) and rank higher, against other sites.

I don’t know if I made a good enough case for creating content frequently clear enough yet, but in all honesty, creating content in higher frequency is in literal terms one of the best ways to get more traffic from Google. It is 100% great for SEO. 

Also another BIG tip you will want to implement is interlinking the content you create with one another, so each time a new one is published, and Google crawls it, having links point to previous blog posts you write will also have them get re-crawled and that is another major booster for rankings.

Real examples of the 5 above scenarios…

Since I mentioned that I went through each of them with different sites and saw how my SEO was affected, I can give you my anecdotal evidence…

1) The first scenario: When you blog multiple times daily.

While it is very hard to find great writers to blog on your site, if you can even get 1 person to do it, you can double your content creation frequency and produce several of them daily. 

And if you have more than one, well then you’re gold and your site is going to conquer the SEO world. Considering you read my case above for creating content more frequently, imagine a blog that has multiple posts being made daily.

That site is going to explode with rankings, impressions and get traffic in countless numbers. 

I had a site like this before and had 1 writer working for me. We managed to get 2 blog posts published a day and it did help rankings and traffic.

I also had a page where I desperately created new content at least 2-3 times a day (because I had been losing rankings from lack of creating new content from months before, so it caught up to me) and I almost went nuts from this, but through doing this over a period of a few months, I saw incredible results, with massive rise in rankings and traffic. 

I will be showing you a case study of this for one of my site’s ranking reports below, which will clearly illustrate the importance (and results) of posting frequently and doing the opposite and how it affected my SEO.

Tip: For making sure every new content you create gets the MOST value from SEO, make sure it’s following these 10 optimization tips.

2) Posting once a day.

If you can manage this frequency on your own, you’re honestly doing great and I’ve had sites where I managed to perform at this level for a long period of time.

In fact, some of my SEO teachers advise this frequency as being the best, because it’s doable for one person.

3) Posting 2-3 times a week.

This is also a good frequency to stick to in my view and far more doable for beginner bloggers. Here you will see an improvement in rankings and traffic. 

4) Posting once a week.

Should you ever run into a situation where you can’t blog often, try to least make sure it doesn’t go under once a week. This is the satisfactory frequency you may want to stick to if you can’t invest enough time into creating new content. 

If your site is on a high in rankings and traffic (and it will happen from stick to the top 3 frequencies), maintaining a once a week frequency of making new content is not bad to keep your site’s rankings afloat. 

5) Posting once a month, less or not at all. 

Circumstances of all sorts can hit a website owner. They may need to leave their site alone for an extended period of time, during which they will not have time to create new blogs. 

Just recently, such a circumstance happened to me…

I took a two week trip during which I was certain I’d have some time to create new content at least once a week, the bare minimum, yet, I wasn’t able to, because I was so tired from whatever I was doing on the trip and so for at least 2 weeks, my site didn’t exactly grow. 

Other circumstances can hit people and have them stop doing the necessary things for an even longer period of time, months even.

One of the biggest circumstances that leads to this scenario taking place is laziness OR having too many sites to manage and create content on, especially if they are working alone. Eventually, you have to choose which one deserves most of your effort, but this redoubtably leaves the others unattended, and then that affects their SEO.

This is why I never recommend people create too many websites if they want to do SEO, they just won’t have the time to manage them all.

But anyway…

What happens in those cases where you stop for too long? 

Well it’s nothing positive, but it’s really NOT the end of the site either. I would never recommend people JUST stop creating content to their site because whatever rankings they had prior to stopping, will not hold out forever. I’ll explain what this means in a moment.

I’ve had times where sites I owned grew a lot because I created new content a lot, but then for whatever reason, I couldn’t post there for a few months. So what happened?

Well let me give a few examples of the different results that occurred:

For 1 site, for this exact circumstance playing out, rankings stayed the same even though I stopped adding new content.

The reason this occurred was because the keywords this site was targeting had low competition, so while I didn’t post for months, new competition for the keywords I was ranking high for didn’t appear either and thus I was able to keep the same positions and keep getting the same traffic. 

I still have sites that maintain the same page 1 positions for a decent keyword, and that’s ONLY because other sites haven’t come around with their own content trying to compete against it. Essentially, I’m monopolizing the keyword because there’s no other competition, but this is VERY rare.

For another site, this played out differently. During the time I stopped creating new content, during the second month of this pause, my rankings and traffic slipped gradually and this was because in this circumstance, the site and the keywords I was targeting were getting new sites targeting the same keywords, and those sites were able to outrank mine because they few, while mine stayed the same.

So generally, the advice I’d give is…try not to stop creating new content.

Essentially, your site’s authority, if it’s high, will stay high for awhile, even if you don’t add new content, but there’s good odds, your site will be outranked by others overtime, if you don’t add new content/grow the site. 

And I can also say that in MOST cases, not creating new content at all for a long period of time, will in 99% of cases erode whatever SEO results the site has. 

How blogging frequency affects SEO & traffic, 1 case study:

To illustrate just how important blogging frequency is, I would like to draw your attention to the follow chart of one of my sites, which is several years old, and went through periods where I was posting a lot, to periods where I stopped doing that for a long period of time.

Here is how this affected my traffic, my rankings and the site’s overall success:

So remember I said that what you post today takes time? This is important for this graph and let me explain why…

In 2016, I created content like a madman (once a day), then 2017 is when this investment really paid off (1,000+ visit days) because the work put in throughout 2016 began to rank high throughout 2017. 

However, this made me lazy and I really lowered my content creation frequency in 2017 while on this traffic high, and thus suffered in 2018 as you can see. 

However, halfway into 2018, I started back up again and created new content several times a day and now, in 2019, the traffic is rising again.

This is to illustrate how blogging works when it comes to seeing the results. You post today to rank and bring in traffic tomorrow basically.

So overall, the key tips to takeaway are as follows:

I have 4 tips to share with you:

Tip 1:

Use the 5 point chart at the very beginning of this article and stick to the first 3 ideal frequencies you should be creating content at, from several times a day to several times a week and you should be fine.

Tip 2:

At worst, if you go on vacation or something happens where you just can’t maintain this frequency, write more blog posts ahead of time, and publish it in a spread out approach as you’re on hiatus.

For example, if you write 3 blog posts a week, and then have to take a 2 week vacation, write 9 ahead of time, publish 3 the week before you leave, another 3 during the first week of your vacation and then another 3 on the second, then when you return, maintain the same pace.

Tip 3:

You can always raise the frequency at any point, which as I explained will only lead to better SEO results (more rankings, more fetching, more Google crawling, and just positive SEO results).

Tip 4:

It’s not a catastrophe if you stop creating new content for an extended period of time. If you run into this situation or are currently in it, just raise the frequency you’re writing at and start to grow the site faster, you will be able to raise the site back up.