Helping Hand SEO

The Google disavow tool was created to combat people trying to send toxic links to other sites to damage their SEO rankings. That is what it is.

And while the very thought of someone trying to sabotage your site with bad links may be on your mind right now, I have to say that not only has this scenario become nearly impossible to happen (if you follow certain rules), but the very tool itself may not even be necessary to have or worry about using.

That’s right, an SEO expert just told you not to worry about bad links or using the disavow option. And before you close this page and head over to others which say the complete opposite of what I’m saying, give me a chance to PROVE to you that my position on this tool is the right one.

Read this article first and then tell me I’m wrong.

Why the Google disavow option even exists in the first place:

Backlinking USED to be a very serious and important part of SEO and by used to, I mean MANY years ago. In short…

• If you’d get good links coming to your site, you’d get good rankings.
• And if you got bad links coming to your site, you’d get a penalty from Google and bad rankings. 

In regards to the bad links, this eventually became a weapon that people used against each other’s sites, since they didn’t want competition.

And a site which was ranking well, upon receiving an influx of bad links, would have it’s SEO crash, very quickly sometimes. This became known as negative SEO. 

Since this became a very widespread problem, Google invented the disavow option which basically allowed any webmaster to fight back against bad backlinks coming into it.

How the disavow tool works:

First, you must examine a list of backlinks coming into your site. There’s specific programs for that stuff, including Webmaster tools.

Next, you must distinguish which of those links are toxic and bad.

Then and only then can you take the list of the bad links, put them into this tool and tell Google to disavow them which basically means, ignore them and not let them affect your site’s ranking.

Here is a link to the actual page where Google explains how it works and it also warns against using it, because of it’s complexities (which basically come down to understanding how to distinguish backlinks from the good and bad ones). Here’s what it looks like:

It’s a useful option, so why am I telling you not to worry about using it?

Because the period in which this was truly necessary is no longer the problem it once was. Yes, there’s still LOTS of people seeking to destroy each other using this method, but…

That actual sabotage method of sending bad links to other sites has itself been disavowed by Google. 

Google was very smart to recognizing the trend years ago when this was a truly serious issue and they took massive steps to update their algorithm to correct this problem and in the process, they basically disavowed ALL backlinks, good and bad in the process, without you having to worry about it.

So what does this mean for good backlinks? Well the actual process has greatly evolved and the value placed in the actual link is now worth 0 in Google’s eyes.

Do NOT misinterpret this as meaning backlinks are worthless, they are NOT. Here is how they have evolved and how you SHOULD be using them the right way.

And what does this mean for bad backlinks? Well it now means that no matter how many people, send however many bad backlinks to your site, it will still mean 0 for the SEO impact it has. 

Ok, that’s a problem right? Well if you believe in bad backlinks harming your site, then it is. So what do you do if you believe it’s a problem?

You’d go through the process and basically tell Google to ignore those 1,000 backlinks.

Now you should be fine, until the same person or someone else comes around and tries to do this whole sabotage thing all over again.

And as long as you keep believing in this being a problem, you’re going to have to keep using the disavow option again and again to counter these attacks.

What I’m getting at here is that this process can truly become a loop and no matter how many times you combat it, someone, somewhere will still come around and will still try to negatively hurt your site with this approach.

It just seems like a foolish process where someone innocent has to constantly tell and prove to Google that they are innocent, while the bad guys keep throwing these bad things at them over and over and in my opinion, this system favors the bad guys.

Unless you consider what I just said about the whole evolution of backlinks, in which case, the process flips and the bad guys, no matter how hard they try can’t hurt your site with this approach no longer.

If this is true, then why are so many SEO experts saying otherwise? 

I have to say that while looking over this topic on other websites that talk about SEO, most of them have said the complete opposite of what I said here. 

• They still believe in backlinks playing a very important role in SEO.
• They still believe in people sabotaging competing websites through sending them toxic backlinks.
• They still believe a site owner needs to be careful and be ready to use the disavow option and even hire people to do it for them.

My personal opinion on this matter is that many SEO experts are honestly out of touch with the way the model has evolved. 

I truly believe that you are protected from this form of negative SEO thanks to how Google has evolved it’s view of it.

As long as you do these following things, you will not even need to worry about the tool:

It is through these 3 specific methods that people get their bad backlinks onto your site and hurt it. Otherwise, if these 3 things are correctly maintained, it doesn’t matter if a tsunami of bad backlinks are trying to hurt your site, they will not succeed.

Again, I urge you to read these 2 following articles:

1) This is probably the most important article you’ll ever read on backlinks, which proves how Google has basically disavowed both good and bad ones altogether and how you can still get good ones if you know how to identify which are really good.

2) And second, you have to understand that negative SEO has different forms and classifications and each has it’s own counter system to stopping. Read this article and you’ll understand how your site can truly be harmed by negative SEO and how to reverse it if it ever happens.

What to do after you use the disavow tool:

Generally speaking after using it, your site’s rankings should start to climb overtime on it’s own. A disavow tool is basically going to clear your site from the bad link/s that were plaguing it, but the recovery time after this happens varies.

To speed it up or optimize it, use these SEO techniques to help that process.

An SEO penalty from Google sucks. I’ve had it happen to 3 sites I’ve owned in the past. But, it’s possible to recover from this, let’s go over how.

One of the main things people absolutely need to understand is that SEO penalties from Google happen for generally these following reasons:

The ability to understand which of those specific things your page is responsible for doing and correcting it is what will lead to the recovery of the said page as each of those reasons above has their own manual action you can take to correct it.

The problem is that most people who engage in those activities don’t even understand that they are bad and when their site gets hit, they are lost as to why. Well at least now you have the main reasons on why this occurs.

I’ll go over the basic corrections for those issues below, but before we do that, let’s be absolutely sure your page is indeed suffering from an SEO penalty and not just a regular drop or fluctuation in rankings which happens to every single website (see the top 10 reasons), which is normal…

How to check if Google penalized my website:

If you notice your page or pages are losing traffic, rankings and so on, the question is, how much traffic and rankings is it losing? If you’re getting 10%-20% less traffic, it may be a period where something causes your audiences to forget looking up your page. It could even be (and likely is) a Google dance.

Another thing that might be happening is that a Google update (like this) has occurred during which MANY websites go through a ranking turmoil and if you give it a few weeks, it should subside. 

In short, if you’re experiencing a loss in rankings, that are around losing 1-10 spots on a particular page in the search results, that is not something I’d be concerned about as generally algorithm changes (and that dance I mentioned) are responsible for this, and it doesn’t go on for long, before your rankings go back to the way they were. You may need to give that a few days or even several weeks to know for sure. 

Now if you are experiencing a 50% or more loss of traffic and/or several pages of lower rankings (or none at all), then it’s time to raise the red flag and see what’s going on…

Note: If you’re not familiar with how to check for this stuff, I wrote a tutorial on how to check your keyword rankings on Google.

How do you check for a Google penalty? The tools that work:

So there’s specific SEO tools for this, including ones from places like Moz and other sources. I have an article here that links to 6 supposedly good ones, but I have to be honest, I haven’t personally used any of them.

What I do know works well is Google’s own service that is designed for this specific problem. It is called the Manual Actions Report (link included to the page).

You will find that this particular page has a button you can press, and then submit your site through which will produce a report on how your site is doing, if indeed there was/is a penalty taking place, and with that diagnostic tool, you’ll be able to at least pinpoint where the exact issue/s are coming from:

From there, you’ll be able to take the right actions, and then re-submit your site to be reviewed and hopefully recover from the penalty.

Now it is important to note that in order to use this service, you will need to have a Webmaster Tools account. With that, at least you’ll have a more direct connection with the service and it’ll help you speed up the recovery process of your page.

A more manual/advanced method of spotting penalties:

Once you have a Webmaster Tools account set up (remember, you need this to make all of this work), you will need to go into it, visit the page you verified within there, and then look at the following things:

Now the red areas I circled are what you would want to look at as soon as you suspect your page is suffering from a Google penalty. In those sections, you will be told (if there is an issue) what’s going on. 

Now I also include the yellow areas because you may very well see these same things one of my sites is, and panic that a penalty is headed your way. In this case, it’s not, because in the following situation, the “errors” or “coverage issues” message I’m getting are not a big deal and do not fall into the 10 main issues I listed above.

Sometimes I’ll want to prevent any search engine indexing and ranking to happen on a page I have for personal reasons and the fact that it won’t be able to access it, it will still let me know there’s an issue, but it’s not one that will cause SEO dangers.

So don’t worry about things like:

Crawl errors: If you don’t let Google index a certain page or post, this is a message you can disregard. Only worry about that if there’s a 404 error page (in my case, it’s not an issue).

DNS, server connectivity. Sometimes your page’s hosting goes down, and it may be during a time that Google’s spiders are checking out your page. And when it does this, it’ll turn up an error, and let you know that, “hey, we checked your page and it’s not up, you should fix this ASAP”.

This happens to everyone, and when your hosting resumes and everything comes back, Google will see that and it’ll be fine. Once again, you can disregard this, unless you have bad hosting (in which case, upgrade it because bad hosting can lead to too many fetching errors).

Messages which say “new coverage issues detected”. Webmaster will notify you of any coverage problems, but like I said, they aren’t a big deal, worry about the red flag ones.

Also Webmaster Tools sends you notifications and emails with warnings about all these things beforehand, so by having this account, you can preemptively stop a penalty from happening (but I suspect you’re past that point if you’re reading this).

Taking the action to recover from the penalty:

Once you’ve identified the exact issue or issues that have caused the SEO penalty to occur, it’s time to take the necessary actions. This is where, the first step would be to again go back to the manual actions report page I linked above:

What you want to do is see which particular issue is causing your page to be punished, and to see the fix for the said problem. Followed by that, you have to take these following actions:

1) Manually correct the error/s and/or hire someone for this.

2) Resubmit your sitemap to Webmaster Tools. That link will show you how to set a sitemap up.

3) Manually let Google know that you’ve made the changes. This will happen when a penalty occurs and if you are registered with Webmaster Tools, they’ll send you an email warning you about that.

From there, they’ll provide a link to send them a message letting them know the fixes you’ve made (you can also elect to just let Google re-crawl your page/s again (you don’t need to do anything if that’s the case) and let them make changes at their own pace, but sending them a message speeds it up, more info).

That is the general way of recovering your site from a Google SEO penalty.

It’s certainly a lot of info but being that there are so many rules and restrictions to improperly doing SEO, when people violate it, there is a way back. The question I pose however, in spite of showing you the recovery method is…

Is it worth going through the trouble of the fix? As I said earlier, I had 3 pages that suffered from an SEO penalty long ago, 2 of them went down due to horrendous backlinks and the other was down due to a maleware infection.

With the first 2 sites, I decided to scrap them and took them down entirely. With the 3rd, I went through the manual review route I talked about by simply cleansing the page of the malware issue and letting Google know, and it was back up in a matter of days.

Looking back, I probably should have done the same thing with my other 2 sites, but I ask if this is all worth it because many people build horrible pages that are beyond recovery and my whole thing about this is that sometimes it’s better to start a brand new page than to go through the effort of cleansing your site of all the bad content, the backlinks, the duplicate content and whatever else I said that causes these penalties and knowing what not to do, to take that into the next new domain and new page you create on it.

Now this is your choice, and you have to decide if your particular page is at that point of where it can still recover or if it’s at the point of, no way, it has to go down.

What I will say is that for the MAIN issues that penalties occur, here are the summarized fixes and while I am giving you a short “fix” for these problems, you will see a lot of them may require tedious attention, which is why I say consider starting a new page:

Just remember though, the manual actions report link I gave you is where I would go to identify the EXACT issue and then pick out how to correct it. And once again, once the fix is made, either let Google know manually or let them see the change automatically because in SEO, Google will come back to your page again and again to check for what’s changed and if they see, you made the changes to fix the issues they cited, they’ll restore your SEO credibility. 

Note: I recently updated a particular issue your site can get penalized for, which is “stealing images” and/or ACCUSED of stealing images (which is what happened to me very recently), which triggers what is known as a DMCA take down notice. 

If you happen to incorrectly have this issue happen, it can lead to a penalty, but it can also be corrected if you take the right steps. I’ve listed them here, so be sure to follow that, because the steps for THIS particular problem are not the same as the steps I listed above for other situations your site may get penalized for.

Note: One more penalty that could occur (and what to do).

There is a penalty scenario which involves people trying to sabotage your site with bad links and in that circumstance, you may need to use something called the Google disavow tool to correct it. 

Personally, I am of the opinion that unless you publish toxic links on your site, you will be fine, but in case, I am wrong, that link will help you correct that problem if someone or a service is trying to attack your site via negative SEO methods.

In June 2019, Google released another major update it called the core and many sites (as usual with these events) suffered in rankings, as usual.

If yours was one of them, there’s specific things I’ll be talking about that you can do to your site to regain your rankings and even improve them. I say this because the very same SEO guidelines I’ve been following across all my major websites have continued to work and this most recent update did absolutely nothing to hurt my rankings.

I wanted to wait at least one month after the Google core update was released to be sure and let me prove that my sites are OK. I wrote a recent article on whether SEO was dead and on that article, I displayed a few websites of mine and how their traffic is doing. Overall, there were no major changes to it after this event happened.

Here’s how my sites are doing after the Google core update:

Site 1:

As you can see during the June period (when this happened), the traffic was at the very worst, stagnant, but I also suspect this is because the niche topic of this site generally sees a stagnancy during this summer periods because of vacations and other events. Either way, this page was not affected.

Site 2:

In this site’s case, the traffic actually grew during the update, BUT I don’t actually attribute it’s rise because of that. I was actually making updates on this particular site and improving the content and SEO of it. And I assume the improvements started getting noticed by Google around the same time this core event took place, so it’s a coincidence.

BUT I am certain the event had no negative ranking results on this page either.

Site 3: 

In this site’s case, it’s basically the same results as site #1. No major changes.

I have at least 2 other sites, but their results are the same so I think I’ve provided enough evidence to show that this whole event didn’t affect my pages.

Now why is it that nothing bad happened to my sites?

Well that’s because I’ve continuously preached about how to properly do SEO and follow the most important trends, on my websites and I have before when I talked about other updates such as E-A-T and Medic that I don’t care about them, because my sites in question follow the most important Google guidelines for getting great rankings and it’s these 15 guidelines.

Ok, that’s wonderful for you, but what about me? My sites suffered!

If you have seen DRAMATIC decreases in rankings and traffic for your site during this Google Core period, there’s 2 things I need to say…

1) It may not be that bad and there are many cases where even good websites that follow good SEO strategies still suffer, BUT they are temporary, meaning that as the update is occurring, it can hit good websites, but that eventually settles and the good sites return to their original rankings and in some cases rise.

So if you are indeed doing white hat SEO things on your site and you saw decreases in rankings, give it a little bit more time and see if they rise again.

2) If you’ve been waiting for at least a month while this whole event occurred and have not seen improvement, my guess is that your website is either…

Not doing white hat SEO things, in which case, I’d tell you to start a new one and STOP trying to cheat at the SEO game because this core update is one of many to follow and one or more of them WILL doom your site, even if you get away from one of them.

Or if your site is indeed one of the good ones and the rankings just aren’t picking up, then you need to follow this 15 point SEO guideline. I have said many times that these guidelines are the exact ones I use to:

A) Make my new content rank as high as possible.

B) Optimize my old content to get better rankings if it’s not doing so well.

If you follow these 15 things, you will see the positive results too.

What are other experts saying about this update?

The most trusted experts I know on SEO are basically saying the same things I am, and if you look at the major forums, you’ll also find similar advice I’m giving, but let me share other articles that provide good overviews of this new update and what to do if you need more info other than my own to show you what needs to be done:

Here is a link to an article where one of my original SEO teachers talks about this event. He gives good general advice on how to handle this thing.

And there is also another SEO expert I often consult with who basically gave these tips regarding this event:

Improve your content (add more to it).

Interlink more of your site.

Do a URL inspection on webmaster tools once you’ve improved the content to help Google see you’ve made improvements.

These guidelines are actually part of my 15 point strategy so I can vouch for them.

The main point: Expect these updates, but don’t fear them.

As I say in every article that I write which covers these SEO topics, you should not fear any Google update if you follow the main concepts that have always worked, which is writing great high quality content, and without going through the “short cuts” in SEO, which happen to be the same shortcuts that make you the first target of these updates anyway.

If you have a website that has experienced negative effects from this latest Google event, let me know the specifics about it, so I can help you recover it’s rankings the right way, but ultimately, do note that I will likely suggest you follow that 15 point strategy I linked above.

It’s almost guaranteed to help your site improve, unless it was penalized by Google. 

Everyone who begins a new website with SEO aim HAS to go through the Google Sandbox, but it’s temporary and if you do things right, you’ll get out of it.

My goal today is to help you understand the following things:

• What the Google Sandbox is and if it’s a myth or real (it’s unofficially real).
• Why despite it slowing down initial SEO success, it’s actually a GREAT thing to have.
• I will list exactly what you need to do to get out of it as quickly as possible. It’s not a big deal, but it requires you grow content, be patient and stick through this “waiting period”.

So what is the Google Sandbox?

It’s an unofficial theory that basically says that for the first several months of a site coming into existence and trying to rank on Google, that it’ll undergo this “sandbox” period where it WON’T rank high, no matter…

• How much content it has.
• No matter how many backlinks it gets.
• No matter how many social shares there are.
• And basically no matter how many positive SEO things it does, that until that period passes, it’ll be stuck in the lower end rankings.

Now that period, like I said can be several months and in the sites I’ve personally made, that period has been around 6 or so months in general. 

There are cases too where that period is even longer and generally that applies to sites who do a bit too much affiliate linking or attempt to get ranked for really competitive keywords that already have a ton of websites ranking for them.

When I first experienced this, I was obviously frustrated, having to wait this long, but overtime, as I saw the same sandbox effect play out on the websites I’ve made throughout the years, I’ve become far more wise as to it’s importance…

Now I did mention that this is a theory which is unofficial…

It’s a theory because just about everyone who knows SEO terms and other processes to it, experiences it, including me and it’s unofficial because Google hasn’t officially talked about it from what I know. 

But they do a lot of things to evolve and update their search engine, without publicly announcing it and it is a fact that there have many unannounced algorithm changes. 

But if you’ve ever made a site and tried to rank it, you know it takes longer than expected (at first), even if you do everything right. Clearly, there is at least “some” truth to this theory and in fact, I happen to think it’s real because ever single website I have created with SEO intent always had a long period of months before it started to rank (as did anyone I know who also started in SEO) and that is proof enough of the sandbox existing.

But whatever is done by Google openly or in secret, we as webmasters see the results though (our rankings change) and all the stories say that it’s real. 

Don’t let the sandbox monster stop you…

While many SEO folks freak out, especially when they first encounter this “monster”, it’s really not a big deal.

Because as I’ve said how I’ve personally seen this particular thing play out again and again on all my sites and other on other people’s sites, I know how to proceed to get out of it so what I want to say is…don’t let the sandbox monster scare you.

Do the things I’ll be talking about shortly, and before you know it, your site will be out of it.

Next, I want you to understand why I’m not worried. It isn’t just because of experience and knowing that this thing eventually ends, it’s also because this system makes total sense if you gone through it as many times as I have…

There is no monster, and here’s why:

Google sandbox is in my opinion just another word for “website maturity”, where you simply don’t get that favor from them until your site “matures” or “grows” to the point where it can be taken seriously. And there’s many people who don’t know about this maturity period who get into SEO, don’t see fast rankings, and think they failed, or that this stuff is dead.

What makes that maturity grow? Content and time.

And frankly, there is nothing else that is as important. Think about the progression of a human being and their experiences. As they grow, so do their experiences and with that, their “authority” in the eyes of others grows too.

In my opinion, it is very wise on Google’s part to have this whole set up. A website that DESERVES to get more respect from the #1 search engine has to earn it and it has to earn that with what I said makes it mature: Content and time.

So let me show you how to get out of this thing:

There’s no escaping that maturity period, you HAVE to go through it, so accept that right now. However, despite that being a given, during this maturity, waiting period, you have to do the following 5 things as often as possible, so when your site does overcome that maturity period, it’ll EXPLODE with success:

For the first few months that you are doing this, you ARE going to get frustrated waiting for this maturity thing to end, and you WILL see your rankings go crazy, but hardly every hit page 1, as you’ll be seeing a Google dance…

But no matter how chaotic or frustrating it gets, you HAVE to stick to those 5 tips, especially the tips about blogging frequently as well as interlinking those blog posts, that is huge.

That waiting period WILL end and when it does, the more of those things you did, the better your maturity will look in Google’s eyes. As such, you will see many more rankings hit their mark at top spots.

If you take 2 websites which TRY to utilize these tips and…

1 of them writes 20 blog posts in 6 months, while the other writes 150, by the time both sites are ready to cross that maturity point, Google will love the second site way more and reward it better, for obvious reasons, so that stuff I said about seeds plays a MAJOR role in understanding why during this waiting period, you can’t just wait, you need to work on the site and do those 5 things as much as you can.

Following the sandbox period…

While most people who don’t understand this thing will quit before the waiting period ends, you won’t because you know how it works now. 

Once you pass that waiting period and truly see what I have seen again and again happen to websites that don’t let that waiting period stop them from growing, every future piece of content will now be classified under a much higher tier of ranking in the future.

Now that tier is actually something I talked about when I was explaining the Google dance here. Basically, sandbox sites go through the 2nd and 3rd tiers, while those who pass it following the guidelines I set, are in tier 1. 

So stop worrying about this waiting period for your site. It’s there, it’ll be there and it’ll pass if you do what I told you to.

Here is how 3 sites of mine performed after they passed the sandbox period:

Site 1: For the first 6 months (pre maturity point), it was getting about 20 organic visitors. Post 6 months, it jumped to over 100 daily.

Site 2: Pre maturity point, it was at 10 visits daily, then it jumped to 200 post maturity point.

Site 3: During the pre maturity period, it was at 5 visits a day as well, then it jumped to 50+ visits daily post. And here’s one example of this:

And currently, this is what is going on with my HelpingHandSEO.com. I started it in late August of 2018. This article has been published towards the end of November 2018, which would make my site a little over 3 months old. 

Given that I explained that the sandbox effect lasts for about 6 months, I’m still obviously in it, but I have 0 worries whatsoever because once again, I have gone through this many times, and it always turns out well when you follow those 5 rules I gave you.

Can a website go back to the Google Sandbox?

Here’s some context for this question:

Suppose a website left the Google Sandbox, is experiencing great rankings and traffic. Could such a site ever return back to that sandbox?

The answer is yes and here are the circumstances under which such a thing could happen:

1) You stop creating new content for the website for a VERY long period of time.

Let me give you an example…

I had a page that I only wrote 12 articles on and it was getting some rankings after a few months and showing good potential. I stopped posting on the same page for nearly a year because I didn’t have time for it, and only recently did I go back to the same page and started posting again, and very frequently. 

What I noticed is that this page went back to the sandbox, because despite the new, great content I was putting up, I was barely getting any rankings for it. This is a sign that the page went back to this grading period. But I am following the same guidelines I talked about to get it back out again (and it will). So the solution to this scenario is to literally do what I had been throughout this article.

2) A penalty occurred. 

Google penalizes websites generally for these reasons and if your page was hit with such a penalty (like Google Medic), then it first needs to correct the issue to remove the penalty, and then it must undergo the same grace period (Google’s Sandbox) to get great rankings again.

One option in this case is to start a new website, but that would also mean that this same new website would still have to go through the same sandbox, so you would need to decide if the said page which was penalized is worth saving or if it’s better to just start fresh. If a penalty hits a site that isn’t really big, I’d just recommend you start with a new one.

Link juice is a measure of how many clicks your site gets via a search engine and how many clicks it gets internally. The more it gets, the better your SEO.

That’s basically what it is as a whole, but there’s specific areas on your site which you can optimize to improve the most important areas where link juice (more clicks) matters for SEO and that’s what I will help you do.

Here’s 3 examples of how link juice (LJ) plays a role in SEO:

1) 100 people look up the same keyword on Google, and 10 website results show up on the first page. One of those 10 websites gets more clicks than the other 9 and therefore, that page will receive more LJ and that’ll help the rankings for that site grow.

2) There are 2 competing websites, both in the same field, but one does a few things extra (internally) to improve it’s clicks and as a result and it gets more clicks and visitors touring their site. Because this is measured by Google, they reward that site more vs the other.

3) You own a website and know it ranks for at least 1 keyword on the first page results, but you decide to look up the same search on say a phone, to check it it’s also ranked that high there. You find that it is and click it. That sends LJ to your site too.

The common thing between ALL 3 of these scenarios is that the more clicks the site gets, the better it ranks. But while the last one is pretty clear (doing a manual mobile search and clicking your site), the other 2 aren’t clear…

• What is that the 1 site out of the other 9 in the first example is doing to get more clicks?
• What is that the 1 site out of the other competing one is also doing right in the second example to also get more clicks?

I left those details out on purpose because that’s what I will be showing you in the 5 ways to get more LJ to your site and as you read them, you will probably be able to figure out exactly what was going on those 2 examples. 

5 ways to get more LJ to your site and it’s pages.

1) Improve your meta titles. 

A better looking blog or page title has an important role to play in that because it’s better looking, it’s easier for people to be attracted to it and because of that, they are more likely to click it if they see it on a search engine or within your site.

Here are a few examples of optimized titles that before they were changed looked boring, but upon updating, are now more likely to get clicked and remember, more clicks = more LJ:

As you can see, the green titles are far more attractive and there was honestly very little editing involved. Just a few changes and suddenly the appeal and attractiveness of the title is several times greater than before.

Well when you take the green versions of those titles into account, what do you think will happen when say…100 people see those titles vs the red versions of them? I’m certain MORE people will click the green titles and you absolutely WANT that to happen.

For page titles, be sure to optimize it for SEO and here’s how.

2) Improve your first paragraph (the snippet).

I’ve talked about what is known as meta descriptions before and why they are, like titles VERY important for SEO. Your goal with the first paragraph of your post or page is to make it short, make it appealing and in context with the title. 

That first paragraph will become the snippet Google (Bing, and other search engines) shows in it’s results and just like the more improved titles led to more clicks, the snippet is also another thing you want to have optimized because it will lead to more clicks too:

3) Improve your internal linking strategies. 

Remember, LJ isn’t just how many clicks your site gets through a search engine, it’s also how many clicks the links WITHIN your site get, as that is also an important SEO ingredient, so some of these strategies, such as this one will involve making changes and updates within your site’s pages…

Specifically, what we’re going here is we’re adding more internal links within out site to other pages we have. Now besides this being good for SEO on it’s own, there’s also an attractive way to do it right, just like with the other 2 tips above…

In this case, what we’re aiming to do is improve the look of our anchor text (the text which points to the page), so it’s “clickable” for people. The more clickable it is, the more likely a visitor will click it, visit the other page and send that other page more LJ.

When it comes to internal linking, I have 2 examples of how I prefer you do it…

The first example is this: Since one of my above strategies was talking about improving your first paragraph, here is one article that helps you do it.

Notice the anchor text there. Does that look attractive?

If not, then I offer you a second example…

Once again, I’m going to offer you the same context, about improving the first paragraph, but in this case, I’ve got an awesome strategy for making magnetic paragraphs.

Now as you can see, both examples point to the same page, but which anchor text looked more appealing? The second of course and the more you use this sort of strategy within your site when pointing to other pages, the more link juice those other pages will get.

Now I also want to mention that you can absolutely use this strategy for the comments on your site, meaning you can edit them and have certain words be anchor text to point to another page. 

Also do NOT underestimate the POWER of internal linking folks, it’s huge for traffic and other things revolving around SEO. Here’s 7 reasons why it’s so huge.

4) Improve your external linking strategies. 

External linking happens within your site, but it points to external sites. You want to do this because Google loves off page SEO strategies like these and you want to do it the exact same way I showed you how to do it internally, in terms of making great looking anchor text that people want to click on.

5) Improve your images so they get more clicks.

Images themselves can be edited to become a link to something, whether it be for internal or external SEO reasons, but the point here is also that you want to get more of those clicks so you can get more LJ. 

One of the BEST ways I’ve found to make this work is this: 

Let’s go back to the 2 examples for a quick moment…

We’re going to finish this up by going back to the 2 examples I gave you where I left out details on purpose, but now that you saw 5 strategies for getting more LJ, I think you’ll be able to better guess how those 2 examples work. And I’ll help you there:

In the first example of the 1 site beating out the other 9 for clicks on the search engine, it’s because it had a better title and a better snippet. That attracted people to it better and that’s why it got more clicks.

In the second example, the reason 1 site got better SEO results was because it did better internal and external linking (and good, clickable images were also there), while the other didn’t.

Because of that, the first site was much easier to navigate and explore for visitors and search engines. I hope these 5 strategies for improving link juice across your site made sense and if you use them on your website, you’ll also see improved SEO results.