Helping Hand SEO

When WordPress first came out, it was tough to master, but today, not only is it easy, but for SEO, it’s not only good, it’s the king for it.

Let me just say a few, quick things regarding competitors. The 2 biggest ones to date are probably WiX.com and SquareSpace.com, both of which aren’t bad, but while I will talk about their SEO abilities in a different article, from what I’ve seen, they aren’t up to par with WordPress. 

So what evidence do I have for WordPress (WP) being good for SEO?

Some of it is anecdotal, while some of it is not. But here are at least 10 important pieces of evidence:

1) Firstly, the amount of people who use it is…well you need to see this:

According to this website (which cites others for further proof), over 50% of ALL websites made today, on the internet that is made through the WordPress platform. I don’t know if you can grasp how many websites that is, but it’s somewhere between 50-100 MILLION.

Here’s evidence you can easily find too:

Clearly, it’s popular and for a good reason.

2) I personally use it on every website I make now.

Whether, it’s this site or any other, I’ve completely made the switch to WordPress. And because I am also an SEO expert, I know how to use this platform, combine it with my ability to rank content high and as a result, I’ve done very well (in organic rankings) with pretty much every single website I’ve made and put effort into.

3) Every SEO expert I trust, endorses it.

Whether it be people who make and rank websites like I do, or even those who know more than me, they ALL recommend WordPress, without question. 

I won’t get into calling other platforms a bad name, but let me just say that a long time ago, when I wasn’t as experienced but still trying to get more experience in this, I was getting advise from an expert on how to help a client improve his website rankings and at the time he was using a different website platform, which when that expert heard about, he literally said “Eww” and while I won’t name what platform it was, let’s just say it’s one of the big dogs, that is very well known.

In fact, below I will show you the BEST and free way to start you own WP site with awesome training to help it rank  included.

4) Do any sort of search query (on Google) and 90% or more of the time…

You’ll find that MOST of the results (the organic results) are websites designed by WordPress. I mean, if you look at that staggering stat I showed you in the first point, its only reasonable and not surprising.

5) It provides the best tools and open space for content creation.

This is more of a personal, anecdotal reasoning I have, but it makes sense, because it falls in line with having successful rankings. 

Very quickly, without getting into the incremental details…

Content creation is what drives SEO, it’s growth and your success with it.

The fact of the matter is that when a website platform limits how much space there is on a page for content creation (particularly writing it), that hinders ranking success for that site.

With WP, this isn’t the case, in fact, it provides countless themes for anyone to create as much content as they want and with all the accessories, or what we call plugins added to this, the ability to share that content, grow the page and expand is also limitless.

If you look at this website, the content that I have written here occupies pretty much 70% of more of the website space and this is important because THIS part of my site is where I want your attention on and just as important, this is also what Google wants to see as well, because you being able to easily read and digest this content (And this provides positive ranking factor points), and giving it positive feedback is what it’ll analyze to see if my website will be worthwhile to rank higher.

While Google hasn’t openly endorses WordPress, it’s not difficult to see that it does favor this platform because of all the ways that it fits in line with what Google wishes a website to have.

6) It’s generally easy to use.

Creating, editing and setting up a site has been revolutionized and made far easier thanks to WP. Now everything I need to monitor the site is available on the dashboard which I can look at, monitor, adjust and add/edit whenever I wish:

I don’t even want to go into how complicated it was before WP came around (HTML people will know). Now there’s always a learning curve, but I have found that for WP, it’s far smaller than it is for other sites.

7) It is beginner friendly. 

Beginners can set up a free WP blog and get started with posting their initial content very quickly these days. The learning curve I just talked about gets narrower and narrower once beginners get going with these things and they discover plugins, editing options and so on.

Because it’s easy for beginners to use, more of them work with WP and more people create content, and you already know what content helps drive 🙂

8) Easy to do the following things:

You can easily add and share things like YouTube videos, links to other sites, links within your site to other parts of it and other things such as including buttons to share your content on social media, as well as fan pages you have made on social media. 

Additionally, you can also install very awesome programs made by Google such as Webmaster Tools quite easily if you own a WP site, and that will itself help the website’s SEO.

All of these features are designed to help the site grow and be recognized by Google and the ability to add/edit and customize all of this on your site through WP makes helping that website rank, much easier.

9) No need to worry about things like FTP/cPanel.

If you don’t know what these things are, they are basically programs outside your website which help you edit it and add new pages and code to it. While this stuff is still available for WP users, unless you’re looking to do some expert coding, you just don’t need to know or use this stuff anymore and for beginners, this is a huge deal, as they don’t need to worry about any programming.

10) Excellent support, for free.

Not only is WP the biggest platform for making a website, but it also offers excellent support if you have questions or want to get something done on your WP site that you can’t figure out. They have free forums available for anyone to ask their questions on.

Don’t have a WP site yet? The best options to get started:

Either you are someone who is just looking to make a WP blog for personal reasons, or you’re someone seeking to make a WP blog or site for financial reasons, perhaps that being online business, SEO interests. 

If you are in the group of people who seeks to make a WP site for personal reasons, start here by making a free WP blog.

But odds are that you probably found this page because you either have an existing WP site or are looking to make one with the purposes of doing SEO. In that instance, there’s a bit of a different approach, but it also involves making a WP site, and it’s the same way I do it each time I decide to start a new website with SEO, business intentions in mind:

WP websites on their own do not cause Google to love that site, BUT using good SEO training WITH your WP site does and you can get started with that here:

 

I’ve already done numerous articles on the weight social media has in regards to improving a website’s SEO, but in regards to Google Plus, does using that have more weight than using other social media networks? 

My personal belief after doing SEO for a very long time is yes.

Note: Google Plus has actually been shut down. You’re welcome to continue reading this article, but if you want to know how to continue to get SEO benefits on your site without this network’s help, read this updated article which explains what you need to do.

Furthermore, there are 15 very powerful SEO strategies I use to get rankings, so regardless if Google Plus was or wasn’t around, I would still classify those 15 methods as being more important for rankings, so I highly recommend reading (and doing) them.

Although there is no specific evidence to suggest that using Google Plus holds more SEO points when you use it vs other social media networks, I’ve personally seen this to be the case as do people whose opinion on this matter I hold above my own and frankly, it only makes sense if you look at it from the following point of view:

-Google created this social network. 

-Clearly, it wanted it to compete with other places like Facebook. 

-In an effort to stimulate usage on this social network, why wouldn’t they want to give the people using it extra SEO points? 

-In my opinion, from a business standpoint, they should be doing this. 

-So if I share an article and get 1,000 likes on Facebook and a 1,000 likes on Google+, I feel the latter will hold more value when it comes to SEO. If I wanted Facebook traffic, I’d obviously focus on doing this on Facebook instead.

-This is simply because I feel that Google itself will value it’s own social network above competitors.

-If more people use this search engine and it’s social network, it will allow more people to potentially use it’s ads and other services.

-One of my main SEO mentors actually advises using this social network specifically. He basically confirms and backs up my points regarding the weight this social network has on search engine rankings.

Here is an article where he lays out the MAIN ways to rank a website as high as possible and you will notice one of his tips is using this social network.

Also regarding this same mentor, there’s people who charge a lot of money for the info he’s giving out in that article, so you’re getting a great, free deal here 🙂

So putting all of this stuff together, these are the arguments I have concluded after doing SEO for years and I would love to hear your take on that below. But in the meantime, let me get into specific things regarding how to use this social network for better rankings (as I have seen it done).

So if this is true, how do you use Google Plus to get better SEO results?

One of the main goals you want to reach is having a website that is connected to this social network and lots of people within that network liking, sharing and commenting on your content and every new content you put out.

This is actually something I preach regarding ALL social networks but in terms of ranking better, specifically on Google, this in my opinion is the network where you want this to happen more so for the reasons I explained above.

Whether it’s a personal blog, a business page or an eCommerce page, the end goal I just stated should be the same. In fact, my own page will be having it’s own Google Plus business page you can start following for updates. I just haven’t done this yet because the site is still new and I don’t see a point in getting this branch of it done yet, not until the rankings and traffic increase more.

Anyway in terms of specific things you want to do in order to get these results, I suggest you read this article and specifically the green area where I talk about how to leverage social media for higher rankings. 

Specific things you need to do ASAP to utilize this social network:

Actually get yourself a personal Google Plus account. 

If you run a business, then set it up this way. 

Create a social plug on your website that includes a button to this very social network.

Include a box (this is optional, but it would help) anywhere on the side of the website where people can click, reach your G Plus page and become followers of it.

The key is to grow that personal page of followers and you do that through 2 methods…

1st, you create content on your website and 2, you share that content on the social network page. Considering you get people liking your social network page THROUGH your site, this is how it’ll grow.

As it grows, every new article you create should see a steady increase of likes, comments and shares from your followers.

In the process of getting all this positive feedback, you should also simultaneously start to see faster, higher rankings in Google. They will see and give value to your page if through it’s own social network, it (your website) is getting positive responses.

A quick tip for business pages:

In the same article where I talked about social media’s weight on SEO, there was a snippet in there where I talked about business pages. When it comes to THIS particular social network, this is how you want to utilize it for YOUR business:

The great thing about this is it’s free advertising for your business. Setting up an account in this area and getting clients saying positive things about it helps your business rank for free, for search terms which include your business topic keyword in the specific area you’re in.

For example, I have a friend who runs a law firm and he followed this very same technique for his firm. When people type up law firms in HIS area, on Google, his business shows up, because it has a lot of positive reviews. 

You simply wouldn’t get that result if you used another social network, but in the process, he gets free exposure and more clients this way.

And if you run a personal blog, no problem, the same likes, comments and shares being given to your content through this same social network will just help the site itself rank better in general, thus you’ll get free traffic.

And by the way, these 2 sites also help improve SEO:

Besides the other social networks you already know about, you should also be using:

YouTube and Pinterest. 

Not only do these places count as social networks of their own, but they are owned by the big G itself and considering the argument I made for it’s plus network holds true, why wouldn’t it be the same for these other 2? Use them too.

It’s not mandatory to use every social network, but if your goal is ranking on Google, then it’s better to use the social networks which are owned by it to get the rankings. 

If your website and the content on it aren’t ranking as high as you’d like them to, there’s specific on Page SEO strategies I will show you in this article that’ll 100% improve that.

There’s actually 7 in fact, and they are killer techniques.

Now you can use these 7 strategies in one of two ways:

1) You can apply them to existing pages on your site that aren’t ranking well.

2) You can apply them to new pages you create.

Before I unveil the techniques, know this:

While these techniques work and you WILL see ranking improvement, know that in SEO, it is impossible to rank every single article or piece of content you have on the first page/first spot of Google.

This doesn’t happen anymore, especially if your website is in a competitive niche topic. But that is OK.

Use these techniques, watch the rankings grow and if it doesn’t rank as high as you want, don’t let it bug you, move on to writing more content, because the more you do that, the more first page rankings you WILL get.

Here are the 7 on page killer SEO techniques summarized:

These 7 techniques should be used on every existing article you have, as well as any new ones you produce:

1) Apply a low competition keyword in the title (meta title).
2) Apply the same low competition keyword in the meta description, aka, first paragraph.
3) Have 2,000 or more words of content on every article.
4) Include several internal links in your article.
5) Include at least one or more external links in the article.
6) Include one or more images with the alt text being the low competition keyword in the article.
7) Use fetch as Google every time a new article is published. 

Now some of these may sound familiar to you if you’ve been doing SEO for sometime, but even if they aren’t, worry not, they will each be explained in detail and there will be examples provided to help you fully utilize them.

In addition, I’ve got 3 bonus strategies for you at the end of this article that’ll only help to improve your SEO, so keep reading 🙂

1) Apply a low competition keyword in the title.

Unless you have or are creating an HTML website (in which case switch ASAP to something else, like WordPress), every article you create begins with entering a title for it.

Whatever you enter into the title is known as the meta title and it’s imperative that this includes a LOW competition keyword. I will be providing a very in-depth article on low competition keywords in the future, but for now, if you’re not familiar with this, read my article on meta titles here.

In fact, look at the very title of this article if you need an example. The keyword I am using here is “how to improve on page SEO”, which has a search traffic of about 75 and a competition of 25:

With a number higher than 50 for search volume and a competition number under a 100, I know this keyword is low competition and thus I use it in the title. Ask me about this below in the comments if you have questions.

2) Apply the same low competition keyword in the meta description, aka, first paragraph.

This is pretty clear cut, but a big rule to SEO rankings is using the same keyword in the first paragraph as you do in the title (known as the meta description). Why?

Because when it gets ranked, that first paragraph is indexed and ranked as the snippet that people see.

When it includes the keyword, it becomes bold and this has a greater chance of increasing clicks to your site. It also helps Google very quickly and clearly see what you are trying to get ranked for, don’t make it hard for them.

Make your first paragraph short, exciting, but include the keyword, those are your only goals with strategy #2. Want an example?

3) Have 2,000 or more words of content on every article.

This is a practice that is tough for 99% of bloggers and content creators to reach, but through practice and creating content on topics you love, it’s easier than you think.

I love SEO, and this site talks about it. Therefore when I blog about it such as I am doing on this article, it’s rather easy for me to reach the 2,000 word count. In fact, by this time in the article, I have already crossed 700+ words and I’m just getting started on the content.

But beyond that, you may wonder, why is it important to write so many words? Does it actually help raise rankings? The answer is yes.

As long as the content is exciting to read and includes the other 2 tips I explained above, writing 1,000’s of words worth of content, for every page you produce is of extreme use to your SEO. 

Even if you don’t reach the 2,000 word count, don’t worry so much about that, just try to cross 1,000 for starters, then when you get used to that, aim for 1,500, then when you get used to that, go for the 2,000 mark.

4) Include several internal links in your article.

Internal links are a very simple concept to understand, you just provide links within your articles to other, older pages on your site.

In fact, I already included a few just above when I was talking about meta titles and descriptions. Those links point to the topic I mentioned and describe it in great detail.

Internal linking is a big part of on page SEO and it’s something that not only Google loves, but when it crawls your page and sees it, it will crawl the link you provided and this will get the other articles you created more exposure, even if they are already ranked.

You WANT this to be going on your site and I recommend an internal link every 100 or more words (not too many links, but not too few basically). Let me use a relevant example.

Here’s one, where if people are interested in my content on this site and how I know so much about ranking on Google, they can read my personal page that talks about my history with all this and that is an internal link.

5) Include at least one or more external links in the article.

If internal links help your rankings, so do external links that go outside of your website, but don’t mistake these for affiliate links, we’re talking links to articles and websites which don’t help your site monetize in anyway but do help your readers get a better experience from your website.

Externally linking to other sites is a powerful ranking technique and provided the site you link to is highly popular and informative, Google will only appreciate your website for doing that.

Here is an example:

If I have an article talking about diabetes, I would provide at least ONE link to a medical site talking about it. The medical site I’d link to would have to also be a highly popular one, which when Google would analyze, it would see that I am linking to a big authority site. 

You will notice, for example, on this article (this is an internal link), I talk about social networks and each time I mention a specific one, I link directly to it. I get no monetary benefit out of it and the purpose for me doing this is to help my readers get a better experience on my website.

I’ll be including an external link very shortly in this article (see if you can spot it :)).

6) Include one or more images with the alt text being the low competition keyword in the article.

There are a number of ways to use this strategy to improve your rankings. The first is to use at least one image in your article and title that image with the low competition keyword you used in strategies #1 and #2.

The other one is to use another keyword, whether similar or related in the other images you include on the same article.

For example, if I am writing an article about the “Top 10 Christmas Gift Ideas For 2018, not only would that be my title and I would be using that in the meta description, but I’d also make an image and give it THAT same title (known as the ALT TEXT) and use it somewhere early on in my article.

Then as I go through each of the 10 gifts and provide images of those gifts, I’d give them a title relevant to the gift. Those titles would provide more relevancy to the main title of the article and boost my on page SEO further.

7) Use fetch as Google every time a new article is published. 

Where you apply these edits to an existing article or publish a new one, absolutely use fetch as Google (it requires you have a Google Webmaster Tools account first and by the way, that is an external link) once you republish or publish it.

This will allow it rank far faster. Here are instructions on using fetch as Google.

Before I give you the 3 bonus tips I promised earlier…

At this point, if you start using these 7 tips, like I promised, they will have a VERY positive effect on your SEO, whether for existing articles you apply these strategies to or new ones you create. They are truly killer tips.

But I want to give you even more to help you rank even better…

That brings me to the next 3 tips, starting with #8:

8) Do not neglect the power of OFF page SEO strategies. 

Optimizing your site’s on page SEO  is great and the first 7 strategies do this, but it can only help you more if you do positive things outside the website to also help in this regard.

That brings us to OFF page SEO strategies which you can use and here are some powerful ones for you to use.

9) Get comments on your articles.

If you already have a website, ask clients, friends, incoming traffic to comment on the article. Have these people write positive, yet high quality comments on one or more of your pages. 

Make sure they aren’t duplicating their comments or saying boring things like “Nice work!”. Actually have them write something or merit, have them ask questions to encourage your answer to it.

And furthermore, invite people who read your articles to leave their thoughts. Comments and ones which provide high quality, your answers or best of all a thriving discussion play a huge impact on SEO, because other people who come and read those comments stay on the site longer, it encourages them to leave their thoughts and it increases the amount of content on the page.

10) Watch this free webinar from an SEO expert whose better than me.

The person whose free webinar I am about to share with you knows more regarding rankings than me and he provides his own 7 tips for ranking well, some of which match my own, but others which I didn’t mention in this article.

This webinar is free to check out, but you do have to sign up to get it. It is highly recommended:

Armed with these now 10 strategies, there should be NO reason why you can’t see your rankings grow and get better ranking results moving forward.

Now I have to say that I use these most if not all of these strategies (definitely the first 7 I mentioned) and they work better as you apply them more and more to each new article you create.

Once of the most important parts of SEO growth is the constant creation of content. As long as you create more, WHILST following at least the the first 7 strategies, the better your site as a whole will grow.

Have your own personal on page strategies? I would love to hear them!

I’d love to get other opinions and perspectives on this topic from people who also engage in SEO, especially if the strategies work well for you. In the end, it’s about the people who read this article to see what works to help them improve their rankings.

My strategies aren’t the only ones which work and I’d love for you to share yours.

And by the way…

For anyone wondering if I used the first 7 strategies in this article, the answer is yes:

• I included a keyword in the title (which I already revealed earlier). 
• I used it in the first paragraph.
• I provided numerous internal links on my website.
• I provided numerous EXTERNAL links on my website.
• I provided images with relevant keywords to the title of this article.
• I encouraged people to comment on the article. 
• And as of this last sentence, I have over 2,000 words written just for this article.

Mission accomplished if you ask me 🙂

Update: Even more strategies revealed to improve your on page SEO…

This article explains 15 specific things I do on my existing articles to help them improve, half of which are on this very article too, but I also apply them to newer articles I write as well. Not all of them are on page SEO specific, but it doesn’t change that when used together, they 100% help!

Off site SEO is simply strategies and tactics you engage in outside your page’s realm to help it’s rankings improve organically. What sort of things are we talking about?

Things such as backlinking across different social networks (don’t jump ahead here, it’s not that simple), pitching your URL to an email list, that’s stuff that happens outside your page, but in the process helps that same page’s SEO improve. 

Now in 2019 and onward, this process has gotten a bit more complicated and tougher to do. But at the same time, it’s still well worth investing your energy in as the rewards are greater than they were before.

I’m going to give you 5 examples of how to do off site SEO correctly:

1) You create a social page to market your page through.

This is a great thing to have in order to utilize off site SEO. The key to making this strategy work is to focus and grow the social page you have.

Whether it’s a Facebook fan page, a Google+ page, a Pinterest page, Twitter or other social network, you should consider these places just as important for your page’s growth as the page itself you are growing from the inside.

Now there’s a particular way to use this strategy correctly and very often, it will require a lot of time at first to do, but it can absolutely become a major weapon in growing your rankings fast.

The key is to start the social network page, post your content on it freely, learn to attract the right audiences best suited for it and have them become fans of it. 

Overtime, the page will grow and every new piece of content you create inside your page should be shared on the social network page. That will be the off site part of this strategy.

Here is an example:

Suppose I run a page that teaches people fly fishing. 

I decide to create a fan page for this on Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest (I’d ignore Twitter for this example).

After doing so, I’d probably focus on writing content within the page itself, and content that is only focused on fly fishing topics.

Even before off site SEO can begin, by doing just this, I would overtime be getting rankings and traffic from that alone. 

Now the key in this is that when the traffic starts to come in, to pitch your social network pages to them and have them become fans of this.

Once they do, and this process continues to grow, you can then share your NEW content with this group, get their likes, they comments, their shares and quickly grow your rankings.

Off site SEO in this case takes time to develop but imagine the end result of having even 1 major social network with fans looking forward to your content. If you can reach this point, then each time you share that new content you create, it’ll cause a rapid chain reaction of attention from readers and this will get Google to notice the value of your blog.

And for my HelpingHandSEO.com website, I have at least 1 page set up on Facebook here.

2) Create YouTube videos. This is one of the fastest ways to do off site SEO.

If you aren’t creating video content through YouTube, you are seriously missing out on an amazing opportunity, and not just for rankings, but just traffic in general.

In this particular case, your goal, like the social networks is to create and grow a channel. The ideal scenario here is to make the channel focus on a specific topic that is popular and visual.

I suppose fly fishing in this case also applies just as it did in the above example.

Your goal would be to obviously create fly fishing content on YouTube, then share your page’s link in the description OR you can even interlink your YouTube videos together, get more traffic that way from YouTube, and grow your subscriber base from there.

Now in this case, every video you have that gets good views could easily be linked to your page and that would be another example of off site SEO. 

In fact, I have a personal scenario where this worked very well for a local client whose business I helped grow in Google’s organic rankings. Here is the experience.

The beauty of YouTube is that it takes a lot less work to grow an audience, a subscriber base and get traffic and once you create a few videos, getting traffic to them (considering the titles are related to popular topics), is quite simple, then linking those videos to your page would really help it’s SEO improve.

3) Grow an email list, and link them your content.

Just like with social networks, growing an email list is like growing a fan base and then sharing your page’s content with that fan base is an amazing way to get comments, likes and shares from these people. 

I would even say it takes LESS time to grow an email list than it does to grow a fan base on a social network. The reason being is that you can easily just focus on creating content on your website, then creating a sign up form on your page or in something like an exit pop up to collect the list.

Then all you really need to do is send the people who subscribe great, free content. 

Again, I have to go back to the fly fishing example. It’s just a universally good one to use in this topic. There’s millions of people who are into fly fishing and considering you put out great content on your pages for it, the people who come to it will appreciate that and it’ll give them a good reason to sign up to get more.

As they sign up, simply set up your autoresponder (a program that collects and sends out emails to subscribers automatically) and then just send them an email once every 2-3 days with a new article you wrote.

Provide a link in each email to a new article you create and guess what?

That’ll be another example of off site SEO in action. As long as people open, read and enjoy your content, you’re going to get a lot of traffic from the email list and the positive affect this has on your page will also be noticed by Google, more than enough for it to give you better, faster rankings. 

4) Own a physical business? Great, do these off site strategies:

5) Mix it all together.

Make content creation one of your website’s top priorities. Do not forget this.

That will be the main way to grow your page’s organic rankings. If you can create popular, potentially viral content, then the other off site things you do for SEO will kind of fall into place. Without good content, none of this stuff is worth going, which is why you need to focus on this.

But considering you are doing this already (great, keep going!), include links to your social network pages that are easily seen, are easily clickable by readers. Some of them are registered on different social networks so having the option to access the social network they are registered with quickly is a good way to get a subscriber there.

Include something along the lines of an exit pop up for other visitors with the intent to build an email list out of this, but also include a side bar sign up form with a call to action to get people to subscribe to get more news on the great content you produce.

Give people a free, valued gift as a way to get them to sign up, it works.

But in doing so, you will also be growing an email list and fan base through that, in addition to growing fan bases through social networks.

And lastly, if you are good at creating video content, DO IT. Share that video content with your email list, your social network fan base, and link the content to your pages.

All of these things are examples of POWERFUL off site SEO going on and it’ll all immensely impact your rankings. These circumstances take time to reach, but I have personally seen how small websites can turn into icons and immense success stories and they do it by following this last tip to the fullest…

They produce content that is craved by their readers and they make sure to let readers know they can be followed on social networks and through email. Then they just keep circulating new content to those people through those areas, and as a result they are boosting their page’s rankings in Google and getting even more fans that way.

A final thing you may have missed…

Earlier I was talking about backlinking, yet I never made direct mention of this in the 5 tips I provided. Why?

Well because these very tips are examples of POWERFUL backlinking methods, even though I didn’t label them as such. Backlinking is actually a blanket term to describe off site SEO tactics, but without the proper description of how you’re doing it, there’s no good way to do it.

And to be honest, most people do not know how to backlink correctly (here’s why). Luckily, with these 5 tips, you are now in possession of great ways to create powerful backlinks to your page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More comments equates to more SEO authority.

2) Shares are also a huge thing.

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

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

3) Likes are also another form of social signals.

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

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

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

There’s a few simple tips:

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

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

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

That’s basically it.

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

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

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

For example…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This means for example that:

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

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