Search engine optimization (SEO) has been around for years helping online businesses gain leverage over bigger brands. But the art of SEO is not as prevalent among bloggers.

Sure, there are those who know the basics (most of which are featured in this tried and tested resource page from SEO Book) and are aware of link building techniques to help raise their search rankings (refer to Jon Cooper’s Link Building Strategies for the complete list), but their knowledge stops here. While the importance is placed on how to set up a blog that will succeed (which is covered by First Site Guide), they also need to understand the importance of integrating SEO as part of their overall strategy.

Nowadays, the approach towards SEO has become much more sophisticated. No longer can you hack your way to diferrent online directory sites and expect to rank at the top page within a month. SEO has become much more intuitive that you also need to make a more conscious effort to develop a more advanced SEO strategy.

If you’re looking for more complex yet simple technique to help boost your SEO effort, below are excellent tactics that can help shore your online marketing.

Create evergreen content

Evergreen content refers to all-encompassing and comprehensive content that covers a specific topic. These are long-form content that can span up to at least 1,500 words due to its scope of coverage. This is advantageous for SEO since search engines favor pages with lots of words.

Tips in creating evergreen content:

Find a topic within your blog niche that nobody has discussed in depth before by your competitors.

Research for ideas and prepare an outline draft that will be used to write your content. Use Google Search , Quora , and BuzzSumo to find pages about your topic of choice that you can combine into a long-form article for your blog.

, , and to find pages about your topic of choice that you can combine into a long-form article for your blog. Keep your evergreen content updated, if necessary. Edit information over time if there have been changes about the topic that needs to be addressed in your content.

For more information about the types of evergreen content you can publish on your blog, read this helpful post by Sujan Patel at Search Engine Journal.

Mine competitor backlinks

If you can’t beat your competitors for your target keyword on search engines, check their link profile using Ahrefs or Open Link Explorer (OSE). Download the CSV file of their respective backlinks and determine which among the sites in the lists that you can reach out to and acquire an outbound links on each.

This is a sophisticated link building tactic that can help you build up your link profile, thus increasing the chances of ranking higher for your keyword on search engines!

To help get you started with poaching your competitor backlinks, here’s a nifty post over at NicheHacks using OSE.

Once you have their backlinks, here’s what you can do to to acquire backlinks from high-quality sites:

Send them an email about a resource page you created (like evergreen content) that they can feature on their site or blog. If they like the page you sent over, there’s a great chance that they’ll use it on their blog with a link back to your page

If the blog accepts guest contributions, you can send over a couple of topic proposals and outline for them to choose from and write the ones they like. Take note that guest blogging as a link building tactic is good as dead, but guest blogging should be approached nowadays more as a relationship building strategy that allows you to connect with influencers within your niche. Learn more on how guest blogging works within this strategy by reading this post at Blog Herald.

Broken link building

This SEO tactic involves searching for resource pages related to your industry where you can get a link to your valuable content included in them. Once you have identified these resource pages, you must use a broken link checker tool (like the Check my link extension on Google Chrome) to find which among the links listed in the pages are broken. You then send an email to the website owners informing them of the broken links in their resources pages. Along with this, you request to include a link to your own content to add on the page.

The psychology behind broken link building is that once you do something to website or blog owners that benefit them (like informing them of broken links), there’s a great chance that they’ll return the favor back (which, in this case, is placing a link to your content).

To learn how to fully utilize this tactic into your SEO strategy, please read this thorough post about broken link building over at Moz.

The power of 100

The concept behind this principle is not necessarily for SEO purpose but it nonetheless has the potential to drive more backlinks to your content. What you do is simple: reach out to at least 100 online users to your latest content.

This can be achieved by doing the following:

Email other bloggers online. Search for bloggers adjacent to your niche and send them your content that they can use for their blog.

Send out updates to your mailing list.

Share your blog content to different online communities (Google Communities, Facebook Groups, and LinkedIn Groups come to mind)

Doing these things should inform at least 100 online users about your content. Of course, these aren’t the only tactics you can do to reach out to your target audience – here are some additional more from BloggingPro.

If people like what they saw from your content, they can use it as resource on the blog and link back to it!

Final thoughts: These tactics are just the tip of the iceberg as far as forming a sophisticated and advanced SEO strategy is concerned. However, the four tactic featured above will help build your solid SEO foundation that you develop and improve along the way.