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by Daniel Burford

Having the right SEO strategy is the difference between a highly successful SEO campaign that increases your website traffic, and one that doesn't.

This guide will give you the best information to help you create an effective SEO strategy for your business for this year to increase your online presence, dominate Google and drive more traffic to your website.

I'm bringing together the information from thousands of orders, websites and case studies that we've created to give you fresh, up to date optimization strategies proven to work.

Let's get started.

1. Keyword Research

Keywords are the cornerstone of every SEO campaign. If keyword research is performedcorrectly, this will open the way for success in later stages, such as link building, which will talk about later.

For now, let’s discuss the mistakes many people make with keyword research and the best strategies for avoiding these mistakes.

First, some of the common keyword research mistakes are:

Choosing keywords that have low search volume

Choosing keywords that are too broad

Keywords that have too much competition

Keywords that won’t convert, not "buyer keywords"

Attempting to rank for one single keyword at a time

Perhaps the biggest mistake that people make with keywords is just trying to rank for a single keyword at a time. It is easier and more profitable to choose hundreds or possibly thousands of keywords and key phrases within your content.

Keyword Themes

Instead of trying to find a single keyword to rank for, it is better to come up with a keyword theme. You already know what type of consumer that you are looking for and whether or not you want conversions or traffic or both to your website.

Be specific about about your keyword theme and it will be easier to rank. Choose medium volume with low-medium competition keywords for optimal results.

2. Content as an SEO Strategy

Content marketing is a fundamental SEO strategy that is no longer negotiable to be taken seriously in running an online business.

Do content well and your audience will show appreciation with comments, sharing with friends, visiting your website (whether that's what you intended or not).

However, when it comes to ranking your selected keywords it is not enough to simply find the keywords and produce articles related to your keyword theme. You need to make sure that the content that you are creating is valuable.

In essence, you need to establish content on your site that will prove you are an expert in the field to both position yourself as an authority and naturally attract backlinks from other websites.

Valuable content must have the following:

An emotional response

Utility

A point of view that is either positive or negative

Perceived value, which may include the fame of the author

The content on your page does not have to include all of these things, but it should excel in at least one to be successful.

What Content to Use?

Think about your keyword theme and how it would be best delivered. It could be one of the following:

Engaging articles and blog posts

Videos

Infographics

Interview series

How to guides

Question and answers

New tools

Webinars

Slide decks

It could be just one of these or it could be a combination of several. The more ways that you find to deliver content and the more channels that you utilize, the more likely you are to reach new audience and position yourself as an authority.

Think about what makes sense for your business.

If you are a fitness instructor, video demonstrations make a lot of sense. If you are a journalist, an interview series or podcast makes sense.

The truth is, you'll have many options to choose from. Today, businesses are finally waking up and realizing the need to put value first. This means that the competition is fiercer than ever. So you need to think about how you're going to stand out.

One trend that took off in 2017 is video marketing. And it's not too late to get on the boat now. You can see we have begun using this as part of our sales strategies, such as on our Diesel Core landing page.

The trick is -- think about what will engage and appeal to your audience. Then adjust your content marketing strategy accordingly.

It's not too late to start content marketing!

But if you've chosen not to engage in content marketing, ask yourself how you are going to remain relevant to your audience today, in 6 months and in 6 years time.

Need help finding and writing engaging content? Check out our content writing services here.

3. Link Building: The SEO Strategy

Now that we have covered the basics of keywords and creating quality content, it is time to look at link building: the most overlooked, and often the most powerful way businesses can increase their website rankings.

What is Link Building?

First, it is important to understand what exactly link building is. Simply put, link building is acquiring hyperlinks to your website from other websites. A hyperlink offers a way for users to navigate quickly from one website to another.

When a search engine, such as Google or Bing, is crawling the web it will use the links from individual pages of your site between other websites. There are many different techniques that can be used to build links and some are more difficult than others. Since link building is extremely important and requires a lot of skill for correct placement, most businesses, including everyday small businesses, choose to hire a reputable link building agency such as Diesel Marketer to create powerful backlinks for you.

As shown through the below graph, backlinks are the most important part of any SEO strategy and have the most significant impact:

Therefore, link building should be your number one priority to secure higher search engine rankings and increase your website traffic.

How Search Engines Use Backlinks

There are 2 basic ways that search engines will use backlinks:

To determine how well a page should rank

To discover new web pages

When search engines crawl the pages of the web they extract the content from the pages and then decide whether or not the page deserves to be ranked for certain keywords.

The crawlers will not just look at the content of the web page, but will also look over the quality of the external websites that are linking to and from your page.

Generally, the more high quality websites that have linked to you, the more likely you are to rank highly in search engine results.

In short: the more high quality backlinks you have, the more likely you will rank high in the search engines.

Benefits of Link Building

While link building is important when it comes to determining page rankings, there are other benefits to consider as well.

Builds Relationships

Link building often requires reaching out to relevant blogs and websites within your industry. This will often relate to promoting something that has been newly created such as an infographic or a piece of content.

This outreach can help you build long term relationships with influencers within your industry. This can be very valuable, even without the link building aspect as you will be creating advocates for your business.

Referral Traffic

Good links from highly visited websites can increase traffic to your website. If the referring website is relevant, this can lead to an increase in sales as well.

Again, the value of the link is not just about optimization, but it is about potential customers, which is essential for any business.

Brand Building

Quality link building can also help build your brand. With the right links you can become an established authority and build strong reputation online.

Types of Link Building

Now that you understand the importance of SEO and link building, let's take a closer look at some of the different ways to build quality links to your website.

Editorial Links

Editorial links are defined as links that result from having good marketing techniques and content on your site. These links are not directly requested and they are not paid for. Editorial links will provide your site with traffic and authority that not many other types of links can. In order to get this type of link to your site you will need to make journalists, editors, and authors want to naturally link to your site.

There are several ways that you can improve your chances of gaining editorial links for your website. If you want us to handle this process for you, check out our premium editorial links service.

First, read the news. News sites and authoritative websites like to report stories that are relevant to current news stories and trends. Research different news channels and use trending tools in order to find content opportunities that one of these sites may want to reference.

Another way to gain editorial links is to research the authorities that you wish to work with. You can search recent articles on topics that your content is related to. Find contact information for the authors and editors of these pages. When you are looking at authoritative articles make sure that the page links to external websites and that the links on the page do not have a “nofollow” tag on them. If a publication does not link out to other sites you are wasting time asking for a link.

It is also important to “sell” your content. If you do not have any established relationships with writers from authoritative websites you are going to need to sell your current content through the right sources. This is referred to as outreach as you are not selling your content for money, but rather selling the idea and attracting interest to your site. Twitter and Facebook are great places to “sell” your content.

Gaining editorial links can be quite tricky and time consuming. For this reason, it is often recommended to use an SEO strategy service for help in this area.

Outreach Guest Posts

Another successful way to gain backlinks that has gained traction in 2017 is through outreach guest posting. This means contacting established authorities within your niche and securing placement on their site.

This outreach may be through webforms, emails, blog comments, social media, phone calls, etc. The main point of outreach services is to provide something that the recipient will open, read, and hopefully respond to.

When it comes to outreach it is important that you will have a very short amount of time to get your recipient’s attention. You will want to get your point across in as few as words as possible.

When it comes to outreach guest posts, one of the most important things to remember is that you will be dealing with real people. Since you are dealing with people you will need to elicit emotion in your request and there is going to need to be something in it for them. This could be in the form of social media shares, comments, conversions, etc. It is important to let the site owner know that you will help them get what they are looking for.

With an appropriate outreach service you will be able to reach a larger number of recipients in a shorter amount of time. While it is possible to conduct all of this work yourself, most businesses owners prefer to use proven outreach guest post services as many businesses lack the industry knowhow and connections to secure these types of backlinks.

But make no mistake, every bit of time spent in securing Outreach guest posts is worth it. This is how brands grow online, build backlinks and become a credible, sought-after business.

Press Release Distribution

The best press releases report brief, but specific information about events, circumstances, announcements, milestones and more. Press releases allow your business to be featured in news channels, building your reputation and trust while reaching a new audience.

Additionally, press releases have many SEO benefits as discussed in this post here.

However, it's important to note that oftentimes the media is not going to just grab your press release and uncritically distribute it. It depends on how relevant and compelling the story is and if their readers or listeners will benefit from the information.

There are two types of press releases that can be created. Immediate release press releases are available for anyone to share as soon as it is made public. Other types of press releases may allow only specific media sources to report it immediately and then offered to other blog owners, websites, and new services at a later date.

When it comes to the main purpose of a press release it is important to note that they are different than a news story. A press release is designed to promote something specific and significant. This could be a change in management of the company, a company milestone, product release, or anything else that may be noteworthy to the media outlet's audience.

Press releases are written in the third person and should be written as though the information you are sharing is riveting. A press release needs to be interesting and if it can be linked to a current trend it will be that much better.

Press releases are not guaranteed marketing tools. However, when they are done correctly they can be picked up by the sources that you want and improve traffic to your website and help increase your business.

Press release writing and distribution is rarely done in house. Instead, businesses rely on SEO companies to write and distribute these releases. This ensures the release will be picked up by the media and receive maximum publicity. Additionally, SEO companies have access to their own connections that can assist as the release is being written and afterwards.

At Diesel Markteter, we offer reputable businesses one of the best press release writing and distribution services, which attracts media outlets worldwide, offering placement in channels such as Google News, ABC and more.

Private Blog Network (PBN) Backlinks

Private Blog Networks can be a powerful tool when it comes to your SEO strategy. Historically, SEO companies have used PBN backlinks to significantly improve client rankings in short periods of time.

However, PBN backlinks are truly meant only for the best SEO companies. Managing a network is extremely difficult and requires a team of in-house, dedicated staff to ensure the network remains private.

One of the biggest benefits of PBN backlinks is that you have control over the backlink. You can choose the anchor text, what the backlinks are, what they look like and control the lifecycle of the backlink. There are no third party dependencies.

Another reason to consider PBN backlinks is that is truly on demand. Unlike outreach and editorial links, there is no need to build relationships or use outreach in order to get the backlinks that you are looking for.

Private blog networks should be used for link building, but they should be used sparingly. It has been seen over and over again that they form one part of an overall SEO strategy. This is where services such as our Diesel Core Gold Package shine: offering a complete SEO service utilising best practice SEO strategy including PBN backlinks and more.

For dedicated private blog network links, I highly recommend looking at our Diesel Power packages, which contain very exclusive and powerful backlinks incorporating many advanced features exclusive to Diesel Marketer.

Choosing a company that specializes in private blog networks is highly recommended to provide the best PBN service.

Core Backlinks Every Site Needs in 2018

If you truly want to fully optimize your website and get more traffic, using a diverse, white hat foundation links the best choice. While there are many black hat methods that have worked in the past, many of these are akin to "tricks" that work for short periods of time.

The truth of the matter is, white hat foundation links are a lot of work that require time and expertise to secure.

What are white hat foundation backlinks? These are backlinks from other websites. Examples include:

Web 2.0s

Edu blogs

A blog post on Medium

Guest post blog on related niche site

Editorial links in Huffington Post

Wikipedia Backlinks

The truth is that there are many different types of white hat foundation backlinks that every website should be incorporating into their link building strategy. To complete these backlinks, you will need to be researching keywords, creating great content, and then finding authoritative sites to link to your site.

Even if you spend a significant amount of time doing all of this, other websites may not like you, your company, your stance or certain elements of your website, which can often mean they will refuse or simply not acknowledge your efforts to publish on their website.

This is where hiring a company to do the work for you comes in. All of the link building strategies listed above are white hat methods that are offered within our Diesel Core service. The methods incorporated are built upon thousands of case studies and best practice SEO strategy. This is what works now with SEO; the service incorporates the most powerful backlinks to enable businesses to increase website traffic and generate more leads from their websites.

The Proven SEO Strategy Template

As you can see, creating a well-considered and proven SEO strategy is mission critical to growing your traffic online. You need to be on top of your game at all times to ensure you are continually increasing your website traffic and do not fall behind in instances where search engine algorithms change.

Even if you have an established website and business, it is important to re-evaluate your SEO strategy regularly to ensure that you are still following best-practice SEO. But more importantly, that you are doing all that you can to increase traffic to your website and generate more leads from your website.

The most important aspect of SEO is link building. A proper link building strategy can lead to more traffic to your website and the more traffic that your website gets, the more conversions that you are going to see. However, link building in the most effective ways, that yields serious ROI for businesses, is scarcely found. And it is even rarer to be found in employees.

Now you have the first step to higher search engine rankings: a proven SEO Strategy Template that you can follow. The next step is finding the best SEO company to manage the process for you.

Diesel Marketer has a proven track record of providing results-focussed SEO campaigns that deliver exceptional increases in website traffic and leads.

Talk to us today about how we can help grow your business with a free SEO strategy call here.

If you are ready to take your business to the next level or are interested or have any questions about how we can help you, feel free to contact us any time.



P.S. Signed up for your Diesel Marketer account yet? Get access to our client portal to easily manage all your link building in one place. Click here to sign up for free.