Link building is hard, but it's not the only way to make traffic gains in Google's search results.
When I first started SEO, building links wasn't my strong suit. Writing outreach emails terrified me, and I had little experience creating killer content. Instead, I focused on the easy wins.
While off-page factors like links typically weigh more heavily than on-page efforts in Google's search results, SEOs today have a number of levers to pull in order to gain increased search traffic without ever building a link.
For experienced SEOs, many of these are established practices, but even the most optimized sites can improve in at least one or more of these areas.
1. In-depth articles
According to the MozCast Feature Graph, 6% of Google search results contain In-depth articles. While this doesn't seem like a huge numbers, the articles that qualify can see a significant increase in traffic. Anecdotally, we've heard reports of traffic increasing up to 10% after inclusion.
By adding a few signals to your HTML, your high quality content could qualify to appear. The markup suggested by Google includes:
- Schema.org Article markup – NewsArticle works too)
- Google+ Authorship
- Pagination and canonicalization best practices
- Logo markup
- First click free – for paywall content
While Google seems to favor authorities news sites for In-depth Article inclusion, most sites that may qualify don't have the proper semantic markup implemented.
2. Improving user satisfaction
Can you improve your Google rankings by improving the onsite experience of your visitors?
In many ways the answer is "yes," and the experience of several SEOs hints that the effect may be larger than we realize.
We know that Google's Panda algorithm punishes "low-quality" websites. We also know that Google likely measures satisfaction as users click on search results.
"… Google could see how satisfied users were. … The best sign of their happiness was the "long click" – this occurred when someone went to a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return."
-Stephen Levy from his excellent book In the Plex
The idea is called pogosticking, or return-to-SERP, and if you can reduce it by keeping satisfied visitors on your site (or at least not returning to Google to look for the answer somewhere else) many SEOs believe Google will reward you with higher positions in search results.
Tim Grice of Branded3 reports a saying they have at their SEO agency:
"If you have enough links to be in the top 5, you have enough links to be position 1″
While we have no direct evidence of pogosticking in Google's search results, we've seen enough patents, interviews and analysis to believe it's possibly one of the most underutilized techniques in SEO today.
3. Rich snippets from structured data
Google constantly expands the types of rich snippets it shows in search results, including events, songs, videos and breadcrumbs.
The first time I heard about structured data was from a presentation by Matthew Brown at MozCon in 2011. Matthew now works at Moz, and I'm happy to glean from his expertise. His Schema 101 presentation below is well worth studying.
If you're just getting started, check out this amazingly helpful Guide to Generating Rich Snippets from the folks at SEOgadget.
Two of our favorite types of markup for increasing clicks are videos and authorship, so we'll discuss each below.
4. Video optimization
Pixel for pixel, video snippets capture more search real estate than any other type of rich snippet, even more than authorship photos. Studies show our eyes go straight to them.
Eye-Tracking Google SERPs - 5 Tales of Pizza
Unlike author photos, video snippets are often easier to display and don't require connecting a Google+ account.
Video snippets generally require creating a video XML sitemap and adding schema.org video markup.
To simplify things, many third party services will take care of the technical details for you. Here at Moz we use Wistia, which creates a sitemap and adds schema.org markup automatically.
Pro tip: Both schema.org and XML sitemaps allow you to define the video thumbnail that appears in search results. As the thumbnail highly influences clicks, choose wisely.
Recommended reading: Getting Video Results in Google
5. Google authorship
Scoring the coveted author photo in Google search results doesn't guarantee more clicks, but getting the right photo can help your click-through rate in many results.
What makes a good author photo? While there are no rules, I've personally tested and studied hundreds of photos and found certain factors help:
- Use a real face, not a company logo, cartoon or icon
- High contrast colors. Because the photo is small, you want it to stand out with good separation between the background and foreground.
- Audience targeted. For example, young Disney fans are probably less likely to click on an old guy in a suit who looks like a financial adviser.
Google recently got more selective about the author photos it chooses to show, but if you implement authorship correctly you may find yourself in the 20% (according to MozCast) of all search results that include author photos.
6. Improving site speed
Improving site speed not only improves visitor satisfaction (see point #1) but it may also have a direct influence on your search rankings. In fact, site speed is one of the few ranking factors Google has confirmed.
One of the interesting things we learned this year, with help from the folks at Zoompf, is that actual page load speed may be far less important than Time to First Byte (TTFB). TTFB is the amount of time it takes a server to first respond to a request.
As important as page speed is for desktop search Google considers it even more important for mobile devices. Think about the last time you waited for a page to load on your cell phone with a weak signal.
"Optimizing a page's loading time on smartphones is particularly important given the characteristics of mobile data networks smartphones are connected to."
- Google Developers
Suggested tool: PageSpeed Insights
7. Smartphone SEO
Aside from speed, if your website isn't configured properly for smartphones, it probably results in lower Google search results for mobile queries. Google confirms that smartphone errors may result in lower mobile rankings.
What is a smartphone error? It could include:
- Redirecting visitors to the wrong mobile URL
- Embedding a video that doesn't play on a particular phone (Flash video on an iPhone, for example)
- Pop-ups that aren't easily closed on mobile
- Buttons or fonts that are too small on a mobile device
Google recommends making your site responsive, but many of the top brands in the world, including Apple.com, don't have responsive sites. Regardless, a good mobile experience is imperative.
8. Expanding your international audience
Does your website have traffic potential outside your existing country and/or language?
Our international experts like Aleyda Solis know this well, but folks inside the United States have been slow to target specific languages and countries with SEO.
Oftentimes, the opportunities for appearing in international search results are greater than staying within your own borders, and the competition sometimes less. To see if it's worth your while to make an investment, check out this International SEO Checklist by Aleyda (who is also a mobile SEO expert—it's so unfair!)
9. Social annotations with Google+
When you share content on Facebook and Twitter, your network basically sees it only when they are looking at Facebook and Twitter.
On the other hand, when you share content on Google+, your network can see it every time they search Google.
Google's own research shows that users fixate on social annotations, even when presented with videos and other types of rich snippets.
The easiest way to take advantage of this is to expand your Google+ network and share good content regularly and often. Rand Fishkin elegantly explains how to use Google+ to appear in the top of Google results every time.
Additionally, content shared through Google+ often ranks in regular search results, visible to everyone on the web, regardless of their social connections.
10. Snippet optimization
This goes back to basic meta tag and title tag optimization, but it's a good practice to keep in mind.
In the past two years, Google changed the maximum length of title tags so that it's no longer dependent on the number of characters, but on the number of pixels used, generally around 500 pixels in length. This keeps changing as Google tests new layouts.
Because 500 pixels is difficult to determine when writing most titles, best advice is still to keep your titles between 60-80 characters, or use an online snippet optimization tool to find your ideal title tag length.
Google also updated its advice on meta descriptions, further clarifying that duplicate meta descriptions are not a good idea. Matt Cutts tells us that if you can't make your descriptions unique for each page, it's better to have none at all.
"You can either have a unique meta tag description, or you can choose to have no meta tag description."
Google's Matt Cutts
Given that duplicate meta descriptions are one of the few HTML recommendations flags in Webmaster Tools, does this indicate Google treats repetitive meta descriptions as a negative ranking factor? Hmmm….
11. Updating fresh content
Websites that stop earning new links often lose ground in Google search results. At the same time, sites that never add new content or let their pages go stale can also fall out of favor.
Freshening your content doesn't guarantee a rankings boost, but for certain types of queries it definitely helps. Google scores freshness in different ways, and may include:
- Inception date
- The amount (%) your content changes
- How often you update your content
- How many new pages you create over time
- Changes to important content (homepage text) vs. unimportant content (footer links)
Recommended reading: 10 Illustrations on How Fresh Content Can Influence Rankings
12. Ongoing on-page SEO
The factors listed here only scratch the surface of earning more real estate in search results. Issues such as indexing, crawling, canonicalization, duplicate content, site architecture, keyword research, internal linking, image optimization and 1,000 other things can move ranking mountains.
The job of the Technical SEO becomes more complex each year, but we also have more opportunities now than ever.
It's easy to think nothing is new in SEO, or that SEO is easy, or that Google will simply figure out our sites. Nothing is further from reality.
The truth is, we have work to do.
Hello Mr.Cyrus,
Thank you for writing this useful post. All the tips are just scrumptious and the reference links are going to the exact mark. Just need a clearance at the In-depth articles point.
Suppose a site is running a blog, by just adding the Schema Markup in their articles will that post qualify to be appeared in "In-depth Articles" SERPS? or are there any other factors like the credibility of author, site, etc also plays the role? As there are the assumptions that, Google only picks the high authority blogs there.
Looking to get your feedback! :)
Thanks
I think this post by Neil Patel can answer your question :).
Said that, from what I've seen, in-depth articles tend to be shown for very broad queries or Brand's name queries (check this example with Disney).
More over, Google tend to prize very recognized news sites over less popular ones, even though for very specific niches you can have an opportunity for being picked up in that box.
More over, even though - as Cyrus well wrote - Google told that we should follow a set of specific rules for just having the option of being presented in the in-depth article box, Google itself doesn't care about its own rules and shows articles that don't comply with any of them.
For instance, if you look at this article about Disney buying Lucas Film (and that is present in the in-depth articles box for "Disney") and analyze it with the Structured Data Testing Tool, you can easily see how noone of the suggested rules are followed by BusinessWeek. Neither pagination mark up rel="prev" "next" is present!! :)
Then, why is it present? Because:
Hello Mr. Fiorelli,
Thank you so much for your detailed answer to my query. I checked the Disney's example and yes you're right Google sometimes do give the edge and recognize the real authorship. So can I conclude that we should use the Schema markup for the detailed and comprehensive blogs as they are not that popular but if the markup is implemented and social shares are at the peak, it may be picked up at in-depth SERPs.. ?
Theoretically yes... but I would look for what generic keywords in our niche Google presents in-depth articles, and will try to make the long-form semantically relevant for the chosen keyword's sets.
Interestingly, as Gianluca points out, almost none of the articles Google chooses to promote for In-depth articles follow the rules, but almost all have some sort of extensive structured markup.
Often, I've found, the schema.org type is "newsarticle" instead of "article", so it's possible Google prefers news publications.
Also, I'm guessing it helps to be an authority in your niche. We're about to include in-depth markup here at Moz, and we're curious to see how it works.
Cool! Advice when the in-depth markup will be implemented, so I'll monitor it #veryinterested
Thank you for your valuable input Mr.Shepard.. I'd also like to know when Moz will be implementing in-depth markup and I'm expecting a detailed post about the Moz experience with that. In a mean while, with the useful suggestions of Mr.Fiorelli I'm gonna experimenting this with my blogs. :)
Cheers!!
Exactly ! Cyrus, With out generating back links we huge traffic from Social media sites and our (brainvire) Most visit's are coming from Google + . At Present We are getting traffic from all over the world - make simple strategy make your web present count give content which can make impact in on peoples mind and make more interested.
Authorship and Rich snippets are two big things that SEOs should focus in 2014.
I think we should have focused on them since 2011 :) #joke #youareright
Rich snippet more than Author
But combined give the best results
Hi Cyrus,
very nice post and useful linked references.
Just one thing about which I don't completely agree, and I want to discuss it also because it is something about which I am asked tons of time and about which I see some confusion: Page Speed.
It's undoubtedly correct that PageSpeed matters, as we know how there're studies saying that for every millisecond a page upload slower, its conversion rate decrease. Just because of that, every SEO should spend time in optimizing that facet of a site.
But it is not so true saying that PageSpeed is a huge ranking factor. The same post by Amit Singhal you link too says:
While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation...
Matt Cutts too was underlining this and in a video he did, he was saying that PageSpeed is a negative factor, meaning with that that a page will rank worst if its PageSpeed is overly too slow. And that means that it won't rank better just because it is very fast in uploading in the browsers, and that this is especially true for Mobile Search, as in Mobile PageSpeed is considered an important user experience factor.
In Mobile Search, correct me if I remember bad, he came saying that if a page is too slow in uploading, it may happen Google deciding to not showing it in the Mobile SERPs.
So... I just wanted to make this more clear, because I saw many SEOs fixating in PageSpeed not because of the benefits it has for the UX and CRO, but just because of rankings.
Page speed maybe a small ranking factor, but it is a huge usability "ranking factor". If a user finds your website page loadtime slow, the chance he/she leaves is big. That is an issue and could cause a large "pogostick" effect, which means your website could be tagged irrelevent to Google, as a user returns back quickly to Google. Other words this clicking back is not a "long click" which Google also uses as a ranking factor.
I wasn't saying a different thing from what you are saying now... but, I know, my English can sound a little weird sometimes :)
I just read an article about page speed on Search Engine Round Table explaining how page speed is a factor for keeping the user on the site as mentioned already. The UX is a large factor for visitors. No one wants to wait around for a site to load. It has also been said that the later part of PageSpeed is the time is takes for the server to load the page. So a good server along with a well coded and optimized page brings greater performance and provides a better UX for the user.
Thanks Gianluca. Page speed isn't a huge ranking factor, but I believe it is hugely important.
In our last ranking factors study, server response time correlated at -0.10, while not massive, made it the most significant negative ranking factor we found.
I do suspect much has changed in the 4 years since Google first confirmed site speed as a factor, and wouldn't be surprised if the number was much greater than 1% of sites impacted by site speed factors.
Secondly, because improvements in site can reduce bounce rate and improve other user satisfaction metrics, it can have a secondary effect of influencing other ranking signals in more positive ways.
Of course, the faster you are the fewer benefits you'll see. And folks with slower sites have the most to gain.
So it's something I'm pretty passionate about, and I think the benefits of page speed spill over well beyond page speed itself, but I don't want to give the impression that improving will automatically give you a huge boost in rankings.
Another way to increase your traffic without building links is to "write another article". That will put another page out in the SERPs for new keywords that you are not already competing for. As long as your site has the power to toss new pages up to traffic-pulling rankings - even on the longtail - then writing another article will bring in more traffic. I spend close to 100% of my time on new content. Expanding my library of content and the keyword reach of the site.
I think you should do some caveat... I mean, I know you're an expert in everything content and your new pages surely are relevant et al... but your same way of thinking can be considered on poor and almost scaled variant, creating tons of pages just for the sake of targeting long tails, but with no relevance for the users or even for Google, now that Hummingbird is ruling.
I agree with you, Gianluca. Thanks.
Creating tons of spammy pages will get you in trouble.
The pages that I am talking about are either: A) article pages that are best-on-the-web or close to it for your topic (these can take me several hours to several days each to produce); or, B) ecommerce product pages that have substantive and unique product descriptions (on a good day I might be able to produce 10 to 20 pages like this).
Somehow you managed to write a better tip in the comments than I did in the entire article!
Cyrus,
First of all thank you, and in addition I'd like to suggest adding Google News to this list.
Even though it isn't relevant to everyone, for those who produce news articles - this is a must.
What's interesting, is that in a similar way to the videos, authorship, and the In-depth articles, Google News too uses images.
While many don't know, very often Google decides using an image by a different source just because they find it more relevant, or because the image simply isn't on a domain approved by Google News (3rd party hosting).
This source can definitely help: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/13369
Excellent tip!
Hi Igal, I don't suppose you have any technical tips for getting a Wordpress site onto Google news? My friend is facing a permalink/unique identifier conundrum and as of yet, I haven't seen any "definitive" guides on the web. Great addition to the main post BTW.
Hi Nick,
It’s important to remember that the Google News team approves each site manually.
The first step is right here at https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en. Read the general guidelines and then in order to submit a site for the very first time just click on the "submit your site for inclusion!" link at the bottom.
I don't see how the site's CMS is relevant in this case; It simply doesn't matter if the site is built on Wordpress or on anything else. Each site still has to go through the process; no plugins will help you out here.
From my recent experience they (Google News) have separate teams for the languages, the English team got back to me within 2 working days and as for the international teams (we have the news featured on Google News on other languages as well), it usually takes them between 3 to 10 weeks to respond.
Now regarding the Images
The idea is actually quite simple: As with Authorship, Google now adds images next to many of their News stories, and I don't think I need to elaborate on its advantages for the CTR. The most important thing to know is that the images must be relevant to the story! I saw some really interesting examples where the story is written by source A, and the Image next to it belongs to source B (the image links to source B). In many cases, even when the technical aspects of the image of source A are perfect, Google would still attach an image by a different source right next to it.
In one example there was a financial story about the French manufacturers, source A had an image of a location in France, but source B had an image of the Renault Factory (the French car maker's logo was very clear in the image), Google used the Image of source B in that case, and this just to emphasize the Image relevancy factor.
And of course, it’s important to take all technical aspects into account as they’re listed right here: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/13369
So size and format are quite basic, but what many miss is that the image must be hosted on the source's domain. If we'll take Moz as an example, you'll see that the images' location is cloudfront.net/uploads... If Moz will ever add a news section and would want to be featured on Google News, the guys at Moz will have to switch the images' location to Moz.com/...
I hope this helps Nick, and if not just let me know where exactly he's stuck.
P.S - I wish Yahoo and Bing would have similar forms for their news as well, it is much harder to get to them for some reason.
Awesome stuff Cyrus!
I have to thanks you first for delivering such useful tips. I’m considering that Google will no longer strongly rely on links to rank pages, so your post is there to demonstrate that others effective ways should be kept in mind.
While reading your post, it still appears that snippets are definitely “worth-leveraging”.
Moreover I think authorship do actually help CTR. From my personal experience, I tend to click through Cyprus or Rand post for instance when performing a query on SEO area. So once you establish a strong authority in your industry, you would probably get higher CTR with authorship.
Great post! +10
I think this is a fantastic post. While earning editorial links can be a challenge for a small business or a newer website waiting to find its feet, there is still plenty of work to be done onsite that can be a potential game-changer, and this nicely outlines a few items to get started!
First of all: Thank you for the resources and transparency, especially concerning the markup needed for In-Depth Articles! This is fantastic and clear-cut. Schema.org and those types of markups have been increasingly more important for our team and our clients, and it's great to know that it can translate into In-Depth articles as well. However, if we had a client who was a local business marked up with the appropriate schema markups, yet their blog had in-depth pieces focusing on their vertical, could we then markup just their blog or news section with the Article or NewsArticle markup?
Second: In regards to frequent on-page updates/revision, is there ever a window of time where you recommend avoiding any major on-page updates to "let the dust settle" so to speak? i.e. Refraining from updating major content areas like the homepage more than once per quarter to see how things are being indexed and responding?
Lastly, Smartphone SEO: How do you feel about third-party mobile solutions like Duda Mobile, etc.?
Thanks, Cyrus, for the insightful post and the Moz community for all of the great content. :)
If you are testing, you need to leave the test running long enough to gather results. For everyday improvments, never give yourself an excuse to wait!
Thanks for these reminders. I like how you ended this post saying that the truth is we have work to do. Some people may say SEO is not important and that Google will eventually find our websites but we do have things to do, check and maintain.
Find? Yes, but for example on 12th search results page (without enhancements like that) :)
Exactly my point. That's why we need to do these things.
Forget about adwords too. I've completely cut this since cpc is 400% base value (I started it 4 months ago). Content, long tail, snippets, freshness, authorships, socials give more (and cheaper) than adwords. The only cost is my time and knowledge:)
Great article Cyrus! Thank you for posting something not related to links - it's nice to see something else once in a while when talking about building SEO..
What a helpful article Cyrus. The title tag thing had completely passed me by! And you're not wrong when you say it's going to mean work! And Gianluca don't worry about your English! You could teach most of us native speakers a thing or two about optimisation ;-) Oh well here we go... remount the learning ladder for structured bits!
Thanks for putting this post together, Cyrus.
I had an experience with Smartphone SEO just the other day. I wanted to order off the "hidden menu" at Panera bread, and their site was in the top few positions for my search, but anytime I chose one I was redirected to their mobile home page and poor site search experience. I ended up pogo-sticking until I found an external article that gave me the info I wanted, all because of poor assumptions about what the intent for mobile users is.
Thank you Cyrus, I have wordpress blogs and wondering if there's an easy way to setup the in-depth articles mark-up? Any wordpress plugin you can refer me to?
Sukhpreet,
I think this would be the best plugin, Please check it out.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/virante-in-depth-article-maker/
Great post, Cyrus. I'm glad that authorship was talked about. I wrote a post on my blog that's gotten a fair bit of traffic from Google, and I don't think it would've been anywhere near as popular if I hadn't implemented authorship - mainly because from the keywords I've checked, I'm one of the only results implementing authorship. So even though I might be 4th or 5th for some of them, people are ignoring the plainer-looking results in the #1-3 spot and jumping straight to mine (or so I like to think!) :-)
Hi Cyrus,
Interesting ways to increase traffic indeed! Improving content creation and social signals seems to dominate the ways explained here.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to know that one or more of these can help improve Google traffic without building links.
You guys at Moz just did a very good job with this article. Its a practical post!
Great post once again Cyrus. Lot of great points here. I did a little case study when in-depth article update rolled out and I found that in-depth articles were triggered only for broad keywords and the results were very weird too. I tried that a few days back and I don't find significant improvement in the results. I feel that Google should refine these results a lot.
Good observations. Thanks for sharing your case study.
Good post so far, I also dont really liked to write outreach emails.... it was anoying when I started SEO. The Pogostick is really underrated.
I have seen many sites wich redirect smartphones to pages with less content. I think that is a big big fault. It should be the same content for everyone.
A link brings us more than onpage and in some cases it could be the easier and faster way, but the onpage factor (including page speed) is such a great winner. I started working for a client. I saw that he had enaugh links to rank. He had good links to. But onpage it was a desaster. After onpage optimization the site gets up for his most wanted keyword phrase over 70 positions in google - bam top 5. The traffic increases so much that now I first take a look at the onpage part, than I watch client links.
Wich I could write point 13 - but I dont have one in mind. Maybe I come back later, its 8:45 here, maybe to early ;)
Hi Cyrus,
Awesome tips for Small Business Owners. I had written one article also on "How to optimizing your website when you have no budget for SEO".
There are many things matters like On-page(Meta Tags, Sitemap, Page Speed), Assets Optimization(Video, PDFs, Docs, Images etc), Content Optimization which people can perform without any cost.
Good Idea about In-depth Articles, Authorship.
Nothing you would cost for SEO if you start optimizing well(one time).
Now you have to start generating fresh contents which could help the community leads earning links.
loved this post Cyrus. I'm one of the few people that could care less about seo for my site, however, I do realize that people can benefit from it. I don't actively build links and these methods are great for me. I will point out one thing, you mentioned that our sites needs to be responsive for mobile users. I'm actually on mobile right now and the Moz site isn't that great for people with cell phones and smartphones. Just thought I would let you know. How does one go about optimizing for mobile anyway?
Cyrus,
I love how Google was testing the shrunk-down version of in-depth articles the DAY before you release a blog post highlighting that opportunity! More than a coincidence…? Haha.
Google giveth, Google taketh away.
(so far it's just a test, thank goodness)
Great post and takeaways, Cyrus. It's important to remember that there is a whole lot more that can be done to grow traffic volume than just building links.
Great post. Again:)
- Recently I'm writing new articles, not 1k chars or less, but 3k+ focused on one subject (mostly google penalties). I see impact a few days later. And growing:)
- Optimized metatags gave me longer visiting time (content is important too!), more pages per user seen and drop % of exits.
- Rich snippets gave more visitors. More visitors and jobs;)
- Google autorship is set and it's giving me more visitors as number three.
- I didn't know about putting high contrast photo but You're right. Users see it and even from 10th place on the list my website will be clicked more frequently than other without photo/video etc in snippet.
- High speed website? That was my goal when I was building it - less than one second to full download. Server is very important, not only lightweight webdesign. Does it matter? I don't know but I know users hate waiting.
- Mobile version is a must today and that's on my to-do list.
- International website version? Also on to-do list and I have to do it ASAP - 15-20% users are outside my country.
- Social with G+ and FB works too but it's not comparison having at start 10 people in circles and 13k:) Good content will do all for that. No matter g+ profile or g+ on my website.
- Google loves fresh content but good/informative/unique more than only "fresh".
With authorship, snippets, socials, fresh content (compared to this and previous month):
+30% visits
+47% pageviews
+13% pages/visit
+41% avg visit duration
+15% returning visitors
I hope that's not the end:)
Nice to hear the hard work paying off. Thanks for sharing your experience!
Still 80%+ came from long tail keywords. Content marketing is rather cheap and can be done without massive link building (with that it's way faster to get lots of uu daily).
Two words: Just write!
Great Points Cyrus Shepard, as you believe that mostly new sites gets qualified for the in-depth article. So, I am eager to know whether it is possible for the ordinary blogs to get listed for the same?
It may be an uphill battle, but if you become an authority in your niche I see no reason why not.
Plus, the effort of adding structured data to your content may help you in the long run.
Awesome stuff Cyrus!
I have to thanks you first for delivering such useful tips. I’m believing that Google will no longer strongly rely on links to rank pages, so your post is there to demonstrate that others effective ways should be kept in mind.
While reading your post, it still appears that snippets are definitely “worth-leveraging”. Moreover I think authorship do actually help CTR. From my personal experience, I tend to click through Cyrus or Rand post for instance when performing a query on SEO area. So once you establish a strong authority in your industry, you would probably get higher CTR with authorship.
My ironic thought when reading this was "and if you build links, you'll be on page 1 and your authorship photo and videos will be seen by more people." :) Great post overall - I agree. I just think the majority of these tricks *also* require you to be on page 1.
I don't mean to imply you can rank with no link building whatsoever. But there are lots of gains to be made beyond traditional link building.
Ha, no I understand. I just think it's funny that they're all enhanced by being on page 1 anyways. Love the post!
in some cases it is not necessary to be on page one, but you can get on with that. what you can earn with onpage, speed- and mobile optimization can be incredible.
And I think when you have build links and you still are not on page then you can think about these 12 hints. Thats what this post is for i guess.
There are topics where you cant rank without links - the best page with no links is like the noise in a wood ... last part is a german saying. Dont know if there is a english one which means the same :)
Nice list Cyrus, I actually started on a new project I've been wanting to do for ages.. Focusing mainly on well placed content with near "perfect" (unfortunately perfection does not exist) OnPage work and conversion optimized meta data, as well as making sure OpenGraph etc.. is setup correctly for every page - Making every share count - Though social isn't necessarily causation blah blah.. Hopefully I can pull a few things from this list over to my new project, the Rich Snippets are something I should definitely look at adding - I'm using a cool plugin called WP Social SEO Booster Pro (Long name, I know) and it makes adding all these rich snippets into a Wordpress installation SUPER easy! Though I'd suggest hacking some of the CSS within the plugin, it can come out a little 2008 looking, if you catch my drift hehe.. Video SERPs reminds me to check out the Yoast video seo plugin as well! Great post man! :)
Very nice post! There really good things to do. I would add that we should not forget that when we create a site, it is because we have a personal project. We must put our expertise, passion... in there. The will always pay!
Thank for this post Mister Shepard!
Thanks Cyrus for sharing the information, I completely agree and even I implement most of these things to gain ranking. But the problem I face by not making any links is that only my blogs rank and conversion for blogs is not too good either. I have also implemented Authorship and rich snippets on by blog but then again it only promotes my blog.
For ranking I only rely on keyword optimization and social signals. But I think these 12 ways are best to promote a blog.
Hello Cyrus, such a nice information thanks for providing this.
Updating fresh content; I thing this is the best way to increase your website traffic. Not only fresh content but content also should be Informative.
I don't agree whit this "If you have enough links to be in the top 5, you have enough links to be position 1″. From position 5 to position 1 the way is very long.
Depends on the query and the competition. I do believe it's more than possible, but you are right, for some queries 1-5 is a loooooong way to go. It took us 3 years to move from #3 to #1 for SEO tools.
Yeah but if 4 above don't have rich snippets or authorship, but You have, whose link will be clicked first (or get most attention)? Theirs?;)
Hi Panagiotis i agree with your opinion it's not so easy to be on the top into serps
Being on top doesn't guarantee conversions... that's not 2012 or earlier:)
Great write-up Cyrus. Rich snippet, authorship and smartphone optimization has changed the today's seo strategies indeed. A great check-list you've given to start-ups here. In short a complete on-page optimization I would say.
Authorship & Rich structured data are without doubt best way to generate traffic from Google. Both dramatically theft the traffic of other competitors who aren't using these. Again a very encouraging post Cyrus !
I needed some info about increasing traffics to my website. Thankyou Cyrus!!
This is good for site ranking. i use it for my site Twist Writer .
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Hi there, and welcome to Moz! We'd appreciate it if you'd refrain from those sorts of links; we moderate the comments on all blog posts, and as a general rule, only allow links that are relevant to the author's points and provide added value for the readers. Thanks much. =)
Hey people i was wondering if i can get a critique on my scholarship essay i posted up on my blog? The prompt claims you have to explain how the internet has helped you in life. The 500 word essay is in my blog. https://theinternetscholarship.blogspot.com/
Hello Mr. Cyrus
I am working hard on off page activities but my website rank is not good, can you provide me some tricks so that my website can rank well.
Edison Info Systems [link removed]
Good posted! I may share it with my SEO team members! [link removed]
thank Cyrus, this is really informative.
Informative article and i have written similar article about 10+ ways to get Traffic from Google here. your post inspired me to write this post and i have found hidden google products and i'm sure you can get millions of google traffic :)
Thanks for sharing this Information, It's really beneficial & Amazing.
Great post! Thanks for that great tips Cyrus!! You are amazing.
I have been struggling with ranking on the internet and now I have found what I have been missing.
I'm very interested on reading this article. I'm just started SEO a couple of months ago on my blog Jayr Concepts with following some tips and tutorial of this blog, and finally I've seen some improvement.
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Awesome ways to increase website traffic. For those who assume link building is the only SEO, here is the wonderful answer! Cyrus, thank you for the great insights!
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for detailing interesting ways to increase traffic. Improving content creation and social signals seems to dominate the ways explained.
I have applied almost all the things but i am not getting the more traffic. I am attaching the website. Please review this and please tell me where is the loophole.
I read moz blog alternative day. Can anyone tell me the way how to increase traffic from Canada?? What should i do for this website?
Thanks a lot.
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Hello, Aum InfoTech! Those sorts of questions are perfect for our Q&A section. I'd recommend heading over there to see if you can't get a few expert opinions on your site -- we generally try to keep the blog comments relevant to their respective posts. Good luck!
Good post! Yes, we can get more google traffic without building links. Just you need to work hard and wait patiently for positive results.
Thank you for writing this great article. As a person who is bad at search engine optimization techniques, I could try applying these to my website https://androidjunkie.org whose low visitors count has been killing me in the past year.
Great , thing is to deeply down your article with killer and juicy Content . Google loves simple language that can easy to understand by the user. I follow up the moz blog and neil patel blog to make better one new blog
Hi Aman! We do ask that you keep your comments (and the links you put in them) relevant to what the author discussed. They should add value for the readers, not for your own sites. Thanks much! =)
I am very glad to read above artical really enjoyed reading this artical. very informative. You have done a good work.
Thanks for sharing
Thanks Cyrus for your amazing articles. Ofcorse these are the real truth for engaging users. Many thanks once again.
Online Coupons
Very amazing post
Great info! We are almost doing all these steps, mentioned in this article. Still struggling to get traffic! Can anyone help us from your team? Appreciate your response!
Such a wonderful post Cyrus ! and awesome ideas to increase website traffic without link building. I have a website and most of keywords in top 10 but i have less traffic, so I think your tips helps me to increase my web traffic. And I have one question that my keyword is ranked on top in google (first position of first page of google), but i have no traffic or so less traffic. Can anyone solve this problem.
It's a good article and it covers a broad array of things you can do. I know a lot of traffic comes from Google but maybe it's worth picking up traffic from some of the other search engines. The likes of Bing and Yahoo see relatively easier in comparison to rank for search terms. I never see this covered off.
I've been using some of this strategies for a couple of years now... It could really help a lot. I will try the ideas posted here which I haven't tried yet..
Great article… Informative and well researched. Thank you for your illustrative images. I think if we understand how search engine indexes the site, it can better help the reader understand the overall picture. I read this article on search engine https://www.fibigroup.com/2016/05/20/how-search-engine-indexes-your-site/ and together with your article, it gives a bigger wholesome picture of SEO… once again thank you for the great article.
This is really stunning. Yes, I absolutely agree with link building, I have spend most of my time in 2016 in link building, but however those tips you have mentioned are way promising and realistic... Thanks....
Great article and more recently with changes to Google relating to "Mobile Optimised Sites Ranking Well" (or badly if not brought up to date) we wrote this 'easy guide to check your website for mobile' in other words is your website mobile friendly - hope it is also helpful!
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Thanks Cyrus for sharing the article. We actually implemented some of your suggested SEO techniques and measured the traffic. There was a noticeable 6% growth in traffic for our Singapore Properties For Sale, Rent, CrowdInvest website after just 2 weeks. I have also shared your article in my social networks to help the other website owners.
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I want to know that does snippets matter for a product sites only or for classified sites as well ? Like I have a site https://clickob.com and I want to make a snippet for it. would it work for it ? I've heard that snippets only work for products sites. Also I want to know some techniques to gain more ads and traffic apart from paid campaigns of Google MOZ and FB. As the site of classifieds, so I can't keep updating it with new content like articles or blogs etc. But of course it will be kept updating with new fresh ads.
Hi there!
These questions are really better suited for our Q&A forum. :) You should be able to get some help there!
@Cyrus amazing post. My friend even tested a few of these points on his site without doing any SEO and got excellent results within 6 months.
Actually a lot of things that I apply in my www.senatechno.com web based article above, but may still need to learn more. Thank you for a great article share.
Hi Cyrus, Thanks for the article.. Might be an old one but still is a very helpful one. Too bad things have changed since you wrote this; i.e Google Authorship. Anyway, thanks! New things to look into..
Another wonderful way to bring traffic to your website is to post articles elsewhere online. Write these articles about something related to your industry, and make sure that they are interesting and informative; basically, don't write anything that you wouldn't post on your own blog. Then, contact other blog and website owners and ask them if they would be interested in posting your article on their sites with a link to your social media profiles. This is a good way to gain authority and show everyone that you are knowledgeable about your industry, and if the site or blog is popular enough, it can provide you with a lot of traffic.
How can you tell the diference between a seriouscomment and a comment left just for the link? For example, the comment above has two exclamation marks in it and adds very little substance to the conversation.
For my blog, I would usually remove the link from the name, but keep the comment. Is that a fair practice?
Thank you so much that you provide something special for us that not only can help in our studies but also help to learn in the practical life.? I am a game developer and i like to play games ? If you people love to play games you should visit once… https://www.rsgoldaz.com/ to buy RuneScape gold games https://www.viprsgolds.com/
Really this article help me to collect more visitor for my online money making site https://www.online-tips24.com/
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for sharing your professional thoughts. Very unique way to increase website traffic.
Thank you Cyrus! Saved it and using it :)
Pay Per Click provides immediate traffic, after putting up PPC ad, you can expect people clicking on your ad and visiting your site. This is why it is ideal for new websites with little or no exposure.
Very interesting article
But this whole web site management thing as i like to call it really is a full time job !
I occasionally check out Mt Matt Cutts videos and you really have read in between the lines on what he says . Google do not do what Google say !
I aim a small garden shed manufacture based in Liverpool , Merseyside and run a shed web site called
www.shed-king.co.uk i am my whits end now , i have totally re written the site , copy scaled it 100% uneque , sent a few small links with a selection of long tail key words from well ranking directories but i still can not get it to rank
When will google give us small business a break ! or why don't we all blank Google and use other more friendly search engines
John
This was very informative and I will have to put some of these into use as a new small website owner.
Getting engaged in Google's in-depth articles not much easier you must be an authoritative author, thanks to Google's new algorithm update's occurs reduction in showing relatively lower author photos in Google search pages. And using schema microdata markup will help a lot to easily reachout our pages to Google's notice.
Thanks for presenting an in-depth case study.
Nice to know, i will test this Tips on my own Blog!
Very nice post .. Thanks for the sharing such tips..what about the images submission ? will this help or not ?
thanks for the valuable input. i have been trying above mentioned strategies on my website www.price-hunt.com since last 6 months but the ranking has not been improved. i have improved mobile site as well, made it responsive and have been adding fresh content also regularly but somehow the trafiic is stagnant since last 3-4 months. please guide me if possible.
Indeed, amazing what I read, thanks.
Cyrus, great share especially the bit about Google + being favored for great rankings. Anyone else noticing that Facebook pages are also doing pretty good on SERPs? Thanks
I really enjoyed reading this post. Thank you for informing us on the different avenues of generating traffic. Could you recommend a book which will provide further information on building traffic?
Thanks
For the money, these aren't bad (they are both associated with Moz, so I'm a little biased)
Inbound Marketing and SEO: Insights from the Moz Blog
Books are good for sitting down and diving into a topic, but honestly, most people get most of thier SEO knowledge online, from blogs like this.
But googlewebmaster central blog says that the doesn't use the keyword meta tag for web ranking.
That's right... but I wonder why you are saying this, as I didn't find in the post nothing affirming that you have to use that meta tag.
@point 10 (snippet optimization) we have a lot of meta and meta-tag in text, but the keyword is still missing.
I read the post at 8:45 o'clock (in the morning - yes I did) and I thought Ok... may be I wasn't that fit. I read over it again - still no Keyword Meta Tag. I found Key word in Keyword research, but nor keyword meta tag - so I tried out STRG+F - nothing - Rahman's post is the only user of that phrase - now I am to ;)
I like your answer Gianluca Fiorelli so smooth, steady, cool and unexcited in one answer - great x)
Some interesting points here Cyrus, Has anyone done any studies into click through rates with contrasting colors for Google authorship? Would be interesting to see how the CTR's compare.
Not directly answering to your question, but Cyrus himself did an interesting experiment related to the photos' effectiveness in authorship. You can find it here.
Oh cool!
Never seen this before. Cheers Gianluca.
I was unaware of that photos can also affect in Authorship :D
Very nice, have to bone up and read this intensely. Know some and using it. but there is always room to improve. Thank you kindly
Cheers
Thanks for the reminder that I need to focus on the implementation of rich snippets.
With authorship, snippets, socials, fresh content (compared to this and previous month):
+30% visits
+47% pageviews
+13% pages/visit
+41% avg visit duration
+15% returning visitors
Its a true facts about all given data.
Amazing research. .. But we can not avoid link building for complete process of Search Engine Optimization.
Is this a comment to Krzysztof comment? I think so, seeing that the stats are his.
SEO and link building is a must but will have bigger impact with these.
Agree with you that Link Building can not be avoided. I support links which have been earned not manually created.
But sometimes earned links looks like unnatural;)
Agree with you, Krzysztof. Sometime its looks like unnatural.
And Google gives You Manual Action:)
I Just want to know that can i link my internal page URL on my blog by pasting some Pipeline seperated keywords at the end of my post.
Will it count at ethical or unethical
Rather: will it be good or bad anchor. Answer is: depends.
Hey Cyrus,
Awesome tips and links that you have shared. In-depth article is something that I was looking out for since past few days and I found it here. So if we follow these guidelines, we can be a part of those search results as well. Although link building is critical for SEO but with these added markups one can be a long term player in improving visibility. Perhaps any article with good content and all the SEO markups discussed above can have a position until it possess the needed authority of the author in a particular niche.
it takes time to get authorship.
Great post..all are known practices itself but reminded us once again with well deserved reference links.
I think we need off-page Seo. These all points are really important I doesn't ignore them but still we need link building. And one point I added. Use live chat support on your website. Its beneficial for business and E-commerce website.
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Thanks for your helpful article!
Great Post; I always says that “SEO is not all about building links” there is much more we can do in order to increase our search traffic. Awesome list of 12 ways to increase Google traffic. Schema markups and authorship plays really important role in increasing search traffic from Google and every SEO should focus on them the most.
Hi
Cyrus Thanks for detailing alternatives of link building that gain high Google traffic..
But I can't find image optimization in your 12 ways to increase traffic,,,
Is all above listed ways more effective than image optimization?
Very INFORMATIVE and just FANTASTIC! I was looking for the related information. Thanks a lot it is very useful for me. Would love to read some pieces on the topic.
Hello
First of all thank you for post this most informative article.Before reading this article my website's daily page views only 50 to 60 and there was more than 250 posts but now my website have 400 pagviews.I'm working it with the supports of MOZ articles.
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You do not think that changes to important content like home pages or landing pages may harm SERP ?
I think if we want to get more traffic, so building links not a good way but by publishing high quality content on our site and by spending some time on social media, we can get high traffic.
thankyou sir for nice inforamtion. the article is very good and i applied it on my website www.techfree4u.com and i got very good result in it. Sir if you have any time please give me any suggestion for my website. thankyou ...for such a good info..
Wonderful points most people wrote in this post ... Great items… I think you have made some genuinely interesting elements.
I have a question regarding Meta Keywords, I have seen few of my competitor not using any meta keyword tag on their catalog pages. Does it effect in any manner to perform in SERP.
Your content is very nice :) but i've one question on your article. it's just hammering me....
you mention in google authorship point "Use a real face, not a company logo, cartoon or icon"
but lots of company are come up in google with his cartoon logo and company logo.
i.e - https://plus.google.com/+youtube/posts
I suppose if I had to pick a perfect article, it would be yours. Thank you!
Nice one Cyrus. Well can you be some specific about smart phone optimization? Will bad rankings in smartphones affect the rankings in PCs?
I don't have the link handy, but Google recently made comments that smartphone errors should only impact smartphone rankings, and shouldn't influence your desktop rankings. In my experience, it only seems to effect a very small number of queries at the moment.
Nowadays Google is giving priority to those who are using more their products, I don’t know why but I guess something that will be the secret of Google to use the Google products more. I know some of them but I get more things from this post.
Thanks
thanks for the deep insight into the Google's search optimization technique !
Thanks @Cyrus for sharing such valuable ways.
Another well written, informative, and helpful article ---> thanks Cyrus :-)
Thanks for the update. Everyone must should read this informative article.
Thanks Cyrus for so many resource. our website (Techtic) get good visit from social media. in today word Social Media and Content Marketing is best way getting quality trafic and leads.
It's very good information thanks for share and good tricks in this article i already have work visit now
https://web.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://dollarjob.online/?ref=45815
Great article.
Good stuff, will be usefull i am sure. Keep it up !
Awesome! So many great resources in one place.
I implemented new strategies for content creation and changed some things around to improve my Google Snippets. The results have been awesome!
For anybody that's interested, I found this guy on Fivver that will tell you what caused your traffic to spike or fall for just $5. I used to do it, but this is way easier: https://www.fiverr.com/jongaull/tell-you-why-your-website-traffic-dropped
Do you have any affiliation with the gig? It can look a bit unusual for a new user to come in and leave a comment promoting a service on an old post such as this. Thanks!
thanks sir this post really help me .
please read our blog
Great, very informational post! [email protected]
Really useful information Cyrus...Thanks I was not happy with the rank of my site https://www.jaibiz2day.com
This very nice, I used https://www.sharesomethingnew.com to get my blog going.
Hello Dear All,
Please suggest me to increase traffic on www.adityaestates.com
Yeah It's Amazing Stuff.....
That is a nice post Cyrus, I would like to read it. Actually, I have the knowledge about this thing, but it helps me to get some new points as well and In-depth articles and Snippet optimization these two points are good to know for me.