Dominique Jackson: His Tips For Running A Successful Blog

#1 Do not underestimate the basics

Completely learn the basics! While altering a title tag is an easy way to get started in SEO, so many folks never cover their education. Unfortunately, figuring out how to learn the basics can be hard.
Currently, I think DistilledU is the industry’s best at the moment. But even a copy of The Art of SEO would be a good place to start.

#2  Provide complete solutions

I was reading the Ahrefs blog recently and was impressed with everything about the blog itself. They’ve seen something like 100% traffic growth in the past year, and you can see why. Every blog post solves a problem for the reader and suggests the next step. The next step typically includes Ahrefs software. It’s a complete solution. The reader never has to click back to Google to perform another search.

#1 Take an experimental approach

SEO needs to be approached scientifically. There’s no manual you can read to master it. There’s no degree you can study for. You can only apply different stimuli to websites, and track the results, hoping to glean an answer from the output.

Track anything and everything. Get creative with your experiments. And pay close attention to the sites on page 1, because the answer to ranking is already in plain sight.

#2  Answer the queries precisely

Google is getting extremely good at figuring out if your content is answering the search query correctly. Think about what “questions” the users are searching for with their queries and focus hard on answering them very precisely in your content.

For example, if someone searches for “best way to lose weight”, answer them distinctly and concisely, such as “In our opinion, the best way to lose weight is to manage calorie intake.” This will make it very easy for the natural language processing algorithm (NLP) to determine your answer for the query, and increase your chances to catch the featured snippet.

Of course, the rest of your article will back up your statement, but make sure to answer it very distinctly as well.

#1 Try SEO first-hand

Start your own website so you can freely test and do your own SEO experiments. The best way to really learn what works and what doesn’t is to try them first-hand. There are a ton of resources out there that you can learn from, but I believe that experience (and having your own data) would be far more valuable in this particular discipline.

#2  “If you build it, they’ll come”

I’ve been spending a lot more time doing technical audits these days, but one thing that I’ve been really fascinated in rediscovering recently is how to semi-automate link building by strategically optimizing highly-informative and highly-linkable pages on a website to consistently earn mentions/links from other authority websites.
There’s a bit of truth in “if you build it, they’ll come”.

1. Don’t be afraid of gray hat

Work on your own sites and test everything. There is a lot of great SEO content out there these days, but there are also a lot of unsubstantiated claims that are provided as facts. Test everything for yourself on your own sites to determine what actually works.

Don’t be afraid to test out grey hat tactics as well, they can really deepen your understanding of how search rankings work. Learning by doing is the best way to become competent at SEO.

2. Get more value from your current content

The fundamentals of SEO haven’t really changed much in the past few years. If you create good content, build links, and provide a great experience to searchers you will put yourself in a good position for long-term success.

Also, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a great complementary skill to have along with SEO – getting more value from your current traffic can often be much more effective than trying to increase traffic volume.

#1 Follow the right people

In the beginning, it’s always hard as there is so much information from a number of different people, I would say be careful who you listen to.

Follow a handful of experts rather than a whole bunch of them as you can get confused very quickly, so focusing on someone who does the job well with a credible proven track record is key.
I spent the first few years of my SEO career following the wrong people and wasted a lot of time and effort in doing so.

2. CTR manipulation works well

When I was in Chiang Mai for the SEO conference they have over there, there were a few good moments where I got new bits of advice. There is a lot of knowledge bombs when you surround yourself with the right folk, and that event has literally hundreds of successful people dropping SEO tips all the time.

There are too many to mention them all, but one that stood out was CTR manipulation. With CTR being a ranking factor, how to manipulate that to get better rankings worked very well.

Michael Pozdnev

Founder of I Wanna Be a Blogger

#1 Read the case studies

Cultivate your SEO-intuition from the beginning. Experiment and measure. You need to understand how SEO works based on your experience and skills.

It’s better to read not just blog posts, but case studies to learn the necessary knowledge. It’s desirable that the example was in your niche. The strategy and tactics will be significantly different.

#2 Dig into Analytics

My aha moment happened when I wondered what users do when they read my blog post, especially which links they visit the most. I decided to find out the details and added a Google Analytics code to track outbound links to the page.

I found out that my readers were particularly interested in an outbound link pointing to a site with a certain topic. This topic was only mentioned in my article, but not covered in detail. So I wrote some new content on this topic and added it to my original article.

After a couple of months, the article started to rank for a couple of new keywords that ended up being the major source of organic traffic to the article.
Therefore, it’s very important to conduct your experiments!

John Doherty

CEO at Credo

#1  Get to know ALL the aspects of SEO

If I was going to give just one piece of advice to a brand new SEO, I would tell them to familiarize themselves with all of the aspects of SEO.

This includes technical SEO, keyword research and content creation, outreach and link acquisition, PR, and then paying attention to how an SEO’s work interfaces with the different teams within a company and ultimately how it affects the bottom line of business.

I, unfortunately, see way too many “SEOs” these days who are myopically focused on one thing and don’t understand, nor do they try to understand, the other parts of SEO and that leads them to prioritise things that are not the highest leverage SEO activity to undertake. This is a disservice to clients!

#2 The power of internal linking

Over the last year, I’ve increasingly become re-amazed at how powerful internal linking changes can be to drive more (or even 1 if there were 0 before) internal links to pages that are relatively orphaned on your site.

I expanded the number of pages on my site about a year and a half ago, and when we’ve made internal linking changes to index as many of them as possible we’ve seen great lifts in rankings.