Think of SEO links as the corridors connecting different rooms within a great house. Now let’s put a content marketer in each room of the house, lock the corridors and hide the keys, while we tell them that there is a spare key in the rooms. With the corridors gone, each marketer either searches for the key or tries to break the wall. Finding the key is natural to link again to the rest of the house whereas breaking a wall flouts the rule. Ever since Google rolled out its PageRank Algorithm, this game has been played over and over again with link votes distributed to SEOs who find their key. With modern SEO, however, the game changes.
Google expects marketers to combine other factors to get back link votes such as posting shareable content on their sites, contributing to guest blogs, and using rich description tags in articles. In this post, I will focus on two underutilized link building strategies on social media and an additional on-page optimisation that can help you increase you market traffic:
- Creating rich hash tags on Twitter
- Writing 200 word description for video on YouTube
- Ranking Hub page with internal links
Table Of Contents:
The Twitter-Google Deal
Brian Hong New Orleans based SEO expert at Infintech Designs says the future of content marketing belongs to social media because, “Social media allows you insight into your customer base like never before.” Within the social media pool, I get more interested in Twitter because of the mysterious deal they had struck with Google. The deal would be “eyeballs”. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo affirms. For the SEO expert, it will allow his post to be updated in real time, every time (which is what Twitter is all about) and then to be indexed on Google SERP. However, this is not eureka yet. Google will not index all the content you post on Twitter. According to data research of content Google prefers to index on Twitter, three are its favourite: images, hashtags and link-worthy content because these have high volume engagement for Twitter users.
Yet, within the social network, marketers can leverage on these three for market visibility by anticipating the searches users will be interested in, and then creating hashtag and link content using industry keywords. For example, if my startup was a mobile beauty treatment saloon, I would use these simple steps to decide the keywords that would form my hashtag and link:
- Research on current trends in my niche on major search engines
- Try different keywords on the search engines to see how competitors rank
- Use Google Adwords for sample campaign
- If the adword on Google generated good traffic to my site, then I know it will make a perfect hashtag and link content on my twitter timeline.
There is a link value to having industry keywords on your blog page and then on Twitter. First, you get plenty of retweet links; secondly, you get indexed on RankPage, and that could just pull the traffic you need to grow your business.
Takeaway: According to Twitter, a simple hashtag has the potential to drive conversion up by 12%, which is largely driven by Google traffic.
Writing 200 Word Description for YouTube Video
How often do you upload videos on Youtube? And when you do, what goes with the description of the video. My guess is a call to action statement, which without mincing words, is a dead end. According to Brian Deal, the link building expert, “A dead-simple technique that can get your YouTube videos to rank for competitive keywords in both YouTube and Google is: write 200+ words description.” There are two reasons why you should follow this advice. First, Google crawlers are not human enough to turn on your video; secondly – even if you didn’t know – Google does not need to watch your video even if you were CEO of Google. Instead, the search engine algorithm can only read keywords and phrases that are found within blogs. So, taking less than 20 minutes or so to write 200 plus rich text-based title and description for your content video is an effort in the right direction.
Ranking Hub Page with Internal Links
A lot of blog sites are overly concerned about throwing links to other websites that they forgo making effort in creating an integrated user experience on their own blog. It’s no longer myth that content refreshes and blog updates are essential to getting ranking, but how can you maximise market lead with this effort? The skill is to link these refreshes to your hub or landing page. On the long run, your hub page should consistently gain ranking on Google SERP if that is what you want. But, if you want another page to rank, simply follow this technique as the BBC’s category page success showed during Euro 2016.
Finally, remember link building is just one of the many ways to make your content visible to Google and then to Internet users. Besides this, you have to always write content that is valuable.
