Ranking a new website in 3 months
Hey guys. This is a guest post of a recent case study from a blogger who just started 4 months ago and how he ranked 1st after 3 months doing a simple but well known strategy. The strategy is similar to the one posted 2 months ago. Writing good content, quality and post length seem to be important and I can prove that. Especially if you write constantly on your blog. Anyways, I’ll let Dipendra (Guest Blogger) in charge from now and on:
Search Engine Optimization and its trend has changed and Google has been able to improve its result gradually with time. With Penguin, Panda, Humming Bird and many other algorithm changes Google has been implementing every now and then, the practices has changed and gradually spams and black hats techniques have no places in the search engine rankings.
I started a blog at the end of December, 2014 and fortunately with all the genuine practices, I was able to rank for forth position in one of the long tail keyword just at the end of January. The result gradually improved and now I rank first for same keyword with just three months since I started a new blog.
Before starting, the blog is http://www.dipincome.com and the main keyword I rank for is ‘easy backlinks in 2015’. I get some good organic visitors for my blog.
Graph – Organic visitors from January 2015 to March 2015
The above graph represents organic visitors from January 1 – March 31 2015. Within this time I was only able to generate 1700 visitors to my blog, but it was a good result for a blog that was only three months old. It also generated 33 email subscribers, got me an SEO client and sold an eBook worth $200, which was a great achievement.
What you will learn in this post?
- On Page Optimization
- The value of content in SEO
- My back-linking strategy that worked
On Page Optimization
I am a regular reader of top blogs like quicksprout.com where Neil Patel shares the experience that helped him grow his and his client’s traffic. The first thing he does when ever he handles a client is the on-page optimization. Considering all the knowledge that I got from top bloggers, I made sure that my newly blog followed all practices for on page optimization.
These are the few things I did before I added content.
- Sitemap Generation: I installed a WordPress sitemap plugin; Google XML Sitemaps. This would add all of my recent posts and pages into a new sitemap. I decided not to index any tags, search results or author pages in order to avoid any duplicate content.
- All in One SEO pack: I installed this plugin because it tells me if the on-page SEO quality is good or not. Additionally I wanted to create unique meta descriptions for every post and page to avoid duplicate meta description (which can be seen under HTML improvements in Google webmaster tools).
- The Permalinks structure: I removed folders from my permalink structure and used the %postname% structure only.
- Preferred domain and 301 Redirection: Usually Google considers “www “and “www” version of your website differently. So I added both versions in my webmaster tool account and then choose a main domain (www in my case). Additionally I made a permanent 301 redirection from all my “non www” to “www”. This will pass any link juice back to my main domain in case anyone links to my non “www” version.
The Role of Content
I have read this almost everywhere. Search engine values quality content and with its implementation in my new blog I got results. The keyword I’m ranking 1st on Google (easy backlinks 2015) is found on my largest post and it brings 40% of my organic traffic overall.
The content not only was lengthy but I also did some interlinking, keywords management and got good results. Google’s head of web-spam team, Matt Cutts, has explained that even with little or no SEO, sites with good content could get organic visitors. This is why my new blog got some decent organic visitors.
The backlinking Strategy that Worked
Do it the right way and you will benefit. Do it the wrong and you will go through a nightmare.
Backlinking is still number one factor for ranking. To prove it, perform a google search for ‘click here’. You will find adobe’s website in second place in search ranking and that page has nothing in its content relating click here. This is probably because of the number of links adobe gets with the anchor text ‘click here’. What we could assume is backlinks still carries high value in search results, however not as huge as it used to be.
If you are able to generate links in a natural way, you will benefit from them. However, generate backlinks in a way that looks suspicious to google and you will suffer a penalty.
What are the backlink strategies that I used in this blog?
The strategies are all the same and nothing new. I wrote about 10 guests posts to get backlinks, commented in authority blogs, participated in forums and got some links. I also submitted my blog in some directories, collected some web2.0 backlinks, etc. However, most importantly, I made sure they looked all natural to Google.
How did I made links look natural?
- Diversified anchor texts: One of the main things I considered while backlinking was that I did not used a single targeted keyword in all my anchor texts, I limited them to 10% or even less. This means if I collected 100 backlinks in these three months, only 10 were my primary keywords and I might have used more than 30 anchor texts for my 100 links.
- Diversified incoming links: I did not limit backlinks to homepages only. This means along with homepage links I also generated links to different internal pages in my blog. Suppose I had 100 links, 30 were to my homepage and remaining were linked to different top performing pages in my links.
- Brand mentions: These are something Google takes into consideration when ranking. Links to domains with the brand name in the anchor texts are important and I mentioned them in almost 30% of my incoming links.
- Non linked links: Get prepared to hear something new that you might have never in search Engine Optimization. Along with some backlinks, I got some textual mentions to my blog without getting links and that counts. It was something I accidentally discovered when I was checking my 404 error pages in Google webmaster tools. I saw one 404 error, and when I checked the webmaster tool that displayed where the links came from, it was a page where I mentioned something without even linking, for example if you just write example.com without links but not example.com, Google still takes that as a plus point for your website.
Anchor Text distribution for my backlinks
As shown in the image above, only 10% of my anchor text was for my main keyword.
The Two Tier Linking method I used
I did not just collected links to my blog, however I made backlinks to my backlinks. This means I got some backlinks to the pages that had my backlinks and this helped. However to make it natural, I made sure I never got links to my blog and my backlinks from a single domain. This means, If I had a backlink from a website to my blog (tier 1), I never used the same website to create a link to my other Tier 1 backlinks.
The 2 tier backlinks pyramid
As shown in the image above, only 10% of my anchor text was for my main keyword.
To understand the 2 tier link building, think of a pyramid similar to the one shown in the image above. The roof of a pyramid is supported by bases below. Similar to that, the tier 1 in the picture above are the links that were directly linking to my blog and tier 2 were those that were linking to my backlinks.
As shown in the figure, the tier 1 links never linked back to tier 2 and tier 2 never directly linked to my main blog.
The most important lesson I learned was to be patient. Although I was gifted with organic visitors quicker than I expected, it takes a lot of genuine effort and patience to get some decent visitors to the website. You must work hard and search engines will certainly reward it.
Author’s Bio – I am Dipendra Pokharel from Nepal and I write at dipincome.com. I am an IT graduate from UCLAN, Java and PHP programmer. I am Google certified and have been into internet marketing for six years. Currently I am a co-founder of an Internet Marketing and IT company in Nepal
