What strategies to best use to boost rankings across long-tail articles on site?
-
Heya!
I'm currently engaged in what appears to be a slightly unusual SEO task. I run a large, reasonably well-respected (but not global-standard, yet) site that I'm currently monetising through individual articles targetted at addressing specific search engine queries that I know have decent traffic.
It's the EHow / Demand Media model, except with a focus on a single specific (video games) niche, and much, much better quality articles (sufficiently good that they attract a fair amount of praise - all the writers on the site are published authors and the quality's damn high).
Most of our articles end up ranking with essentially no backup, but they don't rank high - usually 2nd or 3rd page of Google. I'm trying to determine what the most effective strategy would be for us to boost our article rankings with the least possible expense / effort (we don't have a huge budget).
Our long-tail articles are mostly being trumped by articles with either a couple of external links to them or by other articles with no links but from a site with significantly higher Domain Authority (70+ to our 48).I'm working to improve our on-page optimisation, but it's already pretty good (an "A" report from the SEOMoz tools on most or all pages).
So, I'm wondering what the best use of our time would be to increase traffic globally across the site. Strategies I'm considering:
- Focussing on building links to the homepage and to any other pages on the site, by asking for links from community members, doing linkbait articles, directory submissions, guest blogging, and so on. Long-term aim: increase our domain-wide MozRank and MozTrust.
- Build links to our long-tail articles specifically, most popular first. Get direct links from relevant blogs, press releases, social bookmarking, etc. Long-term aim: get to #1 on Google one page at a time.
- Something Else?
I'm wondering what the big SEO brains here would suggest?
Happy to provide additional details if it would help!
-
Since the search engines aren't very good with videos yet, that is the reason behind the practice. For clients, I also always try to include a brief summary below to help out a bit more. Never hurts to cover all the bases!
-
Hmm, now that is an interesting idea. Do alt tags for video correlate with ranking as strongly as alt tags for images?
Thanks - these are all useful ideas!
-
Make sure you have links back to your site from the social media too.
Might already have it but never hurts to review.
I always optimize all page elements because you never know when things change. I tend to use H2/H3 in those I am looking to have rank using the kw phrase.
When you construct a post, the first link gets some weight and so using anchor text with an emphasis can help. I use it in the first or second sentence generally. I also use the main site phrase in an anchor link call to action at the bottom.
This reminds me, since you are doing a lot of videos, you might create a short commentary below the video and make sure you have the alt optimized for the video topic.
Hope that is helpful.
-
Thanks!
I'm already doing most of this, I must admit. I'm using the Keyword Strategy plugin to do internal linking using exact keyword phrases, although I could probably optimise the number of places I'm doing that on the site a bit more.
Titles and headers are fairly optimised already - although from reading the SEOMoz reports, I understand header tags have a very small SEO effect anyway?
We've already got a Twitter, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, and Tumblr presence, so I think we're reasonably covered there!
Things I'm not doing, and will probably start - thanks for the suggestions -
There's a related articles plugin I should be installing - thanks for recommending that, I'd forgotten I meant to do it.
First link anchor text I must admit I'm not optimising - can you explain a bit more or suggest a resource I could check?
Thanks again for these suggestions!
-
Since I have a lot of small businesses that I market with new content, I would suggest you take a closer look at the long tails you are using and make sure you have all the on page elements in place to work for you.
I am sure some of the veteran folks here will give you some valuable input on other strategies but here are mine from a writing perspective:
If you are not linking to external sites, make sure you are using your long tail kw phrase to interlink on the site.
Titles, headers, and author bios should also be tight. Your first link anchor text will also be valuable. Consider archiving by author as well as by topic.
If you are using a CMS such as Word Press, consider implementing a related article plugin so you can further drive traffic to related articles.
Finally, if you are not using social media--get a Facebook page (not profile) and Twitter account going so you can share the links of your new and previous articles.
YouTube is the number three search engine so you might post some teasers to attract traffic and make sure you optimize your channels in the social media landscape.
I've had good luck with using these tactics for clients. Looking forward to seeing what others have to say.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Long tail there are no long tail keywords....
Hi I am struggling trying to optimise product pages for a product area which doesn't have a lot of specific longtail product related searches. It's 'Lockers' I have more specific sub-category pages which drill down such as - Wire Mesh Lockers Charging Lockers Laptop Lockers Just to name a few, but to drill down more to product names doesn't offer much. Or, in some cases the products are so similar they focus on similar keywords, for example '2 tier metal lockers' applies to loads of different products. Do I do the best I can with product titles, then focus on sub-categories? Love to hear thoughts 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
When do you use article markup for AMP pages?
Hi all! For a healthcare website we have setup AMP. Google Search Console suggests to use article markup for several pages and I am not sure if this is correct. There are two kind of pages:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DeptAgency
1. News pages
2. Information pages, for example: symptoms alcohol addiction or Binge Eating Disorder There's no doubt the article markup will be correct for the news pages but I am not sure about the information pages. Do you guys suggest to implement article markup on these pages as well or only use this for real news/blog posts? Hope you can help me out. Thank you in advance and happy holidays! Regards, Anouk van de Velde0 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Sites still rank who don't seem like they should. Why?
So you've been MOZing and SEOing for years and we're all convinced of the 10x factor when it comes to content and ranking for certain search terms... right? So what do you do when some older sites that don't even produce content dominate the first page of a very important search term? They're home pages with very little content and have clearly all dabbled in pre Panda SEO. Surely people are still seeing this and wondering why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
How do I get my site to rank in the right country?
I work with an organization in the United States that purchased a 3 letter .com domain from another company based in the Netherlands. After transferring the domain and setting up the new site we've completed the following: Registered the site in Webmaster Tools and selected the United States as the international target target Used Schema Markup on the US business address Built links from US based websites Setup a Google My Business site and verified the address All site content is in english Requested removal of links from sites in the Netherlands that were linking to the old website Disavowed all links from the Netherlands that refused to remove links to the old website Despite these actions, our website rarely shows up in Google.com search results. However, we're in the top 10 for many of the same queries when performing searches at Google.nl - Interestingly enough, if we set our location for the US and do a search in Google.nl we do not show up in the search results.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianspatterson
It has been about 18 months since we've completed these actions and Google still assumes our website is best served and targeted towards people in the Netherlands. Is there anything else we can do to fix this?Thanks!0 -
Huge drop in rankings for specialist life insurance site
I work with a site who specialise in life insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions - http://goo.gl/Drwre6. The site has ranked really well historically, but was hit hard on 16th June when we saw an almost 100% drop in rankings overnight. We picked up on quite a few issues straight away and rectified these. A list of steps we've taken so far are below: removed CSS & JS files from robots.txt changed hosting provider back, as it had recently been moved somewhere new updated copy on main landing pages to remove small amounts that were duplicated requested removal of some suspicious looking backlinks and submitted a disavow found and removed a test site that was live and indexable found an external site that had scraped copy from our site - requested removal (this site is no longer live) cleaned up any 404 and ensured all redirects are working correctly updated the diabetes page to include more valuable info - including linking out to authority sites After taking all these steps, we have still seen no improvement. It could be that Google just hasn't yet re-crawled the site to take the changes into account...? We're aware of one other site in our industry that has noticed a drop in rankings in the last couple of months, but a number of our competitors are still ranking well for our target terms. We wonder if the site was caught up in the Payday Loans update, as the timings almost line up. Other sites with spammy medical content seem to have been hit, so we wonder if the "medical" type content on our site could have been penalised? Incredibly frustrating if so, as it's a valid, genuine service being offered! Really at a bit of a loss as to what to do next, so any help would be hugely appreciated! Katie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Article Falls After Maintaining ranks for years. Page penalty?
Hello, I have had an article consistently rank between 3-5 for the last two plu syears now. Recently it dropped down to 11-13. All I did was add my Google plus picture to it. I have been hearing things along the lines of content rewrites. I am well aware of the fact that there are many duplicates of my article are out there. Is this the legitament problem though? Those articles have links to my sites. I have even found other articles that link to my article that have been duplicated. So there's all sorts of duplicate syndication out there. Wondering if I should start asking people to take down my article. Any info on recent Google activity on this subject?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612901 -
What is the best strategy to get a company located in one city, but does business in other cities, ranked locally in the other cities as well?
For example: this client is a custom clothier located in Phoenix, but would like to come up in the search engines for Scottsdale, Tucson, Prescott, Chicago, etc., because he travels to those cities and does business there with his custom clothing business. His website is www.artfultailoring.com Right now, he'll come up for custom suits phoenix, custom shirts phoenix az, etc. So how would I get him to come up in the search engines in more locations than just Phoenix?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cgray010