How to float to the top of Google Search Results, without paying
Seems like too many websites and brands start up from scratch, and get absolutely NO WHERE. Without the blitzkrieg of press releases and public relations broo-haha, it can be damn hard to get relevant traffic to your site, especially with no money. Here’s my comprehensive guide for getting traffic to your site when you have no fan base, no tribe, no cult following, no page rank, no domain age, no public relations, and most importantly, no money.
Before you even write, follow SEO best practices
We’ve done several posts on SEO here at AssaultBLOG. Our most popular one being, “Tips & Strategies For SEO That The High Priced Consultants Aren’t Telling You.”
There’s no point in trying to get Google to spider you if you aren’t following best practices.
A quick recap of SEO best practices from this article
- Minimize HTML and use table-less layouts
- Utilize alt tags, title tags, meta title and description tags, and anchor tags with keywords every
- 3% keyword density is more than enough on every page
- Utilize strong, em, h1, h2, h3 for headings and elements that carry more importance
- Think like a human, what would I search for in a post about [your blog post here]
- Register your business with local search, you appear at the top of the pages in the maps section
- Use an XML Sitemap
- Don’t waste too much time on META keywords
- Keep up with the latest Google trends and follow search engine resource websites
Provide something useful, unique
Content is king. It took me a long time to realize that no matter how much I wrote, unless it was something useful, and interesting to the masses, no one was going to take the time to read it, if they could even find it in the first place.
Writing for the web is a different kind of beast. People use the internet as a tool, to find information. How to do something, how to fix something, What’s the best way to skin a cat? Who did Michael Jordan punch in the face at the Bulls practice one day? What’s the name of Shawn Kemp’s 12 kids–you get the point.
Ulysses is a great novel, but no one on the internet is going to read an epic saga, we’re here to get answers, fast.
Hit the ground running, get links back cause you’re awesome
Congrats, you have something interesting to say, and you’ve followed SEO best practices when coding your website, but you’re still not showing up for any major searches in the top 20 results. It’s not secret, you must have links from other popular, relevant websites pointing back to your site, using the keywords you want to show up for in searches. A good way to start, is to mention other articles, and websites in your posts, and contact the original writers telling them you enjoyed their article, and you wrote about it. Some of my closest network of online friends are people I emailed (or Twittered) telling them I liked their articles.
Use Google docs, and make yourself a list of places you can send out freebie links to. There’s hundreds of websites you can submit links to in a user link feed to a helpful blog post about design, programming, and just about anything else. Our current list has over 100 places we submit our stories to, and we submit every quality blog to every one of the pertaining websites. Most importantly, when you find a new site, take the five seconds to add it to your list, and be sure to update your list if changes are made to the website.
Here’s our list of websites we submit our posts to
The most important thing to remember when getting links back to your site is the popularity of the site linking to you, as well as the relevance of it’s content. Second most important thing when getting linked to is that your targeted search keywords must be used inbetween the anchor tags and title tag.
In our case, getting linked on websites like Shirt.Woot.com, Hide Your Arms, Emptees, has helped us because they’re popular, the send lots of traffic, and in the future their links to us help us float up to the top of popular searches with the word t-shirt in it. This works the same as getting your pages on Digg, Designfloat, and many of the other sites in our list of links above.
Recently, Digg released the Diggbar, and they did a ton of research into it’s SEO-ability, and it appears as though they have done their homework. Don’t be afraid to utilize it, more people will digg your stories, and you can only benefit from it. One general rule I try to use when utilizing Digg is to not submit your own stories. If you do have a specific story you think is worthy of the Digg homepage, go for it and push it-but hell hath no fury like angry Diggers. So submitters beware.
Beware the rel=”nofollow”
When you type your name and website into a comment area on a blog, you get a link back to your website. While I do encourage participating at other blogs and websites, beware the rel=”nofollow”. That tag inside of an anchor tag tells the search engine not to go spider your link, so in other words you are getting no “link juice”. I see comments showing up from normal users and spammers all the time saying things like, “art community” trying to get link juice. I have bad news people, no one spiders your link text in comments–at least everywhere I know of doesn’t.
Delicious bookmarks is one place where the rel=”nofollow” tag is setup, as well in all Flickr image descriptions and comments.
That’s not to say you get no benefit from those User Link feeds on some of the websites in my list of websites we submit our posts to, alot of the time we end up getting featured in other popular design blogs as a direct result of those links. Keep this in mind when submitting your website, but don’t waste your time. We also pull in RSS Subscribers through these posts, so even though there is no actual “link juice” benefit, there is still the benefit of repeat visitors, and possibilities that you may be linked later.
rel=”nofollow” tags do have their benefit though. The more links you have on your page, the more Google divides their importance. For example, if you have 50 links on a page, there is obviously a less amount of importance on each one instead of having ten links. You can carve out which links not follow just by putting rel=”nofollow” in the <a href=”link here” rel=”nofollow”>Link not getting followed</a> I believe this has some fancy title called “link carving”, but that’s just how it was explained to me. If you do have lots of links on one page, sprinkle the rel=”nofollow” tag on ones you don’t want spidered. Like when you’re trashing a competitor.
Freebie “link juice”
I know some people like to keep their secrets to themselves, but I like to tell everyone in hopes that a few of you subscribe to my RSS feed. (As well as hopefully buy the occasional t-shirt, or hire us to design something for you.)
Believe it or not there are ways to get good quality link text back from very popular websites. Here’s a few websites that, upon approval of your content, will link back to your website without the rel=”nofollow” tag (This is subject to change) A couple of places that provide link juice are:
- Ebay blogs – We repost our relevant articles over at our ebay blog and link back to our site. You get quality html link text and there is no rel=”nofollow” tag on the links
- Flickr – While you used to be able to get link juice from flickr.com, that is no longer the case
- I Snare – Limits your links, but does give link backs
- Ezine Articles – Limits your links, but does give link backs
- Go Articles – Limits your links, but does give link backs
- QBN – Design resource website
- Noupe – Design resource
- Squidoo – Make your own pages
We’ve only done a handful of these things, but find a site that fits your demographic and run a contest there, or see if they feature “cool stuff”. Through a mutual friend I was able to show our products to Slash Film, and they wrote a very nice piece about our Chainsaw Bunny Shirt which sent us about as much traffic and sales as getting featured on Woot.com as a side deal.
Surgically Precise Keywords™… No not meta keywords
As I said earlier, pick the keywords you want to show up for in searches and use them inbetween anchor tags, in your title=”" tag, as well as in your head title tag. Don’t forget to use the keywords on your actual site content as well inbetween H1, H2, H3, and <strong> and <em> tags as well. They put extra emphasis on terms. 3% keyword density is MORE than enough per page. Don’t be evil.
Know what you want to show up for in search results and fight for them. Put those words in your H1 and H2 tags. Put them in your title. Put them in your product names. Have blogs link to you with that link text.
I touched on this in the, Tips & Strategies For SEO That The High Priced Consultants Aren’t Telling You, but it really is the do or die for your company.
You’re not going to show up in the top 10 results for “design blog”. At least not right away, you have to attack search results from the outside. Get ranked in the top result for other more specific searches that aren’t highly sought after like, “custom photoshop brush downloads” or, “repeating seamless background image” and you will eventually climb to the top for other searches organically.
Assault is never going to show up for the Google search, “t-shirts”. That search term is dominated, but we did feel we could show up on top for “zombie t shirts”. If you’re small you have to carve out your keyword niche with surgical precision. Pick keywords that are less competitive, but still have high search volume. (Use the Google keyword analysis tool for that)
Give it time, 3-6 months to see results
If you’re doing everything correctly, it still takes a few weeks and/or months to see quality results. Unless you’re a huge brand name, like Oprah, or have your name in the news constantly, your site isn’t going to get spidered and benefit as quickly.
If you’re starting from zero, every link, and every keyword counts. Give your link exchange partners the code and keywords to link you with. Don’t go overboard (title=”t-shirts t shirts art on our fancy designer graphic bloody t-shirts officially zombie awesome cool neato”) You’ll look like a fuck-stick.
A few additional thoughts
Google changes there algorithm several hundred times per year, so your site may fluctuate up and down in the rankings, and a lot of what goes into the Google algorithm is a mystery. What I’ve outlined above works for me. Don’t get discouraged. I should also note that in my other article, I provide a link to the PDF Google has written where I have gotten a lot of this information. I highly recommend reading it, and memorizing it. As I always say:
There are about 50 techniques, and everyone’s doing em, don’t let anyone sell you their Google first page results in 30 days snake oil bullshit, it’s not happening.
Have a tip? Did I miss something? Disagree?
Post it in the comments and share it with the world. I read every comment that hits this blog. (And sometimes when I’m bored I read spam for a laugh, or to order my viagara at discount prices.)
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About the Author
Tim is the co-owner of Assault, and tends to think he can party twice as hard as anyone. Follow him on twitter @assault Email this Author | All posts by tim
That’s one of the best outlines of “organic” Google development that I’ve seen. I agree, that for all the optimization services and consultation you could buy, the best and most secure long term development is great, well put together content.
Invaluable list of sites to submit to, lots that I hadn’t thought of or didn’t think you could submit to. What’s your submission strategy? I hear a lot of horror stories about people who oversubmit their own content, particularly to the likes of StumbleUpon, and the subsequent penalties to their “reputation” under the service’s algorithm. Do you have a selective approach?
[...] n How to float to the top of Google Search Results, without paying – Assault Blog [...]
None of these SEO blogs ever seem to talk about Google Local Business. I feel like getting on there and asking clients for reviews on it is also great practice. Now I guess this doesn’t work for sites not offering services (I relate everything to designing as a designer), but for, say, artist’s blogs, this is a very relevant thing to do.
Nice article, great to see someone preach correctly and actually tell people how its done in such a simple way. great tips
I think the comment by Aetoric Design about Google Local search results is very relevant. One of the first things I do when I do SEO for a client is find how how big the market is that they service. If they only service a local market then there is not much point in SEOing their site for the whole world.
Much better to optimise there site for their local area. eg. optimise for search term like ‘real estate san diego’, rather than just ‘real estate’. or for term like ‘dentist tampa’ rather than just ‘dentist’.
I have simplified my answer a bit for the sake of brevity, but I think this is a major point for alot of businesses. Not much point in having their business come up in search results if they cannot service the market.
@Steve Hall and @aetoric Design
I absolutely agree. One of the terms I targeted for my site with local search was t-shirts Chicago. Low and behold I now show up on the google maps for my business in the local search results above even Threadless’ online store.
It’s a great thing to be able to show clients.
About the title tags…do h1 title tags have much more impact over h2? Or is it as long as the title tags are big that they will get more notice?
Thanks for the info. We provide a really inexpensive service for contractors and it’s free for consumers. Your tips are greatly appreciated since we do not collect very much money and can’t afford to pay $5,000 per day to each search engine just so we can get clicked on.
Thanks so much. It’s stuff like this that’s going to keep you guys growing.
Thank you so much for your article.
I really appreciated to read this. Hard to find someone talented here in Germany to talk with about SEO. You inspired me to run a lot more test on the things you mentioned, since I absolutely agree with your opinion and experience.
[...] die sie mit SEO machen konnten. Besonders hervorzuheben ist jedoch ein Artikel von “assaultblog“, der sich detaillierter mit dem Thema [...]
Great info for a newbie like me. You said, “pick the keywords you want to show up for in searches and use them in between anchor tags.” Do you mean “in” the actual anchor tag or between anchor tags – like somewhere else on the page in between two tags?
Thanks!
I mean that if you have a Put the link text in here cause this is what google reads
pretty usefull dude…..
Thank you so much for this comprehensive explanation.
As a writer and a photographer, I’m mostly interested in displaying my content, learning from others and chat over various subjects. I didn’t start a blog to make money and it took me a while to realize I still had to follow some SEO basics in order to… survive online!
I feel that I still have to improve a lot, especially to get links back. But I’m gonna follow some of your advices and we will see!
Thanks for this article Tim! There’s SO much to get my head around with the SEO stuff – one thing at a time…
I just recently emailed everyone I know with a website to ask for reciprocal links and if my (somewhat hazy) understanding is correct, I’d be better off only exchanging links with sites that are directly related. Thanks for clarifying this for me.
I certainly don’t want to look like a “fuckstick” either (thanks for the laugh!) so will take your advice on that one!
Here’s to much success and abundance coming your way!
Susan:
Thanks for the kind words! I hope some of what I wrote helps.
yah really very much useful.
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