Michael Martinez has a nice yearly article that gives out 20 hardcore seo tips for folks to advance their SEO skills. I am not at his level yet but I thought some hardcore tips for SEO beginners will be useful to sharpen their skills and to know what is expected of a junior seo analyst or executive. Here are the 10 hardcore seo tips, in no particular order.
Hardcore SEO tip #1: Create a list of 5 websites to mine keywords
What: Discount all the common keyword tools such as Google adwords, Market Samurai, LongTail Pro, Wordtracker, Google insight. Google suggest, Google related searches etc. Pick 5 websites where you think you can learn about new keywords or conversations happening in your niche. These websites can be forums, trend blogs, personal blogs, newsletters etc.
Why: Most of us rely on keyword tools to helps us with keyword research. However, advance keyword research depends on understanding the conversation flowing in your market. Knowing where to watch these keyword flows help you to forecast what is coming, what is already past and what are the different words used by the market to describe the same thing.
Hardcore SEO tip #2: Use 20 different terms in the same article to describe a common topic
What:Write an article about a focus topic and use 20 different words to describe the topic. You can common modifiers, adjectives etc. For example, if you are writing about the best running shoes. Use 20 different ways to replace with the word ‘best’ such as top, best rated, most loved etc.
Why: People get caught up in the ranking game because they focus too much on a particular word. Our job as a SEO is to draw in more SEO traffic, not in caring about ranking for any individual keyword. One way to do this is to understand that people use different words and combinations to describe the same thing. By practicing how to sprinkle different keywords in the same article without keyword stuffing, you will improve your long tail traffic and see for yourself how different people really used words.
Hardcore SEO tip #3: Create 5 what-if posts
What: Look at your niche and predict 5 news that can happen in the next 3 to 6 months. Write 5 articles about it as if the news happened.
Why: Most SEO only know how to look backwards in terms of keyword research. An advance SEO can look into the future and predict what keywords will emerge. By preparing your content early, you will be a much better position to leverage on the buzz around the news when it happens. See my article on the guest posting algorithm update for an example.
Hardcore SEO tip #4: Pick 5 keywords from your analytic that didn’t have a matching article
What: Look through your analytic and look for 5 keywords that you didn’t have an article which address it. Write 5 unique articles that give more information about these 5 keywords. Come back after a couple of months to see if you have more traffic surrounding these 5 keywords.
Why: As long as your site starts to receive search engine traffic, you will have more than enough keywords to build more content on. Learn how to mine your own stats to create useful content that makes your site more complete.
Hardcore SEO tip #5: Write a post series
What: Write a 5 part series with the same article headline and a different byline. Something like
- How to start a business part 1 - Picking your niche
- How to start a business part 2 – Knowing your competitors
Why: You will learn what it means to have your content made relevant for specific topics and how it affects your search engine traffic. SEO is not 100% about links and this exercise will let you see how powerful relevant content is.
Hardcore SEO tip #6: Look at how the 5 top sites in a competitive niche organize their content
What: Pick up the top 5 sites in your niche and look at how their content is organised. Make notes about internal hubs, navigation, sidebar, internal links. If you cannot learn anything, try another 5.
Why: In competitive niches, everything counts including onsite seo. This exercise lets you see how to really organize content to make it easy for search engines to find and index your content. It will also let you evaluate how useful a site’s structure is from a user perspective. Then use what you learned on your website.
Hardcore SEO tip #7: Write an article that can achieve first one ranking for at least 5 expression
What: Pick any topic you are knowledgeable about and write about it. Use your knowledge to answer questions that searchers might be looking for. After a month, check your stats to see if the article ranks at page one for at least 5 unique expressions. No backlinks allowed.
Why: If you can draw search traffic for at least 5 unique expression with each article, you will understand why simply producing more helpful content can help in your seo without doing any backlinks. You will also see how in depth knowledge can create expressions that a person outside the industry will not produce. If your article is not ranking for anything, either you lack knowledge about the topic or your copy writing sucks.
Hardcore SEO tip #8: Post 3 lousy comments and 3 thoughtful comments
What: Pick out 6 active blogs and leave a comment each. Make 3 of them lousy such as the often used “great post!” and make the other 3 as thoughtful as you can. Look at your referral stats and compare one group’s referring traffic with the other.
Why: Most SEO folks only see blog comments as links and failed to see them as a genuine way to generate real traffic and visibility for the site. Doing this exercise will let you see what a real thoughtful comment can do to your traffic. Do this often and you will see why it is worth your time to leave thoughtful comments, rather than spam them with more anchor text links.
Hardcore SEO tip #9: Leave enough comments on a blog until you earn an editorial link from the site owner
What: Chose a blog that you think you can build a relationship with. Leave thoughtful comments on the blog regularly. Do this until the site owner mentions you in their blog post.
Why: Learn how to network with other relevant sites is one of the most useful skill a SEO needs to acquire a natural backlink. If you can earn a link by just leaving comments, you have learn how to be useful so that others appreciate your content. This alone will take you far in any future SEO efforts.
Hardcore SEO tip #10: Get all nofollow links for a brand new blog
What: Create a new blog. Put some content on it and start getting links which are only nofollowed. These links should contain anchor text that are unique but not found in your site’s content.
Why: It is commonly believed that nofollow links do not help in your search engine ranking. Prove this to yourself by doing this exercise. Once you are convince from your own results then you will learn that not all SEO advice is valid.
These 10 hardcore seo tips is meant to build a foundation in 3 important areas of SEO, which are
- keyword research
- onsite SEO including content
- how to promote your site
Doing the above will let you create your own SEO competitive advantage for your own websites.
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