5 contemporary strategies that help improve your rankings

Improving your rankings, Web Posting Pro isn’t as simple as it used to be. As businesses become more invested in SEO, search ranking algorithms have become smarter and more sophisticated. The result is that many techniques that used to be acceptable are now considered the grey hat or black hat — and, in some cases, can even earn you a traffic-throttling Google penalty. Still, the challenge remains: We need links, we need traffic, and we need rankings. How do we ethically achieve this? Luckily, there are still powerful white-hat strategies you can leverage to improve rankings. Here are five of the best that we at E2M use successfully.

1. Guest posts

Guest posting has been a contested territory for some time. In 2014, Google’s then-head of webspam, Matt Cutts, advised that guest posting was increasingly ineffective at building links. If you’re doing a lot of guest posting, he warned, “you’re hanging out with some terrible company.”

READ MORE : 

• ‘Life With MS’ Blog Marks 10th Anniversary
• SL Green Signs 603,650 Sq. Ft. Lease Extension with Penguin Random House at 1745 Broadway
• Why The Best Bloggers Control Their Passion
• A generous customer leaves the waiter a $500 tip after his random act of kindness towards an older woman.
• Microsoft Surface Hub smashes sales forecast, plus tips to get the most out of yours.

It’s easy to see why guest posting has come under fire in recent years. After all, guest blogs used to be a straightforward way to get backlinks — maybe a little too easy. All too often, the standard guest post is 500 words long, includes no links to sources (other than the author’s website), and presents no thoughtful commentary or new insight. I’m not saying you can’t have a worthwhile 500-word post. Of course, you can. However, most guest bloggers aren’t looking at readers’ concerns. They don’t care whether you derive value from the post or not. They care about getting a link, and they’ve nailed the absolute bare minimum required to achieve that end.

That drags the name of the “guest blogger” into the mud. But it also gives you an opportunity. Rather than focus on acquiring links, guest blogging can help with SEO in other, less direct ways. By consistently posting excellent, in-depth content on relevant blogs, you’ll drive up authority and get more social shares, along with signs of quality that Google takes seriously. You’re also more likely to get traffic to your website from high-quality content — which is what link-building should be about, anyway. Stuffing low-quality posts with links to your site — or paid third-party links — may be a thing of the past. However, guest blogging is still a powerful tool to increase authority and search visibility.

2. Infographics

Infographics are a powerful way of getting the point across quickly and intuitively. That’s one reason why they’re so popular. But they’re also an effective way of getting high-quality backlinks rapidly. The trick to getting that to happen is in the embed code. After you create your infographic, you can use a tool like the SeigeMedia Embed Code Generator to build the code. This code that people who want to post your infographic to their site will use Sci Burg.

So include a request to link back to your site, and make it easy by bundling exactly the URL you want them to use into the infographic’s embed code. That way, they can’t avoid seeing it. Sure, some people will ignore it, but most will attribute your infographic when they post it — and make the attribution a hyperlink back to your site. Bingo! Use infographic publishers to get your infographic in front of more people (Visual.ly is one). Most will want a 70-or-so-word description of the infographic; then they’ll store it, and when other content marketers and bloggers wish to a graphic, they’ll be more likely to find yours. The free infographic publisher landscape changes quickly to ensure you’re not putting your content on dead sites.

Want some extra juice? On those sites, you can search for infographics on the same subject as yours, then reach out to users who have accessed those infographics and ask if they’d be interested in yours. Our annual infographic on Google’s algorithm updates (now in its fourth year) was picked up by Entrepreneur, Social Media Today, Marketing Land, and more!