The Ultimate Guide To Ranking A Website Without Building Backlinks

[BikSMM]

Very useful guide for newbies, thanks a lot!

 

[Professor88]

Very interesting read Zwielicht. Thumbs up!

 

[mindblogger]

Thanks for sharing....

 

[L3G10N]

Thumbs op! Well written post that covered on page seo well.

A little tip that helps me on a wordpress platform is install an seo check plugin. Personally I use Yoast Wordpress Seo plugin. It works wonders for me. Well, it at least helps me remember to check the big stuff, titles, keywords, meta description etc.

 

[fullyniche]

Thanks for taking time to write for us.
Appreciate your effort. Thanks man

 

[SweetMike]

going to bookmark this for a later read, thanks

 

[vandalais]

Great read with some solid advice. Thanks for taking the time to write this article.

 

[SuperPsych]

Hold up wait a minute let me build my first site with these tips ;p

 

[leadfinder]

great advice, thanks for sharing.

 

[Nichekid]

Found this at the right time, thank you. Noted very important points.

 

[feelfreeto]

The question about "competition" in G Keyword Planner: does it actually reflect the ranking competition?
As long as I am aware it represents the competition among AdSense advertisers.

To be fair, I've met both explanations on the internet. I understand that intuitively people tend to go for the lowest competition regardless of the context, but in this case it might be so that we are interested in highest competition - the higher competition among adsense advertisers, the higher demand for the product.

Quote from KW Planner regarding competition: "How to use it: See how competitive ad placement is for a keyword. " It doesn't reflect how competitive KW is to rank, does it?

P.S. I don't have clear understanding. I wrote all that to initiate a discussion to clarify it to myself and to others.

 

[WPRipper]

Its well written but this is not enough to rank a website. These are important facts, don't get me wrong. Plus, you say that categories and tags are important for search engines. WRONG. If you let these pages to be indexed you just got urself with duplicate content.

Overall its a good guide, but like I said this is not enough.

PS. BHW is turning to WHW

 

[WPRipper]

The question about "competition" in G Keyword Planner: does it actually reflect the ranking competition?
As long as I am aware it represents the competition among AdSense advertisers.

Its all about AdSense advertisers.

 

[DenteDeLeone]

Great Post. Although nothing new.

 

[Zwielicht]

Its well written but this is not enough to rank a website. These are important facts, don't get me wrong. Plus, you say that categories and tags are important for search engines. WRONG. If you let these pages to be indexed you just got urself with duplicate content.

Overall its a good guide, but like I said this is not enough.

PS. BHW is turning to WHW

The guide was originally much longer and more detailed, although I had an issue with the page when I went to upload an image and the page froze (becoming unclickable), causing me to lose what I had written. I had only made a short backup of what I had written, so I took a screenshot of what I could, pasted the backup, and I posted what I had left (you may have noticed that some sections of the guide are much shorter than others). But I know what you mean by this guide not being enough, which is why I was considering making a few separate guides that go over specific sections in greater detail (unless a moderator can make the thread editable again, then I would post the additional content in this thread).

About the categories and tags, I actually didn't say that the category and tag pages were important to search engines, I said that it was important to organise your blog using categories and tags (while I did mention that it gives search engines another article to crawl, this is pretty negligible, but I felt that it was worth mentioning anyway), mostly for users who may be interested in viewing similar content and for you to find similar content on your website once it gets bigger, although I'll admit that I was a bit vague there. With that said, I've never had an issue with duplicate content on any site when I allow these category and tag pages to be indexed (probably because the articles I write on the category and tag pages add some unique content to the pages, but I haven't had a chance to test this yet), although if you're still worried about having too much duplicate content on your site, then you can ignore that part of the guide and noindex category/tag pages.

Part 5: Categories and Tags​

Organising your content into categories and using tags is important, but you may be wondering what the difference between categories and tags are.

• Categories are meant to be more of a broad topic. For example, if you created a post about Churn and Burning, then the category would be "SEO" or Black Hat SEO"
• Tags are more specific than categories. For example, if you created a post about Churn and Burning, then the category would be "Churn and Burn"

As shown in the image above, if you're using Wordpress, editing your categories and tag pages is as simple as hovering over the "Posts" tab on your dashboard and clicking on either categories or tags.

Did you also know that categories and tags have their own pages? If not, you should go and write articles for these pages. While it's unlikely that your audience will ever stumble upon these pages, it does give searches engines another page to crawl and index as well as another article to determine the overall theme of your website.

Tip: You can try writing engaging articles for your category pages and target keywords for them as well! If you put effort into your content and effectively optimise it, you'd be surprised about how many people may visit these pages.

PS. BHW is turning to WHW

It seems like there has been more "white hat" content than "black hat" content across the forum lately (especially in the black hat SEO sub-forum), but this is the white hat SEO section, so I figured it was appropriate.

 

[WPRipper]

"it does give searches engines another page to crawl and index"

Then what is that?

 

[Zwielicht]

"it does give searches engines another page to crawl and index"

Then what is that?

I already answered that question in the previous post.

...(while I did mention that it gives search engines another article to crawl, this is pretty negligible, but I felt that it was worth mentioning anyway)...

In other words, the importance of creating articles for these pages is not significant, especially when compared to the other parts of the guide. If you're trying to avoid having more duplicate content and feel that the minuscule benefit that they may provide to your site is negligible (or that it may harm your rankings), then ignore that part of the guide. Again, if I could go back and edit the guide to have it as specific as I intended it to be, I would.

Edit: You know what? I'll admit when I'm wrong. I did a bit more research on the subject of duplicate content on Wordpress sites and I see that some people do have an issue with these archive pages as mentioned on Yoast's SEO tutorial (section 3). While I've never had an issue with letting these archive pages index myself, I understand that the duplicate content on these archive pages has the potential to harm your rankings. Unfortunately, I can't update the original guide to reflect this change, but everyone will more than likely see it here.

 

[fc-dh]

Its a good guide on how to construct your content, but without backlinks or domain authority (that you only get true back links and age) this content is going nowhere fast, unless you have very low competition, but in your example (the dog training niche) you better have some high powered backlinks or you will not rank at all.

People often measure competition on the amount of pages indexed by Google, but that is wrong, i do a lot of tickets sales, you know sport tickets, concert tickets etc, if i where to do a low targeted artist like Herbie Hancock and i would create a post like yours for the key phrase "Tickets Herbie Hancock Columbus Ohio" i bet my life on it it will not make the top 10 without backlinks.

But if i have a piece of spun content of 250/300 and i add some Tiered GSA, PBN and Sape links to them i hit top 3 no problem, onpage SEO is overrated, you can test this theory for yourself in so many ways, so my advice would be that you should not write your content for the SE at all, just do your basic optimization and write to sell or have people sign-up or whatever it is you want them to do, stop using SEO plugins for keyword density and LSI, just write for your visitors, that is where the money is, the Google bot doesn't have a credit card.

Thanks for the read cus i did enjoyed it.

Dave

 

[gexton]

This is one of the best threads I love it and is an AWESOME SHARE...
Love how you break it down for us noobs...


Thanks
And have a blessed one...
Well put all together.
Of course, it helpful.
its no doubt a sticky worthy thread..

 

[feelfreeto]

Its all about AdSense advertisers.

Why does the guide says to go for "low competition" then?
Are there any advantages ranking wise (if we are not talking about adsense)?
Or we can easily neglect it?