My Blog For Practicing the Art of Organic SEO

[Austin Henson]

Hello guys,

I am a student at the University of Michigan - Dearborn going for my bachelors in Digital Marketing. We are currently building out our own personal sites to practice Organic SEO. I am just at the beginning of the site so it is pretty bare bones. However, I was hoping that you guys could offer tips for getting my site to rank higher than my other classmates.

We are ranking for two search terms:

"Best Digital Marketing Programs In Michigan"
"Dearborn Search & Visibility Concept"
*If you search these some student already have their sites indexed by google*

I know the important things to consider are:

• Original content on my site.
• Back Links to my Site
• Social Media

I have built out a Facebook page and Twitter account for my site. It is set up to automatically post my new articles. I have gotten some social action since making them.

My URL is listed below:
www.bestdigitalmarketingprograms.net

I would really appreciate some tips for getting back links to my site. Any Ideas for Building Content out efficiently. Or Any other knowledge you think would help me.

Thanks for the help ahead of time,

Austin

 

[JoyHawkins]

Re: My Blog For Practing the Art of Organic SEO

Austin,

Moz.com has some killer beginner guides to SEO. One thing that caught my eye instantly is that your title tag is too long. Make sure you stay within the character limit or Google cuts it off. I use this tool when writing the title & description: Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool

 

[mborgelt]

Re: My Blog For Practing the Art of Organic SEO

I would recommend you put your blog roll on a dedicated page and create dedicated home page content focused at your keyword. I would also recommend using Google AdWords (since it's free) to learn about your keyword environment to get ideas and topics for blogs to keep your content relevant. I would also check out this thread http://www.localsearchforum.com/org...sting-domain-trust-how-spread-link-juice.html for link building ideas. Building links from these sites has helped a lot of our clients in less competitive industries move the meter so I think it could be beneficial to you. This is a great opportunity that you have I think it's great that Universities are no longer turning a blind eye to this industry.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Re: My Blog For Practing the Art of Organic SEO

To start I'll just say that everything you will learn, you'll learn by doing. Pick some topics that you're interested in, and start writing; write for the people who will be reading your blog not necessarily just for search engines. You'll want to optimize for specific terms, but you'll be surprised how many long tailed variations pop up. Make sure you have Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) verified for your site - that's where you're going to find some good ideas once you start writing.

Read up on some of the strategies mentioned above, but then just start trying some stuff. You're going to find a ton of strategies that you'll fail at, or just not get any traction with but that's half the fun. You can spend all day reading, but that won't really help you learn anything. Like Joy said, go to Moz.com and read the beginners guide to SEO to start. Then subscribe to a bunch of blogs on Feedly and check that in the morning to see what's new. Past that... pick a few strategies that look interesting and try them yourself.

Just because some "expert" on some blog said something will or won't work, doesn't make them right. The only way you'll know if it works or not is if you put it to the test yourself.

Run the site through a technical audit tool to get a quick glance what needs to be fixed up front, then move on to the more ambiguous ranking elements. Also worth mentioning that basic knowledge of HTML and CSS will help you quite a bit.