An SEO Lesson Gamified for the LEO Community

brettpullen (53)in LeoFinance • 3 years ago

A lot of excitement has been made about an AI SEO tool that Khal might buy for the LEO Finance community. The idea is that if we get fifty authors to use the tool and point them to some keyword topics, LEO Finance will be able to increase its organic traffic from Google. Search traffic will probably uptick some, but I know the force would be even stronger having 50 authors educated about SEO who are building a lot of backlinks.

In this post I teach some basics of SEO, in the hopes you will be able to conceptualize SEO theory a little bit better after reading. In attempt to draw more attention to this SEO lesson for the LEO community, I have gamified it with the object being to get a LEO Finance article ranked very high on Google for our desired search term. There are many calls to action in this post so I’m hoping as a community we can SEO our target post very well. Remember that our target post will be driven higher and higher in the search engines with the more work you do on this lesson. A #1 spot is not out of the question. If any of these link building styles are new to you, try them out, you owe it to yourself to learn this stuff. The post we are trying to rank is a new one about Andrei Jikhn’s portfolio from @rollandthomas. The LEO team determined “Andrei Jikhn portfolio” was one of the most valuable terms for LEO Finance to rank for. So with a little community effort, we can easily place another article very high (we already have a post in the top 5) for that term.

So here is where the lesson begins. When doing SEO work there are two main categories of value to add; onsite SEO, and offsite SEO. Onsite SEO could be referring to any optimizations made on your website to help your piece of content rank higher. While there are thousands of factors to consider for onsite SEO, the url and title that you choose are extremely important on your posts.

The article that LEO Finance currently has ranked in the top five for our keyword is titled “Problems with all Dividend Portfolio | Andrei Jikh Sells His Stocks”. At the time we had no clue there was search traffic for "Andrei Jikh portfolio" so, fair enough good title. The URL the author chose is terrible though. “/lsmjyfnd” is what they chose for the URL to their article. This highlights the single biggest SEO error that is consistently being made by many prominent writers on the LEO Finance platform. They don't choose a URL for themselves. Always opt for entering a URL on your posts, never leave the field empty as Hive will autogenerate something like "lsmjyfnd" to be your URL. The URL is the most valuable real estate onsite to tell Google what keywords your content is about. Your post's URL's should look like this “/perfect-keywords” and not like “/lsmjyfnd”. Please stuff the exact keyword(s) you are trying to rank for on Google into the URL. In this case, the perfect URL would be “/andrei-jikhn-portfolio" or “/andreijikhnportfolio". For your title, you have more room to be artistic than your URL, but at the same time be sure to use the exact match of the keyword you are trying to rank for within the title too. A good title for this keyword would be “Is Andrei Jikhn’s Portfolio Going to Tank?” or "What's In Andrei Jikhn's Portfolio".

I'm going to grade Rolland on his onsite SEO to illustrate these points.

URL

“/lets-meet-andrei-jikhn-playing-card-magician-turned-youtuber-personal-finance-influencer”

Analysis: I would leave out the “lets-meet” from this url as there won’t be any long tail search volume with the words “let’s meet”. The exact phrase "andrei jikhn portfolio" should be somewhere in the URL if not the entire URL. A rule of thumb is leave small words like "a", "and", "the", "lets", "meet" out of your URL. Save those little words for your more artistic title.
Grade: B-

Title

“Lets Meet Andrei Jikhn, Playing Card Magician Turned Youtuber Personal Finance Influencer.”

Analysis: The critical error is not having the word "portfolio" in the title, and preferably the exact phrase "Andrei Jikhn portfolio" all together within the title as well. Unlike the URL, the title can get edited and optimized by Rolland to include the exact phrase we are trying to rank for before HIVE locks in his content 7 days after posting.
Grade: B-

Article

Analysis: I didn’t read the entire article, but it looks like he used the new SEO tool from Khal. When I was researching some of the offsite SEO for this term, I found one of the biggest financial podcasters had a podcast with Andrei titled “Why Andrei Jikhn keeps 1M in cash at all times.” Rolland's article states that Andrei Jikhn’s net worth is 700k, so I would grade Rolland’s article; very low quality. Don't fret LEO community, we are going to push through, because Rolland might edit some things, and we are going to get another first page ranking for "Andrei Jikhn portfolio" regardless. In general writing a good article that makes sense is the most important part of onsite SEO. If we have a high bounce rate and people are clicking away fast to leave the site, your article is never going to perform in the search engines.
Grade: C-

Onsite call to action for the LEO community to rank Rolland’s post well

First to our author Rolland. We are going to be building a lot of links to your article, please edit and optimize the title and article to the best of your ability before the post locks in on the HIVE blockchain after seven days.

For the communities onsite work, the focus will be similar in strategy to the offsite work, we want our money article from Rolland to appear to the search engines like it has gained popularity and gone viral. Onsite we can do that by leaving a tons of comments. Before you go off shit posting “thanks” like Trumpman does, make sure your comment on this post actually adds value. As authors, the first thing we can do on our own posts to add SEO value is engaging with every single comment someone leaves in a valuable way. This will seemingly stuff your post with more unique content, more long tail keywords, and keep readers on your post longer, all things that will make Google think your content is special. So let’s blow up the comment section of Rolland's post with real interaction and valuable content about Andrei Jikhn. Go read a real article about Andrei Jikhn and drop some knowledge in the comments section. Someone else, listen to the podcast “Confronting Andrei Jikh | Why He Keeps $1 Million Dollars Cash” and drop even more knowledge about Andrei in the comments section.

Now it's time to build a lot of links to our money article from Rolland. Link building in my opinion is more important than the content itself when it comes to generating organic search traffic, so this is where we can really leverage the power of the LEO community. Much like commenting on Rolland's article, the purpose of link building is to make the content appear to Google like it has risen in popularity (gone viral) and became an authority on a certain niche keyword term.

Before getting into the offsite link building, we are going to begin with some onsite link building as a community. Start by liking Rolland’s post. Liking the post will trigger a network of Hive blockchain websites to record your action on the ledger with a link to Rolland's article. Next reblog Rolland's post. This will create a link from your author page on LEO Finance to the post we are trying to rank in Google. We need to aim to get as many reblogs of Rolland’s article as possible. As a community let’s beg, borrow and steal our way to 20+ reblogs on the LEO Finance website. The original post performing so well from LEO Finance for our search term has just 4 reblogs.

Now let’s transition into learning about offsite SEO work. Offsite SEO is basically just another name for link building.

When link building in the future to help our articles rank better, your three main focuses should be:

On building links the LEO Finance homepage itself
https://leofinance.io/
On building links to your LEO Finance profile
https://leofinance.io/@brettpullen
On building links to the articles themselves
https://leofinance.io/@brettpullen/seo-lesson-tips-gamify

Now this is where the fun begins, let’s build some links to Rollands post.

We can start with our own platforms. That could mean placing links on websites or social platforms that you control. Now that you have posted Rolland's article to your Twitter and Facebook pages, let’s move onto something a little more creative.

Obviously links from authority websites that send 1000’s of visitors like the Wall Street Journal would be very valuable for SEO. In theory though, the most valuable links we can build are on the websites that have a post or page taking up the ranking spots ahead of us for the search term we are trying to rank for. This project, we are trying to rank for “Andrei Jikh portfolio”. So Google the term yourself. I see a very obvious opportunity. Currently Reddit has the #2 spot for the term, and Google is displaying three of their posts about Andrei Jikhn. Unfortunately all three are older threads that are archived and can’t be commented on. Luckily Google provides us with a lot more opportunities to build links to Rolland's article on niche content about our guy Andrei. Go on through those Reddit threads and drop a link to Rolland’s article on threads that aren’t archived. If you see another LEO community member got to a thread before you with a link, respond to their link with a thoughtful response. If the moderator sees a post with a link is being interacted with, they are much more likely to think the link is adding value and isn’t spam. Write unique comments especially on Reddit, and engage with the content legitimately so your backlinks don't get taken down. It looks like there are twenty plus reddit threads on our niche topic, ripe for you to drop a link in.

The next item is to go through each and every page ranking for “Andrei Jikhn portfolio” and see if we can put a link on the page that is ranking. Google only displays me 73 results for "Andrei Jikh portfolio". Many times there are forums, or websites that we can sign up for, verify the account by email, and then are allowed to comment and leave backlinks. One time a forum required me (as their FAQ stated) to make 60 posts with no outbound links before finally allowing a outbound links in your posts. I happily obliged over the course of a few weeks, and got to drop a link to my website on my 61st post. 73 results isn’t many to scale our operation. Let’s move onto the 106 results Google displays for just the name “Andrei Jikh”. Still not many results to scale, so pick any of the related searches Google displays at the bottom, and search those results for other unique websites that have a page ranking for related search terms to ours for placing a backlink on. A 2-3% success rate of being able to add a backlink is about what to expect. Some niches will be a higher percent success rate, and some lower. The more you practice this technique of link building the faster you will get. For example if you know Discus comments, forums, and Wordpress comments are targets you are having the most success on, maybe the next level for you could be Googling “discus + keyword” or “forum + keyword” or “wordpress.com + keyword” to find these targets even easier. It’s still a good practice to always click through to each search result that appears in Google for your keyword and make an honest effort to leave a backlink on each one, because you will be leaving value on the table if you don’t.

Now let’s move on to picking off his actual social media profiles themselves. The most valuable social links for us to get would probably be Andrei himself tweeting our article, or placing our link in the description of one of his Youtube videos. The next best thing to him posting about it is for us to reply to his recent tweets, Facebook posts, or Youtube videos, and drop our link there. Getting more fancy, let’s try to drop links in other Youtuber’s videos about Andrei. All Youtubers censor links in their comment section differently, so there is a small opportunity there. Getting a little more cute, we can reply here to all the people tweeting about Andrei Jikh with our link.

Now let’s snap our fingers, and rank Rolland’s post very high.

To Wrap Up, Here are the Calls to Action

Onsite

Rolland:

Attempt to make your post better, so our link building attempts are not futile.

Community:

Like Rollands post
Reblog Rolland’s post on LEO Finance
Reblog this post on LEO FInance
Blow up the comment section of Rolland’s post with valuable content.

Offsite

Community:

Build links to Rolland’s post on social platforms and websites that you control.
Build links on all the possible threads about Andrei on Reddit.
Build links on all the websites ranking on Google for the results “Andrei Jikhn portfolio”, “Andrei Jikhn”, and the other related search terms Google displays.
Build links on Andrei Jikhn’s Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other social media profiles. Try to target posts you see other LEO members haven’t spammed yet.
Build links on Twitter by replying to all the people tweeting about Andrei Jikhn with links to Rolland's article.