First, a concise blueprint, then we will dig into the details of each element.
1) Create content that is informative and useful for people looking for the information contained in the content. This could be blog posts, articles, videos, web pages, etc.
2) Have that content published on a wide variety of websites (only one publishing location per instance of content; do not publish the same content on multiple web locations).
3) In each instance of the publishing of your content, refer readers (or listeners in the case of video or audio [for ease of writing, from here on out I will refer to all categories of content publishing, written, audio, or video, as written content, and hence refer to consumers of that content as "readers"]) to both your website and another instance of your content that might be relevant to those readers.
4) Send people who might be interested in your content topic, to your content pages.
Why does this process work?
The first step, creating useful and informative content, meets the core desire of the search engines for useful, informative content to show in their search results.
The second step assures that your content is available on a wide variety of web locations which has 2 benefits: 1) if one web location goes out of business, is disabled, or otherwise is removed from the search engine results, your business is barely affected because your content is widely distributed online in a way that could possibly be imagined as being holographic in nature and 2) the wider the distribution of your content, the wider is the possible audience for your content.
The third step assures that your total content readership can be exponential, meaning that if someone reads one blog post from you, they can potentially read multiple instances of your content simply by clicking through from each instance of your content.
And the fourth step assures that you begin the initial phase of discovery by people online, which can lead to people recommending your content to others, and leads the search engines to see that your content pages are receiving natural traffic levels and social activity.
Notice that by doing each of these 4 steps, all the critical components of the search engine algorithms are achieved: content components, traffic, linking structure, and social activity. Nothing additional needs to be done to inflate traffic, links, or social activity. The more natural those activities appear (and the most natural is when you don't unduly influence or manipulate those activities), the more your web pages will be rewarded with search rankings into the future.
To summarize the process: constantly create new content, consistently linking to old content in the new content, creating multiple layers of interaction between content pieces, and send targeted relevant visitors to your content pieces based on possible interest level of those visitors.
Psychological core of strategy
Notice that this strategy centers around creating relevant content, meaningfully linking to that content for the purpose of allowing readers to read more of your content (not for the purpose of artificially inflating link counts), and sending targeted, interested people to your content based on their needs and interest (not for the purpose of inflating traffic or social activity).
By now you might be wondering, well you are advocating getting links and sending traffic to your content. What's wrong with just sending more links and more traffic to the content to get higher rankings? Here are the reasons: 1) The search engines forbid it, 2) Because they forbid it, although it might cause a temporary increase in traffic, in the long run, it endangers the long term viability of your content strategy, and 3) when you drive links and traffic for numbers' sake online, you leave a digital footprint that marks your content as participating in search engine manipulation.
So you might still be wondering, why the extreme emphasis on this? Because I know from experience that if you do it right, you will get long term traffic (although it will build slower in the short run) and that if you manipulate your rankings through artificial means, you will likely lose long term traffic. I am in this business for the long run, so I teach my clients to build their business for the long run. It is too much work building a real business to build it on a foundation that may crumble quickly with changing tides and search engine algorithmic changes; instead, I believe in building a strong solid foundation that will lead to long term success. And the information in the steps I give you next is so powerful that you may be tempted to manipulate its use, so I want to be ultra-clear that that is not in your best interest!
Ok, now for the good stuff! Now I will teach you the specific processes to do each one of these 4 steps. Stay tuned for tomrrow's post!