Acquiring Bitcoin Users Organically
Probably the greatest success of 99Bitcoins is the amount of organic traffic it manages to produce. When I say organic traffic I mean traffic that is basically free and comes from search engines or links people post about you around the web.
Since Bitcoin is pretty new, there are huge SEO opportunities inside this space. I'll give you some examples towards the end of this section.
The basis of organic traffic is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO in short. SEO is the practice of improving and promoting a website to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engines. Even though there are many different aspects to SEO we can generally categorize our SEO efforts into three main topics: on-page optimization, off-page optimization and user behavior.
Before I get started, it's important to know that SEO is usually done to target specific KWs. This means you'll need to find out which KWs you want to rank high on Google and then focus your SEO efforts on these specific KWs.
That's also the reason we went over Adwords before moving on to SEO. Since it's much faster to discover which KWs are converting through Adwords, and then try to target them also through SEO.
Since Google is always updating its algorithm, it's sometimes hard to track all of the changes that should be made, that's why we'll try to focus only on the basic guidelines which almost never change in this chapter.
Chapter 12.1: On-page SEO Optimization
On-page SEO optimization is basically what you can tell Google about your page. Of course Google will take this with a grain of salt since there are a lot of manipulators out there which tell Google their page is about one thing and it's actually not. That's why Google will also use the other two parameters to see if your story "checks out" later on.
There are several parameters Google looks for on your page in order to establish what it's about. Here are the determining factors on a page that tell Google what the page is about:
Meta Title
The meta title of the page tells Google the topic of the page. Deciding on your meta title is crucial since it's also the title that will show up in the Google search results.
Meta Description
The meta description is a longer version of what this specific page is about. You can view it on the search results right under the title.
Content
The content of the page or article is scanned by Google and helps it decide the topic of the page. Throughout your page there should also be various headline tags which will imply about the contents of the page. Headline tags are tags that surround the headlines of your articles and tell Google that these are the main topics of this page.
Since I don't want to turn this book into a technical manual about how to write html code, I'm going to explain the simple version of how to do on-site optimization. Assuming you have a WordPress site, all you need to do is install the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin and you're good to go.
Site navigation
Is it easy for users to navigate around the site and to find what they are looking for?
Mobile optimization
Is your website adjusted correctly when a user views it from a mobile device?
Site load speed
How fast does your site load its content? This is a critical factor in Google's algorithm.
Optimizing meta tags
Each time you write a new post, you'll have the opportunity to change its Meta Title and Meta Description at the bottom without any coding whatsoever.
Once the plugin is installed, you can configure the meta title and description for each page from within the WordPress dashboard.
Here are guidelines regarding crafting your meta title:
- Make sure your headline is descriptive and compelling. Use the headline writing tips we've learned the beginning of this chapter.
- Try to incorporate your target KW inside your headline if possible.
- Make sure your headline is no longer than 64 characters or else not all of it will be readable on Google.
- Your headline is what will make users decide if they'll click your link or not, make it count. High CTR on Google organic search results will lead to higher rankings.
- Here are guidelines regarding your meta description:
- Try to incorporate your KW inside the meta description as well.
- The meta description should be roughly 155 characters.
- Consider your meta description as your sub headline since it shows up after the title in Google. Treat this as the "desire" part of your marketing message.
Optimizing Your Content
If you focus on writing great content, then SEO will shortly follow. Having said that, there are some guidelines you may want to follow in order to give your content somewhat of a boost:
- Try to write for actual people and not for search engines.
- Never build content with any program or "technical" SEO writing.
- Usually Google prefers longer content. Try to aim for your posts to be 1500-2500 words long and you'll be fine.
- Break up your content using headline tags. There are six different headline tags from Hl (the biggest) to H6 (the smallest). Using the WordPress interface you can add headlines to your page which will help Google understand what the page is about.
- There should only be one Hl title on your page and usually it's your page title.
- A good method to see if you broke your content down correctly to sub sections is to make sure that someone can read only your headlines and still understand what the page is about.
- Google doesn't only look for your exact KWs he is also looking for LSI keywords. LSI (stands for Latent Semantic Indexing) means that Google also looks for related KWs to your content. So if I'd target the KW "buy Bitcoins", I would try to incorporate inside my content similar KWs such as "Bitcoin exchange" and "get bitcoins". Type in your KW in Google and scroll to the bottom where it says "searches related to [your keyword]" and you'll get ideas for LSI keywords to put in your content.
Making Sure Your Site Navigation is Easy to Understand
Google tries to figure out how user-friendly your website is by checking out its navigation structure. Here are some tips for optimizing your site's navigation:
- Make sure each page on your site can be reached with four clicks at the most.
- The more important the page is, the lower number of clicks it should take to reach it.
- Utilize WordPress's categories in order to group your content into sections. For example, 99Bitcoins has different categories such as News, Guides, FAQ, etc. Each category is a tab on the website's menu. You can also have sub categories within categories.
Is your site ready for mobile?
One of the biggest changes Google deployed in the last year was their mobile compatibility algorithm. Sites that aren't mobile adaptive automatically show lower rankings. You need to make sure your site shows up well on mobile devices.
If you're using WordPress the easiest way to do so will be to make sure your theme is responsive. This means that your theme changes according to the screen it is presented on. This way if someone views your website from a smartphone, the theme will change accordingly (making the website more readable).
How fast is your site?
Taking care of your site's load speed can be a challenging task. First of all, go to Pingdom and perform a speed test. Ideally you should see your site load in less than two seconds. If that's not the case, you may want to consider optimizing it.
One of the best optimizing plugins available for WordPress today is W3 Total Cache (it's also free). Another factor of your site speed is the hosting company, but if your site doesn't have a lot of traffic this shouldn't be that much of an issue. If your site still doesn't make the cut I recommend following these instructions and using the help of an experienced freelancer.
Additional Recommended Setup for Yoast
The Yoast SEO plugin is probably the most valuable resource you can have on your WordPress site in order to customize it for SEO. Make sure to check out the "start tour" option they have on their plugin tab.
If you have any social profiles for your business I'd also suggest adding their information under the "social" tab of the plugin for better online sharing of your webpages.
WARNING
Don't tamper with any settings you don't understand in Yoast. If you have any doubts just ask a question on their plugin supportpage. I'm saying this because not so long ago I accidentally marked a check box called "noindex" which told Google not to index most of my site. The result was that almost half of my site vanished from Google and it took me a week to figure this out, so be careful when dealing with this plugin.
Chapter 12.2: User Behavior Optimization
Once you've got your on-site SEO configured correctly it's time to move on to the second parameter - user behavior. Since Google got its glory from being the best search engine in town, it want to make sure it stays that way. That's why it's very important to Google if users find what they are looking for when they click on your site in Google.
In order to determine how well your site performed, Google looks at many different statistics, but I'm going to cover the main ones here. Keep in mind that these numbers can all be found inside Google Analytics.
Improving Your Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is defined differently for each tracking software, but in GA (Google Analytics) the bounce rate is the percent of visitors who only visited one page on your site. It is said that you should lower your bounce rate as much as possible.
As you can see from the picture above 99Bitcoins has a 76.61% bounce rate. Meaning 3/4 of the people who come to the site only read one page and leave. The bounce rate where I can probably most improve, but I don't necessarily want to - here's why.
There will be times where you will want users to move to another site after visiting only one page on your site. For example, if you're an affiliate marketer and you are writing a review about a Bitcoin product, you want people to move on to the actual product page outside of your site and buy it. But in other cases you'll want to keep users engaging with you site.
How to improve bounce rate:
- The worst thing that can happen for you Google-wise is if the user hits the "back" button since he didn't find what he was searching for. This is exactly the type of thing Google wants to avoid. Make sure that the important information of the page is displayed clearly on your site and isn't hidden beneath thousands of ads.
- Make sure to end your posts with an additional call to action. This can be anything from signing up to a newsletter to reading additional related posts.ThriveLeads is a plugin that will let you enter an email sign up form at the end of each post (discussed on Chapter 15). A good plugin for related posts is YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin). Sometimes you'll find themes with the related posts capability built in so you won't even need a plugin.
- Encourage people to comment on your website. Although they will still stay on the same page, but Google will recognize that they took some sort of action
Improving Your Time On Site
Another metric you should take a look at is your "time on site". Of course you'd want this to be as high as possible. If you implement what we talked about so far then the "time on site" metric should take care of itself.
Usually higher time on site is a result of longer posts, additional information at the bottom of each post and more engaging content. One method I use to help my time on site is to create videos whenever possible for my posts.
So I may, for example, write about Bitcoin mining, and then also add a 2:30 minute video about it. This automatically gets the user more engaged and keeps him on the site longer.
If I could sum up the whole "user behavior" section in one sentence it would be: Make sure visitors find what they were looking for and take some sort of action in the end.
Chapter 12.3: Off-page Optimization (Links & Social Shares)
After we told Google what our site is about, and it also measured how people act on it, the last parameter Google takes into account is what other websites are saying about our site. Throughout the history of SEO backlinks (links linking back to your site) have had a tremendous effect on SEO. In the last couple of years, social buzz also started to take effect.
Getting the Right Backlinks to Your Website
There is a HUGE amount of factors to take into account when Google analyses a link to your website. Here are the main ones:
- The anchor text - This is the visible, clickable text in a link. Usually this will tell Google what the link is about, but many time an anchor text can be just "read this post" or "click here".
- How trustworthy is the domain the link originated from? Did Google find a link to your website on a spammy domain with hundreds of other links or did you receive a quality link since you were mentioned on Coindesk or another reputable site? . There are also links which are known as "super links" like .edu and .gov links. A link from Wikipedia is also considered pretty valuable.
- The diversity of pages linked to in your site- Do all links to your website link to the same page or do several pages on your site get linked to? Is the anchor text always the same? If there is no diversity, Google may suspect that you are conducting some link-building scheme.
Bottom line, Google wants to see other reputable websites from around the web linking to your site naturally. Usually if you deal in any link-building schemes, Google will see through it in no
time. I say this from experience, and at the end of this chapter I've even added my own personal example of this.
So make sure to get links for your website, but not at any cost. How? Here are some techniques to get you started:
Content Marketing - The Latest Buzzword in SEO
If you've been around the online marketing world long enough you've probably heard the term content marketing. Content marketing is just a pretty way of saying "create great content so that people will share it and promote it for you". Easier said than done.
Here are some practical tips and ideas for content marketing you can employ right away:
Guides and tutorials
Since Bitcoin is such a complex subject, creating tutorials and guides about it in a simple manner is a great way to get people linking to you. This video about "what is Bitcoin" cost me $15 to create and already has over 14K views.
Free tools and widgets
You can always build or hire someone to build a useful Bitcoin tool. CoinLlama is a Bitcoin comparison search engine which I built via Upwork. AmIfilthyRich is a website that allows you to compare the amount of Bitcoins you own to all other Bitcoin addresses out there.
Coindesk created BTCQuote- an embeddable Bitcoin price ticker. Preev is an excellent Bitcoin currency convertor. At 99Bitcoins I've created not only a WordPress Bitcoin price ticker but also a news widget as well. All of these tools can get people talking about you and linking back to your site.
Write interesting content
Don't worry I'm not going to leave you hanging with this general saying. There are actual ways you can find out what interests people and then write about it. Go to BuzzSumo and type in "Bitcoin". You'll immediately see the most shared Bitcoin stories around the web. Now you can try and write similar
stories for you own website, knowing that these are already topics that interest people.
Another great tool for this type of research is Quickspourt. When using Quicksprout, just choose a very popular Bitcoin information site (e.g. Coindesk) and see which stories got the most social buzz.
Write "X vs. Y" posts - This is probably the best strategy to get organic traffic in no time. Pick a brand in your industry and type its name is Google with the word "vs" and see what comes up.
You just got your next five post ideas. This may sound funny, but one of my main traffic generators to the site is the keyword "Coinbase vs Circle" or "Circle vs Coinbase". Of course you can use the Google autocomplete to find a lot of other Bitcoin keywords people are already searching for and write a post about that.
Another way to go about this tactic is to use the word "alternatives" after a major brand. So for example targeting the KW "Coinbase alternatives" may result in some nice organic traffic.
Guest blog on other websites
A great way to get backlinks and shares is by writing a guest blog for other websites. I did a beginners series on two different Bitcoin related websites which got me some quality backlinks and traffic. Keep in mind that most sites won't let you guest blog without knowing you beforehand, this means you'll have to build a relationship with them before suggesting such a thing.
Create a professional glossary
This tactic is extremely relevant for Bitcoin as there are so many terms and phrases "normal" people don't understand.
Release a white paper or infographic based on actual research - The web adores research. If you have access to information that other people don't you can easily create a nice infographic using picktochart or even publish a white paper. A good example for a white paper that got a TON of traffic and backlinks is the willy report.
Improving Your Social Rank
As I've mentioned before, it's not only links that count with Google, it's also your social reach. If you're already writing interesting content than you'll probably start getting "likes" and "shares" anyway, but here are some tips on how to improve these numbers even more.
Display social buttons on your site
Amazingly enough, finding the right social button widget is a pain in the ass, since usually they slow down your site significantly. After a lot of research I found a paid widget that seems to do the job exceptionally well. Ultimate Social Deuxis the plugin I use on 99Bitcoins to share my content and it seems to load fast enough while still offering customization options.
Ask your users for help
99Bitcoins homepage has more than 750 FB like, 200 tweets and 100 +l's, and I didn't pay a dime for them. How did I get them? Simple. After I send people there first O.lmillliBitcoin, I just add the following:
People are so ecstatic they got coins (this is three cents we're talking about) they are more than happy to share the site.
Use a social locker
If you write truly great content you can use a social locker to lock your content to visitors who didn't like your site. I don't employ this strategy on 99Bitcoins but I've heard many people stating it brings in a lot of shares.
Chapter 12.4: SEO Practices You Should Avoid at All Costs
Since SEO has been around for a long time, some people still use old and outdated techniques which will get you banned from Google in no time. As a rule of thumb, whenever you're trying to do something that is manipulative instead of creating actual value for your users, you're probably not following Google's guidelines.
Here are some examples of what NOT to do:
Keyword stuffing
Writing articles with multiple repetitions of your KW within them. Not only does this make the article unreadable, but it also signals Google that you are trying to manipulate it.
Buying links on Fiverr
Or from any other source for that matter. Usually when you buy links it will be from low quality websites which will get you penalized. Don't buy links, trust me on this one. Read the bonus section at the end of this chapter to see what happens to someone who does.
Hiring and SEO Company
Many people will perhaps disagree with me, but throughout my seven years dealing in online marketing I never had a good experience with an SEO company. Most of the time my experience was negative, and in some places only neutral. You can't outsource SEO since it means you're outsourcing the most important part of your business - your professional knowledge.
Having said that, you can definitely use the help of SEO consultants but never let anyone write something for you in a field they don't have an understanding.
Spamming links to your website on other websites - Don't go around forums and websites adding links to your website without it having anything to do with the site's topic. If you're commenting on a Coindesk post then that's OK, but if you're on a nutrition blog there's no need to add a link to your Bitcoin website, it's not relevant and it will probably not get approved by the site's administrator any way.
How to Analyze Links to Your Website
I talked a lot about backlinks but I never really showed you how you can analyze them or even find what links point to your site (or to your competitor's site). Here are some of the best free tools you can use to analyze backlinks:
- Open site explorer
- Ah refs
- Majestic
Each of these tools is a bit different and of course all of them have also a paid version. But if you just enter your domain in any one of them you'll be able to see who is already linking to your site and perhaps get some ideas on how to get similar links.
Another great tactic is to put your competitor's site in one of these tools and spy on how he's getting his backlinks. Perhaps you can get links from the same domains as well.
Chapter 12.5: Actual SEO Case-Studies from 99Bitcoins
Since I know SEO can be a bit overwhelming, I decided to give you a bonus section with some real life examples of how I deploy SEO tactics on my site, which you can just copy and paste. There is so much you can do with SEO that there's no way we can cover all of this in this book, but these simple case studies exemplify how to put what you've learned into practice.
TREZOR vs. Ledger Case-Study
One very interesting case-study I'd like to share with you is how I promote TREZOR and Ledger, both Bitcoin hardware wallets, at the same time.
TREZOR is a pretty solid product with a great team behind it, so automatically I was drawn to promote it. Since there are almost no affiliate marketers in Bitcoin (yet), I figured I'd deploy my "X vs Y" technique to get some traffic.
Google automatically completed "TREZOR vs Ledger". When I examined the competition, I didn't say any reviews specifically comparing the two. This of course was a "go" sign for me to start writing my post.I wrote my review and made sure to optimize the title to say "TREZOR vs Leger". I made sure my review was long enough (in this case it was only around 1000 words) and that I mention both TREZOR and Ledger several times in it.
I submitted it to some websites which would link back to my review, like Reddit, Bitcoin Facebook groups, Google + and Bitcoin talk so that Google would be able to "find" it. After a few hours, my review showed up in Google on the 3rd page.
A few days later, my review climbed up the Google charts until it reached its current place at #2 right after Reddit and ahead of Coindesk.
Now of course my website already had some "authority" when I wrote this review and that's one of the reasons it moved up so quickly, but if you find such a KW that no one is writing about you can easily do the same even if your site is brand new.
I was actually outranked by several websites who did the same thing a few months later. This is because Google always prefers fresher content, so you still have your chance.
Chapter 12.6: Authority Marketing My Own Private SEO Hack
I started looking into alternative methods to SEO around late 2013 when my website dropped from the #3 spot on the 1st page in Google for my targeted KWs to the beginning of the 2nd page.
Because of this major ranking change (basically I lost 50% of my traffic) I had to find other ways to keep bringing traffic into my site. This led me to the idea of Authority Marketing. The main concept of Authority Marketing is that you use authority websites to rank for your KWs and not your own website.
Let me explain. Instead of wanting to rank #1 for a specific KW, you want to have as many listings as possible on the first page. So you move from counting your rankings to counting your listings. Basically you're diversifying your risk, since if one of these results gets pushed down, you still own a lot of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
But how can I get multiple listings on the same SERP?
Good question, here is where Authority Marketing comes in. Since it might be difficult to have your website rank multiple times on the same SERP you can use authority websites that are targeted at the same KWs. This works amazingly well because:
- Google values these websites, indexes them almost immediately and prefer showing them at the top of the SERPs.
- People don't usually use other websites to rank for their KWs so there isn't much competition.
So how exactly do you implement Authority Marketing tactics?
Step 1 - Identify authority websites in your niche
You need to find sites who have high-authority ranking and that allow you to post on them. For example Reddit, Quora and Stack Overflow all have high authority ranking and will let you post on them as a user. Of course some of them will have limitations for posting such as gaining a minimal amount of reputation on the site, etc. For Bitcoin I would also look at Stack Exchange for Bitcoin, BitcoinTalk,etc.
Step 2 - Post on authority websites using your desired KW
Now it's time to use these authority websites and conquer the 1st page on Google. Write a post or a question that targets the desired KW. An important thing to keep in mind here is that whatever you write has to be of quality content. These websites usually monitor new posts and if something is SPAM and doesn't add value, it will be deleted instantly.
So this can be anything from writing a post on BitcoinTalk with your KW in the headline to asking a question on StackExchange with your KW in the question.
Step 3 - Link to your website from the authority website
After the post/question gets indexed you will want to make sure it is linking to your website as well, so that you will gain new visitors.
This is a different step since it shouldn't always be done initially. Sometimes in order to get traction to your post/question, you will want to add the best content you can find. Only after your content has reached the first page on Google you would want to edit it and maybe add a link to your site. This way it doesn't seem that the only reason you put the post up is to promote your own website.
Google+...the secret weapon almost no one uses...
One of the best tactic I've found is to submit links on Google+. Since Google really wants to promotetheir own network, they give added value to links submitted there. So if you're not using Google+ yet, start now.
And now for a real, live case-study
Let me give you a short example of how I used this method in order to rank for the KW "Bitcoin pricer ticker".
I knew I had no chance to rank for this KW with my main website initially, I decided to use authority marketing. I created a WordPress plugin called "Bitcoin Price Ticker Widget" that allows you to place a price ticker on your WP website. This took me three days and $200 on Elance. I then submitted this plugin to WordPress.org and...viola! I'm on the first page of Google for this KW within 30 minutes.
Today, almost a year and a half after, that ticker is still on the first page.
Chapter 12.7: How I Got Penalized By Google
In this last section I'm going to show you an example of what NOT to do in SEO, so you won't repeat the same mistakes I did.
When I started out with 99Bitcoins, I used some really low-quality links to get my site ranked higher in Google. Of course this mistake came back to haunt me eight months later when I received an email from Google stating they had taken "manual action" against my site - meaning I got a Google penalty.
When I looked inside the Google Webmaster Tool (WMT) I saw this notification:
For those of us who are not SEO experts, manual action means that someone actually made changes to Google's algorithm manually to avoid manipulation of their search engine. Here's a videoexplaining some more about this. In short, I was screwed manually. If you want to read more about Google penalties and their meaning you can do so here.
Needless to say, I wasn't very happy about this. Specifically because for the past four months or so I hadn't been dealing with any dubious SEO companies or Fiverr link-building projects - I was actually creating original and quality content.
Before I go any further, if you haven't installed WMT yet on your site DO IT NOW! It's probably one of the most useful tools you can use when analyzing your site.
Why was action taken against me by Google?
I can't say for sure, but my guess would be:
- My low-quality link-building had come back to haunt me. In the beginning, I used some low- quality SEO companies which apparently brought good results in the short term but bad results long term.
- My Bitcoin Ticker Widget which was a great success, had a footer "DoFollow"text link in it which Google does not approve of. Since the widget was installed in hundreds of websites (each containing dozens of pages) I got thousands of backlinks which seemed to be unnatural. In my defense, I should say that most if not all of the websites were Bitcoin related.
How do you remove such a penalty by Google?
Well if you've followed the advice and used authority marketing, the first thing you should do is not panic - your business isn't completely destroyed.
However, if your sole tactic for getting traffic to your website is through Google, then you may want to panic. I can't emphasis enough how important it is to not use only one traffic source for your website. The process I'm about to describe is pretty long and tedious and isn't guaranteed to work every time, but it's probably worth the effort.
The thing to remember is that Google is willing to give you a second chance, but you need to prove you've earned it.
Important!!!
Before starting this process, create an excel sheet that documents everything you do! What URLs lead to your site, if they are spammy or not, who the contact person is, when did you contact him, what was his response, etc. You will need this sheet when you finish the process in order to prove your efforts to Google.
Keep in mind that this process may end up hurting you in the end, because you might be removing quality links by mistake. That is why I recommend on using a professional that knows what he's doing.
Step 1 -Time to clean up...
The first step would be to get rid of all of your spammy links. There are several ways this can be done:
- Hire a "link deletion" company such as LinkDeleteor Removeem. There are many more other companies like these since this seems to be a growing trend so you can conduct your own research online.
- Hire an independent contractor to delete these links for you - Using Upwork or Elance you can post a link-removal job post. This is the method I used since I like to have an individual working on my project and not a company.
- Do it yourself - if you have the time and don't have the money this would be the best option.
Keep in mind that the process can take anywhere from two weeks to two months depending on how many backlinks you have to your site. Each link/referring domain needs to be evaluated for whether it's legitimate or spam. If you don't have the knowledge to do this yourself, I highly recommend you hire a professional.
If you do want to do this yourself, you'll need to find out who links to your site using WMT and start contacting them one by one. Here's how you find this from inside the Google Webmaster
When you contact each webmaster, you will need to request that they remove the link to your website. If they don't respond it's recommended to try contacting them up to three times.
In my case, aside from using a professional to remove the links, I also took two other actions:
- I've changed the footer link on my Bitcoin Ticker Widget to "NoFollow" and made it an image link instead of a text link - apparently this way it does not manipulate Google's search algorithm.
- I've completely discontinued my old domain BitcoinWithPaypal.com which had most of the spam links pointing to it (since I've moved from that domain to 99bitcoins I redirected all of the links from the old domain to the new one). This way I got rid of a lot of links through the click of a button.
Step 2 - Eliminating the mess that sticks
After you've tried to reach each and every webmaster three times and removed as many bad links as possible, you'll still have several bad links remaining. This will be due to the fact that some webmasters aren't responsive, your couldn't find any contact information, etc. The remaining bad links need to be disavowed through the use of the Google Disavow Tool also located inside the WMT.
There is a specific format of file that can be submitted to the disavow tool and it's important to follow the instructions carefully. DO NOT just put all of your backlinks into the disavow tool and submit it to Google. It will not show your commitment for getting back on the right track and your reconsideration request will probably get rejected. Note that there's an option to disavow specific URLs or entire domains depending on what you need.
Step 3 - Submit a reconsideration request
After you've done the first two steps (for me they took a month and a half of hard work), it's time to submit the reconsideration request.
Remember that there will be an actual live person reading this request and going over your efforts so invest the time in getting this right. The request I sent was about three paragraphs but I guess it differs depending on the case.
Step 4 - Pray
Now we wait. Keep in mind that even if you get rejected, you can resubmit a request. This will have to be done after you evaluate and understand the reason for rejection and then take care of it. But more on that if and when we get there.
Basically they're saying that they've revoked the manual action taken on my site. I can't tell you how relieved I was. Hope you have the same results, and remember - it's just better to avoid doing stupid things then having to deal with this whole process later...
Homework- Deploy SEO Tactics
Wow....that was a lot to cover. Now let's try to put this into action:
- Conduct KW research (explained in detail on Chapter 10) and decide which KWs you want to promote through SEO.
- If you're using WordPress install the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast and go through its tour.
- Create dedicated pages for the KWs you want to promote using content that is engaging and over 1000 words. Make sure to optimize the title, description and headline tags using the Yoast plugin on these pages.
- Install the W3 Total cache plugin to speed up your site.
- Install Google Webmaster Tools on your website.
- Make sure your site is well optimized to load under two seconds. Test it out with Pingdom.
- Think of sites that may want to link back to your site and reach out to them. Whether it's guest blogging or any other type of deal you want to strike with them, make sure to build a relationship.
- Use any or all of the "hacks" mentioned in this chapter to get additional organic traffic. I highly recommend trying the "X vs Y" tactic.
- Use BuzzSummo and find out which content already works well on your competitors' sites. Write similar content on your own blog.
