As a business owner I am always being approached by the latest and greatest SEO guru. They always promise to help us reach page one. However, a few months in and my page never seems to budge from the depths of the Google results. Fed up with this I decided to explore the skills of this seemingly mysterious and dark art.

What follows is the process we took to get our blog post on the first page of Google for the terms “book marketing campaigns” and “book marketing campaign”. You of course need to choose your keyword or keyword phrases. Another key point is that your position fluctuates. It has changed twice in the process of writing this.

I would also hasten to add we are far from experts. SEO certainly seems to be a process with many variables and methods. What follows is a breakdown of how we achieved our success.

SEO Must Haves

First things first, make sure the title of your blog post contains the keyword or phrase. That’s the easy part. Our research recommended that we add our keyword in the URL for our page. The long term goal is to rank for book marketing so we made this the key focus.

"My philosophy has always been to provide value in my content, not to compete or jostle for good rankings"

The images on your posts page contain alt tags. This allows you to essentially tell the search engine what the image is explained in plain text. Use your target keyword or phrase in this text.

Include good outbound links. Google seems to look favourably upon content that links to other relevant sources. These can be links to other items of content on your blog, references or other articles on external websites.

Keyword density without compromising the quality of the writing is key. Thankfully this has become less important. Google is much better and understanding the content of the article. For our post we kept the keyword density around 1% of the overall word count.

Google is much better at presenting browsers with good quality content

Make sure you Meta description is setup appropriately. There a large number of plugins for Wordpress that make this very easy. Find one and install it. It will save you so much time

Finally make sure it is an epic post. Make sure you give the audience really value. Our piece was over 2700+ words. It took time to write but this appears to be becoming increasingly important.

Great Content

From our experience this is the most important part. Great content. Invest your time writing content that genuinely provides value to others. Make sure there are key takeaways from the piece. Ideally your readers should be able to implement elements from the post and see results.

My philosophy has always been to provide value in my content. Not to compete or jostle for good rankings with cheap tricks. The more useful to readers our book marketing post is then the better it will do. We thought that was naive but it appears to be paying dividends.

James Altucher gives great advice for writers and content creators. He says “you should bleed”. We couldn’t agree more. You have to really be honest and share content that almost makes you uncomfortable. It was nerve racking to share what we have learned over the course of 200+ campaigns. We were laying bare the good, the bad and the ugly from our experiences. The result was incredible and people really connected with our honesty.

Don’t let the post remain static. We intend on improving it as we hit the 300+ mark and so on. Constantly update your content and add to it as you carry out further research. Write about what you know.

Distribution

Once you have published your new article how are you going to immediately obtain your readers?

Email List: As we mentioned earlier your email list is crucial for distribution to your core fans who want to read your article. If you don’t have a list, start building one. This has been a valuable investment. We never feel guilty about collecting emails because we provide value to those on our list. Custom for our services is a happy side effect.

Social Advertising: We advertise our content. Our Facebook ads are a mixture of information about our services and free valuable content. A great way to drive extra traffic and boost awareness.

Social Sharing: A large social media following has helped immensely. We are able to distribute posts to over 22,000+ targeted followers on Twitter.

Forums, Reddit – subcategories and LinkedIn Groups have also been very effective.

With all of the categories above be very careful not to SPAM. You will be removed from forums and groups very fast if you do this. Instead build discussions around your posts. If no one is discussing your topic in that group or forum don’t force it upon them. See where other authors and bloggers in your niche have shared their content.

Patrick Walsh owner of PR and book marketing agency Publishing Push and the MD of marketing consultancy at Growth Hunters.