Video Transcript – 3 SEO Hacks To Jump To The Top

3 SEO Hacks To Jump To The Top – original post here

Hey, welcome back, Rankers. Trying something a little bit different this week. I’m out in amongst the crew, the workers, the hard workers, the ones that get down and dirty with the code, so I’ll try to be a little bit quiet. See this bloke over here? He’s got a standing desk but he sits at it. I don’t know why. And this bloke, can you see that bloke through there? That’s his actual size. He’s actually only that big. That’s his size.

Anyway, I wanted to talk to you today a little bit about getting above the normal organic results. I think this might be a little bit helpful, a couple of hacks. I thought this might be a little bit helpful for people who might get a bit of a bumpy ride with the Penguin update that’s about to come. So you can do these three hacks at home yourself. And we’ve already talked about a couple of them, but I thought it was worth having a look at probably two that you may not have heard about before.

Before I get into that, the talk within the SEO world this week is all about, you know what, you really probably shouldn’t trust all those temperature algorithm things that are out there that forecast that something’s happening with the Google algorithm or there’s been an update. That’s the big news. If you watched last week’s show, that’s pretty much what I said. Not that they’re following me, they’re just going, “Hey, you know what?”

Anyway, the first hack you’re probably very aware of, and that is Google News. Oh, not Google News, featured snippets, featured answers. Featured answers, this is a featured answer here, we talked about it a little bit last year. Google at the State of Search Conference last year told us a little bit more about this featured answer, and that was to appear here you actually have to ask the question and/or answer the question implicitly or explicitly. So, you’ve got to ask and answer it directly or indirectly. Thanks for that.

The interesting thing here, though, is that this image doesn’t necessarily come from this URL. So this image could come from a completely different website, not necessarily from the website where Google’s grabbed the text from. What I haven’t seen, though, is a featured answer appear where this URL is not already on the front page. We’re running a couple of experiments here to see if we can get a couple of clients’ branding images in some of the featured answers, because I think that’d be a bit of fun. So I’ll let you know how we go with that, and once we get one, I’ll certainly show that to you.

Here’s a thing to do. Go and do a search, or if there’s a question in your industry that you’re aware of, like how to freeze sandwiches, “Can I freeze sandwiches?” Incidentally, maybe how to freeze sandwiches is also a result that we should possibly look at. How to freeze sandwiches, there you go. So we’ve still got the featured answer. Some of this has changed a little bit.

Have a think about a question. Start doing some searches and see if you’re getting one of these featured answers pop up. So if you have got one of those pop up and you’re already on the front page, you can probably go to number one through a featured answer, which is pretty cool unless you’re not the one who goes to number one.

The other area, of course, is Google News. So Google News, you type in…So the search I’ve done here is SEO. Then, we have our places entry here, or a Maps entry or a Google My Business entry or whatever you want to call it. Then, we have a Wikipedia entry. Then, we start to see the news, and you can see there Dan has jumped in there with a story. And you can see there’s two more stories there all about SEO, and this is in the news. So you’ll notice with these at some point is SEO really, really high in the copy. So Dan’s got it in his URL obviously, and then in this one here it’s both in the headlines.

If you don’t have a news site yourself, you’re not publishing more than three articles a day and you don’t have bucket loads of journalists sitting with you, then what you can do is start looking at syndicating your content out. Because if you syndicate your content out, what you can then do is make sure you get your keyword in every article that you publish on someone else’s site. Get your keyword, key phrase. I always try to get SEO in there if I can. Because if I’m publishing to a news site, if I’m syndicating my content out to a news site and I get my keyword like SEO in here, like hopefully tomorrow…no, sorry, on Thursday when we get published by a couple of news sites, you’ll start to see our results in there as well. So that’s the second hack that you can do.

The third hack, which is relatively new, is Twitter believe it or not. A lot of people say, “No, Twitter’s dead.” Well, Google’s been indexing it for a little while again now, and I say again because they started doing it in about 2009 and then stopped because I think Twitter wanted license fees, from memory.

So the search I’ve got going here is Lego. And you can see here we’ve got the Lego account for Twitter and their last two tweets. That’s above all the organic search results.

If I go ‘Jim Stewart’, you can see my Twitter results are down here. So this bloody poet gets an entry from Wikipedia. I don’t know who he is. But in here, ‘Jim Stewart’ is the title, not the name of the account, the title of the account. So that’s where they keywords are. So in Lego, it’s in the actual name of the account or the title of the account.

Let’s just try a big brand over here. We’ll try Bunnings. Probably won’t get anything because they probably don’t tweet. No. Let’s try Will Anderson who is a very big tweeter in Australia. I think he may even be Australia’s biggest tweeter. Yeah, there he is. So he’s got his in there as well once again.

Now, I haven’t seen yet these appear for generic keywords or brands. It’s something worth looking at though. If you haven’t got a Twitter account, get a Twitter account. Get one under your brand account as well and start tweeting under that. Because Google, if people are searching for it, you may as well dominate that whole page one results with your brand.

So hopefully that’s helpful. And have a play with this Twitter stuff, because we certainly are. It’s going to become very interesting. You can see there. Well, actually, not all his tweets are there, because he’s pretty prolific, and there’s only two there from today.

But there’s three hacks for you if you get hit by Penguin, which I suspect now will be next week. Everyone will forget by next week that I said “next week” anyway, so it doesn’t matter. But I think it’ll be next week. Good luck if it is. If you have problems, if you do get hit by Penguin, just drop us a line on Twitter or email [email protected] and we’ll have a quick look at it for you. But it is coming and it’s going to be huge. Thanks very much. See you next week. Bye.