You have probably used before Google Webmaster Tools to check your traffic, keywords and many other aspects concerning your website. However, have you ever considered using this very powerful tool from Google to tweak your already published articles and to get a boost to your content, in terms of visitors?

If your response is a concise no than this blog post is definitely for you. There are some small steps you should follow for getting the most out of a blog post:

1. Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account

2. Check the Search Queries that lead traffic to your blog

3. Now here comes the most important part:

-          Pick up the keywords you are ranking high for but have a very low CTR

-          Optimise them – create a more appealing call-to-action title, tweak your description and watch out the click-through-rate increasing in a matter of days/weeks

4. The last part is related to keywords that get a large number of impressions but you do not rank high for them (such as position 6-7 or below)

5. See if the blog posts contain that very keyword in title and description; if not, add them!

6. Link Links Links – build links to those blog posts; as they have large numbers of impressions they are definitely some good traffic-bringing keywords, just that they need an extra-push in the SERPS

Important tip: before building backlinks to your blog posts from external places, always check out other opportunities on your website! You probably have tens of places where you could place an internal link, with the desired anchor text. Internal linking is a very important aspect when it comes to link building and SEO in general.

Many webmasters are usually asking what is to be done in case their websites are let’s say 1-2 months old, related to link building. Developing a link building strategy for an old, authority website is most of the times a difficult task but when it comes to newly launched sites, things tend to get more and more difficult.

First of all, a new website has zero authority, zero backlinks, zero trust. You can see this when publishing a new page/post – for a new website, it could take days until that very page gets indexed while for an old and established website indexation rate could resume to minutes. So, the first sign that your website is gaining some authority is definitely how long does it take for a blog post or new page to get into Google index.

The second best thing related to terming a website’s authority is to check the ranks of your actual posts, by title. Just copy your title, paste in Google and see where it ranks. If it is a long and not-competitive title not appearing at least in top 3, you should be definitely building more content and trust before starting a link building strategy.

The biggest problem when it comes to new sites is link velocity – you cannot expect that a new website to get thousands of links in the second month of its lifespan (at least not in a natural way, unless you are publishing content that goes viral), and Google is well aware of this. A good rule would be to gradually start building links and probably the best “starter” links for a new website are social bookmarking ones.

Following the social bookmarking links you can easily continue with guest posts, blog comments and anything that is not automated in any way, to avoid link spikes/link velocity. Once you have started to become an authority in your niche (depending on if you want to follow the blackhat way or not) you can go further with links and get mass blog posts from different networks, link pyramids and so on.

Remember, when it comes to link building consistency is the key.

Although there are many methods to use in your link building strategy, according to Matt Cutts editorial links (in-content) seem to play a major role when it comes to search engine positioning. There are a few great ways for getting this type of backlinks for your website but your whole SEO strategy should not rely only on these.

Here are a few of them below:

1.      Reviews

There are certain websites that offer reviews for a service/product/other website, in exchange of nothing. It is quite difficult to find those and you should be aware of two things: a) the review will be most of the times un-biased, so expect negative “words” as well and b) you will not get most of the times the anchor you might want.

2.      Paid blog posts

There are lots of bloggers/webmasters that want to some more money in their pockets and most of them reveal this on their websites. You can search for “advertise” pages on the web (related to your niche) and see if they are offering paid blog posts or not.

3.      Guest blogging

Probably the most effective/safe method for getting contextual backlinks. Basically you are offering free content for their blogs in exchange of 1-2 backlinks pointing to your website, with the desired anchor text.

4.      Blog networks

With the arise of “in-content links” popularity, there are many investors raising networks of thousands of blogs made exactly for selling blog posts with contextual links. If you go with this route make sure you are choosing the right network and do not overdo it!

5.      Build My Rank

We have talked in the past about this great service and would still recommend it further. With about 1,000 websites in their “arsenal”, you are getting some good links from aged websites with PageRank, for the cost of $59/month.

Keyword research is probably the most important aspect when trying to build a website that attracts targeted visitors for a certain product or service. Whether we are talking about long tail keywords or the most competitive one-word ones, without a proper research one business cannot survive (and expand) in the word-wide-web world.

Whenever we hear about keyword research we think about those so popular keyword research tools, from free ones like Google AdWords Tool to paid ones such as Market Samurai, however there are plenty of other methods for digging deeper and grab those words/phrases that might attract potential customers.

Here are two great ideas for your keyword research:

1.      Find related questions

Whether you are using forums or Q&A websites for this method, there are literally thousands of questions in every niche that could lead to potential customers. Say you are selling web design services, you should definitely check related forums, see what people are asking and simply build pages/blog posts that answer those questions. Although those might not get many searches (according to keyword tools), those are most of the times keywords that will bring you targeted visitors and prospects for your services.

2.      Offer a solution

This is quite easy: as per our above example, what problems do web design services solve? From creating a website for a business (or for affiliate marketers) to even partnerships with SEO companies, there are many answers that could translate into future business. List some solutions and start building related keywords ideas from those – you should end up with a nice list to build future content on.

Keyword research is probably the most important aspect when trying to build a website that attracts targeted visitors for a product or service. Whether we are talking about long tail keywords or the most competitive one-word ones, without a proper research one business cannot survive (and expand) in the word-wide-web world.

Whenever we hear about keyword research we think about those so popular keyword research tools, from free ones like Google AdWords Tool to paid ones such as Market Samurai, however there are plenty of other methods for digging deeper and grab those words/phrases that might attract potential customers.

Here are two great ideas for your keyword research:

1.      Find related questions

Whether you are using forums or Q&A websites for this method, there are literally thousands of questions in every niche that could lead to potential customers. Say you are selling web design services, you should definitely check related forums, see what people are asking and simply build pages/blog posts that answer those questions. Although those might not get many searches (according to keyword tools), those are most of the times keywords that will bring you targeted visitors and prospects for your services.

2.      Offer a solution

This is quite easy: as per our above example, what problems do web design services solve? From creating a website for a business (or for affiliate marketers) to even partnerships with SEO companies, there are many answers that could translate into future business. List some solutions and start building related keywords ideas from those – you should end up with a nice list to build future content on.

It is a well known fact: all webmasters are running to rank higher for those short keywords that could bring a massive amount of traffic/prospects/sales but most of the time this seems like an impossible thing to accomplish. However, with the right keyword strategy anyone can rank for some really competitive keywords – of course, this should not be seen as a “rank quickly without any work” formula.

The most important part of this strategy is, yet again, keyword research. We all know that long-tail keywords are probably the best “targets” for any niche/website but above this there is yet another way of getting higher rankings for competitive terms, through “keyword pyramids”.

Let’s say your main keyword is web designers, a term that gets thousands of searches each month within the UK and you are targeting a certain area (for the sake of this blog post, let’s say London). Although you might be inclined to work hard on web designers keyword, you should be probably creating first sets of keywords that incorporate that term (in order of their easiness). So we have:

-          Layer 1: web designers

-          Layer 2: cheap web designers

-          Layer 3: cheap web designers in UK

-          Layer 4: cheap web designers in London UK etc

As you may see, the deeper we go the lower the competition we get for a certain keyword. Once you have got your set of keywords (you should not limit yourself to only one set, the possibilities are endless) you should try and rank the keyword from last layer, then the 3^rd layer and so on.

As many keywords you rank related to your “goldmine” phrase/word, the more chances you have to grab the highest spots for the most searched/competitive one. So basically this is again related to long-tail keywords but with a twist – search engines will give you credit for the related keywords and after a while you will notice gaining rankings for the main key phrase without any particular work on it.