A lot of bloggers and website owners dream of ranking on Google’s first page for their keywords, but most of their efforts are met with relative failure.

If you are one of those people who has been trying in vain to get your content in Google’s top ten by hunting for links through various SEO techniques, and if you’re on the verge of giving up, don’t despair.

There are ways of increasing the traffic to your site without having to continually seek links from each and every site that you come across, and this post will show you how.

In this article, we are NOT going to discuss the proven and effective ways of building links such as anchor text, editorial links, and scale link building.

That is a topic for another post.

Instead, we’re going to talk about some powerful methods of researching and writing articles that will attract more organic traffic to your blog.

This will help you generate more customers and enable your site to get higher rankings in Google – all without you having to build any back-links.

Is that really possible? (I hear you ask…)

Yes. Absolutely!

The first thing you have to understand is that it isn’t all about links online.

Attracting massive amounts of organic traffic to your site has more to do with the quality of your content than the links. You can have all the links in the world, but without great quality content, you don’t stand a chance of ranking on Google’s first page.

What you need to worry about is building a strong foundation or base for your blog or website. WordPress bloggers have a huge advantage here since there are dozens of tools and plugins that they can use.

While some of them have a monthly subscription fee or a one-time investment, most of them are absolutely free.

Implement the strategies outlined below to vastly improve the quality of your content and radically increase search engine traffic that you get on your site.

3 Essential Strategies for Increasing Traffic to Your Site Without Building Links

1. Create Viral Infographics

These are among some of the best types of content to create, and they have been proven to generate huge amounts of traffic. When you share interesting, well-crafted infographics on your site on a regular basis, you will see a significant boost in your site’s traffic levels.

Infographics are a great way of driving targeted, organic visitors to any blog.

If you create high quality, helpful infographics, people will want to share and link to them naturally which means that you’ll still be getting all those link-building benefits without even trying.

Even when it comes to social media marketing, this can make a huge difference in the number of organic visitors that you get.

Whatever niche you’re in, and whether you’re an individual or a corporation, there is a lot of competition to deal with. Articles and other text-based pieces of content have a lot more competition in the search engines than content that is image-based.

That makes a lot of sense when you consider that writing an article (high quality or not) is much easier than creating a high quality, information-rich graphic.

So, when you start to use visual information as a core part of your content marketing strategy, you will start to see explosive results in your organic traffic generation.

There are many other reasons why you need to integrate visual content like infographics into your overall marketing plan, and one of them is that such visual content makes up the vast majority of human communication, and it has been scientifically proven that our brain processes visuals at a rate that is 60,000 times faster than text!

2. Write Top List Posts

These types of posts are extremely popular and they can help boost your organic traffic, particularly if you make them in-depth and back up your claims with data-driven facts.

Adding images, videos, and slides to your content will get even more of your audience to respond positively to your list post.

When crafting list-type posts, it’s vital to provide numbering for every item on that list. You should also include the total number of items in the title.

This works particularly well with odd numbers.

The science behind odd numbers

A study was conducted by The Guardian which involved over 40,000 participants.

They wanted to find out whether people preferred odd or even numbers, and it turns out that they prefer odd numbers to even ones for whatever reason.

This means that there is more of a chance that they will click on your titles that have odd numbers in them as opposed to the ones without numbers and those with even numbers in the headlines.

So the next time you’re crafting your top list post, make sure the list ends on an odd number and you will get better results.

Also, remember to search for list posts on your subject that have already been written so that you can ensure that yours is even more exceptional and better than what already exists out there.

Most of the content being published on the internet these days is a remix, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t improve upon what’s already there.

Going beyond keywords

Keywords are still very important in today’s SEO, but it’s no longer enough just to do basic keyword research for your posts. These days you have to go beyond keywords if you want to get effective results from the content that you write.

Categorize your keywords.

This will help you in understanding user intent and ultimately improve your SEO.

Google’s Hummingbird algorithm works very hard to measure the authority and relevance of web pages, and each improvement that Google makes to the algorithm is aimed at helping users to find the exact information that they are searching for.

For this reason, keyword intent is only one of the 4 core components of effective keyword research.

User intent of keywords is the reason why users are typing the search queries in the first place. This means that they either want to know something, do something, or go someplace. It could even be a combination of all three.

This is where long tail keywords assist with this whole effort.

If you have a product or service to sell, then the keywords with a prefix or suffix such as ‘buy’ will have the highest level of commercial intent.

When you craft your content, don’t just aim it at keywords. Look at the user intention behind those keywords, aim your content at that, and you will undoubtedly get better results.

For instance, when you conduct a search for ’email marketing services’, Google uses a lot of factors to find you the most relevant, useful, and in-depth search results.

They base this on the user engagement rates that each possible result has.

Embed Relevant Slide Presentations

One of the quiet giants of content marketing is SlideShare.net.

It’s among the top and most trusted Web 2.0 sites today and combines the benefits of PowerPoint with the power of YouTube to give your content cutting edge value. This is an effective, yet little-used tactic when it comes to building up traffic to your site.

In spite of the algorithm updates from Google, SlideShare continues to grow and remains stronger than ever. Embedding slide presentations that are relevant to your content is a great way of giving your organic traffic a massive boost. Using SlideShare has a lot of benefits.

You can use it for:

• Getting targeted traffic
• Improving your search engine ranking
• Building your email list
• Enhancing your brand image
• Growing your online network
• And a whole lot more…

Try to imagine being able to combine all of the benefits listed above in a single post.

When you embed a slide presentation into your content, you’ll stand out from your competitors and Google will reward your hard work.

Link out to authority sites

Linking out to authority sites in your niche and sending them traffic through your anchor text phrases will improve your organic traffic (believe it or not).

This will also improve your online brand whether directly or indirectly.

It’s important to keep in mind that the web was created for the purpose of connecting web pages together, so to that end, users could more easily find what they were searching for through the use of search engines.

That is how the great Google came about in the first place.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular authority sites today and it ranks for pretty much every keyword in all different industries.

But how did they achieve this?

They got to that level because they fully understand how to make the most of on-page SEO strategies such as linking internally and linking to authority sites to improve their search rankings without having to build any additional links.

Your own internal links on your site will be more effective once you begin to link out to authority sites whether inside or outside of your niche.

When you start doing this you will also get link juice naturally because people will be happy to link back to your site – provided, of course, that you have quality information on your site. They will gladly tweet the content, share published URLs with their email subscribers, and so on.

3. Use Content Upgrades to Build Your List

Content upgrades are a simple yet effective strategy where you look for pieces of content that you can update and add more value to. You then use those posts to build your email list.

There are posts on our blog that go into the topic of Content Upgrades in more detail.

When you start upgrading the content on your site, Google notices thanks to the higher engagement rate for your content and rewards you with more organic traffic to your site.

Follow the simple steps below to start using the content upgrade strategy to increase traffic to your site without building a single back-link:

1. Find outdated titles and ideas in your industry. List the ones that you feel you can significantly improve upon. Google will reward you for rewriting, upgrading, and well-organizing outdated content.

2. Research the current information. Now that you have the topic that needs an upgrade, your next step is to do your research on that search term or topic.

3. Create a headline that is benefit-driven. The content upgrade strategy requires you to write compelling headlines that are benefit-driven so that people actually click and read the introduction.

The goal is to get them to stay on the page for longer and ultimately buy something from you or join your email list.

Here are some tips on writing benefit-driven headlines:

• Keep your headlines under 75 characters long
• Use numbers in your headlines (preferably odd ones)
• Target your main keywords that you are trying to rank for
• Understand keyword intent before using them in your headlines
• Write in active voice and not passive voice

You are better off going with a meaningful headline as opposed to a catchy one.

For instance, a headline that reads ‘How to Create a Blog in 30 minutes With WordPress’ is much better than one that says ‘How to Make Thousands of Dollars With Your Blog’.

In Conclusion

Use of the proper headlines together with content that is interesting and packed full of value will get you steady organic traffic even without you ever building a single back-link to your site.

Just focus on ensuring that your content is optimized to appeal to people (not just bots) and that it effectively solves specific problems for them.

It’s not easy to change your mindset when you have been believing for so long that links are the only currency online, but if you put the strategies listed above to use on your site, you will start to see significant results from your organic traffic generation efforts.

Do you have any strategies that you have been using to increase traffic to your blog or website instead of continuing the hunt for back-links?

If so, feel free to share those below in our comments section.

Feel free to post your comment below.  An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!

PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published August 10th 2018