Many health and wellness web sites are always looking for ways to improve their Alexa ranking, Google ranking, social media skills, and SEO. The Tech Tools section of this web site will have basic tips from experts and non-experts alike who will share their successes with the audience of this blog. Hopefully, they will help anyone who has their own web site improve the sites popularity.
If you have a tip, use the contact link above to send it along.
SEO For Weight Loss Blogs: Our Strategy
By John Chandley
Our weight loss blog, Weight Loss Triumph, was started around 4 years ago.
As time came on, like many people with a weight loss blog today, we came to realize that your website is literally meaningless without people reading it.
In other words, you need effective marketing.
I couldn’t be happier when Len introduced the Tech Tools category to this blog since I get to contribute what has worked for us over the years.
SEO has been a core part of our strategy for the past 4 years, being a core part of how we grew WeightLossTriumph.com to over 60,000 visitors monthly, and I’ll be sharing how we did it in this article.
Coming Up with a Strategy
This starts with the realization that SEO is more than just a tactic, it’s a whole industry.
This starts with the realization that SEO is more than just a tactic, it’s a whole industry.
Just as there are legitimate ways to implement SEO, there are also countless spammers and people abusing SEO as a whole and if you’ve had your website for any more than a few days now, you will probably already have been bombarded by emails and ads from people who want to help you “rank” your website.
From blog spamming to directory submissions, a lot of tactics have been advertised, but what really works?
What has worked for us in the past 4 years, and where I see the future of SEO going, is content marketing.
According to Wikipedia, “Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation and sharing of content in order to attract, acquire and engage clearly defined and understood current and potential consumer bases with the objective of driving profitable customer action. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action.”
Simply stated, the idea behind content marketing is to use any form of content, on and off your website, to acquire an audience, spread your message and gain customers.
On our blog, as a form of content marketing, we publish regular updates with fitness tips, diet reviews, weight loss tips, guest posts and other types of content. We do this on a regular basis.
I’ve also contributed a number of guest posts to Len’s blog here and that’s a form of content marketing on its own.
Being active on forums and community sites, creating videos, podcasts and presentations is also a form of content marketing.
The reason why our strategy is based around content marketing is simple, not only will it help you improve your search rankings and traffic, it will also help you get your brand across in front of a lot of people and increase both direct and referral traffic as a result.
But since this post is about SEO, I’ll be going straight into what works for us:
1. We Publish Special Landing Pages Aimed at Ranking High in the Search Engines
This could be a product review page or a high quality information page, but it’s different from a normal blog post and often doesn’t allow comments.
Also, unlike regular blog posts, marketing for that page doesn’t stop the day the post is published. We keep marketing the post and building links to it months and years after it has been published.
A great example of this page is this one; it’s a page reviewing the Nutrisystem diet program. With thousands of words, several images and a video, it’s one of the most detailed posts on our blog. As a result, it ranks well for various Nutrisystem related keywords and also results in thousands of visitors monthly from search engines.
2. We Ensure My Blog is regularly updated
We publish quality articles on a consistent basis.
Having a regularly updated blog is critical to SEO success and someone who does this right in the health niche is Len. This blog is regularly updated, with consistent articles and guest posts.
We publish fitness updates and diet reviews on my blog regularly. We also invite guest authors and paid contributors and I believe that’s one of the reasons why our blog is growing fast.
3. We Write Quality Guest Posts for Relevant Blogs
Like the guest post you’re reading right now, we look for relevant blogs in the health and weight loss niche that accept guest posts. We submit quality guest posts to them and link back to Weightlosstriumph.com in the author bio, or sometimes inside the article if allowed and search rankings and traffic go up as a result.
While guest posts are not published on your blog, it can be difficult justifying submitting it to another blog but it works.
Not only can guest posts result in direct traffic to your blog, they will also result in increase in search engine traffic for you and as a result more traffic.
Repeating the Process
While the above tactics are very effective, remember that Weight Loss Triumph was started 4 years ago. The effectiveness of these tactics lies in the consistency of their use.
Keep repeating all the above steps until you get results.