Concepts for SEO and Traffic for 2021 and Beyond

[Kurt]

One really good strategy is strategic use of authority sites as "parasite pages". A parasite page is a page on a site you don't own but can post content on that Google seems to prefer. I don't really like the term parasite as I believe you can (and should) add value to these sites and it's not just about what you can get from them.

Here's a good video from Mick Meaney about using Flurther.com and SpyFu.com to find questions that you can reply to that you know gets Google traffic and not just internal traffic.

While the video talks about finding Flurther pages, the same technique can (and should) be used on other parasite/authority sites.
 

 
Taking it a step further...keep track of your parasite pages that:

Benefit you by having a link to a resource you own.

The link is prominent on that page, IE in the first or second response or voted best answer, etc.

Think of these as valuable assets and build a few links to these pages. Because of the authority of sites like Quora, these pages are probably a LOT more likely to rank in Google than pages on your own site. You can also be more aggressive with your linking strategies as Google is more tolerate of linking to respected sites and you're not putting your own domains in danger.

Especially if you are knew to Google SEO, I really believe you'll have far more success much more quickly using a strategy like this than trying to rank your own domains. Plus, this also is a very solid strategy long-term for building a good link profile to your own domains.

There is a down side and that is you're building links and content on a resource you don't own. As mentioned in Mick's video above Yahoo Questions just closed their doors. A lot of folks spent a lot of effort using YA for their marketing and now it's gone.

It's up to you to weigh the risk/reward for your situation, but I don't think using these strategies should be used exclusively...or totally ignored.

[Kurt]

An important concept for modern SEO is how many different strategies for search traffic there really are. Things aren't as simple as "how do you rank in Google"?

Google itself offers different methods and strategies. There's the "regular top 10" but there's also different rules and listings for what Google considers a local search. You may also get listed as a "people also ask" listing for related questions. There's also the results for certain kinds of facts and data that have "show more" rows. Each of these are use different methods to be ranked.

A number of social sites have their own search potential. Youtube is the second most use search engine on the Web and ranking a video on Youtube is different than on Google. Of the popular social sites, Pinterest's internal search engine is a major way to drive traffic. Twitter's search is more about hashtags.

The selling platforms like Etsy, Amazon and eBay all have their own search engines and ranking on them is a money-making skill.

And there's a major trend with many of these search engines. They are shifting from keyword relevancy to include more data from real human activity to as a big factor in ranking. Also remember why every one of these sites exists and that's to make money.

Let's say you go to Amazon to buy a tshirt as a gift for your friend that's a nurse and type in "funny nurse tshirt". If you were Bezos, how would you rank the results?

How about ranking the tshirts that actually SOLD THE MOST the highest? Amazon makes money from every sale. Plus, if people are actually BUYING certain shirts for the keywords "funny nurse tshirt" and not others, that's a really good indicator of relevant search results. Amazon can also factor in things like click-through rate, scroll rate and depth, time on page, etc. to consider in their rankings.

Amazon/Etsy/eBay also likely use what I call a "You Rank" and consider the history of an account, giving them a boost in the rankings. Again, they want to make money and they make money when someone buys something. Trust built through history is another likely factor as well as your seller and customer communications record.

The "You Rank" greatly hurts new accounts while favoring older accounts with good track records. While this seems unfair, these sites are businesses and more money with less hassles makes good business sense. While this seems to hurt newbies, this is only for the short term. These sites now take a bigger investment in terms of time and effort. However, once you have your own track record, your You Rank will give you a benefit.

IMO, keyword relevancy "picks" the competition then as user engagement data is collected for the new products/pages, it is factored more and more into the ranking. Basically, someone types "funny nurse tshirt" and the search engine looks at all the products that use those words and do a basic keyword relevancy score. This is the competition.

Then the user engagement is factored into the actual rankings of the competition that make up the search results, with allowances for new listing to acquire some data. New listings from accounts with good You Rank may get priority in trial listings.

I'm not an expert on the following, so do your own due dilligence. Because of the factors I'm listed above, there's a strategy where you said paid traffic to your new listings on these sites like Amazon. Your goal is not to make a profit at first, but rather try to get a couple of sales for your new listing from external sources.

By doing this, you are increasing the ratio of sales-to-traffic sent internally by Amazon's search engine. This may impact the rankings of the new product for a long time, giving it good consistent buyer traffic from the Amazon search. For example, they may spend $100 on PPC to send to their Amazon product page. If they get sales, the product will likely rank well and if they don't get sales, it probably wouldn't have sold anyway.

My main points are that there are a number of different search opportunities and that keywords will only take you so far on many of them.

[Claire Koch]

Just tried to find Flurther.com it was 404 for some reason. I hope it is not gone.

[Kurt]

Just tried to find Flurther.com it was 404 for some reason. I hope it is not gone.

Hi Claire,

There's a typo in your post...it should be:
https://www.fluther.com/  (no "r")