Four years ago, I got my Master’s Degree in Journalism. A year later, I acquired this website back when it was called The Switch Effect. I’ve always been knowledgeable in journalism, having written more than 300 articles on entertainment, sports, crime, and local news before that. But none of my experience as a writer prepared me for all the behind the scenes stuff. Writing for others is easy, but things get complicated when you have to do everything.
I learned this the hard way when I had to start focusing on views, ads, social media, and Google Search rankings. At the time, the site was getting around 150 views and 15,000 Google impressions per day off of 7 years worth of articles. Through tinkering and trial and error, I increased the numbers to 500 views and 30,000 impressions per day. But I constantly had to read SEO and growth articles to keep up. This was especially true when I changed the name of the site and lost 90% of impressions.
But many of the guides I found were accidentally misleading. Most of them automatically assume that you already have all the tools and resources that you need. These guides have good starter information, but the beefier SEO stuff is usually hidden behind a paywall. I don’t mean the guide is behind a paywall, but the tools that they want you to use. For instance, this site uses Yoast SEO. But it’s very limited because we only use the free version.
The free version of Yoast doesn’t give you multiple keywords, enhanced optimization, redirects, linking suggestions, social previews, or local SEO. For Premium, you’re paying at least $10 per month. Websites that are looking to grow in the first place are generally smaller and might not be at the place where they can pay for extra stuff. I estimate that just for the baseline $10 per month, a website would need to pull in more than 350 views per day with ads. That’s 350 extra views per day on top of the revenue that covers the domain, hosting, and other stuff.
This website currently can’t afford it at all despite being around for almost a decade. So most websites that are looking to grow have to rely on the starter stuff only. That’s why I want to help out with all the stuff that I’ve learned over the past few years. This guide will help you with SEO and growing your website in general. To do this, I’ll go into detail on two tactics which I call Keyword Bloat and Content Connectivity.
Keyword Bloat
Keywords are the most important aspect of promoting a website or page. How and where you place them in different aspects can greatly impact a page. Let’s look at an article that a former writer did. It’s a review of Pokemon Sword. I can’t fault anyone for not doing SEO stuff since it was mostly a blog back then, and I did fix it since then so I have to explain the changes I made. The title was “[Review] Pokémon Sword – Nintendo Switch” That honestly has all the keywords you’d need, but it doesn’t work the way you’d like.
There was also no meta description. There are multiple good keywords there, Pokemon, Pokemon Sword, and Nintendo Switch. So in theory, if someone searches for any of those on Google, it will eventually show up. But just having a keyword isn’t enough to get people to click. You need adjectives in your title to describe why the keyword matters. Is something about the keyword good or bad? Why is the keyword there in the first place? Adjectives are the difference between “[Review] Pokémon Sword – Nintendo Switch” and Pokemon Sword Review (Nintendo Switch) The Best 3D Pokemon Game Yet?”
The same thing goes for the Meta Description. If you have no description, Google won’t be able to do much with your page. You also don’t want it to be too long. This is where you expand on the title. You want the keywords to be repeated here and you want to go into detail about why the keyword matters. Imagine someone searches Pokemon Sword and the original review shows up. There’s a boring title and no description under it. They’re likely to move onto the next result and just skip yours entirely. If you use the right keywords and details, Google will place yours higher and if you have an interesting but concise title and description, people will click when they see your result.
But you also want those keywords everywhere else too. Post a Pokemon image within the page and your keywords should be both in the Alt Text and caption. If you’re limited to one keyword suggestion for your SEO plugin, use it. But also make sure your connecting your keywords as much as possible. You want the focus of your title to be in the body itself at least a few times to tell Google that your post is an authority on the topic. You also need to make sure the keyword is in the url, any subheadings you use, and potential links.
Ideally your keywords will all work together. People won’t just search Pokemon Sword and find your article. Pokemon Sword Review, Pokemon Sword Switch, Pokemon games, Nintendo Switch Reviews. All those queries will lead to your page if you use the right keywords and use them enough and in the right places. Then using your adjectives and descriptions will get more people to click on your stuff after they appear in search results. The next tactic is just as important, not just for SEO purposes, but also to ensure that as many people as possible see many pages.
Content Connectivity
As far as I can tell, the single most important thing to get good rankings and lots of impressions from Google is to have backlinks from other websites. These backlinks can from a variety of places from random blogs to giant websites, and they all matter. In 2017, we interviewed the founder of Switch Player Magazine. A link to that article is now included as a reference on the Switch Player Wikipedia page. When Google crawls that Wikipedia page, it sees the link to our article and assumes that it’s an important link. But it also allows for random people viewing that page to also find our site.
Every site that links to your site is important, no matter how big or small. But it’s something you don’t really have much control over. A high-quality article and promoting it will help, but it’s still up to other websites if they want to link to your site or not. That’s where Content Connectivity comes in. You always want your content to be linking internally to other pages on your site. This will help grow your site on two ways, by helping Google find important pages and by helping readers find more pages.
If Google crawls a page that doesn’t have internal links, it’s a dead end and the chain ends. But if there’s a link present, Google will see it as important and create a loop of crawling different pages. Last year I wrote guides for Umamusume: Pretty Derby. Originally they were just one-off guides that didn’t connect to anything. At the time, it was fine because they were all doing great on their own, each generating between 50 and 200 views per day. But after the site change, I started linking them together.
I created one detailed hub page that linked to all seven guides. Then in each guide, I added a link back to the hub page. Google now crawls one of the guides, follows the link to the hub page, then follows the other links to the other guides. This helps Google a lot, but it helps retain readers too. Originally someone could search “Umamusume Sparks and they would find my guide on farming sparks. Once they were done, that would be the end of it. They wouldn’t see my other Umamusume guides unless they went back to Google and did another search. Or if they manually decided to search the site to see if there were any other Umamusume articles.
But it was only guaranteed to be one isolated view and then they’d move on. Now if someone searches and reads the Sparks guide, they’ll see that there’s other guides. Maybe they’ll go to the hub page and click on the money guide or one of the others. That one isolated view now has the potential to be as many as 8 views on 8 different pages. It doesn’t even have to be a complete hub page, just links in general will do the trick. When I did my review of the newest Doki Monsters: Quest, I made sure to put links to other monster catching RPG’s that I have reviewed.
Google crawls all those pages and maybe the person reading decides to read my review of Pokemon Scarlet and Digimon Story Time Stranger. The more internal links you have, the more chances you have that a reader of one page will stick around and read other pages. I hope this guide helped, focus on improving your keyword usage and internal linking and both Google and your readers will thank you.