Jay's SERP Ranking Blueprint

How to rank on Google is an ongoing battle with new strategies and shiny objects coming out all the time. Either Google is making fancy pants new algorithmic changes or someone has discovered some 'ranking secret' and sells as a product.

But if you stick with some core evergreen based strategies and throw in some awesome keyword research, then ranking in the SERP's is actually quite easy.

Here is a mindmap of my SERP Ranking Blueprint, this is the exact method I use to rank my own blog posts.

As you can see, it is split into 2 categories. Let's dive into each.

ON PAGE SEO

This is the SEO stuff that you do on your post.

META TITLE

• Create a captivating title that will show up in the SERPs
• This can be different than your actual blog post title
• Ensure your keyword is within the meta title
• Limited to 60 characters

META DESCRIPTION

• Create a captivating description that will show up in the SERPs
  
• Ensure your keyword is within the meta description
• Limited to 160 characters

INTERNAL LINK

• Within your article, have a link that points to another page or post on your site
  
• Try to have the internal link related to the initial article
• Use related keyword anchor text
• anchor text: the words used to create the link
  

EXTERNAL LINK

• Within your article, have a link that points to another website's article
• Keep the external link relevant to your article
• Don't bother with having it open in a new tab
  

IMAGES WITH ALT TEXT

• Have some images within your article
• Each image should have alt text
• The alt text should describe what the image is about
• This is primarily to serve the visually impaired
• Try to have a related keyword within the alt text, but it's not nessesary
  

EMBEDDED VIDEO

• Find a video on YouTube that relates to your article's topic
  
• You can have your own video or someone elses
• Embed the video within your article
• This keeps your readers on your site longer which is a ranking metric

COMMENTS

• Ask for reader comments within the last paragraph of your article
• This can be done by asking a question related to the article
  
• Try and reply to the comments as they come in
• This is essentially writing new content for your article which will aid in ranking

OFF PAGE SEO

This is the SEO stuff that you do away from your post.

FETCH AS GOOGLE

• Inside of Google Search Console, go to Crawl > Fetch as Google
  
• Add the URL slug of your article and click fetch
• Click the Request Indexing and Crawl only this Page
• Do this under the desktop setting
• This is asking Google to go and look at your new article

RESUBMIT SITEMAP

• Inside of Google Search Console, go to Crawl > Sitemaps
• Select your sitemap and click the resubmit button
• This is asking Google to go and look at your updated sitemap
• Helps with indexing your new post and any associated images
  

POST TO GOOGLE+

• Go to Google+ and post your new article URL
  
• Once your social image shows up, add your meta title | meta description at the very top of the post
• Below the URL, add an abstract about the post with some digest about what you are posting - make it personal
• Add the URL once more below your abstract
• Post it
• This creates a small boost to your article and will show up in the SERP for anyone who is in your Google circle.

NOW IT'S UP TO YOU

I'd like you to try this strategy on your next awesome blog post on your website and let me know how it turns out.

Regards,
Jay