Search engine optimization is absolutely essential when it comes to running a blog, a website for your business, or anything involving the web really

Without good SEO you can kiss your chances of online success goodbye, so it’s a good idea to run through some basic steps to boost SEO every so often, even if you have decent rankings already.

That’s why I’m starting this post with the following statement: spending money on SEO is very worthwhile. You typically will not need to spend boatloads of cash to at least improve your rankings, if not top the rankings and land yourself on the first page of Google. As long as you aren’t competing with sites like Amazon, eBay or Twitter, you should be able to get some impressive results without spending more than about $50 (even if you are competing with them, there are ways around that problem without spending much more).

But alas, not all of us will consistently have a spare couple of bucks to spend on advancing our SEO rankings, especially if you are a newcomer to the blogging and online business scene. So, for those of you who need a boost on your SEO, but don’t necessarily have the cash to go all-out with your efforts, here are 3 ways to boost SEO without spending money.

 

How to Boost SEO Without Spending Money:

1: Post your site to social media, with links leading back to your site

This tip may seem a bit odd to some of you who have a more in-depth knowledge of SEO. Yes, a site’s PR is very important when it comes to backlinking and showing Google that your site is worth showing to people, and no, links to your site through social media do not have any link juice to pass on to your site. But think about it, if a page has 150 backlinks to really high PR sites, but no one is talking about those sites, would it make sense for Google to give your site priority? No, because all Google sees is a site that no one seems to care about.

Essentially it boils down to your site having authority in Google’s eyes. High PR links are great for getting link juice through to your site, but we all (Google included) knows that there are ways to manipulate those rankings to some extent (I mean, that’s the whole point of SEO). So an additional way that Google checks to see if your site is worth prioritizing in their rankings is by looking at how many people are talking about, sharing, or mentioning your site in their social media posts.

Therefore, getting your site shared through social media will give your site and it’s backlinks a bit more clout in Google’s rankings. Google sees that, yes, this site is linked to by other high PR sites, and yes! people seem to actually care enough about the site to share it! In turn, Google will assume that your site is worth paying a bit more attention to.

If you already have somewhat of a following on your blog or website, adding ‘share’ buttons is a great start here. If you’re the humble sort, you can ask friends and family to promote your page. A point worth mentioning is that social media backlinks are some of the cheapest available (I believe at present you can get about 250 for around $15).

 

2: Backlink to your site through forums

Allow me to say this right off the bat: DO NOT SPAM FORUMS. DON’T DO IT. EVER. Okay? Okay.

With that little warning out of the way, forum linking IS a reasonably good way to both expose your site to more potential visitors, and build some backlinks while you’re at it.

The best way to boost SEO with this method would be to add the links to your signature on a forum where you already have some authority. People are smart, so if you are a newcomer on a forum and people see that you have an ungodly number of links to your site in the signature of your posts, you won’t make any progress. Additionally, if people come to associate your site or business with spammy comments and signatures, you’ll be seriously hurting your brand, and it’ll take a lot of convincing for those people to ever trust you enough to buy from you or visit your site.

If you aren’t currently an active member of any forums, my suggestion would be to spend a couple of weeks building up a reputation on that forum, and then add a link to your site in your signature. At that point people will already know you and trust your opinion to some extent, which will give more authority to your link and give people a better impression both of you as an individual and of your brand itself.

 

3: Find niche keywords you can rank for

This is actually a very common strategy for affiliate marketers, or other people who make sites with the sole intent of ranking them well so that they can sell something.

Essentially, the process is as follows:

1. Find keywords related to the topic of your site (typically through Google’s Adwords Keyword Planner, or a similar service)
2. Check to see how many monthly searches that keyword receives on average
3. Look for other keywords that are related to your topic, but that receive fewer searches per month (between 250 and 1,000 is usually good for a small blog)
4. Put together a list of those keywords that will total something like 10,000 searches per month
5. Target those keywords in your content, ALT tags, meta descriptions, page titles, post titles and anything else you can include them in.

At first glance, this idea probably seems pretty counterintuitive. Just hear me out.

If you have a blog about gardening, and the search term “Gardening blog” receives an average of 10,000 hits per month, what is the likelihood that your site is going to make it past all the other “noise” in Google’s results? Not very good.

Now, suppose instead of “Gardening blog,” you target “Flower gardening blog,” or “Vegetable gardening blog,” and those search terms receive maybe 2,000 searches each month? In that case, so long as you target your keywords carefully, you can hit the first page of Google pretty easily because you don’t have as many competitors to fight with, and if you do have competitors they probably don’t have very strong SEO either.

By using this strategy, you can gain popularity with the people who search using these more specific terms, and once your site has grown a little, it will be far easier to rank in broader searches like “Gardening blog.”

This strategy probably wouldn’t be advisable for a site that already has a decent following (although it couldn’t hurt, I suppose) but it will almost certainly provide a much needed boost in search rankings for a smaller-scale or up-and-coming site.

If you DO have a few bucks to spend on your SEO work, BlackHatLinks.com is a great resource that I use a lot. They have very reasonable prices, and their service is amazing, they even provide detailed reports so that you can keep an eye on how many of your links have been processed and indexed.

 

I hope that these tips help you to boost SEO for your site and save a few bucks while you’re at it! If you have any ideas for boosting SEO without spending additional money, feel free to leave a comment and let me know what I missed in this post!