Transcription
There was this post a couple days ago on the search engine optimization subreddit. "What's your most underrated SEO tip that actually brought real results or traffic?" It was so good. I've already shared a few of the tips from this, and now I want to share all of my favorite tips from this. All of the, the just a collection of great underrated SEO tips that are either that are weird, that are interesting, that are fun. What like there was one that that not a lot of work gets hundreds of backlinks, some things that are critical but completely overlooked, and overall just a lot of cool stuff here from a lot of familiar faces in search engine optimization. So the first one that I'm going to share, and I'm actually starting from the bottom and going up, so the more interesting ones are going to be as as this continues.
The first one I'm going to share is the hierarchical structure of the website is often underestimated, but it is decisive on many projects. Having sections with child pages that explain a topic in greater depth is seen as more credible by Google. Another thing that not everyone understands is how important it is to have important pages to place inside the nav menu, inside the header. I often talk on the show about information architecture. This is how you structure the pages and the posts on your site. And I always recommend having a hub page for bottom-of-funnel SEO landing pages and placing that hub page in your footer. It's just a really easy way to do that. You have a bunch of different pages that are going after purchase intent keywords, going after them, very deliberately targeting the keywords, very deliberately putting the keywords in your page title, URL slug, meta description, H1, beginning of your first sentence. And you need a place to have these pages appear authentically and naturally. And that is one of these hub pages. And you call your hub page something like "Uses" or "Services" or "Collections." And then you place that instead of the nav, instead of the navigation within your heading menu, in the footer. A footer, the footer like "Resources" is a great place to to do that, though you can also place it in the navigation and just going after your keywords like that. It's clean. It's natural. It's authentic. Google likes it, users like it. It's great. So I like that tip.
Here's another one. Write actual useful content for people, not search engines. And when I say write, I do mean write, not get ChatGPT to crap out articles for you. And this is actually similar to to one above, which is make sure you have something to say which people actually want to read. I was talking to somebody recently and I said to this person, "It looks I'm just reading this." And this person was like, "I've worked on improving my articles a lot, as you said, or improving my pages a lot, as you said. I think they're really good." And so I look at these, this page and I'm like, "It really, like you're repeating the keyword a lot. It's unnatural." I'm like, "It really feels like you are writing this for search engines and not for people." And this person's site had taken a hit recently. And the person was was trying to figure out why the site had taken a hit. And I, I said, "It really feels like you're writing these pages for search engines and not for people." And the person went, "You know what? You're right. I was having ChatGPT. I'd said to ChatGPT, 'Give me SEO optimized copy for these pages.'" And I was just mostly using a lot of that and not really writing it myself for people. And the the person's site had taken a hit, and Google hates this. Google hates this, and Google can tell as well. And so I said, "You know, this was very recent. So," and I said, "Redo these pages." And that's what's happening. Google doesn't like it. Users don't like it. I write my pages or my posts with a reader in mind, with the searcher in mind, because I am targeting keywords deliberately, and then I am thinking, "Who is behind a computer searching this keyword? Who am I writing this for?" And then I write it for that person.
By the way, if you want to learn more about this, I go so deep into this in "Compact Keywords," my SEO course. I talk about this. I have an entire big section on information architecture and how to make these hub pages, what they should look like, the templates, what a bad hub page is, what a good hub page is, all of this stuff. And then how to make the bottom-of-funnel SEO landing pages, templates, more best practices, bad practices, all of this stuff. How to find keywords, all that stuff in my SEO course, compactkeywords.com.
Next comment: "Editing image file names to keyword-1-keyword-2-keyword-3.jpeg super easy way to rank in image search." That is cool. So what I do for my pages is I have a structure, and that is first comes the child folder. So maybe it's an article. So it would be "articles" then an underscore, then comes the slug for that article. So maybe it's "best-standing-desks-2025." That would maybe that's a slug for the article. And then I do another underscore, and then I give a richer description for that specific image. But the thing is, because I am putting my keyword in the slug of the article, my keyword is always in every image that appears in the file name. My keyword goes in the slug of the article or the page. And so every image that appears on that post or that page has the keyword naturally in it because of this structure. And then because of this underscore, I give extra description which helps the image rank for other keywords. So that's how I do it, and it works really, really, really, really well.
Next one: "Grab queries from Search Console, then add those queries and answers verbatim at the bottom of relevant pages." So, Google Search Console, Google's own tool for seeing how your site appears in Google Search and what it ranks for and how many clicks you're getting and how many impressions you're getting and your CTR and all this fun stuff. It shows you what you're ranking for and what pages are ranking. And so, this person is saying, "Take exact keywords that you are ranking for, and then take them and add them verbatim at the bottom of relevant pages." So maybe the page that your keyword is ranking for. Take that keyword and just make sure it is at the in that page exactly, and just put it at the bottom verbatim. I personally think this is what I've seen. This is how I do it. I work the keywords in naturally. It is so much better if you work the keywords in naturally rather than just putting a list of keywords at the bottom of relevant pages. Honestly, it's a bad idea to do it like that. Work your keywords in naturally. It's not that hard.
And this one comes from Bill Hartzer. Love Bill Hartzer. Bill Hartzer came on this podcast. That was episode 608 of this show, "SEO Shortcuts from a 25-Year Veteran." Bill Hartzer, episode 608. Bill Hartzer says, "Internal links, especially links to other pages in the middle of a paragraph." So link to relevant pages on your site and do it in the middle of your paragraphs. If you look at my blog, I do that all the time. I'm always trying to get users of my site to go deeper into my content with relevant internal links. And you know, I remember when I was learning SEO, and I would be reading, a lot of people don't like Neil Patel. I don't care. I learned a ton from him, and I would be reading his blog, and he would have all of these internal links to different posts on his blog, and I would be like, "Oh, that looks interesting. That looks interesting." And then all of a sudden I'd have so many tabs open that I wanted to read. Internal links work. They help people go deeper, spend more time on your site, get more into your brand. Internal links are great. They also help structure your site with information architecture.
All right, so I shared this tip 3 days ago on the podcast. That was episode 763, "The SEO Trick That Breaks All the Rules: How Ultra-Long Page Titles Boost Rankings." And this comes from SEO Pub, who said, "I ignoring the 60-character limit BS for title tags and writing title tags that are 150 to 250 characters instead." And then SEO Pub added later on, "The way I write them is usually as two to three title tags separated by hyphens that match slightly different searches or search intents that still fit the content of the page. Most of the time, Google will pick the section that best matches the search." And so in SEO Pub's blog post about this, there are many examples. One such example is the short title, the short page title is "Setting Up a Minecraft Server, Acme Corp." Change it to "Setting Up a Minecraft Server for Beginners and Experts, Simple Guide to Hosting Your Own Minecraft Server, Optimizing Your Self-Hosted Minecraft Game, then the name of the brand, Acme Corp." And when I shared this on my podcast, SEO Pub commented and actually pinned that as the top comment. And this is what SEO Pub said: "What will often happen is Google will not rewrite the page titles. Instead, Google will pick out the segment that best matches the search intent. Everywhere I have implemented this, we have seen a minimum of 10 to 20% uptick in traffic." I thought that was a cool, cool tip, and you can listen to the full episode about it, episode 763 of this show.
Next comment: "Writing 'guide to finding the best insert type of business here' has done pretty well to get us featured for general searches for said type of business." I'm just bringing this one up because I actually don't like this tip. You will people are just spending more time getting their top-of-funnel answers from AI, whether that's AI overviews or ChatGPT or Claude. Ahrefs said click-through rates for top-of-funnel content are down by a third, are cut by 34.5%. And compared to to bottom-of-funnel content, top-of-funnel content takes a lot more effort and resources to make. You need to do more research. You got to put in a lot more words, maybe thousands of words. Instead, you do a bottom-of-funnel page about why your business is a great option for the bottom-of-funnel query that's being searched, and you only need to do 400 to 500 words. That's way better, and bottom-of-funnel, way less competitive. So, I just wanted to bring up this example because I'm not a fan of it, and I wanted to comment on that.
I like this one. "Updating old content and changing the year in the SEO title to the current one. Google loves fresh content, and this has always worked a treat for me." Let's say you are doing one of these best-of guides, which I don't recommend spending a lot of time on, but let's say you are doing one. You have "The Best Standing Desks." First of all, make it "The Best Standing Desks of 2025." And your URL slug is "best-standing-desks-2025." By the way, your image file names would just be it would be "articles" or "blog_bestanding-escore" and then a description of the image that is in that blog post. But the URL slug for that article is "best-standing-desks-2025." And then every year it changes to 2026, 2027. You 301 redirect the old article to the new one. And the page title and the H1 changes as well to 2026 to 2027. You know what? In fact, have the date everywhere in the in all the key places: page title, URL slug, H1, meta description, beginning the first sentence, and every year you just swap out 2025 for 2026, etc., etc. I like that one. Everyone likes fresh content. Google does too.
And the last tip, and again, I made an episode about this one as well a couple of days ago. This was episode 762 of this show, "The Unsplash Backlink Hack: How to Earn 100+ Links with Free Photos." This was such a cool tip. So, basically, this guy uploads, and what I like about this is now this can be automated with AI, with with AI agents really easily. But so what this person does is this person uploads relevant high-quality photos to free stock photo sites like Unsplash or Pexels. People use these photos. A lot of them, they will link back to Unsplash or Pexels. This person does reverse image search, finds everyone who's used your photos and who has credited you on Unsplash or or they haven't credit you credited you, and just says, "Hey, I took this photo. It'd be great if you could give me credit to my website. Here's my website." The this person gets a 5 to 7% backlink conversion rate and has gotten can sometimes get 100 to 200 backlinks per photo uploaded. And that is wild, and that is a cool, cool, cool tip. Everybody likes backlinks. Backlinks are fun. Different backlink schemes are really fun. You know, I say a lot backlinks don't matter or they're not that important, but going after those super competitive keywords, that's where backlinks are cool. I have a 2-hour section on how to get backlinks in "Compact Keywords," and I just, I love different creative backlink strategies, and I have a bunch in there, but this one, when I read this one, I'm like, "That is cool. I hadn't heard that one." So, I like that tip. I liked a lot of these tips, and that's why I wanted to make this episode.
The link to this Reddit thread will be in the description for this show. And this is episode 766 of the Edward Show. 766 days in a row. No days missed doing this podcast. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.