If you want to get Google’s attention, you must have deep knowledge of the site’s subject matter.  You have to be a real expert. In this article, I am creating content about search engine optimization. Unless I really know what I am talking about, I will not get respect from Google, Bing, Yahoo…or you, the visitor.

Your objective is to create at least one page or blog that Yahoo, Google & Bing will love.

But there is no way of knowing for sure what they will like;

So my recommended Chicago SEO strategy is to create various types of blogs and pages in different styles, longer, shorter, many tags, few tags, different H1-H5 headers and different HTML tags and description. Every page and blog should be perfectly unique in style and content.

Examine your Google Analytics data carefully every day, until you identify the page that is landed on most often, and then you will know exactly which page the search engines like.

Create a Google Analytics, Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools accounts. These accounts are crucial to monitoring and understanding your site’s visibility with search engines.

Submit your sitemap to Google & Bing, and make sure the sites are crawled and indexed. In the event of any error messages, you will need to investigate if they have been blocked from crawling your site by your Robots.txt file or web rules on the server side.

Once you have your sitemap crawled and indexed…be patient and wait.

I recently optimized a new large site, and for the first 6 months, the site was getting only one visitor a day from Google. Now, the site is getting 5,000 visitors a day. So it takes a long time.  A lot of patience is required.

Identical content is not allowed, and will not get indexed. But similar content is OK. All you need to do is look at your competitors’ sites. Pay special attention to their headings and HTML title and description tags. Once you see what Google likes…you can easily create similar content using your own perspective…there is nothing unethical about it, everyone does it.

So before you choose me as your Chicago SEO professional, you will probably do some research about Chicago digital marketing agencies and what they offer. When you see them talk about “Competition Research”….well, you now know exactly what that means.

If your site has fresh, original content offering value to the visitor, sooner or later one of your pages or blog posts will start to rank well and pull in traffic.

You need to carefully review your Google Analytics account on a daily basis, and focus on Behavior / Site Content / Content Drilldown / Landing Pages.

Once you identify the landing page that gets the most hits…you create similar pages like it.

If you are offering a service, like SEO in Chicago for example, you will duplicate it several hundred times, with special attention to city optimization, as you want to rank well for “SEO + City”.

If you are selling a product, you will want to duplicate the page as many times as you have products, for example, if you are selling cookies, and Google, Bing or Yahoo really like your “chocolate chip cookies” page, duplicate it with small changes for your “peanut butter cookies” and “oatmeal raisin cookies” pages.

Search engines don’t crawl your site blindly. They crawl pages that are new or pages that have changed.

When the bots read the sitemap, they are able to identify the new and changed pages.

Ideally, you want search engines to think your pages are new or changed, forcing the bots to come back regularly and crawl the pages, to keep everything fresh and updated all the time, as when Google crawls the page, it will also follow links to tags and categories archives.

WordPress Archives change when site-wide changes are made to headers, footers and/or sidebars, but these changes are not reflected in the sitemap, unless the pages that are inside the archive are marked as new or changed. In order to have the archives recrawled,  you want the search engines to think the pages inside them have changed.

Further more, as you add pages and blog posts to your site, the content of the archives changes, and adding even one new page to the site, can change the content of ALL the archives, here is how:

Let’s say you have a blog with 50 posts, displayed as 5 pages containing 10 posts each.

The moment you add a new post, the post that used to be no.10 on the first page now becomes no.1 on the second page.

The post that used to be no.10 on the second page, is now bumped into position 1 on the third page, and so on.

Adding just one post can change the content of 100 archives (pages)!

Every page/archive containing 10 posts now has one new post, meaning 10% of the archive has changed.

So making Google Bot and Bing Bot come back regularly to get updated content is a high priority.

I use a very effective SEO tool that achieves this, I will offer more info in my Chicago SEO site audit.

As a freelance SEO expert I use tools that help me optimize websites.

Here are some of my favorite SEO tools:

• Yoast: amazing tool. The main function for me is the ability to have site-wide settings for HTML title tags and description tags. If you have a large site with thousands of pages and various archives, it makes no sense to create the tags page by page.  With Yoast, you can create site-wide HTML tags for custom posts and taxonomies, which will automatically adjust the content of the tags based on the tag or category name.  Don’t worry, I will tell you how to do this in my SEO site audit.
• Sitemap Trick: This tool will trick search engines into thinking blogs are new, which will cause them to come back again and again to crawl the site for fresh content. I will tell you about it when I email you my SEO site audit report.
• Create Blogs in Bulk: Every search is considered a local search, so every page needs to be optimized for a specific city. So if I want to rank well for “SEO digital marketing agency in (city)” I would need to create 1000 pages, one for every city I am targeting. For example: “SEO digital marketing agency in NYC”, “SEO digital marketing agency in Los Angeles” and so on. Creating 1000 pages one by one optimized to perfection is not practical. But with my special SEO tool, I can create these 1000 pages in one day! Take it easy, I will tell you all about it in my SEO site audit.

WordPress will create archives for tags and categories. These archives are essentially new pages with new high value content, which are very similar to the pages that are put in the archive.

Usually tag archives and category archives will rank better and pull in more organic traffic because they are extremely optimized.

Using tags and categories is a very powerful Chicago SEO technique, and this is how it works:

• When you create a blog post, you give it a very highly optimized H1 header and HTML title tag.
• This post has one chance only to rank, a rather limited chance, if there are 1,000,000 pages in the SERP, your post has 1 chance in a 1,000,000.
• If you insert 100 tags in the post, on publication, WordPress will create 100 archives, each one with a different HTML title tag, and insert the post into the archives.
• So now instead of having 1 chance in a million, you have 100 chances in a million…much better.
• If you add 100 tags to every post you publish, you will end up with thousands of archives, and each one of them will have not only different HTML titles, but also totally different content, and very highly optimized content, because the content of the archive will be the H1 headers of the various posts.
• Let me illustrate with a simplified example:
• I publish 5 posts with these titles: “David Is The Best Freelance SEO Expert”, “What Is A Digital Marketing Agency?”, “Do I Need An SEO Site Audit?”, “What Does It Mean Affordable SEO Services?” and “What Makes RetiredSEO.cc the best SEO Company?”.
• As you can see, each one of these posts has a powerful title optimized to the max.
• By adding the tag “Freelance SEO Consultant” to these 5 posts, a new archive (page) with a HTML title tag “Freelance SEO Consultant” will be created with these 5 posts in the archive, and all 5 titles together, with their excerpts ,will become the content of the archive. This archive (page) has a better chance to rank because it is so much more optimized, loaded with a very high density of high value keywords.
• The same logic exactly applies to categories. Instead of assigning the post to one category only, assign it to 10 different categories, and you get 10 new powerful archives that have a high probability of ranking well.
• In addition to the above mentioned benefits, the actual tags themselves when inserted into the post, become part of the page’s content, increasing the level of optimization exponentially.
• Usually the tags will contain the city name where the product or service is offered with a follow-up key word. (“San Diego SEO”, “Houston Web Design”).
• When the new archives are created, the tag’s name automatically becomes the HTML title of the archive.
• I know it is confusing, but, believe me, if you want to multiply your chances of ranking on page one of Google, Yahoo and Bing, you absolutely need to use tags and multiple categories for each post.
• Btw, look what happens when I use my special tool mentioned above to create 1000 posts in a day:
• Each one of the posts will have 100 tags, generating 100,000 archives, and when each post is assigned to 10 categories that will create 10,000 category archives, for a total of 110,000 new archives, easily created in one day.  This is how powerful WordPress is in combination with my special SEO tool.
• The city name must be part of the tag’s name, because the tag’s name becomes the archive’s HTML title, and without a city name in the title, the post will not do too well in the search results. But the downside is that many of the archives will contain only one post in them, which can be considered by Google as thin content and ignored. So when tagging, a good chunk of the tags should not contain the city name, for example, if all the 1000 posts have a tag called “Freelance SEO Expert“, this archive will contain…1000 blogs.
•  A good way to solve the problem of having only one post in an archive with a city name in the title, is to create several posts with different content, all of them optimized for the same city, and to tag all of them with the exact same tags containing the city name. Then, all the posts related to a specific city will be in these archives, sharply increasing their chances of ranking well, as the archives will have high value content which includes the name of the city, multiple times.
• For a better understanding of tags and categories, look at the bottom of this post to see the list. Click on a few tags to view the archives, things will become more clear.