Being a Blogger is not only about writing quality content anymore, but it's also about implementing the best SEO practice, adding more value and social touch and do many more tasks. As all the bloggers have realized recently after the Google Penguin update. The importance of SEO has itself increased.
There is an obvious need to change our view to SEO. And why not learn from the only website that ranks 1 for almost 99% queries. Yes, you guessed it. It is Wikipedia, the largest online encyclopedia. Whenever you want to learn some new words. Wikipedia is the place.
There is no doubt, Wiki SEO is out of the box and they take care of each part of site SEO structure carefully. For us (Bloggers and SEO's) Wikipedia is a good case study to learn and understand what an effective SEO is.
There are a lot of ways in which Wikipedia retains its online quality. But, it doesn't even use so much 'secret' SEO tips that you cannot figure out.
Here, I have listed the SEO tricks used by WikiPedia that helps it to rank higher.
These tips, when used properly on your site also increases your rankings on Search Engine Results.
Factors which contributes to Wikipedia Ranking
One thing which you need to keep in mind before we get into secret behind Wikipedia ranking, and that is their content quality. Many sites in the past tried to copy their strategy, but high-quality content from Wiki pages always outranked the competitor.
Along with high-quality content, other factors like site SEO, speed, OnPage SEO also contributed the same in the outstanding ranking of Wikipedia.
If you are fond of Wikipedia, then you might know that Wikipedia is the largest linker of its content. It links to around 500-600 other Wikipedia articles itself from its one page. So that none of its articles get dumped ever. You know that Wikipedia links to its category pages and its tags.
It also links to its Wikimedia files about images and other stuff. That is why Wikipedia never gets ranked third or fourth in any of its articles.
It lives on the idea that if you want others to promote your content, you should promote it first. This also has the direct impact on low bounce rate of Wiki and better user experience. Don't you think so?
If you are using WordPress, you can use WordPress Smart link for automatic internal linking. Link as much as you could, but make sure it should be relevant and meaningful.
Also keep user experience in mind, while doing Internal-linking as lots of irrelevant linking may give bad user experience.
You will see that all the Sidebars, footer and the header of the page. That is quite a good deed. After observing for a while, you can also conclude that 98% of its content changes over the page.
On the terms of copyright text, Wikipedia contains just a line and the plain HTML written a link to its Copyrights documents. Isn't that just another vote towards cleanliness of a site.
It says itself on the Webmaster Guidelines that same words or content should be minimum on different pages, and it will be better it the content changes a lot across the different pages of the site.
Wikipedia has many different pages, and it also does not uses English as the preferred language. So, how does it protect itself from duplicate pages. By using Canonical settings and making language markup for these different pages.
One more thing that you will notice is that Wikipedia has different subdomains for different languages which create different virtual sites containing the whole page with a specific different language.
This also tells us how we can use multiple subdomains for multiple languages and save our self from those cruel updates.
Wikipedia is the online example of how a site can stay big yet not spammed. Also, Wikipedia offers its users to edit any content on its page. But, never allows the SPAM content to stay long on its pages. It keeps the record of each of the edits that are made and lets them stay on the page only after reviewing completely.
For Blogger, you are responsible for any links on your webpage. That could be in the form of Guest posting or via commenting.
Since, irrelevant links are considered as bad SEO example, so before adding any link to your page (Comment or guest post or any other way), make sure it's useful and add value.
The primary motive of Wikipedia is just to stay informational and provide content that is true and useful. All the other sites and blogs on the net that think the same way will always succeed the same way.
Don't you think that happy readers are much useful than unhappy advertisers? Yes, they are, because when people are happy, they share the same things that they discovered with their friends.