I am looking for SEO tips specifically for magazine site's

[BlueprintMarketing]

I have a client who has a website that is based on a magazine. They make their money through advertisement I am primarily an inbound marketer I would be very grateful if anyone out there has any tips for a site that has been around for quite a while ( over 10 years) we are transforming the site from HTML into WordPress then hosting it with a fast managed WordPress host using CDN. I feel the lack of links is an obvious place to start however if there's anything specific to magazine based websites I would be more than grateful to hear your opinions.

Thank you all in advance.

Sincerely,

Thomas von Zickell

[nyanainc]

Hi Thomas

I would suggest to :

1. Copy your competitors campaigns.

2. Write linkbaiting articles + quality content. (which leads to natural link building)

3. Use the crazy egg, heatmap, so you can know where the visitors tend to click more, and there to install social sharing button, so you can get lots more social signals+traffic.

4. Set up the structure of the site so the link juice to flow to inner pages.

5. You could put backlinks to the categories + tags so they suck more easy the link juice the inner pages , and the fresh ones.

I hope that  this helps, if is something more please advice.Learning new things is good

Regards Nik

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Nik,

you've got some fantastic ideas I think these are definitely very helpful I'm currently using a combination of tools one of them being http://scribeseo.com/ to generate the best content. However I do strongly agree with you link bait is where it's at. Thumbs up man thank you

sincerely,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

just to let you know our competitors campaigns are extremely advanced. Extremely famous companies If you would like to talk over PM I can get into more detail.

Respectfully,

Thomas

[nyanainc]

Yeap, drop me a mail. Id I can I will help you. Anyway sometimes 2 brains are better like 1

[RobertFisher]

Thomas,

There is one thing that will help a magazine type site IMO more than anything else: Original quality content that people are looking for. We build sites, do SEM/SEO, etc. and I never cease to be amazed at what happens when one of our copywriters seems to write the "perfect" piece for one of our clients. It does not matter that the on page SEO was not perfect, etc. All of a sudden we are seeing the piece on different sites and in news feeds and we did not use some press release or other mechanism. One person picked it up after another and all of a sudden it was out there.

If you concentrate on this and then provide a way to stimulate/tickle the reader along the lines of say a highly known sports site (ESPN, Sports Illustrated, one I have just begun to marvel at is The Bleacher Report) people will have more reason to stay on and go through your site. Just go to one of these and look how often a given story teaser appears on a single page. Have teasers that attract attention: If on the NBA page, see what is there about specific teams, on a team page specific players, etc.

Lastly, a client of ours has probably taught me more about the value of an image than anyone ever. He was unbelievably strong in how many, where, quality control, etc. on his site. As the result, he has a site with a ton of traffic much because of the images (not a mag type site though). So, look at successful magazine to web sites and learn from them.

The one concern is "they make their money primarily through advertisements...," make sure the good is not the enemy of the best. Many business people fall prey to the "if we take that off, we won't have the revenue..." line of thinking. Too much advertising will cost you in bounce rate and time on site. It must be advertising that fits the visitor and it must not be so obtrusive as to be annoying. I once let my online subscription to a major newspaper that I truly enjoyed because the way the began doing ads kept interrupting any chance of finishing an article.

Later they dropped that mechanism; I never went back.

Good luck,

[BlueprintMarketing]

hey guys I just wanted to say thank you both those are some top notch ideas and I will be in touch soon.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

Will do thank you for the invite