Are there any alternative ranking strategies for not a blog site other than on site SEO, speed improvement, building backlinks and social media engagement to improve rankings?

[websitebuilder]

We own a horoscope  website and looking for some SEO advice.However most of the websites are blog sites therefore most of the SEO content is about how to rank a blog site better. IE getting new quality content, use anchor text link out etc. However if your site is different by nature it is hard to find good advice on how to rank better in these scenarios.

I would like to know if there are alternative ways of increasing rankings apart from the usual strategies of improving social media fan pages, building backlinks and optimising the site speed wise and making it accessible and understandable to crawlers and people too.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Marton

No. You need to be doing all of these things in unison in order to be successful in search engines. Granted, all of these things take an immense amount of research and time due to your audience being different than other industries.

I would take a look at this resource from Moz. Going through this will help you in the following ways:

• What your user looks / act like
• What kind of content they like
• How they digest that content
• Where you should share that content
• How often you should be writing
• Where you should look to link build based on your audience

I know this probably isn't the answer you wanted, but everything you listed is important, and it comes down to knowing who you want to reach and how to reach them. Everything else will fall into place. Take a look at Moz Academy as well, lots of great information!

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[TomRayner]

Hey Marton

Try and think of ways of capturing a wider audience to care about your industry.

Could you run a contest - free personal horoscopes for a year, for example - and look to promote it via social networks, bloggers and buzzfeed type news websites?

Can you think of famous horoscopes on the days of big or prophetic events? Like when a horoscope was eerily accurate to something major that happened in the world? (Think 33 Horoscope predictions that will shock you") Maybe a major sporting event? I wonder what Jordan Spieth's was before winning the Masters?

Or how about contacting a Taylor Swift or other celebrity fan site and offer them free weekly horoscopes on the celebrity every week?

These are just ideas from the top of my head - but in reality they are just variations of the principles that you mentioned - trying to earn backlinks from quality websites, increase your social footprint etc.  The added benefit of these approaches is that they - may - get a bit more exposure and so could result in more referral traffic and general good PR for your site.

No doubt, it's a tricky task - but the good thing about horoscopes is that everyone has one, if they choose to read it! So take a look to see if you could try and capture a wider audience by playing to their interests and incorporating that with your website.

Hope it helps.