I wrote a ton of blog posts.

Over the last year alone, I’ve published a minimum of three blogs per week here at Quick Sprout. Some weeks it was even more, at times with multiple posts per day.

If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while now, you know that everything I produce is long-form content—just like the post you’re currently reading.

This means it falls somewhere in the 1.800-3,000+ word range. I’m not writing quick 500-word pieces for the sake of publishing at a high rate.

Over the years, I’ve covered lots of in-depth topics about content marketing, website optimization, conversions, SEO, and other related subjects. But today I want to share with you a seemingly small and subtle SEO hack that can drastically improve the performance of your content.

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SEO goes far and beyond keyword research and building backlinks. There is also a technical side of SEO that will largely impact your search ranking.

This is an area where your robots.txt file will become a factor.

In my experience, most people aren’t too familiar with robots.txt files and don’t know where to begin. That’s what inspired me to create this guide.

Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is a robots.txt file?

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There are so many different elements of SEO.

For the most part, all of these various aspects can be broken down into two main categories; on-page SEO, and off-page SEO.

The biggest factor of off-page SEO is backlinks. While on-page SEO is comprised of elements like content copy, title tags, meta descriptions, internal linking, and site architecture.

It’s nearly impossible (unless you get extremely lucky) to have a successful on-site SEO strategy without conducting keyword research.

There are tons of tools on the web to help you with finding keywords related to your business, but Google Keyword Planner is arguably the most powerful.

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In the past, I’ve shown you how to build links and traffic from link roundups. This strategy involves creating content that will get featured in a weekly or monthly roundup post on other websites.

Now I’m going to teach you how to create an expert roundup. What’s the difference between these two?

Rather than trying to get your link featured on another site’s roundup post, you’re going to create content on your own website using expert opinions.

At the end of the day, this will have similar advantages to getting featured on a link roundup. Creating expert roundups will still help you build backlinks, boost your website traffic, and add plenty of SEO value.

Why are expert roundup posts so great?

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The most extensive and comprehensive introduction to online marketing that you’ll find anywhere.

• Why We Wrote this Guide? Online marketing moves at the speed of light. To keep up, you need a strong foundation with the judgment to think critically, act independently, and be relentlessly creative. That’s why we wrote this guide — to empower you with the mental building blocks to stay ahead in an aggressive industry.There are plenty of guides to marketing. From textbooks to online video tutorials, you can really take your pick. But, we felt that there was something missing — a guide that really starts at the beginning to equip already-intelligent professionals with a healthy balance of strategic and tactical advice. The Beginner’s Guide to Online Marketing closes that gap.
• Who This Guide Is for? We wrote this guide for an audience of first-time marketers, experienced entrepreneurs and small business owners, entry to mid-level candidates, and marketing managers in need of resources to train their direct reports. Most of all, we want you to walk away from this guide feeling confident about your marketing strategy.
• How Much of this Guide Should You Read? This guide is designed for you to read cover-to-cover. Each new guide builds upon the previous one. A core idea that we want to reinforce is that marketing should be evaluated holistically. What you need to do is this in terms of growth frameworks and systems as opposed to campaigns. Reading this guide from start to finish will help you connect the many moving parts of marketing to your big-picture goal, which is ROI.

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