Sometimes it is good to go back to basics. In today’s episode, I take a look at what are the basic principles of SEO and why every business owner needs to have an SEO strategy for their business.
The topics I cover are:
What is SEO anyway? And, why does it matter? There seems to be a lot of confusion on how this is executed and when is the time to ‘start’ SEO instead of understanding successful SEO is more of a foundational item for it to be successful long term.
We talk extensively about keywords and content and how that should be executed.
We talk about links and how they affect a website and how great content should always the best way to procure links.
We talk about Social Media and choosing the right platform as well as having a strategy that supports your content and your keywords.
We also covered WordPress and some of the plugins that will help you succeed. Including Yoast vs. RankMath, whereas I think RankMath is easier for a beginner to understand because it’s more graphical and spells out what is needed.
Episode 112 is something I speak about a lot which is what web building tools or platform is good to use. As I teach these classes many point out their tools/platforms don’t have the ability to do what I’m suggesting. That is because they are platforms that have the most rudimentary SEO functionality built-in but little more and simply do not need the standards that are needed. Additionally it is estimated that 94% of all sites built with tools like Squarespace, Wix Weebly, Web.com or even Shopify are not even indexed by Google let alone appearing in SERPS. Even WordPress.com has these issues.
This bugs me because, in my opinion, they are marketing to unsuspecting small business owners promising a pretty site but there is little consideration for the success of the website. Inherently the website and the story about a tree falling in the woods are similar. If no one comes to your pretty website how effective is it. Additionally and for example, I looked at a 1000+ page website on Friday built in Shopify and every page on the site was marked at no index. And, better yet the images, which are ranking, were coming off the CDN for Shopify. These are the type of problems you can run into using tools like this without an experience level on par with someone like me. Telling Google not to index your site is not the right path and it was not done on purpose.
Although I don’t discuss them directly here Hubspot’s platform, touts being able to do SEO but in no way is that correct. It is in an inbound marketing tool and does that very well. and most Hubspot Users use WordPress in conjunction with HubSpot, which can be a winner. But all these platforms and tools are not built with Google quality guidelines in mind, in my opinion, and you have to ask yourself if your listing to people like me talk why would you choose a vehicle that will not even get out of the starting gate. You can look pretty and rank well but online tools like this are really not the right way to go.
So I do have very strong opinions about this topic and the questions I am being asked was by a group of folks that are very small business owners. Please feel free to leave any questions you may have below. Oh and I am going to apologize because Harley decided to express his displeasure with the neighbor kids. Sorry for the barking, I tried to kill a lot of it but I didn’t want the sound to get inaudible.
Todays’s podcast covers a bunch of different SEO topics as we work on our ultimate end of the year checklist for 2020. (I know it’s a few months away but it’s coming fast!)
Google Webmaster Tools
We talk about webmaster tools and why every site should have it set up. The easy way to do this is by using Sitekit from Google.
We reviewed how and why you should add a sitemap to your website
What are some of the more problematic errors you can see and how do you fix them
What are core web vitals
See detailed Webmaster Tools Class
Bing Webmaster Tools
Remember to add Bing to your arsenal now because it’s almost a 1/3 of all web searches. You can set this up here: Bing Webmaster Tools
Set up Google Analytics and StatCounter.com
It’s an important function and all websites need to have solid statistics. We recommend adding both because it’s sometimes good to see all the traffic not just what google is omitting.
Rank Math vs. Yoast
Yoast has been around many years but Rank Math is starting to turn heads. A lot of them. I like the rank math interface better than Yoast. It also does a better job of assembling the interlinking of pages and I think its much easier to understand for beginners but has the flexibility for experts. It also adds schema by default so if you forget it remembers. Overall I think Rank Math is the better route, but i fully expect Yoast to not concede and up its game.
Make a Keyword Checklist
Keywords matter. Long-tail keywords matter. We talk about how to select them and some of the best practices for them
Create a question that people want the answer to
Talked about some online forums that help us as well as sites like Ask the Public
Create SEO Friendly URLs
Why does this matter and how should you go about doing that. Why it’s bad to make things too wordy. The shorter the better but keeps it keyword rich but don’t overdo it and stuff
How do you position your keywords in the Title tag?
So the position of the keyword is very important based on what your objective of the page is
Consider adding delimiters to the title tag like the year of the word best that help mirror more what searchers do. This will help you land better in the search results.
Use your keywords in H1, H2 or H3 tags
But don’t overdo it.
1 H1 at most
Optimize Images
We often rank #1 on our terms so I am often reluctant to do this, however, its a good practice and it does help land you in image search. If you have a product specifically that would be searched for by image, we talk about how to optimize images in both alt text file name and really size still does matter. The smaller the better.
Learn the art of Synonyms and LSI keyword
Google is big on signals and there are words it expects to see on a page and others it doesn’t learn what those words are and how to effectively use them. They are not in place of keywords but rather in support of them
External links
Although I’m not a huge believer in linking outward, I will say that at times there are reasons to do it. For example, I did one above. Or on our home page, I linked to our sponsor partners. It makes sense.
Part 2 will be posted at the end of August as we continue down our ultimate SEO Checklist
In this episode, we take a look at the importance of six specific items that will make or break your Google rankings:
Content – Why content is important and how Google may now go as far as to exclude thin or. underdeveloped/uninspired content. Without a strong content footprint, it is very difficult to have a ranking website on any meaningful terms. We explained why quality content helps and used the example of our Chamber of Commerce podcast we did that helped explain how Chambers affects local SEO.
Cultivating Backlinks – If you create great content a good solid natural link profile should occur. We also talk through the buying of links and why this should not really be needed if you create really good content that makes people want to link to it.
Keyword Spamming – The natural inclination is to spam keywords and overuse them or forget to use them all together, there seems to be a hard time finding a happy medium. We talk through how you should approach the use of keywords on a page and what the proper keyword ratios might be.
Search Engine Friendly Web Design – We talk though standard web design issues we see. How to properly construct navigation and why search engine friendly transcends a title tag, meta description and alt image tags. We also talk about why SEO should be planned first and not bolted on to a website after the fact.
Quality Links – What are they and why they are important
Page Speed – Why is page speed now more important than ever and why it transcends the end-user and cell phones.
The importance of authority has been growing. Because of the May 2020 Core update, authority is back in the spotlight. Blogging is now more important than ever. What are you doing to bring value to the internet at large? We emphasized why to add a blog, how to blog, and what to do push the blog forward. We emphasized identifying items that bring values to the end-user and how to create verticles within your business that allow you to grow your business. Remember to set up your author box on your WordPress blog so that Google understands your an expert
In this episode, we take a look at the 4 items that help build internet success. We cover the need for onsite content and building authority for your site and for your brand. We also look at Social media and the proper use of social media to build up the reputation of your website and the brand. Our topic covered various small business types and owners. This is a great place to start if you are new to internet marketing or not sure what you really need.
In today’s episode, our topic covers the use of a chamber of commerce membership and how it will impact your local search success. We cover how to find and identify a good chamber of commerce that will help a website. We discuss website authority. And, we also discuss which ones you should join based on where your business is located and what it is you hope to achieve. We also recommend https://www.hwcoc.org and https://www.houstonnwchamber.org as good chambers if you are based in the Houston area.
