It’S a search engine, optimization service and you’ll, be explaining what that’s all about thanks for joining us Chris. You bet thanks for having me on today. Well, for the sake of brevity here. Let’S go ahead and refer to search engine optimization by its industry. Shorthand initials SEO stands for search engine optimization Chris, just what is SEO and why is it important to online marketing? Well, SEO is a track of skills that helps a website be found, and what’s happened? Is the internet is put the power into people’s hands the consumers hands, while traditional media marketing has always pushed the messaging at people, the internet really asked people to pull it from them.
So most online sessions include querying a search engine and that event is the marketers opportunity to be present on the search result without applying SEO to a site. It won’t be present for the search results. So it’s a very important aspect of having a website today. In kind of a new twist on the old saying that, if you build it, they they will come, but really if they can’t find you they’re not going to come at all.
Are they exactly so you better build it right? Well, who needs SEO and what sorts of companies are you working with? Are they large companies small companies? Well, we deal with all sizes. We have a lot of state associations, visitor centers for States and things like that, and then we have a lot of mom pop businesses for sure. A lot of our business has sprung out of my past life, which was marketing in the hospitality industry, and so that kind of gave us an ability to leverage ourselves into the search engine, optimization business.
But basically, unless a website is designed just to be shown when someone – and it is asked about it – in other words, if if a business owner was asked, do you have a website and he gave somebody in a dress that would send somebody to that website. But if that’s all, you ever do with your websites and that’s all you ever have to do, but as we know what we’re really trying to do with web site to get our message out to new people, people who have never heard of us.
So in that aspect everybody needs SEO, because really, if you don’t optimize your site for search engines, how is anybody going to find you out there? It’S really quite a revolution in the marketing model? Isn’T it we’re now just for the cost of getting a host, which quite often is free and putting up some creative content and getting yourself well placed in a search engine? The small guy is on equal footing with the big guys.
Aren’T they to some degree? Absolutely. I mean for a hundred years, marketing and advertising was about shouting about who we were and hoping that people would take notice of us, and now we basically sit in a library waiting for someone to find us so very, very different methods. So you can succeed simply by being clever these days very much so when there still is room for four people with great ideas and not a pocket full of cash for sure.
Well, what are some of the general principles of SEO? Where does it all start? Well, in one word Steven, it’s definitely relevant. All items on your page have to be congruent with each other, and this is a lot of what people miss, because it’s so simple and what I try to have people understand is a search. Engine is just a computer application. If you will all it seizes pluses and minuses, and so it has to be able to add something up from all of that and come up with an answer, so you have to give them the answers.
Who are you? What do you do? Why do you do it when you do it and where do you do it? If you don’t answer those age-old questions of marketing, then there’s no way for the search engines really to be able to compile that information and index you correctly into their collection of literally hundreds of millions of websites well and they’re, pretty clever at that, aren’t they. I know they have certain algorithms, that these search engines use, and quite often their top secret, that Google algorithm.
Sometimes it seems that people are focusing on trying to chase the algorithm, rather than simply starting with the fundamentals that you talk about is who are you targeting and and what value? What content are you going to provide? Well you’ve got that right. If you’re an expert done safe flying pigs, but your site talks about the birds and the bees, you’ll fall short of your goals. To be sure, I want to quickly do a Google search on flying pigs.
I imagine there’s probably a website specializing in it. How about some of the specific fundamental steps that you take when you’re, providing your your search, optimization service, one or three or four fundamental steps that you offer well given the opportunity to get involved with a client early on in their process of either creating or redesigning A website there’s a lot of things we can do before.
Even one piece of code has been written, it’s so important, especially these days that a site be built. What we called search engine friendly and what I mean when I say search engine friendly, is that a computer application such as a search engine is able to do some things, but it’s not able to do other things. So if you build a website that makes it hard for the search engine to traverse across all of your pages and your navigation and your links, then it’s not going to find all of your information.
So we get in right at the beginning with the web designers and make sure that the site is being built search. Engine friendly, for example, fret using frames, might not necessarily be a friendly thing to do absolutely frames. Overuse of flash there’s there’s a number of pitfalls to be sure, there’s literally dozens of types of code that will display a web page, but not all of them will will allow us their tension to read it.
So all these great bells and whistles might be good for holding somebody once they get there, but isn’t necessarily going to work to attract them in the first place. Exactly I mean if we’re not on the first page of Google, for what it is, we’re offering our chances of being found, at least through search or slim, to none yeah. I’Ve heard quite often in studies, you may get millions of returns, but if you’re not in the top ten or the top twenty, you might as well, not even be there or what? If you optimize yourself for something, you think would bring you a lot of traffic, but it’s completely irrelevant and you find yourself getting a thousand visitors a day who have no interest in what issue offer people do that at more and then you would believe.
After after we have a search engine friendly site design, the most important thing that can be done on the page on each page of the website is make sure that correct titles and meta descriptions are used that match the content of the site. It has to be targeted at specific search phrases that have been proven through research that you’ve done to be the way that people actually search for what it is you offer we can’t just assume.
We know how people search we have to go out and do the research as to how they actually perform the searches that they do that bring up the websites that they’re looking for now may toe tags may sound like a fairly complicated concept of people who aren’t Used to actually web design web development, but it seems to me it’s one of the simplest things to do for most effective return on your efforts ago with search engines.
It’S very simple, very obvious. There are a few rules, and most people completely forget about it by the time they get to that part of their web design. They’Ve spent so much time and effort coming up with good graphics and writing whatever their their information is the simplest things get missed and that’s where the opportunity lies for people who are paying attention for sure, which is all for naught if it’s not optimized, for the Searches well – and you know finally, an interesting thing about websites.
Is there never finished? You know that the final of three fundamentals that that I list for people is that always be considering that you have never-ending improvement in growth of what was originally unique content that you wrote, in other words, don’t go and steal a bunch of content from someone else And expect to do very well for the search, especially if you never go on to go back to that patient and work it over even more.
So you want to think of yourself as being a contributor to the web and not just adding more noise to all of that. That’S out there it’s a never-ending process, that’s for sure, as the Internet itself, and can you think of any industry that you have ever seen that it has revolutionized the marketplace so quickly is the internet? Look at what’s happened in just the last decade? Absolutely – and you know, I would bet that people from the 30s would say that direct mail certainly change things and it did back.
Then this is nothing more and nothing less than that. It just has the ability to reach people is like nothing ever before. What is a job like for a SEO specialist? Does it give you flexible time with your online work? Does it give you free time for some of the other projects that you might be working on? Oh absolutely, but I caution people that if you don’t enjoy the work that you do, this will be drudgery like nothing else, so very specialized.
The vital research and I like competing, and so those two things are what I spend the majority of my time doing. The writing of titles and descriptions and tweaking people’s content. So it’s congruent with that is the easy part.
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This is the show where you get to know about all the technological advancements that are happening around the world. My name is on going okay and in this particular show we are blessed to have two wonderful young gentlemen who are business partners. We have cahiim Angemon, who both work at the East African online company. Welcome to the show I’m happy to have you great.
Thank you for having us. How long have you been in Somalia – and I understand that you both were in Canada for quite some time, yeah yeah we’re both born a boy in Canada born in Canada, oh and now, you’re here from Island yeah. But this is only this is wrong, and how did you guys get to being involved in digital marketing, because I hear you’re, training, people or not digital marketing is like how did this start and while digital marketing will and the way we started, was we seen really A big gap in the market over here where and people were not used to anything digital.
You know they’re using traditional tools like you know, commercials or you know, and posters flyers, mail stuff, like that. You know so then on and when we first introduced digital marketing and we had our first project and the guys were working for. I were doing an another project for it. They started calling us engineers, you know it kind of. Did you know so I kind of motivated us, you know yeah and motivated us to uh to establish a company.
You know, how did you learn, you know and tell you know we found out guys that you know build toilets are called engineers too. You know so he told me oh yeah, yeah, so jamelia, the founder of east african online. Tell me you story like: where did it all stands? Yes, suddenly I’ve been here for two and a half years going on my third year. I shall assume it started. Actually, as a pilot project, you know to Sharla.
We said that there is a big problem here with unemployment, so there was many people they had many of the youth. They had no jobs and most of them they had this idea that they can’t work the government. They have to get from a chopper mm-hmm and, if you for me the idea of unemployment, it’s so it’s a figure. That’S an idea, somebody that they they. They believe that this this much of a percentage of people living in this land and they don’t have an opportunity to work.
What if somebody wants to work? It’S like the prophets of Allah release a large if you were to have true reliance upon your not, but there are lines that you are supposed to have upon it and you were to go outside seeking URIs Allah is going to provide for you like he provides For the birds, so the birds they leave, the house starving, looking for their profession and then when they come back home, therefore they have what they were entitled to that day, although he provides for every single living creature on this planet.
So somebody if he wants to work, you can work. Even if you look at the history of the world most of the people, they were either they learned their skills and they walked with their skill or they involve themselves with trade. So just this generation people they believe that the government they’re entitled to given me a job and they say the government is corrupt and ok, if you believe the government is corrupt, you’re going to worry you’re going to depend your livelihood on somebody who’s come.
You cannot know what you’re going to you can’t. Even trust me with who you are here. Are your backpack? Yes, Jenny. You want me to your I’m going to defend my livelihood on, doesn’t make sense mm-hmm. What we did was we saw that there’s a big opportunity for people to to work, unlike something called the digital economy today, so almost four billion people they connected to the Internet. Four billion people the whole world, maybe there’s eight billion people, almost the entire world, half of the one we on the Internet.
So if you look at, I had a case of our example. Our case has two million people, maximum two million and four billion they’re. Not the same so you can reach more people, yes, its own surface, its own market mmm-hmm. So if you give people that opportunity what they’re spending time, I facebooking doing things that there’s no no benefits for them, they can. They can make money office yeah the social media platform, so I started off one in two and Charlotte gave people an opportunity to work.
I’M the lessons day to officiate over 800 students. Those students under that is a number of success stories in Orissa where they earned income online no handle is digital marketing. People are used to the traditional ways of marketing. So what is digital marketing? In a nutshell? Him? Okay and digital marketing is basically promoting a product or service using an digital technology like phones and computer apps and and using modern technology.
You know reaching people, but the social media, social media, Google and email and that’s about it. So among all these tools, Richard is more popular for digital marketing, which n is more effective. Is it Facebook? Is it email with it Google search like which is which Facebook Facebook could be yeah? I think Facebook could be and a number one, the number one because and I think about Facebook – is it’s very easy to connect to a big platform at one time.
You know and your target audience you could you could and specify the people that you wan na you wan na target. You know your audience, you know, so that’s what makes Facebook different from everything else you know so like if I want to reach out to women – and I have this product of selling, I’m able to identify which groups the women are in or pages the best. This way is to understand Facebook, how they, how you’re able to even reach that woman in Boerum a were in my rope, yeah Facebook, there’s no company in the whole world that has more information and its users in facebook.
So Facebook, when you log on to Facebook, Facebook, a knows your email and knows your name in those. Your phone number knows where you live knows who your friends are and knows where you worked and knows where you want to score the things that you read on Facebook. If you go to soccer pages – and those are here – somebody who, like suck mm-hm so everything that you do on Facebook is recorded yeah, it has a database okay Jamal.
He is somebody who always goes on this page. We’Re going to put him under that category. Now, when you know that Facebook has the most data in the world – and you want to use this database, facebook allows you to use this database. So me, I used to work at a company called stats, Canada. That company is the best statistical organization in the world. What they do is they collect data, they sell their data, they put out statistics every single year so to buy data from a company its money because money yeah, but the best company in the world, the one that has the most date in the world’s Facebook and It allows anybody to use their data miss.
So how do you use a database campaigns? You put up advertisements, you say I want to target. You know the women in this country that age group really. I only want to target the people who like soccer or who, like frankincense or like, and then Facebook will tell you. Okay, we have information on 100,000 people that are like, then, when you want to do an advertisement and you reach those people you’re going to put your budget, I want to spend $ 10.
Facebook will say: okay. Well, we can estimate it reach that many people every single day, the time you want and the people that you want, there’s no there’s no advertisement platform in the world that can do that right now. If I go to CNN or Al Jazeera – and I give them all of that money – maybe a few thousand dollars to put out a commercial just for one night – al Jazeera can’t guarantee with the people who are going to read the commercial.
They can’t guarantee me as much people as Facebook and guarantee me two billion people. They use Facebook, it’s the whole world, we think there’s not even it will bring it to me where people who are in Cyprus, there’s no TV network, cable now and the whole world has a reach of more than a billion people. So when it comes to Facebook has the most data you can target, whoever you want, you can reach a lot of large amounts of people mm-hmm.
My opinion is same, is kind there’s nothing like Facebook, Terry and even other digital platforms. Google search engine optimization YouTube. There’S no comparison to traditional music yeah, so you are telling people that you get value for your money. If you pay Facebook to advertise, you get value for your money as compared to when you do it, maybe on other traditional. If I ask you give me $ 20 and I give you 20,000 pieces of papers – and I say go to the souk, then I go to the market.
I want you to reach, you know just people in Hargis. This is an example. Visa handout, 20,000 paper study. When you probably got ta say it’s impossible, I can’t do that, match people or you’re going to say. If I do even that people at $ 20, it’s not a lot of money. For that, it’s you might. You might accuse me of Russia mm-hmm. So then, if you go to Facebook, you say I’ll, give you five dollars today it can reach not only that amount of people, people who you want to reach.
I give me twenty thousand papers and I say reach that specific person in that specific location. You’D, probably even if you want to do it, you won’t be able to be impossible graduates, yeah mm-hmm. What is Google search like there are times when you go to Google and maybe you’re searching for a handbag, and then pictures of a handle will come up and they have brands on them. How is that effective in digital marketing? So Google has a number of ways.
You can market on cool when it’s called Google search engine, optimization the process of being on page number, one on mobile. So if you want to you know as an example Somaliland that word when people search it on google, if I ask you you search Somaliland, are you more likely to go on the pages on the websites on page number, one or the websites? On the other pages, page number, you’re going to say page number, one will be out of 100 more than 80 % patient over 1.
They don’t go past it when they search something specifically that keywords so Marilyn has around 10,000 to 100,000 people searching at every single month those people. If your website is on page number one. You have around 10,000 to 100,000 people coming to your website that much if you have a store in our case – and you have 10,000 to 100,000 people coming to your store that month for your store is very successful treatment of 1 %.
They buy something from that store, so your website is right. Your store people, you need people coming into your store. Google search engine optimization is one way of marketing a product. You mentioned something about pictures of handbags. It’S another way. You can advertise an herbalist or advertisements. Google Adsense program Adwords, you pay a certain amount of money depending on the keyword the menu on the websites you want to put it on.
Google will take your advertisement and put it on a website that enabled Adsense and that’s another way of you advertising your product. It’S also a very effective way, and I would say it’s second to Facebook when it comes to very effective, a very effective. How many people have you trained so far, because I hear you guys are not just doing digital marketing like you’re, also trying to reach out to young people and then any young people in her case or who are interested in digital marketing? Wow.
That’S a really good question and first of all, iron Africans are people back home, especially Somalis. They love learning new things. They really love, learning, new things and they’re really fast learners. So, as my brother Jamal was saying earlier and over the span of two years and and we trained eight hundred plus people, a big number – yes, a really big number and that Damona success stories and that came out of that 800 people was phenomenal and the long We first started the program.
People didn’t even believe that you can work on just like Annie said people in Africa, but they love to learn and they love to learn. So after two years nothing go to the super-nervous you’re going to see everybody now, of course, online store online online. Many people are trying to earn income online mm-hmm. I haven’t come to the dollar store, mmm Delilah, so you’ve reached out to a number of people.
Yes, how have companies now adapted to going the digital way, companies in some islands advertising online as compared to Hangzhou before mm-hmm? How would you rate it? Well, when the conversion was was mashallah, and we were here before an odd change so alhamdulillah and handle we were ready for the change and and then hamdulillah. We seen whenever, whenever a hit the market – and we seen a lot of businesses asking for e-commerce websites and in social and non, how to social media market and all those and basically how did change their their and promotions and their advertisements and to the digital marketing And al hamdulillah, we we we, we took a we took and yeah.
It was a good, very good opportunity for us to basically and build our brand. You know yeah effort and people, not only in her case of all over and East Africa to really and get to know what we really do and you know hamdulillah and we seen the change. We seen the change, we seen the change physically. You know you seen the change in and HMDA led that demand is there now. You know, as in two before people were more asking questions on like the quizzes and I just really real.
What is it yeah? Well, what is this you know till now, people are asking us questions that that are more and there are more on digital marketing and coming to us with things that we didn’t even know they knew about. You know yeah, so people are starting to take and they’re to learn about these things. Now you know so alhamdulillah. Now, if you go out to soup, you see a lot of young guys asking these on business people if they knew websites as a chance to train a lot of businesses exactly biggest turkey, telecommunications company nice, to meet you their stuff, the marketing department, everything that they Do now digital marketing mm-hmm was a changed.
It changed a lot and and we’re even getting contacted by by and NGOs big NGOs not who are trained and refugees and people and refugees and and people in need. You know on how to earn income other than the more traditional ways you know so I have today. Like you know, people are good people. I really like like something that yeah exactly the accepting it yeah really acceptable. Do you need any special skills to be an digital marketer and their secrets snake? Can you share with us a few secrets? You need to be online tuned for hours like what you need to have.
Is it just basic IT knowledge and doing how to use a phone like? What else do you need number one? You need a computer and then you have to do research, so it’s our it’s like any other venture. If you want to become a doctor, you have to learn how to become a doctor. You have to study a number of years. If you want to start a business, you should know you should do research before you get into that business.
So you can waste a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money. Just give you an example when you want to advertise on Facebook. Facebook has something called algorithms system of Facebook. If you want to to people, they use the same amount of money. One person uses $ 10, the other person uses $ 10 same, not yeah. They both did a campaign. They both are good at the same location, but one person he reached 100,000 people in person.
He reached 1,000 people, so why? Why did one person reach a lot? Why the one person reach small amount, one person he put up a picture that picture had a small amount of words: three words LS the other person. He put up a picture with a lot of voids inside the picture, so Facebook’s algorithm system. Facebook will look at the pictures and see. Okay. This picture has a lot of words. We won’t show it to a lot of people.
This picture has a small amount of words, so just doing research beforehand, learning Facebook’s algorithms learning the system of Google learning the system of YouTube. You will be able to better optimize. Your campaigns engineer is the difference between articles like if I feature and a article which one will be viewed, I think I can answer that and the article is it’s not as nada. It’S not like a magic trick, or you know, as my brother was saying, you know, there’s there’s there’s just as a guru, those and algorithms is and when it comes to, as he said, the pictures less words you have the more people I reach the same thing With articles as articles is the shorter, the article that better cuz mom’s going to sit around for 30 minutes or an hour to read a article because as humans, we all have short attention span.
You yes, so then, and the best article, the best type of article, that you want to really target and to reach your target and a big platform over a platform and an audience is a article that is maximum three minutes with all the details. Yes, the basic details summarized maximum three minutes and, and that is that the best quality article to reach a target and a wider platform, and – and that is it’s – not it’s not magic.
Is you know it’s just you know yeah, but as as you go along, you know, you learn these things through trial and error. You know so then, just you know, keep trying. You know ya know. Technology keeps changing, they’ll be doing. Digital marketing in 2019 might not be the same that we used to do it’s, maybe in 2016 duty to keep up with technology like yes, it’s very important time, for example the one who goes to school.
He said his IT. He graduates in 2015 he’s not going to be the same as a person who graduates this year. Technology changes every single year, for example. If you wanted to be on the first page of Google and be more than ten years ago, all you need is to have the same domain name is what somebody is searching, so somebody searches some Island you’re, going to see some Island calm. Now, every single year, google has panda updates so this year, they’re going to add something else: the example this year in the year before social social trends, it’s very important what you want to be on the front page of Google.
So, just keeping up with the updates knows there’s a lot of factors they take into consideration the balance of website traffic yeah yeah yeah, so you know ready to give the people my personal fish, I’m not really not. Really. I want to keep a business and, as my brother said in East Africa online we have a Facebook page around 20,000 followers. We have a website, you know, and we have. We have a building and hosted yeah and the theater and downtown Hargeisa is behind and it’s in the neighborhood reiha-sama you can’t miss it and and – and you can come at the offices there you could come, we can and we’re open to anybody anytime.
You know and hamdulillah we’re we’re here, we’re here and Hum Dil. I know and we’re here to help our country you know and I’ll handle a lie. Lie lie, has brushed us a lot so far. You know yeah so hamdulillah and I advise people to consider digital marketing as a career. Does it be it’s digital marketing is a way to help them work so online itself, there’s many different types of jobs that you can do.
If you want to be a freelancer affiliate marketing, you just want to outsource mm-hmm. If you have your own type of business, you want to promote it online. You have a service you’re, offering people. Digital marketing will help you in every single Junction. If you want to just like marketing in real life – and you want people to come to your store, yeah you have to marketing digital marketing is the same thing.
It’S going to bring people to me. Well, thank you. So much for making time, I’m sure our audience have loved to hear from you. We’Ve learned a lot that maybe we did not know and thank you for being young people who are making a big contribution in our economy, because you’re creating jobs and it’s having people that you do not have to wait for official employments work in a government office Is money online? Yes, so thank you so much for making time for money and technology to our audience.
There are also many facets to SEO as well. And it’s important to know what those facets are. We have keyword, research, metadata and a Variety of other things Today we’re going to be focusing strictly On metadata, But I wanted to include keyword research because It’S extremely important not to start filling out your metadata before you’ve executed a Really well thought-out and well-researched keyword, research campaign And we can talk all about that at The Net.
Impact, We know a lot about keyword, research and we Can definitely help you with that as well, But today, let’s dive into metadata Metadata consists of keywords that you list On your page, your page’s description headings, alt text for images and title tags for your Page Now, it’s important to know that all this Metadata is behind the scenes. If you’re looking at a web page, you will Not see any of this metadata actually rendered on the page that the consumer, or that your Web visitor sees It’s all in the background and it’s all for The search engines, So, first of all keywords, Keywords are very important to metadata.
You want to make sure that after you do your Keyword, research you’re applying the best keywords that are focused to your page, not Too broad not too overly specific, and you wan na make sure that you use a lot of those To attract visitors to your page, So two things to remember about keywords: Are that they are…you have an unlimited number of space, but don’t abuse it and you Want them to be focused to your content.
Next is the description. The description is, what will actually show Up in your Search Results Snippet as Google calls it. So the description is your search result. You got the search right here and you’ve got The listing one-two-three listing This is your snippet. Now it used to be that the descriptions would Show up exactly as you had entered them into the snippet, but now Google will pull from A lot of different areas to create that snippet.
So if you have a really well-written description, A lot of that description should show up in the snippet Headings, You’ll see headings in your source code, One of the things that a lot of people do For search engine, optimization is they’ll check, source code And all you have to do to check source code. Is CTRL+click or right click on the page and you have the option to view source code And you can see all of the code.
That’S behind! Your website, which includes the metadata So headings, will be listed in your source. Code as H1 H2 H3 – And these are all really important because They basically tell Google what the hierarchy of your content is. An H1 is more important than an H2 is more Important than an H3 – And you know a lot of times – they’re headings – They’Re bolded, so they show how your content is organized on your website.
We also have alt text for images. This one is…, There’s a little debate about how to do. Alt. Text I know even among the team here we might Have a little disagreement about what exactly alt text should be, But let’s say you’ve got a picture right here. And we’re going to you know…, Don’t judge my art skills, but we have a tree. With a sun rise in the background, Well, typically, alt text is supposed to describe Exactly what that image is, So it’s basically describing the image it’s Not giving any additional information about it, So you have.
.., The alt text would be. You know Tree at Sunrise Now, a lot of times there’s a deeper meaning. To that image than just what it shows in the physical sense, And so there’s also another metadata field, That you can add to an image, it’s the long description field And in the long description field you can Provide more info about that picture, So maybe this is a tree at sunrise, right, Before a rainbow appeared over the Grand Canyon, That would be where you can add content that Would maybe connect that image specifically to the content on your page Title tags? This is a big one.
A lot of the search engines will use different Lengths of title tags, but you wan na keep your title between 60 to 70 characters And you might wan na do a little research on These There’s a lot of speculation that title tags: Are changing that Google is changing, how they create title tags for pages? Typically, title tags were given a lot of Weight in search engine rankings and they were used to basically determine the content.
Of the page, But now there’s evidence that Google was Possibly creating title tags with additional information from H1s and descriptions And they may be updating title tags or adding Title tags where there were no title tags before So there’s a lot of discussion going on in The SEO community about that right now And you know some companies will create Title tags for their pages and they’ll render exactly as they listed them, and other companies Will create title tags and they’ll show up slightly different than how they have them.
On the page or even completely different, So that’s sort of a controversial item. Right now, but just keep your eyes open to see how that discussion progresses. What else is there? We have basically, all of your main metadata Listed out right here, but what else can influence your SEO? Well because of how Google is now creating New snippets, it’s increasingly important to make sure that you have good content on Your page and make sure that you have a great website information architecture.
So basically, what that means is when someone Visits your page make sure that it’s really easy to find the content that they’re looking For your navigation is very intuitive, And a lot of that comes through a wire-framing Process – and we do a lot of that work here at The Net Impact. Other things you might look at are ADA compliance. For those with disabilities, who might be looking at your website, I think part of that is having your alt tags.
Filled out, but there’s also a lot more that goes into ADA compliance as well. You wan na make sure that you are minimizing Your validation errors as well. So if you have a 404 error page not found You wan na make sure that you’re going through and checking your website and that all of Your links lead to a good page and that everything is well connected on your website. Finally, your URL, That’s probably one of the hardest things To change because you have to register a new domain But make sure that when you’re starting a Webpage or if you’re redoing a website and you can potentially change the URL, make sure That your URL still fits exactly what you want for your content and that your URL In and of itself will be intuitive to people who wan na know exactly what to expect to find On your website, That’s about it for our discussion of search Engine optimization, If you need any additional assistance with Search engine optimization or search engine marketing, please contact The Net Impact, We’ll be happy to help.
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Just take a look at it from your perspective. What do you do when you want to find something on the Internet? You search for it right and then you click on one of the links on the first page of the search results. In fact, more than 90 % visitors will behave exactly the same way ever wonder how those web pages at the top of your search results got there it’s, because they were search engine optimized, exactly how search engines.
Work is a closely guarded secret, but the main principles are known: they’re based on two main factors: keywords and links. Let’S focus on keywords: first, your chances for a better ranking grow when your website contains the same words that are being searched. Keywords are especially effective when they’re found in a website title address or headings, but careful quality over quantity should be your rule of thumb.
Some so-called SEO experts try to fool the search engines with some ridiculous keyword occurrence, instead of focusing on quality content first and how about the links websites that link to yours basically tell search engines that you have some good stuff there, but again quality over quantity links From irrelevant sites won’t help you get a better rank. What we’ve just talked about provides a basic introduction to SEO.
In reality, it’s not a simple task and you’ll definitely need someone to help you with it. Someone like us will develop a custom SEO strategy specifically for your business, identify the right keywords, right, friendly site code and figure out the best linking tactics but, most importantly, we’ll help. You find ways to provide high quality content for your visitors and search engines as well. So do not hesitate and contact us today.
You
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I get annoyed quite easily at bad data visualizations. I think it’s incredibly important to get it right to make sure using the right chart to make sure you format it correctly. You focus the attention right away. You remove all clutter so a lot of things going to building a good, visual and there’s a lot of things to consider.
What is the question that your audience might ask? Quad is the main message that you want the audience to take away when looking at your chart. So there’s a lot of things to to consider in order to make sure you build a good, visual and there’s already a ton of resources online. They talk about how important is the use of color the choice of the way you present your dashboard, the orientation of the dashboard, so a lot of a lot of things come come into play to build a good visual.
So I wanted to do a series of articles to kind of share my experience and give some ideas of how I like to address. Visualization and I am using real, live web performance website performance data and something that comes quite often in my line of work and something that I work with on a daily basis. So one of the things what you see in here is attend for website traffic. So really basic piece of data that actually can tell a lot about how the website is performing.
This is something that I do all the time. Usually I do looking at a period of 13 months or looking kind of year-over-year stacking of this role so for this example, I’m looking at a very simple wine chart that visualizes sessions through a website for a period of 13 months. So we can look at the beginning at the end of the of the line chart to compare year over year results, so this is built in Excel a fairly basic these days tool for data visualizations visualization, considering all the fancy tools that are available now.
I still think it’s great for building beautiful charts. So when you select data, this is, and you insert the line chart this is here. This example is how Excel is going to insert it. So this is the default, and this on the right is how I’ve worked around it. To make sure that I tell the story I want to tell with this and while this first example still shows a good upward trend for website traffic, there’s a lot of things that are cluttered so first, I always try to make sure I don’t make the audience Tilt their head so kind of aligning the horizontal axis so that it really aligns well – and it’s not tilted.
I’Ve included data labels on each data point which in this case is each month and when I include date, the labels. I always delete the vertical axis because I think it becomes really cluttered when we have two points of the same data I remove gridlines. I think they do add clutter in certain cases. They might be useful in this case. However, I think they would just add additional things to look at in this trap.
I always try to include a take away title and I’ve put a few annotations, so this is the one thing I really like about wine charts is that you can include annotations point to certain data points that are important and that you want the audience to look At immediately when they look at the chart, so this is really basic example of a line chart showing overall traffic to website. Another example that I see often is a line chart built for multiple categories.
If you want to look over time – as in this example right here, so I’m going to remove this to see the table with the data we’re looking again and website traffic by social media, and we want to compare how the traffic is, how these metrics are performing. Against each other, one thing I’ll be really careful is to not include more than three categories with the wine charts over the you know, chart that has more than three lines would become really cluttered tangled, and it would really be very hard to process.
So that’s why I’ve chosen an example with only three metrics in my second article next week. I will talk more about how you can handle data, where you have a lot more categories that you want to look at over time with the line chart. So this example here is what Excel inserts by default, and this is something that I’ve tried to rework. So I haven’t added a title here. This is something that you can consider depending again on what you want to tell with this data.
I have decided to use the axis rather than data labels, because with a few lines between each other, it will be hard to be certain numbers. So I have chosen to clean that and use an access and in terms of legend, I have put all this. The names of each social network, social media network at the end, so it’s very easy when someone’s looking at it to see the performance and not kind of look at the line, then look at the legend to make sure they’re looking at the right color.
So in this way it just makes it easier to follow the trend for each of the categories that you’re comparing. You can obviously be a little bit more careful with color and choose different colors. You might want to point a specific one with color, so what I think the takeaway here is from what I’m seeing is Facebook performing really well going up for the past 13 months, while the other social networks have experienced the dip.
So, in this case, you might want to analyze, what’s happened and what has changed in terms of compete are getting on those two social media networks. The other chart that I use a lot – and it comes very often handy and it’s probably my favorite chart – is bar charts and column charts. So here in this example, I have a single category bar chart. I’M going to move a little bit this, so I have two sets of data here that I want to talk about a little bit so in this first one we’re looking at users to the website for each day of the week summarized for the month, and in This case, I would rather have the data sorted by the way the category flows so the way the week goes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on, rather than sort by the number of users.
So there are a few use cases like that. You might want to look at hour of day again sorted by the progression of the hours or maybe age group again, this may go in a progression, so be careful what your data and how its structured and how you want to sort it. So in this example, I’m sorting by the category the way the days of the week flow in the second example, which is this chart right here – we’re looking at users to the website by social network and since social networks don’t go in a certain order.
I’Ve sorted this data by the number of users April to the website, so this is what Excel inserts by default when you click to insert column chart, rather in this case vertical bars – and this is what I’ve done with it. Using some formatting I’ve included a take away title I’ve chosen to highlight the day. That’S brought the most users to the website. You might not necessarily want to do that, but depending again on what you want to see with the chart, this could be a good idea to choose a highlighting color for the best performing or the worst performing category.
So the second example we looking at users by social media, so this here is what Excel inserts by default. When you choose a horizontal bar turn slightly first, the metrics – I haven’t highlighted them in this case, just because they are sorted already by the doc performing social media network again, depending on what you doing, and what do you want your report ones to focus on? You? Might want to choose to highlight the top one and I’ve included a takeaway title, so I’ve used a few that I’ve removed this axis so really trying to clean the charts to make sure it.
It looks good and is kind of right to the point. So other circumstances using a bar chart is, if you have multiple categories so like in these examples here and again I have by week and by marketing blog. The data by we looking at the day of the week is sorted by the way. The days go for marketing blogs, we’re looking at the top performing one altogether, so we are looking at blog subscriptions and use like the subscriptions on the website, and with this with the blog ones, I’ve included a total column where I’ve summed all the both of these Metrics so that I can sort by the one that performs best overall, not by a particular conversion type.
So let’s look at this day of the week. This is how Excel inserts it by default. This is what I have tried to do with with this chart. So I’ve chosen a color. There is software, for you know, kind of is the same color, it’s just different intensity. Just so it’s kind of I I think it looks better. I don’t want, otherwise it becomes really distracting when it’s bar charts and you kept to come. Look at two bar charts at a time for the same category and I’ve decided to keep the ledge and there’s a few things you can do depending on how long the names of those metrics are.
You might include them here at the beginning and get rid of get rid of the legend so that it’s again removing an export, an extra clutter, so here it in the bottom example, where we’re looking at those same conversions by blog. This is how Excel will inserted by default. Again, I have put their categories in the first order, and I decided to use a stacked bar chart and I think, with horizontal charts, horizontal bar charts, gaghe bars can actually look really good, especially if you only have two categories.
If you have more than two, it can become a little too colorful. Depending on how you keep you know, there’s ways you can look at formatting of those colors and choosing columns wisely. I have a article about that also coming up, so I’m going to talk more about how you can visualize with stacked bars, so in this again kind of the same concept and what I forgot to do here, I’m going to do it right now is to point Which color is what conversion so I’m going to use a text box I’m going to choose, although it’s sitting on top of it, I will still try and use the same color as the bar.
The color of the bar yes, and I’m going to can choose the colour of the border and hold it in this case. You can go all the way down and include these on top of each one kind of again, depending really on how you want to build your visual. I think I’m going to leave it like that. I think that’s pretty straightforward and easy to understand what we’re talking about for the rest of the chart, so I’m going to leave those right here and only appearing at the top.
So I hope this was useful and gave you some good ideas on how to approach data visualization for this. These two basic chart types that I find myself using very very often, and they come really handy when you load in a digital marketing, company, dashboard or website performance dashboard. I have a few articles coming up that I’m going to talk about more about the stag bar charts and how you can approach this.
If you have multiple categories more than two, how you can visualize how you know how you can avoid? Rather, a line chart that uses more than three categories so that you can avoid the tangling in the clutter of so many chart, charts and lines. Sorry whines. Well, I hope this was useful and thank you for reading and also join me. The next few weeks as I’ll, be publishing more articles on how you can tell a story with data using Excel.
Optimization some SEO seems like black magic. Having worked with Google search for over a decade, what I’ve learned is that, first, it’s not black magic and second, if you want long-term success, there aren’t any quick magical tricks that an SEO will provide so that your site ranks number one.
It’S important to note that an SEO potential is only as high as the quality of your business or website so successful SEO helps your website put your best foot forward so that it ranks appropriately in the spot, where an unbiased potential customer would expect your site to Be seen a successful SEO also looks to improve the entire searcher experience from search results to clicking on your website and potentially converting a good SEO will recommend best practices for a search friendly site from basic things like descriptive, page titles for a blog or small business.
To more complex things like language markup for a multilingual global site SEO is ensure that you’re serving your online customers a good experience, especially those coming from a search engine, and that your site is helpful, whether they’re using a desktop computer or mobile phone. In most cases, the SEO will need four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see potential benefit.
My strongest advice when working with an SEO is to request if they corroborate their recommendation with a documented statement from Google, either in a Help Center article, article or Google, a response in a forum that supports both one the SEO description of the issue. That needs to be improved to help with ranking and to the approach they prescribed to accomplishing this tasks. Requesting these two bits of information will help prevent hiring a poor SEO who might otherwise convince you to do useless things like add more words to the keyword, meta tag or by links, because if you search for google advice on this topic, you’d see blog posts and Articles from us that clearly explain that adding keywords to the meta tag wouldn’t help.
Furthermore, while google uses links for page rank, our documentation highlights that we strongly advise against the approach of buying links for the purpose of increasing page rank. One basic rule is that, in a majority of cases, doing what’s good for SEO is also doing what’s good for your online customers. Things like having a mobile-friendly website, good navigation and building a great brand. Additionally, if you’re a more established brand with complicated legacy systems, then good search, friendly best practices likely involved, paying off some of your site’s technical debt, such as updating your infrastructure, so that your website is agile and able to implement features faster in the long term.
If you own a small local business, you can probably do the initial work yourself check out our 30-minute article series on how to build an online presence for your local business. Now, if you still believe you want to hire an SEO, here’s a general process, one conduct a two way interview with your potential SEO check that they seem generally interested in you and your business to check their references.
Three act: four and you’ll probably have to pay for a technical and search audit 4. Decide if you want to hire, let’s break this down and start with step 1 conduct. A two-way interview in the interview here are some things: to look for. A good SEO. Doesn’T focus only on search engine ranking, but how they can help your business, so they should ask questions like what makes your business content and/or service, unique and therefore valuable to customers.
They want to know this information to make sure it’s highlighted on your website. For your current and potential new audience, what does your common customer look like and how do they currently find your website 3? How does your business make money and how can search help for what other blogs are you using offline advertising social networks 5? Who are your competitors? What do they do well online and potentially offline if the SEO doesn’t seem interested in learning about your business from a holistic standpoint, look elsewhere, it’s difficult to do good SEO without knowing about a business’s goals, their customers and other existing marketing efforts.
Seo should complement your existing work. The second step in hiring an SEO is to check references if your potential SEO provides prior clients be sure to check their references. You want to hear from past clients that the SEO was able to provide useful guidance and worked effectively with their developers, designers, UX researchers and our marketers. A good SEO should feel like someone you can work with learn from experiment with and who generally cares about you and your business, not just getting your site the highest rank as ultimately those techniques rarely last long if they work at all, they’ll want to educate you And your staff on how search engines work so that SEO becomes part of your general business operations.
Step 3 is to request a technical and search audit. If you trust your SEO, candidate, give them restricted view, not full or right access to your Google search console data, and even your analytics data before they actually modify anything on your website have them conduct a technical and search audit. To give you a prioritized list of what they think should be improved for SEO, if you’re a larger business, you can hire multiple SEO to run audits and prioritize improvements, see what each has to say and then determine who you could work with the best in the Audit the SEO should prioritize improvements with a structure like one the issue to the suggested improvement 3: an estimate on the overall investment, in other words the time energy or money.
It would take for your developers to implement the improvement and for Google search as well as searchers and customers to recognize the improvement. The SEO will need to talk with your developers to better understand what technical constraints may exist for the estimated positive business impact. The impact might be a ranking improvement that will lead to more visitors and conversions, or perhaps the positive impact comes from a back-end change that cleans up your site and helps your brand be more agile in the future.
Five, a plan of how to iterate and improve on the implementation, or perhaps how to experiment and fail fast, should the results not meet expectations that covers the structure of the technical and search audit. Now, let’s talk about each of these audits individually in the technical audit, your SEO should be able to review your site for issues related to internal, linking crawl ability, URL parameters, server connectivity and response codes, to name some if they mention that your site has duplicate content Problems that need to be corrected make sure they show you the specific URLs that are competing for the same query or that they explained it should be cleaned up for long term site health, not initial growth.
I mention this because lots of duplicate content exists on web sites and often it’s not a pressing problem in this search audit. Your potential SEO will likely break down your search. Queries into categories like branded and unbranded terms. Branded terms are those with your business or website‘s. Name like a search for Gmail is a branded term, while the search for email is an unbranded or general keyword.
An SEO should make sure that for branded queries such as Gmail, your website is providing a great experience that allows customers who know your brand or website to easily find exactly what they need and potentially convert. They might recommend improvements that help the entire searcher experience from what the searcher sees in search results to when they click on a result and use your website for unbranded queries.
An SEO can help you better make sense of the online competitive landscape. They can tell you things like here are the types of queries. It would make sense for your business to rank, but here’s what your competition is done and why I think they rank where they do. For instance, perhaps your competition has great reviews, really shareable content, or they run a highly reputable site. An SEO will provide recommendations for how to improve rankings for these queries and the entire searcher experience.
They’Ll introduce ideas like update, obsolete content. They might say your site is suffering because some of your well ranking content is obsolete. Has poor navigation a useless page title or isn’t mobile-friendly, let’s improve these pages and see if more website visitors convert and purchase or if they can micro convert, meaning that perhaps they subscribe or share content improve internal linking your SEO might say your site is suffering because Some of your best articles are too far from the homepage, and users would have a hard time finding it.
We can better internally link to your content to feature it more prominently, generate buzz. The SEO might say you have great content, but not enough people know we can try to get more user interaction and generate buzz, perhaps through social media or business relationships. This will help us attract more potential customers and perhaps garner natural links to your site. Learn from the competition your SEO might explain here’s what your competitors do well.
Can you reach parity with this and potentially surpass them in utilities? Or can you better show customers your business’s, unique value again, a good SEO will try to prioritize what ideas can bring your business, the most improvement for the least investment and what improvements may take more time, but help growth in the long term. Once they talk with you and other members of your team, such as developers or marketers, they’ll help your business forge a path ahead.
The last thing I want to mention is that when I talk with SEO s, one of the biggest holdups to improving away site, isn’t there recommendation, but it’s the business making time to implement their ideas if you’re not ready to commit to making SEO improvements. While getting an SEO, audit may be helpful, make sure that your entire organization is on board else. Your SEO improvements may be non-existent, regardless of who you hire so that wraps it up thanks for reading and best of luck to you and your business
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It’S a search engine, optimization service and you’ll, be explaining what that’s all about thanks for joining us Chris. You bet thanks for having me on today. Well, for the sake of brevity here. Let’S go ahead and refer to search engine optimization by its industry, shorthand initials SEO that stands for search engine optimization Chris.
Just what is SEO and why is it important to online marketing? Well, SEO is a track of skills that helps a website be found and what’s happened is the internet is put the power into people’s hands the consumers hands. While traditional media marketing has always pushed the messaging at people, the internet really asked people to pull it from them. So most online sessions include querying a search engine and that event is the marketers opportunity to be present on the search result without applying SEO to a site.
It won’t be present for the search results. So it’s a very important aspect of having a website today. In kind of a new twist on the old saying that, if you build it, they they will come, but really if they can’t find you that they’re not going to come at all. Are they exactly so you better build it right? Well, who needs SEO and what sorts of companies are you working with? Are they large companies small companies? Well, we deal with all sizes’um state associations, visitor centers for States and things like that, and then we have a lot of mom pop businesses for sure.
A lot of our business has sprung out of my past life, which was marketing in the hospitality industry, and so that kind of gave us an ability to leverage ourselves into the search engine, optimization business. But basically, unless a website is designed just to be shown when someone – and it is asked about it – in other words, if if a business owner was asked, do you have a website and he gave somebody in a dress that would send somebody to that website.
But if that’s all, you ever do with your websites and that’s all you ever have to do, but as we know what we’re really trying to do with websites to get our message out to new people, people who’ve never heard of us. So in that aspect everybody needs SEO, because really, if you don’t optimize your site for search engines, how is anybody going to find you out there? It’S really quite a revolution in the marketing model? Isn’T it we’re now just for the cost of getting a host, which quite often is free and putting up some creative content and getting yourself well placed in a search engine? The small guy is on equal footing with the big guys.
Aren’T they to some degree? Absolutely. I mean for a hundred years, marketing and advertising was about shouting about who we were and hoping that people would take notice of us, and now we basically sit in a library waiting for someone to find us so very, very different methods. So you can succeed simply by being clever these days very much so then there still is room for four people with great ideas and not a pocket full of cash for sure.
Well, what are some of the general principles of SEO? Where does it all start? Well, in one word Steven, it’s definitely relevant. All items on your page have to be congruent with each other, and this is a lot of what people miss, because it’s so simple and what I try to have people understand is a search. Engine is just a computer application. If you will all it seizes pluses and minuses, and so it has to be able to add something up from all of that and come up with an answer, so you have to give them the answers.
Who are you? What do you do? Why do you do it? When do you do it, and where do you do it? If you don’t answer those age-old questions of marketing, then there’s no way for the search engines really to be able to compile that information and index you correctly into their collection of literally hundreds of millions of websites well and they’re, pretty clever at that, aren’t they. I know they have certain algorithms, that these search engines use, and quite often their top secret, that Google algorithm, and sometimes it seems that people are focusing on trying to chase the algorithm rather than simply starting with the fundamentals that you talk about is who are you Targeting and and what value, what content are you going to provide? Well you’ve got that right if you’re, an expert on safe flying pigs, but your site talks about the birds and the bees.
You’Ll fall short of your goals. To be sure, I want to quickly do a Google search on flying pigs. I imagine there’s probably a website specializing in yet how about some of the specific fundamental steps that you take when you’re, providing your your search, optimization service, one or three or four fundamental steps that you offer well given the opportunity to get involved with the client early On in their process of either creating or redesigning a website, there’s a lot of things we can do before.
Even one piece of code has been written, it’s so important, especially these days that a site be built. What we called search engine friendly and what I mean when I say search engine friendly, is that a computer application such as a search engine is able to do some things, but it’s not able to do other things. So if you build a website that makes it hard for the search engine to traverse across all of your pages and your navigation and your links, then it’s not going to find all of your information.
So we get in right at the beginning with the web designers and make sure that the site is being built search. Engine friendly, for example, fret using frames, might not necessarily be a friendly thing to do absolutely frames. Overuse of flash there’s there’s a number of pitfalls to be sure, there’s literally dozens of types of code that will display a web page, but not all of them will will allow a search engine to read it.
So all these great bells and whistles might be good for holding somebody once they get there, but isn’t necessarily going to work to attract them in the first place. Exactly I mean if we’re not on the first page of Google, for what it is, we’re we’re offering our chances of being found, at least through search or slim, to none yeah. I’Ve heard quite often in studies, you may get millions of returns, but if you’re not in the top 10 or the top 20, you might as well not even be there or what? If you optimize yourself for something, you think would bring you a lot of traffic, but it’s completely irrelevant.
You find yourself getting a thousand visitors a day who have no interest in what it issue offer. People do that at more and then you would believe. After after we have a search engine friendly site design, the most important thing that can be done on the page on each page of the website is make sure that correct titles and meta descriptions are used that match the content of the site. It has to be targeted at specific search phrases that have been proven through research that you’ve done to be the way that people actually search for what it is you offer we can’t just assume.
We know how people search we have to go out and do the research as to how they actually perform the searches that they do that bring up the web sites that they’re. Looking for now. My toe tags may sound like a fairly complicated concept to people who aren’t used to actually web design web development, but it seems to me it’s one of the simplest things to do for most effective return on your efforts ago with search engines.
It’S very simple, very obvious: there are a few rules and most people completely forget about it by the time they get to that part of their web design. They’Ve spent so much time and effort coming up with good graphics and writing whatever their their information is the simplest things get missed and that’s where the opportunity lies for people who are paying attention for sure, which is all for naught if it’s not optimized, for the Searches well – and you know finally, an interesting thing about websites.
Is there never finished? So you know the final of three fundamentals that that I list for people is that always be considering that you have never-ending improvement in growth of what was originally unique content that you wrote, in other words, don’t go and steal a bunch of content from someone else And expect to do very well for the search, especially if you never go on to go back to that page and work it over even more.
So you want to think of yourself as being a contributor to the web and not just adding more noise to all of that. That’S out there it’s a never-ending process, that’s for sure, as the internet itself, and can you think of any industry that you have ever seen that it has revolutionized the marketplace so quickly is the Internet to look at? What’S happened in just the last decade? Absolutely – and you know, I would bet that people from the 30s would say that direct mail certainly change things and it did back.
Then this is nothing more and nothing less than that. It just has the ability to reach people is like nothing ever before. What is a job like for a SEO specialist? Does it give you flexible time with your online work? Does it give you free time for some of the other projects that you might be working on? Oh absolutely, but I caution people that if you don’t enjoy the work that you do, this will be drudgery like nothing else, so very specialized research and I like competing, and so those two things are what I spend the majority of my time.
Doing the writing of titles and descriptions and tweaking people’s content, so it’s congruent with that. It’S the easy part! When I worked in television and radio, we were always checking. How is our ratings, comparing with the competition from quarter-to-quarter even from day to day? Imagine you probably do the same thing with search engine optimization. Absolutely you know one of the one of part of our process with the client is that we report back to them on a regular basis, exactly how well they are competing in the marketplace.
So I’m constantly looking at that and to to an obsessive extent. I guess: do you focus on a range of search engines or do you target primarily the big one or how do you? How do you go about selecting your strategy? Well, isn’t that interesting come you know, we’ve seen the rise of Google come at the turn of the century and when they when they, when they change the way people searched at at that time, we were probably querying upwards of 20 to 30 search engines for a Client there were that many, and you can probably remember things like Lycos and hotbot all received millions of visitors a day that we’re searching on it and what we’ve seen, certainly in the last three to five years, is a closing down of that too.
At first there were, there were four majors that would be Google msn yahoo and you could say, ayo l, even though that was really just a portal for somebody else, but it had a lot of a lot of traffic at it at that time. A lot of members, it was not forget to ask jeeves write. A speech has always been a second fiddle to everybody, whether it ever will rise. You know above a percent or so of market share remains to be seen.
However, I’m a true believer that if someone can build Google in the year 2000, someone will beat Google in the year 2010. So we have got our eyes and ears out all the time. Looking at literally hundreds of beta tests of different ways of searching that are going on in the marketplace today and just in the last year or so, we’ve seen a huge explosion of what’s called social media and tagging things that have nothing to do with search engines.
But have an awful lot to do with optimizing: the information that you’re delivering the people much like we optimized for search engines and Chris Tucker. I know you’ve been doing this since 1996, that true, that’s quite a bit of evolution. You’Ve seen happening within search engines within the Internet itself and I’m sure you’re keeping a sharp eye on future trends as they come out as fast and furious.
We’Re fortunate that Chris is going to be sharing with us. A few leaks that we can take a look at of some of his optimized sites and see how their ranking in the search engines and what little tricks Chris may have been applying. Chris, it’s been a pleasure having you with us today we’re here some contact information for credits. His website is email if you’d like to discuss some of the topics of today or to get more information on its services, and thank you for joining us Chris.
Thank you for having me Steve.
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The wrong way, you know, they’re doing automation, tools they’re like no. You know that’s easy. I can just schedule the stuff out you’ll.
Basically we forget about it, but you know the three C’s of being. You know content consistency. Community community is the most important, even though it’s a third one, because without it for a brick and mortar business, you know you’re in person. If you don’t have a community around your business like it can be transactional, it can be like okay, I sell here got ill there, but after a while people going to be like well, what makes you guys different from the big chain, not much weight.
You know. So it’s the same thing with online communities is like you’re not connecting with the people, and I feel like a lot of businesses they think of it as being more. They think of social media like it’s just a online connection, thanks yeah now yeah, I’m an extension of TV radio, although traditional marketing out there, but it’s like it’s – definitely not that you can have a two-way conversation with their customer, even clients, and they want that yeah.
They want that because, like even for me as a consumer like when I reach out to you especially a local business – and you don’t respond to my call – okay well they’re all about talking about, though you know they’re about community and all that stuff guys, they don’t Fall through with that to where it’s like, okay, I get so excited with my favorite brands. All share my like we’ll retweet, nothing like.
If I take a picture of my food, you know and they retweeted I’m like. Oh my god, they did. Are you going to fail yeah under you, especially when they do that you’re? Like oh right, I’ve had some really fun conversations with like there’s. This bee bee vomit honey company? Okay, like what’s going on yeah – and I remember having this funny conversation with somebody where we shared an article about how honey is bee vomit, oh and they started in our conversation they joined in the conversation they were like.
It really is see ya. Well, I mean what right there is this build credibility, their business to to wear like you know, you’re, not just making up stuff and they’re, not just standing behind being silent, be like yeah sure just wait, you know, can I think they’re like yeah they’re participating in It as a person but, like you know, that’s the entity itself to where it’s like. You have a voice yeah the business online.
You know you do have a voice to where it’s like. You got ta talk with people, but you also got to make sure that you know when they ask you questions you respond so much about oh, hey, next special here and next special dare and oh come to our event kind. I think it’s like it’s not so much about the broadcasting so yeah, that’s part of it. It’S just that. You need to make sure that you’re having the conversation to told you’re, thriving online community and then in the end, it’s like yeah.
You might have 500 followers, but they’re 500 in games Paul, you know versus a million followers who don’t even know who that you exist. They’Re like based in other countries, they’re never going to buy from here, they’re just like Auto liking. Everything autocon think this is great. You know it’s like muffin, so it’s all about authenticity, yeah. I can appreciate that I feel like the online world is it’s very different than any other type of advertising and I feel like you, can’t really look at it as advertising.
If you want to be successful with it yeah, you have to really view it as something different as more of a relationship. You know customer relationship, management or customer relationship building platform versus looking at it like an advertising platform. Yeah, it’s all about the storytelling. I mean it’s just about just being real, like people are trying to flip that front up being like I’m like this or you know the business there being like.
I’M like this, but if they’re just they’re not telling a compelling story, people don’t know they’re. Just like. Okay, I’m going to go on to the next coffee shop or the next, whatever you know yeah, so what’s your favorite tip for businesses, small or large, and I want to start really cultivating a community for their business on social media. Well, I mean I guess especially for Twitter, but you can do it on Instagram and other networks as well.
Is that you know just think of what you want to listen for other business um? So you know twitter and instagram has the hash, hash tags and stuff. So you know, listen for or you know, put up search terms for people, for you know terms that basically would search 404, your business so, for example, pizza company. Yes, people are like I’m hungry or they use the pizza emoji. You know you could you’ll see what they’re talking about with their friends through that or you can just even pop in and be like.
Hey. You want pizza, we’re down the street from you I mean that’s that gets a little borderline CLD. You are so cute. It’S also you’re being a little more active in that way to where you’re not waiting for them to come to you right, so our people start doing that. Is it just like going to Twitter and searching or you can go through Twitter and search. You can also use tweetdeck, which is owned by Twitter.
Okay, of course, you know that’s more than what we can talk about this yep. I you know people want to reach out out to us and talk about it, and just have me do a tutorial. I can do that. Okay, awesome yeah. I know you do lots of workshops and things like that yeah well, thank you so much Helene for those amazing tips and helping people to understand the importance of building communities on social.
I wanted to do a article on search engine optimization. I want to do a little bit deeper of a dive. I’Ve done several SEO articles in the past. I had a good conversation last night with a genius SEO guy that I highly respect in the in the space, and we were kind of talking through some things, just kind of being marketing, guys discussing the ins and outs of what I’ve learned.
What they’ve learned and the one thing that I found was that everybody kind of has their own different flavor, but I will tell you that search engine optimization has changed vastly over the last five or six years. I mean what I want to do is kind of give you an overview to make sure that you kind of know what search engine opposition it optimization is how to actually go after those keywords that you want organically and then really just kind of build towards.
You know getting an organic ranking on Google to try and get that traffic that you don’t the pay for per click or pay for by lean with social etc. So the first thing I want to do is just kind of break down what I would call like. A Content first, what a lot of us say is content first SEO strategy. Now what I mean by that is is I believe that your website content is the chassis at which your search engine optimization is built upon, meaning I don’t care how great you’re out you know your external links are your reviews? Are your conversions that you’re getting through Adwords or whatever you’re getting that does have a factor in your domain Authority? If you don’t have a lot of educational, unique content pages on your website, you’re not going to ever be able to be ahead of someone.
That does and also has those things. So the first thing I want you understand is that content website content is highly important. Now, what is website content well website content would be the individual pages that are on your website, so I’ve done articles on the on the past on this on the past, talking about foundational content versus supplemental etc. But one of the things I want you to understand is that you really need a to be working towards a large website from a Content perspective from a page number perspective.
So one of the first things that we do whenever we go into analysis of a competitor and try and figure out what they’re doing to get you know so many dating quotes a day. I’Ve got a Medicare prospect right now. It’S getting 200 quotes a day from their organic SEO. Now they’ve been doing this for years, but that’s a huge number. I think I think they tell me 2000 policies a years what they’re getting from their organic.
You know website just passively. That’S those numbers are bonkers. Like right, so obviously, if we can understand and crack that code, then it’s a big big part of it. So content is: is the chassis of your SEO now there’s other things that are going to matter, but the main thing with content is that it’s unique in that it’s structured, the correct way with Google search console and that your pages are structured.
The correct way you got all your page titles set up all your meta descriptions set up h1 set up, your keyword, integrations, etc. There’S lots of ways to manage that, but you know just make sure. That’S that’s key, so every page in your website needs to be structured correctly from the meta data perspective and then once you get, you know a content strategy where you’re creating content, there’s other things that that we’re all noticing as SEO is out there that are really Affecting the overall organic listings, absolutely one of those things is just articles.
Okay, one of the things that I am seeing more and more and more and more is that those websites that have highly integrated articles, along with either transcripts below the article or actual, like blog posts, with the article embedded that matters to Google. If you, if you’ve noticed, Google has actually pushed organic listings, sometimes below the recommended articles, why do you think they do that? Well, let’s think about it.
For a second, if you’re googling a keyword on Google – and there is a article that explains that keyword better than a website, would then would Google rather give you the article or someone randoms website? Well, of course, they’re going to try and give you the article, because it’s makes sense for the user, but it also gives Google paid think about it. Every eyeball that goes to YouTube to look at articles on their actual platform is a potential eyeball to advertise to for their impressions.
So what Google is doing is actively moving up different queries, search queries based the note that, based on the nature of the search query, if it’s very informational – and there are articles that are tied to that, there give me those recommended articles above even the organic listings, Which is crazy, like that’s something I didn’t even see coming two years ago, so you know I’ve done millions and millions of dollars of search engine optimization across different industries and now that I’m in one specific industry, which is the insurance industry, I’m seeing that article is Making a big difference, it really is so that’s one of the things I want to talk through.
The next thing that I want to talk through is inbound links. Now this is a interesting conundrum. Okay, because Google has stated that they don’t want you to buy links. I don’t want you to engage in link building services, but there’s two main things that you got to pay attention to when it comes to link building one, the domain Authority and the content of the website. That’S linking to your website matters a ton getting a doggie daycare website to link to your life.
Insurance page is not going to help you in any way getting a Medicare gov link to your website will matter. I mean that’s huge okay, the thing that I don’t love about working link building into into SEO strategies is one. Unless it’s a major SEO strategy, then you want to do that, but for basic SEO strategies linking isn’t controllable or sustainable, meaning. I can’t guarantee myself X amount of Link’s for X amount of budget, so it’s difficult for me to really put resources towards it, because I’ve had clients and projects where we’ve tried to build links and we’ve done like hours and hours and hours and hours and hours Of work – and we only got one or two links done and it’s hard to quantify that as a return on investment, so snippet, it’s typically been something.
I’Ve tried to stay away from, not to say that inbound links aren’t like important, but it’s something. That’S it’s difficult to manage, but if you can get inbound links, of course, they help your domain authority, especially if that inbound link is a relevant website to the content that you’re trying to drive right. That’S that’s the key, so inbound links still work now. I will tell you that six, seven years ago the link wheel and link pyramids and all that stuff.
That was how you did SEO it didn’t really matter about your website as long as other web sites were linking to you as an authority, Google would give you that domain. That’S not the case anymore and just think about it. Would you rather go to a website that has a bunch of links tied to it on the backside or we really go to website it’s educational, informational answers, the questions that you’re looking for for that particular you know viewing session on the internet.
You know the answer to that. So does Google so they’re optimizing the backend smoke and mirrors away from search engine optimization? That’S why I still believe content first strategies are highly important. The second thing that I’m noticing that’s working out for SEO big-time is reviews. I had a client bring this up to me yesterday and reviews believe it or not do provide a somewhat of a link, but but there’s systems out there, where you can actually get reviews and reviews.
Well, let me try and explain this whenever you’re looking at search engine, optimization, you’re, typically doing things that are helping the search engine, robots, crawl, your website and rank where you deserve to be ranked, based on content based on domain Authority based on all the metrics that Are involved on getting on the top of the list, but you also have to tailor to your users your actual people that are looking at your website to get information and potentially opting in in the form of a lead.
So one of the things that reviews does is it really heightens the engagement of the user because it adds social proof to your overall. You know domain Authority, but also the individual. That’S looking through that, if they see that 14 people in the last you know 22 days have given you positive reviews, 5 out of 5 stars, then that’s absolutely going to be a factor for the user to determine if they’re going to opt in or not so.
But what is interesting is is that we’re finding also, and that reviews actually helped on the organic SEO site, as well as the user experience as well. I had always really kind of been under the impression that reviews were mostly user experience and less search. Engine optimization and the algorithm I’m seeing and based on what colleagues are telling me is that they’re actually merging the two you know together so, but what really ends up being the truth of search engine optimization is really just building a resource for people to educate themselves.
On whether it’s review content articles other websites that are linking to it as an authority as well, that is how you win the game in 20. You know 20, 19, almost 20, 20. So with a good search engine, optimization plan, I you shouldn’t like never ever ever. Do those $ 1.99 SEO bullcrap deals? All they’re doing is they’re taking 200 bucks a month for five months. Until you realize it’s not working, then you cut it, but you’ve paid them a thousand dollars and you just cut your losses.
Do not do that to do SEO the right way, and you know these in 2019, you have to have unique custom content written by human beings. You can’t even really spend content. You can’t figure out a way to bring in a bunch of content. That’S already written not going to work, it’s got to be custom and unique. You’Ve got to try and shoot and work towards articles, and you got to try to get to the point where you’re actually soliciting reviews, whether that’s through an email sort of acquisition.
After the customer, you know signs up with you hey. How did we do? Would you mind filling out this review platform, whatever you’ve been going into some sort of paid service? That would help your reviews would be something that you could think about to help your overall organic SEO. So those are the three things that I feel like have been supplementing the content first, but I really believe that your website content is the chassis that your SEO was built on.
As long as you can focus on those three things, you don’t have to do all these three also by the way. This is something that you have to do usually internally, it’s difficult to have an external company produce articles articles for you, because it’s usually your content. That needs to be on that article, but typically, this is where the SEO company can thrive. That’S what we focus on a lot is unique custom content and then coach on the reviews, coaching, the inbound links coach on the articles and just kind of provide some insight on what that looks like.
So we obviously do SEO for insurance. Only the interesting part about SEO is if it’s content first, that means you need to know what the heck you’re talking about about Medicare. We spend all day long talking, Medicare final expense, life, insurance, health insurance, long-term care, disability, all these insurance, because all we do so our copywriters only write for insurance, so we kind of know what infographics to produce what content to write etc.
So if anybody hires and unspecialized marketing agency anymore you’re silly because you need to be starting to find just like lawyers are doing, you don’t go, find a general attorney if you’re a criminal case, you go find a criminal lawyer. Well, I’m starting to actually refer other industries to my colleagues and they’re, starting to refer insurance people to me, because digital marketing is becoming such a huge part of people’s marketing budget and I used to own a jack-of-all-trades marketing agency.
And if I was competing with myself. Ten months ago, I today would just I laugh at how I would approach an insurance prospect, because it’s so different than how the general world operates from a digital marketing perspective. Please please please, even if you don’t hire secure agent marketing, if your insurance hire someone that specializes in insurance marketing, because it’s a big difference between how the general you know the general world markets, that’s that’s the truth, so I hope you guys found some value out Of this content, I try to kind of have to have these articles, be very educational, focused my goal.
I’Ve always said this. If you guys follow our content, I want to help you guys understand what is north there’s so much garbage information out there. That is just like people chasing rabbit trails that this don’t even make sense people that aren’t experts in anything trying to give advice, just it’s just bonkers. So what I hope this article can do is give you understanding of how SEO works in 2019.
And you know what guys this is going to change in six months. Also, it’s going to work more differently. Every six months, Google updates, the you know every more than six months. Google is updating how they are. You know, tracking websites etc. So I would HIGHLY encourage you guys to you know: take this model run with it and really don’t listen to any of the bye links and buy this or blah blah blah that just doesn’t really work anymore.
It’S got to be content. First, you need content and in order to even get to that point, you got ta have a website which we also can build as well. So hope you guys found value in this today and we’ll see you again on the next time.
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In letting more clients find your photography business, I’m Jamie from jamiedelainewatson.Com and Let’S get into basic search engine, optimization for wedding photographers right now, The first step to getting started with search Engine optimization on your blog is installing the Yoast SEO Plug-in I’m using a WordPress blog, which I highly Recommend for the functionality and availability of all their plug-ins.
If you don’t see this on the recommended page When you go to your WordPress settings and their plug-ins we’re just going to search From keyword here, Yoast SEO and you’re going to hit install now, I already have it. So that’s why mine says: Active so you’re going to hit install now, Once that’s done when you go to one of your Blog posts you’ll see it underneath your main blog post content At the end of your blog post content, you’ll See the Yoast SEO plug-in right here.
This is a really handy plug-in that allows You to set the focus keyword right here and also helps you to edit the snippet that’ll Be shown on Google when somebody searches, so this is how it will appear in Google. You Can edit that there Then they’ll also tell you an analysis of How your SEO’s doing so any problems they’ve found improvements. You can make and good Results Then the plug-in will give you either a red Light a yellow light or a green light for good, okay or bad.
You can this specific blog post, because I Haven’T worked on it yet says: “ SEO Okay” The second step to achieving a good SEO rating For your blog is to create titles that your ideal client is searching for For this wedding that took place at this specific Venue you can see that I’ve named it with the venue’s name, followed by wedding. This is a huge improvement versus naming the Blog post, Sarah and Brandon Wedding, because nobody is Googling for Sarah and Brandon’s Wedding Instead, I want to attract brides who are searching.
In Google, the name of the venue followed by wedding assumably, because they’re getting Married there and want to see examples: Let’s try this out. I’Ve opened up a new Chrome Window in incognito mode, What this means is that it’s not taking into Account any of my past history or personal preferences, and it’s not personalizing, my Google results at all, it’s all exactly as another client or another person would see.
I’Ve searched Robert H, Lee Alumni Wedding. Because that’s the title of the post – and you can see here – fourth, fifth, sixth, my Post comes up number seven based on that search result. This is an amazing way for me to market to Brides who are getting married at this venue and actually number eight, is also me from A wedding two years ago After you have your search friendly title. You’Re going to want to make sure that you have the same title right here in the permalink Because this also will help Google know that this is relevant information.
So not only is The title there it’s also here Another great title – I could add photos to The end of this, because that may be an exact search term that somebody would be using Either one You definitely don’t want just the venue name: You want to add wedding, if not wedding photos SEO tip number three is to name all of your Images in the specific blog post with the search term as well. All of these images that I’ve put into this Blog post that you can see here, they’re not called SarahandBrandon.
Jpg instead they’re Listed as RobertHLeeAlumniCentreWeddingPhotos01.Jpg You can see here, if you look into the HTML You can see all of these different images tags here. This is how I’ve named them. It’S quite easy to rename using a program. Like Photo Mechanic or Lightroom, and you can rename these really quickly and I have them All named under the venue name or the search term, The reason we name our images with the specific Venues name is: it provides another opportunity for Google to show off our photos to a client Who may be searching for the specific venue Instead of typing into the regular Google Search results.
I tested this out by clicking images and under images I’m going to search Through these are all images that Google has deemed relevant to this search term. Now I don’t see… Well. This is actually My image right here you can see Jamie Delaine Blog written there, so the third image is one Of mine and as we go down I’ll see a few more of mine here, this is also one of mine. It’S Even pulled in other weddings that aren’t at this venue because it’s been from my blog That had this wedding on it Here we start to see Sarah and Brandon’s The blog post – I was showing you so these are popping up here.
This is also one of there’s Now this is only going to increase in weeks. To come, this is a pretty new blog post. Maybe a bride would be searching for wedding. Photos on Google images, she’d click this and then she’d want to go see where this post Is and the next thing we know she arrives on my blog post here and hopefully contacts Me to book her wedding SEO tip number four is to include the name: Of the keyword you’re focusing on throughout the blog post, It’s not enough to just have it in the title: And in the permalink and in the images we can go one step further and include links.
Throughout You can see that I’ve done that here by saying “, I’d love the chance to photograph weddings at Robert H, Lee Alumni Centre,”, while linking To the venue site, I’ve also listed it here under Ceremony and Reception Venue there. You always want to make sure that this flows Naturally, you definitely don’t want to just copy and paste that link a million times. That kind of used to be the old SEO rules 10 years ago.
What you’re going to want to do is try to Fit this in naturally with what you’re saying I could have probably done even a better job. At this, a good example would be. I could go down to where there’s a reception image like Here, for example, this is the ceremony and I could say something like I love photographing. In this beautiful space at the Robert H Lee Alumni Centre and then I could link to that As well – and that would be another way of introducing my keyword into the blog post SEO tip number five – is you want to include Quality links throughout your post A really easy way to do this when we are wedding, Photographers is to link to all of the vendors involved in the day I’ve gone through here, and I have every single Vendor and a link to their website, this is showing Google that my website is quality.
And it’s also focused on directing traffic to other quality websites, and so I’ve linked All of these here These are called outbound links, you’ll also Want some inbound links, which means bouncing people around to other blog posts? You have That they may find relevant Something I maybe should have done with this Post is, I could say, “ P.S. If you want to see another wedding photographed at the UBC Alumni.
Centre,”, it’s another name for it: “ You can visit Jamie and Jason’s wedding, blog post Right here,,” and then I would link this to another wedding that I did at the Alumni Centre. And that provides another quality link to Google to show that my website is worth indexing. And bumping up in the search results, The sixth and final SEO tip is going to be Using alt tags in your images, Essentially alt tags are something that describe The image to Google, because Google doesn’t know what they’re actually looking at it’s Relying on all of this data we put in our blog post and in our images to provide quality Search results for people who are searching In WordPress if you click the edit button.
Here on the image you’ll see the alt text under alternate text written here. I’M going to write Robert H, Lee Alumni Centre. Wedding Photos: this is telling Google that this is what this image is about. Let me click update. What this means is that When I go to this image here and say you have a pin it Pinterest button, I can click, save And my alt text will automatically be imported here so anytime.
This image is shared you’ll Have that text embedded in the image through the alt text, Of course, adding alt text to 80 images? One By one, by using this, edit tool would take a long long time, so instead, what I do is I use the HTML version of this post If you’re new to HTML we’re going to click Over here to text and then I’m going to copy all of this text by going command C. But I’m Going to open up my text editor Once I have my text, editor open, I’m going To go format, make plain text so there’s no formatting and then we’re going to paste.
This This looks like a confusing amount of code. But what we’re going to look for here is alt equals two quotes, We’re going to use the find and replace and We’Re going to have alt two quotes go here, so this is what we’re finding and then what We want to replace it with What we want to replace it with. Is your keyword? Search term Anytime, you see this in the document. It’S Going to replace it with that, so we’re going to replace all and then we’re going to copy This text again and drop it back into the text editor and cover everything there Then you’re going to want to make sure that Nothing else changed in your post, which it didn’t and then you’re going to hit update.
And that’s a really quick way to update all of your alt text. I hope you enjoyed this article if you want More tips on how to find your ideal client and how to bring more work into your photography. Business you’re going to want to head to jamiedelainewatson.Com/50ideas five zero ideas and there’s over 50 ideas. For how to market your photography business and bring more clients to your awesome work, If you like this article, please give it a thumbs.
Up subscribe and comment below, and I would love to hear from you in the comments and Interact with you there. Thank you so much for reading
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