Originally posted 2018-02-09 14:49:41.
I was recently listening to a great podcast on Michael Covels Trend Following Podcast with John Jantsch from January 2017. Covels podcast is ostensibly a share/financial markets trading podcast but he has a habit of interviewing some really interesting people who have nothing to do with trading at all. I have purchased more than one non-trading related books from authors he has interviewed and get a lot of great information from his podcasts. Highly recommended!
The RSS feed for his podcast is at http://trendfollowingradio.com/rss
John Jantsch and Phil Singleton wrote a book called SEO for Growth and yes – I did buy the book!
Click the cover to buy on Amazon
While I have only just started reading it, there are immediately things that just jump out and you find yourself in agreement. For instance, John makes the point that Google and search engines have become modern telephone directories on steroids. When you were last delivered the Yellow Pages, did you immediately put it in the recycling bin? (guilty m’lord)!
However I think many people in business may be able to tell you (maybe!) that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation but beyond that they may not really know that much about what it actually is or does.
Or perhaps, they have been sold on SEO by a web designer and are paying a large amount of money for ‘SEO’ every month. Perhaps they have even paid a company to do some SEO work and have not generated any results from it or worse still have found a negative effect. Perhaps they fell victim to some scammer promising them thousands or millions of backlinks for some large sum of money.
So what is SEO?
Good SEO on a web site comes down to three main things.
- Keyword Research to find the words that someone would key into Google to find your business. This might also be the types of things you want your company to be known for. What would your ideal customer who would spend the most money with your business on your most profitable products or services type into a search engine to find you?
- Second factor is content. There is no substitute for good content. When you type something into a search engine, Google (or bing or yahoo) are wanting to deliver to you the most relevant, highest quality , most authoritative information on that search that they can. SEO is about that search result pointing to your site, ideally, being on page one of the search results at the top as the first organic search listing. So if you have optimised your content for the right keywords, ideally, your site will come up in the search results and your customers will find your site.
- Third factor is links. What sites are you referencing in your content and which sites are referencing you? For example, I am referencing Covels podcast and linking to a book above. I have given backlinks to those sites by citing them here. That doesn’t mean much (at the moment) as my site (this site) is not as authoritative as it is very new. This builds a web of sites all interconnected with each other and the search engines look at this when determining rankings and how they display search results.
Over the years some ‘dodgy’ techniques have been used trying to scam and game the algorithm used to rank sites. You might even find some today – sites where there are long lists of random words on them down the bottom of the page – when algorithms were in their infancy this could trick them into ranking a site for those keywords. Some people will even pay someone who promises millions of links for $5000 say. Google is wise to these kinds of things these days and your site can be punished and disappear in the search results if you do these kinds of things. Google wants links to appear natural and wants to see a network build up over time. They want to offer a great end user experience! Their reputation is on the line. They too remember the bad old days where almost any search you entered took you to a porn site! Don’t try and fool the system. Do your keyword research and optimize and provide great content and a great user experience to your customers and google will notice.
