If you are sitting there asking yourself this question: What is SEO? You came to the right place. A slight caution: This article is quite lengthy and it may not be what you expect.
You would probably agree that SEO doesn’t stand for Sandwich Eaters of Oklahoma. Ok, kinda lame joke. It means search engine optimization, but you already knew that didn’t you?
So, you do know something about it.
If you finish reading this whole article you should know a lot more.
When you do, you might be surprised how human SEO is.
This article is not going to be like reading a Wikipedia article though. There might be more jokes and a number of stories. In other words, it might get a little weird.
SEO really could be called GO or Google Optimization. You probably also already know Google is the most popular search engine in the world. (So, you actually already knew two important things about SEO.)
Because most of the world’s online searches are conducted on Google, search engine optimization mostly means optimizing content for Google.
If that wasn’t clear, now it is.
Another fact to know about SEO is that some people actually mean search engine manipulation which is really Google manipulation. Now this is a key point.
Manipulating Google is probably a bad idea. It might turn out to be a very bad idea.
Do you know why?
Well, Google makes tens of billions of dollars each year and they do that mainly by maintaining high quality organic search results so they can have their customers run ads on search results pages using Google Adwords. They don’t want low quality, spammy, manipulative organic search results because their search audience will become unhappy. If that happens Google’s audience shrinks and they won’t be able to make as much money from Adwords.
Google works very hard to maintain its organic search results quality.
Again, Google is the top search engine in the world. If you were running Google wouldn’t you want to keep it in that position?
We can easily see Google is extremely motivated to fight back against people who try to manipulate the organic search results for their own gains.
How do you do SEO for beginners?
SEO beginners can start learning SEO by watching free YouTube explainer videos, reading blog posts and online articles, listening to podcasts, or reading SEO books. Another way that complements digital media consumption is create your own site and begin trying to improve its search engine rankings.
Some popular SEO websites are:
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Watch
MOZ
SEMRush blog
Sometimes the best source for beginners is Google’s own SEO guidelines because for whatever reasons they tend to be overlooked or dismissed. If you want to rank well organically on Google it will probably be beneficial to study what Google allows and does not allow.
What are four types of SEO?
Officially, there aren’t four SEO types. However, there are some terms that people use to describe SEO that might be considred four types:
On-page
Off-page
Local
Technical
There are also:
Black hat
White hat
Gray hat
What is SEO for Dummies?
SEO for Dummies is a book written by Peter Kent to teach people who have no or little SEO knowledge how to do SEO. It has been popular enough to have been published in multiple editions. For about $20, or less if you buy a used copy, it’s a good deal. (There are similar books for less, if SEO for Dummies is not for you.) Your local public library might also have a copy. The book covers SEO basics and generally is well-regarded. The only downside to this book is the page length — about 500 pages. For some folks, that’s a lot of reading. Others may prefer an extensive, in-depth book. If the page count seems daunting, you might still benefit from reading SEO for Dummies simply by focusing first on reading the chapters that interest you the most and forgoing the others.
Can I Do SEO on my own?
Yes, you can do SEO on your own. In fact, doing it on your own might work out better for the long-term. Whether or not you choose to do it yourself depends on a number of factors.
Do you have the interest to do it and sustain the interest?
Do you have the time and energy to do it?
Is there a financial return favorable to you?
Learning SEO could take the average person about 6 months learning on a part-time basis. You might start by creating your own website and trying to get the homepage or other pages to rank within the top organically on Google or other search engines. The DIY website and SEO path is a fairly common one for people who eventually become digital marketers. If you are working on your own business knowing SEO will help get your own site and pages ranked better thus bringing more visitors to your site. If you know SEO but have limited time you also might choose to pay a digital marketer or digital marketing agency to do the SEO because it might be more cost-effective than doing it yourself.
What is white hat SEO?
You’ve probably seen at least several Western movies. You know there are good guys and bad buys. The good guys sometimes wear white or light-colored hats and the bad guys wear black or dark-colored ones.
White hat SEO is playing by Google’s rules. First, you have to know Google’s rules.
If you are reading this article, you probably aren’t aware of them, so let’s take a look.
- Google wants you to produce high-quality content. It wants the content to help visitors/readers. It doesn’t want it to manipulate or trick them. It wants factual content that may also be educational.
- It wants your content to download quickly so users have a good experience. It also wants it to be usable on a range of devices, not just on desktops or laptops.
- Is your website secure, meaning it does not distribute anything malicious or suspicious and isn’t tricking users in any way into doing something they don’t want to do?
These are just several of the highest-level guidelines to provide some examples. Some folks who are beginning to learn about SEO aren’t aware that Google has such guidelines, so they might wind up violating them. The consequences are that your website’s content may never get ranked organically high enough to get any visitors or it will receive very few.
At the same time, you might spend a lot of time and/or money trying to get good organic rankings. If you don’t play by the rules, you may suffer.
The first thing to do is to learn the basic guidelines. Be a good guy or gal, and you have much better chances of getting what you want. If you follow them and have a long-term approach, you can benefit from free Google traffic and you can provide value to Google’s searchers.
We humans are social creatures and we need to know the rules, customs, guidelines, etc., in order to succeed.
When it comes to SEO, however, some people seem to believe that anything goes. You can do whatever you want as long as you get results. In fact, you might see some benefit in the short-term, but eventually Google will drive your rankings down, or your content might get booted out. Then, you will have to start all over again.
If you don’t learn the lessons and be a good guy/white hat you will suffer the same fate.
What is black hat SEO?
If you read any blog posts about SEO or watch any online videos or listen to podcasts, you will most likely come across some SEO-horror stories.
There are some SEO consultants you may hear talking about how they used various techniques to get backlinks from questionable sites, but at the time that’s all they believed they could get so they made some bad decisions. One morning they checked their rankings to find they were all pushed down so far their traffic dropped down to almost nothing.
Months or work might have been lost, and all the money they spent acquiring those links. Their income might have suddenly tanked as well.
These kinds of SEO failures are fairly common.
Any ideas why?
It’s because they started with the assumption that SEO means search engine manipulation.
This view is nothing more than a myth though.
Some people actually believe that SEO is synonymous with tricks and manipulation.
They understand they are engaging in tactics that violate the rules and guidelines but they believe they have to do so to get results.
Unfortunately, they find out the hard or sometimes very hard way that they were wrong.
Do bad guys and gals win in life?
Why would they win in SEO?
So, don’t be a black hat/bad guy or gal manipulator.
This might seem like a huge tangent and therefore utterly irrelevant, but what kind of assumption or belief supports bad behavior in business?
If you hire an SEO consultant who has shady practices online, because you believe that kind of manipulation is acceptable or even necessary, you might be associating with someone you wouldn’t have otherwise.
Do you think that person will be trustworthy and fair when dealing with you? If you consider it for a moment, some SEO consultants and practices do the black hat techniques and therefore are sort of in the business of manipulation. Maybe you don’t care as long as they get results, but the results probably won’t last long because Google works hard to combat the black hat SEO.
If you choose a more ethical SEO company or consultant you will be interacting with someone who is operating in a more ethical manner.
Here’s a little tip, some SEO people might rip you off — not all of them though. They aren’t all like that.
Can you get ripped off by SEO firms?
Yep. If they promise you instant or very fast results for 4 easy installments of $199.99 — run away!
Trouble is, sometimes we like people to tell us what we want to hear.
If you are looking for some help with SEO one of the most important questions to ask is: Can you show me pages you have ranked well on Google right now?
They should be able to provide you with some keywords so you can search in Google’s live index today and see the good organic results for yourself. If they can not do that, they may not know SEO.
As with any purchasing decision, it’s best to employ the ‘Buyer Beware’ strategy.
Additionally, the more you know about SEO the better questions you can ask. Some of the more unethical SEOs may gauge your lack of knowledge and use it against you to try to overcharge. They might also get you to sign a long-term contract, when you only wanted to try the service for several months.
Grey Hat SEO
Is there a middle ground?
Yeah, sort of.
Some consultants and agencies use a blend of white and black SEO techniques, which is the gray hat approach. They might have a contract writer who writes 1,000-word articles and then edit them to stuff them with keywords.
Keyword stuffing is adding an unnatural number of keywords to a page or article. You can tell it’s unnatural if you see the same words repeated over and over again to the extreme that the article you are reading is hard to read or very difficult to do so. For example, you might see the keywords repeated in the headers, sub-headers and throughout the articles paragraphs.
They might also appear many times in the footer. Google will recognize this as a black hat technique and a violation. Some gray hat techniques go too far and ruin good content.
Are you prepared to learn and change?
How Much Does It Cost To Do SEO?
Doing SEO doesn’t cost anything if you do it yourself, other than time.
The learning curve varies by individual interest and desire. Literally anyone can learn how to do SEO and the learning curve is not that steep or demanding. If there isn’t anyone with some extra time to learn it or if you don’t want to do it will be necessary to hire someone.
There are online freelancer communities, such as Fiverr, and people who present themselves online at sites such as Craigslist. They might charge anywhere from $10 to $100 per hour. There are also search engine marketing and digital marketing firms that charge a flat monthly fee. This fee can range from $500 and well beyond. Another potential source of SEO help is your hosting service if you have one. They may provide SEO and SEM services or they may be able to provide you with a referral. Another way to find a digital marketing agency is simply to do organic searches on Google and add your location to see if there are any providers in your area.
Another option is to take an online course in SEO on a site such as Udemy. A Udemy SEO course might cost less than $15. This option might be more effective for a beginner rather than spending dozens of hours or more watching YouTube videos and reading online blog posts and articles. Online courses should have a recognizable structure and they are self-paced. Once you have become acquainted with SEO through a very affordable course you can go from there. If you like online courses it may also be possible to earn an online certification.
Training Website Has No SEO
One company I worked for had very well-educated executives. One was an Ivy-league graduate and the other had an MBA. They were very proficient with literature research and writing as if they were composing for book production, but not for Web content SEO.
Their mental block was that writing for SEO is quite different. In fact, they had published a very well-received book in their field. It was very successful in acquiring reviews and attention and had many sales. But their strategy for creating blog content was to take about one page a day from the book and copy and paste the text into WordPress. Each blog post was only about 300 words. I looked in the company’s Google Analytics account and saw their blog posts had almost no visitors from organic search. Short blog posts which are not matched to keywords people are using will not get ranked well and therefore no searchers will find them. Why bother posting blog posts no one will find on Google?
You can create content all day long, but if no one sees, what is the point? This company had another site with sales training content. It was not indexed by Google because the Web designer put a noindex instruction in the code when designing it. He forgot to take this out later so Google never crawled it. The site had no visitors from Google or any other search engine.
From their point of view, what they were doing was a success because they had plenty of high-quality content to use for their blog. They could also share it on social media. In their minds, they were done. At that time, they were not open-minded enough to consider how to format that content to make it Google friendly. They lost scores of opportunities to draw new visitors to their site from Google. No new visitors means no new customers.
How can you partner with search engines?
Search engines are your friends if you are friendly with them.
Photo Lab SEO Success
One time I was going to a California photography laboratory to have large format film developed. The lab specialized in black and white photography. It was one of the few labs remaining that could process large format film. The woman who owned and managed it was herself a photographer and had been for decades. Her lab had also been in business for about 20 years. She cared deeply about photography and hosted photography shows in her space for local photographers.
She seemed like a sincere and very careful person — in a word, meticulous. By going to the lab repeatedly to have my landscape film sheets developed I got to know her. One day she proposed that I help her with SEO in exchange for free film processing. The development of a single 4×5 sheet of film was about $4.00 at the time, so I accepted her offer.
It wasn’t about the money. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. So I helped boost her organic rankings some. They were already good; there wasn’t much work to be done.
The point is that it’s fun working with people who you respect. It’s enjoyable to learn with them when you collaborate. It’s also fulfilling to help a small, local business which contributes to the community.
In a sense, she is an artisan. You might have heard of artisan bread, cheese or coffee. People who make things often do so because they love to do it.
Sometimes SEO seems like a sort of ‘ratty’ or unethical practice but it doesn’t have to be.
If we think about personal and professional relationships first, we value the synergy in business. We also don’t have to behave unethically in SEO or any digital marketing. Strategy is often seen as being manipulative or shady, but it doesn’t have to be.
If you have defined core values in your company or other work organization then you stick to them when you are making your marketing and communications decisions. You do the same thing when choosing potential business partners. To be trusted we have to be trustworthy.
What is your relationship with Google? SEO starts with questions.
What do you want from that relationship? What are you willing to do to begin and maintain the relationship?
What will you contribute to it?
SEO might seem like it is only technical aspects, on-page optimization and backlinks, but it actually begins with some simple questions that can be more on the introspective side.
If this all sounds like sentimental nonsense or worse, consider this statement made by the Dalai Lama, “Not only is it the case that happy people are more willing to help others, but as I generally point out, helping others is the best way to help yourself, the best way to promote your own happiness. It is you, yourself, who will receive the benefit.”
Creating high-quality content for your site helps your site’s visitors and Google. It’s a win-win approach.
Dentist Website Has Ethical Problems
When I was in Silicon Valley working at a software company I saw a Writer ad on Craigslist, and the writing was online health content. I had three years of online health content experience so I applied and got an interview. The company was in LA but two employees were at a conference at the Marriott in San Francisco, and they said they could meet there.
So I went and talked to them. They were interested and said there might be other opportunities too, but didn’t say what. (I found out later the company sometimes used its own employees to act in commercials it produced.)
LA is not exactly my favorite place to live, but it certainly can be fun to visit. Unfortunately, I ignored my inner truth to not move there and did. It didn’t go so well. While I was there I identified an opportunity for the company’s site to gain some high-quality inbound links and mentioned it. The manager didn’t understand who important such links were and vetoed the idea. This rejection was weird because I was hired to help with SEO. In fact, for the software company in Silicon Valley my efforts resulted in doubling the number of monthly visitors to the company’s website. (I knew a lot more about SEO than my manager at the dentist marketing company.) Quickly, I was finding this fact out and it was disconcerting.
The manager seemed to believe that you learned about SEO by attending conferences. I learned it by having worked with one of the top search engines and by doing it. Eventually, this manager started telling me to do things I already knew, and behaving in a way that seemed unethical.
For example, I once wrote an article about Periostat, an antibiotic used to treat gum disease, and showed it to the manager. She took a pen, and crossed out all the information about side effects, including a reference to that fact the pregnant women should not use the drug because doing so could cause skeletal deformities in unborn children. She said that would ‘scare people’.
At that point it seemed clear that omitting such information might contribute to harming the health of unborn babies, so I decided to start looking for employment elsewhere.
DUI and SEO
During that time, I also went on a job interview working for an online marketing company that worked with law firms. I found in the interview that specifically it was DUI lawyers they supported with online marketing. Personally, I don’t want to help DUI drivers get out of paying their fines or sentences. I believe we all should be responsible for our actions and if we violate such laws there should be some penalties.
I didn’t take that job. You might be thinking that these situations don’t have anything to do with SEO, but they do. Online marketers can work for employers who are doing things which are bad for society, or choose not to do so. We know it’s not right to promote such companies and we need to make sure we don’t lose our moral compass while we are doing business. Working with unscrupulous employers can damage our own moral frameworks, which sometimes is what is most valuable in our lives. Corruption can show up in small drips and grow if we don’t do something about it. SEO on its own is sometimes viewed as being sort of ‘dirty’ or slimey but it doesn’t have to be.
Timesheet Software Company Gets Better Google Rankings
I once did some contract work at a search engine called Inktomi which later was acquired by Yahoo! Inktomi had some employees who regularly conducted research within the live index to check for spammy pages and domains. I spent hours every day documenting the most manipulative black hat pages and sites in a very large spreadsheet. Then I sent it to a senior software engineer who would run a process to delete them all! Imagine if your site was getting some visitors from a search engine and then one day it all disappeared. In that role, I was sort of a spam detective. I like it because I got to do a lot of internet research and it was very educational. There also was some ‘power’ in doing work that made the live results better and purged the work done by the bad guys.
After this contact ended, I got a job at a timesheet software company. The person who hired me did so because I had done work at two search engines. The company already had a marketing manager and I was helping her. Before she worked in marketing, she was a software engineer. So, she sort of knew some things about SEO, and she worked on content for Web pages and press releases. I accessed the Google organic rankings and noted for the two most important keywords the positions were no. 52 and no. 55. I made some tweaks to the site’s product pages that matched those two keywords and then set up an inbound link building campaign, using specific anchor text. The number of inbound links grew by the thousands. Eventually, the product pages moved up to no.8 and no.12 on Google organically. These improvements resulted in the number of monthly visitors increasing by 100%. The company President was very happy about this. The Marketing Manager was let go, and I didn’t not feel good about that at all. Working at Inktomi in spam detection had taught me some of the black hat techniques and a perspective on how to alter certain details to improve rankings. Today, I would never do anything like that because it wouldn’t work and it would only damage rankings.
The point that made itself evident in this situation is that digital marketing is a moving target. What works today probably won’t work for very long — especially if you are doing ‘black or gray hat’ techniques. Yes, they might move the needle temporarily but Google is better at detecting them. Remember when I mentioned entire sites getting de-indexed by the hundreds at Inktomi and losing all their traffic? The same thing can happen with Google. To put it simply, “Don’t mess with Google.”
If you do, you may very well pay a severe price in lost money, time and effort.
The difference between myself and some other digital marketers is that I have done work for several Silicon Valley search engines. Please do not think this fact makes me a better person. My view is that it helped inform my perspective on how to approach SEO in a more diplomatic and long-term way.
Film School Website Gets Improved Rankings
Many years ago I was accepted into graduate programs in cinema studies at NYU and USC. I didn’t go because they were both very expensive and I had doubts about their value for getting work after graduation. About 15 years after deciding not to go, I got a job as a Web content manager and online marketer at a film school. The school was unique in that it didn’t have classrooms or conventional assignments. It used the apprentice model where students were assigned mentors who were working in the film industry. This approach emphasized the business side of the film industry which I think is more effective than academic films programs. Academics sometimes suffer from the Ivory Tower syndrome, meaning it is too sequestered away from the realities of the marketplace and practical living.
So, I liked that my employer was helping students learn real-world lessons about film and how the business model worked. In fact, the ‘school’ was tiny with only about five employees in one office, but the mentors were located all over the country. There were some in LA, NYC, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and so on. This model also works well because film is not only in Hollywood. For example, George Lucas has been living and working in Northern California much of his life. He considers himself to be an independent filmmaker and rightly so. If he had grown up in LA and remained there his creative output might have been very different. For example, the independent film American Graffiti wouldn’t have been made because it was based partly on some of his own life experiences growing up in central California.
So, what does this have to do with SEO? By way of analogy, you could try to do SEO the Hollywood way, by spending a lot of money, trying to hire some ‘stars’ and maybe really ‘going for it’. However, some of those ‘stars’ might be more glitz than substance and you might regret paying their large, very large, or huge fees.
One weird thing about us humans is that we have a tendency to assume that if something costs more it must be better. For example, some believe that having a degree of Princeton must be miles better than one from San Jose State. What if the Princeton grad was a frat boy who graduated with a GPA of 2.0 and spent more time drinking beer and playing tennis than learning?
The San Jose State graduate might have studied like a mad person, had a genuine passion for her or his major and achieved far more in that subject scholastically. In fact, I had a friend who did attend SJSU and went bonkers over learning the Spanish language, and he became a top student in the county for learning it. He is now fluent and essentially became somewhat Central American though he was born ‘white’. The Princeton guy/gal might have had some good college times and learned relatively little.
Unfortunately, there are some SEO folks who misrepresent what they can do to get contracts and they rip their customers off. This happened at the film school. While I was there I once asked my boss about what the previous webmaster had done. I asked because in one of the company’s websites I noticed keyword stuffing in the bottom of some pages. Some SEOs do this black hat technique because they believe that it works, but it can trigger bad consequences. The trick is adding keywords in footers of certain pages and making them the same color as the page backgrounds, so people can’t see them but search engines can. The point is try to make the pages appear more relevant to the search engines to increase the organic rankings. The previous webmaster had done some link stuffing too, which is a similar trick using links instead of keywords.
I removed all the stuffed keywords and links, and then told my boss about it. Then I asked him about what his relationship with that guy had been. He said the other guy had set up his sites and was charging him a fee per lead — leads that came from the boss’s own websites! They were his sites and his leads, so there was no reason to charge my boss a fee — other than ripping him off. My boss said he probably overpaid for leads by about $100,000. My boss was a father running a small business and had both a son to care of and a mortgage to pay. That $100,000 could have paid for his son’s college degree, but it was gone.
So, of course, this situation is just one example of many rip-offs that happen every day around the world. It did impact someone I knew and because I did Web content management, and online marketing I related to it personally, and knew I never wanted to do anything like that.
One thing I appreciated about my role was that every day I would download a text file from a server with the info for the new leads captured by the company’s sites. Then I would prepare that lead information in a spreadsheet and upload it to an Access database where the sales people could see it and contact the fresh leads. I could see the direct impact from the websites and online marketing on the lead generation, and on revenue. I really enjoyed that ‘whole system’ view of the business and I think it’s important for online marketers to want to help businesses grow.
Some SEOs might not have that goal, and even mention to you that they aren’t responsible for helping for impacting the bottom line. Who wants to work with an SEO who demonstrates that he or she doesn’t care about your business?
At the time, I wasn’t aware what a good bit of fortune it was that I was interested in film, filmmaking and the film industry. When you are choosing an online marketing individual to work with or a company it helps considerably if they have a personal connection to it or know it well enough to have informed conversations with you.
It’s not enough to hire a general SEO or online marketing agency because they might not be aware of how to drive leads that are of high enough quality to be of benefit to a business.
Driving low-quality leads might not help you that much. So, how might that happen?
For one thing, an SEO agency might choose the wrong keywords. They might also use black hat techniques that cause a temporary increase in organic rankings, but get your pages demoted later.
If whomever you hire has demonstrated an interest in your industry ask them what that interest is. Maybe they have a relative who worked in it, or maybe studied it in college but decided to change majors. Any connection of some substance will probably wind up being a better indication of potential success than simply hiring a generic digital marketing agency. Do you know why this is?
Some SEOs get into the game because they don’t like their day jobs and they want to be self-directed. On the surface, there is nothing wrong with this motivation. However, they might not know that much about SEO when they are starting and may not care about the industries they are trying to serve.
They might have read some blog posts and watched some YouTube videos and then decided to try SEO because it sounds ‘interesting.’ Some SEOs are 20 years old and they don’t know much about any business. Is that who you want to hire?
Some SEOs and even hosting companies are not exactly scrupulous. I once made the mistake of choosing a very cheap hosting service for my personal photography website. One day, I checked the HTML in the site’s pages and someone from the hosting company had inserted links to e-commerce pages to sell Nike shoes! Some of my pages had multiple spam links which were hurting the organic rankings. No one at the hosting company asked my permission, so it was a violation of my trust and the terms of service.
Remember the photography lab I mentioned previously? I was talking to the owner’s husband one day and he asked if I could speak as an SEO expert on behalf of his client in a legal case during a courtroom session. I declined that because I had never been called to speak in a courtroom and I was kind of too reticent to speak in an official capacity in front of a group of people, and with something important on the line.
Does that mean all SEOs behave unethically? Nope, but it only takes choosing the wrong one to rip you off.
A Software Company’s SEO Problem: Low quality and Questionable Inbound Links
I once did some work for a software company that had some SEO issues. An employee had tried link building and added dozens of links from software reviews sites. That wasn’t such a big problem, but some of the sites were questionable and had links to things that weren’t software like online casinos and online shopping sites that sold things other than software.
You don’t want inbound links from unrelated sites, because they can appear like spam links. In some cases they were. If you have a situation like this, you have to document all the questionable links in a spreadsheet to prepare for disavowal. This process might sound sort of formal or complicated, but it’s actually mostly straightforward.
You can read about it on Google’s own site if you like, “Google works very hard to make sure that actions on third-party sites do not negatively affect a website. In some circumstances, incoming links can affect Google’s opinion of a page or site. For example, you or a search engine optimizer (SEO) you’ve hired may have built bad links to your site via paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines. First and foremost, we recommend that you remove as many spammy or low-quality links from the web as possible.”
Once you have compiled a list of your questionable links you can upload them to the Google Disavowal tool to have them removed.
Some SEOs make a mistake in believing they can trick Google easily and/or permanently. So, they rush into getting links of any kind to the pages they want to rank and indeed these pages might move up briefly and garner some visits. The ‘victory’ is short-lived though, and the rankings may actually fall to positions below where they started.
Then what?
Well, that’s what the link disavowal process is for. You might be surprised to find out that some SEO consultants don’t know that much about their own field. In fact, if you ask some digital marketing companies their opinion of how well SEOs in general know their own field, many of them might say, not all that well.
This happens because there isn’t much standardization among SEOs or online marketers. There are some courses to take, but not many SEOs or social media specialists, or content marketers have degrees in their fields. It’s pretty common for adults with B.A.s in communications, English, philosophy, history or other liberal arts to wind up in online content or online marketing because it’s interesting enough. It also pays much better than the typical jobs available to people with generic college of university degrees.
If you were working a cafe or restaurant with a B.A. in economics, it might be kind of fun for a year or two, but after that, forget it.
So, some SEOs are frustrated telemarketers, or service industry workers who are barely making it or were working from the parents’ homes and Googled, “how to make money online.” Somehow they came across SEO and in truth it is a very interesting field in some ways. Also, some online marketers who have some aptitude for it can make quite a bit more than minimum wage plus some tips. Mainly, what many workers are looking for is the chance to be self-directed.
It’s much more fulfilling to work and live that way, and there’s no commuting.
So, some SEOs get into for the wrong reasons or a mixture or right and wrong. Others like it and develop competence.
It might actually be somewhat rare to find an SEO who actually is interested in business and wants to work with clients.So, being a ‘computer nerd’ is not enough to be competent in search engine marketing and digital marketing. It helps very much to hire someone who knows SEO, practices it ethically, and can demonstrate an interest in business.
The Startup’s SEO Problem: Keyword Issues
At a startup that has an anonymous networking app and website I wrote some l long blog posts that were based on careers-related keywords, like careers at some of the biggest tech companies. These are Apple, Facebook, Airbmb and so on. Within about 6 weeks, they ranked in the top 20 and sometimes as high as number 12 on Google organically. However, the primary founder came to visit the California office from another country and decided that was too slow. It seemed he had unrealistic expectations for how long it takes to rank new blog posts. My contract actually ended after one month, though it was supposed to have been three.
Some decision-makers are not well-informed about SEO and they expect almost instant results. SEO is much like farming though, not hunting. You plant seeds, water them, weed and so forth.Time is required and much more than one month. After two months, I was no longer doing any work for that startup. Some of the blog posts I wrote reached as high as number 10 on Google and were starting to bring in a little traffic. It helps to establish realistic and clear expectations at the start of an SEO project to avoid confusion and disappointment. It seemed as though the decision-maker who ended the contract prematurely didn’t know SEO very well because the main site — not the blog — had keyword stuffing in hundreds if not thousands of its pages. The same 20 or more keywords were stuffed in every page!
Keyword stuffing is a very outdated and ‘black hat’ technique you would not want to do now. Google has known about it for years and it simply isn’t done any longer by people who know SEO. The same site appeared to have description stuffing too, which is also an SEO no-no.
The Self-storage Company, SEO and Blogging
For a self-storage company with 50-60 self-storage properties I was in a marketing role. The company had a blog with some posts about how to store items in storage units, which is what you would expect. When I was looking in the Google Analytics account, I saw there was almost no traffic from organic search — meaning Google. So, I started writing blog posts about moving to wherever the company had a self-storage property. I wrote posts on moving to Napa, moving to Sonoma, moving to Salt-Lake City, moving to Sacramento and many more. They were about 1,000 words and were optimized. Eventually, they began ranking in the top 10 on Google. Mainly this happened because there wasn’t much competing content. My blog posts were full of facts and were much longer than other pages ranked for those keyword phrases. After about 20 of these blog posts were ranking well on Google — including some no.1s — I saw the number of monthly page views in Google Analytics grew to 2,000 in one month. So, many more people were seeing the blog content after that project. (There are some screen shots of the organic positions in the Portfolio section of this site.)
Impulsivity, the Pre-Mortem and SEO
Do you ever try to examine your mistakes and figure out you make them? Do you even acknowledge your mistakes?
Have you ever heard of conducting a pre-mortem? You probably know what a post-mortem is. A pre-mortem is similar but you imagine a mistake you could make in the future and then analyze the cause or causes. The point is to be able to better predict mistakes in order to avoid them.
You can sort of walk through your future mistake and see all the reasons why you made it, though it only happened at the level of imagination.
So, if you are currently considering working with a digital marketing agency because you need help with SEO, imagine you hired the wrong one. Why would you do that?
Are you under a lot of pressure right now? Are you stressed?
These two conditions can cause us to make impulsive decisions. So, we will be more likely to overlook certain things like doubts, red flags and so on because we want a quick solution or fast results.
If that is the case, it might be better to hire an online marketer from personal referrals rather than hiring a stranger after doing some online research.
Have you already worked with an SEO and been burned?
Do you know exactly why you chose that company or person?
How likely are you to repeat the same error? You may have noticed that sometimes our thoughts, emotions and behaviors are on loops. Some of us actually don’t notice the loops and we believe we are going in a straight line. So, we make the same mistakes over and over and over.
A big mistake in SEO and online marketing is cheating, cutting corners, — using unethical techniques. Some business people know they are deliberately behaving badly, but they get money from doing so, so they repeat these behaviors.
With SEO though, you are trying to manipulate the world’s most popular search engine, and you know what? It probably won’t work. Even if it does, the results won’t last long.
When we rely heavily on short-term thinking, this is known as temporal discounting. We might be thinking, “If i eat this whole pizza now, I will be happy or feel good.” Afterwards, we feel sick and notice how much money we spent and wasted. If we over-eat regularly, we can become overweight and even damage our health.
When we rush into important business decisions the results can be similarly destructive. We know we shouldn’t but like binge eating to avoid emotions we make snap business decisions anyway. Even worse, because we are going too fast or working very long hours we might not learn to slow down and make more careful, measured decisions.
Have you ever climbed a metaphorical mountain only to find it was the wrong one?
When we do that we have to admit it was the wrong one and come down. Some people won’t admit they are wrong, and keep doing the same things that don’t work over and over and over. Sometimes they die repeating the same mistakes.
I once worked with someone who was critical or very critical of Google. It seemed as though she or he was battling with the search engine, which is just technology.
You could say Google for some of us something of a rorschach. Our brains interpret aspects of technology and turn it into something which may be revealing something about ourselves.
So, some people might see Google as a gold repository like Fort Knox and because they use that metaphor they seem themselves as thieves who want to break into it.
Once you have a metaphor like that in place a logic can be established. Google is not a repository of gold or ‘traffic’. It is merely technology used by billions of people to find information.
How do you see Google?
Are you employing an interpretation of faceless technology which does not serve you or your business?
Some SEOs do the same thing. They see the manipulation of Google as a way to make a lot of money, to be free of working for someone else, or to live the life of an entrepreneur rock star who travels the world.
The Law Firm’s SEO Problem
A prominent law firm had no SEO strategy and was not practicing SEO tactics. They were creating high-quality, daily content. However, they were not even adding keywords in their Yoast SEO WordPress plug-in for each article. They were also not considering the word count of each article. These are basic SEO considerations; they are very easy to discuss and implement. You might think the law firm must have been very small or was of no stature. It actually was ranked in the top 3 in its field and had well over 500 employees. For some reason, they did not have any knowledge of SEO and were missing out on the opportunity to increase their organic rankings. They were also reducing their lead flow by not following through on some simple white hat SEO practices.
State Government Had Not Heard of SEO
For a state government website, there were no titles in their html pages and no descriptions in their meta data. For some reason, no one had bothered to add this information. The organic Google rankings on these pages was very high — in the top 3. When I added titles to their pages and descriptions the rankings improved to no. 1. The Web pages were missing the simplest bits of information. Why? No one in that particular State department knew what SEO was. They did not understand how Google ranks Web pages and therefore were not aware what was missing on their pages.They did not know what they did not know. What is your website missing?
Hollywood, Narcissists and Digital Marketing
I once worked with a woman who has a doctorate in psychology and she lived in the LA area but closer to Santa Barbara. Her mother had been a Hollywood actress in the 1930s and 40s. So, she knew Hollywood from the inside. She had grown up around actors, writers, producers, directors and music composers. When she was an adult and practicing psychology with her clients she worked with a number of narcissists, this personality type is generally characterized by two things: grandiosity and a lack of empathy for others. Grandiosity is self-importance. Narcissists tend very much to see themselves as the most important people wherever they go. They believe they are the smartest, the most virtuous, more attractive than others, and so on. They also might believe they deserve all the attention, all the money, all the material resources, all the status, power and so on.
In point of fact, some narcissists are rather convincing in the way they present themselves. They might appear to be very confident, engaging, strong, knowledgeable, well–connected, very well-groomed, attractive, etc. Research studies have indicated that we generally like narcissists because they seem to exhibit qualities that we admire, and we may even want to be like them.
However, anyone who has been close to a narcissist personally or professionally has an idea of how destructive this kind of person can be. Narcissists can be very manipulative, dishonest, abusive, controlling and even engage in criminal behavior. Some of them are intelligent enough to get away with their bad behavior.
So what does narcissism have to do with SEO?
Some SEOs might behave like narcissists. They manipulate, maybe lie and promise results they don’t deliver. They might even know they are unable to give you the results they say they can produce.
The point is that SEO has a bad name among some folks because of the bad actors. Some companies have been ripped off by SEOs or digital marketers.
Just like some of the Hollywood actors, some SEOs present themselves as being important or very important. They might throw around some technical sounding jargon to try to confuse or hoodwink you.
They might try to lock you into a high monthly retainer with a long contract. They might prove you to see how little you know to use that against you.
So, how do deal with someone like that? If you have any doubts or ‘bad feelings’ about them at all, don’t work with them. Don’t hire them. There are plenty of others to speak with and strike up a working relationship with — and don’t hire the first one you talk to. Do careful research, and talk to at least 4 digital marketers or agencies. Take notes and then wait for a while before you make a decision. Most of all don’t make any impulsive decisions.
Health Food Website: Too Obsure to Survive
Here are the mistakes that were made in the following true scenario. The content was extremely obscure. Almost no one was searching for it on Google or any other search engine. Some of the articles did make it into the top 10 on Google organically but the search volume was so low there were only about 300 unique visitors per month.
During the post-recession period I was freelance writing, mostly for WordPress websites. I wrote over 1,000 news articles on a variety of subjects. One topic I was interested in personally was health food, so I created a WordPress site called healthfooddaily.com. I wrote about 50-100 pages of content as a test to see if I could get some organic traffic on certain keywords, and it worked. There were some top 10 rankings. I could see in the site analytics that there were about 500 visitors a month which were all coming from search, with some from direct and a few repeat visitors. At that time, I didn’t use much social media presence.
So, from a search engine perspective it was successful. The content was thrown up too hastily though so it wasn’t of high quality. This was a mistake from the user experience perspective. When people are searching online they not only want to find relevant content they want to find content that is useful. So, it should answer their questions, teach them something, or solve their problems. Some of my content did, but it also was a little sloppy because the emphasis was on optimizing not on quality writing.
We might think of SEO as only the optimization process and the results in terms of organic rankings. If you have well-ranking content that isn’t very readable, useful or engaging, then users will bounce right off those pages and learn not to come back.
So SEO that begins with the intention to help readers/viewers will perform better because they will stay on your site longer and they will probably return to it. They will mostly likely want to share your content on social media or by emailing links to friends, family members or colleagues.
When I created my health food blog I wasn’t thinking of any of that, just the rankings. So the site was successful in SEO terms, but not in starting and maintaining relationships with readers because content wasn’t high quality.
Another thing about this site is that it was extremely niched in that it was about vegan and vegetarian food, and it was about oil-free food. If only 1% of Americans are vegan and even less are aware of what oil-free food is, then the number of people searching using such queries is going to be tiny to the point of being almost non-existent.
Again, initially I wasn’t thinking about that it was a site I made out of personal interest. Generally though, it wasn’t ever going to attract much of an audience so it wasn’t viable in financial terms.
Some people try to build up blogs with content and then sell products and that could have happened with Health Food Daily but even within the niche of health food it was segmented and interesting to only a tiny portion of them. It was almost niched into oblivion. It might have been named Oblivion Daily.
Not thinking carefully about who your audience and how you are going to reach them are two deal-breaking mistakes. You might as well forget about it or you will waste a lot of time.
Doing it yourself is excellent in terms of the freedom to explore and make mistakes because you can learn rapidly by tracking a wide range of things–sometimes much greater than you might be allowed to do at a job. Jobs can be mostly about not making mistakes, but in some cases you need to make mistakes to learn faster and experience more significant lessons. This approach is self-learning and if it is motivated by personal interest, enthusiasm, passion, and/or purpose this intrinsic motivation can carry you much further than the extrinsic kind. Extrinsic motivation is the external variety like getting money, social approval, credentials and so on. These rewards can be meaningful, but they can also be meaningless. Intrinsic motivation is based in a degree of self-awareness. In other words, knowing yourself well enough to understand what you like, dislike, love or hate.
You might not think that simply making a blog could bring these kinds of considerations to the foreground. Any kind of effort can do this because of the challenges you face and the risk/reward scenarios you experience. Creating a website and the content for the wrong reasons will likely only head to frustration and eventually become a dead end.
It won’t matter how many SEO tricks you apply to it and get some good organic rankings and visitors if you don’t care about it in the first place. Even if it makes money, you will probably lose interest eventually and drop it in favor of something which is more true to you.
When we behave unethically, doing so may very well impact our happiness and mental well-being negatively. Eudemonia is Aristotle’s term describing the happiness associated with well-being and proper moral behavior.
What is SEO? This is a very loaded question, though the answer is very simple. It is a way of relating to search engines. Essentially, you don’t want to fight with them to try to get free visitors. Play by the rules and give them what they want. Then, you will experience a mutually beneficial relationship — a symbiosis.
Why Should I Care?
You don’t have care about it, but if you want visitors to come to your website you probably don’t want to have to pay exorbitant sums every month for pay-per-click campaigns or by advertising online. Internet users have an intention when they search. They are qualified or filtered by their intentions. If they can find answers to their questions or solve their problems by finding your content you can benefit be establishing a connection with them. Then they are more likely to become customers.
So, have you learned anything about SEO you can use from this article? SEO might not be what you think it is or what your friend or colleague told you about it. It also might not be what a digital marketing agency tells you what it is. If you read this far, you are motivated to learn. Keep going, read more articles, watch some YouTube videos, perhaps join some forums. Ask questions on Quora or wherever you can. It is in your interest to learn about it so you can benefit from it. There are also affordable online courses. If you don’t have time or energy to learn or implement digital marketing on your own, please contact us.