Content SEO

This is probably not an official term, but I’m going to use it any way. What we’re talking about in this section is Content SEO.

Other search engines follow a similar process—Bing, Yahoo, etc. (Those are the main ones, but Google is the overwhelming leader in most of the world. In China, Alibaba reigns supreme, and other countries have unique leads in certain cases, like Naver in South Korea).

Here is my top secret graphic that summarizes the entire book and field of SEO. If you remember a single thing about SEO, remember this:

IMHO means in my high and exalted opinion (okay, I mean in my humble opinion) .

Get it? It’s about the content, and only 10% is about technical tweaks. In other words, if you just put good quality, relevant content up on your site and never do another thing with SEO, that would be something like 90% of the battle. Conversely—and this is the important thing—if you spent your time learning about and mastering all the latest best practices of technical SEO, such as the latest changes in algorithms or fine-grained coding techniques, it might be helpful, but if it’s not built on a foundation of content, it’s not going to be very impactful. It’ll do some good, but not as much as if you have good content.

Keywords and More Keywords: Can you Ever Have Too Many Keywords?

At this point, it is fair to stop and think about keywords for a moment. Keywords are at the heart of SEO. If you haven’t watched the video titled, “How Search Works” that was mentioned in the last chapter, you should put the book down right now and watch it.

An easy way to think about keywords is that people have to type something in when they search, right? You could think of a keyword like a fishing pole.

If you type in a keyword or phrase, it’s kind of like using a fishing pole, where you throw it out in the water and hopefully catch something. On Google, when you type in a keyword, you get search results, not fish.

If you were to use your fishing pole (Google) and type in the phrase “non-profit stock exchange” you might get something that looks like this:

The important point to remember is that search engine optimization is ultimately based on keywords. That is, what are the phrases that people type that will lead them to your site?

If you typed in “RGB Exchange”, you might get something like this. The RGB web site comes up as the first search result. Woo-hoo!

This is sometimes called a “brand” keyword, and it’s a little easier for such keywords to get top rank than others, because there is less competition.

Another common search keyword involves either a generic product name or a specific brand name product. Let’s try the generic product type. Say you are a safety engineer and have electrical equipment of all kinds. As part of your industry’s safety standards, you have what’s called a lockout tagout station, which is a system that ensures that the right switches stay turned off when you are working on electrical equipment, so that no one gets hurt.

You could try typing “eco-friendly lockout tagout station” in Google, and you might end up with something like this:

Note the ads and the organic search results. In this scenario, the Zing Green Safety Products site comes up as a search result, based on the keyword “eco-friendly lockout tagout station”. The rank for the keyword is good; it’s on the first page.

To understand the relationship between SEM and SEO, you can see that there is an ad at the top that appears when the keyword is typed in. If someone clicks on it, the company will pay for that click. For the subsequent search results, the “organic” search results, no one pays for the click—technically it’s free. Except that companies spend a lot of money to do SEO, which is the process of trying to get your search result as high as possible, ideally at the top of the first page—for whatever keyword or keywords you are going for.

If you find yourself getting confused or intimidated, remember the marvelous 90/10 rule. Even if you just post content to a web site—quality compelling content—you’ve fought 90% of the battle. From that standpoint, you don’t even need to think about keywords. Some SEO professionals might balk at that claim, but evidence increases every year that Google rewards quality content over just about everything.

You could spend time editing an article, for example, based on emphasizing particular keywords, but if you try too much of that, it might sound unnatural, right? So technically you might have followed a typical practice of pro-actively inserting and emphasizing, and even repeating, particular keywords, because those keywords are on the “hit list” for the web site. If you do this too much, or if it diminishes the underlying quality of the text, you’re just going in circles, because the content won’t be as compelling.

What I generally recommend then, for learning about “technical tweaks” and as you start to be aware of keywords, is simply to be aware of them, to consider investing time in some keyword-level optimization, but definitely place a priority on quality content.

In the previous example, a goal of SEO optimization for Zing Safety Products might not only be to maintain the first page search rank, but to try to increase the rank for that keyword, to get the organic search result as high on the page as possible. Why? Because it’s like free advertising, in a way.

Okay, so how do you do it? You could develop some content on the site, related to that keyword, such as an introductory article (or blog post) that describes it. Make it relevant and helpful enough, and not only will people have a better view of your company, but they might also share it with others, and so on.

To return to the “game playing with Google,” basically most of that involves trying to determine exactly how Google works, and then trying techniques to get as high a search result as possible, often using unnatural techniques, like taking keyword insertion and going to extremes. An example of this in earlier black hat SEO was to include invisible keywords repeated over and over on page. They were visible to user, but were visible to Google.

Keyword based SEO, such as optimizing, adding, inserting, and managing, is an example of on-page SEO. It’s something you do on your own web site.

Off-page SEO is something like trying to get a different site to link to your web site. Along with many other ranking factors, some known, some revealed by Google, others only guessed at, “inbound links” to your web site can contribute to rankings, but they are not on your site.

Like when using keywords, there is a natural way to do it, and you can get unnatural as well.

For example, if you write compelling content, and if it is compelling enough that people share it on social media—that is like a link back to your site. It may very well produce traffic, and Google notices things like that. It may be that a product review web site has an article, along with a link to your site. That’s another example of natural off-page SEO; it happens because of the quality of your content or product, not because you proactively sought the link. You can take one step further and try to find places to review your product or site—that’s pretty natural. Another approach might be to get coverage by a blogger, news site, etc.—this is also fairly natural.

But if you go too far, such as participate in some kind of “sounds too good to be true” link-building scheme, where a company promises you the world for a cheap price, eventually Google will penalize you for these black hat practices.

So just go natural, okay?