Digital Marketing - What is SEO?

Question

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) seems to bring up a lot of unknowns to many investors who are interested in building their website and online presence. The push around implementing SEO is to help rank your site so it can reach page 1 on Google searches. This is called organic search results. You can increase your traffic by working on SEO which will, in time, increase your ranking, thus increasing traffic. But. many folks still do not know what is SEO, how can it be applied to your website, and the length of time it will take until you see results.

My question is can folks share your experience of SEO implementation? How long did it take? What do you really need to know? How did you learn about SEO and do you need to hire people to teach you about this tactic?

Here are the basic categories of what I have learned about SEO:

Offpage - Things you can't control on your site, but can have an influence on how it gets ranked.

• Building Backlinks (from aged and trusted domains)
• Social Reputation/Social Shares
• Offline Marketing

Onpage - Things you have control within your site, that you can make changes to right now.

• ContentKeword ResearchShort Tail KeywordsLong Tail KeywordsKeyword PlanningKeyword OrganizationKeyword DensityBody CopyQualityContent researchFreshnessHeader tags (H1/H2/H3)
• Keword ResearchShort Tail KeywordsLong Tail Keywords
• Short Tail Keywords
• Long Tail Keywords
• Keyword Planning
• Keyword OrganizationKeyword Density
• Keyword Density
• Body CopyQualityContent researchFreshness
• Quality
• Content research
• Freshness
• Header tags (H1/H2/H3)
• Vertical Search (Images/VIdeo/News)
• Title Tags
• Meta Description
• Alt Tags
• Alt Description
• Permalinks
• Descriptive URLS
• User Experience (UX)/User Interface (UI)
• Mobile Responsive
• Silo Structure
• Use of Images/Videos
• SSL Certificate (https)
• Site Speed
• Sitemap
• Internal/Outbound Links
• Link/Anchor Text
• Blogs

• Keword ResearchShort Tail KeywordsLong Tail Keywords
• Short Tail Keywords
• Long Tail Keywords
• Keyword Planning
• Keyword OrganizationKeyword Density
• Keyword Density
• Body CopyQualityContent researchFreshness
• Quality
• Content research
• Freshness
• Header tags (H1/H2/H3)

• Short Tail Keywords
• Long Tail Keywords

• Keyword Density

• Quality
• Content research
• Freshness

Violations

• Duplicate content
• Cloaking
• Thin Content
• Keyword Stuffing
• Piracy
• Ads/Top Heavy Layout
• Paid Links
• Link Spam

Jerryll Noorden · Answer

ALMOST correct.

SEO actually stands for Seriously Evil Ostriches.

This is what Google unleashes on your butt if you dare do it wrong!

Get it straight people. Sheeesh!

Shrey Khanna · Answer

SEO is an acronym that stands for search engine optimization, which is the process of optimizing your website to get organic, or un-paid, traffic from the search engine results page

Lucas Machado · Answer

One thing about search engine optimization - it's a black-box. Google's algorithm is proprietary, and as hard as you study, there is an element of the unknown. I'm not saying there aren't facts. However, in the industry, many sites are fairly cookie cutter. There's only so much "on site" testing we are going to work or able to do.

As a quick example, depending on your market, you might be lucky to see about 50 organic visitors. I'm page one on all the key searches (goes up an down a bit to #1 through #10), and I get around 30 to 60 visitors per day.

I started a VWO site to run some A/B split tests. I was advised, at 50 visitors per day, a high certainty test was going to take nearly a year to run.

As a matter of perspective, conventional wisdom says buying back-links is bad? Spam links are bad? However, if you SEM rush competitors in my market, you see plenty of black hat tactics, including purchased links. I am dead serious when I say my competitors have built a business off black-hat. Where is Google to slam them? I reported this a long time ago. No action.

The conclusion I'm looking is that you simply can't put your eggs in one basket. Local directories, national directories, press releases, on-site blogs, off-site blogs, articles, follow links, no-follow links, off-site forums, comments on high domain authority sites, social media sites, guest blogging. All of these tactics have their place.

McKinley Crowley · Answer

@Omar Ruiz Yeah you don't want to pay for backlinks, but adding your site into relevant (local) directories is good to do and beneficial for SEO. Moz and SEM Rush are both awesome tools for research and like you said competitor backlinking.

Keep Studying up it sounds like you are on the right track :)

Cheers!

Omar Ruiz · Answer

@McKinley Carbone,

When you are speaking about local listings are you referring to Moz Local or Yext listings. I have manually entered my site to different sites (Vator.com, BBB.com, Local directories, etc) for the purposes of backlinking. I used SEMRush to help me see what my compeition is using for backlinks.

I learned not to buy backlinks but if I pay for Moz or Yext, is this the same as buying backlinks or are these viewed differently since they are more for creating local listings rather than backlinks?

As for researched, I have spent time reading blogs, watching YouTube videos (Brain Dean, Neil Patel, and others) and installed Yoast plugin plus Google Analytics. I have submitted my site (sitemap) to Google Console today, so I am just waiting for them to crawl and index my site. I was told it would take from 4 days to 4 weeks. Since its the holiday season, I am fine with being patient around the crawling process.

McKinley Crowley · Answer

Hey @Omar Ruiz So my background is actually in SEO and it sounds like you have a really solid understanding of how it works and how to implement it into your marketing.

I would make sure to track your organic key words and look at how you are ranking for those. Also another component worth looking into is local listings and making sure those are all up to par. That is essentially making sure that all your info is up to date and accurate on Google listing, yelp, manta, yellow pages and so on.

Normally I would suggest that you have an SEO consultant help you out but it really seems like you have done your research here so I think as long as you are diligent in looking things up and optimizing in many (Off page/on page) areas you should be golden. As far as timeline goes... it is really hard to say when your efforts will pay off. It is 100% a long term process that will help you out down the line. Hope this helps! Good luck. :)

Digital Marketing - What is SEO?

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