Are you one of those people who think SEO is some kind of black magic?
I definitely used to. In the first place, SEO practitioners use all kinds of arcane language. They like to sit around and talk about algorithms and Florida updates and “noindex meta tag in the non-canonical copies.”
As soon as you start talking “non-canonical copies,” my eyes glaze over and my brain leaves the room.
It’s true that serious SEO can get pretty wiggy technical. But here’s the thing.
You know the 80/20 rule, right? Which usually ends up being the 95/5 rule?
95% of your results will often come from 5% of your effort. Your job is to know what 5% to focus on.
Effective SEO is all about that 5%
And it’s not as mysterious as you think it is, because SEO isn’t about code or bots or latent semantic indexing at all.
It’s about people.
(Before you send hate mail, yes, of course code and bots and latent semantic indexing are a part of SEO. But they’re tools that search engines use to better serve the people who make searches.)
There are, it must be faced, ninjas of SEO. It’s a deep, complex, and always-evolving practice. If you want to make page 1 of Google for “weight loss,” you’re going to need some serious SEO mojo.
This lesson isn’t about that. This lesson is about doing the simple stuff that, for many of us, is all we need to rank for the terms that will send us traffic and business.
And if you do ever want to hire an SEO ninja, it’s helpful to have a strong grounding in the basics. There are a lot of phony ninjas out there.
Make sure the search engines understand what you’re trying to do
Remember when I said SEO was about people?
The tricky part is that people use a complex computer-driven system (Google, or the search engine of your choice) to find the information we want.
And that system is complex. Mostly because there are thousands of weirdos and spammers out there trying to game the system and send people garbage.
Google’s rules get ever more complicated because they’re
trying to do something very simple: send searchers to valuable
content that gives those searchers what they need.
As an official Smart Internet Marketer (we’ll be preparing those merit badges soon), that kind of content is exactly what you create.
So you and Google are already starting off on the same page, even if it doesn’t feel that way.
Now you just need to convince their computer code that you’re one of the good guys. And because computer code is inherently very stupid, you have to do that in a certain narrowly-defined way.
SEO is people!
(Extra credit to anyone who gets the reference.)
Most SEO guides will tell you a lot about how to arrange your web page. And that matters quite a bit, because it tells the very stupid computer code what your page is about.
But the hard, cold truth is that you’ve also got to get some links.
Links, that is, from someone other than your Aunt Mary and a mob-run link farm in northwest Romania.
Everything we’ve been teaching on the blog and in this newsletter:
- About building relationships first and foremost,
- about the second customer who’ll help share your content,
- about terrific content that serves a real purpose,
- about great headlines
… all of it will help you with SEO.
Because it will get other people to “say” great stuff about you in the form of links.
That’s why you’re already a long way toward being an SEO ninja, even if you don’t realize it yet.
The website code is the easy part
Creating a website with SEO-friendly code and page layout is no longer tough. If you use WordPress, all you need is a well-designed theme that creates search-engine-friendly code.
Great content is the thing that’s tough to create. It takes dedication and care.
Once that great content is created, however, tweaking it so search engines love it as much as people do is not that tough either. Sure, you need to know what you’re doing, and you need to do it regularly and efficiently, but it’s not hard.
To help you out with that, Brian put together a free 27-page report on how to create compelling content that ranks well in search engines. You’ll discover:
- Why SEO Copywriting Still Matters
- How Search Engines Work
- Why You Have to Spoon Feed Search Engines
- The 5 Essential Elements of Search Engine Keyword Research
- How to Create Cornerstone Content That Google Loves
- Five Link Building Strategies That Work
- Five Areas to Focus On for Effective SEO Copywriting
- Why Writing for People Works for Search Engines
- How to Make SEO Copywriting Simple
27 quick pages and you’ll have that 5% of SEO knowledge that will give you 95% of your desired results.
We want you to have this free report with no obligation, registration, or email address required, so … grab your copy here.