SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of those tricky subjects for many people to grasp. I knew that SEO results were important, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. It was hard for me to understand. Until I started paying attention to one thing and one thing only. Content. Now, let me be clear, I’m not expert by any means. But I have learned a lot from Jason, who while he won’t admit it, is quite the expert on the topic.
The idea behind search engine optimization, is to get ranked highly on the three major search engines. The best way to do that is to increase your domain authority. The best way to increase your domain authority is to acquire high quality and real links. (Notice how I didn’t say build links or link-building.)
Now, like all things digital marketing, SEO is constantly changing. What worked last year, might not work this year. And what’s working this year, might not work next. While this may be true, we do know one thing. Organic, value driven and content based SEO is here to stay. Actually, it always has been the key to getting long lasting results on search engines. What changes year after year is the line between black hat and white hat SEO tactics.
In case you aren’t familiar with black hat vs white hat, let me fill you in.
Black Hat SEO
Black hat is bad and you want to avoid it at all costs. These are things like comment and forum spam, keyword stuffing, and old-school link building.
White Hat SEO
White hat is the good stuff you want to do more of. It starts and ends with good content like blogging, social media, landing pages and quality inbound links, or as we call it, link earning.
3 More Things You Need To Know About SEO
SEO is all about trust.
SEO is a train of trust. You want to have good search engine results because when you show up at the top, you are automatically trusted. Why? Because people trust search engines and if you are at the top of Google, Google trusts you thus passing along this trust to your site.
Don’t build links, get links.
You need to focus on acquiring links or earning links, not building them. The best way to do this is through blogging and producing high quality content that people want to link back to. The links that people give you and that you earn are GOOD links. Those that you force are bad. So how do you know if you are building a link vs acquiring a link? Ask yourself this one thing. Did you control the anchor text? If you answered yes, then you are building that link, not acquiring it.
Now, in case you don’t know what anchor text is, let me explain. Anchor text is the text you hyperlink. You want this to come naturally as the writer wishes. The writer should have control over what the anchor text is, not you. If you are controlling it, you are probably over optimizing it for the top tail keyword that you are trying to rank for. Just don’t.
You can’t just do SEO. It needs to be a part of a larger strategy.
This is something we hear all the time. People say, “I need SEO and only SEO.” The truth is you need more than just SEO to grow your website. SEO is part of a larger strategy. You need to blog, share and be social, have high quality landing pages, and earn links. All of these things will help with your search engine rankings. In other words, social media is part of SEO. Blogging is part of SEO. Content is part of SEO. SEO is not this one thing you do all by itself, it’s the combination of all of these strategies working in combination together.
Do this one thing to get better search engine results.
Increase white hat SEO and avoid black hat SEO.
Sounds simple right? It really is. Forget about all the code, forget about all the keyword optimization and focus on content. Your content should be targeted towards your readers and no one else. It should be content that your readers and potential customers want to read when they search for specific keywords. Make them find you and when they do, make your content exactly what they are looking for. While you are focusing on this style of content, people will want to link to it and share it. Both of which help your domain authority and help you get better search engine results.
I hope that clears things up for you and you are ready to embrace the new content backed SEO.
