SEM and Backlinks

Why all websites look the same.

What is SEM, how does SEO work and why user experience dictates what websites look like.

Full, non-edited transcript by descript.com

SEO, Backlinks and why bull websites look the same.
Hi, it’s Clint Griffin, and welcome to Re:iterate. This week we going to be looking at search engine marketing or ECM and how it’s broken down and what it really means with particular attention to SEO, search engine marketing or ECM as broken as the two pods. Search engine optimization or SEO and paid media.

There are camps that play into the paid space and there are camps that play into the eco space, both telling anyone that will listen, that they are equally important. But at this stage, I think it’s important to take a dive into eco and find out what it really means. So the first thing is ACO is not paid media.

You don’t pay to place any SEO content anywhere. What you might want to do though, is pay for eco to be implemented. It’s quite technical. It’s not difficult like anything, but there are certain things about it that you might need some technical help with. Most of it you can do yourself. So let’s look at how it works.

Probably the easiest way to look at eco is to think of it as tags and the way that tags make things relevant to search. If you look at a webpage, there are elements. Which acts in a similar way to the way that maybe Instagram or Twitter work. So anything with a hashtag that you put into Instagram or Twitter, or if you really want to be that kind of person into Facebook will work in the same way as ACO.

So let’s look at a webpage. If you start at the top, there’s the page name. They normally don’t display in Chrome. You don’t really see them. In Safari, they do show at the top, and on Firefox there’s a limited version of it, but they don’t really show up any more. But they do show up in search results.

So the important thing here is not to call your page, maybe home or something as derivative as that. Think about it in a more descriptive way because that’s the way that we use tags to find things. And those tags show up on search results. So if you do a search, you’ll see the first line that comes up.

Is the name of the page. Make sure it’s descriptive and make sure that it relates to your business. After that, there are meta-tags that are also hidden. They part of the code at the top before you get to the actual body of the takes that you read all the pictures. Um, and these are important as well.

Now, in the old days, there was a thing called the mitten name, and that was really, really important. Unfortunately became abused and the biggest search online, I think it still is, is the word porn. So what people were doing is calling the mitten name something something porn. It would show up in your result because of that surgeons and said, hold on, you’re abusing this.
Let’s not use it the most. They don’t use Mehta name, but there’s another thing called meta description that works really, really well, and that’s an idea of a long tail keyword. If we did this, this pug cost, for example, we would say this podcast would be described as reiterate digital marketing and philosophy.

Podcasts by Clint Griffin. So some key elements in here are things like looking for marketing, digital, digital marketing, and podcasts. They didn’t know my name or that it’s called reiterate. So don’t make the mistake of learning or SEO with brand names if they’re not known. So think of what people are looking for by categories.

So it would be digital marketing, maybe philosophy, podcasts. Those are the key words. But. Turn it into a sentence. The long tail there is reiterate digital marketing and philosophy podcast by Clint Griffin. You can see in the key words will be taken out, and then we get to the actual page. Here’s the title of the page.

Will the H one tag, that’s really, really important. So make sure that has the keywords in it that relate to the page specifically. Then you get H two and sometimes age three and then body tags. So H one think about that headline. H two could be, uh, something like a sub headline, maybe a third headline, and then body copy, which is a body tag.

Each one tells a bit more of the story. And if you think about it like a newspaper, that is the way that newspapers work. There’s a masthead, there’s a headline, the big headline that you see, this is hybrid line, and then there’s some text underneath it. If you think about that in terms of H one, H two H three, if you want to, and then body, that will give you a good understanding of how it works.

The other thing that, uh, newspapers have, it’s an image and images are really, really great because the image, you can name it using hyphens. So you can say cat at the mall about podcasts using hyphens, not underscores. And then Google reads that as a sentence if you use underscores, that doesn’t take, you use hyphens.

It does. The other cool thing about images. Is they use things called alt tags, alternative tags. These are descriptions of the image that describe them to people who are visually impaired. It really, really works well for search. It’s like a two for one deal with images. You can add in things like descriptions and captions if you wish to, but name and I’ll take style.
Really a good place to start. It gives you an understanding of how you should at least name an image. If you use those two, you’ll be good to see what a headline tag, a sub headline tag. A body tag. In other words, the body of the text with your image, you’ve got the image name, plus you’ve got a description.

So if we continue the newspaper and analogy, search engines use what we call above the fold to check your eco. In other words, what can be seen before? You have to scroll like the top of a folded newspaper. That’s what makes the sales. That’s what makes Google and the other engines understand what’s important on your page.

The really, really short include your keywords here, your phrases. Maybe you want to look at two or three times using that word or phrase maximum above the fold. It will become quite difficult to do more than that when you write them off, but don’t stress about that. There are lots and lots of helpers on the internet.

Just use them. Find things that work for you. Start racking your headline and stop writing your body copy, and there are ways to see how many times you’ve edited a keyword or a phrase. Before you start doing a thing called keyword stuffing. So once you’ve done that, you’ve got your name of your website, you’ve got the name of the page, you’ve caught your H one H two tags, you’ve got the name of your image, and then these things that you can’t really control yourself unless you are a developer, like a load speed of your page.

This size of the image files, is it mobile first? Does it resize nicely for different browsers? And is the user experience wonderful or terrible? These are important things when it comes to eco, the bidder, your user experience easier just to use the website, the better that ranks as well. So a little hint here is to make sure that your website looks like all the other websites.
I know that sounds a bit counter, but users understand how websites work and don’t change that. Imagine if each person used a different alphabet. It would be very annoying and very impractical. So the way it works is you’ve got logo left or center, a menu next to it, a main menu below that, an image, and then some takes below that.

You know the flow. I bet you could draw 99% of websites in your head and I can give you a pencil and a pain and a piece of paper. You could write it down within five seconds. You’d know exactly what a normal website looks like. Don’t change it. So once you’ve done this, then your website’s got a name of the page.

It’s got a title, it’s got a meta tag, it’s got an H one H two it looks like it should look, and it loads quickly. Your images. I’ve got two titles, at least the name of the file. And an all tag. And then what happens is they’re little automated bots. They called web crawlers and the index your website, and they use all the words and phrases that you’ve used to match to searches, including images.

So when someone types in a search, they look for all the images and all the takes that you written, and they match what you’ve said to what they querying about. It’s really, really important if you think about this, to make sure that they all align. So he headline should use your keyword once your sad page should use it once again, and your body copy should use it once or twice or three times.

If there’s multiples of them. Make sure the one in the H one tag is the most important one. Make sure an H, T but again, maybe some other key phrase. And then in your body you might want to do two or three of them to make the person understand what they’re looking for. You’ve all done lots of searches.

You know what they look like. Go and do some for yourself and see what those results look like again. Now that you know what they look like, you’ll understand how you should put your words into that phrasing.

So once this is all done, you can start writing articles. You can write blogs and posts off of your site, which then link back to the website. These are called inbound links or backlinks, and they add value to the weighting of your website. When something links from a very important website to another one, it takes the important website and sees there’s a value to that, the value of that website linking to something less important.

Adds value to the website. It’s linked to. So if you look at something like medium or any of the bigger bit of blog sites where you can add content. They considered important. Linking to your website gives you more importance than you not linking to them. So you need to be multiple links from there as well.

And also from your social networks. If you link from social networks all the time, like Facebook or Instagram or whatever it might be, what that shows is that you, the content of your website is dynamic, stuff’s changing, or it’s relevant to different kinds of searches, different kinds of content that you’re writing about all the time.

It keeps the stuff in your website. Linked to current things that makes it more important. Once you’ve done that, go back to your site and do the same internally. Make sure that you can link a page to another page with certain ideas and key things. If you think about Wikipedia, anything that Wikipedia has links to other articles within Wikipedia.

These are called internal search links. Make sure that your site has a link to others inside your sites. If you’re talking about one thing on page two, it might link to an idea that may be on page three. Well, page four and then come back and fill the links. Also work at it shows the unikernel is oralism the web crawlers at your site as well.

Understood. That is linked between different pages and not these kind of random ideas that don’t make any sense. So you’ve got all the keywords done, you’ve got your tags wooden put in, bottlings working, you might link externally and that’s fantastic. Now it’s really important to be hosted locally, wherever that might be.

Lyft does is it gives you a good, a good load speed. Try to have the right extension for your business, for your business.biz. If you’re a nonprofit, may get a.org. The Kong kind of works everywhere in the world that makes sure that it makes sense to within your business context that you name it, property.

If you locally encase it in, or if you locally in South Africa and make it dot. See it as, Hey, if you local to american.com if you British dot see it at UK, New Zealand at . The content a year is Australia. Try and make sure that you buy the right domain name,
page name, meta-description, title H, one H, two body image names above the fold. All of that you can do yourself. Then the page speed and all the rest of it you can get your developer to do if you don’t know how to do it. One thing I don’t want you to do, please, is to do your thing called keyword stuffing, where you try and put too many keywords into your search once your page, or a lot of people do this where they take, um, a lot of keywords.

They’ve put it at the bottom of the page. They put in a white and a white background and think that it will pick it up. The engines understand this. They actually negative rates. You, they see that you’re trying to cheat and you got bread at the bottom. You’ll never ever be seen again. Do not try and do that.

So all of the things you’ve spoken about, not all science to all of them are trying to do the basics properly, iterate and see how it works. And the cool thing is if you do your eco properly with the tags, with the naming, with the right pages, with the internal links, with the inbound links, when you start doing paid media, the thing about your keywords for paid media, they will match the keywords in your ACO.

And what happens. Bang. You’ve got content that’s relevant. You’ve got search terms that are relevant. People find what they want. They look for it in search. They go to the page, the page talks about the same things, and you go up in the rankings and when you go up and rankings and paid, you pay less for the paid and you rank higher.

So they do work together. Also, when you get paid more people click the high. You rank on non-paid media. So my advice is to start with those basics. Start with it. Keywords. Start with the titles thought with naming your files correctly, your images. Make sure it kind of feels like a newspaper.

Make sure that it looks and feels like every other website. Make sure you’ve got internal links and make sure you start writing articles that come from external links. Try and link that as well if you want to, and once you’ve done it, do it again and do it again and do it again. That’s the iterative process.

And we even that properly, you’ll see that your ed rating will go up, the cost per click will come down and you’ll rank higher and the research that you do, that’s it. It’s a simple one. I went into eco. Please always give me feedback at podcast@reiterate.org or go to the website and leave a comment.

That’s all I have to save for this week. Have a great week and we’ll chat again soon.