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7-Figure Small with Brian Clark
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing
Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing
Hack the Entrepreneur
Members Only
Rainmaker.FM Elsewhere
Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites
StudioPress FM
Technology Translated
The Digital Entrepreneur
The Missing Link
The Showrunner
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience
Youpreneur with Chris Ducker
Zero to Book
Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing
hosted by Darrell Vesterfelt and Tim Stoddart

10 Quality Factors Search Engines Need to See on Your Site

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Previous Episode:A Simple Content Strategy to Make Your Site Massively More Useful More Episodes Next Episode:Storytelling for Modern Content Marketing (Part 1 of 2)

All Episodes:

March 30, 2020

The Advantage of Email Marketing, Featuring Nathan Barry of ConvertKit

March 15, 2020

How to Write Content That Resonates

March 9, 2020

How to Conquer Your Fear of Selling, with Leah Neaderthal

March 2, 2020

How to Build Remarkable Products to Grow Your Business, with Ramit Sethi

February 17, 2020

What You Should Talk about on Your Podcast, with Tara McMullin

February 9, 2020

How to Win at Search in 2020

February 3, 2020

How to Turn Pro as a Freelance Writer

January 27, 2020

Marketing Segmentation and Personalization with Brennan Dunn of RightMessage

January 20, 2020

Podcasting Still Matters, with Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income

January 13, 2020

The New Look Copyblogger in 2020

January 8, 2020

New Year, New Copyblogger

October 23, 2019

The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur with John Jantsch

October 2, 2019

Consistency Will Take You Further

September 25, 2019

The Past, Present, and Future of Online Learning

September 16, 2019

How to Get More of the Right Things Done

September 9, 2019

Why the Future Is Still Email

September 3, 2019

What’s Next for
Copyblogger Media?

August 26, 2019

How Smart, Nimble Companies Are Using Webinars Today

August 19, 2019

The Clarity Method: A Conversation with Tim Brownson

August 12, 2019

Digital Business Trends and the Latest on the Rainmaker Platform

August 5, 2019

4 ‘Naive’ Business Principles for Enduring Success

July 8, 2019

How to Write an Epic Blog Post, Part 3: Polishing and Promotion

July 1, 2019

How to Write an Epic Blog Post, Part 2: Getting It Written

June 24, 2019

How to Write an Epic Blog Post, Part 1: Thinking and Research

June 17, 2019

3 Almost Magical Headline Ingredients for More Traffic, Engagement, and Shares

June 10, 2019

Lessons Any Business Can Learn from an Impressive Influencer Marketing Fail

June 3, 2019

13 Ways of Looking at a Headline

May 27, 2019

The 7 ‘Bad’ Habits of Incredibly Successful People

May 20, 2019

Writers: How to Move from Making a Living to Driving Revenue

May 13, 2019

Choose the Right Frame to Boost the Power of Your Content

May 6, 2019

How Copywriting Teacher Belinda Weaver Reenergized Her Email List for Massive Engagement

April 29, 2019

3 Reasons Why Really Good Writers Sometimes Can’t Find Great Clients

April 22, 2019

3 Slightly Embarrassing Emotions that Drive Effective Copywriting

April 15, 2019

Get 10 Content Marketing Boosters in 20 Minutes

April 8, 2019

Becoming the ‘Chief Empathy Officer’ of Your Copy and Content

April 1, 2019

One of the Most Important Marketing Decisions You’ll Ever Make

March 18, 2019

What Nobody Wants to Hear about Content Marketing

March 11, 2019

Getting Your Big, Scary Projects Finished: A Conversation about Growing Gills

March 4, 2019

When Is It Time to Bring in a Professional Copywriter?

February 25, 2019

Using Content to Systematically Move Prospects Toward a Purchase

February 18, 2019

Understanding the Lifecycles of Your Website, with Pamela Wilson

February 11, 2019

5 Ways to Manage a Stress-Induced Creative Slump

February 4, 2019

3 Ways Strategic Content Can Drive Measurable Business Outcomes

January 28, 2019

The Social Media Platform Every Content Creator Should Be Using in 2019 (Nope, It’s Not Facebook)

January 21, 2019

Real Talk about Generating High-Quality Content

January 14, 2019

A Conversation with Paul Jarvis about Staying a ‘Company of One’

October 29, 2018

The 3 Plus 1 Foundational Elements of Effective Persuasion

October 22, 2018

5 Essential Copywriting Techniques from Copyblogger

October 15, 2018

5 Ways to Recover Your Professional and Creative Confidence

October 8, 2018

5 Stinky Sardine Secrets to Make Your Content More Fascinating

September 24, 2018

The Mindset ‘Hack’ that Frees Your Creativity and Makes You Happier

September 18, 2018

How to Kill Your Sales and Mess up Your Business: Lessons from a Used Car Salesman

September 4, 2018

The 7 Things Writers Need to Make a (Good) Living

August 27, 2018

Are You Making These Social Media Marketing Mistakes?

August 20, 2018

Fix These 7 About Page Mistakes for More Traffic and (Possibly) Better SEO

August 13, 2018

7 Ways to Boost Your Creativity

August 6, 2018

A 10-Step ‘Checklist’ for Your Content Marketing Site

July 30, 2018

The 3 Keys to Publishing Strong Content … Even If You Aren’t a ‘Great’ Writer (Yet)

July 23, 2018

Fix These 3 Points of Failure to Get Better Results for Your Content

July 16, 2018

Big Changes at ConvertKit: A Discussion with Founder Nathan Barry

July 9, 2018

3 Skills to Master to Become a Marketing Badass this Year

June 18, 2018

The Quiet Power of Conversational Copy

June 11, 2018

5 Rules of Thumb to Relieve SEO-Induced Stress

June 4, 2018

How to Use the GDPR to Make Your Business Stronger than Ever

May 14, 2018

‘Good Karma’ Selling that Works: A Conversation with Tim Paige

April 30, 2018

How to Get More Comfortable (and Effective) at Selling

April 23, 2018

Privacy and Permission in the Wake of Cambridge Analytica

April 16, 2018

Seth Godin and How to Create Change

April 9, 2018

Email? Chatbots? Social? How Are We Supposed to Reach People?

March 26, 2018

The Double-Edged Sword that Can Make (or Break) Your Content

March 19, 2018

Make More Progress by Getting (Gently) Out of Your Comfort Zone

March 12, 2018

Are You Doing Content Marketing Wrong?

March 5, 2018

Storytelling for Modern Content Marketing (Part 2 of 2)

February 26, 2018

Storytelling for Modern Content Marketing (Part 1 of 2)

February 19, 2018

10 Quality Factors Search Engines Need to See on Your Site

February 12, 2018

A Simple Content Strategy to Make Your Site Massively More Useful

February 5, 2018

How to Avoid a Heartbreaking Business Failure

January 29, 2018

Hey Writers: Let’s Get You Paid What You’re Worth

January 15, 2018

5 Keys to Making Your Content More Shareable

December 18, 2017

3 Observations on Trends (but not Predictions) for 2018

December 11, 2017

3 Tips Now to Build a Strong Foundation in 2018

December 4, 2017

The 3 Success Factors that Help Writers Earn a Great Living

November 27, 2017

How to Recognize a Great Content Idea

November 20, 2017

How to Cultivate a More Meaningful Gratitude Practice

November 13, 2017

Advice for Poets, Advice for Killers

October 30, 2017

Face Your Business Fears on Halloween Week

October 23, 2017

How to Make Smarter Decisions about Your Website

October 2, 2017

A Series of Unfortunate Content Events

September 18, 2017

The Evolution of a Successful Copywriter

August 28, 2017

7 Ways to Improve Your Marketing by Harnessing the Power of Evil

August 14, 2017

Smart Questions from our Brilliant Audience

August 7, 2017

Does the Web Have Enough Patience for Your In-Depth Content?

July 31, 2017

How to Write (Much Better) Blog Comments

July 17, 2017

Which Works Better: Positive or Negative Content?

July 10, 2017

How to Attract the Exact Customers You Want

July 3, 2017

How to Create Stability and Success as an Artist

June 19, 2017

Two Powerful Resources for Life-Changing Growth

June 12, 2017

How to Turn All that Marketing Advice into Action

June 5, 2017

How to Develop a Compelling Marketing Idea in 4 Steps

May 30, 2017

Getting Over the Fear of Selling

May 22, 2017

Talking Community and Digital Business with Tara Gentile

May 15, 2017

Plagiarism, Self-Deception, Bad Sandwiches, and Other Interesting Disasters

May 1, 2017

Professional Writers: Find Out How to Get Certified by Copyblogger

April 17, 2017

The Painful Core Lesson Taught by 3 Astonishing Big-Brand Fails

April 3, 2017

5 Mindset Habits that Actually Work

March 27, 2017

On Grammar, Usage, and Not Being a Great Big Jerk

March 20, 2017

Creative Strategies for Content Writers

March 13, 2017

A New Ultra-Easy Resource for Creating Excellent WordPress Sites

February 20, 2017

Thriving Freelancers and Clients from Hell

February 13, 2017

Politics, Content Marketing, and the 2017 Super Bowl Ads

February 6, 2017

Copyblogger Book Club: Winning the Story Wars

January 23, 2017

3 Content Marketing Strategy Fails (and How to Fix Them)

January 9, 2017

The 2017 Content Excellence Challenge: Your January Assignments

December 19, 2016

Bad Writing Advice: The ‘Post Truth’ Episode

December 12, 2016

Get Ready Now for a Creative and Productive 2017

December 5, 2016

The 4 Pillars Every Online Business Is Built On

November 28, 2016

Orbit Media’s Latest Survey of 1000 Bloggers

November 14, 2016

Have You Already Missed the Podcasting Gold Rush?

November 7, 2016

Getting More Traffic, Links, and Shares to Your Content

October 31, 2016

5 Quick Wins for Content Marketers

October 24, 2016

Announcing: An Intriguing New Tool for Collaborative Content

October 17, 2016

A New Book to Make Content Marketing Easier

October 10, 2016

Behind the Scenes at Copyblogger: Our New Email Approach

October 3, 2016

The ‘Obligatory’ Structure of Effective Content

September 26, 2016

7 Powerful Content Strategies Borrowed from Advertising Masters

September 15, 2016

How to Handle Demographic and Psychographic Segmentation (without Looking Like an Idiot)

September 8, 2016

Ethics, Professionalism, and Good Manners for Content Marketers

September 1, 2016

3 Questions that Can Haunt Creative Professionals

August 25, 2016

How to Give and Get Exceptional Testimonials, Part Two

August 18, 2016

How to Give and Get Exceptional Testimonials, Part One

August 11, 2016

Are You Leaving Money on the Table with Weak Headlines?

August 4, 2016

Content Marketing for Nonprofits

July 28, 2016

The One-Two Punch that Creates the Most Successful Copywriters

July 21, 2016

Pokémon Go: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

July 14, 2016

5 Suggestions When You’re Writing About Controversy

July 7, 2016

Announcing: A Breakthrough Educational Collaboration between Copyblogger and U.C. Davis

June 30, 2016

How to Break Past the #1 Conversion Killer

June 23, 2016

The New Age of Marketing Automation: Powerful, Simple, Cost-Effective

June 16, 2016

How to Make a (Really Good) Living as a Freelance Writer

June 9, 2016

Self-Publishing, Side Hustles, and Doing It All: A Conversation with Linda Formichelli

June 2, 2016

A Process for Content Marketing Success

May 26, 2016

Content Marketing Best Practices: Getting Email Opt-Ins

May 19, 2016

Behind the Scenes: Adventures in Advertising

May 12, 2016

Trump, Apple, and Facebook Advertising: Content Marketing News for May, 2016

May 5, 2016

Sally Hogshead and the Art of Fascination

April 28, 2016

Behind the Scenes at the Rainmaker Digital Company Meeting!

April 14, 2016

Social Media News, Social Media Constants

April 7, 2016

Strategies for B2B Podcasting, with Clark Buckner

March 31, 2016

Content Marketing Success Stories: Fitness Powerhouse Examine.com

March 24, 2016

Behind the Scenes: An Inside Look at the Rainmaker FM Redesign

March 17, 2016

Our Latest Advice and Resources for Digital Business Owners

March 10, 2016

Should Content Publishers Adopt Google’s New AMP?

March 3, 2016

7 Ways to Get Smarter with Social Media Listening

February 25, 2016

Content Marketing Shout-Out: Orbit Media and Andy Crestodina

February 18, 2016

The Tactic You Should Steal from Copyblogger

February 11, 2016

Content Marketing News for February, 2016

February 4, 2016

Email Marketing: The Misunderstood Powerhouse

January 28, 2016

The Secret Weapon Behind Great Websites: The Role of the Content Editor

January 21, 2016

Behind the Scenes: The Relaunch and Re-Imagining of Copyblogger.com

January 14, 2016

Trends and Predictions for Digital Commerce: A Conversation with Brian Clark

January 7, 2016

2016 Content Marketing Resolutions

December 28, 2015

The End of The Lede, The Beginning of Copyblogger FM

November 10, 2015

Constraints Can Be Blessings (Plus 2 Other Essential Lessons Jerod Re-Learned This Week)

November 3, 2015

Long or Short? The Content Length Question Answered, Once and For All

October 27, 2015

The Simple Publishing Hack That Gives Old Content New Life (Plus 3 More Tips)

October 20, 2015

The Surprising Truth about Earning a Profit from Your Content

October 13, 2015

How to Move Your Audience From Infatuation to Love

October 6, 2015

3 Things Your Audience Wants You to Know about Useful Content

September 29, 2015

Revisiting Authenticity: What It Is, What It’s Not, and Why It Matters

September 22, 2015

Publishing Lessons from Dave Pell, the Most Fascinating Email Newsletter Writer in the Business

September 15, 2015

Why Content Creators Should Kiss Their Programmers

September 8, 2015

Finally — A Podcast about the Superiority of Written Content

September 1, 2015

Hot Seat: Grilling Jerod on Using Audio Content to Seed a Content Arsenal

August 25, 2015

How to Optimize Your Headlines for Content Discovery with Vinegar (Before You Die of Cholera)

August 18, 2015

5 Stories That Explain Jerod Morris (Plus One Massive Marketing Lesson)

August 11, 2015

Lede Potpourri: A Big Idea, Talking About Demian Behind His Back, and Lessons from #PM15

August 4, 2015

How to Attend an Industry Conference Like a Boss

July 28, 2015

Getting the Most Out of a Conference When You’re There to Promote, Part 1

July 21, 2015

How Much Does the Modern Content Marketer Need to Know About SEO?

July 14, 2015

Are Podcasters Digitally Sharecropping Without Realizing It?

July 7, 2015

Celebrating Our 101st Episode (with a Special Guest Interviewer)

June 30, 2015

Why The Phrase ‘Leaders Are Readers’ Should Die

June 23, 2015

Why You Should Think Outside the Box About Online Courses

June 16, 2015

The Proper (and Safe) Way to Republish Old Articles

June 9, 2015

How to Grow an Audience on LinkedIn by Repurposing Content

June 2, 2015

Key Takeaways from Three-and-a-Half Hours with Henry Rollins

May 27, 2015

Rapid-Fire Takeaways from Authority Rainmaker

May 19, 2015

The Proper Way to Grow an Audience on Medium

May 12, 2015

The Introvert’s Guide to Launching a Successful Podcast

May 5, 2015

The One Quality All Popular Podcasts Share

April 28, 2015

Proof That Grit Is the Only Way to Reach Your Potential

April 21, 2015

Do We Celebrate Failure Too Much?

April 14, 2015

Choose Yourself Part 2: James Altucher Fights Back

April 7, 2015

Should We Fear Content Shock? (Or Could It Actually Be a Good Thing?)

March 31, 2015

Should You Really ‘Walk in the Direction of Your Fear’?

March 24, 2015

Is ‘Choose Yourself’ Good Advice … or New-Age Phooey?

March 17, 2015

Is Authority Earned or Bestowed?

March 3, 2015

Dan Pink on How to Succeed in the New Era of Selling

February 24, 2015

Here’s How to Answer the Most Important Question in Life (and Make a Living from It)

February 17, 2015

Sally Hogshead on How You Can Unlock Your Natural Ability to Fascinate

February 10, 2015

How to Learn from Your Successes

January 27, 2015

How to Learn From Your Mistakes

January 13, 2015

Lessons Learned from Conducting Two Monster Audience Surveys

December 16, 2014

Adaptive Content: A Trend to Pay Attention to in 2015

December 2, 2014

The Most Important Lessons You Should Have Learned in 2014

November 18, 2014

How We Built Our Careers Online (And What You Can Learn From It)

November 4, 2014

Interview with Brian Clark: How Customer Experience Maps Help You Develop a Smarter Content Strategy

October 21, 2014

How Empathy Maps Help You Speak Directly to the Hearts of Your Audience

October 7, 2014

How to Ignite a Feeling in Your Audience

September 23, 2014

Are You Overlooking This Cornerstone of a Smart Content Strategy?

June 26, 2014

How to Curate Knowledge, Turn it Into Wisdom, and Build Your Audience

June 19, 2014

How Successful Writers Curate Ideas

June 13, 2014

The 5 W’s of Link Curation

June 6, 2014

Why You Should Curate Content (And How to Do It Right)

May 30, 2014

How Freaks and Misfits Can Succeed in Business: A Conversation with Chris Brogan

May 23, 2014

The 2 Reasons People Don’t Click on Your Buttons … And How to Overcome Them

May 16, 2014

Chase Customers, Not Clicks

May 9, 2014

How to Be Authentic

May 2, 2014

How to Close With Style

April 25, 2014

The Best of Seth Godin on Copyblogger

April 17, 2014

How to Choose Arresting Images for Your Blog Posts (And Why You Should)

April 11, 2014

Removing Blog Comments: The View So Far

April 4, 2014

How to Use Internal Cliffhangers

March 28, 2014

Hangout Hot Seat with Brian Clark

March 21, 2014

How to Tell a Seductive Story

March 14, 2014

How to Create Exquisite Subheads

March 7, 2014

How to Write Killer Bullet Points

February 28, 2014

How to Write Damn Good Sentences

February 21, 2014

How to Use Persuasive Words

February 14, 2014

Michael Stelzner on Capturing Emails and Committing to Quality

February 7, 2014

How to Nail Your Opening

January 24, 2014

How to Write a Magnetic Headline (in Under 15 Minutes)

May 18, 2012

Seth Godin on When You Should Start Marketing Your Product, Service, or Idea

May 11, 2012

How to Attract an Audience by Integrating Content, Social, and Search

March 30, 2012

Why You Should Build an Audience Before You Build a Business

March 16, 2012

How Chris Brogan Built His Content Platform

March 9, 2012

Jay Baer on How to Turn Interested Prospects into Lifelong Customers

March 2, 2012

A 30-Minute Copywriting Course from a Master of the Craft

February 24, 2012

The Path to a Legendary Copywriting Career

February 17, 2012

5 Tips for Affiliate Marketing Beginners

February 10, 2012

Why Not Sell Physical Stuff With Digital Media?

February 3, 2012

Whether You Call it Blogging or Not, Online Content Still Rules

January 27, 2012

Answers to the 3 Biggest Email Marketing Questions We Get

January 20, 2012

How to Newsjack Your Way to Free Media Exposure with David Meerman Scott

January 13, 2012

Steven Pressfield and the War of Work

November 18, 2011

The Strategy Behind the Copyblogger Redesign

November 11, 2011

7 Ways to Create an Email Marketing "Snowball Effect"

November 4, 2011

Warning: If You're Not a Privacy Nut, You're Losing Sales

October 28, 2011

The 3 Kinds of Writing That Builds a Business

October 21, 2011

The Art of Seductive Writing: A Conversation with Robert Greene

October 7, 2011

Why Content Marketing Doesn't Suck

September 30, 2011

Are You Weird Enough to Succeed at Content Marketing?

September 23, 2011

What Works With SEO Right Now and Why No One Does What You Want

September 16, 2011

Are You Flushing Your Marketing Down the Social Media Toilet?

September 11, 2011

Seth Godin on Blogging, Business Books, and Creating Content that Matters

September 2, 2011

The Return of Copyblogger Radio …

June 10, 2011

Answered: Your Most Burning Content Marketing Questions

June 3, 2011

How to Get All the Clients and Customers You Can Handle

May 20, 2011

Is Content Marketing Worth the Work?

May 13, 2011

How to Write Nearly Undeletable Emails

May 6, 2011

Is the Online Gold Rush Over?

April 22, 2011

The Art of Enchanting Online Marketing with Guy Kawasaki

April 15, 2011

The Market for Something to Believe in is Infinite: An Interview with Hugh MacLeod

April 8, 2011

How to Constantly Create Compelling Content

March 25, 2011

The Content Marketing Question You Need to Answer … Now

March 18, 2011

Good SEO is Simple. Really.

March 4, 2011

Did Social Media Kill the Marketing Star?

February 25, 2011

How to Write (and Execute) a Simple but Powerful Business Plan

February 17, 2011

How to Kick Groupon to the Curb and Become a Local Hero

February 3, 2011

Convert … Or Die

January 27, 2011

Attention: Is Your Headline Getting Any?

January 20, 2011

How to Craft Landing Pages that Work

January 13, 2011

Why Every Smart Business is in the Media Business

January 5, 2011

2011 Content Marketing Predictions

December 15, 2010

Tim Ferriss on How to Reinvent Yourself with Blog Marketing

December 8, 2010

The 6 Elements of an Influential Web Experience

December 1, 2010

Your Staggeringly Unfair Marketing Advantage

November 17, 2010

How to Get Some Action

November 10, 2010

The Foundation of All Marketing that Works

November 3, 2010

Introducing Copyblogger Radio

February 19, 2018

10 Quality Factors Search Engines Need to See on Your Site

What do the search engines mean by a “high quality site”?

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While technical SEO still exists, a huge chunk of modern search engine optimization consists of “generating high-quality content.”

So what does that mean? When a search engine ‘bot looks at your site, what kinds of things is it looking for?

In this 23-minute episode, I talk about:

  • Some of the things (both simple and complicated) that can mess up your search rankings
  • Why you need to use professional-quality tools if you care about your web traffic
  • 10 factors that generate the “signals of quality” that search engines look for
  • Other ways to get discovered beyond the search engines

The specific quality factors I talk about include:

  1. Mostly original content (not scraped)
  2. A reasonable commitment to quality
  3. Freedom from stupid tactics like keyword stuffing
  4. Using the language of your audience (in other words, keyword research)
  5. Usefulness
  6. Truth
  7. Creativity and interest
  8. Smart content promotion
  9. Good links
  10. Breadth, depth, and richness — showing you actually know the topic

Listen to Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing below ...

10 Quality Factors Search Engines Need to See on Your SiteSonia Simone
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The Show Notes

  • If you’re ready to see for yourself why over 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress — the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins — swing by StudioPress.com for all the details
  • Sean Jackson’s post on OCDC (optimizing content for discovery and conversion)
  • Follow the link in this post to pick up my ebook on content promotion (it’s free with registration)
  • Good tools include reliable site monitoring to keep malware and hackers away. We like Sucuri
  • A post I wrote about the right way to think about Google
  • I’m always happy to see your questions or thoughts on Twitter @soniasimone — or right here in the comments!

The Transcript

10 Quality Factors Search Engines Need to See on Your Site

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by the all new StudioPress Sites, a turnkey solution that combines the ease of an all-in-one website builder with the flexible power of WordPress. It’s perfect for bloggers, podcasters, and affiliate marketers, as well as those of you who are selling physical products, digital downloads, or membership programs. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 200,000 website owners trust StudioPress. You can check it out by going to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the Chief Content Officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always get extra links, extra resources, and the complete show archive by going to Copyblogger.FM.

SEO for the Rest of Us

It is March already, and this month on the Copyblogger blog we’re going to be talking quite a bit about SEO, search engine optimization. The art of getting found by the search engines and more important, getting found by people who use search engines. I try to never talk about SEO without introducing the subject by saying there are so many people who know a lot more about the technical side of SEO than I do. Many, many, many people. We’re going to be inviting some of those people, some SEO heavy hitters, to the Copyblogger blog this month. They’re going to be talking about some of the more advanced scenarios, some of the more technical considerations of search engine optimization.

Today, I am not going to talk about that, because I’m not qualified to talk about that. Instead I’m going to talk about, I guess you could call it SEO for the rest of us. The kinds of best practices, solid business advice that normal businesses, especially smaller businesses that don’t have massive websites or massive budgets, things that we can do, good best practices that we can use, to improve our chances of getting found in the search engines, and just as important, not to waste money on things that don’t work well, things that are outdated, or something that’s being sold to us by somebody who’s really not fantastically great at SEO themselves.

If you are trying to rank for the keyword ‘weight loss,’ or something along those lines, something ultra competitive, if you have a massive site, a very database rich site, lots of queries, lots of data, lots of things going on, this podcast might be a little bit beyond your ken. Although, I do think that there are going to be some things you’re going to find useful here for how to structure your content, because that’s the part that I do know something about. Just to put the thing as crudely as possible, a search engine will rank your site well, in other words it will come in toward the top of the search engine’s results page, if it feels that your site is generating signals of high quality.

Some of the Things (Both Simple and Complicated) that can Mess Up Your Search Rankings

There are two approaches to search engine optimization. You can try to figure out what the algorithms are looking for today. That, of course, could change tomorrow. Then you can try to figure out how to generate a signal that matches what the algorithm is looking for. Or, you can create a site that is high quality. Immediately, all the SEOs are going to be yelling and rightly so, because that is really putting it overly simply. However, for a smaller business, for an individual website, for somebody who has a blog who’s just trying to get some search traffic on some keywords that are not ferociously competitive, it’s a thing. Creating a site that actually is good is a thing and it helps.

I’m going to talk about some of what goes into that in this podcast and also in my Copyblogger post on the same topic. Now I’m not going to tell you that gaming the search engines never works, because that’s not true. It certainly has worked, it still works in some cases. The thing I will say is that I have been in this business for quite a while now, a good chunk of years. I have noticed that the ones who really crow about the results they get from being fairly creepy and fairly spammy and the ones who are really condescending about how well their creepy spam fest is working are the ones that one day you just don’t hear from anymore, because all of their clients overnight lost their rankings.

Does a certain amount of tomfoolery still work? Yeah, it probably still works. The problem is, when it stops working it’s really irritating to try and figure out why and fix it. I ignore those kind of tactics. I don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with them. It’s not what I’m good at. What I look at are essentially content fundamentals. For me, that’s really where the success is. That’s where I really see results.

Let’s start talking about specific recommendations. The first one is make sure your site isn’t borked. In other words, make sure that there is not something technical going on on your site that is messing you up. There are any number of things that you can do to mess things up.

For example, you can buy links and get caught, that will mess you up. You can also have, and this is a bit embarrassing when it happens, you can have some code on your website that tells search engine bots not to crawl the site, or not to index the site. In other words, not to analyze it, or if they do analyze it, don’t report it in the search engine’s results page. It’s a little thing on your site called the robots.txt file. I’ll give you a link that’ll show you what to look for, what not to look for.

It seems a bit silly, but sometimes, for example, somebody might have been working on your site, set one of these parameters to don’t index the page because I’m working on it and I don’t want it to index right now. Then you wonder why you’re not getting rankings. It’s just ’cause somebody forgot to turn that off. These are things that can happen. Small things, but a small thing with technology will bork it up just as bad as a major problem.

Why You Need to Use Professional-Quality Tools if You Care about Your Web Traffic

To that end, I really recommend if you care about your website, if you care about how much traffic you get, if you care about your search engine rankings, you have to use a reasonably professional grade class of tools. In other words, you’re going to use a premium WordPress theme. You’re going to use real hosting, you’re not going to use like the $2 a month stuff. You’re going to pay for site monitoring to make sure that some weirdo hasn’t hacked your site without you realizing it. You’re going to use tools, professional grade tools. These are not necessarily ultra crazy expensive. I’m not talking about something that’s going to cost you $1,000 a month, but I am saying a moderate professional investment.

If your site is teeming with malware, then your customers are not going to want to go through, Google is going to have a little warning on the search engine’s results page that’s going to say, “This site seems to have something yucky going on,” and other bad things will happen. You have to take reasonably good care. The most common problem that I hear from people about or that I hear about when I talk to people at conferences is a site that got borked by a bad SEO. This is a thing that can happen. Somebody comes in whose sales ability is a ten and whose actual technical SEO ability is like a 1.2 and implements all kinds of shenanigans and problems happen. Again, that’s not a bash on SEOs. It is a bash on terrible SEOs. Just like every other profession, there are plenty of them out there.

If somebody who comes in, they don’t know what they’re doing, they either buy a lot of really bad links or they stuff your content with a lot of keywords and tell you that they’re SEOing your content. Somehow, SEOing as a verb can be a red flag. I’ve seen that not work well, or people who make a lot of technical behind the scenes changes that instead of making your site cleaner and simpler for the search engines to analyze, which is an important part of technical SEO, they’ve made things complicated or confusing because they’re trying to play games.

I do not know of a remedy for a bad SEO who’s come and messed things up for you, other than to hire a really good SEO to come in and fix it. That person is not going to be the most budget person. I’m not going to say they’re going to be a fortune, but don’t expect to be a cheap fix and do not expect it to be an instant fix, unless you do have something silly like you’re robot’s text is set to no index or something.

Most SEO problems, if they’re real problems, take time to get corrected. If you’re using somebody’s time who’s very good at their job, then that’s going to cost money as well. Hopefully no such terrors have visited you, and we can talk about creating a quality site. And more to the point, what does a search engine mean when it’s looking for a high quality site?

10 Factors that Generate the “Signals of Quality” that Search Engines Look for

I’m just going to give you a little bit of a laundry list of some of the things that these algorithms are looking for that shows the search engines that your site is better than somebody else who’s writing about the same topics. Your content needs to be original. It’s content that you created, it’s not something that you scraped. People get hysterically worried about the duplicate content penalty, which is not exactly a thing. It’s okay if there is some content on your website that also appears in other places on the web. There are ways to finesse that and manage it, but your site’s not going to get dinged by Google if you have some content that also appears elsewhere.

Much of your content should be original. If you do have something that is original but also appears in other places, then you need to follow some basic, decent SEO practices and help the search engines recognize that yours is the one that they should consider to be the real one, this is the real post. The second factor is a reasonable commitment to quality. What I’m saying is not that all of your content should be able to be republished in The New Yorker at any moment, but that if you would like to rank for a particular term, a particular phrase, you have to be creating better content around that phrase than other people who are writing about it.

The more competitive your keyword phrase is, or your phrases are, the more amazing your content is going to have to be. That’s just logical. Your content is going to be free of foolishness like stuffing it with keywords in a extremely outdated attempt to fool the search engines into thinking it’s super, super relevant. You don’t ever want content that’s had something done to it in the name of SEO that makes it weird or awkward for a person to read. That, for me, is my most important north star, my most important rule of thumb. The content has to work for human users first and foremost and then you tweak it lightly, lightly so that the algorithms can find you and efficiently understand what your site’s doing.

A good site, a high quality site from the point of view of a search engine is going to use language that is related, that mirrors the kind of language that users enter into the search engine when they’re looking for something. That’s what keyword research is all about. It is very simply using the language that your audience is using to write about and think about the topic. It’s not any more exotic than that.

How does your intended audience think about this? What kinds of specific words do they use when they have a question about your topic? For this reason you can get into some issues with your search traffic if you use a lot of cutesy, in-terms, things you made up, for concepts that nobody else really shares with you. That can work well if you get a big enough audience for it. I’ve seen some marketers, and it’s kind of good from an audience building perspective, they have this whole private language that they use around their stuff. That’s fine, but make sure there’s some normal human speech in there as well.

High quality sites are useful. They answer questions that people are searching for. They are true. They’re not fake news, they’re not … Has fake news been doing well in search engine results? Yes it has. Is that going to keep being true? Probably not. It is a problem that is being worked on. Please publish information that is true, that is useful, that is helpful. If all we want to be is true, useful and helpful, we might as well all go work for Wikipedia, right?

Useful is not enough. It has to be interesting. The reason it has to be interesting is not that the bots that conduct these crawls and analyze content get bored easily. It’s because content that is interesting to people gets people to generate those signals of quality. Those are things like links, spending a lot of time on your website, sharing them. If your content is useful and interesting, it’s going to generate those signals of quality. And PS, special bonus, those signals of quality tend to get your content in front of more people. It’s building your authority with search engines, but just as important and really more important, it’s getting your content in front of people who could benefit from it, which is the point, right? It is the point of the exercise.

One thing I want to talk about is I think sometimes we definitely fall into this trap of thinking that if the content is good, so we made it interesting, we made it true, we made it useful, and so we’re going to publish it and then through some kind of magical event, Google is going to know that it’s good and reward it with a good ranking. That’s not really how it works. We have to publicize our content in order for people to start looking at it and generating the signals of quality. It has to be good first, because if you publicize crappy content you’re not going to get what you want. That means we have to start thinking about things like developing our professional network, about cultivating a community of publishers in our topic, about supporting each other’s work. All those good things.

I have a whole ebook on content promotion that will help you with that if that concept stresses you out. The ultimate signal of quality at this point is still links, as far as I know. Real links from real people, not links from weird sites that nobody’s ever heard of, but solid links from credible websites created by people who know what they’re talking about. Those are still the strongest signal. You get that signal by creating something worth linking to. Incidentally, I just talked about that community of publishers in your topic, give links to people who are producing good stuff on your site. Link to people who are good. It’s the right thing to do, it’s the right thing to do for your audience, it’s the right thing to do just in general. Be part of the community. Don’t imagine that this whole thing takes place in some kind of isolation ward, because it doesn’t.

The final thing I’ll talk about in terms of quality signals is really the breadth of your site, the richness of your site. We are not in the world anymore where one really well optimized web page will tend to rank. It can for a specific enough set of keywords, but by and large your site needs to have some richness. It needs to have a good volume of content that addresses your topic in different ways, in important ways. That’s why one of the more useful things you can do, especially when you’re launching a site, but really anytime when you want to just give your site some vitamins in terms of getting more attention, is to put together a cornerstone of the most useful, the most interesting kinds of content, the how-to content, answering the most important questions, that just essential knowledge cornerstone.

Other Ways to Get Discovered Beyond the Search Engines

If you can get 10 posts, 12 posts, 20 posts written about key topics in what you write about and get them published, that really helps. Again, it helps the bots, the algorithms, understand that you know about the topic, that you have a lot to say about it and you really have something to offer the searcher. That’s what they’re looking for. The final thing I’ll say is just keep in mind that Google is not the only game. For one, people do actually use other search engines. Google has a very large share of search traffic, but it doesn’t have all of it. More to the point, people discover sites and they discover content in multiple ways.

One of my business partners, Sean Jackson, wrote a post about this on Copyblogger. The way that he refers to it is OCDC, which is optimizing content for discovery and conversion. I have to admit that around the digital office the phrase OCDC makes some of our rather OCD people twitch a little bit. The point is we don’t live in the world of, “Hire the right SEO, buy the right links, make certain technical tweaks and then you’re going to get traffic and you’re going to make a lot of money.” That’s not the world we’re in anymore. The world we live in today is about people finding you from all over the place. More to the point, they find you from all over the place and they come across you again and again. You keep crossing their path.

They might see you from a search in a search engine, but they also might see you on social. They might see your social advertising. They might see a Facebook ad that you ran. Then they might get a recommendation, a referral from a friend. All of these things add up and work together to create a path that leads people to you and so it’s not just ranking the search engines and then a miracle happens. It’s more complex than that. The nice part about that is, you can be working on the whole path while your search game is being built. Over time, search is going to become an important part of it but it probably won’t be the whole thing. Really summing it up, the best practice in search engine optimization is to create content that deserves to be found.

I will repeat that because it is important. The best practice is to create content that deserves to be found. Then you figure out the path to getting found. The search path, the social path, what have you, and you make the tweaks, you make the changes that are going to make it easier to do that, that are going to smooth that path out a little bit and make it a little easier to see you in this vast forest of content. SEO techniques that help you do that or that are harmonious with that goal of creating content that deserves to be found are probably going to serve you well.

SEO techniques that you would never in a million years do if you weren’t trying to rank, those are the ones you really have to look at and ask yourself, “Is this a good use of my time? Is this a good use of my money? Is there any way in which what I’m doing is compromising my larger goal?” That’s what you want to stay away from. I hope you will tune in this month for SEO month. It’s going to be, of course, very content focused, but we’re also going to have some more technical people who understand lots of things I couldn’t begin to explain to you. I think it’s going to be fun and interesting and can’t wait to see you there. Take care.

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Comments

  1. Roger says

    March 11, 2017 at 2:04 PM

    Sonia,
    Could you post (or just send me) the link about the robots.txt file, which shows what to look for?
    Thanks,
    Roger

    Reply
    • Sonia Simone says

      March 13, 2017 at 1:05 PM

      Hey Roger! There are quite a few pretty good resources, here are a couple of my favorites:

      This is a “cheat sheet” from Moz about what the different codes in that file do:
      https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

      Here’s Google’s help file on it, which is pretty readable:
      https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en

      Old but relevant piece on Search Engine Journal:
      https://www.searchenginejournal.com/robotstxt-4-things-you-should-know/7292/

      These will probably cover what you need. 🙂

      Reply
      • Roger says

        March 14, 2017 at 9:20 PM

        Very helpful, Sonia — especially Google’s help file. Thanks!

        Reply

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