 Welcome to Killer Keywords, how to write content for both humans and search engines. Our speaker for this talk is Pam Humphre. Pam owns two agencies, Ham and Marketing, and Stealth, Search, and Analytics. Both specialized in SEO, PPC, and Analytics. Pam gives us talks at WordCamp from the country about SEO and Google Analytics, and very, very knowledgeable, I've heard her speak before, so you guys heard her, so I'm going to turn it over to her. Thank you. Hello everyone, thank you for the kind introduction, and thanks for having me here. Can everyone in the back hear me? I'll try to project as best I can, just wave if you can't, give me the ear sign if you can't hear. So today we are talking about how to write content for both humans and search engines. It is quite the balancing act, even with the little parts of it, like image alt tags, which came up in the last talk, so we'll touch upon that and the balancing act involved in that. But let's talk big picture first, and if you want to download the slides that I'm going to show, there are some tips and tricks in here you may want to download. It's stealthsearch.com, and then just go to the slides link in the upper right. I'll leave that there for one more moment, and then I'll show it again at the end. All right, so who am I? Well, Josh just introduced Pam and Marketing and Stealth, so you know about that. Personally, I'm a lifelong nerd. I started playing with computer code at six years old. I started coding websites in HTML in the late 90s, and have been fiddling with SEO and whatnot since 2005, somewhat professionally, and then very professionally, kind of wiggled my way into it. And fun fact, I'm a not-so-closet metalhead. A lot of you know that about me by now, and some people are surprised to find that out. So favorite bands include Kill Switch Engage, Fear Factory, and of course Slayer. So feel free to contact me afterwards with any questions or heavy metal music suggestions. Anyway, I'm going to start out with what not to do. I'm going to step aside and make sure everyone can see this, and I don't even think it needs further explanation. When it comes to trying to write copy for SEO, don't do that. That is absolutely not desirable by your human readers, nor Google. Google does not like keyword stuffing. It can be penalized for doing that. So the art of writing for both humans and search engines is a balancing act. Like I said, that is not what I'm going to show you how to do. But it is possible to incorporate good keywords for search engines into your copy and still maintain a copy that looks nice, reads naturally for your human readers as well. I'm going to walk you through this formula for success that we've come up with, that we use with our clients, and it's very easy to follow. It's really small there, so I'm going to walk through it one step at a time coming up. But just a quick overview, zooming out to high level. Your website really does have two audiences. You've got humans and search engines. You can have the prettiest, most awesome website in the world, but if no one can find it, then what good does that do? You can also have a very highly optimized website that looks like crap and reads like crap. So you really do have two audiences that you want to keep in mind at all times. And sometimes they want the same things and sometimes they want different things. So humans, what do they want out of your website and your copy? They want high quality advice, natural sounding language, it's easy to read, and short digestible snippets of information. Now what do search engines want out of your website? High quality advice, that's what they want you to be giving in your copy, so that's the same. Natural sounding language, that's also the same. But here's where it differs. Search engines do like words. Some people are very shocked to hear me say that. I'll pick on a home page design or something. They'll say, how I see how friendly do you think this looks? So I'm like, there's this thing called words that search engines like that aren't on this page. You do need words. Search engines do like copy. That has a lot of words. The average top 10 ranking, meaning page one, ranking has about 2,000 words. I know everybody's face is like, I get the same reaction every time. Really? Actually, yes. Now I'm not saying you have to write 2,000 words on every page of your website. That would not be appropriate. But for certain things, it could be appropriate. An in-depth blog article certainly can be 2,000 words. And doing a real in-depth article like that once in a while is a good idea. Otherwise, it's a balancing act. You have to do what's appropriate for the page. But you do need to flesh it out as best you can while still sounding natural for humans and not overdoing it and so on. In short, that's the biggest discrepancy between what the humans want and what the search engines want. Everything else is really the same. But you can compromise effectively by picking a specific number of points that you want to make in a piece of content on a page or an article. Write thoroughly about each point so that your word count gets nice and fleshed out and in total you have a lot of words. But break down each point with subheadings. This is huge and it makes it look like... If you just put 2,000 words on a web page, it looks like a term paper. But you can artfully put 2,000 words into an article nicely broken up in short digestible snippets with subheadings and with imagery or visual assets of any kind. So if it's subheadings and images and it's kind of broken up a bit, it doesn't look like 2,000 word term paper and then humans are not turned off by it, yet your word count is there for search engines. So it can be done. That compromise can be done. Couple tips on how to write for humans specifically to make your copy even more attractive to humans. You want to, as we said, provide high quality advice in natural sounding copy, but also break down those subtitles by key point, not just for the visual purpose that I just mentioned, but to make it short skimmable and easily digestible so people can skip right to the part. If they already know the first two things, they can skip right to the third section easily. And you want to use catchy titles. And there's some tactics that you can, well proven tactics you can use for this to get people to click on your article. The first one is including the number of key points in the title. Top five marketing strategies for success. You see this a lot because it works. And just a little side tip, the higher your click-through rate on Google, I reference Google a lot, but all search engines use similar technology, but I'll reference Google because they're the most common. The higher your click-through rate on Google, the better that benefits your SEO. If people are clicking on your result, as opposed to one of the other 10 results that are there, that Google sees that as a good sign for your website. So it's important to make the titles catchy so that the humans click on them so that the search engines are impressed. But making them catchy for the humans includes a couple of tactics like including the number of points in the title that they're going to read in the article. Adding a sense of exclusivity or urgency, like there are only three ways to increase online sales. I'm like, wow, only three? That's easy. I got to know what they are. That wow factor, that definitely works. Identifying your audience also works. Like essential marketing tips for contractors. If I was a contractor, I would be skimming by and see that. Oh, if I was just searching marketing tips and I came across one that said marketing tips for contractors, I'd be like, I'm a contractor. That's me. So anything they can identify with, anything you can put in there that makes them say, hell, that's me. That'll be more likely to be clicked on. And also including the result of your advice like that, same one, there are only three ways to increase online sales. It increases the WIFM, the what's in it for them, that they're going to get out of reading your content. What they're going to get is they're going to get the result of increasing their online sales. So including that WIFM, that what's in it for them, or what's in it for me, in each title, whenever as best you can, works as well. And last but not least, you want to try to use powerful words. And here's some examples of power words. And this is also a delicate balancing act thing, too, because you can quickly start to sound kind of click-baity and less professional with some of these. But it depends on your brand and your brand's style and how far you want to go with that. For the most kind of strict corporate brand, some of these words would apply. You know, just most important. You know, that's a powerful thing. Like, these are the most important tips you could possibly learn in this topic. Amazing shocking, that's where you start to get into perhaps click-bait category, but that might be the style you're going for. So, and you can look up, there's lists. There's just Google power words and power words for titles. And you'll find lists of hundreds and hundreds of these. These are just some of the most common, but essential. I like essential. Like, even the most dry corporate brand can write an article and include the word essential in the title, and it makes it more powerful of a title. So, those are some things you can do to impress your humans and get them to click on your article and consume your content. Now, for search engines, again, we want to give thorough advice so that word count is high. We want to naturally incorporate right-sized keywords that people actually search for. So, here's where we get into the weeds with the SEO stuff a little bit. I'll explain what I mean by right-sized keywords right now. What we're going to do, and we're going to go into this a little more in-depth, is we're going to figure out how to use a keyword research tool to pick phrases with search volume at or below your monthly organic traffic number. Again, if this sounds confusing, we'll get more into it in a moment here. But the concept, the rough concept behind this, this is not an exact science, but there's a rough concept here that makes sense, which is that if search engines were willing to rank your site for keywords with a huge amount of search volume, you'd already have a huge amount of traffic. So, if a search engine was willing to rank your site for a keyword that gets 90,000 searches a month, and you only have 10 hits a month on your website, I don't think Google's going to be willing to rank that website for that keyword at this time. You can always work and should work your way up with this concept. But the right-sizing concept is you want to stay within the realm of keywords that are attainable for your site in terms of popularity. Because the more popular a term is, the more competitive it is and the more strength of SEO reputation your site has to have in order to be worthy of showing up for that keyword. So you want to work your way up. We'll have questions coming up after I get through the slides. So hold that thought. So when picking keywords for your content, you want to stay in an attainable range for you, and I'll show you how to find out what that is for you. So you need to pick right-size keywords that search engines will actually be willing to rank your site for at this time. And the way that you find out how much monthly organic search traffic you have is in Google Analytics. You go to Acquisition, and then All Traffic, then Channels, and then set your date range to last 30 days and look for your organic search traffic number. Again, this is not an exact science, but you just want to stay in the rough realm of this. So this site got 583 hits from organic search from SEO traffic in a month. So that site probably wouldn't be able to rank for a keyword that's searched 90,000 times a month. Otherwise, that number would already be much bigger. This site could probably rank for keywords, and the 500-ish range, maybe even a thousand, or lower is fine. The idea is not to exceed, not to overreach and try to rank for keywords that are just too popular for where your site is at with its SEO standing right now. Does that kind of make sense? Okay, got some nods. So what keyword research tools should you use? There are plenty out there, and there's plenty of good things about a whole variety of them. So I'm just going to highlight one of them that's our favorite of late. We try new ones all the time, always trying to find better and better ones. The one we've been using the most recently is called KW Finder. It is a paid tool, but their plans start at $30 a month, and you can play around with it a little bit for free. They give you a certain number of searches for free every day. And so you can put your keyword in, put the region you're targeting and the language, and then it will tell you how many searches per month that keyword gets. And so what you want to do, like I said, is pick right-sized keywords. Keywords that don't exceed greatly that monthly organic traffic number that you already have. So this was a client who was an HVAC client. They wanted to write an article about air conditioning compressor failure. And so we looked up the term AC compressor failure, and found out that it was searched 90 times a month. And they had at the time 583 hits of organic SEO traffic a month, so that was fine. That was attainable. Overreaching. If we had looked that up and found that it searched 9,000 times a month, then I wouldn't have felt as confident that this 500 hit per month website that that keyword would be attainable for that website. So that was in the right range. And like I said, it's okay to go under, but what you're trying to do is not overreach, because then it's just not attainable. It's just not going to happen at this time. So 90 per month, that was fine. You also want to pick out a couple of secondary keywords to support the primary keyword that you're going to use. And I'm going to go through how to use primaries versus secondaries. But just while you're doing your keyword research, make note of a couple possible related keywords. Google has indicated in the patents that they're applying for that they want to become more of a topical match engine, as opposed to a simplistic keyword match engine. So each piece of content that you write, and your site as a whole, but we're talking about one piece of content at a time here. So each piece of content that you write has to really fully flesh out the topic, really represent the topic holistically in order to impress Google. So you want to go through all the other options of keywords that aren't going to be a primary one, but are related so that you can represent the other kind of angles to that topic. So like symptoms of AC compressor failure and causes of AC compressor failure. There's only two things we were going to talk about anyway, so we're just going to make sure to include that wording to support the primary wording. Another area you can look for other than a keyword research tool, you can look for secondaries is in just Google search suggests, to just take the primary keyword that you picked and start typing it into Google and see what else comes up. The same two came up, symptoms and causes, and another one, reasons. So that's another place you can get good ideas for secondary keywords. And then one final double check before you make your final decision as to what keywords you're going to use in your piece of content is to just Google the term. This may seem like a no-brainer. You picked a term because you know what it means and you know it's the right term and like why Google it to double check, but you'd be surprised. I Googled a marketing term. I wish I remember exactly what the words were, but one time I Googled a marketing term and for some reason all the results on Google were about farming. It was like marketing and farming, but it was farming. I'm like, this is not the angle. This is not the audience that I'm going for. So it had an acronym or something in it, I guess, that Google understood it as being related to farming. And I didn't expect that at all, but that's what happened. I was giving this talk somewhere else and someone gave an example about some kind of fire punch, I guess. They were writing an article about a video game and the move was called fire punch or something. I thought like, of course, it's going to be all about the video game. When I Googled it, they Googled it and apparently there's an alcoholic version of Kool-Aid called fire punch. So that was not at all what he was talking about or the audience he was trying to attract. You never know. So just do the quick double check. Google the term. Make sure Google understands the term in the same way you do or else you're not going to get the results that you want out of the piece of content. So now we're going to go through the formula for success. In depth, step by step. The first thing is to include your primary keyword in your title and repeat it in the opening paragraph. Because you do want to use your primary keyword a certain number of times in a certain number of places and the formula will continue to show us how to do that. But the first two places to do it are in the title and in the opening paragraph. It's so easy to use the primary keyword in the title and just simply repeat it one more time in your introduction without it sounding unnatural at all. And the title is a very powerful place to put it. If you can, try to put it towards the front of the title. That's not the case actually in this one right here because we were doing the number thing from the, you know, making your titles catchy for humans. But if you can and sometimes you will see articles that have like a keyword in front and then colon and then the rest of the title. That's why people do that because it's slightly more powerful in the front of the title than the rest of the title but it's not as big of a deal. Like make sure your title just reads nice and if you have to put it at the end, it's fine. It's not a big enough impact to put it in, to have to put it in the front every time. But if you can, great. Otherwise just in the title, in the intro paragraph. That's easy enough and sounds totally natural. Next up you want to use your primary keyword in a quick overview of the key points that you're about to make. We talked about for the humans you want to break down your article into nice and easily digestible separate key points with separate subheadings. But a quick little trick to A, let your humans have a little preview of what they're going to learn in this article and B, use your primary keyword naturally one more time is to give a quick recap or I guess recap's not the right word since it comes in the beginning, quick preview of what those points are going to be. And the little subheading above that quick preview can have the primary keyword sounds totally natural, looks totally natural, doesn't look keyword stuffed at all like that first example that I showed. Next up you want to break down each key point just include in the regular part of the copy just including the primary keyword naturally whenever you can, whenever is appropriate to do so. And then this is where you use your secondaries just pepper them in, it can be one time each but those secondary supporting keywords that you picked out in the beginning when you picked the primary just naturally write those into the paragraphs as you have an opportunity to do so as long as it sounds natural. After that you want to use your primary keyword in two final places which are the subheading and the paragraph of your conclusion. Again, just like the intro, like it sounds so perfectly natural to use these in these places and not have it sound keyword stuffed so the lesson don't ignore symptoms of AC compressor failure as a closing subheading sounds totally natural and just one more time in the concluding paragraph. College English essay teacher taught me once like the proper essay writing is very similar to this where you make a few key points and then you do an intro paragraph saying what the key points are going to be and then you do a conclusion paragraph reiterating the three key points it's kind of the same but it works for SEO and getting those keywords in there in a very natural way in all of the right important places. So once you're done, you want to count up the number of times that you did end up being able to naturally use the primary phrase which will probably be a good amount if you follow this formula and you do just want to double check your ratio to make sure that you're not going into keyword stuffing territory if it was a really short article and you do it in all those places you might have actually gone a little heavy in relation to the total word count of the article. So you can double check this counting up the total number of words count up the number of times you used your primary and just make sure that you don't exceed two times per 100 words that's when you can get into that keyword stuffing on natural sounding perhaps Google penalty creating overuse of the keyword but if you have a nice fleshed out long article like a thousand word article and you know you use the keyword ten times it's probably not going to look like that and that's totally fine but you do kind of want to make sure you're not going under either so say aim for one time per 100 words but not to exceed two times it's more important not to go over than to go under same thing with picking the keyword you don't want to overdo it one quick FAQ before we get to your questions is a frequently asked question about questions phrases sometimes the primary keyword that you want to use is a question what can affect ovulation that's easy enough to put right in the title but obviously that gets really tricky and hard to keep repeating throughout the article without being obviously unnatural so what you can do in this case and Google will understand this just fine is to reword the question as an answer so use it as a question where you can like in the title and maybe even repeating it in the opening like so what can affect ovulation in the intro but then you can kind of rephrase that as an answer this can affect ovulation that can affect ovulation just retuning that question phrase into an answer is fine and will be understandable by search engines but in your conclusion you can sneak in as a question one more time so as long as you can get in there in a natural sounding place as a question do that otherwise it's totally okay to reorganize the structure so that it's an answer instead of a question so that's the formula success first success that we just walked through starting with picking your right size keywords using them in your title opening paragraph quick overview of key points followed by the breakdown of each key point just written naturally along with the secondaries in there conclusion subheading conclusion paragraph and one other thing I didn't focus on probably as much as I should have is every piece of content should have a call to action at the end it is amazing how usability studies and websites show that you would think it's so natural the next thing you want someone to do if you just talked about a whole page about your services you'd think well obviously if they want to contact me they're going to go up to the menu and they're going to hit contact it's amazing how specifically you have to tell users what to do next so in the bottom of every piece of content it doesn't always have to be contact us you know it can be just check out our other articles whatever action it is you want them to do next you have to specifically tell users to do it in order to get them to do it and the call to action is another opportunity to very naturally use keywords so I just did the quick run through non-animated version and since we're short on time I'll fly through that but you can download these slides and have this and on one side it says why we're doing this for the humans and on the other side it says why we're doing it for the search engines so that's the formula we just went through and oops there's my well we're going to do quite Q&A now but there's my email address if you have any follow-up questions that we don't get to I'm also going to go to the happiness bar and if you have any heavy metal music suggestions of course I'd like to hear those too but we will take questions now so I'm sorry you were first before yeah regarding keywords you talked a bit about what's the average monthly source for a keyword you can look it up on the world keyword plan you can pay to have your results higher based on someone's keyword search right? okay so the question is can you pay to have your website come up higher for certain keyword searches yes through Google AdWords if you run an official ad but then does paying for Google AdWords in turn improve your organic non-ad position eventually there's a lot of conspiracy theory out there about that I'd say that I've seen a bit of a correlation but I won't call it a causation I'm not fully subscribing to the conspiracy theory that Google will naturally enhance will automatically improve your organic results because you're an AdWords customer but I have seen a kind of trickle-down effect where the more traffic and engagement a website gets which could be caused by the fact that you're up there high on Google AdWords then the better it does in SEO so it makes sense that the more people are visiting it sharing it, linking to it because of the Google Ad traffic those are signals that will make a website rise naturally so I'll say correlation not causation will be my personal answer to that yes so they say right exactly Google supposedly will get in a lot of trouble they've said that they don't do it because they will get in trouble so they supposedly don't do it can't right they said we can't right right yes that's true and real quick the image alt tags I wanted to spin off of Laura's talk about that image alt tags are very important for first and foremost screen readers like she said the accessibility that's incredibly important one thing I learned through the WordPress community that I'm glad I learned a lot more about is the struggles that these people go through when they're trying to consume the content on a website and they can't see it well or at all so think first and foremost about screen readers you don't want to just stuff keywords for SEO purposes into an image alt tag it needs to be a short descriptive description of the image that's helpful to close your eyes and try to think of the image that's helpful to someone who can't see it if you can happen to work your primary keyword into that description perfect because yes it is very helpful tag for SEO purposes but don't watch the experience of the people that need the screen readers for the sake of that hearing that is really meaningful and one thing that I've been doing my work order has like quintupled recently so I've been doing like a slug, an excerpt and then taking the excerpt and turning that into keywords temporarily so that I know the main people involved along with them just running through the article pulling out whatever the other main keywords are and it's more for me to be able to go back but is that actually then turning that like in a reader device as like a chunky paragraph that's totally messing someone up so when you say you're taking a bunch of words and dumping it in the keywords spot are you talking about the image alt field you're talking about the meta keywords keywords section okay yeah yeah meta keywords has been ignored by Google since 2008 so it's been an official decade that they don't use it but if you overuse it like they don't use it to make any decisions but if you overstuff it it can be a red flag yeah meta keywords no meta description is still important it's not a ranking factor but it's very important for getting people to click through so it is actually good to use your primary keyword in your meta description because it will come up bold if it matches with the user typed and be more likely that they'll click on it it won't make it show up higher the meta description tag won't make it show up higher but it will increase the likelihood that it'll be clicked on but the meta keywords tag hasn't been used for 10 years although if you try to overuse it it can still hurt you how would you respond to the content of the website? great question so the question was this was obviously the example was a blog post how would we apply this to the content on a page of a website or the home page I'd say like I said before you have to be reasonable with the length of those other types of pages so just port over as many concepts of the room that you have but you don't have to fill it out to a thousand words so that you can have key points and blah blah blah just try to use your primary keywords in the main heading always have an H1 I see a ton of home pages without an H1 and I'm like there's no words there's no main words here I always have an H1 and then if you can H2s and so it'll come out a little bit different but the idea is the same as far as the placement goes subheadings as much in the text as you can keeping it balanced so that it's not overstuffed the same concept is just not going to be as thoroughly fleshed out as this would be if we're okay on time we'll do that the example where they were getting organic search 90 visits a month they were using those keywords does that mean each month you go and look and see or what's the time frame to see when the next blog post is writing and what number you're at sure so for the sake of the recording repeat the question it was basically about if the keyword that you're looking for you know you want to pick the right size keyword so if you're in like the 90 a month range at one point in time how often do you go back and check for that to change I think it's always a good idea to check your organic traffic monthly anyway if not weekly or even more because with the speed at which this stuff changes it's important to watch that number make sure it doesn't suddenly fall off a cliff for some reason so you should be keeping an eye on it at least monthly anyway so short answer I'd say monthly although SEO is a slow and steady growth tactic so that number is probably not going to change dramatically monthly anyway so if you're at 90 and the next month you're at 100 and the next month you're at 110 that's great but you're still picking keywords kind of in the same realm for a while so you may actually maybe quarterly want to officially adjust that if you are having nice increases you have plenty of time because next is the break oh okay don't feel rushed for questions you can go to 15 minutes if you want okay great this will have a lot of questions I know okay so we can take as many questions as you want or I will not be offended if you want to go take the break don't feel obligated to say here for a new site what's the benefit of okay so the question was for a new site but I imagine any site what's the benefit of including the same keyword on multiple different images in that alt text tag on multiple different pages right so from my experience I think that Google kind of likes to associate one page with a certain set of keywords and then another page with a different set of keywords and they definitely look for any sign or signal of over trying so I think that that might be a little bit of a red flag to use the same keyword on a whole bunch of images a whole bunch of different pages because A it looks like you're trying too hard but B also it just kind of doesn't make sense in my brain because from what I see they like to take this piece of content as about these keywords this page is about those keywords and so it would be better to instead of using the same one across a bunch of images and pages to tailor them to that page and that page's keywords which is something that I think the formula shows but just to reiterate and clarify you really should be focusing on different keywords for different pages each page should have a primary keyword and then a set of secondary keywords to support that primary but those keywords should be different for the different topics and different pages across the board okay Hi I wanted to explain the snippet for the heading and how many characters that could be and what are the best keywords to use in that I'm assuming since you wouldn't want to use your domain name or barrier company name because that's already in the site many times and so what keywords do you want to do out there? So you're talking about the meta description like this preview on the search engine page okay yes so we touched upon that a little bit but to be clear questions about the meta description and what keywords to use in that the meta description is it's a field in the back end if you're using an SEO plugin like Yoast you'll have a field called meta description but on the front end the purpose is that that's the little excerpt preview of the page text that comes up on the search engine so on Google when you google something and there's little excerpts under each website that's the meta description so what keywords to use in the meta description I always suggest using the primary keyword that you picked for that page or article so when you went through this planning process whatever it was that you picked for that page try to incorporate that into the meta description the meta descriptions used to be 160, 165 character something like that and now they're more like 300 but more so I think than character count it's important that that's like a little ad in a way try to convince people to click on your result and come to your site which is why I like to use the primary keyword in it because if the keyword in your meta description matches the keyword that the person typed in Google it will appear bold in your little preview and eye tracking studies show that that makes it more likely that someone's going to click on your result versus someone else's result so including the keyword in your meta description is not a ranking factor it won't actually cause your website to rank higher for that keyword but it will cause more people to click on it again correlation causation which in turn brings more people to the site and if they stay there and they don't bounce back to Google that it looks like a good thing to Google and over time that could actually raise your rank position does that make sense? that helps okay great there are 70 characters that would be visible after 70 you get the dot dot dot and you get a click on under that right you're only going to see the first 70 well it's so they support up to 300 now but yes in different like screen sizes mobile etc it can vary how much is actually shown yes so short sweet and to the point is still good because it may not all show even though up to 300 characters is supported but either way just a short sweet succinct sentence saying why they should read the article what they're going to get out of it and include that primary keyword so that comes up full affordable whatever you're putting to sell your site you can see it right there you can see your 70 word yeah it's a very prominent thing that people are going to see on the search engine results page so it is a chance to treat it as a kind of like an ad of sorts but but it's a balancing act you know not to be too salesy in it like use the with them the what's in it for me concept is what I say that let the reader know what they're going to get out of clicking on your result what are they going to learn if it's an article what are they going to learn if it's a business if it's a service page you know what is sort of the benefits of the service and so on so the question was is it better to write that meta description snippet in your own words or let Google auto-generate it because they will auto-generate it if you don't put one in I think it's better to write it in your own words Google's out of it it's better to write it in your own words Google's out of it in your own words Google's algorithms will actually overwrite what you wrote if they feel they have a better description that excerpt that they picked from your page so it's actually not guaranteed anyway that they're going to use your words but you know when they auto-choose it's usually not great and you certainly haven't taken that opportunity to make it into a nice compelling statement as to why someone should click on this page so I'm yeah I'd say write it yourself I think there was a question back there I'll go here first so the question was about one page websites I think that's often referred to as parallax where it's you know there's a nav menu but it really just hops down to different points of the page so are there any tips or tricks for making that work better for SEO because apparently it's not working well right now first tip or trick would be don't have one page website they do traditionally underperform because Google likes sites that are big so I talked about how they like pieces of content that are big but they like sites that are big too as far as the number of pages as I said they're trying to become a topical match engine so they want to rank sites that look like whole encyclopedias on their topic which is why it's important to have a lot of different pages publish a lot of content on a regular basis and ensure link it all smartly so that it looks like an encyclopedia on the various topics that the business represents with nice neat organized chapters in the book and so on it's really difficult there's a couple of technical tricks you can do on the back end with making links that are not separate URLs look like separate URLs to Google that can be done still doesn't tend to perform as well as a true encyclopedia type site yeah here's a question and I struggle because I'm in the SEO world I kind of know what's going on my site's been around for 2007 in WordPress 2009 I had people come back and say oh I left a link on this page 2009 with a bunch of links that I did back in 2009 I wanted to scrub the crap out of this site because I had like 1500 pages in WordPress and to move the site from server to server to bear all that stuff my concern is that there are links I ran spike myself I really did I ran really well with my terms because I had so much stuff that overshadows that links but what do I do? it's not going to happen this far but what do I do? can I just delete the pages that are not that links they were using a discuss plugin when discussed with something I find things in the book we're going to discuss and then create those for once a week so you're talking about external inbound links so they're on someone else's site and they're linking to your content but it's old content alright, so to try to summarize that question shortly he's got a 1500 page WordPress website, a lot of content but a lot of it's really old and there's websites out there that are linking to the old content still even though it's really old outdated content and the site is ranking well so he wants to clean up the old content but is afraid of what will happen if you get rid of it if you get rid of it yeah I did that because I'm not ranking well or despite that right, and I guess some of the websites linking to the old content might not be of the highest quality because quality of inbound links is important right, so we could definitely discuss that for a while later in short though to reiterate the other point that I was just making Google does really like large sites so if you have 1500 pages of content and a lot of it is old and outdated a lot of people will be tempted to delete that old outdated content but it's helping even if not directly even if that old outdated content itself isn't ranking anymore it's contributing to the overall size of the site contributing to the overall number of links that you have coming in it's kind of like a rising tide lifts all boats kind of a thing so when people go or ready to take a hatch into a bunch of old content I'm always like no you could be poking a hole in your boat it's that old stuff contributes to your high page count can contribute to your inbound link count it can be like a rising tide lifting the boat kind of a thing which helps other pages and other keywords to make content rank so I'm not in general we could discuss the specific situation further but in general I'm not a fan I'm just deleting a bunch of old content because I've seen it have terrible results it's better to if you can update the content or at least just put a note on it that this is outdated so you don't feel bad about serving up people outdated content but even better, put a note this is outdated here's a link to our new article on the latest in this topic does it rank better because how often should we be looking at adding new content? great question about talking about new content how frequently should you add new content and does new content rank just because it's new and then does that expire etc etc it is very important to publish new content on a regular basis A because to reiterate the point again Google likes big sites so that makes your site always growing the bigger the better so yes, publishing new content regularly helps because it makes the site bigger on a regular basis does new content rank just because it's new? not necessarily actually new content can take quite a while to get recognized and trusted by Google unless you're already some type of news site that Google just kind of trusts the whole site to release breaking news and rank it so it's very topic dependent if you are a news site and it's a news topic and Google trusts the site at large yeah, you might actually the new content might rank because of its timeliness but if it's a topic that's not newsish or timely in nature AC compressor failure that's a bit seasonal but it's not like week by week timely that would actually it might take a little longer for it to rank it might rank better when it's a little older than when it's brand new but then there's kind of a point where it becomes really old and it might drop off a little bit because it's really old so Google will know by the time that it first sees the URL and by the date in the byline how old an article is so if there is an article that's really old has traditionally performed very well and then it does start to slip you can update it I mean Google will still know it's the same URL but you can change the date you can put a note at the top that you updated the article or you can write a brand new article from the old article to the new article use some of that old link equity juice to boost the new article so there's some time decay strategies that you can do there but going very deep with that short answer frequently publishing new content is very important I describe it as putting gas in the car if we do initial SEO optimizations on a site it may get an immediate lift but if the client doesn't then publish regular content on a regular basis it's like we built you a powerful race car and gave you your first tank of gas and you never put gas in it again blogging is like gas in the car and how frequent the more frequent the better I could show you the study but it's just a diagonal line the chart is a diagonal line there's a direct correlation between the frequency of blogging and how much traffic and rankings you get it's literally just the more the better so as frequently as okay so there's a perfect example old piece of content used to rank well for a long time started to slip at some point she just updated it updated the day of the article added a little fresher content linked to a little fresher content and then it was back up again yep good example thank you for sharing that and thank you guys so much for having me I'll be back in a minute thanks thanks for sharing that and thank you guys so much for having me I'll be at the happiness bar if there's any more questions