 I'm really excited to present here at WordCamp. It's my first WordCamp, so I really appreciated Carrie's presentation about being the new kid on the block. So stick with me, and I'm going to do my best to share with you some essential SEO for bloggers and content producers. So my name's Leah King-Tall. I live here in Asheville, and I work for an Asheville-based online marketing company. I'm the director of SEO. I've worked with SEO for four years, and I've been teaching SEO for two years, and that's my favorite part of what I do right now, because it's really something that everyone can learn. So how many of you produce content or are writers in your current jobs? Okay, that is fantastic, because writing is actually the hardest part of the job, and what I want to share with you today is how you can do some simple things to make sure that your content is optimized for search engines. So today we're gonna cover what is SEO, just a bit of a review, how blogging or producing content impacts SEO, and three stages for approaching your content to ensure that it's properly optimized, and some extras. So what I want you to take away, again, the writing is the hardest part, so once you have that covered, what else can you do so that you feel confident in understanding how content impacts search engine optimization, and then with that, how have these Google updates impacted your writing, and between the two of those, I hope you'll feel more confident and therefore more efficient with your own writing and content development, and ultimately, as is always the goal with search engine optimization, you'll build more site traffic. So to review, search engine optimization is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a webpage in search engines unpaid results. So what that means is we're talking about in the search engine results page when you Google something, search engine optimization is the posts that first appear that aren't those paid ads. So ultimately, search engine optimization is all about getting what you create in the Google search results, and drive traffic to your site as a result, so that's what it all comes down to. So how does blogging or content impact search engine optimization? So first, blogging builds authority and when you build authority on a topic, you build search engine traffic to your website for keyword phrases. It also builds authority in search traffic for niche keyword phrases, so if you're talking about a specific element of your service or your business or what you offer, you can have people arrive to your website through that post. And lastly, if you create great content and great blog posts, people will link to you and building this link helps you show up better in search engines. Let's just put it into context. So let's say you have a website about cats, as one should. If you want to show up in search results for people searching about cats, then you have to be an authority on cats and you become an authority on cats by talking about cats like a lot, like a lot a lot. So you definitely have to want it. So with cats, you gotta talk about all the different things that people are interested in in relation to cats, like all the different cat breeds, like you might want to write a blog post about Scottish fold, you might want to talk about, the cat on the right is Cozy, a Maine Coon cat that won the first cat competition in 1895, in case you were wondering. So you want to talk about the history of cats, you want to research what are people interested in when it comes to cats. So you can kind of just a quick Google auto fill search brings up this list of things that people commonly are wondering online about cats. Like why do cats like boxes? That might be a great blog post topic that you can use to help build your authority on cats. I actually had to look up why do cats like boxes and at the end of the presentation, I have some resources and I've included a link to why cats like boxes if you are interested. So as you talk about all these topics, you're growing your authority and when you grow your authority, that is what leads to search traffic. So what I want to offer today is since you are writers, how it seems, a lot of times when you're writing something, it seems like you're pulled in so many different directions, especially when it comes to SEO. People are telling you, you have to optimize this post, like insert all these things and you want to focus on the writing. So how can you go about doing all the things you need to for a blog post or a content piece without being kind of overwhelmed by the details? So what I advocate for is that every single piece of content you produce that you take three approaches to it. When I mean that, I mean like you write it and then you go away and then you come back the next day and then you go away again and you come back a third time. And that's a lot of attention to one blog post but essentially that's how you can shape and frame how you're looking at the value of that piece of content for all the different areas that it needs to be optimized for and to really function. It's like crossing the T's and doubting the I's. So the first stage is simply writing for your audience. So at this point, like I give you absolute permission to not think about SEO at all. Like just put it out of your mind. So when you first sit down to write, you definitely want to just think about your audience. Like who is it for? Why are they interested? Why is this important? And don't think a thing about keywords or optimization or anything people have been telling you to do probably for a long time. And part of the reason why you want to do that is Google has advanced significantly in the last few years. It's pretty scary. And so I want to talk a little bit about Google updates. So Google updates their algorithm regularly and there are two big updates. One is called the Google Panda update. And this changes what the search results look like. And if we think about what is Google's mission and their objective? So Google wants what shows up in the search engine results page to be the best match for their user base. So the audience of Google. You know when you search for something and what appears, if it's not what you were looking for then that's a bad job that Google did. So they're constantly refining their algorithm to make sure that what shows up in the top of search results is the most qualified content. So that is part of why your first stage needs to, the first stage of writing needs to approach just your audience in the point of the piece. So the Panda update essentially targeted thin content, duplicate content and overall poor quality site. I mean you know how aggravating it is when you click on like the first result in search engines and look at the site and say is this from 1995 or something? Like how did they get here? So when Google's doing these updates they're trying to refine how things show up in search results so that they are the best quality. And they do answer your questions and your queries. There's actually a Panda update rolling out last weekend and this weekend. So it does happen regularly but if you stick to this first approach of addressing your audience and being authentic and actually trying to be the best at what you do then you can really don't have to worry too much about these Google Panda updates. So I just wanna put that out there because I think there's a lot of fear mongering online around what especially bloggers and content producers have to do when these updates happen. So I just wanna allay those fears a little bit. If you're focused on developing good content you will be okay. So what does good content look like? So from this first approach, looking at your audience what is the point of your content piece, your call to action. I just have a couple examples here of good looking blogs. So this is Mod Cloth. Does anyone familiar with Mod Cloth? They're a great online store that sells sort of hipstery clothing for young women and professionals but they have a really great blog and when you look at what they have, it's well designed. You can easily share it. They have great images. So I mean, I am not a designer but I certainly look at this. I'm a person. I'm a person who uses the internet. So I think using that text on yourself when you look at the piece of content you produce doesn't look good. And it's as simple as that. So here's another example of a well designed page. This is for a company that I'll use as an example throughout. They're called Part Select and they create super exciting. They create parts for home appliances. Like any home appliance part that you need, you can get on this site. But what they have going for them and what makes it really interesting is the way that they've designed their posts. It's super engaging. They have a video in there that's well laid out. It's targeting their audience like how to fix a dryer that's not producing heat. And then it shares information with people about how to troubleshoot that problem. So that's just a quick design. Look, asking like your niece or nephew or somebody is always a great way of addressing if it's well designed, let someone click on this and care to read it. And then Coca-Cola actually released what their quality checklist is for any of the content that they develop, which I think is great for doing this first job of your content, which is should someone care? Does the piece of content or the blog list does it surprise you? Does it have universal appeal? Does it generate interest? Is it new or something you haven't seen before? And is it different from what your competition is offering? I think that one's key because a lot of times when you're creating content, there's so much out there and it's a total flood of information. So figuring out how you can stand out or answer questions or maybe have a new angle on a conversation that hasn't been written before, researching your competition will help you sort that out. So now you've written this amazing piece of content, which is like I said, that's the hard part in your writers. So you have that down. Step away from the computer and like do something else for a day. So then when you come back to the post, this is when you wanna think about SEO, not before. So now you have a great piece of content like let's say it's 600 words. You know who you're talking about. Maybe it's a blog post that's highlighting a certain service that you offer or maybe it's a blog post answering some common questions for your company or business. Now let's think about search engine optimization. So this is the review and editing of the piece of content you've already created. We're gonna talk about some essential SEO elements, keywords and some WordPress plugins that make it really easy. So the areas of your post or your page that you need to be intentional about like craft these areas is the URL itself for your blog post or your page. The metadata, which is your meta title and meta description which I'll go into further. The content, the headers on your content and images. So images, I'm not actually gonna talk about that much because I think later today someone's talking all about image optimization which is great and important. So see him for that. So when we talk about, we can't talk about search engine optimization without talking about keywords. So keywords provide the framework for understanding what a page is about. And I think there's always in the realm of SEO there's a lot of conversation. Like people write their own blog posts about do keywords still matter because of how sophisticated Google is becoming. And the answer is yes. Keywords still absolutely matter. Google is getting great at reading between the lines but we're not quite there yet. So when we talk about keywords, you know essentially optimization is math with words. So Google is a program that reads the words on your post or page and that's when they're indexing your page, how they can understand when it should show up in search results. So keywords are important because if you don't have certain words on the page then Google can't associate your post or your page with those words. So sometimes I do a test with people I work with where I take them to a blog post or a page on your site and ask what is this page about? And then we just read through and see if any of the words that they just mentioned are on that page. And I think this is a great thing you can do for yourself especially on existing, like if you have service pages in particular or product pages, just do that quick test, like step outside of yourself and the content and make sure that those words are on the page. So keywords also, the reason people talk about our keywords dead is because again the Panda update, the Panda Google update that is about quality and what has happened is that it used to be, if any of you have been in the SEO realm for a while, people used to game the system which is what Google is trying to prevent you from doing because it's not in the best interest of the end user. So people would game the system by creating blog posts or pages that were not for a particular audience. They were for a particular keyword phrase. So like laptop computers. So someone might, actually when you search for things now there are still some people who do this, like if you're like watch this game for free online which I don't recommend but you know I've done it before for soccer games. And you see these, what shows up is like a page that just takes the keyword phrase and pastes it all over. It's terrible content, terrible quality. It's just a keyword phrase pasted all over the place. So that's the history of SEO. Like these techniques that people employed to tell Google that they were all about a topic by instead of actually being about that topic and being authoritative on that topic they just paste to the keyword over and over again. So the Google Panda update is meant to curb that. Google now recognizes synonyms which is crazy but it's happening. So that's why keywords are still important but we have to talk about keywords in the context of a topic for an audience. Which I think for content producers this is like no big news. If you've been blogging and writing for a long time it's almost like SEO finally caught up with what's actually legitimately right which I'm really excited about because the games that SEO people used to play don't work anymore. And like this is now the time of the writers. It's like the time of the actual content developers because being authoritative makes sense from the way that you construct a story and construct whatever information you have to share. Like it's becoming not only was it always natural to talk that way now you're encouraged to talk naturally instead of just kind of copying and pasting a keyword phrase all over your post. Back to the list of what, so all that being said keywords are still important because when Google reads a site there are certain areas that they look at first when the bots scan your page. It's sort of like the outline of your site or of your post. So let's talk about metadata. So this is the search results page for a sample query. Dryer not producing heat. So the metadata what we have is of course the URL that shows up in the search results page and what's underlined in blue here these are the meta titles of your page. So when you're in the back end of WordPress you can customize these things but when you write your post it's not obvious like what is the meta title and what are the meta descriptions because where they appear on the actual search engine results page and the meta descriptions are the couple sentences that fall below your meta title. Customizing these areas is critical for optimizing your post or your page. Because I mean there's a couple reasons first you can include calls to action within these couple of sentences. Like you can still speak to your audience you can still reflect your brand. You just want to do so by throwing in doing all of that and then inserting some really important phrases that you want that topic, that page, that post to show up for. Like what is it about? Don't just tell your audience, tell Google. And this is where you can do that. So we have the first one is how to fix dryer with no heat. That's great because I'm curious about my dryers not producing heat. Like this example actually came from a colleague of mine who had this exact problem and was incredibly helped out by what returned in search results which is this first post. So what I want to point out here to go back to the keyword conversation. In the past the first result would not say how to fix dryer with no heat. It would be the exact match of what I typed into Google. And you may recall seeing this in the past. So the first thing would say, dryer not producing heat, like exactly. And that's the history of SEO again. And I just kind of want to clear this up because not everybody, the industry changes very quickly. So I know that if you produce content you probably hear conflicting messaging based on who you're talking to and how caught up they are. So now with Google's updates, Google's recognizing topics, incentives. So the first result does not say dryer not producing heat, but it's matched to the intention of my search. Like Google understands that my dryer is not producing heat. They don't have to find a page that says that exact phrase. They're finding what is a really great result. So how to fix the dryer with no heat. The second meta title here is diagnosing the no heat dryer. Whirlpool dryer not heating. So these again are the meta titles. And critical for you to well define that including keywords for your posts and your pages. And then again in the meta description. So you want to have, again, we're going to talk a lot about synonyms. So, sorry. So the difference between the meta titles and the meta descriptions is that it's a variation of the same concept but written a little differently. So that's important. Don't use the same words all the time. So we have how to fix the dryer with no heat. And then the first sentence, I know you can't all see this, but the first sentence under that is when your gas or electric dryer is not producing any heat or not enough heat. So that's a variation of what the title is. It's another way of describing it which helps Google understand right away that you're covering the topic itself. So let's go to the back end of WordPress where you are working when you're creating posts and blogs. So the first area, what we have at the top here, this is a post I wrote, new Google update targets mobile friendliness. Are you ready? So this was a couple of months ago. So that first area, when you're writing your blog post where you put the title of your post, that's gonna be your header one tag, your H1. And that's really important. So we're talking about the URL, the metadata, and your header one, your first header, which is the title of your post in WordPress. These are where you wanna think about the topic and insert keywords and keywords synonyms into this area that define what your post is about. And so in WordPress, WordPress is so great for making blogging easy and making it super easy to optimize because you can just, as you add your content, go in and adjust your URL. So the URL is one of these key places as well where you can diversify the keywords that apply to the topic that you're talking about. So the last, what you don't wanna do is exactly match everything. That's old strategy SEO and it's no longer a best practice. It's not really gonna hurt you, but if you do it all the time, it can be come, basically wanna make sure you don't look fishy. So if you're exactly matching things all over, I wanna say that, taking the same keyword phrase and putting it in your meta title, putting it in your URL, putting it in your meta description, repeated, that raises like alarm bells. So just diversify it. So the easiest thing you can do is just take out, if you do nothing else, when you're customizing your blog URL, just take out like the articles, like the or of, you know, just to condense it a little bit. But, I mean, I recommend including a bit of a variation, like a synonym of one of your main phrases, if you can. I did not do that in this one because I couldn't think of one at the time. But anyway, so you wanna look at this in the backend of WordPress when you're creating your posts. And then, to adjust all the really critical metadata for optimizing your posts for SEO, WordPress has awesome plugins. And the all-in-one SEO pack is a fantastic one. Yoast is a fantastic one. To make it super easy to cross the T's and dot the I's for optimizing the content you've created. So I'm gonna show you, this is the backend of WordPress after you've installed Yoast. So what's great about it is it shows you, there's a snippet preview at the top, that shows you what your post is gonna look like in Google search results, which is super helpful to kinda connect all the dots. So then what they have, they have an option for adding a focus keyword, which kinda helps you make sure you're organizing things around your topic. And then we have the SEO title, which is your meta title. So this post is Kickstarter campaign marketing tips. The focus keyword Kickstarter. And then the meta description. Here's where again you have the opportunity to highlight what is another way of talking about Kickstarter. That would be important to help improve your authority if you wanna be an authority on Kickstarter marketing. Well Kickstarter is a method of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is another way that people search for Kickstarter related projects. So in the meta description, it says marketing your Kickstarter campaign is key to meeting your funding goal. Here we offer a few tips for successful crowdfunding marketing. So we have crowdfunding marketing and Kickstarter marketing all in the meta description, which helps diversify and improve your authority around the topic of Kickstarter marketing. So that's what you wanna look at doing when you're optimizing your meta description and your SEO title. This is the Yoast backend. In WordPress, once you install Yoast plugin, the all in one SEO pack is really similar. They all create these areas for optimizing these critical places. So then once you write a whole bunch of blog posts, this is kind of like when you say like you all post in WordPress, this is your list of the blogs that you've created. And on the right side, it shows you what you customized on the post. So you've got your SEO title and your meta description and your focus keyword. The reason I am including this is because those green circles. So there's like this big green circle that's like, hey, you optimized this post, good job. And I just wanna say, especially for like the overachievers out there in the content writing, if it's not a green circle, it's totally okay. Like I'm the kind of person that wants to see everything is a green circle because green means good. But because of the advancements Google's made, you're optimizing for a topic, not a keyword phrase. So you use this as a guide, not as like the definitive be all end all, this was a good, well optimized post. Because as I was mentioning, like that post, the Kickstarter marketing tips, it's about more than Kickstarter, it's also about crowdfunding. So I might, when optimizing the SEO title or the meta description, because I'm looking for synonyms, they might not off say Kickstarter in them. They might have some variations. And if that's the case, then it might not be a green circle. So it's okay. And don't let that like limit how you're thinking about what it means to be optimized. Red circles, orange circles. We're all good. Okay, so now we wanna talk about the content itself and keywords. So keywords, again, you wanna look at synonyms. What's also important are your adjectives and qualifiers. And I'm gonna give an example of that in a minute. So your headers again, keywords in your headers and describing your images with keywords, which I'm not gonna cover today. But let's think about content itself. So the difference between the fox jumps over the dog and the quick round fox jumps over the lazy dog is that you get descriptors in there. You get adjectives and qualifiers. So I really recommend for your company or your brand, whatever your site is overall about to list for yourself, all of the adjectives and qualifiers that are important to defining who you are beyond just a keyword phrase. A quick round fox, you could have a site that's just about a fox, but it's gonna be easier to acquire search traffic if you're actually not just about foxes, but you're also about quick brown things with your businesses. So if you're a business coach and you're writing blogs about business coaching, what are, list out all of the audience types, all of the adjectives, all of the qualifiers. And for products, I do this as well, I list all of the sizes, all of the colors, all of the materials. So that way, when you're looking back over your posts for SEO opportunities, for optimization opportunities, you can tack on some of those qualifiers to help broaden the topic that you're covering. So this is the content that was for how to fix a dryer that's not producing heat, which was the first search results. And so also, like I learned all the time from what is the first search result for a query. So if you're competing with someone, or you know that you want to show up and search results for a certain query, just search it and like study whoever showed up first, because, and this is where you can learn a lot from large companies because they have a whole lot of money to spend on this stuff. And so this should, I hope, really help you assess why the people who are showing up first are. Like here are some of the reasons that they're there. So how to fix a dryer that's not producing heat. So what we have are two header tags. There's the H1 at the top and then H2, there's a heating element. The full article has like about six headers that are all about basically structuring, outlining the post itself to tell you, here are the different elements of addressing your dryer not having enough heat. And what that does is help you frame the posts to cover a topic and Google reads those headers more thoroughly than the content on the page as part of that outline that they read first. So it's important to include header tags but only have one H1. And then you can have as many of the other ones as you want. So the thing I want to point out about synonyms. So I've highlighted all of the keyword phrases in this post. But let's talk about if I am interested in how why my dryer is not producing heat, I'm also interested in fixing my dryer, repairing my dryer and troubleshooting the problem with my dryer. So these are all different ways of talking about the problem that I'm having and how to address the solution, which is the intent of my search. So this post is a fantastic job by using all of the phrases that are associated with someone like me who's looking to figure out what's wrong with my dryer. So this is where having those synonym lists will really help you make sure that you include these variations of how to talk about whatever problem you're addressing in your blog post or whatever query you wanna solve for your readers. So now you're gonna walk away from your post again and like take another day, like leave it alone. You're gonna come back one more time to fully optimize your post. And the third time we're gonna look at it for linking opportunities. So how does this post exist in the internet as a whole but specifically on your own website? What is the context for this digital piece of content in space? So we're gonna talk about why it's important, actual interlinking, and another Google update that I just wanna share some information on. So interlinking is good for SEO because it helps Google determine which pages are most important on your site. So this is really helpful if you have a particular, say you have a service and you have four services but one service is the one you make the most money off of or something like that. You want most people to find you for that services so you can use interlinking to help highlight that service page that's most important to you. Internal links also help build and pass, it helps build and pass authority around your site. So when we're talking about interlinking, we're talking about within your own website just links to different pages on your site. And lastly, like I said, as you can learn, you can always learn from the big guys in town. Wikipedia does it and they're the best. So we look at a Wikipedia article. So Wikipedia shows up first in search results all the time for many reasons. Part of the reason is because they're absolutely massive but the other thing that they totally have down is interlinking on their own site. So you know, anytime you go to a Wikipedia page, if you are curious about more information on any element of that topic, it's gonna be hyperlinked and you can just go to an article it's all about that piece. So this is a Wikipedia article on fainting couches just because. And if you're interested in learning more, this interlinks to articles on just couches, on fainting rooms, female hysteria, which is pretty fascinating. So essentially you wanna do this to your own website through your blog, it's really exciting. This is like what brings it all together as the final piece of actually optimizing your post in the context of your site. So you'll notice that these are keyword links, right? Let's talk about keywords a little more. So another update that Google rolls out fairly regularly is called the Google Penguin update. And again, Google updates are meant to stop people from trying to gain the system and end up in search results when they're not actually the authority on a topic. People used to do this by paying for keyword links to their websites. They would pay other people to do this. If you've been blogging for a long time, you may have been asked in the past to insert a keyword link like laptop computers within a content piece you wrote and that link takes you to some site that sells laptop computers. This used to be totally standard SEO practices. It's no longer okay and that's what the Google Penguin update was about. It's targeting manipulative link building practices, link schemes, link farms, on the, it's essentially unnatural links. So if you've never engaged in this in the past, you really don't have to worry about it. But for people who've been in SEO for a while, it was kind of like a behavior that became natural because it was really helpful to pass authority on a topic through these links from these other sites. So now you cannot get keyword links to your site from other sites that are not, like, that are not your own site. Or if you are blogging for other people and you get asked to insert a keyword link to another company or another site, like, don't do that. That is what this Penguin update is all about. But you can still do it on your own website. My rule of thumb is like, if people are on your site, they should expect to stay on your site unless you tell them otherwise. So like on Wikipedia, you know if you click a keyword link on Wikipedia, you're gonna go to a page about that on Wikipedia. You're not gonna be sent somewhere else. So my personal rule of thumb is if you're sending someone somewhere else with a link off your website, just make sure that it's clear in the link. So I, you can't do this, sorry. This is just an example of a company that was majorly penalized by the Penguin update, which is always fascinating to read about. So it's overstock.com. Overstock basically paid all of these universities to write somewhere on their site a post that linked to overstock.com on keywords like laptop computers and different products that overstock.com always sells. Like this one is diamond rings. This is an example from a real university website. So like, let's think about it. That actually makes no sense that someone on a university website would ever be writing about products that overstock has for sale. So like if it feels weird, if what you're asked to do feels weird, then it is weird. And Google is catching up to all of these things that people used to do to game the system. So overstock was totally penalized and lost all this traffic because you just can't do this. You know, like let's just be reasonable. So when you're doing your own blog post, this is a little map of a, a sample map of a site. So you've got your homepage, you've got your blog, let's see, you have three services. What you can do is take your blogs, blog about service one, blog on unique audience for service one and link over to that service one page on a keyword phrase. So I kind of, when I'm developing a strategy for blogging, I like map, I literally map out a site and like draw these connections for myself. So here is a service area. We're gonna talk about it in five different ways in these five different blog posts and I wanna make sure I link on a keyword phrase over to that service page which will help build authority for that service and for your site. Now I'm gonna take you really quickly through an example of a site that does this really well, the three approaches to developing your content. So this is just add ice orchids. I haven't worked with them, they're just doing a great job. So they sell orchids online that you put ice cubes I guess in them and then they work. So if you search online for buy orchids online, this is highly competitive. We can tell this because lots of people are buying ads so you already know it's gonna take a long time. How do we become an authority on buying orchids online when it's super competitive and part of how you do that is by becoming an authority on orchids. Like just grow what you're talking about. Be the expert that you say you are. So they have a really fantastic blog where they talk about all elements of orchids and this is an example of the first test, test line, first look, quality in audience. Looks good, it's got some calls to action. That's fantastic, you know it's well designed. There are pictures, there are social cues, answers important questions. This is how, four tips to spike your orchids growth. Stage two, SEO editing. So if I type in how to make orchids re-bloom because who hasn't done that if you have an orchid? They are so hard to deal with. So I've definitely searched this before. This search itself has 1,680 searches a year. Just that phrase. And what's coming up first is just ad ice orchids. How to trigger re-blooming of your Latin name orchid. So that's the meta title. How to re-trigger the blooming. The meta description is what follows. And what I've highlighted here is like, let's look at how they diversify their keywords. So there's trigger re-blooming. How to, how to, an important way that people search. Blooming in there again, orchid may re-bloom. Like re-blooming is way different than blooming. Good to have them both. Getting orchids to bloom again, what's under there. Different ways of, how do we talk about it? I said make them re-bloom. And some people talk about getting them to re-bloom. Some people talk about orchid flower, why not? I mean, not that you wanna put that in there, but it would return searchable like that. So now let's look at the content itself. And I've highlighted it again. This is for the page, the first page that shows up. What have they done to cover their topic? Orchid re-blooming, finished blooming. Create large, beautiful flowers. Blooms and flowers are different. I mean, if the same topic would cover it all. Trigger the regrowth. The Latin name, I love that they include that. People search for that, you know, maybe not as much. But if you don't include the Latin name, you're not gonna show up. And then linking. What they do, and this is another great thing you can do with blogging, is link to, oh, I do wanna mention one thing. What they don't have are great headers. So if I was gonna like recommend something to them and say, hey, put some headers in there and throw in some keywords. So linking, this links to other blog posts on keyword phrases. You can do that within your own blog. Did you talk about this topic in a different way somewhere else? Like they have, this doesn't mean your orchid is dead, you know, a lot of people search for, is my orchid dead? So they have other posts on that topic. They're thoroughly investigating all elements of orchid care, and they link to each other. And they also have when appropriate, links to their product page on keywords. Not all the time, but enough to help grow their authority and compete ultimately for searches like buy orchids online, which is gonna be tough. But you can definitely, it certainly acquire a lot of traffic and brand impressions by being an authority on topic. Select review. How does blogging impact FDO? Which is the whole angle for this. If you write a blog post, people come to your website in two different ways. They either search for a niche topic you cover on your blog, and they arrive on your blog. Like I work for a SEO company. I write posts on different elements of SEO. If people are searching for that specific informational topic, they might arrive on my blog post. What also happens is because I'm covering SEO in my blog post, people who are searching for that might arrive on the homepage of the company or on the service page. So your blogging is not just a doorway into your site because you've covered that niche. It's supporting your site as a whole. And I think that's really, really important because it can feel defeating sometimes, especially when you're starting out and you're writing these blog posts. It seems like nobody's arriving on my blog, why not? But no, the more that you do that, it's not just about the posts that you're creating, it's about building your authority across your entire site. And you are doing that when you regularly write on a topic, even if people are not arriving on the post itself, especially if you interlink it and check all the boxes. So ultimately, authority, when you build it, once you have the whole site about cats and you answer all the questions about cats and you have all this going on, you've improved your authority and you will get some search traffic, which is what we want. Content stages, stage one, write for your audience, stage two, edit for keyword placement and synonyms in your URL, metadata, content, headers, and your images. Three, review for the linking opportunities and where does your blog exist in the context of your site as a whole? Where can you direct your users for more information on any of the pieces of the topic that you're covering? And my final thoughts are a quote from my dad. I think this is what optimization is all about. So the difference between doing a good job and a great job is really just a little bit because you already have the hard part down and that's developing and creating the content. So that extra little bit are just these optimization steps that make a good host a great host. So here's some resources. Why cats love boxes in there, if you wanna follow it later and learn more about that. And some mob beginner guides, algorithm cheat sheets, some other things I thought would be helpful for you all to look at later. So that's my talk. What's that one keyword phrase per blog? No, so that used to be what SEO was like. Now, you can, in the plugins, they have a spot to put a keyword focus in there but you wanna optimize around an entire topic, not just one keyword. Anybody else? I mean, is that something that Google looks at? Yes, and let me back up real quick. In the backend of WordPress, you can highlight and set, oh geez, sorry, this is way back. So you can highlight and set in this area, usually there's a dropdown that says header two, header three, if there's not, because it really depends on who created the site or what it's like, if there's not, you have to actually go to the source code and type it in there. Which is actually really, what? It's not the little tags inside. Yeah, it's basically the outline of your site or the outline of your post and applying the HTML H1, H2, H3 tag. And a lot of times there's like a little dropdown where you can just set it and be like, all right, this is my header two. If there's not, it's like really easy coding. It's just like. If you click on that, click on all the way to the right, it'll drop down the second level, the second layer of the tools, and that's where you'll see heading one and a two paragraph. Awesome. It is there, it's just not showing, but if you were to click on that, it would drop down a second set of tools on the toolbar and that's where you could then drop that. Okay, got it.