 So I brought up that I was going to have someone who knows a lot more about SEO than me I know a little about SEO because I've done web development for a number of years Anthony owes a whole lot of SEO and So he put the other slides he put some time into it because one of the problems he has he is not an SEO By trade it's like you don't do SEO you do web development web application development, right? That would best way to sum up your okay, and not like average maybe a company or two You heard of I don't know like Domino's and You've also do work for stock X currently with your current company, and he's doing all the web application But which incidentally when you're doing web application development you have to be thinking about making sure it's Set up for easy SEO and then that way their content creation team will take over and do some of the SEO for the content Well, he's gonna go back and forth the details of that But I introduce you Anthony from amber Detroit, and we're gonna talk about all those fun little things about SEO and all those people That are full of BS that will guarantee you the top ranking in Google and every other BS thing that comes in an email that you see and Oh, and you've told me so I don't know how much we're gonna be a share on this but Anthony's certainly doing some horror stories of people who've Critiqued after he developed the web app of what they thought the SEO would be and this is what led to all of this Right essentially how wrong they were So tell us a little bit about that start with that process them before we jump into we had a whole slide decorate and go But don't worry They're not a wordy boring slide because normally it's talking points not a long PowerPoint presentation here. Don't worry Yeah, so without jumping head because I'm gonna pretty much jump ahead a little bit here But I don't think SEO is really that complicated And I don't think it should be thought of it that complicated and honesty I think it comes down to just creating good content and half the times everyone's focused on all these technical details And I think their focus is in the wrong place I get that there are technical things that need to get done. I think we all agree that that's the truth But it's kind of goes to that whole 80-20 rule where you're spending 8% of your time on 20% of what actually matters when it should be the other way around and You know, I look at there's two things you need to do You have to have content. Yeah number one and then you need to have the technical pieces But in all reality the time spent should be more on the content Yeah, and if you look at really successful SEO strategies and I brought this up to people I said if you take home depot or Lowe's and we'll use them as really big examples But they have entire like build processes that they have for how to build this or how to build that these home improvement projects By the way, the tools are located on these aisles with these links to these product and that kind of drives it So you came there looking for how to install something you found this cool build DIY project That's good content. You're there because of the content and I've seen travel sites to this as well Hitmunk has a really good like their travel blog. They really good vacation reviews of spots And by the way, click the link here and you can book that's good content As opposed to these people who try to sell you this black magic of alright We're gonna buy 30 million domains that all have a varied name of things people type in and that's that's not There's not like a shortcut to it and that's kind of what we want to cover in this So we'll go ahead and get started on the slides here for I just ramble on about it too much I'm right with that. Right. This is what you're seeing, right? This is yeah This is the problem here. So I'm gonna just skip through this a little bit here. This is myself But I thought the best way to really try to understand SEO is if we just kind of talked about like What is a search engine and it's fundamental state and then also? What is search engine optimization and then from there what you can do kind of going forward? So that is the general analysis or thought process behind this conversation for today I do this right All right, so what is a search engine? I mean to break it down to me like a search engine is essentially It's meant to provide something to the user So it's doing two things It's essentially collecting data and then it's returning Relevant data to the user that is a very very short like I don't know if you can get much simpler Yeah much simpler than that Search engine so collect the data and then return the data Based off of a particular query. So that is a search engine I know there's a lot of them out there Obviously Google is the one that we all think of but the ones I don't think many people do consider are the fact that things like YouTube and Amazon and you know even like Facebook or LinkedIn are also search engines in themselves because again They're collecting data and then when you're searching for stuff and returning it Google essentially is the largest search engine Obviously as everyone knows them which they own YouTube Which is the second largest search engine and it's helped me in SEO because I create content And I link it all back with this so it's kind of interesting to see that and Matter of fact if you look for anything if there is a resulting YouTube video it pretty much shows right up that right underneath the Results even though you're not searching YouTube So there's a blending of all of these and somewhere in between you're gonna have all the Amazon links showing you you know Where to find all this stuff and we're to buy it. Mm-hmm exactly So now that we have a lead a very small simple idea what a search engine is So how do these actually work? So this is gonna get a little bit more technical But I still For the as much intent as I could I really want to keep this relatively simple again We're collecting and organizing data and then we're just returning data based on a query typically a user query so To dig this in a little bit more if you think of it like this Again, many of you may already be familiar with this, but the thought is there's a program out there. We call it a crawler It's just crawling the internet. It's finding websites. It's finding content and then from there It's just cataloging it and indexing it and it's making it easier to be queried for the second half of what a search engine does So that's part one and I guess I talked about part two a little bit So the part two of a search engine is essentially it takes a query which is essentially whatever you say You know, how's the weather which would be a query or you could say you know cheap Hard drives or something like that something that those are simple queries And then they have all that data index and so all you're really doing is just searching the index of these search engines You're not actually it's not live searching the web for the most part So yeah, that is the short I tried to do a little diagram because I thought this made a little bit sense to do so So as you can see here We're searching it's indexing so the little circle the cylinder is there our database of searching And then you have a user which is going on a website making a query The way I think of it again just breaking us down the first half is collecting the data Second half is searching through the collected data and returning so again very simple thoughts here about what you search engine is and what it's actually doing So to bring this a little bit further here I copy this I'm gonna read this so apologize for looking directly at the screen But I it's it's amazing because like Google basically tells you how their stuff works at a very broad sense And so everyone tries to play the back black box game when it's really like hey They're pretty upfront about how this works, so I'm gonna read this so hopefully it's not too dry But I think that there's some really big things I want to pull out here So from Google it says to return relevant results for your query We first need to establish what information you're looking for the intent behind your query Understanding intent is fundamentally about understanding language and then is a critical aspect of search We build language models to try to decipher what strings of words we should look up in the index It sounds semi-drive, but the simple thought here is you're asking a question. You're asking for something and You're supposed to get a result. That is what Google is trying to do And so the big thing I like to point out here is they're trying to understand language And if anyone's tried to learn a new language you would understand that it's it can be difficult So can you only imagine how these search engines have to think and how they have to be able to pull an information out and help And so the big thing to pull out here is it's all about language and we'll dig into this a little more without pre-looting But yeah, you know that is the content and before if you started out like I did I mean in Anthony as well in the early 90s or late 90s when web started coming up It was all about keyword stuffing. Yes, and other and people still think that's relevant in 2019 It's just not it's like oh you've been doing this a long time But you haven't been keeping up a technology when someone says that I'm like, yeah that mattered by just filling it now It's you gotta remember Google is very clear about this error system Contextually reads the results and make sure they're relevant YouTube goes a step further if I make a video on YouTube they read the data They read my lips so speak they're doing language conversion and seeing if it's relevant to my title and if it's relevant to you They're actually indexing those words. That's how they get all the auto display on the bottom So this is really important Google's very open about this So there's links that'll be we'll leave this whole slide deck in there But there's link to this Google's very you can spend time directly from the people doing the search engine Google and read all the stuff They're very open about what they're doing because they want you to create good content Which is the whole purpose of this yes, and at the time of this recording is 2019 and I think that a lot of people They almost forget like That it's we are much more advanced than we were in like 2005 or 2004 when like Facebook came out and the fact that like You know everyone's always asking questions about like well, how many factors is Google using it doesn't matter I don't care. I don't really look into those things I just go back to the content because at the end of the day. What is Google trying to do their goal is to provide? Quality content to the user based off the query So I get that they're doing the indexing and they're doing the searching through their index to give you the information But the end of the day their goal is to provide an answer directly to that user based off that query And I'm gonna skip around here because I have a slide that essentially talks about it Which is this here obviously this is Google and I'm sure many of you have used the I'm feeling lucky button Or maybe you haven't but the thought here is when you click on the I'm feeling lucky button It takes you to the first search result based off of what you're searching in here And so the thought here was Google has is here because this is kind of where they would love to be They don't want to show you a list of search results because that means they're giving you the option to figure out What it is if they could build their stuff so perfect and so amazing in turn the right answer It would always be the first result so you can ask it anything and the first thing they respond is correct And it should always be that way and that's essentially what Google is kind of alluding to with this I'm feeling lucky button here. And so at the end of the day It's not about trying to get up in the rankings or whatnot It's about providing quality content to the user and the quality I should see quality relevant content to the user Because you Google things and the goal is to find what you're looking for not a bunch of pages that are stuffed with ads and Irrelevant contact. So it's they've kind of gotten there I mean for a lot of a lot of things I search for the first link is frequently the one I want unless I'm Well, unless I'm on stack channel look for a code problem on stack exchange or something. Well, there's a whole different problem In URL colon. Yeah, in your own one. Yes Yeah, it's another class on advanced searching. Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one. That's a good one Yeah, and if you look at it even today like I'm trying to think of how often I go past the first page because Google's getting that good at returning results and now that they're doing some of the really nice dynamic cards So you're seeing like the weather cards that the sports and the snippets Sometimes I get the answer. I want I had some question about a product The snippet was the answer about the product without me going to the page. So sometimes I'm like, oh, this is actually great Yeah, exactly. So Yeah, so just kind of going back to the thought here is the goal of a search engine is to return the most Relevant content based on the user search query. That is the at its core What it's trying to do. So let's advance here a little bit Yeah, oh the page rank system the page rank system So this this also I love So I read the very first version of page rank a little bit many moons ago Like full context. So this has been about 2006 and 7 I actually did search engine consulting SEO consulting as well as like affiliate consulting did this for a latter half of three years and Trying to explain to a lot of people like the whole idea is content and there is no quick fix or quick Oh have my you know web guy do this thing. It's it doesn't work that simple and so one of the things I love to talk about is page rank because this is really kind of a a soul it's like the way to think of this sometimes is it's a Social proof to the authority of the content and that's essentially what page rank is trying to do So the simple thought here is When you have a page of content, so let's say Tom puts out a really amazing video like every video that you do I don't know about that roll back to the beginning. I left them up for embarrassing reasons And so like the thing about the video is like or any page out there is the way that it's going to be considered Of more value is often based off the authority of other people talking about it or recommending it and that is the simple thought of page rank where let's say in this diagram here where you have be as a arbitrary website page individual page not a website, but an individual page And it's getting links from other sites And so the different size circles represents the relativity or the authority I saw sorry the authority of each other site pointing to it. And so you can have something where this example here how there's roughly five Actions and they're at like six with one point six percent Yeah, so they're small amounts and so that's a small amount of authority even when you add it up So like I can go try to do this whole you know Pay for links on a bunch of non-authoritative websites But you're not really doing much work where if you actually create a good piece of content and a big website like you know New York Times or like, you know CNN picks up your page and talks about it You're gonna get more authority off that one because the content at the end of the day is higher quality And that is the goal in its essence of what the page rank algorithm is trying to do and this is something even I see So as my website becomes more authoritative because of all the videos and all the content and the traffic and the high volume of Traffic that my site has more and more people reach out to me You want me to help promote their content because they know like they can look at my ranking on this Actually, Google's talked a lot about this never since I believe it was the panda update is when I really got rid of a lot Of the back linking a lot of people would choose some of the link link stuffing and you can read some of the history Spent a number of years since they did that but that broke some of these old things that people still cling on to like All you got to do is stuff all these back links in here And that it doesn't work like that like it comes back to the content Google's getting better and better people try to game the system Google ups the game that's you Bottom line they want people to write good content and Google has been on that topic and here's probably repeat that a few times To this video, but I that's really the truth. Yeah, there is no there is no Secret sauce to it. I mean if you there is if anything it's all about the content Yeah, you know like you said if you're trying to to game the system, you're doing it wrong That is not what it's about like I don't even follow any more like what Google updates are or what is coming out because to me that is semi irrelevant I understand there are things like oh, we should focus more on mobile, which you know again It's 2019 if we haven't been doing that for the past rough decade now. Okay, that's you're doing it wrong But right, you know for the most part it all comes down to that content And that's that's essentially where we're going with in this conversation here So while we're breaking down some of the fundamentals of search engines What we're really saying is just create good content. And that's yeah, we'll go. That's where it's at. Yeah so What is search engine optimization SEO as we're talking about here? This is I think I just googled this and found it again. Yeah, it's easier to find other people's words than sometimes mine And I did link and these slides as Tom said we'll share but you know I thought this made a lot of sense Which is it's a practice of increasing the quality and quantity of the traffic to your content on the internet again This is all about trying you want people to see your stuff But if your stuff isn't good, even you're just trying to gain the system for people to see not good stuff So just create good stuff and then the rest will kind of come from there So Two types of optimizations again, you may have heard some of these terms, which is on-site SEO off-site SEO Again, both of these terms are pretty self-explanatory to me. It's what you do on your site versus what you do off your site That's the two there some examples of on-site optimizing page titles and descriptions optimizing site for speed different devices Maintaining an active site map. So these are things you can do on-site Then off-site things like guest blog posting podcast YouTube today, yeah You know active use of social media even I even think of stuff like public speaking and attending network events as off-site SEO because again You're there to talk about your authority and ultimately it's going to drive people back to your country And I remember in early tech days. We called it getting slash dotted where Slash really popular news sites still is somewhat popular But you would get an article that was really popular and it linked back to your site because it's something you had done And you would see all that traffic there But that would later and still will show up in things like searching results same with guest blog posts This is what people ask me for a lot They want to do a guest blog on my blog and like have me link back to them because of the authority and a public speaking and networking Don't underestimate that you'll find Even an event when someone has done it that they if it was big even a meet-up had a lot of attendees Or any of the other different platforms that are made for event management That linking back to your site because there was a lot of people interacting and discussing and sharing it across a lot of those Those are all indicators Google as well a lot of people said you should you know look at this person because we see all The people goes back into page rank. These are things that the search engines are still using as indicators For that. Yeah, I mean and also like if you do like a public speaking event I've done one out in Vegas and they had a speaker profile on a relatively Authoritative website and that pointed back and I looked at my analytics. I was like, wow, I didn't even think of this I'm like, yeah, I mean I'll ask you I didn't think about the speaker profile would actually generate some traffic Again, it all come down to being able to provide that quality content at the end of the day so Another way to think of onsite off site I think onsite is create great content off site is being able to tell people about your great content And that's really what you know, you should be focusing on so it all comes down to the very beginning Create good content and then go talk about it. And that's where you're going to do a lot of your quote SEO tactics Yeah, that's what you want to call. Yeah, which is like even YouTube YouTube is my off-site content that integrates back into my website to do and bet it But it's where the discovery process is gonna be better on YouTube to find my videos But it does lead back to and we get a lot of a lot of my inbound traffic is one of my analytics people clicking The links off of the YouTube because we had links to my website in description exactly Okay, so Again, this is going right. I feel like a broken record. Yeah This is a really simple thought what are we really optimizing for and at the end of the day, it's people I mean, that's what we're really we're not trying to optimize a computer that is has no emotions or thought I mean, they're just there to solve a purpose That's what a search engine is there to do is to solve a purpose But at the end of the day what you're really trying to do is provide quality content to people And so I often joke have hard to have hard to just saying we are like people optimizers That's what we're trying to do. Yeah people content optimizers instead of like search engine optimizers And that's more important than anything is being able to create good content for people So I guess the next question is is like what should you do? And again create good content. I have this I know we again. This is where I mentioned earlier We kind of pre-looted this I love How we say Pareto? Pareto or Pareto? I don't know. I'm a king of mispronouncing things. So flame me in the comments This is the thought I said earlier Which is the idea that most people spend 80% of their time focusing on the 20% of effort when they should be doing is Taken at 80% focusing on a lot more that they could do. Yeah, this applies to so many things spend some time Just thinking about this like this is a tangent We're not going to go off on but trust me this discussion happened unrelated to this topic just before we got here of you Know where you spend your time. So this is something good to think about but it applies a lot to the SEO Yes, yeah I mean even in when I used to do on my the SEO consulting days like the thing that always would come up is like You know, can I do this and what about that the backlink thing would come up or like? How should I or how many keywords make sense or like which I put in my title and like well what makes sense to the content? No, no I want to rank good for this keyword and this keyword and half of times people would pick like very simple keywords like best Restaurant that is so irrelevant. Yeah, so broad and not a good query to try If your restaurant has a niche think about the niche and think about there So, you know recipe and matter of fact when we're done We ordered Thai food before we started so we're gonna have Thai when we're done But you know the search engine for that's going to be not just best Thai food But the specific type of Thai may be a specific flavor and that's how you can create content around What you want people to know you're about. Yes, I mean I always would often say like what are your audience? What is your audience doing? I mean that is I mean what would they do if they went to Google? Would they search best restaurant? They would probably search something a little bit more specific like, you know Best restaurants in you know downtown Detroit or being able to say like new restaurants in downtown Detroit So those are the type of things I think people would search not necessarily just best restaurant because it's it's not a quality Queer there All right, so we talked about this so we can skip through those there So hey guess where we're at? content If we haven't said it enough by now, yeah So I always joke and I've joked for ten years now Honestly, because I've had these SEO conversations with too many people and I always said that like if I were ever to write an SEO book I would actually write the book about creating great content and then I would have an appendix Which would be all about the technical optimizations about how to set up a sitemap and how to get your Google count Your web console set up and how to get your Google it so you can review it at like those are all the technical things But that's that 20% that you're spending 80% your time on where you should actually be focusing on the content So and I'll actually yeah, and I'll speak to this yeah, it doesn't exist yet But it should and this is something like the whole process of doing the sitemap Registering to your with Google business Loading analytics all these little details Developer can knock this out in a day or two. This is not that's the thing It is just not the part now when you say I want to you know, I'm gonna be hitmunk And I'm gonna write these really good travel blogs. That's a lot They put a lot of effort in the content. It's a DIY projects that Lowe's or Home Depot put on their blog They're not like hey just grab a hammer and a nail in a two by four and put something together They're much more elaborate for kitchen remodels and things like that because they put a lot of effort into that content So later make you go oh wow I can build this kitchen In fact, they somewhat build it and someone I think that you do I think Home Depot Well, I've taken it some YouTube videos like showing construction like this old house style stuff putting it together But that it take great contents not easy We say it but we know that it's a lot of effort to do that You will spend some time on that aspect of it to really give people that I spend hours on my YouTube videos to You know go in-depth on a topic just you know for many reasons, but that's part of the content I can't just kind of say hey, I do firewalls this video. No, you have to put together something Someone's gonna want to read watch engage with Yes All right, so let's talk a little bit about pretty good content I'm sure you could probably speak equally if not more than this But again, this just goes back to that the same thoughts that we share with a lot of our clients things I've done in the consulting days You know for us it comes down to essentially a few simple thoughts here number one is creating a content schedule I always say like just start with like one day a week or one piece of content a week that you're going to release The next thought is Learning how to write good content now This is like you know, let's not go back to English class because that But I think that there's a lot that you can learn out there And I do have some resources that I've shared more than I can remember About how to create good content the next thing is learning what your audience wants There's lots of great ways to doing this like keyword tools or even your Google Analytics has lots of insights to what your Users and audience wants that you can learn how to create content based off of that And then the other thought here is what content do you like? Can you learn from it because I think that you know, we see lots of like whether it's a blog or whether it's a YouTube channel or anything You really like it. And so If you like something why don't you learn from them? I mean, I guess you can call it steal it but stealing it But at the same time you're really just learning what makes good content And I do this often where I take notes and see something. I'm like that's awesome How they did that or I really like that cool sidebar because that's a really good way to make the content It can be an unrelated industry to yours. That's I see all the time I'll see a way something was presented and I'm like why I like the way they presented that it's completely not tech I may be watching but the way it was just done or the thought process on it kind of kind of inspired me to do my content differently of the other thing too is don't think of if you're a small business owner It doesn't have to all fall on you you can't outsource it Maybe your disciplines your skill sets are not in writing and things like that. We even see CEOs of very large companies They're not wonderful public speakers. They're probably wouldn't be good at content either But they figure out who is and that's an important part you find you can hire someone for this You can contract it out and it's kind of like telling your story and there's actually I've actually kind of like the term I'm seeing more popular here in 2019 like story branding companies and those are kind of related to content They help tell your company story and they'll break and create that content out there So then that's not the same person necessarily that does your web development. They're not necessarily one the same It's not a technical person a storyteller does not have to be technical So that you can think about that from a different perspective and so you're building out your whole strategy for your business online It may not be an all-one-stop shop You may hire someone for your web application development someone to do maybe some graphics and marketing stuff and But then someone else to help tell your brand story and bring that to life. That's a different Silly I said a different is when you may find one design team that has it all in-house awesome great We those are dreams have one-stop shop, but even myself I've actually hired people in over the years to help tell my brand story. Yeah I mean one of our client stock X. I know we brought them up But I mean the amount of content that they're creating and they have a whole content team and that's all they do And I interact with them. I would say just about every single day and the strategies that they're coming out with I mean, I think they're I don't even know how big their team is now just the content side But it's roughly 20 maybe even up to 30 people now and their whole goal is every single day is figuring out What do I want to write? When to we release it? What content to put in? What photos do I need? What are the keywords that make sense like and I said keywords as I should say key phrases So, you know, what are people looking for and so they they do a pretty good job at breaking this down And they just pump out so much content and the good thing is is they're pumping out quality content And that and it's it's really enlightening to see a company take their content so seriously And to give you perspective stock X is a company that you may have heard of you Google You'll definitely see them in the news But they're not a company of like 10,000 employees with 20 people creating content 20 people creating content is a big piece of their team I mean, I don't know what the total number works there now is or they're really rapidly growing They're like really big. Yeah, but half of it isn't even that's a whole nother side of their business Yeah, but just from their digital space I mean, yeah, I think that probably half of their digital team is all in content Yeah, so it's interesting because it's not it's not like they're the size of some mega company yet They're working on it But it's interesting. I mean, there is they have a lot of resources dedicated to it But for their the way they convert the way they make money is, you know Creating this content around the products that they have on their site And that's just so key because they're understanding your audience They're looking at what sells like all right We need to do a story about this topic because this is what's going to get people to engage And it's like you said it's articles you want to read you will learn something about product reading your article Exactly. Yeah, I mean at the end of the day like stock X that their whole goal is to essentially sell a shoe or a Handbag or something like that. That's what their goal is but they're writing content about like oh the shoe just got released They're look who wore it best like I mean, they're doing all of these really cool ways of talking around the products And of course they're gonna link back to like yeah check out the product on stock X or you know We have an exclusive version of this product on stock X or check out, you know How you can match a really cool handbag with the shoe of course they sell them both So, you know, they're all about creating the content that people really want to learn more about products And then ultimately they have the opportunity to buy it right through stock X. Yep All right, so I know I have a few slides about each one of these so we'll kind of briefly because I touched on mostly I don't want to like repeat myself here Just carry a schedule be consistent stick with it. I think that as long as you're constantly putting out content It's going to do well. I should say quality. I need to not just say content But quality quality content and also don't expect results within like the first few months I would say if not like multiple months before you actually start to see some type of audience off this I mean, I think you can speak the most with this YouTube channel here. It takes a long time I mean even my YouTube sure you see whatever the scribe account is right now I know it's over 70,000, but there's years into making of me putting all the videos to make this happen Yeah, so at the end of the day just you know trust the process It's kind of a thought here put out create create quality content put it out Try to be consistent in releasing it So you're not like releasing 500 articles now or videos now and not doing any like for a year Yeah, it would make no sense and you know, I think we both read Alexis Ohanian's book Yeah, yeah, and which it goes to a really good point that he makes that book I love don't ask your mom if the content's good don't ask your friends You got to ask people who will be honest with you go and know that's terrible Because the world will let you know overall because if you don't get a lot of views you don't get a lot of engagement It may be bad content, but if you ask your mom, oh, honey, it's great So there's a You do find honest review of it because it is that is an important aspect So you can't just create a bunch of content and ask comes back to that create good content thing and asking people who are Never want to hurt your feelings They're not doing any favors when they say oh that was great. Oh by it Yeah Criticism is so much sometimes like more valuable than optimism like as much as it it feels good to be told things are great And I like it but having people kick back and say well, it would be nice to hear this or well I think you meant to say this like those are type of things that I think you find a lot more value in and you can You learn from it like everything you put out there You can always put something else out there. You can create something better So that's the beauty of being able to create new content. I've seen this I do read the comments and I've had some comments that someone's like downloading a person because they're like, oh, you're mean I'm like, no, they're actually right. I I Should have done that bit better and I will work to do that. So those I appreciate the honest people then someone or whatever So, you know going to the creating quality content so a book I've referenced I don't know how many times and not just the book But also the website is pro blogger because they talk a lot about how to like essentially blog for money But they teach a lot of really good content creation strategies that I've learned so much on I love the book The book has some really good ideas of like here's some things that you could think about talking or writing about They even have this six month plan where they give you a topic every single day It's like an open-ended sentence and you can basically structure around nearly every business That's the intent and so they're literally giving you an opportunity to think of a topic or something you could Write about or talk about every single day for six months, so they're giving you like a six months lead into content Which is super awesome Yeah, so I know you can Google like content topics and find plenty of them if you get the writer's blog The other thing and this just touches on a little bit of you know thoughts on the SEO Which is you know titles and photos that would show in search results Again, I know we're all visual people. We like to see very visual things And so you know search engines do have the ability to have images And I think that'd be really great that you are picking good images the other thing too, which is the titles I think you're so valuable That I think that if you think about it if you go to Google and you search something You're gonna read the titles and then whatever you read the titles Most likely what you're gonna click on to see whether it's the right content And so to the end user that person who wrote it They thought about that and I think that's important that you think about that as well when you're creating your content And that goes for not just like you know your website, but also things like YouTube like obviously when you create a YouTube video You're gonna think about what that title what title makes sense Yeah, so that when someone searches it that they're more inclined to click on it that in it sometimes they overthink it But it think about it in more natural language. That's the biggest thing is what would be the question That would be asked of this pull out your jeopardy hat You just went full circle right back to the Google what they said they're trying to understand language Yeah, and most people type in things in a natural query So you start with that as a thought the other thing I'll recommend for great content that helps me a lot is one I read a lot of books just in general and even if those books are I'm not technical matter of fact one of the people I think speaks equately is John Green I've actually recently read one of his fiction books, which is completely non-technical But boy it made me think a lot about words because he's so he's such a prolific author But the way his writing style gives me better thoughts on how to do it So that is just read books there even if it's fiction man It just it's weird, but I really feel it puts me in a better mindset I did another book over the weekend Same thing puts you in another mindset of how those books are created and even it's even if it's not related to your industry If it's just a popular book sometimes there's a reason it's popular yeah, exactly and and just to touch base a little bit more on some of the title thoughts here because You know one of the things that our clients come to us often and ask is like you know They want to increase their traffic and they want to do SEO things and you know, they're creating content sometimes Not as much as I wish they would I really do yeah But you know the ones that do though They'll create a content and they don't really think about the title and they don't put much effort into it And so I often say like the title is essentially like your elevator pitch to someone being able to look at that article and the thing too is you know some some of our clients have gone in there and just Put like a title tag for like just the home page but in reality most people are not coming to your website to the home page that they're gonna Google something per se and Find a piece of content. They're gonna come to that individual page So don't always make the assumption that everyone is going to see your home page to start because that's most likely not the truth Yeah, that's it And if you think about the way a headline works, especially with clickbait and things like that But in the media industry or in a newsroom reporting and they're gonna call the byline and it's it's all about that grabbing title I love the title that wired had the other day Everyone was upset because it's July of 2018 about the face-app stealing everyone's the one to make you look older And their title was great. It says so you're worried about face app But have you heard what this Facebook company is doing with your data? I was like that's I want to read that article now Yeah, they just publish it I was like oh spot on guys But and it's that that is engaging and what are the people searching? What's face app? What's this because it's a hot topic right now of is this company selling my data to somewhere else? Article the article is on all those points. It's on point where it is related to what people was searching Have you heard a face app? Have you heard of Facebook? You know, it's just it's a fun play on that But it engages you it makes you go, okay, I got to click on this link and gotta read the rest now Yeah, and speaking of you know finding information and what you're looking for and what your audience wants Yeah, I love the fact that like Google on looks gives you a lot of information They tell you what queries people are searching for to get to your website To be specific. They they give you the queries that are non-Google and then you have to use Google Search console. I always forget the name a few times. I don't know what's called. Yeah, I know I think it's search console I think it's about that. Yeah, so through Google search console They'll give you what the queries are from Google But those are really valuable because you know, you can see what people are searching to find you and often like I've gone in there And I've seen like some really random things that about the web space. I'm like, oh, that's weird that they found us through that The thought should be you know, well, let's co-create some content around that because maybe there's other users that are also searching that Yeah, there's lots of great keyword tools I'm not gonna go too far into these because I think to each their own to be honest I don't have you know, I've been asked which the best keyword tool I haven't used them all so I don't know is the first answer The second one the one that works best for you is how I would say it because again, they're all you know good in their own rights The thing I often like to talk about is being able to embrace the long tail keywords or essentially being more specific about What someone is searching so going back to that restaurant analogy best restaurant it'd be a more of a broad statement of a keyword but being saying like best restaurant in Detroit for for a Date would be something more specific So if you said if you put out a blog article and said something about like here's a top five best restaurants in downtown Detroit to take a date to that would be a much higher quality title than just best restaurant So right you can think about around that too You can get more in depth and say maybe you list the place to start you start for to walk in a park You know you want to walk downtown go here go here when you land you're gonna stop at our restaurant and here and we got a special package So you know you can kind of lead them into it and have this great blog article take some photos around Detroit people especially When I travel I just got back from Pittsburgh day today. I will I'm a we're all visual people I looked at places and places that had good photos. I'm like that looks like a place They have good atmosphere as well, so don't underestimate kind of bringing them along even those photos are outside of your place or bring them to The city and we're speaking about restaurants here But you kind of get the concept and you can extrapolate that to whatever you're you know if your stock X you're you're doing Fashion style stuff to relate to fact that you sell fashion It's all relatable like that and understanding your audience And the great thing too about long-tail keywords is you can I know we're using the restaurant analogy today But you know if you were to do like you know best restaurants in downtown Detroit for a date You can also do best restaurants in downtown Detroit for lunch So by doing something like long-tail it allows you it gives you the opportunity to create more content around a very similar topic So you don't have to feel so constrained to trying to fit everything in one You can create multiple pieces of content that are very specific because again if you go all the way back to the beginning a search instance trying to Return a result to that user and it goes back to the language that they're asking and most people might hopefully Are typing something much more specific into the search engines and they're going to return that content So if you're going and thinking about that and creating that those very specific things you're going to get much more not just You're not necessarily going to get more links I would say or more views, but you definitely get quality and that's really what it's about Yeah, because you don't want just someone randomly by you want to spend some time on your site Engaging reading it and actually be interested in whatever your product is It's it's ultimately you want the quality leads that turn to a customer if that's the if that's your goal Correct and I had mentioned Google Trends on here, which is a great one Oh, yeah, the face app and yep That would be a great way to realize like this face app things trending and then maybe there's some you know I occasionally will use Google Trends and we kind of joke it I call a little bit of trend hijacking But I if I know something's up and coming And it's something interesting that I especially if I have a lot of words or opinion on it right away I'm like, oh, I got to talk about this and you'll notice it'll be like especially when it comes to security news in a tech World I'll see something coming up I'll have my own opinion or do my own research on it and you can use that as quick write an article people are searching this heavy right now And you can rank up there really quick with it. Yeah And then I guess one of my last thoughts here is really just you know looking at what else is out there You know, I think there's some really simple questions here You know how easy is the content that you read listen to her watch to consume? Consider that what images are they using what makes you feel good inside that when you see an image Is it clear? Are they doing infographics that are like busy or clean? Those things that you can learn like those design trends. How are they structuring their paragraphs? Are they long? Are they short? What feels good to you often what feels good to you? I would say is gonna feel good for other people So yeah, it's really good to learn that you know how it's organized. I guess yeah well The content is around and don't be afraid. I mean if you decide you're the one that's gonna write the content There's writing classes online. There's inexpensive ways to dive into learning this Which I probably should do myself occasionally, but I You know, it's a good sentence structure good grammar is important and thinking about ways to form the sentences better That that does help quite a bit. I've had some really painfully hard to read articles And I having I've had a friend who was a writer who's gave me a lot of tips He's actually went through the few I don't write a lot anymore But when I did he would help structure that for me a lot. It was very helpful Yes So this is like complete curveball I threw here on this slide But I just had to put the sliding because I didn't want to forget to talk about this So a lot of field Building an email list I think is so important to do I think it's your cutting rate to the chase and you're having the most direct way of communicating with somebody Outside of looking at trying to build a follow on like Facebook or Twitter or something else where those I think of her proxies Because you don't necessarily know what you can do or how you can broadcast your message to them But you'll have a lot better opportunity to do this with email And the great thing is is you can use all of the different tools out there to promote your content or your content out there And then build that email list and then ultimately send more content to those users and you know, yeah It's it's really nice. And matter of fact, this goes back to the content as well I've known people who Do like a monthly newsletter and one of the people I subscribe to this is actually where I know where all the Chamber of Commerce events is he's got a Company that does different design work and things like that But he always has at the top of it all of the Chamber of Commerce events and a lot of other business networking events He's it's the business networking user. Oh, by the way, we do this design work of all at the bottom But I've always appreciated that because he's got good content I actually want to read his email He's actually got something that is interesting to me because it's business networking where I did meet him He was polite and asked if he could add me to the list. I said yes, and this is still effective You know email doesn't have the open rate. It's if you're trying to get general consumers It's not as good, but if you're doing B2B work at all email still very effective It's still a business tool in 2019 Slack is not killed email or any insert whichever company made the claim that they're killing email in the next year It hasn't been done. It's it's still alive and well and It still does have a good especially I have some friends that built their business and still maintain it greatly by their email list B2B it so early works I don't millennials may be the people who kill like the really young people may finally start to but I don't know. Do you follow the broom email list? No, it's great It's millennial focused news. Okay single day deliver to email. It's like it's a great email list and say well Maybe I could be wrong. I'm over 40 so I could be wrong about these things But overall I've shown for B2B it's effective and that's the space I work in mostly we don't do any emails for B2B Retail, but for B2B. I will tell you it is effective still. He's not wrong Yeah, I mean like I mean the great thing to it, but emails you do even get to invoke your own branding within those emails So there's a lot to it outside of just being able to you know put something on And you're still owning a platform one of the things as many people have learned with all these other sites Especially as they come and go and change the rules dynamically You may or may not have access to your customers in the early days of Facebook anything you posted on your Facebook page was pretty much viewed by I'm quickly it became pay-to-play and then I think without paying It's something like a 4% view or 5% it's really low They keep lowering the number basically if you want really cool. I have 3 million people like my page But for them to see anything I got to put X amount of dollars into it and that's how any of these platforms are gonna work They're gonna figure out ways to optimize and monetize Which means you don't have the control you send emails other than making sure you don't get caught in filters The emails are gonna get through to the people that are on that list Yeah, I mean at the end of the day an email list is the most agnostic way of building an audience and that's kind of Simple thought there. Yep. So just a touch base on a few thoughts here One of the first questions often comes is like how do I build an email list? Outside of just doing a very simple organic approach of having like an email thing on your website or telling people to subscribe Is giving away free content to get them onto your list? So this could be offering like a PDF or like here's a free video or something like that They just give your email you'd send them a link or whatnot and then you can build a list that way Once you build a list make sure to actually send people emails. Yeah, I've seen that happen I got a lot of people on my list and the last time you sent an email you got to come back to that content creation I have in this strategy for that and then yes expecting your email on a certain date I know print someone daily. It's only 12 a year. They do one a year, but they have a really strong email list They do Consistently on the first of every month they get it out there and it gives them a month to put together some really solid content They're kind of in depth But she says it's been one of the keys to her business success over the last 10 years has been that mailing list And I'm sure they're looking at the reeds in the open. She's a really high opener Was but it was wait statistically way higher than average But it but when I see what they were doing with this really strong content very visual is a big email, but it works That's cool Yeah, so I won't touch too much more on this one, but I just wanted to really bring up the email list It's still relevant so relevant still 2019 at least there now it is Auction company that kills it with their mailing list. Yeah, because they do Really unique like high-end twenty thirty thousand dollars a piece auction items and stuff And I didn't understand their mailing shit So we got to see what they were doing and like wow, I mean they're open rich really high, too people People get excited because that's the next round of things they can buy and so if you have something like that We have a meeting in our company soon similar thing Selling really unique pieces of art people get excited about the email because it's going to be what art's going to be available So if you have strategy for it, it works. Yes build the email list. Yeah Won't touch too much on these other than just some worthy reads that I have found a lot of good It's and if you read most of these it's it's all about creating good content I really love and the last one is actually not a book is just a link the thousand true fans by Kevin Kelly It just kind of breaks down a lot of people They're trying to build an audience and they're focusing on like how do I get to like, you know 100,000 people or a million views or whatever that is like but at the end of the day like you need to like just Figure out on how to get those first true fans and then this Kevin call Kevin Kelly calls it is your thousand true fans And so the thought here really is about trying to start small and let your fans become part of your you know I guess you could say your your force that helps you grow Yeah, and not you know and you see if some of you that may cringe a little bit when you see Gary van There's a love hate. I mean the guy's a little overexcited sometimes, but I will tell you I have He says a lot of really smart things if you look at him and I'm not in his daily Hyped up stuff, but in his longer form talks that he's done I've watched some of those and go wow This is he's got some really smart things to say and his books are all you you know He much more concise. He pumps out so much content. It's crazy like I almost get annoyed at this point like I mean It is and I think that's part of it is like he it's like he's pumping out so much stuff Yeah, you know that the just a touch base on this book the main reason I did put a few notes on why I picked these books But the thing I liked about this book is he actually took like screenshots of like a FedEx Facebook post or like a you know Other Twitter posts and he just critiqued them on what he thought they did right and what they did wrong And so I just found this is a really good way to learn how to basically create content for social media That's what that book is and learn love him or hate him the guy has created content and it's popular It's liked and things like that so there's definitely some strategies to definitely learn from people like Gary And you know we I mentioned on it But I would even say Alex Sainian's book when he talks about how to build audience at one section about how he built Reddit and things like that was really interesting of When he would hand write things to build that audience and stuff like that to people that interact with them Kind of goes back to that you know your thousand true fans and how you build those up. Yeah, definitely So I think that's everything I got. Yeah, that's me So so you can reach out to any questions, which is really weird But that's why we have comments, right? Yeah, we have comments you can do you can also find Anthony at amber Detroit Anthony at amber Detroit comm. There'll be links below right to his website I you can learn more about what they do and all the fun development stuff But we wanted to get this out there because this SEO thing is it's like neither one of us like this is not our job Doing is yes, we have nothing to really sell you So we just wanted to share some knowledge with you on what's right What's wrong and all these people that I every time you're not SEO optimized and or you know You've run into experience recently you had a whole debrief and You said you would die you had to dive deep to all the reasons that they were wrong about stuff Because they were just very dated and these companies want a lot of money. I mean some of these packages I've seen some of my clients one of them wanted to sell my client just a domain for $10,000 because it had a Key word in their name along with the city I'm like really you think someone's going to like I looked at the Google ranking and I tried to explain it to clients Clients like but they said it would really really help our website if we took that one bought that domain for all this money And just forwarded to our site like it doesn't work that way That doesn't help anything for your content the website doesn't have content. It's got a placeholder guys Just domain squatting that worked back when the internet was small and yahoo had an index of every web page It's not even possible even Google's not trying to build index of the entire world not like that not in that manner So hopefully this was insightful. Hopefully you learned something from it and you're gonna get rid of that SEO sales person It's got some magic tricks. They're gonna sell you you're gonna hire someone or if it's not you hire someone to actually create some Good great good content. That's the whole secret of it all. Yeah. All right. Thanks Thanks for watching if you liked this video give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content Hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post If you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video head over to Lawrence systems calm where we offer Both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us Also, if you want to carry on the discussion further head over to forums at Lawrence systems calm Where we can keep the conversation going and if you want to help the channel out in other ways We offer affiliate links below which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us. That does help fund this channel And once again, thanks again for watching this video and see you next time