 Hello. Who's ready for SEO? Okay, great. Another minute. Settle in. Okay, awesome. Thank you guys so much for coming here today. I'm very honored and privileged to be here. This is my fifth year attending WordCamp and fourth year speaking, so this is always such a fun time. So I am vertically challenged and I am staying on time challenged, so I get yelled at every year because I go over. So I'm going to set my timer and you guys have to help me stay on time, okay? It's a group effort here. So SEO for 2015, when I was really analyzing what to talk about with SEO, this is this is really what I wanted to talk about because everybody has so many questions and really is SEO still relevant in 2015? So that really was what I wanted to talk about today because I really think this is the year where we we stop and we try to get out the misperceptions about SEO in our head and we almost start from scratch. So 2015 is the year to get back to basics. So a few things that I want to talk about over the next 35-ish minutes. These are the goals that I have for you guys. First of all, understanding that SEO is not black magic. I still hear that all the time. And I really think that undermines the work that goes into SEO. So what I call SEO is mostly it's just sweat equity, rolling up your sleeves and getting down to business to do the the practice and the discipline of optimizing your website. So there's really nothing black magic about it. I really want you guys to to understand that as well so you can tell people when they say something. No, it's not black magic. The second thing again, working the fundamentals. The the basics of SEO have not changed in a number of years. So being able to understand that and to stick to the plan of of getting the good solid basics on your website is really important. So when I work with clients it can be, you know, I've got giant national websites that I work on and then small business websites. And the issues are the same across the board is they're lacking the foundation of the basics. So that's really important and we'll cover a lot of that today. And then it's a marathon, not a sprint. So people still talk to me like how do I get up to number one fast or what can I do that's going to give me on the first page fast. And I have to break the news. I mean, continuously that the SEO is definitely a marathon. And if you need quick results or you're about to go out of business, then you need to do paperclip or something else that's more instantaneous because SEO is not a quick fix anymore. But okay, so all of that being said is that SEO is a gigantic pain in the butt. Like I know it. Nobody likes SEO, but I do when she'd understand that it is absolutely worth it. So hopefully those will also be y'all's takeaways and goals to that. Again, it's it's it is a bit of a pain, but it is worth it. And then so my little picture of the matrix. So the blue pill is if you guys are going to stay in an ignorant and not bliss. But if you guys were going to stay ignorant about what it took to optimize your site, to be clear, you guys now being here are taking the red pill. So we're going to face the hard reality truth of what SEO really is because after that, you're golden. We're all on the same page starting to understand the importance of working the fundamentals. So you guys are about to take the red pill. Okay, okay. So what we're really going to cover, though, our little table of contents defining SEO. So everybody has their own definition. And I certainly have mine. And I want to cover again, the most basic fundamentals. Well, what is SEO? The second to understand where we are now, you have to understand where we've been. So I always like to kind of cover the history of SEO, because all too often, people, you know, throw out their hands. Well, what's the purpose of doing SEO because it changes every day? Do you guys feel like that SEO changes all the time? Yeah, so I want to tell you why that is and how not to feel like that anymore. And that's all about the history. And then again, what is in now? So what does SEO for 2015 look like? And again, it's working the fundamentals, and then we'll recap everything. Before I talk about me, I want to find out the just a general skill level in the room. Who are my SEO newbies? Okay, and who is on the opposite spectrum? Who's pretty well versed with SEO? Okay, good. And who's my middle, you know, enough to be dangerous. Okay, awesome. Okay, so then a quick overview about me. I started my freelance business about six years ago. That was me with my very first check. I met a business owner at the Atlanta bloggers meetup and he immediately hired me as soon as I became a freelancer. That was my first networking event. He hired me to write two press releases for $125. I know. And that was it. I thought, okay, I've arrived, you know, come on, start, you know, the people are going to be beating down the door to work with me, right? So I got into my UGA Snuggie. And I set to work becoming a copywriter, but I finished our project pretty quickly. And after that, I kind of waited for the business to keep coming. And it didn't. And so after a while, my husband was like, Oh, your little business is precious, but you kind of need to start bringing in some money. So, so that's when I sucked it up and finally realized I had to do something to make that happen. So I, you know, connected with referral partners and got on LinkedIn and I went to networking events quite a bit. And then I also did two very smart things. I put up a WordPress website like Judy was talking about earlier, do it yourself WordPress website because I'm not technical. But I could still put it up. And that gave me a lot of confidence. And it gave me the showcase. So I put up a WordPress website and that's one of the reasons again, this is my fifth year being here. I love WordPress and I love this community. The second thing I did was I knew without a doubt that people were out there searching for the keyword Atlanta Copywriter. And I wanted to find out what it took to get to the top of Google. And I set out to make that happen. So I just learned SEO on my own. I optimized my own website and sure enough, after a little while, people were finding me. And that really helped drive leads into my pipeline. So that while I was out there trying to get business or talking to referral partners, or I was in my snuggy working on my website projects, people were continuously reaching out to me and it helped me have a stable business instead of a lot of ups and downs and a lot of freelancers experience. So fast forward to today, I evolved from copywriter to SEO copywriter to now SEO strategy and training and consulting and talking like this. So I'm absolutely an open book and I came from the School of Hard Knocks like a lot of you guys probably will be. I guess I better get back. Okay. So who wants to play a little game? Everybody? Okay, good. So true or false? So please just yell out the answers. True or false? Using keywords is still important. True or false? True. Okay. I'm not going to tell you the answers yet. Keyword density of four and a half percent per 350 words of copy is still a good rule of thumb for 2015. Okay. Writing title tags and meta descriptions is still imperative for SEO. True. Okay. This is a good link building tactic. You link to me and I'll link to you. Good. Okay. Guest blogging is a good way to get lots of links fast. True or false? Okay. Okay. I'll come back to the answer. Link building is dead. Okay. SEO is all about content. Okay. Social media is the new SEO. I'll come back to the answer. PR not paid drink public relations. PR is the new SEO. Okay. Okay. So let's go back. So kind of like get to the point. Okay. I purposefully put some ambiguous questions in there because that's the problem with SEO these days. There's nothing black or white right now. So let me go back over the answers really quickly. But this is stuff that it's still, you know, which one is the answer? What is so prevalent? One expert says this. Another expert says this. So using keywords is still important. That's absolutely true because all keywords are, it's marketing 101. Keywords are the language of your customer. And over and over when I ask people, if you guys were here in the last session, well, what's your keyword is because that's what people are using in their minds all too often. I see businesses trying to be way too clever and to describe themselves in this crazy way that nobody understands it. But what I always say is clarity Trump's cleverness every single time. So keywords are just the words that your target market is using in their mind. So absolutely, you don't spam keywords all over the page anymore like people used to do, but they're definitely still important to use. The next keyword density, that's just you no longer need to follow this formula. Unfortunately, there really is no formula. It's a little bit of understanding SEO fundamentals with common sense with marketing applied in there and then whatever your business is, but you definitely do not have to follow any kind of a formula, which kind of stinks. Everybody wants a formula, right? Just give us a checklist and be done. But that definitely is out for 2015 and has been for a while now. Title tags and meta descriptions. So this is something that I drill into clients heads title tags. Absolutely. It's the most important place to put a keyword. Meta descriptions are very important, not for really, I don't want to get too intricate, but they're more so important so that people actually when you do rank, then they click on your website and come back. So those are two of the most important things for SEO and to really master the fundamentals. I want you guys to just not fear the word title tag. So title tag, title tag, title tag, title tag. Okay, don't be afraid of that because knowing some of these core words to SEO is really important. So don't be afraid of it. And we'll maybe go into if anybody doesn't know what that is, we'll go into it. But again, these are core words of SEO that you don't have to be afraid of anymore. So still very important. Link building tactics. So you link to me and I'll link to you. That's reciprocal linking and Google just kind of ignores the links now. It used to be a big practice to try to build up links. And well, you know, we just meet each other out there in the hall and well, here's my business card we link to me and I'll link to you. You don't need to do that anymore. If it makes sense, I get to good common sense reason you're linking to another business and they might link to you then absolutely do it but let common sense prevail, you no longer need to try to, you know, do things like, like that too much. And guess blogging, guess blogging can still be a really good business practice, but the rule of thumb is you do it because it's a good business practice, not just for the link anymore. So you can still get maybe one or two guest blog links per month, but you don't want to get like a past client of mine did, you need to get me Jenny 125 guest blog post links a month. That is definitely out and could get you penalized. Link building is dead. Everything with SEO is dead. Everybody wants SEO to go away. And I don't really blame you for that. Traditional link building is dead, but getting good backlinks that are relevant to your website is still very much alive. And SEO is all about content. I think most of you guys said true. And that's, that's hard SEO is a lot about content, but there's still a lot of other things that have to come into play is your website technically optimal can Google even come in and crawl the back end of the website appropriately. Is it mobile responsive? Is it fast to load? Do you have any links? Do you have, you know, fresh content along with your content you wrote six months ago? There's other things that have to come into play, but content good quality content is more important than ever. And then social media is a new SEO. I think social media people a few years ago got so excited that SEO is dead that I saw headlines pop up all the time that social media is the new SEO. Again, that's only partially true. Social media sends really great signals to Google that people are visiting your website from other places. It's a way to get your content found and out there. And again, if people find you that could be potential customers that could find your content and link back to it. But social media is only a piece of what contributes to SEO. It's not the full thing. So again, these are why SEO is just so complicated because it's, you know, that is the truth, but only a partial truth. And PR is a new SEO. So then I think after social media people got so excited SEO is dead, then the PR pros got so excited to and started proclaiming that PR is the new SEO. And it's true that good PR can net you great mentions and great links. I had a client who paid their PR agency 10,000 a month and they got great links from really high authority publications. So PR could be a way to help contribute to SEO, but it is not replacing SEO. So that's again, just a little thing to demonstrate why SEO is so confusing in people's minds. But the thing is, if you work the foundation, if you stop and you just throw everything out, we don't have to throw everything out. But starting from scratch, if you build that foundational, the basics level of SEO, that will help you guard against sensationalized articles and people that try to sway you to other things and you'll just have a very focused plan. So again, the basics will help you not get so confused. Because once you understand, then you can use your common sense judgment about what all this means. And if it's applicable to you, if it's a shiny object, or if you should just continue on with your plan. So what is SEO? I heard someone asked that in the Google Analytics session. And I forget that people still don't know SEO search engine optimization at its most basic core. And I realize that that's probably hard to see. But with SEO, it's a way to drive traffic to your website. What I always say is it's so important to diversify the way you're driving traffic. So how people get to your website, it could be direct, where they type it in directly. It could be referral. So maybe you have a listing at Kudzu or Yellow Pages, or you have a partner, a joint venture partner, someone mentioned you, maybe a blogger wrote about you, maybe you have your speaker at WordCamp, and someone was at the WordCamp website, and then they saw your listing and they clicked over WordCamp would be the referral. So and then social media, people could see you on social and then come back to your site. SEO is only one piece of that puzzle. So it doesn't replace any of that, it just gets added to it. So again, you should have different ways that people are coming to your site. And that's what SEO is. It's just one way to drive traffic to your website. So when people say, well, Jenny, should I do paper click or SEO? Or should I do Facebook marketing or SEO? It just depends on, well, how quickly do you want to see results? What are your goals and resources? Because it shouldn't be an either or it should be, well, which one is a priority now based on your needs? So again, you just have to evaluate your resources. But again, it's just one piece of the pie. It's not the holy grail. When I get leads into my website, or even business, so evaluating the past few clients that have come to me last month, I think maybe 30% of them came from SEO. So I still have to go out there. I still have to meet referral partners. I still ask for referrals for my current clients, but SEO helps drive consistent leads into my pipeline. And that's what it should just do is drive consistent traffic along with everything else you're already doing. So, you know, when new businesses come to me, should I do SEO possibly, but you should also probably do other things. I build up the foundation of your website and maybe the next step is SEO. And so again, what is SEO? This is something we were talking about earlier as well is that when people type in my name, Jenny Mann or Jenny SEO, that's great. And I want that it shows brand reputation. But that's not true SEO. What I consider true SEO and true keywords are when people type in something that indicates they don't know I exist yet. It's words around a product or a service or solution or information. If they know me, that's great. But that's not true SEO. I want keywords that indicate people don't know who I am. They're looking to shortlist other providers. So does that make sense that people always get so excited when they rank for their own name? And I'm like, well, that's great. I hope you rank for your own name. But that's not true SEO. Oh, that's hard to see too. Let me see if I can magnetize the screen a little bit. How is that? Does that help at all? No. We're gonna get really big. Okay. Well, maybe a little bit. So what that says is SEO for business owners, SEO lead generation, SEO learning, SEO time. There's a few more on there. SEO training Atlanta, WordPress training. Those are the keywords that I'm looking for when I'm talking about true SEO. Again, people don't know Jenny Mann. They just know that that's what they're looking for. And that's the specific type of SEO. And generally, when I start working with a client and I always want to look in their analytics to see, well, what keywords are landing people on your site right now? Generally, what I see are a mix of brand names and the variation of their names. But this is what SEO is to try to help these other keywords come to your website. Okay. So how do you know if SEO is working? Again, the very first thing I do when someone says, well, I'm not getting any SEO results, I open up their analytics and I take a look to see what keywords are driving people to their website. And what I generally see, the keywords that are there are a direct reflection of the content that's on your site. So what I'm telling businesses and looking at their websites, you have to be clear. What is your keyword? What is your noun? Are you a consultant, a firm, an agency, a company, services, consulting? What do people use to describe you? Because if you're not seeing those words, then you're probably not using them on your website. So again, looking at analytics, looking at your keywords, that's a direct reflection of what is happening and how Google is seeing people interact with that. So to get those true keywords, you have to purposely modify your content or write new content around that. And I realize that kind of sounds spammy, is write content around those keywords. But again, keywords are the language of your customers. And if those are the words that people are using and you're not using them, then possibly there's a disconnect. So again, that's the major thing is that people haven't purposefully written in and made that connection between what's in a prospect's mind and what they call what you do versus what you call what you do. And then yeah, if you were in the Google Analytics session, how you would find this, I wish I don't have time in my 35 minutes to take you guys through this, but you go under acquisitions, search engine optimization, and then the queries report, you do have to do a little integration. But that data is free and absolutely like Ken, who was up here talking about Google Analytics, the basics. If you just look at the front page of your analytics to look at the bounce rate and the page is visited, the time on site, that's great. But if SEO is in your mind, the next thing you want to do is look under the SEO report because there's a wealth of information in there. And absolutely, if you're doing your website's SEO or you're in charge of the marketing, this is this is this is my report. This is what I look at when proving ROI and when I need to help companies get to where they want to go. This is the report and it's free and it's awesome. So again, what is SEO? SEO is the practice and the discipline of making your content findable, whether that's a home page, your services page, a blog page, a press release, an article, a case study, whatever is on your site, whatever content is on your site that makes sense for someone to land on it, that's what SEO is. It's making your content findable. And again, what it is, if someone were to Google web design consultant Atlanta, it's just having your website be up there, prominent, standing in front of them at the time that they're looking. And if you just add this in, it helps you be consistent with whatever your website goals are. So in the last website critique session we were in, you know, there was a blog website. Well, why do you want to drive people there? What keywords would they use to look for you? It all has to relate back to the overall goal of your business. And what do you even want your website traffic to do? So SEO will definitely help with that. And again, it's not going to take over anything you're doing. It's just going to be, it's just this wonderful whole other channel that can be added on to the way that people find you and that they, you get awareness and that they discover your business and who you are. So it's, it's not the holy grail. You know, Google and SEO is not magic. It's not going to magically save your business, but it can be a really important way that you drive traffic to your website. It's pretty awesome. Okay. So the history of SEO. So as I mentioned, to understand where we are today, we have to understand where we've been. And it is a scary place out there where we've been. Okay. You guys will have nightmares if I tell you all the scary stuff that you see. So once upon a time, there was the story of what people used to do to get SEO. And it was called meta tag keyword overloading. And this is why SEO used to be a very technical discipline because it took someone technical to go into the back end of the code and put in as many keywords and as many variations as possible. And this is how people used to succeed at SEO. Just take all the keywords and just put them into the back end of the code. And then came, well, we're using keywords on the back end of the code. We should also use them on the front part of the website. So how many times can we work a keyword into the copy? So I love to blog. Blogging is a lot of fun. So I blog a lot. When my friend asked me about blogging, I tell them I blog all day and blog all night. For me, to blog is to live. Blog, blog, blog. That's all I do. And then the other one is about contact lens and discount contact lens and imitation. You know, so that's what people used to do to and for a while that worked. And that was really sad. And then when that stopped working, then came the discipline of the bad way to do link building. And you saw sites like Fiverr, who would put up these little ads. And I will spin and submit your article to 7,400 article directories and get you 500 plus Google backlinks for $5. Or I will manually build 150 high paid drink backlinks for $5. Or Spammy blog commenting. Has anybody ever gotten a Spammy comment on your blog or your website? Yeah, well, so that actually used to work to get people backlinks back to their website because there's a little, you know, where you put your name and then you put the URL, the website. So the website would be hyperlink to the name. So this whole business popped up where all Spammers would do would come to our websites and leave these nonsensical Spammy auto-generated comments because it linked back to their website. So that practice popped up. And then I was just talking with some web designers the other day they were like, do you remember that day we would put the keywords and the links and the black code and the black background or the black font and the black background. And this right here, that little arrow is pointing to the words, the hyperlink SEO back to an SEO agency and it's in white font in that white background. So people used to hide their links and that worked for a while. And then Google came recently a few years ago and they put the smack down on all that because that's stupid. Again, it used to work and that's why SEO was a very technical discipline. Penguin came along. If you guys have heard a huge update a few years ago called Penguin, it was an algorithm change and it took down sites. It pretty much wiped them off the face of Google if you had a lot of bad spammy links. Now a lot of legit businesses unfortunately did get hit because maybe they didn't know what their SEO agency was doing. They had no idea or maybe they just thought they could get away with it because their competitors were doing the same thing and they just had to do it. But Google said that's not what we intended with SEO and that is no longer going to work. Also came Panda. Panda was another update that happened right around the same time and it was saying websites that have duplicate content or thin which is minimal content or low quality content or over optimized content you're out of here too because it's a bad user experience and that just that never should have worked. That's not what Google or SEO ever intended. It just happened to work for a while. So when people say Google changes all the time, they don't change all the time for funsies. They change to try to stay ahead of tactics like that. Does that make sense? Yeah. So poopers. You can't even see that but I will describe it to you. So does everybody know Mickey Mellon? He helped co-organize Word Camp. He's awesome. He had tweeted to me on a weekend. He was like, Jenny stat, get into this Facebook group and back me up. Help me. Because there was this person who was on this, you know, a good legit business marketing Facebook group and was saying, hey, the first 10 people that chime in I'll build you 3000 links to your website for free. And all these website owners were biting over the clamoring to get into that. This just happened like a week ago. And a few people were like, well, can't I get you penalized? And he was like, no, I do it all the time. I do it for my own website. You'll be fine. So people unfortunately still fall prey to these easy, quick tactics. And I hope that they don't get penalized one day. If anything, Google will probably just ignore that. But that's why SEO is a little bit confusing because this still exists. And there's a lot of misperceptions out there. Unfortunately, content lives online forever. So people still find bad things. Maybe they just aren't schooled enough to know what works. But now you guys know this stuff doesn't work anymore. And it's actually, can you guys just take a sigh of relief with me like? Thank goodness, it doesn't because that stuff it's too hard to keep up with all the time. So that stuff is is out of here. Thank goodness. But again, this is why people say, well, SEO changes all the time. Why should I bother doing it? That's just not true. But it's when there are Google updates and the general people like us just don't understand why because you're not maybe doing those spammy stuff. And if anybody in here is doing that spammy stuff, I know there's some technical people who used to do that. It's okay that you did in the past. We'll forgive you but come to the new way. And then again, why social is the new SEO? Is SEO dead? Google updates and says press releases now will get you penalized because people then span press releases all over the place. So anything people do in scale, that's what gets you penalized. But again, it's just a little bit confusing for us that maybe didn't understand. That's all the question. Yeah, I don't know. I think I think he I was reading it because I was like, Mickey, I'm not going to go in there. You know, and that's a whole different story because Mickey went in there and tried to say, this is bad. And they attacked him and the guy was like, well, I'm going to send 3000 backlinks to your website. I'm not going to get it. Yeah, he was he threatened Mickey. And I was like, sorry, Mickey, you're on your end. So I don't know. I think he thought that it was a good thing. And I think he was trying to be helpful. Maybe he was because that is a practice. Did I see another question? Yeah, right. And just because you have the back link doesn't mean anybody is clicking on the back link and coming over. They're just seeing it exists. And if it's not relevant, especially if all of a sudden you're late spike, Google is going to be very system that. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. What was the question? Hold on. Sorry. Oh, isn't it? Wait, what? Isn't it common sense to not have that work? To see that that number of links for that little money? Yeah, it doesn't really. Yeah, it doesn't really make sense. OK, did I see it? Thank you. I see another question. No, OK. OK, so this is just a partial summary of what is out. Because again, people got very creative with trying to manipulate and get their websites up there. I'm telling you, people did some really creative stuff like kudos to them for like outwitting Google until, again, another update comes. But here's just a partial list of what is out. Again, reciprocal linking, not because, you know, I submitted a guest blog post maybe to Judy's website. And then I linked and said, hey, check out my guest blog post. That's OK, because that's a common sense business practice. The reciprocal linking is when people did it at a ridiculous level or they put up all these links that made no sense just because the fact that they were reciprocal linking. Buying sponsored links, if you pay for any kind of a link, you can do that. You know, there's advertising, but you can't do it for SEO purposes. Low quality guest blogging, again, when you submit a low quality article to a low quality site just for that backlink, that's definitely out. Same with low quality directory links. So what people would do is create all these websites that were directories. All these directory sites popped up and nobody would ever legitimately visit those websites and people would charge, you know, again, $50 or $5 to submit your website to hundreds of directories. That's pretty much out unless it's a very high quality, relevant directory. Oh, I feel bad saying overseas link building, but I've never seen an overseas company that understands the real way to do SEO today. Submitting low quality press releases to low quality sites. Again, don't be afraid of press releases if you have a genuine business need for a press release, absolutely do it. But if you're just doing press releases for SEO purposes, then you can forget about that. It's not gonna work anymore. Again, same with blog commenting, same with article marketing. Article marketing used to be a really good way to get your content in front of different people, but because the spammers came in and ruined it for the rest of us, we have to be weary about submitting the same article to multiple places. Then content and duplicate content. I talk about this all the time that when you have, especially for my poor local businesses, when you do business in Atlanta and Dunwoody and Brookhaven and Roswell and Marietta and East Cobb, and you have all these places that you wanna service, but you can no longer put up the same website page and just change out Roswell for Marietta for Brookhaven for Buckhead for Atlanta, that's not really okay to do anymore. And I know it's a struggle to get unique content up for every single website page, but it's just what you have to do these days. And then keyword stuffing. Thank goodness, as a copywriter, I started out six years ago when I started doing SEO copywriting. I couldn't believe what I was seeing out there. Again, I believe in writing for the reader and in turning that megaphone the other way so you talk about them and for them and not just about yourself. So to see the keyword stuffing that was working was very painful. Again, it doesn't work these days. Thank goodness, you can really write for your readers. So in 2015, traditional, the old way of doing SEO, that is dead, and that's out. And the modern way, the happy way, yay, of doing SEO is definitely in. And that's all about back to the basics. So you build this foundational core knowledge of SEO that really, that's the part that hasn't changed in a number of years. And that's fun, because SEO, again, it's the who. It's who is visiting your website and what's in their mind and how can you always make sure your website is meeting that goal. So in the last website critique we were doing, you know, where's your social proof? Where's your testimonials? What about your about page? That's the new SEO is making sure everything on your website is sending the right signals to your target market and then just doing a few purposeful things for Google. So SEO is simpler than ever, but it's still not easy because you still have to put in the work. You know, your site's not gonna SEO itself. That's the part that there's purposeful activities and things that you need to do. And again, is SEO all about content? Yes, but there's also a mesh of other things that have to come into place. Like about, you know, would you give this site your credit card? Google wants to rank websites where the answer is definitively yes. I would give that site my credit card. I would trust them in a heartbeat. They look very legit and I'm going to check out and see more what they're about. Google wants to rank legit websites and we have to have those signals showing us that. Okay, so I'll take the last question and it was talking about keyword stuffing. Is there a minimum number of times you should use that keyword? Is that the right question? Okay, thank you. Yeah, so there is a working your keyword into the copy. It's an ardent science and it's a science because we know the correct places but the keyword. You put your keyword in the title tag. You put your keyword in the main heading, the H1 of the page. You put your keyword as is if you can two to three times in the body of the copy. Maybe once in the first paragraph, but it all has to make common sense. So if you had a friend read it and they could pick out immediately what the keyword was, then you should maybe take it out. So again, it's an art and a science because it has to make common sense but you do know two to three times if you can and then use synonyms and variations and just write naturally with whatever the page is about. So yes there is, but again, if it's too formulaic, if it doesn't read nicely, if you can't get creative enough with working it in, then take it out an instance until it makes common sense when you read it. And then your first question. Why would you wanna do that? And are you putting the same article? Okay, so the question was spinning articles. How do you make that work? Are you putting that same spun article on your site or on someone else's site? Right, okay, so you have a personal blog and then you have a cosmetics website. And why aren't they the same? Why don't you just make them into one website? Okay, and again, people in the past, they would have like 10 different sites and they would buy as many domains as possible, like Atlanta Cosmetics, Atlanta Cosmetics expert, you know, and they would buy lots of URLs. You know, I was a coach to do this. Yeah. That's my opinion. Okay, so she said she was coached to do that is to have maybe the two different websites and yeah, these days, the thing is it's so hard to have one super awesome website, let alone try to maintain two. So if they serve the same purpose, you know, I hate saying to merge them into one because I don't know that could be extra work and budget on your part, but that's what you have to do because yeah, it's hard maintaining two sites that are very similar. I would absolutely merge them into one and make it a super awesome website. And then you won't have to spin your content. Yeah, oh yes, Claudia. And the websites all just redirect back to the main URL. Okay, well if she's doing that for a legit reason because what was the stationary website? Like crap, I don't know, does stationary have an E or an A? I don't know. So anyway, so if it's for spelling, then she is correct to buy it and redirect it back. But if she's, and if it's different spellings, if it's because of that, then it redirects, that's okay. If it's for SEO, Google will just kind of ignore it. She is not gonna get any bonus points for having different URLs with keywords in them and redirect them. Google will ignore it mostly. That's a great, oh, oh so she has like health writer, medical writer, all that and is redirecting it back. I mean, she probably did it for SEO then and it's just, it's not hurting but it's not helping. So just don't buy up URLs just for the sake of it. Oh, that's funny, is that a plugin? Oh, I'm sorry. So her thing is that she's a photographer and when she puts in her keyword somewhere, something is flagging that it's like dangerous. Like you've already used this keyword somewhere. Oh, okay, it's not dangerous. You feel bad? Is it a plugin that alerts you? Is it your Yoast plugin maybe? Okay. Oh yeah, yeah, okay, it gives you the colors. Yeah, that's the Yoast plugin. Okay. Well, so you're putting in your keyword, yay, that's great. Senior portraits, you want every single website page? Oh, oh, okay, good point. No, that's actually another misperception. Now people take a big grab onto this keyword and they just use it on every single page and that's a really missed opportunity. The reason is Google is probably only going to rank one page of your website with that keyword. So if they see you've got multiple website pages with that same keyword, they'll just kind of ignore it and put it in that, have you guys ever seen at the bottom of Google that we've omitted or there's duplicate results in here, they're just gonna probably hide the rest of your pages because they say it's a bad user experience if they're showing five results from the same website. They wanna show different websites on page one or page two. So you should have one core page that has to do with senior photographers or senior portraits and then you can write blog posts about but you don't wanna keep using the keyword senior portraits, senior portraits, senior portraits. Good question, I love it. So the question is, so she does senior portraits and wedding portraits and dog portraits and all these other type of portraits, like what do you blog about then? How do you not keep using the same keyword over and over? You need to do keyword research and find out what are some of the longer tail keywords that people use, like variations. So what I always say is you wanna be greedy, like this is the time to get greedy. You want any and every variation that has to do with your main keyword. So find all the different ways, like senior portraits, like what about high school pictures for my kid? You know what I mean? Like people could Google that, that's like a long tail phrase. So find different ways that people say that and use those. You mean always have something like a keyword? You should always have one page but if you had blog posts that all had to do with senior portraits you always wanna link it back to the main page you want to rank. Is that a confusing topic? Yes, that's the page you want to rank. Yeah, yeah, link it back to the senior page. Yeah, link it back to the core page. That's, that could still rank but it should rank for a variation or a long tail. No, you don't have to make up words. You don't have to worry about the SEO then that much. I mean, just link to your main page that you want to rank. Okay, cool, hold on guys. Let me just check on my timer real fast so Judy doesn't not let me speak ever again. Okay, crap, we have three minutes. I'm sorry. Okay, wait, let me see how many slides I have left. Okay, so sorry. Can I come back to questions at the end guys? I'm so sorry. Let me just make sure I continue to go through. I'm sorry. Okay, so trustworthiness. Would you give this site your credit card? Your site, absolutely, and this is again, web designers. If you haven't updated your site in a number of years, it's probably time. Not only because there is a significant mobile update coming April 21st. Google has sent out the warnings that we will reward sites. You're not gonna get penalized if you don't have a mobile responsive site but we will reward sites in Google if yours is mobile friendly. So maybe it's a good time. You know, again, your meeting web designers here, absolutely, but your site absolutely has to look, feel and act extremely trustworthy where people wouldn't hesitate to give your site their credit card. It has to be that good. That's the type of site Google wants to rank. So again, an updated professional looking design, social proof. I can't tell you how important social proof is to keep people on your page. Clear messaging and persuasive copy. I think that's the number one thing. You have to help your visitors self-identify and take them along this little journey in your copy to help them understand why you're the best person for the job. Engagement, are you keeping your readers engrossed in clicking through? So there was a question in the Google analytics session about does bounce rate contribute to SEO? You have a low bounce rate. Is that gonna help your SEO? Possibly, but what's more important is the number of pages visited. Time on site. Are people coming to your website staying for a second and then leaving or are they staying on your website and clicking through to other pages? Are those the signals that Google wants to see as a good, legit website that's actually helpful? So Google looks at a few different things and it's indirect, but that's what they wanna see is a measure of a good website. And then what also counts big time, again, clean design, intuitive navigation, don't make me think. And then site speed. Site speed is one of the big things. There's very few things that Google comes out and says yes, pay attention. Mobile responsiveness and site speed. Your website, they say they want it to be two to three seconds fast, load time. Most websites I see are five to six seconds, but if you're going eight, nine, 10, 11, you're not gonna get penalized, but another website who is faster will definitely get rewarded. So site speed is just so important. Okay, so what else is there to successful SAO rankings? Again, content absolutely is important, but the technical basics, the links coming to your site and social media signals coming to your site are important. Is your site authoritative? What about your on-page optimization? Have you worked your keywords into the right place? Have you written a title tag? All those basic things, remember title tag, you guys are no longer afraid of that word. The core word, learn it and love it. Content and keywords. So again, are you going after the keyword photographer? Because that's gonna be so competitive. You'd be much better served going after senior portrait photographer in East Cobb. So make sure the keywords you're actually targeting are in your league that you can practically and realistically compete against. That's a big thing. If people say my SEO isn't working and they want the keyword weight loss, well, you're in trouble. Yeah, ooh, good question. So the question is, how do you know if your business is big enough to go after a more competitive keyword? So what I want you to do is, depending on the keyword you're going after, go to Google and log out. Because immediately, Google, if you're logged in, if you're in YouTube or Gmail or any kind of Google account, they will, and if you did a Google search, they personalized, they know who you are, they know what sites, oh, Poopers. Okay. Okay, yes, incognito. They know what websites you've been to, so log out of Google, do an incognito, and do a search. And the websites who are coming up at the top, can you realistically, like, do you realistically have a shot of outseating them, of taking their website to page two and moving yours up? That's how you kind of know. If you're seeing Wikipedia, you know, USDA.gov, it depends on if you're seeing Fortune 500 companies and those are all on page one, you're gonna, you have your work cut out for you. So just do a reality check. Look at what keywords you're targeting and can you realistically outseat the people who are on page one? Okay, really quick. I'm gonna go super fast here, sorry. Two things it takes to learn SEO in 2015. SEO is like tennis. You could watch it on TV, you could freaking love Wimbledon and you could study and read books about it, but unless you actually get out there with a racket in hand, you are never gonna get better at tennis. So you just have to do it in order to understand it. The next thing, build your SEO muscles. So you have to hear this kind of stuff. I'm sorry you guys have to hear me year after year. I love coming up here and talking to you guys, but I like to teach some of the same things multiple times because you have to hear this. It's like building a muscle. You have to hear it multiple times until it finally sinks in. Or I say the same thing three different ways and you finally start understanding these core concepts. So this is a muscle. If this is totally new and it's very overwhelming that you started to build that muscle already. So yay, you can celebrate, but you absolutely have to hear these things multiple times. Okay, so I have some principles of master in foundational SEO. Become familiar with basic terms. Pursue a creative mix of keywords. Know what I say, who is the SEO strategist if there's multiple people in a business? Who is the person who's going to actually do the work? Who is the strategy person? When I work with bigger teams, it's not always the same person. SEO has become such a big discipline. I work with the blogger and the copywriter and the technical person and the project manager. SEO is a huge discipline these days. So you have to know who are the pieces that are gonna get the job done. Work your plan to ensure consistency. Apply on page optimization best practices to your priority page. Not every single page on your website is a priority. Everybody always wants to optimize the whole website at one time. Pick two, three, five pages and you have to batch it out in phases. So pick your priority money pages. And then I just have some other things. Baking SEO into the process, knowing Google Analytics and what to look for is very important. Looking at links. I have two free reports on my website. If you guys do just go to jennieman.com because I'm sorry I'm running out of time here. Ooh, it was just one of my favorite slides because I get to use Lord of the Rings. So takeaways. SEO is not black magic. It used to be this magical way that a website would rank but these days, again, it's sweat equity. It's rolling up your sleeves and getting the discipline of the foundational elements done. Again, you have to work the fundamentals. So you know, well, is social media the new SEO? Well, I don't know. Well, if you know the fundamentals of SEO, you'll be able to say, okay, you can take that with a grain of salt. Oh, poopers, no, I'm not done. No, hold on, I have to yell at my PowerPoint. Hold on, okay. It's a marathon, not a sprint. So again, I feel so sad for businesses. They're like on the brink of bankruptcy and they need Google results today but I cannot help you because it's absolutely a marathon, it's not a sprint. You have to be more like the tortoise than the hare and just slowly plod along and get things done. Learning is in the doing. Again, it's tennis. You just have to do it to make it all make sense. You just can't hear me speak and think it makes sense. You have to actually do it. And then again, it's worth it. SEO is a pain in the butt but it's absolutely worth it. So a day may come when the courage of SEO fails or when SEO is finally dead but today is not that day. 2015 is not that year. SEO is still very relevant. And then again, I only get a little bit of a chance to talk. I do do a full day boot camp. If you're interested, absolutely let me know because obviously I love to talk about SEO and I can absolutely talk for seven hours straight about it. So thank you guys so much. I don't think I have time for questions, do I? No, okay, thank you.