Natural Search Engine Optimization is a great topic, especially for folks who are just starting out in the online marketing world, and are really trying to figure out what are the dos and don'ts. If you're wondering, "What should I be doing in the SEO space? How should I be promoting my website?"...this is the video for you. Today we're talking about how to do a natural search engine optimization--how to stay clean in the eyes of Google and how to improve search visibility.
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Hello, and welcome to our video on Natural Search Engine Optimization. I'm Chad Hill and I have Adam Stetzer here with me today.
Hi, good afternoon, Chad. This is a fun topic-- Natural Search Engine Optimization-- particularly for folks who are just starting out, or maybe have just dipped their toe into SEO and into the online marketing world, and are really trying to figure out what are the dos and don'ts? What should I be doing? How should I be promoting?
Most people searching for this term are looking for guidance, have probably tried a little bit of promotion, but are now maybe a little scared, particularly with the algorithmic updates that Google launched in the last two weeks, and are really trying to figure out, what is Google telling me? And what's right and what's wrong? Google, if you listen to them, says, well, just built a great site and the people will come.
We obviously know that's not true. So people looking for natural search engine optimization are probably trying to find the right promotional activities, figure out how to stay clean with Google, but really get their great content out there. So I thought we'd talk to our viewers a bit today on our take on what natural search engine optimization really is, what you should be doing.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, we've talk about this many times, but all search engine optimization starts with high-quality, engaging content that, first and foremost, is written for an audience. But you should always make sure that the content you're writing is what your audience is actually looking for, and that's where we talk also about doing some upfront research to identify the demand in terms of, what types of queries are people searching in Google and other search engines, so that when you decide what content to spend your precious resources on, it's something that people are actually looking for, and there is a demand for that.
I like it. You cut right to the heart of the matter. I think a lot of people get stuck with this term Natural Search Engine Optimization, and end up really getting in a conundrum, like well, isn't every little bit of SEO really meant to influence the search engine? So how can that truly be natural? You get in this catch-22 of what's natural, what's not, what looks right, what doesn't, what's gray hat, what's white hat.
And I like where you went, which is like, that's a waste of your time. Let's not debate that. What you really need to do is focus on the end user. And you really need to promote excellent content that's going to be valuable for someone, and then start to talk about promotional and syndicational-type things you can do to get it out there.
Right. Right. And I think before you get to the syndication part, the next thing we often talk about is actually tuning that content. So once you've created the information, and again, that may take the form of a written article or blog post on your website. It could be an infographic. It could be a video like this.
But once that content is done, you want to then make sure you tune it for natural search engine optimization-- not only for the audience, which is important, so you want to make sure you have nice pictures, obviously, you want to check all of your grammar, but make sure your content flows well. You want to then also tune it for the search engine. So that doesn't mean going and stuffing in the keyword 30 times into an article.
What that means is making sure that your title tag has the key word that you want the topic of your piece, that it maybe is in the headline. And that, of course, you do mention it at least somewhere in the content. So you want to tune it for both audiences-- the audience that's going to actually see it and consume it, as well as a search engine who's hopefully going to index it, and then send more people back to that content.
And tuning these on-site pages, that's a highly mechanical process, and it is really done for the search engines. And they give guidance on how to do it. So really, there's nothing natural about it. But I do think a lot of people get overly focused on that.
And I think our point of view is, don't be. The tuning has to be a part of your process that you do to make sure you're presenting your best foot to the search engines, but don't obsess about that. Because the quality of the content's way more important. And then, of course, how you promote it and syndicate it, which we're about to talk about, is then way more important. So once you've tuned it, then what do you do?
So the next thing is to in creating natural search engine optimization is to figure out where's the best place that I can put this content, or that I can syndicate it out so that, again, people see it, that search engines see it. And then the idea would be that through people tweeting and re-tweeting and the link that you may earn in that content as a way of saying, thank you very much to this company for writing this great article, that those links and that social media buzz being created is what gets your content and your website noticed.
So that then when, again, in the natural search engine optimization approach, that you can't just stop with creating the content and tuning it. You have to promote it. And in promoting it, you're trying to generate some buzz, and generate some people coming back to your website, so that your website increase in domain authority, and ultimately shows up in the search engines.
Yeah. And here you absolutely can do some things that would be very, very unnatural. And I think probably, a lot of folks looking for guidance on SEO are at this point scratching their heads. And so for example, everyone gets solicited every day from email saying, I will sell you 10,000 links for $500. Don't do that.
Things that sound too good to be true, in terms of either building backlinks to your content or syndicating it out far further than is deserved, are too good to be true. And you shouldn't do those. Google is aware of those. Those absolutely do not look natural. What you want to focus on, again, is the quality of the content and getting it to be as good as possible so that it will share itself.
And there's a couple good tests we use, like when we put something out, would I tweet this? Would I read this? Would I like it on Facebook? Would I Google+ it? Would I mention it in a blog post of my own and maybe build a backlink to it?
If you can answer those questions for your own content, then that's a pretty good standard editorial bar that other people might use when looking at it. And it will be very naturally shared. Doesn't mean you shouldn't work like crazy to promote it. You should.
You should talk about it everywhere. You should share it in the forums. You should put it on your Twitter feed. You got to get the word out. We're marketing, after all.
But that's a very natural search engine optimization approach to something you're proud of and you know has value, versus some of the shady stuff that people do, buying these bulk links or duplicate content, or these other crazy ideas they come up with that looks very unnatural. And it's not really what you want for your search engine optimization.