Traditional SEO Strategies Introduction

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>> When we get down to it traditional SEO is more than anything about making it easy for crawlers to do their job. Crawlers are the automated like bots software programs that they will open a webpage and they'll crawl out they'll like read through it and they'll follow all of the links to all of the pages you link to.

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And they basically try to understand your content, understand what it's all about, and then traverse anything that you're linking to and anyone that links to you in order to figure out the topology of the internet right, how everything is connected. And at the very least you want to make sure you don't interfere with their ability to do that, that's like, that is the easiest way to mess your SEO up.

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While we're making it easy for crawlers to do their job. We wanna make sure that we're also paying attention to our content in particular, and you'll often read about this concept of quality. The thing you wanna aim for is stuff that is of true interest to your users and your clientele.

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If you aimed for things that are appealing to like programs, if you try to just stuff a bunch of key words into things, search engines have been wise to that for about a decade or more and you'll in fact be sort of flagged as someone who's trying to game the system.

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So just the focus should be on providing good content for your users. And, this means that oftentimes you're gonna want to find out what is the niche of your business, right? So in the case of front end masters, that wouldn't just be like learn stuff online, but it would be the JavaScript and front end topics that nobody else offers training on, right or we offer it deeper?

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And here are the subject areas using keywords, like we're gonna talk about service workers and we're gonna talk about how to write your own SAS functions and just nobody else is able to address these topics. And this concept of being targeted and unique is what helps you stand out from the rest of the crowd.

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When indexers which are part of how this crawling technology, ingests your content and understand what it's about. When they process your site, they're gonna throw out all of the common words, all of the terminology that everybody else is using. And if you have some unique specific terminology leftover, you can think of that as being the defining characteristic of like the topic and the level of depth that your content is all about.

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So when we talk about quality, we mean that there should definitely be something left after we shed away like the generic boilerplate, verbiage, and material. You also wanna focus on richness of content, but there's a caveat here. So when I talk about rich richness of content, I mean including videos, and imagery and making sure things are styled appropriately so that it's easy for people to read.

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For one because as you as you may assume, like people who these companies who are built around search, they have trackers everywhere, and they can monitor how long people spend on particular pages. And so the actual human behavior that your customers and your readers carry out, that influences your SEO writing, right?

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How likely they are to come in? How likely they are to share it? How much time they spend there versus bouncing out and deciding like, yes I arrived here but no, this isn't what I was interested in. Or you just hit me with a plain wall of text and like I'm now about to read all of that.

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The caveat is, images and videos cannot be sort of ingested and distilled down to their core content, like text can. So if you have a great video there, there's no way for for a search engine to really know what it's about. Or we're starting to move in that direction and you can see that YouTube with its automated translation services and it's automated.

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What do you call it, like, gives you the transcript of what was said, this is a step forward, but anytime that you can supplement media with text, while providing that richness that will boost sort of the quality level of your content. So search indices have a recency bias, meaning they favor content that is new over content that's been around for a while.

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For one, it's content that is new is of interest to users, right? So if you are, you have a top ten list of the best Chrome extensions to download, and you're updating that every week. That's something that is current, it's likely to be fresh, it's likely to still be accurate, rather than a list from 2013, that's four years old.

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That the assumption is that someone who's written an equivalent article, but is constantly keeping it up to date, every time your site is crawled, we noticed that there's a change. This will play favorably in terms of how you end up ranking. And this it also goes to show that like you wanna eliminate dead links, you wanna maintain things, because as soon as things start to fall into an unmaintained state where things are a little bit broken, or maybe the page doesn't render correctly.

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That will be taken as, it's sort of not getting the love that it needs and you will fall in the rankings. We're gonna talk today about the concept of link building. This is to say you want influential sites to refer to your URLs and this is the driving factor that determines where you show up in search results.

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This is equated with quality and importance in the SEO world. So we will get into some specific link building strategies, things you can do to accomplish this because, it's one thing to say get people to link to you, but I wanna leave you with some concrete advice later on as to tactically how you can go about making that happen.

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Finally, there's this thing called keyword stuffing. So we have a meta tag and it's called keywords that you can put in your HTML. Things that fall into this category, they were so over used and it's such a polluted landscape, in terms of all of the various WordPress SEO plugins like, taking this approach and abusing it, that things like this are just ignored completely.

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And the same category is white text on white background, with a bunch of keywords that is also, like that trick is known, and it sort of just washes out, it's not worth doing. Yes, we have a question.
>> I was actually gonna just comment on that because like Gary Vaynerchuk always says like marketers ruin everything.

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You can assume that, anytime there's something that can be exploited, it will be exploited. And that's why the field of SEO continues to evolve. And that's why we're talking about modern SEOs today instead of the tactics of five years ago or ten years ago solely because marketers ruin everything and exploit every possible tactic.

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>> No offence to the marketers in the room or watching the video. Mark doesn't mean he doesn't mean you, he means the other marketers.
>> [LAUGH]
>> So, but it is, as Mark points out it is a moving target that we're aiming for here where they're sort of escalation as people find out a strategy that helps them stand out about their competitors.

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And then they'll write about it or they'll form a consultancy that will implement it for people, then sort of everyone starts using it. And then in order to find new people that stand out, the search engines have to kind of escalate and find new strategies for this. And for this reason, by the way, it is a protected secret of the various search engine companies like exactly the algorithm that they use in order to define, whose showing up as a higher search ranking than others?

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The reason is if people knew it, they would explain it. And then, we would, everyone would have a maximal search rating and like it would be pointless. It would not be the search engine would not be valuable to users anymore.