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SW 364 – The Art of SEO, Mastering Search Engine Optimization by Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts

SW 364 – The Art of SEO, Mastering Search Engine Optimization by Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts

This is Stephan’s podcast appearance on the Speaking of Wealth.

This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit HartmanMedia.com.

Speakers, publishers, consultants, coaches, and info marketers unite. The Speaking of Wealth Show is your roadmap to success and significance. Learn the latest tools, technologies, and tactics to get more bookings, sell more products, and attract more clients. If you’re looking to increase your direct response sales, create a big-time personal brand, and become the go-to guru, the Speaking of Wealth Show is for you. Here’s your host, Jason Hartman.

It’s my pleasure to welcome Stephan Spencer. He is the founder of Net Concepts and has an acquisition history in the tech world that he can talk about if you like. He’s the host of Marketing Speak and the Get Yourself Optimized podcast and bestselling author of The Art of SEO, Mastering Search Engine Optimization. Stephan, welcome, how are you?

Hey, doing great, thank you.

Good, good, it’s good to have you. So this is an area of life that so many people are interested in, and so few understand. I hope you can shed some light on it for us. I certainly don’t claim to understand it or be an expert, but it’s sort of this holy grail dream that every entrepreneur is pursuing: how to get to the top of the search engines. And we all get these spammy emails that say, hey, we’ll get you to the top of Google, blah, blah. Those are probably false promises but shed a little light on them for us if you would.

Yes. Well, any time that you get hit up via a spam email or a spam text message or phone call, just yeah, turn and run the other way. In fact, anybody that’s using automated or semi-automated means or phone banks or anything to reach out to you, they’re not skilled at SEO, and you’re gonna end up worse off than if you did nothing. So that’s an important point is if you do nothing, you won’t end up with a penalty probably.

But if you do something kind of fast and cheap, and you don’t even know that it’s a black hat, you just know that it’s inexpensive. “Oh, I paid $1,000 to some company out of India or wherever, and they did some stuff for me.” You might get some benefit even for a period of time until you end up with a penalty, and then it’s very hard to dig yourself out of that.

And you know, I’m glad you mentioned that because you can actually be worse off by doing something. I’m glad you brought that up. And just philosophically, I have to just throw this in. You know, you may have a comment on it. Isn’t it just ridiculous that we have this big giant company that nobody has any sort of recourse against that can just, your business can live and die on it? And it’s not regulated. The algorithm is not known. Listen, I’m all for capitalism, but these companies are just way too powerful. And, of course, I’m talking about Google, you know.

So, well, you know what else is scary about this is that the number two search engine is not actually Bing or Yahoo. It’s YouTube, and it’s owned by Google. Yeah. So the top two search engines are owned by the same, you know, monopoly.

Anybody who is controlling 70% of the search traffic on planet Earth should be busted up. I mean, that’s just beyond ridiculous, but anyway, feel free to comment and let’s move along to how we beat them or at least survive in this environment.

Yes, let’s figure out how we can outmaneuver the competition. We’re not going to beat Google, but we are going to hopefully have a much better understanding of the Google algorithm and what they’re looking for, the Google engineers, when they code the algorithm and eventually what’s the AI the artificial intelligence that will be powering the Google search results in the future is going to be looking for. So why don’t we start with the concept of relevance and the concept of authority? 

So, if you are relevant, that means the search query that the user typed into Google is a match with the content that you have. Now, we move to the concept of authority. If you’re a nobody and nobody gives you any credence. And you’re just like spouting off conspiracy theories. You don’t deserve to rank in Google because nobody gives you any credibility or thinks that what you say is valuable, even if it’s completely relevant. So you have to be relevant, topically relevant, and you have to be authoritative in order to rank in Google.

Okay, and so how do we measure authority on the authority side of the equation? We measure authority by links to your website, right?

Yes. I mean, there are some nuances to this, but yeah, generally speaking, it’s about links. So you can also get some benefit from people mentioning your brand and your company without linking, but by far, the biggest signal here is links as far as authority is concerned. So, if nobody’s talking about you online, and I’m not talking about you on social media because those links don’t count. Google does not count those links because they could get spammed to death with automated bots and so forth. So much of Twitter is bots, and the same with other social platforms. So, if Google counted those links that are coming from people’s social channels and social feeds, then that would create a lot of noise and a lot more spamming. So the links that matter are the ones that are from blogs.

Yeah, you’re not going to achieve it on social media, in other words, right?

No, but what it’s a means to an end because. I’m not saying don’t do social media marketing because it’s not gonna help with SEO. Well, indirectly, it will help with SEO if you do very effective social media marketing because, let’s say, you do some sort of partnership with influencers that Google considers authoritative and highly trusted, and they link to you; that’s where you’re gonna get the magic happening. Not any link is valuable to you.

The right kinds of links are valuable to you. Those are the links from highly trusted, highly authoritative sites, as far as Google is concerned. So, if you got a link from the National Science Foundation, FirstGov or Stanford University, that would be fantastic for you. That’s highly trusted and highly authoritative. So, not every link is created equal, which is a very, very important concept that the listener understands.

Very good, very, very good. What about Wikipedia? I mean, most people can’t go out and get the links that you mentioned. They might be able to get a Wikipedia link more easily. Is that one considered highly authoritative?

Well, the site is highly authoritative, but the link is going to be no-follow, just like social media. Technically, Wikipedia is a social network, right. User pages and it’s all user contributed content. So, all the external links still followed and have been for a very, very long time, so there’s no link authority transferred through Wikipedia to your site.

Alright, what about the complaint sites? You know, like these rip-off sites and scam book sites and things like that. Are those authoritative? They sure do rank highly in the search engines. You know, if you want to find out about your cell phone provider or the airline that screwed you over. You know, you’ll see lots of complaints about all those companies and a million more on those sites. Are those authoritative? I’m kind of curious.

Well, the sites are authoritative. Like Rip-off Report is very authoritative, unfortunately.

It’s such a scam. I mean that guy is just extorting people, extorting businesses. It’s such a crazy world we live in, but you know, it’s interesting that you mentioned that.

Unfortunate.

Yeah, it really is. It’s interesting that you mentioned that one, though because I saw maybe a conspiratorial video about how Google actually likes that because they have a good opportunity to sell ads against sites like that, and that’s why they rank them highly some people think probably nobody knows the answer except the people inside google but you know if you have a comment let us know.

Well, I don’t really give much credence to the conspiracy theories that Google is trying to manipulate the editorial results in a way to drive more advertising revenue. I think there’s a separation of church and state within Google where the editorial Google engineers working on the organic search results are not heavily influenced by the advertising side of the business.

I hope you’re not going to be the case that that’s the way it’s supposed to be in the mainstream media. Of course, that gap has closed over the years, I think, but it is interesting, and I hope that’s a truly good point.

So, I would like to give your listeners another framework to work off of that will help them kind of frame the SEO game and what they can and should do to improve their rankings. And those three pillars are content, architecture, and links. Content that includes keyword research, identifying which keywords are the right words to use that are relevant and popular with searchers and attainable. You can actually rank on page one in Google. So, identifying those good keywords to use and then optimizing the content so that the pages really sing to the search engines for those keywords.

Now, not every page is going to rank for every single keyword, but what you would do is hopefully have a large repository of content, not a five-page website, because that’s not a lot of content to present to the search engines, and you’re not going to have a very strong presence for many keywords in Google when you have such a tiny little website. So, the more pages, the better. Think of it like a virtual sales force. If you have 5,000 pages on your website, that’s 5,000 virtual salespeople.

Hopefully driving people from Google to your website. If you have a five-page website, well, that’s only five virtual salespeople. So, that’s the content pillar, which is optimizing the content based on the keywords that you’re hoping to rank for and the keywords that the tools tell you are good keywords. And then the second pillar of architecture, that is where all the technical stuff goes. And this is the sort of stuff that’s gonna make your head hurt. I do have a 994-page book called The Art of SEO, which will really make your head hurt if you try to read it and you’re not very technical. Not that I would dissuade a business owner or entrepreneur from reading the book. I would just make sure that you’re not trying to implement all of it yourself because there are very technical aspects to SEO, and that includes rewrite rules and 301 redirects and so many things. Robots.txt, disallowed directives and XML sitemaps.

Yeah, that will make your head hurt. Lots of geeky stuff. Hey, I can’t wait to hear more about the architecture, so I hope you’ll tell us about that pillar a little bit. But feel free to mention any resources where someone listening can find a company or a provider to do this for them. Because again, you know, they’re running their business. They’re not gonna get this deep into SEO. How do you find the right provider? You work with a lot of the big brands in your company, but what if someone’s a small business or an entrepreneur?

Yeah, so I have a seven-step process that I’ve delineated out, and I have it on a free download on my website on stephanspenser.com. It is a hiring blueprint, an SEO Hiring Blueprint. And that allows you to find the right people and avoid the wrong people. And that could be an agency that you’re looking to hire. It could be an individual consultant or contractor, or it could be an in-house employee that you want to have full-time or part-time. Regardless, you’re gonna need to do some clever things to make sure that you’re not getting snookered.  Because they know SEO more than you do probably, and if they are not good at SEO, you will have a hard time figuring that out.

So, the hiring blueprint will help you structure the process and make sure that you’re rigorous in your fact-checking and things like that. And then there’s an addendum, another document that’s gonna be very valuable. It’s called, I call it the SEO BS Detector. And what that does is it gives you some trick questions that you can insert into the interview process. Let’s say that you just nonchalantly ask the question during the interview, tell me what your process is for optimizing meta keywords. And you just keep quiet and you just let them answer the question.

And see if it sounds good. Right.

Well, these are trick questions and you may not have caught the trick in it yet, but you will see very shortly that that was a trick question. Google never counted meta keywords, never. So, if they say anything other than, what, are you serious? Then you know that they are charlatans or they don’t know SEO from a hole in the ground. So, this kind of trick questions, if you even have like three or four inserted into the interview, you will be able to ferret out the fakers and the charlatans very easily.

Excellent point. Hey, I’m looking at your website now, Stephan. Where exactly are these two resources that you talked about? Yeah, I just wanna make sure my listeners can find them.

So, I’ll put that on marketingspeak.com/Jason.

Excellent. Okay, continue on some of these resources and tips that you have. These are great tips. Appreciate it.

Yeah, you bet. All right, now let’s go back to the three pillars, and that third pillar is links. If nobody links to you, you are DOA, dead on arrival. There’s no way you’re gonna rank. So if people are not talking about you, buzzing about you online. And in particular, in the blogosphere, where the links really count, not in social media where those are no followed links, you’re going to really need to work very hard, almost like be a PR professional, a public relations professional, where you are getting bloggers, influencers, website owners to link to your content, to your website, because you have such great stuff and you’re serving an audience that bloggers also serving.

So you’re relevant, and your content is remarkable. And I’m using the word remarkable quite deliberately. The book The Purple Cow by Seth Godin is a classic book about how to stand out in a crowded marketplace and be remarkable. In other words, how to be worth remarking about. And so you don’t have to be the best, most useful, most interesting, most humorous of everything content that is worth remarking about. Every piece of content needs to be remarkable, and that means it’s going to be link-worthy.

Okay, so what do people do? Do they hire writers and write their own articles? Do they use plugins like Yoast, which is a search engine optimizing plugin for blog posts on WordPress? Or any thoughts about the remarkable content?

Yeah, yeah. They’re going to need to use some tools, for sure, but most importantly, they’re going to need to think outside the box. Be creative in the process of coming up with ideas for listicles, top 10 list-type blog posts, infographics, viral videos, quizzes, self-assessments, checklists, worksheets, calculators, downloadable tools, plugins, add-ons and that sort of stuff. Whatever it is that the person is creating. The company is creating needs to be remarkable and it should be something that it’s in people’s own self-interest to share it, to link to it, to blog about it. If, for example, you created an infographic about it, give me a topic, Jason.

Real estate investing.

Okay, so let’s say it’s the history of real estate investing as an infographic. You contact one of the top real estate investors who’s also a blogger, and you really want a link from them. But you don’t want to outright just ask for the link because they’re gonna hit delete as soon as they see that. Instead, you want to give, you want to collaborate, and you want to come from a different angle. So, imagine you send an email and say, well, I am working on an infographic about the history of real estate investing, and I’ve got a bunch of gaping holes, but I’m not a seasoned real estate investor myself.

I’m a journalist, I’m a blogger, and I know you’ve done some incredible investing. You own 350 properties da da da, and I would love to get some statistics, some tips and some data points from you to fill in the gaps that are in my current infographic. Here’s a draft, and I will happily cite you as a co-creator of this infographic and promote you on the social media posts I put out about the infographic, etc. Could you help me out? Maybe even just do a 20-minute phone interview with me so I can extract some of that data out of your head so that we could fill these gaps in?

So, get contributors to your content. These are the contributors that obviously have influence already, right?

Yeah. So that’s just one kind of angle or hook that will potentially get them to respond rather than hit delete. Like there’s so many spammy emails that are coming into my inbox and everybody else’s on a daily basis because of “Guest posts” being a thing for SEO, and Google doesn’t like guest posts. They’ve been saying it for years. But apparently, a lot of link builders haven’t gotten the memo.

I get the emails virtually once or twice a day on the guest post thing.

It’s annoying, right?

That doesn’t really work, right? Wow.

It doesn’t, and do you respond to them? Oh, I would love that guest post.

No, not at all.

Great! Like we hit delete on all of them. So it’s gotta be unique. It’s gotta sound like you’ve actually been a follower of my blog or my podcast for a while, and that you’re a real human, that you’re not using a template, and you’re not using a tool. Even if you are, it’s gotta sound like you handcrafted this email. And if it’s a handcrafted email and the request is to collaborate or the request is for a quote for an article I’m writing for the Huffington Post or whatever, or it’s a question like, hey, are you going to be at XYZ conference in two weeks?

I’m gonna be speaking there, and I would love to meet up with you if you’re gonna be there like, “Wow, you’re a speaker? And yes, I am gonna be at that conference.” And so they take the 30 seconds to hit reply and say, “Yeah, I’ll be there. Sure, let’s meet up.” Or even they say, I’m not gonna be there, but, you know, it sounds like a good show. I haven’t heard of it before. And then you’ve opened the door, you’ve started the conversation, you now have a little bit of rapport, and you can use that to continue the conversation and hopefully have some sort of collaboration or serve their users, their readers in a way that you’ll get a link out of it as well.

Excellent points. Wrap it up for us if you would, and give out your website one more time.

Okay, so let me give you a handful of tools that the listener can use to identify good keywords to identify if they have low-quality or high-quality links pointing to their site already and who’s linking to their competitors and so forth. So, these are some of my favorite tools. Moz Keyword Explorer is at moz.com/explorer. SEMrush will give you a list of potentially tens of thousands of keywords that your competitors are already ranking for, and then you can export that list and bring it right into Excel or a Google Sheet. It’s semrush.com. A tool that does that same thing: these are two different tool sets, but they have some of the same functionality. And that’s Search Metrics. 

One thing I really like about Search Metrics is their Topic Explorer, which is kind of like a keyword research tool but also has a content editor so that you can craft that blog post or article or product page or whatever, and for it to tell you if, you’ve hit all the relevant keywords and most important keywords or not, and how many occurrences and readability score, all that sort of good stuff. So that’s searchmetrics.com. And give you two more. How about Ahrefs.com for link analysis to see if you’re getting great links to your site, your competitors are getting great links, and where you could get basically steel, not steel, but, yeah, research your competitors. How about competitive intelligence of your competitor’s link profile and the top links that they’re getting? You could go after yourself. And that would be with Ahrefs. You could also do the same thing with majestic.com. It’s another great tool. My favorite link analysis tool is LinkResearchTool.com. So, there’s a bunch of tools for your listeners.

Excellent, thank you so much, appreciate it. Give out your website one more time. Let’s wrap it up.

StephanSpencer.com and my two podcasts are MarketingSpeak, so that’s MarketingSpeak.com and Get Yourself Optimized, GetYourselfOptimized.com.

Excellent, Stefan Spencer, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show’s specific website and our general website, HartmanMedia.com.

For appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own. And if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to iTunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you’re using and write a review for the show. We would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.

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The security of your Personal Information is important to us, but remember that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure. While we incorporate standard industry practices internally and with our services providers, which we believe is sufficient for the information involved, we cannot guarantee its absolute security. Because we work with third-party businesses and vendors in various aspects of our business including operating this website, database management, website security, etc., we cannot guarantee the absolute security of our databases, nor can we guarantee that the Information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to and from us over the Internet. Any information that you provide to us via email should be treated with extra caution, as we cannot control the level of security available through email providers.

Children

We are strongly committed to protecting the safety and privacy of children who visit our website. We do not knowingly collect Personal Information from children under the age of 13 through the Website. If you are under 13, please do not give us any Personal Information. We encourage all parents to talk to their children about online safety and to monitor their children’s use of the Internet. If you have reason to believe that a child under the age of 13 has provided Personal Information to us, please contact us, and we will make best efforts to immediately delete that information from our databases.

External Websites

While we have carefully chosen those vendors with whom we work, especially those involved in the transmission of data on behalf of our business, we do not control and are not responsible for the privacy practices or content of third-party websites, including those of affiliates, business partners, sponsors, advertisers, or other websites to which we may link from time to time. When visiting any third-party websites, you are responsible for reviewing the privacy policy and terms of use applicable to each site. They may be different than those that you see here.

California Privacy Rights

Pursuant to Section 1798.83 of the California Civil Code, residents of California have the right to request from a business with whom the Californian has an established business relationship, certain information with respect to the types of personal information the business shares with third parties for direct marketing purposes by such third party and the identities of the third parties with whom the business has shared such information during the immediately preceding calendar year. To request a copy of the information disclosure provided by the Company pursuant to this provision, please contact us via email at me [at] stephanspencer [dot] com.

Our California Do Not Track Notice

Consistent with our policies described above, we collect information from our visitors on our website and across third party websites where applicable, to provide relevant content and advertising. We do not support Do Not Track (“DNT”) signals of web browsers.

DNT is a setting in your web browser that informs websites that you do not want to be tracked. You can enable or disable DNT through the Preferences or Settings options of your web browser.

Visitors Outside the U.S.

Our Website and the servers that make this Website available worldwide are located in the United States. The Internet laws in the United States govern all matters relating to this Website. Any information you provide in subscribing to or visiting our Website will be transferred to the United States. By visiting our Website and submitting information, you authorize this transfer, processing, and use.

EU Visitors and the GDPR

If you live in the EU, certain of your data may be subject to protection by the General Data Protection Regulation (the “GDPR”), a privacy regulation intended to help you have greater control over your personal data.

Under the GDPR, you have the following rights, which we extend to all of our website visitors:

  • to know what information is being collected, as disclosed in this Privacy Policy (“right to transparent information”);
  • to object on grounds relating to your particular situation to the collection or processing of certain kinds of information (“right to object”);
  • to withdraw consent even after it has been given, without affecting the lawfulness of the processing of your data prior to your withdrawal (“right to withdraw consent”);
  • to access, modify or update your information so that it is correct (“right to access” and “right to rectification”);
  • to have your information deleted or erased (“right to erasure” or “right to be forgotten”);
  • to have your data transferred or ported elsewhere (“right to data portability”);
  • and the right to restrict processing in certain situations (“right to restriction of processing”).

For purposes of the GDPR, to the fullest extent possible we do not directly collect or maintain personal data of our EU visitors or clients. This is done through partnerships with third-party vendors who have systems designed for the collection and storage of data on behalf of their clients (“data processors”). The data is only kept as long as is reasonably required to accomplish the purpose or purposes for which it was collected. Certain data may be expunged or utilized more quickly than others, and depending on your engagement and behaviors, including purchasing behaviors, we may be engaged in a business or contractual relationship with some longevity. (For example, if you purchase a course or program, or services that span over some time, you will continue to receive communications in regards to those offerings or services).

The categories of data processors with whom we work, and that help us in the collection of information that allows us to serve and interact with you include website analytics provider(s), website and web form plug-ins and related third-party services that allow us to maintain an up-to-date online platform and communicate with you electronically, an email service provider or providers to assist in managing email correspondence with our visitors, customers and list, as well as payment processor(s) and/or merchant account(s) to help us transact sales online and follow up with you regarding any purchases. For a list of specific data processors with whom we currently work, please visit our list here.

Those within the Company that may have access to the data include Officers, Directors, Managers, Supervisors, Salespersons, or those providing customer or technical support. Access to the data is provided for specific purposes, generally related to communicating with you, fulfilling our contractual obligations, providing customer service or technical support, collecting payment, or monitoring performance of marketing and sales efforts.

You may contact us at any time to have your information with us or any of these processors updated or corrected, deleted, or to obtain a copy for your records. Additionally, you may opt out of receiving any additional emails or marketing messages from us by clicking the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of our email notifications.

Further, if you feel that we have not complied with the relevant data protection regulations, please contact us by sending us an email at me [at] stephanspencer [dot] com with your first and last name, your country of origin, and a summary of your concern or complaint. We will endeavor to respond at our earliest possible convenience to address your concern. If contacting us does not resolve your complaint, you may have additional options.

Residents in Designated Countries may also have the right to lodge a complaint with the relevant EU data protection authority. You may access a list of the Data Protection Authorities in the EU here.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

The Company may update this Privacy Policy from time to time as necessary to protect our users and to comply with a changing environment. Please review the Privacy Policy when you visit our Website to remain updated on our current policy. We have no intention of making any changes to our Privacy Policy and practices to make them less protective of personal information collected in the past. By accessing the Website and/or using our services after making any such changes to this Privacy Policy, you are deemed to have accepted such changes. Please be aware that, to the extent permitted by applicable law, our use of the Information is governed by the Privacy Policy in effect at the time we collect the information. You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Whenever we make changes to this Privacy Policy we will update the date at the top.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us via email at me [at] stephanspencer [dot] com with “Privacy Policy” in the subject line.

© 2015 – 2024 by The Legal Website Warrior® (www.LegalWebsiteWarrior.com). All Rights Reserved.  DO NOT DUPLICATE THIS PRIVACY POLICY (OR ANY PORTION THEREOF). THIS CONSTITUTES COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT.