This is The Missing Link with your host, the insufferable but never boring Sean Jackson.

SJ: I’m back. Yay! Yeah. Hello everyone, it’s Sean Jackson, your host, and I am joined, as always, by the spunky Mica Gideon. Mica, it’s good to hear you again.

MG: Yay. I’m so glad you’re back and I am feeling spunky because you are back. How are you?

SJ: I am well. I am well. And I had to come back, and there was no question. Jason Hobbs sent me an email saying, Sean, Jabez has been doing a great job for you, but you need to come back.

MG: I love Jason. Hey, Jason. And yes, he’s right. I mean, this is phenomenal. They love working with him.

SJ: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Let’s just stop it. Jabez sucks. OK. He’s really good. He’s really talented. He’s really smart, and I hate him. Okay, so, but you know, when you do a podcast, as long as we’ve been doing it now, you do need to take a break every once in a while. So I was really appreciative. Jabez stepped up and tried to take my show away from me.

MC: Hijacked. That was going to be the tagline.

SJ: But since I know people in the production department, I could get the show back, you know.

MG: You know people, Sean. I know people.

SJ: So now it’s good to be back, everyone. And certainly it was nice to take some time off, if nothing else, to kind of step back a little bit, see how the show is playing out, making sure that if I ever needed to take a break, I had someone who was good enough to do it. And while Chavez is not good enough, he’s good for right now. But now he did a phenomenal job, and I can’t thank you enough, Micah, for all the hard work keeping the show going.

MG: So happy to do it. I love this show.

SJ: So, you know, one of the things about taking a break is, as I said, you do get to step back a little bit. You do get to see a different perspective. And one of the things that really kind of occurred to me in thinking about the show is we have done a great job, I think, of covering a lot of the basic stuff, so we’ve really hit on so many different topics. But I do think that we owe our audience, Mica, a little bit of a deep dive into some concepts, ideas, et cetera. You know?

MC: Yeah.

SJ: Because we’ve covered the full gamut of things, and now what I’d like to do for the next couple of episodes is really drill in deep. You know, really concentrate on specific areas. And today’s show with Stephan Spencer is kind of our first stab at that. Now, let me give a little bit of background because I am extremely excited that Stephan Spencer is our guest on our show today. 

But I also want to let everyone know that I owe Stephan a lot. He is definitely someone who when I was starting my career in online marketing, certainly was someone that I not only respected and followed but also validated my crazy ideas from time to time. And you know, when you find someone of such resume that Stephan has, and the fact that he would even listen to the show blew me away because I was like, Oh my gosh, this is someone who I truly respect. So we’re gonna interview Stephan about the SEO and LinkedIn connections. Okay, and that’s very, very important for an SEO guy. I’ve always known that LinkedIn had a lot of power to it for helping people discover more information about you on Google to your LinkedIn information.

And Stephan, listening to the show, said, “Sean, I want to talk more about that.” So I was completely like, “When do you want to be on? I will open up the door, whatever you want.” So today’s show is really Stephan talking at a, not a high level, I would say. It’s more about getting deep into the ideas behind the optimization of information on LinkedIn so that it can be discovered on search engines. So that’s what today’s show is about. And it’s really going to start a trend for at least the next couple of episodes of really getting into the minutia of LinkedIn. So, Mica, what do you think? Is that a good way to go?

MG: Yes, yes.

SJ: Well, I am excited because not only am I back, but while I was gone, our group continued to grow.

MG: Yes, yes.

SJ: Which was really annoying, by the way, because if the show had suffered a little bit, the group wouldn’t grow.

MG: You want it to fail, don’t you, Sean? When you’re not here, but no, we’re not gonna let that happen. We’re gonna continue to add value, we’re gonna continue to give what we can.

SJ: Exactly. And Micah, those who are listening to the show for the first time may not know what the heck we’re talking about. So, as always for all our listeners, we will always plug our little LinkedIn group because it is the anchor of the show. It helps drive our interaction with you. So, Micah, tell everyone how to get to that LinkedIn group if they haven’t done so already.

MG: That’s right. And we do want you to join us for sure. So, to join our super secret LinkedIn group where you can get amazing information and contact an amazing community that’s helping with LinkedIn, you’ll open your mobile device in the continental United States. If you’re here in the U.S., you’ll go ahead, and you’ll text 41411 from your mobile device, and that keyword is going to be MyLink, M-Y-L-I-N-K, and it will try to autocorrect, but go ahead and take that space out. It’s Mylink. If you’re outside the United States, you can email us at missinglink@Rainmaker.fm. Again, that’s missinglink@Rainmaker.fm.

SJ: And don’t worry, folks, we never spam you. We only send you a text message when we have a new show out there or if we have something super important to talk about related to LinkedIn. So go ahead and take a moment to do that. When we come back from the break, my good friend, thought leader, and highly respected in the SEO community, Stephan Spencer, will be joining us to share his insights into using LinkedIn and search engines to drive more traffic to you. So stay tuned.

SJ: Welcome back from the break, everyone. And Micah, please introduce our esteemed guest today.

MG: Yes, so excited. Stephen Spencer has more information to help you on your whole business journey than you can imagine. He’s got two fabulous podcasts, Get Yourself Optimized and Marketing Speak. Both have incredible resources on their own webpage, but mostly, you can go to StephanSpencer.com and get everything you might need to help your online presence, help your productivity, and help your SEO.

SJ: Yes. He is quite the man of many facets and truly the most thoughtful person in the SEO space that I’ve ever known. Stephan, welcome to the show.

Hey, Sean, thank you for having me.

SJ: Oh, we are so, so excited to have you on board. And certainly, for those who may not know the awesomeness of Stephan Spencer, talk to us a little bit about the journey over the years because I met you so many years ago, and you had a profound impact on my life. Just educate our audience a little bit about the journey you’ve been on so far.

Okay, sure. So, I started with SEO in the 90s, a long, long time ago. Before that, I was studying for a PhD in biochemistry, so it was a completely different world. I dropped out of my PhD to start a company, an internet marketing firm, and SEO didn’t even exist back then, and it was 1994, 95. And then, over the course of the 90s, I really focused on SEO. And about, yeah, it was 1999, I decided, hey, I could live anywhere. This internet thing allows me to have ultimate freedom. So I decided I’d like to live in New Zealand. Why not, right? I’d never been there, so I applied for residency, and I got in, and I moved. I stayed there for almost eight years and moved my family over as well. And it was fabulous. The place is magical.

Moved back to sell my business, my agency, which was called Netconcepts, and I did. I sold it in 2010. Also, around that timeframe, I decided I would completely transform myself because I was going through a divorce, I was unhappy, and I looked so old and decrepit. It was, I mean, seriously, if you look at my Google images search results for Stephen Spencer, it’s pretty sad what I used to look like, but it’s awesome what I look like now because I look about 15 years younger than I did back in 2008.

SJ: Wow.

MC: That’s a whole nother show. I want to hear.

SJ: Exactly. But where Stephen really changed my life was when you, along with Eric Enge and Rand Fishkin, wrote The Art of SEO. I mean, that book really became the default guide to everyone in the SEO space in this constantly evolving world of how to optimize for the search engines. And it was. I mean, I still know there are many revisions and versions to this day. I still have your copy with me at all times because it was such an impactful thing. And what really got me interested when I started this LinkedIn journey, you know, from the SEO space, what is that real intersection between traditional or typical SEO and the LinkedIn universe, right? Because we know there’s something there. And really, what I wanted to have you on the show talk about is based on your huge, vast experience in SEO. How does it work on LinkedIn, specifically around the three pillars of SEO? So, first, talk about the three pillars, and then let’s talk about how they apply to the LinkedIn ecosystem.

Absolutely. So, let’s talk about SEO. And you asked about the three pillars of SEO, and these are content, architecture, and links. LinkedIn is just another website as far as Google is concerned. Yes, it’s a social network and has all these additional engagement metrics that a traditional, flat, passive website doesn’t have. But to Google, it’s another website, just like any other website, with many, many, many pages. So we have profile pages, we have LinkedIn Pulse articles and things, and SlideShare is part of the mix as well. So we got to kind of think of this strategically. 

SEO (search engine optimization) is this massive opportunity, and LinkedIn is a massive opportunity. Imagine when you combine the two together, you’re going to be much more strategic, and I love this. This quote from The Art of War by Sun Tzu, “That tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” So, we don’t wanna just waste our time kinda running around making noise and shooting off fireworks with regards to tactical stuff on LinkedIn or in regards to SEO, optimizing our meta descriptions and so forth when meta descriptions don’t even move our rankings up one iota so let’s focus on the things that really get us the outcome that we’re after be outcome focused instead of activity focused most SEOs are activity focused everything’s a checklist and you got to work off that checklist and Meta-descriptions are on there.

So we got to do on even though there is second-order activity, and they don’t move your rankings up. They only influence the snippet. So, you know, let’s kind of frame it all as, yes, there are three pillars: content, architecture, and links. Let’s frame the conversation today about LinkedIn and how to leverage SEO and LinkedIn together. The whole equals more than the sum of the parts. But let’s also think of this strategically in terms of this is an overall part of our online marketing strategy, and if we get it right, we can occupy more of our shelf space in the Google search results. 

So, there are implications in regard to online reputation management in terms of pushing competitors. And when you’re dealing with LinkedIn, you might have competitors who have the same name as you. They’re not your traditional competitors, but there’s the old adage in the SEO world that spam stands for sites positioned above mine. Right. So, a guy with the same name as me is my enemy.

SJ: Right, right.

Because he could outrank me if I’m not careful.

SJ: So, let’s go into this. Based on the three pillars that you outline about contact architecture and links, where does someone start? I mean, let us assume that I have a profile up there, right? I hopefully have maybe updated it recently. I’ve probably got a blog site that I’m writing on, you know, and hopefully have some level of optimization there. So, where do I start based on the three pillars? Where do I start my LinkedIn optimization journey?

Yeah, well, let’s start with your profile and let’s start with the pillar of content. I should mention that with SEO, when you have the three pillars, content includes keywords and the keyword research aspect of SEO, I would fit in the content pillar. So between content and architecture, that’s how the website is structured, the internal linking, the URL structure, and all that sort of geeky stuff, the techy stuff. And then links, getting people to link to your site, your LinkedIn profile, or a LinkedIn Pulse article. So that’s the framework, right? And if any of those three pillars are weak, it’s like sitting on a two-legged stool. It will fall over. You need all three to be strong.

So, let’s start with content. And content would include, on your LinkedIn profile, if you create something that’s basically just an online resume, you are blowing it in so many different ways. And I’m sure you’ve talked about this on stage at PubCon about how you don’t want to write your LinkedIn profile, whether it’s a resume or a CV. But from an SEO perspective, if you aren’t engaging the reader in a way that the engagement metrics look compelling, there’s no major bounce rate, and people are going back to the Google search results and picking a different listing and that sort of thing.

So you have to write for humans as well as for the search engines. It’s not just about incorporating the right keywords. Yes, keywords are important, although Google is really smart about understanding the relationships between keywords, correlations, and so forth. So I’m not going to get into geeky stuff like talking about entities and things like that. But suffice it to say that Google’s smart enough to figure out that these different synonyms are related to each other and different verb tenses and singulars and plurals. You don’t have to focus so much on the exact match keyword.

But you do want to go to a keyword research tool such as Google Trends, which is free, google.com/trends, or Google Keyword Planner, which is also free but requires that you have a Google AdWords account. You don’t have to spend money on AdWords. You just have to have an account that you’ll log into. So you can Google for Google Keyword Planner and click on that first listing, log in, and then start typing in keywords and see which ones are popular and which ones aren’t. The popular ones that are relevant to your business and to you personally are the ones that you want to use, not ones that nobody except your CEO might be using. Right. You know, industry speak, right? 

So, get the keywords right, but there’s a great article I’ll encourage your listeners to go to: backlinko.com/SEO-copywriting. Brian Dean has this really great article about copywriting tips for SEO that make the articles that you write so much more engaging, so much more interesting, and this would apply to your profile when you’re writing your descriptions of your jobs and so forth, things that you do in terms of community service if you’re on a board of a nonprofit and you should put that on your LinkedIn profile as well. And you’re going to write compelling stuff that people actually get value out of by reading as well as convey the right keyword themes. 

And you’re going to apply that concept to the LinkedIn Pulse articles that you write. So that’s the content angle. And then when we’re dealing with architecture, now you gotta think about things like, are the URLs that LinkedIn creates the optimal URLs or not? Because sometimes they aren’t. Like when you write a LinkedIn Pulse article, the links to your profile are gonna include a tracking parameter that LinkedIn adds on, a TRK parameter. And sometimes, that creates duplicate content. A duplicate listing in Google for your LinkedIn profile.

SJ: Oh really?

Yep. So if you do a site colon search, which allows you to search just within one site, so you do site colon linkedin.com, and then a search for your exact name, so within quotes I put in Stephen Spencer, I could see that I only have one LinkedIn profile, but then there are other people who are more active on LinkedIn Pulse and so forth, who have multiple URLs leading to their same profile and they have tracking parameters added on to them. So, the TRK parameter, you can; this is really geeky, so apologies to those who aren’t really that geeky, but if you add an in-earl colon TRK parameter to your Google search, then you can see LinkedIn URLs that include the tracking parameter and sure, enough.

SJ: And, by the way, Stephan has a book that he wrote about all the advanced operations you can use on Google. So when you go to StephanSpencer.com, get the book.

MG: Go find it.

SJ: All these little codes that I completely understand will make more sense when you read that book. Go ahead, Stephan.

And that book is actually an easy read. That’s called Google Power Search. It’s less than 100 pages, and O’Reilly‘s also the publisher on that one. So, but yeah, so the content architecture sides. Let’s talk now about links. So when you create a LinkedIn profile, and nobody links to your profile, not even you, then you don’t stand a chance of it ranking in Google. It makes sense, right? Because links are the currency of the search engines. No links equals no rankings. It’s like voting power. People link to you. 

They’re essentially voting for you. That would apply to whether they’re linking to your website, your YouTube channel, your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook, or whatever, right?

And also individual Pulse articles that you write, so just bear that in mind, that links are the currency of the search engines and you need links in order to rank. So let’s say that you have a reputation management problem and somebody is hating all over you, you wanna push that down off the first page of the search results, because most people don’t go onto page two, like 95 plus percent don’t go onto page two in the search results.

So LinkedIn, your LinkedIn profile could be one of those slots that occupy the top 10. So that’s a good thing. Just think of all these different social network profiles, LinkedIn being one of them, as potential chess pieces that you could move into place and occupy as much of the chessboard as possible, the chessboard being the top 10 results in Google for your name, for your company, et cetera. Yeah, so I like to think of SEO as a chess game, but one where you can move your opponent’s pieces as well as your own.

SJ: Yeah. But let’s kind of stop for a second and recap because you’ve just, it’s like, you know, this is why I love Stephan, is because there’s like a wealth of information that just gets thrown out at you, and I want to put this into pieces and parts for the audience. When Stephan talks about the three pillars, we’re talking about the content, their architecture, and links. In the ecosystem that is LinkedIn, the content is your summary. It is the profile you put together. It is that keyword research that you should start the entire process off with to make sure you’re filling that content with information that is both applicable to your audience as well as to the search engines that consume it. 

You also want to make sure that you’re using that in your Pulse post that you put out there. And then, of course, be careful of the architecture. Make sure that the links that are these tracking codes that he was speaking of how they can somewhat confuse the search engines when they’re trying to figure out the way that the things are put together. And then of course, if you are not creating links to things like your profile, to things like your Pulse articles, they are just not going to get ranked. Did I sum that up essentially right, Stephan?

No, that was great.

SJ: Good job. Because I think this is, you know, this is again something that I really love the fact that you talked about online reputation management. Because certainly it is one of the easier ways, I think to at least make sure people can find you. And I’m not just talking about, I’m just like, hey, I want to find XYZ in this city, right? By putting links from your Twitter account, for instance, over to your profile, I always recommend that your Twitter account URL be pointing over there. Yes, it’s a no-follow, but it’s still a link over to it. Make sure that on your About page, you put a link from your site over to your LinkedIn profile. These are ways that are very easy and within your control to create up Inbound links to those profiles and pulse articles. Would that be appropriate, Stephan?

Absolutely, let’s take just a moment to quickly explain no follows and where they live kind of in inside of the LinkedIn ecosystem because no followed links Basically don’t count as far as Google’s concerned. So let’s just quickly clarify that for our listeners here. So, a no-followed link doesn’t pass any page rank; it doesn’t pass any voting power. So when people link out from a LinkedIn Pulse article that they’re writing, right, none of those links count. As far as SEO, they don’t pass any page rank. 

So don’t waste your time thinking about, oh, I gotta add all these links for purposes of SEO in my LinkedIn Pulse articles. They are neutered. Secondly, when you link out from your LinkedIn profile, optimize the anchor text. Many people don’t know that. You can choose other as one of the options. You don’t have to go with the default text of your website and your blog and that sort of thing. You can custom-write a really nice label for each of your outbound links to your blog and so forth. However, those are no followed as well. So, there’s no SEO benefit. Usually, you care about the anchor text and the underlying words that are used in the links.

You don’t want to use like click here and read more unless you want to rank in Google for read more or click here, right? But when it’s a no-followed link, it doesn’t matter. So those are also no-followed links. But go ahead and customize those profile link anchor texts anyway. And then, if you have an opportunity to get published somewhere other than Pulse that passes page rank in the actual text of the article, that’s probably going to give you more juice and more opportunity than just a Pulse article if you have the opportunity to create it on both sites. Like I have a column on Huffington Post and those links are passing PageRank. So they’re also very strict about if it looks like you’re putting links in there for purposes of commercial reasons, then they give you a really hard time and they don’t publish the article.

But let’s say that you have an article published in Huffington Post that has some great links that pass on page rank to some important sites that you have influence over or control or own or whatever. That’s great. You republish that on Pulse because Huffington Post allows you to republish. But it’s duplicate content, so you might want to rethink how to deal with the duplicate content issue rather than just willy-nilly copying and pasting. You might want to paraphrase and stuff, not just move paragraphs around that do not thwart Google’s duplicate content filter. You need to kind of rewrite the article if you want it to be seen as not duplicate and thus not competing with each other in the Google search results because Google wants diversity in the search results. So, duplicate content is bad, and we want to avoid it when possible.

SJ: Gotcha. But if you’re taking something that has already been published on your blog site and LinkedIn loves syndicated content. They love it when you take existing content and put it into the Pulse network. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Because obviously, they want the content, and they don’t care about Google because they want people in the LinkedIn universe to read the information that is in the LinkedIn ecosystem.

Exactly, exactly. So let’s good clarification. So that’s great for LinkedIn. And if we’re wanting traffic from the LinkedIn universe. Do that all day long. If you also want traffic from Google to these LinkedIn Pulse articles, which is definitely possible, these can rank, then let’s take the extra effort and rewrite the article a bit so that it’s not an exact duplicate of the article that we posted to our own blog.

SJ: Right. And I think that’s, and the justification for that is because context matters. Sometimes a post on your personal site has context around the site so that it can add to what you are discussing, right? But when you strip the content away, you lose the context of the site, and it makes sense to repurpose this content in the new context of a LinkedIn Pulse environment, right? So I may not know who Stephan is, right? Which if I was at your site, I already know who you are. 

So I think these are just little examples, and I think it’s an absolute great advice that I always love syndication. But I do think context matters. And if what you are writing about is better on your site and if it’s removed from the site context, go ahead and just take the time to change it. It not only helps with the Google side of the equation, but it also helps the reader in this new context of Pulse be able to understand what you’re talking about better.

Yep, yep, absolutely. And then also speaking of syndication, if you are creating SlideShare decks, because Slideshare is owned by LinkedIn now, that’s syndicated content as well. It’s visual. There’s an embed that you can add to your blog with a Slideshare deck of whatever, right? And then you can write a blog post around that. Then, that Slideshare embed could also be added to your LinkedIn profile. So you can show a slideshare on there.

You can also get traffic and views from within the SlideShare universe. So that’s great benefits just in syndication in general with regards to Pulse with regards, to SlideShare, and when you embed these Slideshare decks on your own blogs and various sites that you have the ability to post to, that increases the engagement Metrics within SlideShare. So, your SlideShare deck looks more popular and will rank higher within SlideShare.

SJ: I’d love it. Yeah, so I could literally spend hours talking to you because you are such a wealth of information, I swear. And for anyone who really wants to know more about Stephan, because he really has been on a journey. I love the journey that you have been on and the time you’re thinking about, not only the SEO and the technical side but really the life side of the equation of being a tech geek. And I would encourage everyone to go to StephanSpencer.com. His books, I swear to you, make an impact on you. 

His podcasts are absolutely wonderful to listen to. The Marketing Speak, Get Yourself Optimized. I mean, these are things that will add value to your life. And I cannot recommend Stephan enough because, quite frankly, he has helped change my life. I know he will help change others. And Stephan, thank you so much for being on the show and talking about SEO and LinkedIn and how they all work together.

Well, thank you for having me. It was a real pleasure. And thank you, Micah, too.

MG: Yes, thank you for your generosity to our community.

SJ: Well, that’ll be it for this show of The Missing Link, and stay tuned for our next episode. This is Sean and Micah, and we hope you have a great rest of your week. You have just experienced The Missing Link, exclusively on Rainmaker.fm.