Session 17: SEO 101 – Getting started in Search Engine Optimization

In session 17 of A Marketing Podcast I discuss how to get started in Search Engine Optimization. This is your SEO 101 course as I walk you through the three basic progressions to optimizing your website in relation to your search engine rankings.

Session 17: Show Notes

Search Engine Optimization is not part of your marketing strategy

SEO is the act of providing search engines the information they need to rank your website as high as possible for the keywords that you deem to be important to you.

First off, SEO is as much an art as it is a science. Many will claim they understand the science of search engines and how to optimize and rank your website at the top of Google, but it’s a fact, that the number of factors that determine your website’s ranking for a specific term are not 100% known. Therefore, it’s impossible for someone to know all the ways in which to achieve perfect rankings.

That’s where art comes into play.

The art is marketing, making assumptions and understanding your audience to deliver content that they will read and share and get value out of.

If you want to improve your rankings and stay there, develop great content, ensure your website is setup correctly, and generate links from credible websites back to yours. SEO is essentially that easy.

Ensure your website is setup correctly, develop great content, and generate links from credible websites back to yours

But why is SEO not part of your marketing strategy?

That’s because SEO is the act of optimizing content and your sites appearance to search engines. It’s not a strategic approach to marketing, or even a marketing tactic.

SEO is applied to the various tactics that you use to market.

For example, you should have a content marketing strategy, or even campaigns, and you should apply SEO to the content you develop in that campaign.

Much like you should have a Social Media strategy that includes driving traffic to your website. Which will have an effect on your SEO rankings if other begin to share your content or visits your website.

The exception to this rule is potentially having a back linking campaign or strategy. But even then, the way in which you build back links should be through partnerships and content development.

White Hats and Black Hats

In SEO the terms white hat and black hat are used to refer to the idea of there being some SEO tactics that are professional and sound, whilst others are little more fishy and potentially “scammy”.

I’m not going to push you in either direction, but I am going to explain the difference in relation to some tactics. And depending on your way of operating you can apply the approach you wish.

White Hat tactics

• Developing great content

• Working with others in your industry to share that content and link back to your website (guest blogging)

• Providing genuine data in your META output

• The long game of SEO, and built on honesty and a genuine approach to providing value through content.

Black Hat tactics

• Spamming forums and directories for back links

• Creating your own network of websites to deliver back links with ease

• Delivering metadata that is not related to your content and typically jammed with keyword heavy content

• Can get as bad as hacking other websites to paste links and place content referring to your website

• Hidden text or links

• And more but you get the point

Google being the leader in search is always working to prevent the black hat tactics from actually working, but as you can see, from the tactics I just mentioned, some of these still work today.

For what it’s worth the tactics I use on A Marketing Podcast are white hat tactics, not only because I want to appear genuine and stay out of trouble with Google,