Ink & Bytes
Ink & Bytes
Episode Seven: SEO, An Introduction To Optimization
Unlock the secrets of SEO and supercharge your online presence with our latest episode of Ink and Bytes! My time at a tech startup sculpted me into an SEO nerd, and I'm here to pass the chisel to you, demystifying the technical jargon that often shrouds this essential digital skill. From the heart of our discussion, I reveal the importance of understanding both programmatic and editorial SEO, giving life to your content through strategic keyword placement and the artistry of backlinking.
This isn't just a stroll through the technicalities of SEO; it's a journey filled with insights into the tools that can elevate your site's visibility like Screaming Frog and SEMrush. So, whether you're a writer, content creator, or just someone who's fascinated by the digital realm, tune in for an episode that promises to entertain as much as it educates.
Why? Hello, there we're back at it with another episode of the Ink and Bytes podcast. Time really doesn't seem to exist anymore. Right? Last month went by in a blink of an eye. It was really hot and really cold and now it's not even officially spring yet and we have spring weather. Little little concerning. But we will move forward and I'm back with another episode of the Ink and Bytes podcast.
Speaker 1:And last time we met we had a great guest, chris, on, and we talked about memes, video game, the video industry, as well as how COVID really revolutionized more so in a negative way in some elements education and how people act in school. Really good episode. A lot of really good comedy in there too. So if you like comedic conversation, definitely go back and check that one out. But I finally sat down and thought to myself I really need to have a schedule for my blog content and the podcast and all this world builder stuff. So I finally have an answer for all of you and we are going to be looking at two blogs a month on the dash world, dash buildercom and two podcasts a month on the website as well and on pretty much every podcast source, your favorite podcast host. We're going to be on them. So we're looking to a month. Hopefully I can stay with that. I definitely feel like I can. I've been motivated to do it and it's going to be good.
Speaker 1:But on the side of creative things and what I've been up to outside of the blog and podcasts, I started well, I should say I've been doing it since December, but it recently became popular enough to warrant a mention on the show, if anyone's interested. I started Twitch streaming over at twitchtv slash world builder. It's probably going to be changed to a different name soon, but I'll update the notes the show notes accordingly if that happens. But I started doing that just for fun, to see what would happen, and I met a great group of people. I had some people help me start and it turns out I have a lot of people out there that like what I do. So if you're interested in gaming, v tubing and just silly stuff, feel free to check out twitchtv slash world builder and drama follow if you like. But we're going to move on to the show now and I'm and I'm really excited for this episode because it's a topic that I am personally really interested in, invested in, and not only have I done work in this topic. I am looking to do more work in this topic, so, without further ado, let's get into it.
Speaker 1:But what is this topic that I'm talking about? And I'm talking about SEO, or search engine optimization, and we're going to talk about what that means shortly, but I just wanted to spend a few seconds talking about how I got into SEO. And how I got into it was. I worked for a few years at a technology startup called new up. I still work there now and there was a stint of time maybe two or three months, four months where I was leading the SEO efforts, trying to grow our visibility on Google by the way of writing content and blogs and optimizing our web pages and working with the development team to try to make sure we could get in front of as many people as we can organically.
Speaker 1:And I found out through this process that I really loved SEO and I loved how it felt like solving this puzzle and it was competitive and it was just like a game of chess, I guess, and it just was really addicting and I learned a lot and I spent a lot of my own time trying to further my understanding of it because I knew I actually it wasn't something I knew I wanted to do until I was doing it and my life decided to take another one of those really weird side paths, and you know I'm still kind of exploring that as time goes on. But that's where I learned that I really found this interesting and it made me want to do more. So that's a very brief intro on why we're here today talking about oh, excuse me, why we're here today talking about it, because I found that it was really fascinating. So, with that out of the way, let's actually talk about what the hell is SEO? When you put something into Google and you get those millions of search results and those hundreds of thousands of pages, have you ever stopped and wondered to yourself how are these ranked? How is number one and number one? What qualifies making this link, this website, the best for my search over the millions of others that are under it?
Speaker 1:And, as I already said, this is basically SEO, or search engine optimization, and it's a really fascinating field that goes really deep, and today we're going to be pulling back the veil a little bit and exploring the topic and, as you know, with these shorter episodes I like to get right into it, right to the main points. So you can finish this episode in a little coffee run, and we're going to be generalizing SEO and keeping it at an intro level, and we're going to be framing it towards writers and content creators, because that's what I am and I'm pretty sure that's what a lot of you guys are probably doing as well, and SEO is something that you should be thinking about all the time. If you're a content creator, it's how you grow organically and it's how you can grow quickly for free, unless you're paying for a third party tool to help visualize the data that you're pulling in. Because you might hear a lot of people say, spend money on Google ads, and while that definitely helps and you should do it if you can afford it, but that's more of a business thing. If you have a team of people, seo is a way you can get in front of thousands of people. Hopefully, that would be the goal for little to no money, and it's by doing written content, making sure your page is optimized, making sure things that running in the back end, like tags, are correct.
Speaker 1:So we're going to be talking about all that very generally today, but let's start off nice and easy and start to talk about what the hell is that page you get every time you Google something? But what is the page that's shown to you by Google after you hit enter on anything search? Now, bear with me, this is going to be really complicated and we might have to go over it a few more times to make sure we're on the same page. That is called the SERPs page, in other words, the search engine results page. I know, wild right Is your mind blown yet, because that's pretty, pretty wild information. But all things aside, it's just the SERPs page. That's all it's called. It's just an acronym. There's so many acronyms out there, but it's a really easy one to get down.
Speaker 1:Before I kind of reveal the wisdom on the basic idea on how things are ranked on the SERPs page, there's three types of SEO that are paramount to know and understand when you're going into it, thinking about it for your own creation and content, stuff like that. One of them might be a little bit less important than the other two. Actually, I'll leave you go so far to say one of them is probably the most important. The other two are beneficial to know about if they become relevant for you in the future, and we're going to start off with technical SEO. Now, what's technical SEO? That is more of a developer thing that's going to be.
Speaker 1:Is your HTML formatted properly? Do you have CSS and JavaScript on your website? Is it coded in a optimized way? Maybe you have an infinite scroll, which is when you're scrolling down a page on an application or a website and you never really hit the bottom. It just keeps loading more information. That actually has an effect on your SEO. What if your location tags aren't formatted properly? Maybe on a specific web page you have a location tag that says a different country than that page is actually intending. That could affect your SEO. All of that back end stuff and the programming and the really gear and deep level stuff. That's all technical SEO. You won't really have to worry about that too too much. But if you're a part of a team and you're working on SEO together and you have developers, there's going to be a lot of work in the technical SEO. That's where I spent a lot of my time trying to optimize our web pages and tags and basic HTML and stuff to see how we can get in front of the most people. Well, how can we get Google, their little crawler Googlebot, to really like us Up.
Speaker 1:Next is programmatic SEO. Now programmatic SEO is going to be really important for businesses and large companies and companies like Travago. I'll just do a little plug new up as well. Programmatic SEO basically is a method of using software to automatically generate a large number of pages that are targeted by keywords. This is easy to explain with Travago because they have hotels, they have thousands of pages for these hotels and they have keywords attached to them for specific areas. So a hotel in I don't know some county in Texas is going to have its own page. A hotel in New York City in a specific borough is going to have its own page. They're generated probably automatically by software and that is how it's classified as programmatic SEO.
Speaker 1:Now for new up. It's a little bit harder to explain, but on the platform there are types of things you can create, like referrals, jobs and other opportunities, and these opportunities that you're creating are then turned into their own web page with their own keywords attached to them that actually give you SEO online and can help you with your personal brand. That is also programmatic SEO, because it's using the software to make those pages, so anything that is automated and very quickly automated, like Travago, and automatically have keywords attached to them. That is programmatic SEO. You can think of two. Like YouTube in a sense, because there's thousands of videos being created. Each video is its own URL, so it's its own page, essentially, and they have targeted keywords in the sense of the tags that the creator puts on them. So all of this is programmatic SEO.
Speaker 1:And finally, the last type of SEO, and it's the type that is personally my favorite and the one that I worked and work with the most, and that is editorial SEO, and you can probably guess by the name what type of SEO this is referring to, like what it's all about. Essentially, it is the process of creating longer-formed content to target specific audiences and keywords and topics. Now, essentially, blog blogging that's editorial SEO. If you have a blog page on your website, you're doing editorial SEO and this has its entire own can of worms like keyword research, keyword groups and so on and so forth. Like if you are a Cyber security company, you of course want to be writing blogs about Cybersecurity and targeting specific keywords in that field. So maybe you're writing a blog about red teams. You would have the keyword be red team and everything relating to that.
Speaker 1:All of that is Editorial SEO, and it also combines Technical and on-page SEO. So, for example, if you go onto any of my blogs and you see things that are highlighted and they're clickable links that bring you to another page or into another page on my website, that is called back linking and and that is a type of SEO in the umbrella of editorial that really can help you gain traction, because once you link to another page that might not be yours, say, I'm linking to a very reputable page that has a lot of traffic and a lot of trustability. That actually looks good on me when Googlebot crawls my website, because it sees that I'm linking to other people. And what helps even more is if another website links to me, because that shows I have trustworthy content that other people are Referencing. So all of this is editorial SEO, and if you're a content creator, this is the one type that is really critical to learn about, and, while they might sound complex because we're only doing a top level of you here, it's actually not that bad and it's quite fascinating once you get into it. But those are all of the SEO types that are pretty important to have in mind when you're starting on the journey, and they're the most predominant ones.
Speaker 1:But how is all this considered when Google sends out its Googlebot, which is called a crawler, to crawl the internet and see what content is good and what content is bad? Well, the most important thing that Google is looking for when it's ranking content is how fast the user can find an answer to their question, and how long are they staying on your website and are they leaving right away. Those are some of the more important things that Google will be tracking. So, for example, if I am a cybersecurity blogger and a really big hack just came out that compromised a lot of different company and people, if I wrote a blog talking about it and it answered the question efficiently and it was written really well and the images had alt text for people who have disabilities, if my tags are correct, and it was just written really well and optimized, it's likely going to rank higher than ones that aren't, because an event like that would be a really big issue. It's likely going to lead to a lot of people searching for solutions or to ease their mind on that topic. So you're probably going to get a lot of people to your blog if you have keywords set up correctly.
Speaker 1:Now, what are keywords? Keywords are just topics. Think of them like tags. So in the cybersecurity example, maybe a keyword is literally cybersecurity that would be a keyword. Maybe you have a long tail keyword, which is a keyword that's more specific. So maybe you have cybersecurity breach in America. That would be a long tail keyword. It's more specific. So you're likely to get accurate user views and a bunch of other elements go into that. But those are the more important things that Google is going to look for.
Speaker 1:Now, if you're sitting there wondering, man, this is really a deep ungin. How does anyone kind of keep track of all this? And that's where third party tools come into play. It's worth a mention that there's a lot of third party tools and I spent a great deal of time with many of them. Some were really good, some are really bad and some were just downright hostile. For example, remember when we were talking about technical SEO and all of that back end developer stuff. There is a tool built specifically to helping you optimize and seeing what's wrong with your back end stuff, and that is screaming frog. That is a crawler that will crawl your page, similar to how Googlebot would, and kind of bring back all the good things and all the bad things Say you have cybersecurity issues, we'll actually bring that up and help you identify it.
Speaker 1:If you have broken links, maybe someone that you link to their website diet or they change the URL structure, that will then make the link that you provided broken it will actually tell you that and it will help you identify it. And it's all about increasing your technical SEO. And there's a lot of other tools for programmatic and editorial. We have things like SEMrush, which is a really good one that I personally, like you have Ubersuggest, which is a keyword researching tool so you can put in a keyword. For example, if we go back to our cybersecurity example, if you do like type in cybersecurity, it will tell you how hard it is to write content for that keyword, because the more people that are writing content for keywords, the harder it is for you to rank. And this is all stuff that Ubersuggest helps you identify and visually see, because it's kind of hard to conceptualize it and write it down on paper. But all these tools help you visually see it and, as you can see, seo is a really important element if so many companies have their business model built on these tools and they're doing rather successful.
Speaker 1:So, while Google ads and social media and everything else are fantastic ways to grow and you should definitely be pulling on those. Looking at your SEO and how you can optimize it to rank higher above your competitors to get more views and attention, and just rank higher is a very, very strong way to grow. Now that's a very rapid fire and top level view of SEO. If you're interested in any other of the granular topics that I talked about, I actually have a chain of blogs on my website at the-world-buildercom, starting with a introductory blog that's similar to this podcast, but I go a little bit slower and more in depth into certain elements I talked about, and I also have another blog that's recently put out that is about tools that can help you grow your SEO, which is where I go over a little bit slower SEMrush, ubersuggest, google Analytics, google Trends and all of these different things to help you with your SEO strategy, and hopefully this kind of helps out as you start to think about this.
Speaker 1:Like I said, when I never knew this existed, like I just thought Google was magic, but this is the actuality behind that magic. If you're ever interested in how the internet ranks content and how it works, in a sense, seo is fascinating, so I hope this kind of opened up your eyes a little bit and gets you interested to learn more. There's a lot of different resources out there for you to dig into, but without further ado, thank you so much for hanging out with me on this really quick episode of the Inkin Bites and I'll see you in the next one.
