Stephen Christopher

Luis, I am ready man.

Stephen Christopher

Yeah. Absolutely.

Think about it this way. When you go to Google and search for something, do you click on a result? Well, most of us do, and that is SEO traffic generation. We’re still using Google, so SEO traffic generation is still critical.

Stephen Christopher

That’s a great question.

We need to start with the end in mind. What do you want people to find you for? What do you want to be relevant for in the eyes of a search engine like Google? As much as I hate the phrase “Keyword” and “Key phrase,” that’s the easiest way to describe it.

Stephen Christopher

There are couples of tools out there that are free and easy to use. Google has their tool. It’s Google Keyword Planner. You do have to sign up for an Adwords account now, but you don’t have to just launch any campaign. Another one that’s free and pretty easy is SEMrush.com.

When you start looking for keywords, you want to find words that people are searching for.

You want to find keywords that have volume around them. It means that multiple people are typing them in.

If you optimize a website for words that get no search volume, it won’t have any effect.

You might have the best-optimized site in the world. You might show up number one in Google for it. But, if nobody’s typing in that keyword that gets not search volume, it doesn’t do you any good.

Stephen Christopher

Yes.

So, once you find some keywords that are going to work for you,

Going back to keywords, you don’t have to have a list of 50 or 100. Just pick a couple of basic ones that work for now at least to get started. Once you have those, you need to optimize your site for it.

WordPress is super simple. Within our company, we use Yoast SEO as a plug-in, which is very easy to use. You want to make sure that you have a strategy in your on-site optimization. These are things that you do actually on your WordPress website to rank for these keywords.

There’s one of the biggest mistakes we see people doing is. Let’s just say that somebody has five main keywords that they’re using. They’ll take those five keywords, and they’ll put them within the SEO traffic generation plug-in. They’ll put them as their meta description, their meta keywords, their meta title, and then they’ll use them all throughout the content and the text on their website. We’ve all been to those websites. It’s just like sprayed with those keywords everywhere also known as keyword stuffing, and that’s a mistake.

We want to be very clear and concise how we organize the SEO traffic generation strategy on a website. What you want to do is you want to take one or two keywords and make that the focus of each page. If you have five words that are your main topics of your business, ideally you’d want to have five pages, and each page talks about that keyword individually so that it’s very specific about that keyword or key phrase.

Whatever your keyword is, you want it to be very particular on that page and not have all of your keywords spread across all of your pages.

Stephen Christopher

What happens is called cannibalization. Google says, “All right. You don’t know which page you want to rank for this keyword, so we’re just not going to rank you for any of them.”

Stephen Christopher

We don’t care.

What I mean by that is we work with industries that get thousands and thousands of searches for a keyword per month, and then we work with clients and industries that might get 50 or 90. It doesn’t matter exactly how many it gets. You just wanted to be one of the top ones in your industry or your marketplace.

Don’t be disheartened if you go to Google or use one of these other tools and it says “A hundred keyword searches per month” or “A hundred searches for that word per month.” That’s okay.

As we’ve learned in business, it’s good to be specific. It’s good to niche down who we talk to because we can have a higher conversion rate. Just make sure it has some form of search volume.

If you’re not looking out on the main keywords that you would search for your business, start looking at phrases like what are the problems that you’re solving for people as oppose to an example of like “weight loss pills.” You would maybe want to rank for a word that’s like “how to lose weight.”

Just think about that when you’re doing your keyword research and not so much on the particular volume of searches per month.

Stephen Christopher

It depends on your budget and how much time you have.

Nothing is out of reach, but if you have limited time and budget, the search volume is going to be more about the competitiveness of the keyword. –Stephen Christopher

That will show up in the Google Keyword Planner than the actual search volume.

You might get a word that gets a thousand searches per month but is relatively low in competition, and then you might have a keyword that gets a hundred searches a month and is extremely high in competition.

When you use the service like Google Keyword Planner tool or SEMrush, it’ll tell you how competitive that word is, and a lot of times, it’ll tell you how competitive it is based on the estimated bid price of that keyword if you were purchasing it for like an AdWord.

Stick around things that are medium competition to low. Look for those that low hanging fruit where it’s going to be easier to rank for that keyword.

Stephen Christopher

Yeah, cool. I kind of mention it a little bit talking about on sites stuff.

Meta-data is these little strings of words and phrases that Google uses to technically determine what a page on a website is or what a website is about.

Stephen Christopher

When you go to Google and do a search, most often, the short blue description that comes up the actual length that you would click on in the result, that’s most likely the meta-title. That’s what people will see. Then the one to two sentences below that is the meta-description most of the time because Google will sometimes pull from different pieces of your content to display in search. So it’s not always going to be accurately what your meta-data is.

Essentially like I said meta-data is information that Google uses to determine what a page is about. So, you want to make sure that it’s very specific to what that page is about that you’re writing it for, and you want to make sure that it’s unique.

You don’t want to use the same metadata on every single page for every title and every description. You want to make it very accurate like one to two keywords per page and be very focused about how you write that meta-data.

Stephen Christopher

You want to stay focused on what problems are you trying to solve for people or what do you want people to see when they search. That’s how you want to write your meta-data.

Stephen Christopher

You also want to make sure that it’s focus just for that one or two keywords on the page.

Back to the previous example, if you have five keywords that you are trying to rank your site for, you wouldn’t want to put all five keywords in the meta-data for a page. You would just want to put one of those in that very specific page.

Stephen Christopher

You want to be focused on what that meta-data says, and then it’s in alignment with everything else that’s on the page. You want to send a clear signal to Google of exactly what that page is about so that it knows what you want that page to rank for.

Stephen Christopher

Great question and so few people ever asked this. It’s cool.

Google has a huge business persona now. They grew up with that hippy mentality. They want everybody to win, and so, Google doesn’t like selfish websites. They want websites that are creating a excellent user experience.

Stephen Christopher

That’s like the 30,000-foot view of why the outbound links work.

Outbound links create a better user experience, and that’s what Google wants to create within the internet.

And so, that’s the sites that they want to show higher.

Stephen Christopher

As far as length of content goes, there are couple different reasons why Tim, for example, wants that.

1. Statistics are showing that those longer blog posts will help you rank higher compared to shorter blog posts.

The average person or the average website writes short blog posts, so the content isn’t that excellent. By writing a 1,000 – 12,000 – 15,000-word blog post, you’re going to stand out. You have more room to add more value, and Google’s going to pick up on that.

2. You’re going to have a longer time on site because people are going to stay on that site longer to read it.

That sends a signal to Google that they use in their ranking algorithm to rank you higher. Because now, you’re proving that your site is more relevant than a lot of your competition since your readers stay on that page for longer.

3. Also, you’re able just to write a better, higher quality piece.

You’re going to be more likely get people to link back to your article as a resource when you have a much better-rounded, well written, longer article.

Stephen Christopher

I love that.

Marketing could be a whole different topic, but I love that you talked about the way that people learn. We have auditory. They want to hear it. We have kinesthetic, people that want to feel it, and all the different ways that we can communicate with those people.

A lot of people don’t pay attention to that.

Stephen Christopher

Yeah.

The whole backlink thing got a bad name because spammers took advantage of it and now, back links have a negative connotation. Because it’s like “Oh my gosh. I got to get backlinks.”

Stephen Christopher

Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for clarifying.

Backlinks are crucial because it’s a signal to Google.

Again, going back to the relevance of your website, if 15 or 20 or 30 websites are pointing back to a page on your site, Google looks at that and says “Wow. Okay.” These other sites are voting for you because they believe you’re an excellent resource.

It’s still important to have links pointing back to your site, back to interior pages of your site and then, to your blog post, and podcaster, whatever it is that you’re using for marketing. It’s critical that you have that.

Going on a podcast is an excellent way to do that. Luis, like you just mentioned, you’ll put links to whatever resources we talked about today. By adding value on a podcast, now, you’re sharing a link back with the audience, and now, that will help any of my sites or all of the other guest’s SEO traffic generation.

Writing excellent articles and good blogs like Tim Ferris does very consistently. Writing that excellent information and then sharing that so that hopefully, people will link back to it. But, get creative in the way that you look at it and find ways to create valuable content that people will want to link to as a resource.

Don’t think of it as, “Okay, I’m going to write this little thing so that I can get a bunch of links.” Think, “I’m going to write something or create something of massive value and then now, I’m going to share it with people,” and the links will happen somewhat naturally.

Stephen Christopher

Witt linking practices, you take what you can get. Anything is better than nothing at all.

If you write an article and they say, “Okay. We’ll only allow you to link to your website in the author comments.” Great. Take it. That’s still valuable.

You can also get a blog post written that has two or three links that are words, we call it Anchor Text. For example, you write an article on weight loss and then within the article when you use the word “weight loss,” that’s a link back to that page on your site. That’s an ideal situation. If you can get it to be a link as the primary keyword that you’re focused on but only if that page is truly about whatever that keyword is because it goes back to creating a good user experience. Google will know if you’re trying to trick the system.

Ideally, you would want the link to be within the content of an article. You would want it to be the word that’s relevant to the user, and hopefully, also one of your primary keywords are focused on.

Like I said, take what you can get right now because people aren’t giving out links like they used to.

Stephen Christopher

Yeah. Awesome.

I like to think of SEO traffic generation like high school. When you’re in high school, if you’re hanging out with that one different guy or girl that hangs out behind the school and smoke cigarettes, all alone, and nobody knows who they are, then nobody’s going to know who you are either.

If you’re hanging out with all the popular kids, and they all give you their vote of confidence, all of a sudden, the whole school knows who you are. That’s the same thing or the way that I like to look at it when we started talking about social signals, links, and all that.

If you hang out with “cool people,” then you naturally also become cool and social signals operate in a very similar way.

Let’s use Facebook as an example. If you’re on Facebook and you have all kinds of people following you, talking about you, and all this other stuff, there are some instances where Google will pick up on that and now, tracing back to your site and give you a little bit of a bump when it comes to SEO traffic generation.

You also mentioned links in social and you were right that they don’t technically count as links, but what it does do if you have a good social presence and you’re putting links to a blog article on your Facebook, you’re sending people to your site.

Now, that’s one more person that’s going to be on your site as a visitor, one more person that are going to read an article. They’re going to spend a couple of minutes on your site, and all of those signals are going to play into SEO traffic generation.

Stephen Christopher

When you start talking about social media, I would much rather see somebody get good at one platform before they start trying to become a master of all the platforms.

A lot of people come to us and say, “I need to keep up with all the social media.” As Kamala mentioned, Luis, you’re incredible at it. Guys like Gary V are amazing at it, but most of us don’t have time to do all that.

Putting in effort on one social platform that we’re good at or getting traction on is going to hold a lot more weight in the eyes of search engines and social signals than if we’re spread thin across a ton of platforms.

And we can’t add a lot of value to other people on those networks unless we’re capable of spending a lot of time on them.

Stephen Christopher

Like a follow versus a no follow link?

Stephen Christopher

Cool.

Stephen Christopher

There are two different types of links that you can get back from another site. There’s a Follow link, and a No Follow link. The follow link basically, says this website gives you credibility, or it’s endorsing you. It’s saying, “We know who this site is and so, we’re giving them a follow link.” It’s a vote of confidence.

A No Follow link says, “Look, we’re going link to it because it’s relevant to whatever they might be saying, but we don’t know anything about that site. We don’t know if we trust it. We don’t know if it’s spam. We don’t know anything about it, so we’re going to give it a No Follow link.”

What Google does is Google will look at both of those links. If you have a lot of follow links, you now have kind of a high school scenario. You got a lot of votes from the popular kids, so you’re going to be more relevant, and you’re going to show up higher in search.

If you have a lot of No Follow links, it’s kind of like all right. You have a lot of links, but these sites aren’t saying that they truly trust you. So they’re not going to hold near as much weight in the eyes of a search engine as a follow link would.

Stephen Christopher

Keep it basic.

The biggest thing that we see with people trying to get a handle on their SEO or do their SEO traffic generation is they try to do everything all at once.

Just keep it basic.

• Get a nice little list of keywords that you’re focused on.
• Talk about them consistently throughout your website.
• Focus on putting out excellent, valuable information.
• Work on maybe one or two ways to get links whether it’s just going on podcast, getting links that way, working on becoming a guest blogger on a couple of sites.

Just keep the SEO traffic generation simple and do a lot of things that add value to your potential audience.

A lot of the SEO traffic generation portions of that will come if you stay clear, concise, focused, and simple.

Stephen Christopher

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me on guys talking about SEO traffic generation. I appreciate it.