Kori explains “What SEO is Not & How to Fix SEO on Your Website.” After watching this video, checkout our online SEO class available for purchase.
If you need another free resource for SEO here is a video for SEO Tips.
Full Video Transcript
Hey guys. Thanks so much for tuning in to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton here at WebTegrity in San Antonio, Texas. Today’s topic is going to be all about search engine optimization. What it means basically to get people to your website and to boost that traffic. That’s why there’s a graphic sitting right here that says that.
Overall some people think that SEO is just kind of a magic thing that you do on your website. That’s not the case whatsoever. I’ve had several emails come through recently asking me about search engine optimization. That’s why we’re going to do this video and talk just a little bit about it.
Overall there are some basic things that you must do to your website in order to improve the search engine optimization of your actual website itself. There’s things behind the scenes in the “nerd code” that you need to tackle. There are things on the front side of your website that your visitors will see that you need to be sure that are all in place and correct.
If you don’t know what those things are or if you’ve questioned and heard that there are different things out there, take a look at this course that I offer here on WebTegrity. I’ve got a video that you can watch that tells you a little more about it. This is a course, “Basics of SEO.” It’s a 45 minute course I’ve put together. I’ve also given you a coupon discount in the description box below so you can grab that. Come over and use that. Watch this tutorial. It’s going to walk you through and give you an actual worksheet that you can look at your website and work through detail every single thing that are the major things that are required for Google to love your website.
I also have another free resource for you here. I’ll put this link in the description box below. These are all of our blog articles and video tutorials on search engine optimization that will help you better understand some basic things regarding SEO. Overall though, this is never going to be a one time fix for your website. You really need to wrap your head around that. I think this is where a lot of people struggle with search engine optimization. They think, “Hey my website’s been live for about 6 months or even a year and I’m still not outranking my competitors. Why am I not on page one yet?” When they have all these things maybe even in place and they’re still not ranking.
Overall what you need to understand is again, content is king. You must have good content consistently pouring into your website. You cannot create one website and launch all this amazing content initially and set it out there and expect for Google to continuously fall in love with it over and over again and always rank you higher and higher. You must produce key, incredible content consistently. That’s what WebTegrity has done.
Take a look here.
If you go back to our homepage on our website, every single week (as y’all all know) we’re creating video tutorials for WordPress. We put them here on our homepage. You can go through our whole archiving area and that’s exactly what we were talking about here if you go to tutorials. You can go through our entire archive of all of our WordPress tutorials on a lot of different subjects. This is how I produced fresh content.
I know a lot of you are saying, “but I’m a small business owner. I don’t have time to write content. Very busy managing all the other aspects of my business.” Here’s the problem with that. SEO does not work without content. That’s all there is to it. That’s the basic bottom line of how search engine optimization works.
You can get all these things in a row (which are the elements I was talking about over here on our class.) That’s the Basics of SEO class. This will completely walk you through all the different items that are (basically) a requirement of how Google falls in love with your website and understands what your website is talking about. These are the things you have to have in place. Once you get those in place, the task is not over. It has only just begun.
You must pour content consistently into your website. By consistently- some people say how often is that? It really depends on your industry. If you’re in a fast paced moving industry like mine, (where we’re in technology or we’re in digital marketing and things are constantly changing) we should minimally blog at least once a week. At least minimally once a week. If you are in an industry that’s maybe about crocheting and you want to talk about the different types of yarn that are out there. Maybe that doesn’t change as frequently. You could potentially get away with maybe blogging twice a month. That might be something for you to put in your brain. Look at your competitors. See how often they’re releasing fresh content. Are they consistently using social media as well?
That is your next step. You have to be using social media. There is no way around this. Let me say that again. There is no way around this. I have people that tweet to me. I have people that write to me and say, “Kori I really thought that I was doing so well on my website and we were really trying to get things going. I was using social media for like 6 months straight and I have traffic coming in like crazy! Then it stopped. Why did that happen?” I go look at their social media. It’s because they stopped using social media. They got too busy working on their business. They got too busy with all their different orders. Unfortunately they decided that they were too busy to either write content or run their social media. This is a horrible mistake and it’s made very often. So that’s really the way social media works inside of search engine optimization. You write your content. You put the content in your website. Then you go out to your social media networks and you let everybody know that the content exists. You invite them to come read that on your website. You give them the link to your website. You bring that traffic back to your website inviting everybody with all your different social networks. Does that make sense? You really need to be doing this. In order to make it something that’s manageable, (even as a small business) you can use different tools out there.
There’s Hootsuite that will allow you to (basically) schedule all your different posts to blast out across all sorts of social medias. You can come in here on a lazy Sunday afternoon when you’ve got nothing else going on and schedule all of your posts for the entire month. You can just get inspired one day and write them all out. That way if there’s something major that happens (maybe throughout the month) and you want to make an extra post, you can just grab your phone while you’re at work and make that extra post out on your social media. When you’re too busy, (working inside the business) these posts will already be blasting out for you because you’ve come here to Hootsuite and you’ve scheduled them to post- to publish. There are all sorts of cool tools you could use like this.
WordPress itself has a scheduler inside of it. If you wanted to blog and write a bunch of blogs (maybe 3 or 4 blogs) then all you do is schedule it to go out once a week. That’s all you do and it’s perfect. It looks like you’re consistently on top of things when really what you’ve done is you’ve taken one great day out of your month and you’ve stayed focused. You’ve gotten all these things in line to publish throughout the month. It’s really an incredible tool and it really is the only way you can get search engine optimization to work. You’ve probably seen this before.
You can get something fast and cheap. If you want both of those, it’s going to be low quality. If you want something fast and high quality, it’s probably going to be expensive. If you want something very high quality but not pay a lot for it, it’s probably going to take a long time to get it done. In no way, shape or form is there something inexpensive that’s super fast and high quality. That’s a big fat no. That’s exactly the same way it works with search engine optimization. You can try to hire a company to help you do this as well. Even my company offers some search engine optimization resources and services.
Here’s the key with hiring another company, there is never anybody who’s going to understand your products or your services better than you or somebody directly working in your business. I can try to write about an insurance company, I can try to write about jewelry or some other industry out there and try to do my Google researching. When it comes down to it, truly you or somebody in your business are the best people to write that content. Then, if you would like to then outsource that (once that content is written) send it to somebody like our company or another SEO company out there to help you blast it out and get the word out. That plan can really work.
Other than that, you’re up against the possibility of somebody just writing a bunch of articles and selling them. Let’s say that somebody has a bunch of insurance companies and they write one article and they sell it to 10 different insurance companies. It’s the exact same article and you- you wouldn’t know that that’s happening. Unfortunately, there are rotten SEO companies out there that will do that to you.
The other thing that you truly have to understand is: if you don’t understand what’s happening on your own website, if you don’t understand completely what search engine optimization is, what things must be in place on your current website right now. Even if you’re writing a ton of content and using your social media, you could be doing all of this for nothing. All of the other things that have to be in place, (that’s what this class is about) they’re not tended to. Super important that you fully understand what search engine optimization is and what it is not. You could really be frustrated realizing that your website is not ranking well and you cannot understand why. You could pay a company thousands and thousands of dollars and they still won’t be able to do it. There are key things that must be in place first.
I hope this has helped you understand a little bit more about search engine optimization. I know this is a crazy vast subject so if you have questions or comments, please put them in the thread below here on YouTube. We’ll try to comment back as quickly as possible but know that we get thousands of comments monthly and it’s difficult but we try our best.
If you need help with search engine optimization, I want you to start here first. The link to this course is in the description box below. Start here first. Take this course. Use the worksheet that’s in this course to help you basically evaluate your own website is what you’re going to do. Evaluate your website. Figure out how to get it done correctly. Don’t bleed money out there on SEO companies until you have every one of these things in place. Let me know if we can help you further.
I hope you’re having a great WordPress Wednesday. Bye, y’all!
