This is Grumpy SEO Guy Episode 133, SEO for Total Beginners. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy, and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy. Let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because it's very hard for beginners to get good SEO information. So in this episode, we're going to act like you are a complete beginner. This episode might be a really big review for some of you, but I think if you're a beginner, I think this episode will help you a lot. Okay, let's get started. Before we do that, some announcements really quick. New episodes come out on Wednesday, 9am Central Standard Time. That's for the podcast. If the podcast takes a little bit longer to appear on YouTube. If you'd like to support the podcast, you could do so at patreon.com/grumpyseoguy. If you have a question, you can email me at
[email protected]. If you have a question, you'd like to have a lot of people answer it. Maybe you can post it on the Grumpy SEO Guy subreddit, which is reddit.com/r/grumpyseoguy. And if you have a complicated question, and you want to set up a Zoom advisory call, you can email me and we'll talk about getting that planned. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started, everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience. This podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. So we're going to start at the very beginning. Okay, for a lot of people, they learn that they need something called SEO, but they don't know what it is. And they don't know how to find out how to do it or where to get it or where to find it or what they don't because they don't know what it is. Well, I know I need SEO, but like outside of that statement, like literally knowing they need SEO, they don't know what it is or what they're doing or why. So let's start with why. Why do you do actually, before we even do that, let's define SEO. Okay, SEO, search engine optimization. Okay, but like big deal, right? Like define that. Okay, so SEO is the process of getting websites to rank at the top of the search engine results for your keywords. Okay, now let's define keywords. A keyword is anything that anybody searches for in a search engine. Okay, it's anything that anybody searches for in a search engine. So they're just called keywords. Okay, so if you search for refrigerators, okay, and if you go to your favorite search engine and you search for refrigerators, refrigerators is the keyword. Okay, if you search for how to fix a computer, how to fix a computer are the keywords. Okay, that's all it means. So you do SEO to get websites, well, your website, ideally, to the top of the search engines. So you do SEO to get websites to the top of the search engines for your keywords, your keywords, meaning the keywords that you want to rank for, ranking means being at the top of the search engine results. So why? Who cares? Who cares? Well, the higher you rank, the more likely you are to get more visitors to your site. Okay, so for example, if you search for dishwashers, we're just picking random terms here, if you search for dishwashers, and well, I should say if somebody searches for dishwashers and you are the number one result, you are at the top of the search engines. You are in the first position. Okay, you will get more visitors than every other person who is ranking for the term dishwashers. Okay, because you are at the top. So that's the goal. The goal is to get to the top of the search engines to get as many visitors as possible. The reason you want to get visitors to your website, that's your business. Okay, okay, but most people want to get visitors to their websites to make money because they're either selling something or they want them to click on an ad or they're trying to, you know, refer them to somebody or something. But once once the person gets to your website, that's that's up to you. Okay, but search engine optimization is a method of getting more visitors by ranking higher in the search engines. So I hope that explains it. Let's define this more time. Search engine optimization is getting a website to the top of the search engines when people search for your keywords. Okay, or for whatever keywords. If you're doing SEO for somebody else, it would be getting them to the top of the search engines when they search for their keywords or that business as keywords. Like whatever, whatever, right? Search engine optimization is the process of getting websites to the top of the search engines when people search for your keywords. And so the reason you want to do this is because the higher you rank. Okay, now ideally you want to be on page one of the results, right? Because you know how there's like page one, page two, page three, and so on. Ideally you want to be on page one and you want to be at the top of page one. Okay, and the reason you want to do this is so you can get as many visitors as possible because the higher you rank for the most part, the more visitors you will get. Okay, if you are number one, meaning first result on the first page, that's the best position there is, by the way, if you are in the first position, you will get more of it. You probably, you will probably get more visitors. Like look, there's exceptions to almost everything I'm going to tell you. So let's just not concentrate on the exceptions right now. If you are in the first position, you will probably get more visitors than anyone else who ranks for that keyword. Okay, which basically means you're doing as best, as best as is possible to do. Okay, you can't rank higher than the first position in the organic search engine results. By the way, organic search engine results means websites that appear in the search engine results that are not pay per click. Okay, we're going to talk about that in a minute. Anyways, the highest you can rank is number one. Once you get in number one, you will get more visitors than anyone else probably for those keywords. That's the best you can do. So your goal is to rank in the first position for all of your keywords. Your keywords, of course, are the keywords that you want to rank for, which are probably things that your business does, services that you offer, etc. A keyword selection is a different discussion. We'll talk about that later. Okay, so I said pay per click. Let's talk about pay per click. Okay, so there's two ways to get traffic from a search engine. One is to be in the organic results. You do SEO, you get to the top of the search engine results. People find your website and they click on it. That's how you get organic traffic. We call that organic traffic. There's also something called pay per click. You may have heard this PPC ads. These are all the same thing. Okay, just to be clear, ads and pay per click, because they're the same thing are not search engine optimization. So we're only talking about them right now to distinguish them. They are different than search engine optimization. Ads appear at the top of the results and ads worked very differently. Okay, your website will appear in an ad. Every time somebody clicks on it, you have to pay the search engines a little bit of money. Okay, so every time somebody clicks on your site in an ad, you have to pay the search engine because it's an advertising fee. You are advertising. You are paying for that. So anyways, but we're not, we look, my agency doesn't do ads. I don't know very much about ads. I could tell you, you know, basically how they work, but I can't, if you're looking for an ad campaign, go find a different podcast. I don't know. But just, just, let me, let me say one more thing and then we're going to move on. Ads are not search engine optimization. Okay, do not be confused. They are different. Some people will try to confuse you by saying, oh, yeah, we offer search engine optimization and then we'll start talking to you about ads. That person is either confused or misleading you. Okay, there's nothing wrong with doing ads, but ads is not search engine optimization. They are totally unrelated. You can appear in the ads without having good SEO and you can appear in the organic results without doing ads. They are different. Okay, moving on. In order to appear at the top of the search engine results, because that's the goal of SEO. Remember, the goal of SEO, and you might be thinking, you've already told us this like five times. Why are you telling us again? Because you would be surprised how many people don't understand that this is the purpose of search engine optimization. This is the purpose of SEO. People think the purpose of SEO is stuff like user experience or website design or like those are not SEO. Those have nothing to do with SEO. We're going to talk about those in a minute though to maybe clarify some confusion. Okay, so anyways, look, the purpose of SEO is to get to the top of the search engines for your keywords. That is the only purpose of SEO. Okay, and in order to do this, you need to manipulate as well as you can for variables that we're going to talk about right now. So if you've been listening to this podcast for a long time, you probably already know these four things, but if you're a beginner, this will be very helpful for you. And I just want to say this is for normal SEO. This is not for local SEO. You might have searched for something in the past and seen results that appear on a map. Like if you search for something that's like close to you, a business that's close to you or something, you might see results on a map. That is called local SEO. When you are on a map, it is called local SEO and it's different. It has different requirements. We have a different episode that talks about the difference and what those requirements are. I'll put a link in the description. So this is for normal SEO, not map based SEO. So I'm already making a bigger deal out of this than it needs to be. So just forget about the maps for now.
This is just how you rank your website for normal SEO by controlling these four variables. One, avoiding penalties. A penalty in SEO is when you do something that is against the rules. The rules are made by the search engines. Actually, that's all there is to say about that. There are some things you can do that are against the recommendations by the search engines. Usually these penalties happen if it seems like you are trying to manipulate the results. We have another episode that goes into detail on penalties and what they are and how they work and how to avoid them and stuff. I'll put a link in the description because I don't want to bore you by talking about penalties for a while now. Just be aware that I don't want to say it's easy to not get penalties, but you need to be aware that there are SEO penalties. If you get a penalty, what happens is your website will disappear from the first 5, 10, 15, 20 pages. Basically, you won't be found. Getting a penalty is the top priority. There's an episode that explains these penalties and how to avoid them and stuff. This episode is for beginners. I'm not going to spend a while now talking about different penalties and get everybody bored. If you're interested in learning about penalties, listen to this episode. The second thing that you need to rank, the second variable that you can control is content. All content means is what's on your site. Let's keep it simple. This can be pictures and it can be words. Pictures and words. You can put articles on your site. That's words. You can put pictures on your site. That's pictures. I suppose you could have video on your site. You could have music embedded in your site. Let's not worry about those for now. Most websites are words and pictures. Words and pictures. Now, I want to be very clear about something right here. Most of you know what I'm about to say. The beginners will save you years of wasting your time. What I'm about to tell you. There is a belief that somehow having good quality content, by the way, nobody can define what that means. On your site, we'll make you rank higher. It will not. We're not going to get into the reasons why that's the case right now. Let's just accept this as being correct for now. By the way, feel free to try this out on your own and it's see if I'm wrong or not. Just because I tell you something doesn't mean that it's true to the best of my understanding and experience, but that doesn't mean it's true. If you disagree with what I'm saying, try something else and see if it works. You can do anything you want. It's the internet. It's your own website. But anyways, people say that good quality content will make you rank better. It doesn't. The one sentence explanation is that search engines cannot tell the difference between good content and bad content. They cannot tell the difference just from reading it. They have to use other methods that we're going to talk about in a minute. Now that does not mean you should have bad quality content on your site. You should put good quality content on your site because people enjoy quality content. But search engines can't tell the difference. For those of you who are maybe wondering a little bit more about this, you might be thinking, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, how could the search engine determine an account for bias when determining quality of content? That's the right question. They can't, which is just another reason that there's no such thing as good quality content. Some more advanced topic. The third thing you need, the third variable that you need is relevancy. Relevancy just means what is the topic of your website? That's all it means. What is the subject of your site? It's all it means. It's very, very, very easy to get relevancy. All you have to do is post content, so words and pictures about a topic. Super easy. Super website about refrigerators and you want relevancy for refrigerators? Write content about refrigerators. Talk about different types of refrigerators. Where to buy refrigerators. How to fix refrigerators. Any of those, anything about that, that will make you relevant for refrigerators. It's very difficult to not be relevant for the topic you're trying to be relevant for. If you were writing about shoes, you would not be relevant for refrigerators. Your content would be focused on shoes. If you want to be relevant for shoes, write about shoes. If you want to be relevant, do you understand? Does that make sense? It's very, very easy to be relevant for any topic you want. Put content about that topic on your site. Very easy. As you remember from number two, it doesn't even have to be good. As you remember from variable two, it does not even have to be good. It just has to exist. It just has to be relevant. It just has to mention your keywords, basically. Don't think about it like that. Just think about it as publishing content that is about your topic. It's literally all there is to it. Don't overthink it. It's literally that easy. There's another way to get relevancy. We talked about content. There's one more way to get relevancy, which is a little bit more advanced. That is with something called backlinks. A backlink is a link from another website to your website. To be clear, because everyone's in while somebody is uncertain about this, to be very clear, it is from a different website to your website or to a different website. It is not from your website to a different page on your website. It has to come from a different domain. Otherwise, it's called an internal link. If you link to yourself, if you link from one page on your site to a different page on your site, that is an internal link that is not a backlink. A backlink is only from another website to your website or to a separate website. Anyways, this might be a little bit more of an advanced topic, so we're going to do this really quickly. The way to get relevancy with backlinks is with something referred to as anchor text. It's with something referred to as anchor text. An anchor text means whatever the backlink says. If you've ever used the internet, you know that links can be pictures and links can be words. If the link is words, it's whatever the words are. It's whatever the words in the backlink say. If somebody links to you and they use the words dishwasher in the backlink, that's the link you can click on. That's called anchor text. Anchor text would be dishwasher and that's giving you relevancy. That's all we're going to say about that because that's a little bit more of an advanced topic. By the way, listen to the episode about penalties before you use this too much. Number four, the fourth variable that you need to rank is authority. Now, remember we were just talking about backlinks, right? Authority is provided by backlinks. Most websites on the internet have a different level of authority. To be clear, this level of authority is private. The only people who know what this level of authority is are the search engines and it's private so they won't tell you you can't find out. Back in the day, you could find out but then they made it private so you can't find out anymore. Most websites on the internet have a differing level of authority. It's a scale that goes from zero to, you know what, it doesn't matter. It's just a scale. You don't need to worry about it. You just need to, because remember this is SEO for beginners, you only need to worry about the fact that it exists. You just need to know that almost every website on the internet has a different level of authority. Whenever a website links to you with a backlink and you know what that means because we just defined it, okay? Whenever a website links, it's a link from another website to your website. Whenever somebody links to you with a backlink, they are providing you a bit of authority. Now the more authority that website has that links to you, the more authority you get with a backlink, does that make sense? A website with more authority that links to you will provide you a higher level of authority than a website with less authority. That doesn't mean the ones with less authority are bad. It just means it's not as much. So you might be thinking to yourself and you'd be correct, hey, grumpy SEO guy, this all sounds really easy except that authority part. Yes. You are understanding correctly. Look, most of SEO is very simple. The concept is very simple. It's not complicated. People make it complicated and they make up all this nonsense. I don't know why, honestly, I don't know why. It's very simple. The hardest part of SEO, the hardest part of SEO is getting authority, okay? You're absolutely right because you're probably thinking to yourself right now, hey, grumpy SEO guy, how do I get other websites to link to me? I understand that authority is important. That sounds really important. How do I get other websites to link to me? Yes. That is the hardest part of SEO, the majority of your energy that you spend doing SEO will be getting authority, whether that's trying to get backlinks from other people or building them yourself. Look, this is. SEO for beginners. So we're not going to go any further than this right now. But there are four ways to get backlinks. And we have more than a single episode that explain in detail the four ways to get backlinks. Okay. So there are four ways to get back. I'll put links to those in the description. So if you're curious, they will answer your questions about how to do it because there's four ways to do it. It's simple, but it's not easy, but there's four ways to do it. Okay. We'll put links in the description. So anyways, let's go over those four things again. One, don't get a penalty. Okay. Don't get a penalty. Two, have content on your site, but it doesn't matter if it's the content self doesn't really matter. It simply has to be there. Three, you need relevancy. Okay. And four, you need authority. If you understand those four things, you know more than most people. So I said a while ago in this podcast that that will save you years of wasting your time. A lot of people go down the wrong path and then they go down a different wrong path. Anyways, so we've defined SEO. It's the process of getting a website to the top of the search engines, right? Why? Why? Because when you rank in the first position, you get the most visitors possible for that keyword. That's the goal. The goal of having a website is to get viewers and one way to get viewers is by ranking high and getting as many visitors as you can organically, which means from the search engines, but not from ads. Okay. You know that because we defined it. Okay. So we defined it. We explained why you want to do it, which is to get as many viewers as possible. And we define the four variables that you need to use in order to get there. Don't get a penalty. Number one, content, number two, relevancy and authority. Okay. So. And we define what backlinks mean because backlinks are very important. A backlink is a link from another domain to your domain. Okay. And we defined anchor text, which is the words in a backlink, which is a little bit more of an advanced topic. So you actually don't need to worry about that for right now, but I wanted to define it anyway. And we defined ads or paper click and how it is different from SEO. Now let's really quickly end this one. Let's talk about some things that are not SEO because for some reason everybody gets this wrong and I don't know why. Actually, I do know why, but I really don't want to get into it right now. So. Okay. Look. So one of the things that this is, this is still for beginners, but this is like a little bit further than being a beginner right now. So one of the terms that you will learn as you progress in your SEO knowledge is the term ranking factor. Okay. Ranking factor. What is a ranking factor? A ranking factor is anything that affects where you rank. Okay. So if something will help you rank higher, it's a ranking factor. If something does not help you rank higher, it is not a ranking factor. So as somebody doing SEO, your job is to focus on ranking factors. Okay. Your job is to focus on ranking factors, meaning things that will determine where you rank or if you rank or how you rank. Okay. So let's say there's a whole collection of things that are considered ranking factors and whole collection of things that are not ranking factors. You're going to ignore the things that are not ranking factors because they will not help you to meet your goal of getting the website to the top of the search engines. So we just talked about, we actually just talked about things that are ranking factors, right? Like penalties or avoiding penalties is a ranking factor because if you get a penalty, your website position will decrease a lot. So not getting a penalty or getting a penalty, depending on how you look at it, is a ranking factor. Okay. Content is a ranking factor because you need content to create relevancy. Relevancy is a ranking factor. Authority is a ranking factor, which means backlinks are a ranking factor. These things all have an effect on how you rank. Okay. They all have an effect on your position in which you rank in the results. Okay. Those are ranking factors. Let's talk about things because I'm pretty certain you will hear about these other things. Let's talk about things that are not ranking factors. So what this means as, as somebody who is performing SEO, you can disregard all of the things I'm about to tell you because they are not ranking factors. Okay. Website design is not a ranking factor. Okay. And the short explanation for this is, well, there is no short explanation. It's just, it's not, it's sorry, bad definition. It's not, it's not a ranking factor. There is no way that you can build your website that will make it rank higher. Okay. So let's just leave it at that because this is for beginners. Okay. UX user experience is not a ranking factor. Okay. If people have a good time on your site, if they have a bad time on your site, it doesn't matter. If they can easily find things, if they can't easily find things, doesn't matter. These things are not ranking factors. Okay. Site loading speed. Okay. Site loading speed is often not a ranking factor. If your website is really, really taking a while to load, like if it takes like a minute to load, okay, that might negatively affect you. Okay. But if it takes four seconds to load and you make some changes to the code and how it takes only three seconds to load, it's not going to make a difference. Okay. Like it's, it's not, it's not, people, people focus too much on this for some reason. And, and that's the topic that might get discussed at the end here. But, anyways, people, folks on it, I want you to understand you don't need to focus on site loading speed. It's not really a ranking factor. Okay. There's something called dwell time. Okay. Dwell time means how long does a visitor stay on the page? Okay. They find your site in the results or wherever. They click on it. How much time do they spend on your site? That's dwell time. Not a ranking factor. We have an entire other episode that that shares why dwell time cannot possibly be a ranking factor. Okay. So, I'll put a link to that one in the description. Maybe dwell time is not a ranking factor. Okay. As you know, writing content that's really good quality is not a ranking factor. Okay. I can't think of any more right now, but there's a lot more. There's a lot of things that people say are ranking factors that are not ranking factors. And, it's very frustrating if you're trying to learn SEO to get all this advice that isn't going to help you. Because, here's, here's a thing. Sometimes beginners will, they build a website and it's not ranking for anything. Oh, it's not ranking. Oh, no, what do I do? And then they, they look up online and they they talk to somebody or whatever. They find an article and says, "Oh, do this and do this." And, you know, regularly it says, "Right, really good content and you will rank better." But that doesn't work. And then they spend months writing better content and they still don't rank any higher. Well, that's because your content quality is not a ranking factor. Okay. And then they say, "Oh, well, you know, if you improve, if you improve the website design, you will rank higher." No, you won't because website design is not a ranking factor. Or, "Well, if you improve user experience, no, because user experience is not a ranking factor." You will learn that much of what people say is SEO is actually not SEO. They will give you advice that doesn't work. They will say things that won't help you. They are not ranking factors. And, and this brings me to one more thing and I cannot believe I did not say this at the beginning of the episode because this is like the second most important thing you need to know. So my apologies for not putting this in the beginning. Okay. So, let's let's take a step back here for a second. What's the purpose of SEO? We're just talking about it like five times, right? Getting websites at the top of the search engines. Okay. How do you check your progress? How do you check your, how do you know if you're doing good SEO? Okay. You use something. This is, and this is, this is just my recommendation. I don't get paid for this, but you need to do something like this. You need to use a tool that's called a SERP. By the way, SERP is a word. It's S-E-R-P. It's answer search engine results pages. It just means what position are you in? It's literally all it means. It means what position does your website show up in the search results? That's literally all it means. You need to use a tool called a SERP tracker. Okay. Serp tracker is a tool that every day will search the search engines for your keywords and see where you rank and then it will create a chart so that you can look at this chart just like a stock chart. You can look at a stock chart and see if the price of the stock is getting higher or lower every day. And you can tell how the stock is doing. You can look at this chart and see is your position increasing or decreasing every day. That's how you track your progress. That is the only way to track your progress. And there are probably dozens of SERP trackers that exist. I don't care which one you use. Literally go search for SERP tracker, find one that's free or affordable and use that one. We use one called SERP Fox. That's SERP, like the word I just told you, and then FOX SERP Fox, S-E-R-P-F-O-X, dot com. We've been using them for over a decade. They're great. I don't get any kind of commission for referring them. Okay. I'm just telling you to use them because they're great and the first 10 keywords are free anyway. So there's you should be tracking your SERPs right now because the first 10 keywords are free. Okay. So anyways, that's how you do SEO and that's how you check your results. Okay. That's everything a beginner needs to know. So if you're a beginner and this is helpful, let me know and let me know what the next topic now that you're graduating out of the beginner stage. Let me know what the next topic that you want to learn about is and I will either tell you what episode to listen to or I will make a new episode.
on that topic. But I wanted to record this episode for people who are just starting out. I hope it was helpful. Let me know a question to you. Oh, I mentioned this on Reddit recently, but I was interviewed a number of weeks ago on a podcast called on the Content Manager podcast. And so the interview lasts about 40 minutes, and if you want to listen, I will put a link in the description. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe. And if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review. It would really help the show out. I hope this episode was helpful. If you have any questions or want to suggest a subject for a future episode, you can contact me on Reddit. My username is Grumpy SEO Guy. You can visit the Grumpy SEO Guy sub-reddit, or you can email me at
[email protected]. If you email me, please either whitelist my email address or check your junk folders because I've been told that my replies are going into the junk folder. And it's probably because we're talking about things like SEO and backlinks. And I think those words will classify an email as spam. And if you want to support the podcast, because it's the best source of SEO information on the planet, and it's free, you can do so at patreon.com/grumpyseoguy. And I will talk to you later. Join us next Wednesday for another episode.
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