A SEO Blog By TJ Liebgott
Today I got a gig to optimize the speed for a clients website which is hosted on Godaddy. I have 2 domains through them since they are pretty cheap, but have never hosted anything though their hosting accounts and after today, I never will.
Today launched the first day of Search Marketing Expo in Silicon Valley and one of the early topics of discussion was Voice Search with Google Engineering Director Behshad Behzadi. We know that mobile search is on the rise and more and more of those searches are being done through voice recognition than conventional keyboards each day, but does that matter to SEO specialists and Digital Marketers or is it just something for Google to worry about?
Can we finally get rid of the www?
My day job is in corporate advertising doing television and radio ads. When working on a 30 second ad, a lot of the time the copy is too long and you need to make cuts and edits. In the mid 2000’s whenever we worked on an advertisement that had a website in it and needed to make such cuts, I would always suggest dropping the HTTP from the commercial to save some time. Unfortunately most of the time there would be an older client that didn’t quite understand the Internet and would want to keep the HTTP thinking no one would understand it was a website without it.
Of course now in 2016 people have long lost and forgotten the HTTP prefix. When was the last time you heard it or typed it in yourself?
Start your content with getting directly to the point. (See what I did there? No intro.)
No one wants to read through 3 paragraphs of text to find the information they came to your site for. That’s why Google snippets work so well. A user needs information, Googles it and get’s direct feedback to their query. If you are writing intros about your subject and lot’s of flowery text, stop doing so immediately. Visitors that have to scan to hard through your content in order to retrieve the information they need will quickly leave your site for a competitor. There is nothing worse than skimming through an article to find the information you want/need at the very end.
Whenever I discuss my website’s with friends the topic of money inevitably comes up. I make a few bucks a month running a series of nice flash game websites and after learning this, I can see the gears moving in my friends heads.
“How can I make money off a website” they always say.
The answer I give them is that it’s not an easy road to success. They believe that anyone can create a website, attract traffic and thus make money, but it’s never that easy. It takes a lot of time and work to build an audience for your website and unless you are offering something no one else is or have some kind of differential, odds are you won’t succeed.
What I do suggest, if they are serious, is to start a website that aligns with their interests or hobbies. That way regardless of if they make money or not off their site they will have a sense of satisfaction doing what they love.
The hardest part of online marketing is running out of steam. If you don’t have passion attached to your project, it will inevitably happen when you start hitting those growth humps. If it’s a project you are passionate about, you will not care as much about the road blocks and will push through. If you end up gaining an audience and creating cash flow it will only further your passion.
The other aspect with passion projects is your end goal to make a website successful is to become an authority in your topic. If you have a great love and passion for model trains and create a website on that topic, it’s only a matter of time before you will become an authority in that realm. It’s much easier to succeed when you do something you love.
On the flip side, if your website never makes a cent, you will still have the satisfaction of running a website about a topic you are passionate about.
Passion breeds success.
Passion breeds followers.
Passion breeds greatness.
The money will follow.
I’ve seen it a thousand times in this industry. A job posting on a client that states “I want to be on page 1 of Google”.
Don’t we all!
The problem they don’t realize is what that takes. If your content sucks (which most likely it does) all the SEO and SEM’s in the world wouldn’t be able to bring that website to page 1 in Google.
What the client doesn’t realize is that it’s THEIR CONTENT that’s usually holding them back. Not your SEO talents. The average person doesn’t need or want yet another website on Air Conditioning. Unless you have something that set’s you apart from the pack, SEO might help you a little, but will rarely result in page 1 without the content to back it up.
Ok. That’s a little over dramatic. SEO isn’t dead, but conventional SEO thinking is and here’s why.
SEO in the past meant trying to “fool” search engine’s into thinking your content was more relevant than it really is. A lot of them involved Black Hat SEO tactics like cloaking, spam and keyword stuffing. Google has over the years put a stop to these tactics, but scarily enough a lot of bad SEO people still use these techniques.