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#ContentWritingChat February 9 2016 Recap: SEO in 2016 and Beyond with Jeff Deutsch

December 31, 2020February 12, 2016 by Rachel Moffett

Rachel is our team Social Media Specialist. If you missed this week’s #ContentWritingChat, you’re in luck! We have rounded-up some of the best tweets from our chat on Tuesday, February 9th at 10 AM CST. Ready to dive in and learn more about SEO? Keep reading! #ContentWritingChat February 9 2016 Recap: SEO in 2016 and Beyond with Jeff Deutsch Join us Tuesday, February 9th at 10 AM CST for another #ContentWritingChat! Guest host: @jgdeutsch! pic.twitter.com/GGILjEbURu — Express Writers (@ExpWriters) February 2, 2016 Our guest host this week was Jeff Deutsch. Jeff is the VP of Marketing for Ptengine and a contributor to Inbound.org. (Check out the post where he got famous: Confessions of a Google Spammer.) Jeff is super knowledgeable in SEO. He joined our chat to share his expertise on the best SEO practices you should be using. We were so excited to have him joining us! Q1: How would you describe the process of SEO (in your own words)? #ContentWritingChat pic.twitter.com/YbhrZiOT2E — ContentWritingChat (@writingchat) February 9, 2016 A1: Convincing search engine algorithms that your content is the most relevant and authoritative on the subject (1/2) #ContentWritingChat — Jeff Deutsch (@jgdeutsch) February 9, 2016 A1: BUT Google’s algorithms are trying to become as good as an expert human on the subject. So write for humans! (2/2) #ContentWritingChat — Jeff Deutsch (@jgdeutsch) February 9, 2016 A1 Optimizing your online content for the human-robot-search-engine that Google has become. #ContentWritingChat — Julia McCoy (@JuliaEMcCoy) February 9, 2016 As Jeff and our CEO, Julia, pointed out, SEO is about optimizing your content for search engines. You want Google to view your content as relevant and authoritative in order to rank higher in search results. Jeff also gives us a very important reminder about making sure you’re writing for humans. Google’s algorithms keep getting better and better and you want to keep up – and this is a key way. Q2: What are some key ways to gain better Google rankings? #ContentWritingChat pic.twitter.com/rLlzKm7CbT — ContentWritingChat (@writingchat) February 9, 2016 A2: ROI-focused keyword research. Most SEOs just look for keywords with huge search volume. That’s not enough. #ContentWritingChat. — Jeff Deutsch (@jgdeutsch) February 9, 2016 A2: Pick the right keywords to describe your content. Make sure keywords are in your title, content, alt-tags, etc. #ContentWritingChat — Kavita Chintapalli (@kavita1010) February 9, 2016 A2: Is your website optimized beyond keywords in the page title, body copy, etc. Think site speed & mobile. #contentwritingchat — Netvantage Marketing (@netvantage) February 9, 2016 Kavita mentioned the importance of keywords in her answer. Make sure you’re selecting the right keywords for your content. Use keywords that people are actually searching for so you can reach them. Include keywords in your post title, throughout your content, and in the alt tags for your images. Don’t forget to think beyond keywords, too. Netvantage brings up a great point about making sure your website is optimized. Google favors websites that are mobile-friendly and have quick loading times. If it wasn’t already obvious by the answers from Jeff, Kavita, and Netvantage Marketing, picking the right keywords is essential! You want to target the keywords your audience is actually searching, otherwise you cannot expect them to find your content. Kavita added a great tip which is to make sure you’re including your focus keyword in your post title, throughout the post itself, and in the alt tags for your images. Very important! However, don’t forget to think beyond keywords. Netvantage Marketing reminds us the importance of having an optimized website. Google favors websites that are mobile-friendly and ranks them higher in search results. You also want to have faster page-loading times because that’s a good thing to Google! Q3: Describe good standards for SEO content in today and the future. #ContentWritingChat pic.twitter.com/5uKTLzQOHL — ContentWritingChat (@writingchat) February 9, 2016 Q3: Make your content relevant AND authoritative. Ask yourself, “Would an expert on this subject link to this?” #ContentWritingChat — Jeff Deutsch (@jgdeutsch) February 9, 2016 A3: Informative & engaging copy that answers users questions. Establish yourself as an authoritative & expert source. #ContentWritingChat — Ryan Clutter (@Ryan1SEO) February 9, 2016 What are some good standards for SEO content? Follow the advice from Jeff and Ryan and make sure all of your content is relevant and authoritative. High-quality content is key first and foremost! Try asking yourself Jeff’s question the next time you’re writing, “Would an expert on this subject link to this?” If not, you might want to step it up! Q4: How does SEO fit into “storytelling” content and why is it important? #ContentWritingChat pic.twitter.com/MPxzMnkK86 — ContentWritingChat (@writingchat) February 9, 2016 A4: Storytelling connects the reader to you emotionally and makes her support you–and willing to share your content. #ContentWritingChat — Jeff Deutsch (@jgdeutsch) February 9, 2016 A4 Storytelling is MEMORABLE. We remember, share, identify w/ a good story. Storytelling = future of good SEO content #ContentWritingChat — Julia McCoy (@JuliaEMcCoy) February 9, 2016 Jeff and Julia provided great answers for this question! Storytelling is important for building a connection between you and your reader. That kind of connection is memorable to your readers and is going to make them want to share your work. Focus on building a stronger relationship with your readers to grow your brand. Q5: What are ways to earn links naturally for SEO? #ContentWritingChat pic.twitter.com/mdzwS4jWVY — ContentWritingChat (@writingchat) February 9, 2016 A5: Build a BRAND. Be known as “that guy” or “that woman.” This will build you a following that will share your content. #ContentWritingChat — Jeff Deutsch (@jgdeutsch) February 9, 2016 A5: Compelling content MIGHT earn some links on its own but w/o manual promotion you’re leaving links on the table (1/2) #contentwritingchat — Andrew Dennis (@AndrewDennis33) February 9, 2016 A5: If you’re investing time & effort into creating great content, you should put equal effort into promotion (2/2) #contentwritingchat — Andrew Dennis (@AndrewDennis33) February 9, 2016 To naturally earn links for SEO, focus on providing quality content for your audience. When you create valuable content for your audience, they’ll want … Read more

The SEO Basics of 2015 (It’s Hard, Here’s How You Win) Q&A With Jeff Deutsch

December 31, 2020August 25, 2015 by Jeff Deutsch

We sat down – virtually, of course – with acclaimed author and SEO marketer Jeff Deutsch, author of the viral Inbound post Confessions of a Google Spammer (which hit over 160,000 views and 90k+ Facebook shares). He gave us some awesome, original insights on SEO basics for current marketers in 2015 (and beyond). It’s a read any online marketer should take the time to make. Tell us a little about how and why you got started in SEO. I’ve always dreamed of changing the world through mind control. As an introvert, SEO seemed like the best way to approach it. I probably got the dream from my dad. He was a pretty prolific writer. When I was 8 years old, he taught me how to hypnotize people. He used to proudly tell me stories about how, in college at Columbia in the 1950s, he would make his (pretty, female) subjects regress to memories from the womb—and beyond. I thought that was pretty cool. In college, I majored in political science. Because I thought they were going to teach me how to do mind control on a mass scale. (Spoiler alert: They didn’t.) So I tried doing it on my own. My first experiment came in 2003. At the time, the debate was raging on the need for war in Iraq. I was fervently against it. I had carefully collated all the projections on how many lives would be lost and money spent. Then I put up a website with the facts. Then I advertised the website by stapling and taping hundreds of bright lemon yellow flyers all over the conservative, war-hungry streets of New Orleans. The next day, I saw most of my flyers had been torn down during the night. My anti-war website got no traffic. That was the first time it dawned on me how important it is to have a reliable source of traffic that other people can’t easily take down. I wish I could say I started doing SEO back then, because man! It was easy back then. Unfortunately, I only started to figure it out in 2008, when I was doing marketing for a company in Beijing that had virtually no budget. By 2010, I had started my own little SEO company in Plainsboro, New Jersey, in an attempt to escape the Beijing pollution and relocate myself and my then-pregnant wife to the U.S. The relocation failed, but the SEO succeeded in a big way. How big have SEO basics changed since the day you started out in SEO compared to today? Nowadays, it takes a LOT more money, charisma, or tech skills to start an SEO agency. Today’s SEO basics are a lot different that yesterday’s. Back in 2010, anyone with limited tech skills and the right cheat-sheet could easily start a successful SEO agency on a $1200 budget. I even wrote a post about it on backlinksforum.com if you want to know the details. But the basic concept was building parasite backlinks using spun content and force indexing them. If you don’t recognize those terms, never mind. They’re not going to help with SEO for the big money keywords these days anyway. However, I talked to some guys at one SEO agency at Opticon and according to them—amazingly—these methods STILL work for very low competition keywords. They use them to rank for reputation management clients’ names. But they are the exception to the rule. Most successful agencies these days have the money, charisma, or tech skills to have a comparative advantage over you and me. They gobble up all the keywords (and clients… and money…) by combining that advantage with the scaling power of automation and social media to force the Gini coefficient of SEO ever upwards closer to 1.0. Money SEO agencies These guys just buy links on high PR guest blogs like HuffingtonPost, or buy whole sites on Flippa to turn into pumpers or feeders, or pay to build a big ole PBN. They have the resources to reverse engineer their competitors’ backlink profiles and outbid them on quality link placement. Profile: Think in-house link buyers for online casinos. Zodiac sign: Taurus. Star Wars equivalent: Think Senator Lott Dod, Minister of the Trade Federation. D&D counterpart: A NEUTRAL EVIL human rogue. Charisma SEO Agencies These people know how to network, be popular and get tight with high traffic sites. And get them to link to their creative content. Which they know people will like because they extrovertedly talk talk talk to everyone. Profile: Think inbound marketers like Dharmesh Shah, Neil Patel, Joel Klettke. Zodiac sign: Libra. Star Wars equivalent: Queen Padmé Amidala. D&D counterpart: A LAWFUL GOOD half-elf bard. Tech Skill SEO Agencies These folks know how to automate outreach and find loopholes to rank and bank. Mostly these guys are pretty agnostic about the method, and only care about the result, so it’s hard to label them “white hat” or “black hat.” If, for example, they develop a WP plugin that gets them cloaked links, and they only rank reputable sites, who are they hurting really? Or maybe they develop the scripts to find high value expired domains with aged backlinks to build PBNs or 3BNs. The main thing is that they are mavericks who zig when everyone else zags, and they almost assuredly rock the pants off PHP, Python, Ruby, or all three. Profile: Think Justin Mares from ProgrammingForMarketers.com and any SEOs on StackExchange.com. Zodiac sign: Aquarius. Star Wars equivalent: Han Solo. D&D counterpart: A CHAOTIC NEUTRAL halfling swashbuckler. By the way, as you can see from my $1200 guide above, back in 2010 people like me used to hand out actionable, effective SEO basics advice on forums for free all the time. Those days are over. Nobody does that anymore for The Three Reasons People Don’t Publicly Share Effective SEO Tactics Anymore. The Three Reasons People Don’t Publicly Share Effective SEO Tactics Anymore Google’s anti-spam team reads the forums to find and close loopholes the way agents in the … Read more

9 Lies SEO’s Are Still Telling Themselves

January 1, 2021July 21, 2015 by Josh McCoy

Joshua McCoy is our company COO and our all-around developer and web guru. Read more on the About page. Did you hear about this story yet? Chances are, if you’ve made any kind of rounds on the internet, you already have. After years of being a massively successful link builder who made upwards of $50,000 each month by spamming Google, marketer Jeff Deutsch realized that he was building homes on the dark side of the moon. I started out in SEO around 2010, and although many marketers around me did, I never followed suit and went the black hat way. I stayed white hat and inbound marketing friendly ever since I started out (which is why my role at our content agency, Express Writers, fits me perfectly). Yet, I know enough of the “dark” realms to have major respect for someone like Jeff telling his past as a black hat this transparently. The iconic image below was all too perfect for the crazy tale that subsequently fetched 150,000 views and over 94,000 shares alone on Facebook. He didn’t quit black hat SEO because the income wasn’t good or the lifestyle pleasant (quite the opposite, as Jeff details). It was because the SEO model he had created was impossible to maintain in the face of increased awareness about link builders and aggressive Google programs like Panda and Penguin. In Deutsch’s powerful confession piece, “Confessions of a Google Spammer,” the author chronicles his rise and subsequent downfall as a black hat link-builder. He transparently allows readers see the ugly truth of how the life of a professional, black hat SEO can quickly spiral out of control, becoming a merciless and often empty money-machine that leaves the spammer devoid of real skills or knowledge of white hat tactics. When his link-building business begins to fail, Deutsch becomes anxious and addicted and realizes that he is ill suited to survive in the post-de-indexing world. After a hellish 18 months, he finally realizes that to be truly white hat, he needs to cross over into the world of inbound marketing and high-quality content instead of continuing to run on the “anxiety-inducing treadmill of using black hat SEO to get traffic.” Although this story may seem anecdotal, it is more than just a come-to-SEO-Jesus moment. 9 Lies SEO Marketers Like To Tell Themselves (And Stay Comforted In Their Sleep) This story is a perfect example of how SEO’s often tell themselves things that involve the following nine lies, which lead not only to their personal downfalls, but also to the mucking-up of the entire SEO industry. 1) My latest hack will fall below Google’s radar yet again Although there are loopholes in every system, Google is a particularly good one and with developments in de-indexing as well as programs like Panda and Penguin, it’s highly unlikely that a hack will evade Google’s radar for long. What’s more, once Google catches on, there is a solid chance that the hacker is in for a rapid de-escalation of lifestyle like the one Detusch experienced after his $100,000 per month business was lost to de-indexing. 2) Those tiered links won’t get figured out anytime soon Since tiered link building is a decidedly black hat technique and search engines are on a mission to destroy black hat techniques, it’s a safe bet that tiered links won’t work the way SEO’s want them to. Google’s algorithm relies on at least 200 ranking factors arranged in order of their impact on total rank with contextual links being the crème de la crème of the linking world. Not only does tiered linking not work but it is likely to be found out due to the fact that a large number of low-quality links throws out a huge number of negative metrics, which acts as a footprint for Google’s spam filters, which are now built specifically to obliterate spam-filled tiered links. 3) My pyramid linking scheme still works Pyramid linking is a risky business and since it is so intrinsically reliant upon wobbly pillars like tiered links and ongoing hacks, it is liable to crumble and, when it does, the SEO is in deep trouble. Once again, one needs only to turn to Deutsch’s article for an example of this. After the Authority Link Network began to crumble, Deutsch found himself in the position of watching his clients loose their clients and so on and so forth. Although a pyramid seems like it might touch the sky, there is no way for the top to stay intact when the bottom begins to crumble. 4) I can post crappy content that a $5 Fiverr gig author wrote Content is king, as it turns out, and there’s really no way to get around this fact. Nowadays, crappy content sticks out like a sore thumb and Google doesn’t appreciate spammers who add millions of words of spam to its index. As a result, there have been several updates to the system that are designed specifically to target cheap, spammy content. With increasing focus on high-quality content and strong, white-hat links, it’s gotten harder and harder for crappy content to rise through the ranks. 5) I still think I can succeed with .gov links Links are an important topic to white- and black-hat SEO’s alike but the essential difference lies in the type of link being used. Links can either help or hurt SEO or simply be ignored altogether by search engines. .Gov links happen to fall into the latter camp. White certain types of .gov links can be beneficial to SEO ranking, they do not often rank as high as other types of links. The reason for this is that, historically, black hat SEO’s have used .gov and .edu links to lend false authority to their spammy content and, like it always does, Google caught on. 6) My article spinner isn’t broken Simply put, article spinning is poor form for any SEO and, as search engines continue to evolve, the use of article spinning software continues to become a worse idea. One … Read more