All right, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Stukent Expert Session webinar series. We are extremely privileged, extremely lucky today to have the one and only Dwayne Forrester from Bing. He is currently the Senior Product Manager with their Webmaster program.
He's also one of the very first SEOs hired. by a search engine, which is actually really cool. His work has been featured in all of the top publications, New York Times, Forbes, Entrepreneur.
And we're excited to have someone like Dwayne with us today to teach us more about the principles of search engine optimization. He's going to go a little bit further into some of his past experiences and what he's up to at the moment. But we're excited to have Dwayne with us today. And I'm going to turn the time over to you, Dwayne. Awesome.
Thank you so much, Trevor. I really appreciate the opportunity to come in here and speak with everyone today. I'm going to run through a slide deck for everyone during this session. And we've got a couple of questions that came in ahead of the recording.
So we'll get to those at the end. Obviously, if folks feel the need. either while we're watching this or after they watch this to reach out there'll be ways that uh... they'd be able to track me down if you need to but uh...
pretty excited about it i want to get into this because there are about thirty slides to go through so all kinds of useful information tips tricks and tools now let's start us off a little bit about who your speaker is today that'd be me uh... i've written two books uh... how to make money with your blog and turn clicks into customers both have to do with digital marketing If you need to get a hold of me, the quickest and easiest way, at Duane Forster on Twitter.
As was said, I do help run the Webmaster Tools program here at Bing. Probably back in 2012, so a couple years ago now, we relaunched the tools, made them bigger, badder, faster, much more useful. If you have any type of website, I highly recommend you check out the Bing Webmaster Tools as well as our counterparts tools over at Google.
It's really important that you see the data that either of the search engines is willing to share with you. That's trustworthy data and you want to make sure you have it. That said, our tools are better. You'll see for yourself.
So there you go. I've been doing actual in-house work for about 15 years now. I used to be an in-house STO. I ran SEO over at MSN for about four and a half years there.
Then I moved over to the search engine. Along the way, I've helped companies like Disney Gap. Walmart, General Motors, you name it. If you need to get a hold of me, you can connect on LinkedIn if you like. And I actually go hands-on with this stuff.
It's not theoretical for me. I've been blogging since about the turn of the century. I own 150 plus domains currently.
I've got a half a dozen of my own websites that are active and monetized. So I live this stuff. This is very much what I do on a day-by-day basis, in addition, obviously, to my job. So...
That's a little bit about me, now let's get into why we're actually here today. So it's important that everyone understands what SEO actually is and where it fits into the broader scope of work to be done marketing any business, whether it's a bricks and mortar business or an online business. And SEO is simply a tactic, it is a marketing tool like many others, social, email, paid search, paid social, all of these things can be leveraged to grow.
great effect. SEO tends to be a little more of an art. That's why we're going to focus on it here. Paid search, very easy to manage.
Time consuming, but there's a science to it and you can get very good at it and it can become very useful for driving conversions for you. On the organic side of things, the conversation that happens with the consumer is built more while they're in their research phase as opposed to their purchase phase. So we're going to take a quick test of that. When people go looking for products and you'll see this, I'll explain what this is, but you'll see this pattern come up when you get into what's known as the conversion funnel.
Now, as they start into this conversion funnel, what happens is people will literally start talking in the plural sense. They will search on digital cameras. They're in a research phase at that point. When they've completed their research, they don't announce they've completed their research.
They simply start using different phrases when they search and that's your clue. When you go into the keyword research portion of things, you'll start to be able to see that. The reality is they'll go from using plurals like.
digital cameras to singulars such as digital camera because when they are going to make their purchase, they are only purchasing one camera. They are not purchasing multiples but their research took them from the broad notion of I want a new camera to I want a specific camera and then they start narrowing down even further to make and model. So you can see all of that as you look through keyword research. As a result, that information can be. applied across a paid search campaign or an organic search campaign.
Now, just a quick overview of what we're looking at here, generally what a web page looks like. This is the general layout of a typical, what we call a SERP, or a search engine results page in the Bing environment. The areas that are in orange, these are paid ads. So people pay to have those put in that location. It's an auction-based system.
So loosely, The higher you bid, the higher the ad goes. There's a little more to it than that, but that's a good general correlation. The green area that you see outlined, that's the purely organic space.
That's what we're trying to optimize to get a result in there for. And we will pull in images, we will pull in videos, we will pull in actual web pages as well. And then just below that, we may opt to show shopping examples, where you would literally be able to click on something and say, I can buy from that retailer right now.
All of these, this is a general overview. Anytime you come in, you may see variations of this. You may not see shopping in this location.
Shopping may move to the right hand side and push the ads down. We may try other things in there. It is always an experiment that we are running. Every day, all of our pages are constantly under experimentation.
That helps us better serve the searcher and give them the right answers, but it also means that if you watch this stuff carefully, you will see a lot of variation happen. Now, SEO is literally the process of improving a website to make it more relevant to searchers and search engines. At its very core, SEO is about usability.
It is about building a better product. That's the main focus of it. It is not fast, it is not guaranteed, it is not once and done, and it is by no means free. It takes a lot of time to accomplish this work.
So it's very important that you have a clear understanding of what you're trying to accomplish with this. Search engine optimization should be focused on building a better product for the visitor coming to the website, for the searcher looking for you, and for the human being exploring your content, trying to find the answer to the question they asked when they started their search. That is fundamental. If you start thinking of SEO purely as how many characters do I put in my title tag, how many characters do I put in my meta description, how do I alter my H1 tag to make my rank better and more relevant?
you're starting to think down the wrong path. Those things are important, and we will get to them in the technical section, but there's so much more to this that you need to focus on first and foremost. All right.
Now, hopefully, you guys have come across this at some point. If not, it's a heat map. It's a pretty standard thing. And what this one is showing is essentially where people have looked.
This is an eye-tracking study that was done, as well as the Xs in here represent where people have clicked. So, you put this in front of a few thousand people and you start to see a generalized map of what people are looking at when they see a page. This is very important. On the surface, it may be convenient to say something like, well, not surprised to see the big red blotch in the top left corner. Most people in North America understand that you read top left to right and then down the page.
However, what you start to see is people are going less across and more down. So, search has actually trained consumer behavior to be different than if you were reading a book. If you were reading a book, you would go left to right, move down a line left to right and so on.
Computers, on the other hand, and specifically search results pages have taught people that the data you're looking for may not be to your right, it may be below. And the pattern of behavior we see is that people look down. This is why it's so important. This is why people want to rank highly for something. because it's obvious that you will be able to catch their eye.
A couple of other things that are of note with this. First, and you'll see this in your own behavior, we do not, as human beings, we do not read search results pages. We scan them.
That's why the keywords that you enter in when you do a query on a search engine are shown in bold on the page. They're done that way so they stand out, obviously, and attract your attention. That helps you understand that the item you're scanning is relevant to the topic you asked about. That's a very important thing.
It's one of the psychographic signals that can be useful in helping get the searcher to take the call to action you're putting in front of them. Now, in this example, what you will see are these X's that are dotted all around there. And what's really fascinating with those X's is those X's represent a number of clicks that people have had. You can see off on the right-hand side here, I think the number is like 2,071, 2,030.
People were clicking in this wide-open area where there's nothing on the page, just randomly clicking, and not a few people. We're talking a couple thousand instances of people clicking during the test in a wide-open space. That can give you some understanding then of relatively the level of savviness the person that you are interacting with has.
We're looking at a couple of thousand people during this test who had no idea that the open white space if you clicked on it would give you nothing. A lot of people today really understand that. They know most of the things on the webpage are not going to be clickable.
Things that are underlined maybe in blue that look like what we would classify as a link today. You know what? If you click on that, you'll go somewhere else. I understand that intrinsically.
You understand that intrinsically. There are still a lot of people who do not. It's important to understand that because as you do things like invest in your usability, it will bear out the work you're doing.
It will become obvious why the value is in doing that work. These learnings will come forward and help you build a better product. Wow. 12 things to know about SEO.
I'm not going to go through everything on this. You guys can take a look at this. You're going to be able to rewind this event and just go back and look at it and take screenshots and do whatever you want with it.
But this was a handy little cheat sheet. You need to set expectations around SEO. It is not an overnight success.
Those days, long behind us. You are not going to see them again. That's the reality.
Today, you actually have to think of it as investing, as wealth building. It takes time. It happens over time. you select the right path you invest in the right direction and you move forward that's the critical point here into research targeted keywords don't be guessing at this crap use keyword research tools that are out there google has some bing has some whether it's in our bing ads program or inside bing webmaster tools these keyword research tools are available and they're free and they give you data directly from the search engine there are plenty of other tools out there third-party tools are available most of them somewhat accurate data, reasonably accurate data, but the fact of the matter is none of them have data directly from the search engine. So with that in mind it pays to use a few different sources, make sure that the trend that you see is generally accurate.
But that keyword research is going to help you a whole whole lot. I ran into a situation when I was working at MSN where I had an editor ask me, you know they were publishing a story and they had asked me if there was anything that perhaps I should change or that I would change anything I would advise them on. And what was interesting was this was an article for the Autos Channel, and they kept focusing on a sport utility vehicle, and they kept talking about the explosive growth in that market segment and how every manufacturer is making sport utility vehicles.
They would continually repeat the phrase and use the phrase sport utility vehicle over and over again. And when I asked them why they would do that, they said, well, the. that the AP style guide tells us that you're supposed to use the proper noun, the proper name to describe the object. And in this case, it's actually a sport utility vehicle.
So we're having this conversation and I'm doing some keyword research and I asked them if they would change it to SUV. And they kind of laughed and they said, well, we could, but that's not really the proper word to describe the object. Well the reality was that the phrase SUV was searched on nine times more than the phrase sport utility vehicle.
And when I asked the question, which would you rather be more relevant for, the answer was obvious. The article was published, it was published with SUV in it, it ranked very well, it drove a lot of traffic, so on and so forth. So that keyword research is very foundationally important for any work that you are going to do.
Now, title tag, probably one of the most important tags for SEO. This is what you If you're typing in WordPress, for example, and you're typing the title in, this is what will populate the title tag. That title tag is a very important clue. You want to make sure that your targeted keywords appear in there. There is a limited amount of space that you should be writing within, about 60 characters or so.
And you do not want to repeat that title tag over any other pages. Every title should be unique to every single page. Make sure that is happening. You want to make sure that you do little things, like adding relevant descriptive alt text to images.
There's a field as you're... loading an image in your system where you'll be able to use a descriptor to describe what is happening in that image or what that image is actually about. You want to do that.
You want to get your keyword that you're targeting in there. A picture of of, I don't know, Billy Crystal and the Oscar statue. Well, that could be Billy Crystal, it could be the Oscar, it could be the Oscars, the event. We don't really know just by looking at it what your intention is.
So use that alt tag to help everyone understand. And the way this manifests is anytime you hover over an image, that little block of text that comes up when you hover over it, that's the text you're adding. So when someone hovers over the image on your webpage, what text you want them to see that helps that context which is very important I'm suggest obviously writing a keyword rich h1 tag one per page not more I'm if there are more on the page don't worry about it should read the first one targeted the right keyword move on from there I this the sex number six calling meta descriptions this is very important this is important because if we do not think search engine doesn't think you've got it done well we will ignore what you have and we will randomly select tax of your web page and insert that and you've all seen that when you've seen search results where it looks like a series of random words with dots in between them or it looks like the middle the paragraph is in there but you've also seen really good ones that are called action that literally say the product you're looking for is on sale today click here to find more and that is a strong call to action the backs up your title tag the catches attention when you use the right keyword in there and draws people to click on your result. You can manage that all on your own. Every page should have crawlable text on it.
We want to make sure that the search engine robots, the crawlers, the systems that we use to go discover things are able to actually find out what you're talking about. If you're using something like Flash, for example, we cannot crawl in that reliably. So, putting all of your content inside there effectively hides it from us.
It means we don't really know what you have on your page. Very important that we understand it. Getting a little more technical here now, you want to make sure you have valid sitemaps. You can go to a website called sitemapxml.org and you will see the commonly published best practices guidance from the search engines. We have all partnered on this.
You can go to the website, you can look up the information, we explain to you everything you need to know about how you actually set up these sitemaps properly. What is very important is keeping them very clean. That is very important.
Now, canonicalizing your URLs. This is a very important thing. You don't understand it.
I am going to suggest that you stop and you go look up what canonicalization refers to. It basically refers to the first in a multiple repeating strand. So, the first instance of a URL.
Everything that comes after it should be canonicalized to point back to the original. This may happen especially in an area where you have an e-commerce situation where a product is one location but you can get to it from multiple positions. You may have a sales page that directs people and on the end of the URL is question mark, page equals sales one to describe the particular campaign.
We may have a version of that URL for a Facebook ad campaign. for paid advertising campaigns and search you could have one from a billboard that you're running you can all kinds of variations at the URL but run to the exact same product you wanna make sure that the search engine knows there is one version about URL that is the actual one that you want us to have and the rest are duplicates can I was a shun is a process by which you can tell us that very clearly I'll obviously don't put that content inside images or JavaScript, show more like flash, we can't read that stuff, we can't see it. So if you take a picture and put words in it, we cannot hold words reliably out of that picture with enough trust to make it worth our while. So keep your images as images, keep your words as text. Newly published pages take a while to get ranked, we have to build trust on them.
So that's the reality. There's no way to get around that. It takes time. You might feel like you're on your own for a little while and nobody's there and nobody's visiting and there's not a lot of traffic.
Don't worry about it. Keep working on your idea. It will show up. And obviously you want to use social media to build a community for yourself. This is a great way to get people to spread the knowledge of you and your content and attract more attention.
So let's see some secrets to success here. The basic stuff. If you're building followers, you want to do this very organic.
You don't want to take shortcuts on this. You can buy friends, you can buy followers, you can buy links and likes and whatever else, and you want to avoid doing all of that. Those shortcuts are very obvious to a search engine. We see all of that data, and if we see what looks like a shortcut, then we start deprecating any value you think you're getting, which means your time and possibly money are completely wasted.
You're not going to get a result out of it. And over time, if you continue to pursue those things, we may actually label you as a spammer and then start lowering the rank of things that your signature is applied to. You don't want to get into that situation. Now, if you're sharing stuff socially, anything that you're going to share out there that has a link in it, it's generally seen to be more credible.
We did an internal survey here across Microsoft with all of the editors we had worldwide, and we polled them on this. And it was something like 80% of the editors felt that if there was a link in it, then what was being shared had more value. And that's fairly obvious. So if you want to prove useful to people, make sure you share useful things that they can go and consume. You want to cover the basics of SEO and then move on and focus on your content.
That is by far the number one thing you want to be putting time into. And unique, compelling content. You don't want to replicate stuff.
You don't want to take things from other sources. You can reference things. You can note.
that you know this was published earlier and here's the paragraph that I'm going to use and then here's my perspective on it, whatever, that's totally fine. But you don't want to syndicate stuff from other sources and try to publish it as your own. We already have the original version of that. We do not need a duplicate version.
We're not going to index yours. It's not going to rank well. The original will do that. This is where taking content from article websites is the biggest failure point because people think that the article even if they've paid for it, is actually unique and not shared anywhere else.
The fact of the matter is it's on the article website. And as a result of that, it's already been published. We're not interested in it.
We also know that content associated with those is less authoritative. People who are authorities on their topics do not write for article websites. People who are authorities on their topics write for other publications. Now, you could be that publication that they write for if you can contact them, get to know them.
create a compelling pitch and get them to be involved with you. That takes a lot of time and work, and in some cases, money, because you have to pay them for their time. But that's the reality of content creation today. There are no shortcuts. Now, this is really worth digging into.
Content is what people are searching for. Your visitors are going to respond to it. It's exactly what they want. They don't want to see duplicated stuff across many websites.
In their mind, if they see it on the first one and then they see it on the second one, The second one is probably a copy of the first one. That's how people tend to oversimplify things when they look down in search results. It's not fair, but it is a human nature moment. Not much we can do to change that.
The search engines, however, respond to unique content. We're very interested in that. So if we can get unique versions of something, different points of view on a topic, then you stand a much better chance of ranking highly for something, simply because it is unique.
Content, bye. far one of the wisest investments of your time that you can make. No question about it.
It really does complete the answer that people are searching for. Every time someone puts a query into a search engine, they're asking a question. They have a problem that needs to be solved.
Your content can be the solution to that problem, but it has to be unique. It has to be worthwhile. There's a concept called thin content where you provide the bare minimum of information for something, but you do this across hundreds of different keywords.
that has been spammed to death, it doesn't work anymore, and it is seen as a shortcut. And when we see websites doing that, we tend to devalue the entire website because we know that that's a pattern repeated across all of their content. It's of little value to us. So you want to be careful with that.
Now, your niche and your voice. This is really important stuff. The Internet's big, and it is still relatively easy to find a good niche for yourself.
There are plenty of them out there that you can explore and exploit. But you have to be honest about it, you have to be clear about it, and you have to have some perseverance. You've got to stick to it.
Choose your voice wisely. Don't be afraid to express an opinion or something that is a contrary view on stuff. You will rarely find yourself in a position where everyone agrees with you.
Even the most obvious conversations happening in your home, in your community, and across the world will have people on two different sides. That's the nature of being a human being again. Go.
When you see, however, something that you have shared, whether it's socially, a blog post, or content that you've created and put up, an article, whatever, if you see that people have responded to it, then ask yourself, what was it about that that made it more popular? And then look for ways to guide yourself in that way more often and see if more people respond to it. You can grow then and be known as the voice on a topic.
You can then own a niche. When you own a niche, it's like putting a crowbar in a small crack. Doesn't do a whole lot at first, but if you keep prying back and forth over time, that crack opens up, and now suddenly you can see more of the world ahead of you.
There's more that is accessible to you. That's the power of owning your niche. Now, we touched on this earlier, keyword research, critical.
Before you do any work, you need to know what people are searching for, and that's what keyword research tells you. It tells you that nine times more people search on the phrase SUV than sport utility vehicle. That is very important when you're writing your content because you can be relevant for either phrase. It will be easier to be relevant on the phrase with less traffic, but you will have less traffic. So...
Getting your work done, getting it done well, you could be relevant on a phrase with a lot more traffic, which is obviously what you're after. Keyword research does a couple of things for you. It also helps you define or uncover new areas that you hadn't thought of previously. If you've got writer's block, that kind of idea where you're not quite sure, you know, hey, what content should I add?
What else should I put in here? I'm out of ideas. Keyword research will tell you everything you need to know because it will give you a list of keywords that are related to your topic. Everything. that will be related to your topic will be shown to you and shown to you with numbers attached to it so you can get a relative understanding of what's more important to people throughout that conversation.
So really really useful in there. It's really helpful in getting you focused on which content to write. This is a way for you to say if I have to write a hundred pages of content or I have to prepare 52 blog posts, one for each week of the year, how do I focus on it and in which order do I focus on things? this will help you understand that keyword research is fundamental now this is a this is a process understanding if you already have a website or blog this is a way to understand where to put your time it's about defining value for your website now this is a bit of a work project okay so you want to take a website any website and preferably your own obviously You want to take a look at it, you want to list out every single URL. You're going to have things like your home page is obvious and you'll have whatever the first level of your navigation is, so that might be categories, then you come into products and you come into individual items and so on.
You want to capture every one of those URLs. You put them all in a spreadsheet and next to every one of those, you are going to assign a dollar figure. So your home page is worth X dollars to your business. Your category page is worth X dollars to your business. Your product page is worth X dollars to your business and so on.
Now some of this information may be a little more difficult to obtain than you might think because if you have a product page and you know that you sell 10 of those products every day and you make a dollar on every product, well then it's safe to say that that product page is worth $10 a day to you. A dollar a product, 10 products a day, that's worth $10 a day. Your homepage, however, may not actually have a sales pitch on it.
It may simply be the location where people go into. So at this point, you may want to look at your homepage and say, well, my homepage actually doesn't sell anything, so it gets a dollar value of zero. And as you go across all of your pages, you will start to see that different pages have different values. Your email sign-up page, well, how much is an email sign-up page worth? If it actually drives new people to your newsletter and that newsletter gets you X dollars in sales every month, then that sign up page has a dollar value.
So it's really important to capture that. So when you have all of this filled in, what you're going to do is you're going to resort the entire spreadsheet by the dollar values. Now you have a list of the URLs across your website that are important to your business in terms of the dollars of revenue that they generate.
It won't be the top down view that you originally looked at. with your home page, your categories, and your product pages. It will be a very different view of things. In fact, it will probably be a view that shows you your most popular product that's responsible for 60% to 70% of your overall revenue.
Now when you're looking at doing optimization, you have a very clear path of understanding, �Hey, you know what? I need to work on these pages in this order.� For a lot of websites, you're going to do work that will be applicable across the entire website because the website is templated. So that's fine. That just means more pages get more lift, which is always a good thing.
In some instances, however, you will be doing custom work on individual pages and realizing that it is worth investing there. But this is a really great approach. It is really worth looking into. If you want to learn more about this, I'm going to tell you who gave me this idea. It's a guy by the name of Matt Bailey.
He's written a book. That book is called Internet Marketing, An Hour a Day. That's initially where this idea came from.
It's a really cool idea and Matt Bailey goes into a lot of detail on it. I highly recommend if you're interested in learning more, take a look at the book and see what else he has in there. Alright, we'll get a little more technical for you around SEO stuff, because it's not just content.
It actually is affected by technical elements, and you need a mix of both of these things, okay? What's really important is, and a lot of people overlook this, is understanding how clean your domain is. So, you will go online and you will find the best domain that you thought, oh, you'd never be able to find it, oh, look at that, it's available, and I paid $60 for it, holy cow, that's awesome, I'm such a great business person. That's great, except prior to you owning that domain, what you may not be aware of is that a spammer has used it for the last eight years and as a result the search engines basically label it as spam. So any work you do on it will be affected by the fact that the search engines have already labeled it as spam.
You need to crawl out of that hole. If you go to do a search for a place called archive.org, you're looking for what's known as the Wayback Machine. And when you go in there, you will put your domain in there, any domain. doesn't matter what, could be yours, could be somebody else's.
And they keep historical records of random snapshots in time for pretty much every domain in existence. So you can stick a domain in there and go back five, seven, eight years, two years, whatever. And they'll be able to show you what the website used to look like.
Very handy if you're about to buy a new domain, or if you're thinking about buying a new domain, you want to research it. Because this will tell you things like, hey, there's a snapshot of it while it was under construction. Oh, look, There's a snapshot of it when the domain was used as a payday loan website. Oh look, it only lasted that way for two years and then it was under construction again.
Okay well that tells me that I'm looking at a website that somebody tried to use, probably abused for a couple of years and then because it wasn't going anywhere they dropped the domain and got rid of it. That's a clue to me that I should probably not use that domain because they may have been flagged as spam and that's why they got rid of it. That's why they abandoned the business. So. So, important to be able to research those things.
You do want to, if you can, have clean, keyword rich URLs. And as we get to the end of things here, I'm going to include something on one of the latest blog posts that our spam team has put up related to keyword rich URLs and domains in particular. Page load times, things need to be fast.
Things need to be fast because we're already in a world where mobile first matters more than ever. Most people are doing queries now on mobile devices. Then more people are doing queries now on mobile devices than they are on desktops.
So it's important that you understand that things loading up on your phone or your tablet, the speed with which they load is very important to a user. If it's slow, they won't blame the network immediately. They'll blame the website, and then they'll go to somebody else.
So that matters. Layout of the pages, whether you've got a lot of text, images, where the ads are positioned, how many ads you have, all of those things matter. And tech, the technology you use. possibly hiding things in there and being careful with that.
I mentioned earlier JavaScript. One of the big downsides to JavaScript is if JavaScript is powering your navigation, a search engine might not be able to crawl through the navigation to find the rest of your content, which takes us all the way back around to that sitemap.xml stuff I first mentioned because that's a way to make sure we can still find all the URLs on your website even if you are using that beautiful JavaScript. But if you are using that beautiful JavaScript, be careful.
What does that look like on my phone? Does it leave me with a good experience or does it leave me with things overlapping each other and covering up the images that I'm trying to look at? You really have to be careful and test these things out or you will create a very poor user experience which will drive people away from you.
Now this next slide is very in depth. We won't go through everything. You guys can take a look at it.
But these are the general conversations you want to be having across a wide range of topics as you're building up a website or thinking about doing work on a current website. You want to focus on crawlability on your site structure. There's some on-page elements that you want to take a deep look at and really understand how you're working with those things.
You want to have a very clear approach around your content, how you're building it, what you're actually focusing on, things like a content calendar, how you're managing redirects, all of these things matter. Links, how you can drive them actively, how you can basically get your content to be a link building machine for you. All of these things make a difference. Your internal linking, what's relevant versus what's irrelevant, that all plays a role for you. And then of course social, being that authority, making sure you're building your community, that those people who follow you are sending out signals saying that you are an authority.
That makes a big difference. You're an expert when someone says you're an expert, not when you say you're an expert. So all of these things, major investment areas that have an impact on SEO really does make a difference for you.
I'm going to really suggest that you guys take a screenshot of this and make sure you have it handy if there's something in here that you don't understand it's pretty easy to look this stuff up all the details have been shared all across the internet all kinds of information about this stuff but it's very important that you understand that these things actually have an impact on the success of your business Now, if you are going mobile, which, you know, everybody should because that's pretty much where the future is, and, well, the future's now. The future happened about six months ago. We turned the corner where the number of desktop queries was eclipsed by the number of mobile device queries.
Now, that mobile device category is split between things like tablets and things like smartphones. It's really unclear as to exactly which are happening there. The bottom line is, though, it's coming through mobile, and that makes a difference.
If you're building out a site, you want to skip mdot domains. That's not the way you want to go. They produce a lot of unwanted duplication.
We talked earlier about canonicalizing URLs. If you produce an mdot version of a website, you will get very familiar with canonical versions because you will have to do a lot of that canonicalization work. It is a challenge.
This is why the search engines recommend you avoid mdots. And you use what's called responsive design. Use HTML5, whatever.
But use responsive design. so that the website literally says, oh, I see that I am on a mobile device that has a 5-inch screen. I should reorganize myself to fit all the proper elements in an easily consumed fashion on this screen.
And then 10 minutes later, you're on a tablet. Oh, I see I'm on a 13-inch device. I should reconfigure myself to fit properly on this 13-inch screen size. That's responsive design. It is the way forward.
It is how you should be building mobile websites. Now, the authority building shortlist. Really important stuff here. If you want to be an authority, you've got to know the topic inside out. There can't be any, oh, hang on a second, I have to go research that, I'll get back to you.
No, you have to know it inside out. You need to engage your community. You need to make sure that those people know you're accessible and that you're constantly available to talk on this topic.
You want to share useful content freely. Don't think you're holding something back that is so secret sauce that it's going to make and break everything about your business. That's not the reality.
Chances are anything you're thinking about trying or implementing has already been done thousands of times by other people and is already public knowledge. You will look better sharing all of this information than you will holding some of it back. You will get more in the long run by sharing.
You want to be consistent and useful. You don't want to just show up randomly every five or six weeks and say, here's four or five things, there you go. You want to publish a blog post every week, every Thursday night at 5 p.m. Eastern. People know.
They expect it. And it's there. You want to be active on social media every day, sharing something, making it worth their while.
And when you're sharing this stuff, you want to share like 80 or 90% of things that are not about you. And only 10% of the stuff that you share is related directly to you. Otherwise, it starts to look like a sales pitch and people just tune you out.
You don't want that. You want to market your strengths. If you're particularly good at one specific area, then play to those strengths. You definitely want to do that.
In the world of writing, there's an axiom. And it's basically you write what you know. That is very true. When you start getting into areas you do not understand, it becomes very obvious to the audience that you're struggling.
So you want to avoid that. Play to your strengths. You want to become that go-to research or that go-to resource?
You need to be that where people reference you. And when that starts to happen, that's when the magic hits you. That's when you realize other people are saying you are an expert.
That's when you have the authority you can now start to trade on. It's incredible. And along the way you're going to do something really spectacular which is learn to spot trends and data.
You'll be constantly looking at information whether it's your data, industry data, it could be anything. But you're going to learn to spot trends, ideas where you think things will develop in the future. Share those.
Most times you will be wildly wrong. But that's okay. People don't expect you to be wildly right all the time.
That would be freakish and weird. What they expect is every now and then you are going to give them a nugget that is accurate and mind blowing. And that's going to cement why they see you as an authority, why your website is the trusted resource that they want to recommend to their friends.
Very important stuff. Obviously, search will continue to evolve. I mean, we've got mobile devices now, but we have ways of gathering data that are going to become even more important in the near future.
New ways of showcasing data, of pushing data instead of just pulling data. Things like new smartwatches that are coming onto the market. as well as the ones that are existing on the market, and how that changes consumer behavior, whether they look at an email, glance at a number, or engage with it on a smaller device.
We'll see whether that happens or not, but you need to be aware of these things. These signals constantly being fed back and forth by devices in our lives. Our mobile phones are capable of sending thousands of signals any number of locations about everything we're doing. Our location, our distance, our direction. our time of day that we've interacted with things, how many times we've pulled the phone out of our pocket, what is the percentage that we interact with different apps, whether we actually make purchases via our phone, whether we have a location that we would determine as, quote, home versus, quote, work.
So time in a location versus time of day, all of those things. The ability to look across a calendar, look across emails, pull pieces out of email to understand a new package has arrived, UPS has said. Dwayne, your package is on your front step.
My phone can update me and say, a package has been delivered for you. All of that information is out there and available. So as those experiences become more personalized and more mobilized, you have to understand how does your business fit into this. That is a critical, critical thing. There are a lot of different ways to do that.
The screenshot we're showing right here is of an app that's on my Windows phone. that will allow me to understand what businesses are nearby and gives me things like their shopping, their entertainment, the ratings that they have, how far they are from my current location. And I get all of that by simply holding my phone up and pointing my camera in the direction and looking at the screen.
It pulls all that data from reviews on Yelp, from the search results that we have, from a whole bunch of different sources. It helps me make up my mind that, you know what, I'm actually going to go to, in this instance, the old town. It's got good ratings and it's literally around the corner from me. So, I want to go there for lunch. That's the sort of thing that changes consumer behavior and those are the trends that you want to be able to spot to help your business grow.
Now, where does SEO fit in with everything we're talking about? It's still very important. If it's on this list, it's important.
But by far, the number one thing you want to focus on is content. The next most important thing, you want to focus on social media. Next most important thing, user experience.
Without those three things, you're going to fail. If you have those three things, you're going to fail. the next one link building comes natural you don't take any action the links will find you people cannot help they want to scoop their friends they will impress their friends share information that is wow look at that so cool I'm glad you're my friend you share that with me is that blew my mind that comes a result as a result others first three items content social engagement user experience those things will mail link building for you SEO SEO is the technical stuff if at this point in the game you have a business online and you're not doing SEO, you're falling behind.
There is no more, this is the beginning. It is an accepted practice, it is something that you have to take an action on. If you've got a WordPress website, it can be as simple as using a plug-in and then filling in the blanks.
You don't need to go any deeper than that. If you have a custom-built e-commerce platform, it's going to cost you more because you are going to need hands-on expert reviews and you are going to need hands-on coding work. You are going to need to pay a consultant to come in and do this work for you.
And then you're going to need to pay a consultant to come in and do the coding for you. Be more expensive, but you literally get what you want. Just make sure you know what you want when you ask for it.
Now, the kind of search you're trying to solve for looks basically like this. Four main areas. Quality, trust, popularity, and timeliness.
You know, you want to have quality content, good inbound links, and you obviously want a professional look. You want to be an authority, a useful resource, and be trusted. You want traffic, you want repeat visits, you want links building to your website, you want to be popular and timeliness. You need to be current, fresh and relevant. These things are all important and it's part of a moving mix that you will always have to be chasing.
Some days you know you're going to get more traffic than other days. Sometimes you'll have more repeat visits, some things will be more popular, some things will look better. That's all a part of the nature of building and running an online business. Now this is actually very important for you.
Because, as you go through and you're building things, you start to understand, and we're talking about trend watching earlier, this helps you understand trends that are happening and why it's important. So in this example, what we're showing here is beautiful, high glossy, a high gloss image of what are literally chocolate scotch whiskey cakes. I mean, I'm all in. You had me at chocolate, you clinched the deal at scotch and whiskey, so I'm a happy camper at this point.
Giving me the photo, however. It gets a bit more of an emotional response for me. As a human being, I will look at this and say, wow, you know what?
I kind of want that in my life. That's going to make me happy. But other information is available and the search engines are actually showcasing this now.
We have been for a while. Star ratings on things. Which one of these recipes from which one of these locations is the best recipe to showcase here? We do this because we trust the data we're being shown by those sources.
Because they use services such as schema.org, you may also know this or come across references to this as semantic markup, being able to mark up your content. So you can wrap things in your code, you can wrap an image and tell us more about it. You can wrap your reviews and your customer ratings or the recipe itself, which allows us to do really cool things inside our search results, like showcase star ratings on things, the calorie count for a particular thing, or allow the searcher to search for recipes that are gluten-free only and sort results in that way. That makes a big difference to the searcher and their happiness with the overall experience, not just with us at the search engine but with you as the provider of that data. So you want to learn things like schema.org, you need to go to the website again similar to sitemapxml.org It is a partnership by the three major search engines, so that would be Bing, Yahoo, and Google, and we agree to common standards within this space.
So you can implement these standards, and they are useful across all of the search engines. Very, very important that businesses understand this. We've been talking about this for a few years, this topic, out loud and in the public, and it's very slowly being taken on board. There is a cost to implementing this work, and over time... those who have implemented it will start to see the benefits of it.
Indeed, that is starting to happen now. And businesses that have put this off year after year and have not done it are slowly going to end up being left behind as searchers gravitate toward more involved and enriched search results. And as we see them, the searchers, interacting with that, we will move more in that direction. Everything a search engine does is guided by what the searcher responds to. Now, social media.
Very, very important, social media. It's a signal of topical authority, it's real time, helps the search engines find stuff very quickly, which is very important to us. Social signals, they can influence click action of searchers, whether someone will or will not click on something because they see a friend likes it or does not like it, and so on. It is important to note, however, that social signals are only a few of the thousand or so signals that help something rank organically, but it's very important from a community building perspective. If I'm doing business with you and I have a complaint and I voice that on Twitter, you should respond to me in a timely manner so that I can have that conversation with you.
If you don't respond to me, I literally think you don't care about your customers. I will think twice about giving you my money in the future. You do not want to be that business. We've all encountered them.
Conversion optimization is a great idea. It's something that if you are selling any products or you have like an email sign up or something, it's important that you take a look at this. Very, very important.
We've all had that experience where we put something in our shopping cart and then part way through the checkout process we abandon it and we do not make the purchase for a variety of reasons. They ask for too much personal information upfront. There was a problem with this.
There was a survey put in front of me before I was able to check out. I think I might be able to get a better experience somewhere else. Whatever the rationale is, conversion optimization helps you streamline all of that and get more money out of every wallet. It's a very important concept.
It's a standalone concept. It will impact structure of your website it may impact a little bit of the SEO you do but it will have a big impact on your bottom line so after you've got your website up and running and it's basically optimized and you've got good content out there and you're starting to see sales conversion optimization is the very next thing you're gonna do do not think for an instant any off-the-shelf shopping cart program is optimized they may tell you they are every single one of them can be better and fine-tuned The important thing for you to do then is find an expert that can work with you to uncover how to tune that engine to work perfectly in your instance. Because that item, that shopping cart engine that will power your checkout process, almost all of them are configurable in a way that will net you more better and positive ROI than if you just left the default settings that you came in with.
All right. So I'm going to go through this next part a little bit quicker so that we can get to our... resources and the Q&A as we come on to wrap things up here. So organic keyword research tool, this is the one that happens to be within Bing Webmaster.
This is what it does, it gives you an idea of, you tell it what you want to look for, you tell it where it's applicable, whether it's a different country or region, what language, the amount of time that you want to look for, give it a date range, and you hit search. Then it goes in and tells you, dog beds were searched on in this period of time you know, a hundred and eighty thousand times, leashes, two hundred twenty five thousand times. dog collars a million times now you understand within the concept of dog accessories which ones are the big ones that people are looking for online you can use that to make decisions around your content very important stuff link explorer this is a really cool tool this tool allows you to put in any url and then look at it and see who's pointing links to it so you can put in a url for your competitor and see who's linking to them then you can look at your own link report and see if those businesses are linking to you If they're not linking to you, maybe you can reach out to that business and say, hey, I noticed you linked to this person. We're a good resource too. Maybe you could link to us.
So great opportunities in there. Worth exploring it. Obviously, these are the Bing Webmaster Tools. One thing I will say is that I made a joke at the beginning of this that our tools are better than our competitors'tools.
They're different. That's the main point that you need to take away from this. These reports that I'm showing you, these tools that I'm showing you, exist in our tools and do not exist in their tools.
There is a lot of overlapping area, though, where the data is the same between these two different things. They show this data. We show our version of that same data. So very useful to have both sets.
We do provide SEO reports, however. So we will go in every couple of weeks. We'll scan a URL that's inside your account.
We will go ahead and prepare an SEO report for it, tell you what you should be focused on and working on. totally up to you whether you want to use or not it's in there and it's useful uh... this is a different version the reports run every two weeks SEO analyzer is an on-demand tool give it any URL from one of your domains and it will just go in immediately bing bong will go take a look at it and give you the report in real while it takes a couple weeks for the reports to populate initially you can go in and start doing this stuff in real time right away if you'd like to it is important to note that these tools almost exclusively are applied only to your websites.
You cannot go in and start pulling data from a competitor's website with the one exception being the link tool where you can actually go in and explore links to other websites. That is the only area you can do that. The audio file went out for about 60 seconds during Doyne's presentation.
So he picks back up in just a moment on this same slide....execute to amplify your product or service whether... Paid search, display ads, paid social, email, PR, all of these things are areas that you're going to invest in and you're actually going to take actions in. This allows you a three-tiered approach to kind of stack up your work.
So we've created this visualization as a touch point for you to be able to look at and say, ah, okay, yeah, I have to focus on how am I going to run my paid search campaign? Where do I start with that? How do I have my accounts set up?
Do I have my ads created? Are they optimized? Are my landing pages good?
what are the conversions look like and so on. And that's one conversation out of all of these conversations. So really useful resource there. Now I'm going to give you guys the streamlining trick as well for social media. Now this is what I use when I build my social media program.
This is what I currently use today. Follow along. I have a Hootsuite account. I pay for the pro level. It's I think $9.99 right now a month.
Highly worth it. Because it allows you to take RSS feeds from trusted news sources, put them in, and then it will broadcast out onto Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and what I don't have here is G+. This alone allows me to have a social footprint that is much larger than one person could traditionally maintain.
But it relies on a couple of things. One, I have to be very careful in programming Hootsuite in how much content I allow it to put through. Two, I have to explicitly trust those sources that are producing the news that I am tweeting out. because I'm not reading everything as it goes through. These things are happening on the hour on their own.
I trust the source, the content goes out. I do periodically, meaning probably every day, I will go through and read pieces of what I have actually published to make sure that the quality of the source still remains high. And I have in the last year gotten rid of about four websites that started to become a little too self-promotional.
I didn't quite like the tone that they had so I just stopped using them and replaced them with another website. Once you have them into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, G+, this is fantastic. But what you can do then is you can take your actual feed of everything that you've produced in Twitter and Facebook, for example, put it through a tool called If This Then That, and that will translate all of that information and say, every time Dwayne tweets or he posts on his Facebook wall, capture the URL and take it, put it on to what I use as Evernote or you could use other services, and keep a list of all of that. What happens then at the end of the week is I have a long list of everything that I have tweeted and everything that I have Facebooked that week. All of this is news from my industry that people like to read.
What I will do on Friday evenings then is I will take that list out of Evernote, I will copy and paste it, put it into Word document, go through and just find and replace, clean it up a little bit, get rid of my at Duane Forster handle, get rid of the timestamps, the little nitpicky things to make things a little easier to read. Then I will post it up on my blog. and that becomes the news that you should have read this week that was a recurring post that i had for many months uh...
i still continue to do this i don't post actively this flow is a way to help automate that social media timeframe it takes a lot of time to manage social media so using tips and tricks like this can be very helpful back to that how much do you share on here for me approximately ninety seven percent of everything i share has nothing to do with the business I work for. I talk about everything else across these industries, but rarely do I talk about things related to Bing. When we do produce news, obviously that is a part of it, and I happily share that out there. What it does, however, is position me as somebody who is not selling my product, but it positions me as a useful resource among my peers. That builds a following.
very useful way to move it forward. Now if you're looking for tools to get things done, all kinds of tools in here, right? Talk to a webmaster tools.
There's tools here for Twitter, for Instagram, for Pinterest, link off to Evernote, if this, then that, a couple of competitors to if this, then that, Elastic EO and Zapier, some social media analytics with Tracker and social management platforms with Sprinklr and Visible, social mentions on there. It's a cool search engine. See stats on. queries and whatnot actually can use that for up some keyword research i can also use trends at google so as trends that there's a can use that uh...
and if you happen to have windows phone and i know everybody watching this is a windows phone like me of course uh... the great a lot on their call made all which is are really good social media and let's see how to have experimented with fine of this is an awesome thing to do and i really recommend you read this article of posted up there so that our brands get right you know Really, really useful because it forces you within six seconds to get very clear about your message and your call to action. It is awesome too because people love to consume stuff that is short, quick and sweet.
These things, these short little videos, you might think, oh, fine, another social media space, that's the only place I can use it. No, because now you can actually embed those things into Facebook. You can drop them on the Twitter.
You can use them in other places where you can get more exposure for your message in front of people. more people to drive more people back to your website through your social community. And as you find more of these relevant things to share, people want to consume it more.
Therefore, they want to follow you and they want to engage with you. Very useful stuff. And our second to last slide here, technically the last slide for presentation, is 18 social media management tools.
All kinds of useful stuff in here. I recommend going and kind of looking these things up and seeing what each one of them is. They are very useful in different ways.
I have a process that works for me. You may discover a different process that works for you. Don't be afraid to change.
That's the major thing here because your success will be dependent on following consumer behavior and serving it. As it changes, you need to change as well. Very important. Now, I'm going to slip us over to our last slide here and I know we've got a few questions that came up. as we were going through everything so i'm gonna take a look at what those questions were here so first question we've got is what are questions to be made increase engagement lower bounce rate uh...
on college business uh... our business colleges website and how to increase s e l now i'm gonna take these a separate questions get uh... so increasing engagement and lowering bounce rate this was important if that's a problem and you should be paying close attention to your bounce rate because it is an indication of a failure of usability. You really have to look at usability here. First and foremost, any page can be an entry page to your website.
So if somebody does a search on a particular business program or a degree or diploma they're looking for and they see this, they come to your web page and then they leave that web page and they don't explore anything else, it could be you've done a very good job of answering their question. It could be that you've done a very poor job of giving them other related options. within your web page to attract their attention.
So do not ever get hung up on loving your first idea. That is a failure point for so many startups. They think their idea is so good, they refuse to change it, or the changes they make are so minute that essentially it doesn't register with people engaging with them.
So very important. You need to make sure that you're looking at your usability, you're looking at your navigation, that you are looking at matching. keywords that are appearing on the page with keywords that you know people are looking for a topic you may simply using a different phrase and that doesn't attract someone's attention a simple change of phrase could be enough to get the click and stay engaged uh...
and increasing the s c l this goes back to everything we covered in here and what we just talked with this usability and the skewered research in alignment can go a long way to helping with that first and foremost use that target optimization approach a talked about and figure out where the high value areas are and what people are engaging with now, then you'll know where to start doing your work. Now, next question. My professional experience, any killer SEO strategies that come with social media or mobile marketing?
The integration of SEO with social mobile channels is crucial to the success of digital marketing, but I found a few guidelines to enhance websites ranking via organic search. I need to have very practical ways to use in reality or industry secrets. Okay, a couple of things. First and foremost. This to me reads like someone who's looking for some shortcuts.
That is never the right mindset to approach any of this work with. If you do, it will fail. That is the state of being today. We do not have bricks and mortar businesses without signs, without counters, with people just standing around with stuff sitting on shelves and no one talking to you.
those businesses cannot be successful in most cases the reality is when i walk into a store to make a purchase i expect the store to look like a store i expect her to be decor expect the lighting to be good the temperature should be nice there should be a good counter there i expect service from people all of these things will entice me to make a purchase with you and it helps if you got the product that i want obviously when it comes to uh... strategies that you can apply in these areas the reality is that you have to A, understand exactly what your demographic is, exactly who that business, that customer is for you. That is critical. And a lot of people will take a short form approach to this. Oh, I know who my customer is.
They're the person that buys this. And that person is generally this type of person. No, you need to actually do survey-based data to understand exactly who your customer is. That is how you will know who your customer is.
And from that, you can start learning things that are more psychographic in nature. Do they prefer an iPhone over an Android? Are they more of a PC or a Mac type person? This starts to allow you to understand more and greater pieces of information about them.
When you start pulling demographic, old school demographics into this, you then start to learn things like their income bracket, the areas that their education level, all of these kinds of things will help you very clearly understand your data and possibly even see patterns behavior within your own website in a different way. A person purchasing this product goes to this product, you can't make the connection between the two of them because it doesn't seem to make sense to you. Well the reality is it may make sense if you understand that person at a deeper level.
So very important to look into that. When it comes to things like mobile you have to be very fast on load times, you have to, again back to that responsive design stuff, make sure it fits properly. I absolutely hate this.
I use my tablets a lot at home and I come to a website and all of the navigation is drop down based on a hover action. So if I'm on a computer and I have a mouse and I hover over something, the drop down comes down and I can click on it and navigate around the website. When I'm on a tablet or my phone, there is no such thing as a hover action. I am either touching or not touching the screen and therefore your navigation fails.
So Very important that every business looks at their analytics and understands how much of their traffic is coming from mobile because as you see that start to crest the 20-30% mark you're going to have to make a change to some of this fancy navigation that you have that doesn't work in the mobile environment. That is going to be a failure point for you. We've got a few other questions that have come in here. so we uh... we just put a lot of us actually would live yesterday about um...
the you were of the u r l keyword stuffing spam filter and this is really important because people want to focus on domains that are keyword rich and building your else are keyword rich totally fine it's not a bad thing to go and read the article on the webmaster blog at being you'll see that we actually call out of the show examples where positive it makes perfect sense and that example of the use is representative of the vast majority of people and how they will approach this totally fine totally the way to go forward however there are ways where you can use this and that's what we talk about if we see those patterns abuse we will just simply filter those search results so they will not show up so again if you're looking at doing something where it's literally keyword stuffing repeating the same word over and over again maybe you have some domain and it's in the main domain and then you put in a folder and then you put the URL this is starting to look like keyword stuffing and if we think that you're doing that then we will assign you a spam filter and literally pull out of the results so you want to be careful with that it pays for you to go read these articles we publish them is we tell you specifically what we're looking for willing to share it you should be willing to take a look at it make sure you're not I'm kind of getting around that now on this question Does Bing have a set amount of time where they, quote, hold sites before they start to index new websites or pages? How long can I expect for my website, new web page, or blog to get indexed? Okay, there's a bit of an old wives'tale with this one.
Originally, you know, way back in the day, a decade ago, there was this thing called the Google Sandbox. And new content would always follow the same pattern where you would put it out, and if it was optimized, it would rank very highly, very quickly. It would stay there for about a week or so, and then it would drop off.
And then after about 30 to 60 days... it will come back up again. Maybe not as high as it was originally, but certainly much higher than it was over the last 30 plus days.
That concept has largely gone away. That concept was predicated on us waiting for signals to show up and to understand how to trust something. Today, things happen much faster.
We understand patterns in much greater detail. So there's no reason to have any of this, quote, sandbox effect. In fact, there really is none anymore.
So there is no set amount of time. In fact, what will happen is if we see a new piece of content and we think that it's a decent enough quality to be included in the index, we will immediately start showing it in search results on what we think it's relevant to. We immediately at that point are watching everybody's reaction, the searchers, to see if they engage with it. And if searchers constantly click on it and stay engaged with it, it's going to continue to rank there and drive traffic.
But if we show it and one or two people click on it and then people stop clicking on it and they're really not interested, it'll go back down again. And at that point, we're waiting to see what other signals develop. Are there social signals? Are people sharing this? Are there organic links being built to this?
Is it getting talked about? Is the traffic to the website overall increasing? We're looking for other signals to tell us that that is a trustworthy link.
So the reality is all of these factors we've been talking about around social media, usability, quality of content, sharing, all of that stuff has a direct impact in how well something ranks and how quickly it ranks and stays there. And that is down to the work that you guys do. Now, Couple more last minute ones that snuck in here. If I do the things recommended today, will it help me rank just as well for Google as Bing? Would there be any negative impact?
All right, nothing is going to be a negative impact. The whole point of sharing SEO 101 and white hat tactics with you is that these things help. That's it.
So no, you didn't have to worry about these tactics or anything that we've talked about today. And the beauty about this is the work, when you apply the work and you do the work, it pays dividends across all search engines. So this isn't something you would do specifically for Google or for Bing. You would do something for your website and your visitor, and that benefits you across all the search engines.
You have to keep in mind the search engines are following the searchers. The searcher is the most important person in the entire program. So we see them, we see what they're interacting with, what pleases them, and we look for things that are similar that will please them more.
If you have hit upon a combination, you're going to get a notification. that is pleasing to a searcher, it ranks well, they stay engaged with it, they share it. You have to ask yourself, can I create a process to replicate my success? And then continue to apply that in other areas of your website. Now, final question here.
You mentioned SUV and sport utility vehicle. An example of different content can rank for both words. It doesn't being recognized that SUV is an acronym for sport utility vehicle. We very much do recognize it's an acronym for sport utility vehicle. And this brings up a very interesting point.
The fact is that when you write an article like this, you should use variations on these things. You shouldn't just use the same phrase constantly over and over again. In fact, a great test is when you write a piece of content, read it out loud. Literally, just lock yourself in a closet with a little flashlight, read it out loud, and if it sounds like you're repeating a word too much, you probably are, and you need to pull it out and replace it with some other ones. That is an old, old tactic that was used originally, again, called keyword stuffing.
where people would repeat the phrase that they were trying to target over and over and over again. We long ago figured out that that was not good quality and we don't respond to it. However, you have to make sure you're targeting what's relevant.
So in the example where we talk about SUV and sport utility vehicle, you would use SUV in your title tag, in your meta description, in your H1 tag, and you would use it maybe in the first paragraph or two of the actual article. And then you would probably work in the phrase sport utility vehicle as you went down to describe things. And in another location, you may tangentially refer to the object as a car, an automobile, a truck, and so on. And then maybe wrap the whole thing up by mentioning SUV again at the bottom. So you want to be very careful about how you approach your writing and what you do with that.
Every search engine is very clear and understands acronyms and what they mean and what they don't mean. But we're also very crystal clear on what is popular and what is not, what is relevant and what is not. So let's go.
I hope you guys have learned something from this. If you need me, I am at Dwayne Forster on Twitter. I am easy to get a hold of.
And I want to thank the folks at Stukent for inviting me in here to be a part of all of this process with you guys. I truly appreciate your time, and I wish everyone all the best online. Thank you.