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SEO What and Why

The What and Why of SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the latest specter haunting the internet, and “I can’t possibly learn another thing” is a reasonable response. But like the computer-animated action fantasy films How to Train Your Dragon, the ferocious beast likes to play, and makes a good friend.

For companies content with paying for Google Ads, SEO can still provide benefits by enhancing “the User Experience” (UX), while supporting business goals such as raising awareness, trust and authority, leads, sales, and customer retention. Most people access the internet by cellphone, and a cellphone UX needs to be on your webpages, or visitors will “bounce right outa’ here.”

Consider the internet from the viewpoint of a search engine: in January 2020, almost 4.5 billion internet users searched 1.74 billion websites. Only 30% of websites are active, so the odds are small of finding either an active or useful website. Google has prospered by making sense of it all to find and recommend useful websites. Websites that follow Google’s selection criteria can be rated higher, and that is what SEO is all about.

Google’s search engine software makes sense of the internet with pro-active searches and analysis, reading all the titles, text and descriptions to logic-out websites based on:

  •  Beneficial Purpose.
  • E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (Page Quality.)
  • YMYL: “Your Money or your Life” issues: Google doesn’t recommend toxic websites, for moral and liability reasons.

It might take time, but websites can “rise in the rankings” by providing “E-A-T” content, filling out all the paperwork/SEO-boxes, coordinating titles with keywords, and describing photos, sound, and video, with maybe video transcriptions. Google needs to know!

4 SEO Projects

With SEO, there is so much to do, but only a few ways to do it, so workflows lump into four major clusters. Projects 2, 3 and 4 require some level of webpage-programming, on a “clone” of the webpages the public sees, in a non-disruptive “staging” test environment. What can possibly go wrong? Let it happen in test.

  1. Planning: Techie Website-Health Audit, Customer-Brainstorming.

These two planning sub-steps can map-out a customer-first inbound-sales/content-marketing plan.

  1. The “Techie Website-Health Audit” uses software to evaluate how well the website works: are there abandoned web pages because of broken links, or security and SEO issues? WordPress websites can use “Health Check & Troubleshooting”. Yoast, MonsterInsights, and other vendors also offer plugins. Google Analytics and Ads accounts provide many reports, including a Keyword Planner.
  2. “Customer-Brainstorming” looks at customer “Personas”, and all the questions people ask when they hope for answers. The purpose of this step is to know your customers, recognize their intentions, write it all down so it holds still, and provide answers. Are customers researching products, comparing products, ready to buy, or maybe looking for instruction manuals? This step can map-out a series of answer-articles using questions as keywords, establishing website expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T).
  3. An “Optimize core webpages” project could improve trust and authority by update the About page with photos, or breaking the page into several pages introducing key people. Customer retention might be improved by expanding the FAQ page, so customers can find what they are looking for. SEO changes might update all the descriptions that Google looks for. UX changes could break up large blocks of text so it looks readable, not impenetrable.
  4.  “Refine and renew existing articles and webpages” is a chance to revisit all existing text with “new and improved”, “now with more” updates. Has anything changed, has learning occurred, is there something that might have been done better? This is the time to freshen things up. Articles/blogposts can also expand into “serial articles” highlighting different aspects of an issue.
  5. An “SEO Magnet” has the largest scope, and might be best explained with a metaphor: more fish can be caught with more than one hook. An SEO Magnet uses keywords and content to address customer issues, and answer questions. This is an opportunity to provide answers to all the questions customers ask, on the pages of your website. Once there, the curious might convert to a customer.

 [SK1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Train_Your_Dragon_(film)

 [SK2]

 [SK3]https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/micro-moments/why-consumer-intent-more-powerful-than-demographics/

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/micro-moments/being-there-micromoments-especially-mobile
https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/micro-moments/how-to-beat-consumer-tune-out-with-useful-content

 [SK4]https://www.websitehostingrating.com/internet-statistics-facts/

 [SK5]https://www.websitehostingrating.com/internet-statistics-facts/

 [SK6]https://www.semrush.com/blog/eat-and-ymyl-new-google-search-guidelines-acronyms-of-quality-content/

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The Enchanted Islands of Galapagos

July of 2018 I checked something off my “bucket list” then added it back. I visited the Galapagos Islands, and I want to return, to see my friends, the Blue Footed Boobies and the Sea Lions/Wolves.

The Islands seemed to appear and disappear

The Galapagos Islands are strangely beautiful, like another world, except they are here, in our world.

Before the name of Galapagos (saddle-backed tortoise) became usual, “quite a number of navigators” named them Islas Encantadas (“Enchanted Islands”) because “They seemed to appear and disappear on the surface of the ocean, as if by magic.” Navigational equipment has improved since the 1500s: the islands do not move.

The earliest written mention of Galapagos is dated April 26, 1535, from Fray Tomas de Berlanga Sevilla, Bishop of Panama, to King Charles V of Spain. The King wondered what Francisco Pizarro’s Spanish Conquistadors were up to, so he sent Father Tomas to find out.

Statue of Father Tomas, Soria, Spain
Statue of Father Tomas, Soria, Spain

Weak winds and strong currents drifted the sailing ship to islands 180 miles off-shore. Desperate for freshwater, they found “seals, turtles, iguanas, tortoises, many birds like those of Spain, but so silly that they do not know how to flee…” They also discovered that the Galapagos Islands have no rivers. “I do not think that there is a place where one might sow a bushel of corn… as though at some time God had showered stones…”

From a boat the Islands are a stark and arid desert, with giant Opuntiavi cactus poking 20 feet above ancient Palo Santo forests, stubbornly prying life from washed-out stones. Above 300 ft. the Islands can be forested and lush, with grassy pastures where farmers now grow crops and raise cattle.

God had showered stones…

As an international tourist destination, the Galapagos Islands are again “enchanted,” but “exotic” like Walt Disney’s “Enchanted Kingdom”, not “bewitched.” Two Jetports receive people from all over the world, who come to gawk at unusual animals and strangely beautiful landscapes while pondering the mysteries of evolution as Darwin’s Finches pick at fallen food around café tables. Deep highland wells and water pipes now deliver water to the towns of Galapagos, but there isn’t much, so don’t use much.

Opuntiavi & Palo Santo forest

What if the washed-out arid zones are an ice-age inter-tidal zone? During ice-ages, low-water exposed the ancient land-bridge across the Bering Straits, now called Beringia. People walked across that path from Asia to settle the Americas.

Between ice-ages, high-water tides would wash 300 feet higher, pulling soil to the seafloor, leaving only stones. With no rivers to flood silt across bare stones, the excavated stones slowly splinter, allowing plants to root.

And so the cycle continues.