#030: Optimizing Your Own Website: Understanding the New SEO Rules and How to Use Them to Your Ad...

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey, what's up everyone? Thanks for joining me for episode number 30 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. My name is Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. As a reminder, you can find detailed show notes to this episode by going to b2b launcher.com episode 30. So today we're talking about SEO search engine optimization. It's one of those topics that just comes up over and over and over in the blogosphere. And I gotta tell you, SEO is one of those topics that I have a love hate relationship with in. Part of the reason for that, I think, is that I've been seeing people get away with gaming the system in order to rank higher. And I've been seeing that for years. And it's just discouraging to see that when you feel you're doing the right things and maybe not getting the results you want. The other frustrating part for me at least has been how frequently the rules change. The SEO rules, I mean, I just don't have the patience to, to keep up with something that changes so frequently. Which is one reason why I'm not into offering social media strategy as a service. Because I think when you do that, that pretty much has to be like your only game. Same thing with SEO. I've always felt that if you're going to do SEO for clients, you really have to stay on top of it. It's got to be your main thing because you're going to have to invest so much time and energy just kind of keeping up with what's working, not working, and what the new rules are. Having said that, I do have to admit that there is great value in knowing how to optimize your own website. And I'm talking about your own website for your freelance business, not that of your clients. And fortunately, the time to do that, to optimize your own site, has never been better. And that's mainly thanks to Google's big changes over the last couple of years. And to explain what's happened and what you can do to ensure that more relevant prospects find your website and contact you about your services, I've brought in my good friend Diana Huff for this episode. Diana works with small business owners and midsize companies and all the way to really Fortune 500 companies, but mostly kind of the Small to mid size market. And she helps business owners drive more traffic to their websites, generate more leads and get more business. And over the years, her business has evolved from marketing writing services to SEO to website overhauls to what she does today, which is a combination of all those factors. She takes a much more holistic approach to helping her clients get more qualified leads and land more business. And I've known Diana for, gosh, about 10 years now and she was always the person I turned to for SEO advice back in the day. And she has really stayed on top of this broad topic and big topic this whole time. She's very, very good at it. It's a key part of what she does for her clients. I will tell you that if you're already an SEO pro, an SEO expert, this episode might not be for you. But if you just know the basics and you want to brush up or if you are okay, but you'd like to kind of get a better feel for what's happening and how you can specifically optimize your site, I think you're going to get a lot out episode. Diana's going to give you some concrete ideas and some step by step advice that you can start applying right away. So anyway, enjoyed the interview and I'll come back at the very end with some announcements. So I'm sitting here with my good friend Diana Huff all the way out in, what, New Hampshire, Right, Diana?

Yep, Plastow, New Hampshire.

Yeah. So it's very cool to talk with you again. It's, you know, I stayed in touch since, gosh, since I got started and you had been doing this for a while. So it's really neat to be able to share ideas with you even once our businesses have evolved over the years.

Yes.

And one of the things that, for those people who don't know about you, and I think a big part of my audience has heard your name, they know about you. I talk about you a lot. See, Diana, like, you know, I'm always talking you up.

But yes, I get newsletter subscribers from you because they say, I always ask, how did you hear about me? And they say, Ed Gandia.

There you go.

Thank you.

For those of you, for those people who don't know about you, what you do, why don't you give us kind of a quick summary of what you specialize in these days?

Well, I help small businesses grow their companies or grow their businesses through an improved web presence. And by that I mean I help them with their website. So I, I don't do any of the design. I work with designers, but I do everything else from the project management, the strategic positioning, messaging. I write all the copy and I just. I just oversee the whole thing, start to finish. Because so many of these small businesses, they just don't know what they're doing because it's just become so complicated now.

It has, it has. So you, you've kind of taken a more comprehensive approach to. To helping a market. Not just what do you need written? It's. It's the bigger picture.

Yes. Because it's not so much what do you need written, it's more where I. I tie in all the sales lead stuff. So, you know, how are your sales coming in? How do people hear about you? What's your lead generation? What other marketing tactics that have you had are you using? Just how do we tie all this stuff in and have a real strategic plan in place before we even. The writing's the last thing I do.

Gotcha. That makes sense. And of course, a big part of this is the search engine optimization part of things.

Right.

So. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. This is something you've been doing for a long time. I think this has been kind of a constant in your business.

Yes. Actually, I just wrote a blog post on it because, you know, Jill Whalen hung up her hat last week. And so I wrote a blog post about how I got started. And I got started back in 2001 when Google AdWords. I don't think Google AdWords was a big. I was using Overture. And that is when I learned it was a bid process. And that is when I learned that people were using marcom copywriter to find me versus freelance copywriter. And Ed, I said it right in my blog post. It was like, oh, my God. Because I had never knew. I never knew. It was amazing. That was my first introduction to it.

Overture. That's a term I haven't heard in forever. That's like saying Netscape.

Yes, exactly. They got bought by Yahoo, but it used to be go to and then they changed it to Overture and then Yahoo bought them, I think in 2003 or four or something like that.

So you know that that got you hooked. And I can see why this has continued to be a big part of what you do because it is an essential component to what you're doing today. I guess one good place to start this discussion, because today we're talking strictly about not you offering SEO as a service necessarily. That's a whole separate discussion, but really about your own website as a Freelance writer and what you can do to optimize your site. So one thing I know you've been writing about recently and talking a lot about has been how SEO has changed just in the last three or four years. So tell us a little bit about how that's changed, because I think I'm still kind of stuck in 2009, 2010.

Okay, well, first off, the biggest change that's happened is that Google no longer provides keywords in the Google Analytics report or in Google within Google Analytics. So last year they started off where they. If you were logged into Google when you were doing a search, your keyword. So say I'm searching for, I don't know, restaurants in Plastow and I are Mexican restaurants in Plastel. And I hit on the only Mexican restaurant that they, they would not see my keyword searches in their Google Analytics because I was logged in. So that was called not provided. And it quickly became, because I analyzed a number of sites for clients and I could see it was ranging anywhere from 30 to 50%. So all of a sudden it was very difficult to tell if your quote, your SEO was working or not because you couldn't tie things back to keywords. So then just, I think in the last two weeks, three weeks, a month, anyway, very recently Google just came out and said, we're not returning any keyword data. And that's to protect people's privacy. So now you don't know what keywords people are using. And on top of all of that, Google is now using semantic, semantic search. So I don't know if you've noticed when you do searches, but the results that you get back don't exactly match the keyword phrases anymore. Google is taking a really good guess on what you're looking for based on your previous search history. So all of a sudden, ranking for a keyword is ludicrous because it doesn't work that way anymore.

So Google is basically saying, I think I know what you're trying to look for. We're not even going to look for what you said. We're going to look for what we think you're trying.

Yeah. And so if you look, if you notice often the searches that get return to you aren't exact matches with the keyword phrase that you put in.

Now, of course, if you're kind of a power user and you do things under quotations or use brackets and things like that, is that still.

I will do that. And I also have, well, I have three browsers, so I have Safari, Firefox and Chrome. And if I want what I call a clean search, I'll often use, I only use Firefox for when I want something really clean because I don't have any search history in it.

Okay, but let's face it, right? The average user out there is not going to do that.

Right, Right.

So Google is basically trying to get smarter and trying to predict what you're.

Looking for and they're trying to give you a good search result, a good search experience.

Gotcha. Based on, I mean, an honest assumption of what you're trying to do, not based on what other vendors are trying to pay or anything like that.

Exactly.

Okay, so you know, so any other big changes? I mean those are pretty massive, but anything.

Those are pretty massive. And then also there's the whole Penguin and Panda and you know, basically all the, all the tricks that people used to use to try and get things into the search engine. So all this keyword stuffing and all of these writing articles based on keywords and all, I call it diarrhea.

Pretty much says it all.

Yeah, all this junk that was clogging up all the search engines, like all the Ezine articles, all the ehows. I mean some of that still comes up, but it's quickly falling off. There isn't much you can do now to scam the search engine.

It's interesting. Carol Tice of makealivingwriting.com recently, I think last week actually, and we're pre recording this, but recently she posted an article about how the content mills are just dying off very rapidly.

Yeah, I read that you posted it on International Freelancers, right?

Yeah. Wasn't that interesting?

That was a good article.

She had some really interesting analysis there about how basically Google, because they're getting better at this and kind of bypassing and skipping all this diarrhea content as you call it, it's not creating a viable business anymore for these content mills, which is just designed to churn out content for the purposes of ranking higher. Right, so that makes sense. So essentially, I mean, what's your analysis of these big, big trends over the last. Where's Google going with.

Well, thank you so much because this is what excites me the most. What Google's forcing people to do now is be strategic and do real marketing. So I call it old fashioned marketing. And I actually posted Eric Eng. I think that's how you pronounce. He writes, he works at Stone Temple Consulting and he speaks all the time on SEO and Google. He's fabulous. You can follow him on Google. He posted a presentation Last week about the changes that Google's been making and what it means for marketers. And he basically said, you have to be a better marketer. And I was like, woohoo. And it's like posted.

What a concept.

I know. And I posted as I re. Shared his, I shared his presentation and I wrote that, I said, so what Google's basically saying is you need to go back to traditional marketing. And he agreed with me. So I was very happy. So basically what it means is all that content that people are producing, all this content, it's nothing new. We all did it before the Internet. All these case studies, white papers, reports, surveys, all this stuff was done before the Internet. The Internet has just made it much easier to distribute, just to distribute it and for people to find us. So all that stuff is still really, really important. But instead of creating it just so you can get found in the search engine, create it so that you can. Google really wants to see people do something with your information. So whether they're downloading it, plus one ing it, commenting on it, sharing it, they want you to create helpful information. So in order to do that, you really need to know who your customers are and why you're creating this content for them.

Okay.

Does that make sense?

That makes perfect sense. I mean, conceptually, this is what should be happening. Yeah, yeah, that's true. So it seems like what was happening and tell me if this is an accurate assumption or analysis, is it was an imperfect system. I mean it always will be. But, but people figured out, because it was imperfect, they would figure out how to game the system.

Right. Plus it was all keyword based. So there was this heavy reliance on keywords and Google's just basically wiped all that out. There's this huge sucking sound. It's all these SEOers going out of business because what are you going to do if you can't base everything on keywords?

True, true. Okay. So content and relevant content, all these things that should have mattered anyway that we were doing before. Now that's the stuff that's coming back in terms of importance.

Yes.

Okay, so let's talk about, let's kind of come back to a solo business and a business writer, freelance writer. What should we do? Or let's start with what we should not do first of all, since we're kind of going down that road anyway.

Well, I think for small businesses it's harder to what not to do because most of us don't know what not to do because, you know, like, there's no more. And I've never. I've never known what black hat tactics are or any of that kind of stuff. I would say, basically, don't get hung up on keywords, because they don't. You know, people call me all the time, oh, I need help with my keywords, and blah, blah, blah. Like, well, you know what? Keywords are important. Here's what I tell people. Optimize your site around the keywords that you think people would use to find you. And I say each page of your site should have a unique title tag, a unique description tag. And that's because. Think of your site like a filing drawer. So in your file drawer, you have different file folders, and they're all marked, or they should be, so you can find things. Correct?

Mm.

Well, you need to have a unique title tag on each page of your site so that Google knows how to index it and put it in its vast filing system so that it can call it up again when someone does a search. So you can. And this is nothing technical or new you can actually download. Google has this great report called the SEO Starter Guide. If you just type that into Google, Google's SEO Starter Guide, It's a free PDF, I think it's 30 pages long. And they explain how to do title and description tags and why you should do it very clearly. And you can do it all yourself. You don't need to hire anybody. It's not rocket science. Any writer can do it.

And they show you. If your site is on WordPress, for instance, where you can.

That they don't do, but that's a good question. So if you're using WordPress, there is the Yoast SEO SEO plugin, and that's where you put in your title and your meta description tags. So you don't need to know any coding or anything.

Okay. So if you're using WordPress, you have to. You have to upload the. That plugin. That Yoast plugin.

Yeah, there. Well, I think there's a. There are two of them. There's Yoast, and then there's another one. I forget which one it is. But there are two main ones, and I don't know if WordPress itself has functionality. Now. I use the Yoast one because it's called the SEO. It has social media attached to it. So if you download it and you can go over to SlideShare, I have a SlideShare presentation on how to configure your Yoast plugin. But the reason why I like it is because if you configure it correctly, you can also make it so that you do the fit. What's it called? It has to do with Facebook. Oh, what's that?

The social graph?

No, it's Facebook. So basically what happens because I have this enabled in Yoast, if you come to my blog and you like one of my blog posts, you automatically become a fan of my page without liking my Facebook page.

Interesting. Okay.

Yes. I forget what it's called, but it's creepy, but I love it.

Okay.

It works for that. Also, within the Yoast plugin, you can very easily add your Twitter card. So if you look on Twitter, a lot of people have this thing called, I think it's called Summary, but if you click on it, it shows your post and it shows the picture, and it's called the Twitter card.

Okay.

So you can enable that. So it's just another little bit of functionality and it has some other bits you can through my SlideShare, but that's why I use it, because it has all this different functionality attached to it.

And by the way, we'll include a link to your SlideShare presentations here in the Show Notes, but if you know it offhand, do you have kind of a short URL for.

Well, it's SlideShare dianahuff.com or slideshare.com dianahuff.

Or slideshare.net yeah, I just looked slideshow.net dianahuff altogether and Diana has two ends. We'll include a link in the Show Notes, but this is a quick way for people to get there. You got some great presentations there with some screenshots. It makes all these things a lot easier.

Yeah, so to go back to the title and meta tag, so that's the first thing that you should do is make sure that all of your title tags and description tags are unique to each page. And then also the other thing you want to do is connect up your webmaster tools with your Google Analytics, because you get different information within each one. And within Webmaster tools, Google will tell you if you have duplicate title or meta tags.

Okay. Okay.

And it will also tell you if you have broken links, which is very.

Useful once your site starts growing.

Yes.

Okay. So that's also.

It also tells you if you have broken links coming into your site.

Ah, interesting. That's happened to me. Yes.

Yeah.

Okay. So title tags, description tags, and so forth. So that's definitely something we should do. You gave us a couple of resources. Anything else?

Well, then, in terms, to go back to, your original question was what should they not do? So that I'll just stick with what they should do. Because what to not do. I mean, that's all kinds. There's all kinds of. I don't think anyone's not. Oh, I know what a big one is that people think they should do. Creating micro sites. So that's. Google doesn't want that. So, like, client. I had a client that had eight different sites, all because he thought he was, you know, if you typed his name into Google, all this different stuff would show up. And Google's really cracking down on that. And plus it reduces or dilutes your quote link juice and all this other stuff. So have one site and drive everything to it versus having all these other different sites.

Gotcha. Now, I know some people do this and they don't necessarily do it for SEO reasons, but they have two very different audiences. As a writer.

Well, that's fine.

Right? So they have. Which unfortunately, when you do that, you dilute your message or your SEO juice in a way because you have to divert traffic to two different sites.

Yeah. And plus, it's double the effort.

It's double the effort. But, you know, sometimes the benefits of having them separate, I understand, outweigh the other benefit.

But also, I mean, just, you know, having. Just think carefully about what you're doing. So, you know, I used to have two sites. I had my DH communications site and then I had my marcom writer blog. And they were two different sites. And when traffic to my blog outstripped traffic to my regular site, that's when I combined them.

Interesting.

Yeah. And that brings me to my next point of what you should do is definitely have a blog. And I'm gonna. People seem to think like, you know, you need a blog, you need to be copy blogger, you need to be TechCrunch, you need to be mashable, you need to be making all this money and getting all this ROI and being famous. Nothing is further from the truth. What I tell all my clients. So I'm in business to business. I tell all my clients I recommend that they have a blog and that you write on target. So by that I mean write stuff that's going to bring in your target audience. So if you notice on my blog, I write a lot of stuff that I call it meat and potatoes. It's not sexy. It's what brings in a lot of my traffic and it's what brings in the people who hire me because all of that stuff is showing up in Google.

And by the way, where is your blog today? What's the URL? It's dianahuff.com okay, so you have meat and potato type content there. How do you know?

I have tons of how to content, tons of it. Just to show, one, I'm trying to show my expertise, and two, I'm putting out valuable information so people, if they're interested in hiring me, people call me all the time and say, oh, you obviously know what you're talking about. So I'm the. And I think I read this on one of the articles you posted. Don't write for other bloggers. Write for your target audience.

Absolutely. And this is a message.

Don't worry. Yeah, don't worry if you're not, you know, TechCrunch or Mashable. Don't worry about. Always comes down to this for me. Exactly how many customers do I need?

Yeah, well, what happens, Diana, is that I would say 90% or more of the advice that you hear out there in terms of blogging is for people who want to build a blog in order to generate income from that blog.

Right, but I don't want to. I want to generate income from my service, which is website overhauls.

Exactly. But that's not, you know, what's being taught out there. So when you do it the way we're supposed to be doing it as service professionals, then it's a whole different approach. It's about two things. You're right. I preach a lot about being a way to build credibility once somebody arrives at your site and starts scanning your content. And another one, like you said, it's a way to attract the right kind of people to your site. Now, you said earlier, hey, don't worry about keywords, but how do you know what to write about and how to phrase some of this stuff? If you're not worried about keywords or if keywords are no longer relevant? Speak a little bit to that.

That's a great question. So what I do, I write about is I write, I answer questions that people ask me when they call me. Ah, yeah. So I just keep, you know, I have it mostly in my head, but anytime anyone. And I used to not do this because I thought this stuff is so basic, you know, people are gonna think, you know, that I have no idea what I'm talking about because it was so basic. I mean, I get the most basic questions and, you know, now I just answer them. And if I see issues, like, if I see. Like if clients call me or prospects call me and I'm looking at their site and I see things, I just note it. And then at some point it becomes A blog post. I try to let a few weeks go by so that the prospect doesn't connect my blog post with their phone call. You know, I take note of the questions people ask me. I constantly, you know, I'm on the web all the time, so anytime I see things, or I'm just constantly looking for topics to write about.

Okay.

Where I see that there are issues.

And just by doing that, that's smart. I mean, you're doing what we talked about a little earlier is you're being a little bit more natural and authentic and approaching the whole process in a more organic fashion, which is what Google is trying to do. So they're trying to match those questions with the right content.

The other thing you can. Oh, no, I was going to say you can't do that anymore because all the keywords are gone. But the other thing too, in terms of content, I just lost my train of thought. Sorry.

Well, it sounded like it was going to be brilliant.

I know where to go again. Oh, I ask people, I send out surveys. So I survey my E newsletter readership and I ask people what they want me to write about.

Ah, okay, perfect. So if they want you to write about it, obviously it's something they want to learn more about, which then makes it more searchable out there.

Right? Exactly.

Okay. So that's really smart. And even if you think, oh my gosh, this is so basic or what, I mean, it might be basic to you. The real thing is, is it helpful to your audience?

Right, Exactly. So, you know, I sometimes go back and look at some of my posts and think, oh, my God, I've got all these screenshots. You know, here's how to read your social report, here's how to do this, here's how to do that. It's all this really basic how to information, but people seem to love it.

Now, I guess in your case. So you're dealing with a lot of technical things for the person like me. I'm not getting into any of that stuff. I'm writing for my clients. So would it make sense for me to write about some of the internal stuff on how to approach these projects? In other words, how to do some of this research, how to maybe edit smarter, how to put these pieces together more efficiently.

Yep, that's actually very good because I'm going to be doing a blog post on a site that I just redid for one of my clients. And I finally realized that one of the things I don't ever write about is how do I come up with the Idea, how do I structure the content within a site? And I realized I don't write about it because it's so ingrained in me and so natural that I have to break down my own writing process, which is hard, but that's, you know, that's something you can do. Like how if you're a content writer or if you're a copywriter, how do you come up with your ideas? How do you recommend things to customers, to your clients? How, you know, just where do you come up with your strategy?

Yeah, because the whole idea is really to be helpful even if you end up doing that work yourself. So, you know, I don't know if this is true or not, but I love this comparison. I heard that Home Depot actually makes more profit from doing it for you than do it yourself.

Well, yeah, exactly.

I mean, but how do they, how do they give it away? Where they give away all these clinics and all these courses.

But, well, and here's how I. So, okay, so here's a good thing too. So there's all this how to information, you know, and I own my own home and I always have to go and, you know, something always needs fixing. So one day my garage door wouldn't close and it was because that little eye thing was off. So I have an automatic garage door opener. So little eye thing at the top, you know, at the, like at the bottom level, it was, it wouldn't stay in its place, so the door kept going back up. So I went online. How to fix the garage door, right? And I found out there was a whole instruction thing on how to fix this little eye. I could not get it fixed. Oh, it was driving me crazy. So I call the garage guy, the garage door fixer guy. He comes out, he fixes it in two minutes. It was a $95 call, right, for him to come out. He said, well, while I'm here, why don't I just give your whole garage door a tune up? So just because you put all this how to information out there, sure, there's going to be people who are going to take it and run with it and maybe even steal it. I don't know. I don't care anymore. What it does is it shows that I know what I'm talking about and it brings people in the door.

That's a key point. Don't worry about giving away your quote unquote secrets. The way you get to the right kind of clients is by giving this stuff away and knowing that some people are going to take it and run with it. But you have to be okay with it, right?

Exactly. Because I could have fixed my garage door and, you know, but I couldn't. And so. And it's the same thing with everything, you know, something always needs fixing around here. I'm always typing in how to fix and I find videos and I try and I just give up. It's like just calling the guy.

Yeah. Well, okay, so two things really helpful how to information that's relevant to your audience, even if you think it's silly or too basic or whatever. And then the other thing is this is more of a question. I know a lot of people get freaked out when they. When they launch a blog and they got four or five posts there already and zero comments. Is this something to be worried about?

That's another good thing of what to do. So in this Eric Ng presentation that I mentioned earlier, he has in there, his recommendation was build a community. And that is something that I figured out over time. Like within the last year, I really started noticing this. So I don't worry about how many comments I get, but I make sure that I am getting comments, that I am getting retweets, that I am getting shares. I don't worry about the numbers. And what I've done is I've really started focusing on those people who are coming to my blog and I always welcome them. I always thank them for coming. I'll go on Twitter and thank them for leaving me a blog comment. I follow them on Twitter. So I've noticed that people will come to my blog, leave a comment, and then they'll follow me on Twitter. So I'm always. I'm sure to follow them back. I just try to build up this community. It's. And again, I'm not mashable. I'm not TechCrunch. I don't have bazillions of people retweeting my stuff, but I have enough that it's showing Google, it's sending that social signal that here is someone whose content people are interacting with. And so if you go to my blog, I actually have two posts sitting there, Part one and part two, about how to use the social report. And so all of this social activity is really important because Google is tracking it within Google Analytics, within the social report. So I give all the how to's on how to configure that report and how to read it.

You brought up a very important point which we haven't really touched on, which is how social media is impacting search results. So I know this is a huge.

So that brings me to my next thing that you should do. You definitely, you must. You have to. You need a Google profile.

Google.

Oh my God. So Google is first off, I've seen all this data now that says when. So you know what Google is, right? Your little face, your picture shows up next to your search result when you write content.

Yes.

So and that's why I use the Yoast plugin too, because it allows you to very easily set up your Google profile. I mean it allows you to make it so you don't have to do all this configuration. You just put your Google profile URL into the plugin. But anyway, so there's all this data that shows that the Google when you, when your picture is next to the search result, it gets higher click throughs. I've read up to last year I read that the click throughs were up to like 150%. So and then on top of that, everything that I have read and watched says that Google and I've seen it is Google is pushing all the Google stuff up. So the more people you have in your circles, the more that people are plus wanting your content, the more they're sharing it not just on Google, but across all the other social media properties, the higher your content is going in Google.

Interesting. So you're saying that when you say the picture, if I'm searching for how to fix my garage door and let's say that someone I'm connected to in Google wrote something on that or has searched or plussed something on that topic, that will, that will come up.

Yes.

Okay.

Now it's all videos. Do something different. Let's say.

B2B lead generation. How about something like that? Because you and I are kind of.

In that lead generation. Consultants. Yeah. So Judy Carroll, she's number one. I'm not logged in and her face shows up right next to the search results.

Okay. And is that someone that you're happen to be connected to?

No, but if you're logged in, you'll get a whole different set of results.

Gotcha. Okay, so what you're saying is, well, first of all, Google just go ahead and get an account, get a profile. You don't have to be active in Google as a social platform in order for this to be effective.

Well, it helps if you are. You don't want to ignore it. And the other thing when you set up your profile is you want to make sure that you have a link to your blog and you want to have a link to your about us page or your about page.

Okay, perfect. For obvious reasons, because you want them.

To, you know, work with each other.

And you're saying that by doing that it increases the chances that maybe when a prospect of yours is looking for something that not only will you search one of your articles or a page on your website, but then your picture is shown right there next to the results.

Right. And if you were posting this content to Google and people started plus wanting it or commenting on it or resharing it, that just makes it go up higher.

Okay, so then all those factors, including a picture of someone and the fact that everyone's kind of liked it and said this is relevant, this is good stuff. It just.

But it's also, it's not just Google, it's all of the other social properties. So even, and I'm not saying go out and you have to be active and, you know, have bazillions of people following you on all of them. Just that Google wants to see that people are interacting with your content.

That makes sense. Again, they're just trying to make this a lot more natural and really what it should be. Is this stuff relevant? Do people believe that?

Are people commenting on it? You know, so are people resharing it? You know, and so, and to get, and to go back, you asked, you know, what should we do for not getting comments? What I would do and do this in a very natural way. So what I have counseled people is, you know, so, you know, there are all the big gurus out there, you know, the big, the big names. And everyone follows them and you try to get their attention and they're really busy and if you're a little person, you know, they don't pay any attention to you. So instead of going after those big fish, go after the medium sized fish. So go after people who are really smart and just start getting to know them naturally. Just follow them on Twitter, read their blog every once in a while, leave a comment, they'll start noticing you, they'll follow you back and then next thing you know, their posts, they're writing about you and their blog post.

Interesting. I think that's smart.

And if you do go after the smart people.

Yeah. And do it in a natural and authentic way.

Very natural and authentic way. And just, you know, just find, I say five, seven, ten people. Because it's harder to do more than that. Even 10 is hard. Five, seven people who you think are really smart and just start following them.

All right, comments, let's talk then. Just to kind of wrap up.

Yeah. Because it's getting.

Well I mean, I'm just trying to put myself in the shoes of somebody who's trying to figure out, okay, how am I going to do this? This is a lot. There's a lot of different things. If you were to advise someone based on everything we've talked about, you know, maybe kind of a little action plan of sorts, what would you advise them to do, in what order? You know, so this is not going to happen overnight, Correct?

This does not happen overnight. One, give yourself six to 12 months and don't beat yourself up. That'd be the first thing. And second, make sure your site is optimized. Download the Google SEO Starter Guide. Do exactly as it says. Don't get all hung up on the keywords. Just make sure you have unique title tags and meta tags for each page of your site. Start a blog. When you write blog posts, if you have whatever plugin you're using for SEO, you can write a unique title tag and a unique description tag for your posts. Now, what I do on that, I do think about, you know, getting it found in the search engines. This is the last thing I wanted to tell you, and I'm going to be very quick about it. But when you write those title and description tags, write them for social because, you know, when you post something to Facebook or when you post something to Google plus, the little description shows up with it, right?

Yeah. So the description tag should be don't.

It should be don't stuff it.

It should actually make sense and be compelling.

Well, I use it. Yeah, I use it to get people to click on the article. I use it as a call to action of sorts. So anyway, do all that and have your blog and then start writing content geared toward your audience, geared toward your prospects. And to start, you know, at the same time, find three or five people who are smart that you can become friends with and just start following them and getting to know them. And it'll just. It grows over time.

I want to ask you one question that I think I kind of missed earlier on when you were talking about keywords, which is, what if you're kind of getting started or maybe you've been at it a while, like you had in 2002, 2003, and you're not sure if people are using copywriter, marcom, writer, marketing writer, business writer. If you have no access to that information anymore and you need to write some title tags and so forth, how.

Do you know you actually do have Access within Google AdWords, you can use the Google Keyword tool. You don't have to buy AdWords. You can open up an AdWords account and use that tool so you still have access to the information. You just don't know if the keyword you're using is the one people are using to find you.

Okay. I thought they had shut that tool down as well. So that's still available?

I don't think so, no. Because they need it for Google AdWords.

Okay. So at least you can. If you have those questions, you can use it.

And by the way, just some of those keywords will show up. Apparently, Google's still showing some of them in webmaster tools, which is why you should link your analytics and your webmaster tools together.

Okay. So you can just do a Google keyword research tool if you Google that term. Yeah, Google that term in Google. It will.

Yeah, it's in the Google AdWords. Just open up an AdWords account. Really? You don't have to buy anything.

Okay. I don't even. I can get in there without having my AdWords account open.

Oh, okay.

But, yeah, that's cool. I didn't know that you could. That they kept. That I thought they had taken out.

Yeah, no, it's just now you just don't know which keywords people used to find your site.

Okay. Makes sense. Okay, so this sounds a little bit more doable. And I feel. And you've given us some great stuff because now especially I know you will kind of course about all these changes. And of course I've been seeing all this stuff and it's just overwhelming. But it's great to know that this is actually good for us. Good for people who really don't have the time, the budget, or the desire to start creating all this diarrhea content, as you call it, and play all these games to try to game the system and try to artificially raise your rankings. So I think this actually helps people like us.

It's actually. It's natural marketing. And I think it's great for people like us because it helps us. It enables us to do what we do naturally. And that's connect with other people.

Absolutely. So, Diana, where can people learn more about you? Where should they go?

Oh.

Dianahuff.com dianehuff.com and your blog. Everything's there.

Everything's there.

Super. And then the SlideShare is SlideShare.net, i looked it up. Dianahuff. And again, two N's, two F's. Perfect.

Yeah, I have a ton of presentations there.

I'm looking at them here. This is great stuff. You got quite a few views on some of these.

Oh yeah, well, like I said, just produce helpful content.

Thanks for coming on, Diana. This is, this is really good and I think it's, it's very useful and I love how you explained it kind of in a plain English format, which is severely lacking out there, I think.

Well, thank you.

Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed that interview. So if SEO is something you've been meaning to focus on, but you've been putting it off, I hope that you take Diana's advice to heart and as she mentioned there at the end, give this process 612 months. This is not a short term fix, this is not an overnight thing. And follow the simple steps that she's outlined. And again, the good news is that there's never been a better time for solo business practitioners, practitioners like us, to rank higher because much of the old tricks that we've been seeing for years are no longer relevant or effective. So we get to benefit from the new rules of SEO. As a reminder, you can grab the detailed show notes to this episode by going to b2b launcher.com episode 30. These are detailed notes and make great reference material. We reference all the links that we gave out in the show and it's a great reference later if you want to review what we discussed. If you enjoyed the episode, I'd be very grateful if you shared it with friends. And the easiest way to do that is just go to the show notes page b2b launcher.com episode 30 or b2b launcher.com love and that makes it very easy to share that page with others and let others know about it. And also if you've been enjoying the show, I would be very grateful if you would give me a quick star rating or a sentence or two in iTunes. Ratings and reviews helps expose the show to people who would otherwise not heard of it so they can benefit from the information as much as you have. So if you've enjoyed the show, if you've gotten value from it, I'd appreciate if you just take, take a few seconds and leave me some feedback there on itunes. So that brings us to the end of this episode. I am your host, Ed Gandia. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you have an awesome day. The High Income Business Writing Podcast is a production of B2B business launcher. Learn more at B2B launcher dot com.