In this instructional video, Shaun Whynacht of Blue Cow Marketing breaks down the core concepts of search engine optimization (SEO) for beginners. He explains that search engines crawl websites looking for keywords and keyword density, and warns against keyword stuffing. He describes the importance of proper header hierarchy (H1, H2, H3) for signaling content structure to bots. He recommends embedding YouTube videos on a site to gain extra ranking signals. Fresh, regularly updated content is highlighted as essential for relevance. Whynacht emphasizes relevance as the ultimate ranking factor, noting that longer user dwell time and click‑throughs signal quality to Google. He outlines two main avenues for improving relevance: earning backlinks from other sites through outreach and building a strong internal linking system via pillar pages that connect to sub‑pages. He also mentions practical backlink sources such as industry directories, Google My Business, and social media profiles. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to subscribe, comment, and ask further marketing questions.
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Hey everyone, it's Shaun here with Blue Cow Marketing. This video, we're going to be talking about SEO. We're going to be explaining it pretty much basically. So dropping it down to the very basic level. When you think about SEO, search engine optimization, there's a lot of talk out there about what should you be doing, you know, what should you be doing with the content on your site so that you can be found on Google organically in search. And I'm going to explain to you in the next few few minutes the very basic understanding of what you need to know. So let's get right into it. So the first thing you need to know is your website. What comes into play that search engines are looking for? There are keywords. Now keywords are terms or words and, and more so now phrases that the search engine bot, and that's just the software program that's gonna come to your website and it's gonna look through all the content and it's gonna index it in their database. So that when somebody hops on Google or Bing or wherever, and they start to type in a search asking a question, it's gonna look for their database and say, okay, what relevant results will come? Keywords are the way to do that. So making sure that whatever industry you're in, whatever term you are talking about in your website or a blog post, that you have keyword density. This means the amount of times that these show up. Now you can get mixed up where people are like, you know, you need to just inject a ton of these keywords, and it can really, you know, fog up the, the, um, value or the, um, quality of that content. So you want to try to avoid that. Just make sure that you're using terms that you think people would be searching for. The next thing are headers. These are like H1, H2, H3. What this means is if you've ever made an edit to a website and you've got a builder and you can drop down the predetermined formatting at the top, They're gonna be like heading 1, heading 2, heading 3. That's what we mean by this. Search engines are gonna look for this. They're gonna look at H1, meaning the biggest text, the top heading, and then it's like, well, that's really the primary, um, thought or content. And then H2 is a subthought and content of that, and H3 and so forth down, down the page. Instead of having everything on the page just be one style of font, you wanna make sure that you do have those different types of headers that are in there. And there are lots of free tools out there that you can submit your website to, and it will tell you if you've a good score, uh, or you've got some errors on your site. Videos. Videos are huge. If you're gonna be putting a video on your website and you wanna help it get some traction on search engines, especially Google, what I recommend is you put that video up on YouTube and then embed that video into the website. The bots that crawl your website are going to take into account that there are videos on there. And if it's a Google YouTube, um, bot crawling the site, you're gonna get some good points with your positioning that way. And then obviously fresh contents, right? So making sure your site is not stale, and there is an important reason why you want to do that. And that is why we want to know what does Google consider for SEO? You know, I mentioned a lot of technical stuff, but what does it really come down to? And it's this. Relevance. They are in the business of making a great user experience for those that are on their search engines. So they want to make sure they are serving up the best quality results. And it comes down to relevance. And the longer the people stay on your site, the more clicks that they do on your site, that tells Google this site is relevant. So if you do a search for, um, you know, a certain term or phrase or, or, or question you have and a bunch of results come up and you click on one and it's actually giving you what you want and you're spending time on there, you're clicking through the different links, that's telling Google this site because of the search is a relevant site. So most likely they're gonna show it more. Now if that site didn't have relevance, nobody was clicking on it, then it's gonna start to move its way down and people aren't going to be engaged with it and Google's just gonna start to push it onto other pages. Uh, and there's always a joke out there in the SEO world that it's like, where Where is the best spot to hide something you don't want somebody to see? It's on the second page of Google because most people don't ever go to the second page of Google. So we're fighting for that first page rank when we do all that content. So here is another thought process. We've got two more to think about. You've got your website and then you've got other websites. So let's just put four of them on the screen here. One thing that you can do to help bring up your rank and be found when it comes to relevance is have links to your website or content from your website be appearing on others' websites. So what I mean by that is you are going to be able to reach out to different providers. So let's say you're writing a blog article on a certain topic and there are other bloggers out there that have articles. You can reach out to them and say, hey, I've got this blog article that I think would be a great link to add value to yours. And if they take that on, then that's going to help you out. That is called backlinks. And there is a huge industry, and there are people where that is their sole position in the marketing world, to get backlinks for different clients' websites. The more that your site is appearing on others, the more Google's going to say, hey, this is a relevant site. So backlinks are extremely important. The next thought and the last one we're gonna talk about here is how do you really leverage your own content? So let's take this as your homepage or what we call a pillar page. Now a pillar page could be a longer form piece of content, but the idea with a pillar page is that it's on a specific topic. So let's say you have 3 different really directions that your business goes in. You know, maybe it's like apples and oranges and bananas for, for the sake of an explanation here. The pillar page would be, you know, this is our apples page. And on there is a lot of information about apples. But also you have subpages or blog posts or articles, whatever you want to call them. So these also exist on your website. What you want to do is you want to have links to those subpages on that homepage or that pillar page. You may have started to notice that homepages of websites are now becoming much longer. A lot of people don't have menus. They have a lot of links on that homepage because they're linking to subpages that they have because they want to have that internal linking. That is going to do two things. It's going to tell Google when they index your website or your initial page or your homepage that there are other links and other content that they should go check out as well. But from a user standpoint, when they hit that pillar page or they hit that website, they will see other content to click on, which is giving Google the idea that this site is relevant because people are sticking around longer. So that's just the basic understanding of SEO. There could be a lot more that we could go into with the technical details, but from an understanding is your main purpose is to make sure that you're getting great relevant content on your website You're always updating it. You're always putting in new content, and that's why people blog a lot. You're putting some videos on your website, but you're making sure that you're linking pages to other internal pages in your site, as well as if you can, if you can devote some time to try to get some backlinks. And a traditional way would be if you are a member of a certain association, maybe they have a members directory, make sure that your website is listed on there. Any online profile that you have, Google My Places, your Facebook page, those are all going to come into play when it comes down to backlinks because those are indexed sites that will see your website as linked to it. So thanks for watching this video. Hopefully I answered any questions. Please subscribe to our channel if you like this content and would like some more. And as always, if you have a question about this or anything marketing related, go ahead, comment below the video. I would love to hear your questions, and I will be more than happy to answer them. So thanks for watching and have a great time growing your business.
