Now-a-day, SEO (search engine optimization) is a popular term both in and outside of the WordPress world. Thankfully, WordPress is one of the best CMS options for optimizing a site for Google Search. Hold onto your socks, ’cause on this episode, Micah gets on a call with a Google employee, someone who nearly lost their business to an algorithm change, and a founding father of WPMU DEV!
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Recorded Voice: Thank you for calling [beeb]. Your number one source for all things digital marketing.
Micah: Some months ago, I found myself sitting in a tiny phone booth at a coworking space hunched over my phone and a portable recorder. I was conducting my version of an undercover investigation.
Recorded Voice: …business coaching and white label solutions. We are obsessed with providing unlimited support…
Micah: Obsessed?
Recorded Voice: We are an organization of entrepreneurs, providing products and services to entrepreneurs, designed by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs.
Micah: Wow.
Micah: I was calling local SEO companies under my pre WPMU DEV freelance moniker to “get pricing” for improving the SEO on one of my client’s websites. But really, I just wanted to get a feel for the business of SEO. Okay, so, maybe an investigation is a bit of an overstatement.
Micah: Let’s talk to somebody. [repeatedly dials 0]
Recorded Voice: …ensuring the appropriate team member will call, text, or email you back right away….
Micah: If you’re not sure with SEO is, welcome to the club. Because, at this point I’m not sure if anyone actually knows what SEO is, but I’ll try to give you the gist anyway. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In layman’s terms, it’s how you make your website or content organically–meaning without paid ads–show up on Google or other search engines–but honestly, who uses Bing? Anyway, more on this later. Back to my tiny phone booth.
[phone ringing]
Male Voice: Hello, Micah?
Micah: Yes.
Male Voice: How are you today?
Micah: I’m good. How are you?
Male Voice: I am a super. If I were any better, there’d be two of me.
Micah: If you’re listening to this as someone who’s aware of SEO by name and definition, like me, or as someone who’s a well-versed search engine optimizer, then it’s no secret that SEO–and the industry that sprouted from it–gets a pretty bad wrap. Shady car salesman-like pitches–”pitches” with a “p”…get your mind out of the gutter–broken promises of getting your website to the top of Google, and constant spammy emails. Pitch, please. (Again, with a “p”.) So, I decided to turn the tables on them and see what kind of information I could get from five different SEO companies in my area.
Male Voice: Do you mind if I put you on a very quick hold here while I get you over to somebody?
Micah: Yeah, no problem.
Male Voice: Thank you.
[hold music]
Micah: Honestly, other than sitting on hold for the majority of my time, and the drastic price difference between each company–the lowest being $175 a month, and the highest being $10,000 a month–the thing that shocked me the most was the transparency. Listen to this clip from my fifth call.
Male Voice: Hey, Micah, great question, man. So, let me just educate you on a few things that you wanna do. Often times, you don’t want to get a quote for SEO just by having a call. So, I’ll give you an example: If you’re a developer, and someone says, “Hey, what would you charge to optimize my site?” If that person’s page score is ten or 20 out of 100 on Google or Bing, to get them to an A would be a lot harder than from a B or a C.
Usually what we do, Micah, is we usually charge $499 to do a complete website audit to identify areas related to the SEO. And we also do a competitive analysis to identify who is the competition and really can you even compete for those keywords. And then we would offer you, in essence, a tailored plan that runs anywhere from $800 to $2,000 a month, is what you would be looking at.
Micah: I know the audio was a little rough there. So, if you missed it, he basically said that giving a quote over the phone is difficult, because every site requires different types of attention. He then listed the ways he assesses a company’s SEO needs in order to tailor a strategy and pricing structure to them. If I learned anything from these calls, it’s that I have a lot to learn. The ongoing struggle with SEO is that we’ll never be in control of Google’s ever-evolving algorithms. So, if we stop trying to break the code and instead follow best practices, maybe we can live in harmony with Google, build great websites, and expand our reach. And that’s what we’re going to look into on this episode: the ins and outs, the lay of the land, the big picture of SEO.
So friends, welcome to Hello, WP, a podcast that reminds you what it’s like to be a new WordPress user. My name is Micah, and in just a hot sec, you’ll hear my co-host Josh.
[music]
Segment 1: Two Sides of the Coin
Josh: Hello, Micah.
Micah: Josh.
Josh: Back in the studio. Hello, WP.
Micah: Hello.
Josh: Today were talking SEO, and I’d love to know your initial thoughts. Do you know what SEO is?
Micah: My difficulty with with SEO is probably not much different than everyone else’s issues with SEO. It’s that it’s this, like, secret fortress of algorithms from Google.
Josh: Yes. SEO is, if you don’t know the term: search engine optimization.
Micah: Yeah.
Josh: You’re probably not listening to this podcast–like, even if you’re new to WordPress, that’s such a buzzy tech term that people hear all the time.
Micah: It’s a term that you would hear in marketing, which is where I’m from. I heard it in the marketing world a lot, and then as I’m getting into the WordPress world, I’m hearing it more from the other side. You’re hearing it from the guys who are developing for SEO, and from the…
Josh: More technical.
Micah: Yeah, in a more technical sense. But anyway, I wanted to make something that…we could try to break down SEO and try to uncover the secrets, at least a little bit.
Josh [dramatic voice]: Uncovering the mysteries of the Google: Hello, Essie Woo.
Josh: I think what you said is really interesting and maybe unintentional: There’s really two sides to SEO.
Micah: Well, before we go into these terms of how SEO works, what is the process in its most basic form? What is the process of SEO?
Josh: I would say, SEO–in its most basic form–is optimizing your content so that when somebody types in something, they get the best result. So, at the end of the day, it’s about the end user’s experience: that they’re finding the content with the least amount of hassle.
Micah: Right. And. people care about SEO because they want Google to rank them as the best result, because it looks good for their business.
Josh: Right, so as an end user, you’re looking at content that’s being delivered and going, “I want a personalized experience where I have this assistant that’s giving me exactly what I’m looking for.” But as a business, you’re going, “I want to be the solution to everything in life so that my business pops up right in front of the right audience.”
Micah: It’s Google, and then my business.
[laughter]
Josh: Yes. It’s your experience after. First, you see my business, then your experience is good. [laughter] So, essentially, you hit on two things there that I think is missed out. One: producing good content. But, two: there’s a technical element to that, and we’ve divorced those two things, in many ways, to a detriment. I spent a lot of time of my own marketing career, really looking down on the keyword, or the optimization, side of it, partly because it was abused. But with that said, I still want to be discovered. So, if you have a healthy view of what SEO is, it should be a tool that is used to go, “Hey, I think this person’s actually going to be interested.” And I guess, in a real marketing way, what you’re trying to do is get quality leads in front of your quality content. And by optimizing your content, you’re telling Google they’re going to be happy you dropped them there, because my information is going to deliver on the promise and it’s gonna make you look better, it’s gonna make them happy, and it’s gonna sell my product at the end of the day. So, I think there’s a balance that has to be struck between quality content, but also technical. Quality content is usually delivered from a quality web site.
Micah: If Josh’s comments here are true, and SEO takes place on the technical level and the content level, then it begs a really important question: How does Google judge the quality of a website and the content within? I mean, isn’t quality relative? And what if what I view as quality is different from Google’s few of quality? To answer these questions, I didn’t want to talk to some so-called “SEO master”, I wanted to talk to someone on the inside.
Micah: Can you just say your name and then, obviously, who you work for and what you do there?
Barb Palser: Sure, my name is Barb Palser. I am on the global product partnerships team at Google. My job is to work with partners, in this case partners in the WordPress ecosystem, to advance the adoption of modern web technologies and best practices such as AMP and progressive web apps. Also, I am not a technical person, I’m not a developer but I do work closely with the other teams at Google that are part of this initiative.
Micah: Okay, so maybe Barb couldn’t reveal all of the mysteries of SEO, but she could shed light on Google’s larger mission and values, and how that informs their definition of quality. Other than my obvious interest in Google search, I also wanted to learn more about their intentional engagement in the WordPress community over the past few years.
Micah: So, I’ve read that in the last year Google has very intentionally made efforts to engage in WordPress’ community, so I was wondering what sparked this interest in WordPress.
Barb: I think that in order to get to the interest in WordPress you need is to zoom out to Google’s broader interest in improving the health and performance of the open web. Over the past couple of years, there has been a feeling of urgency as well as excitement about what the the new modern web can be. We’ve seen–and you can see just looking at HTTP archive for example–that the size and load times of websites has just gotten heavier and heavier, year over year, that the user experience, on average, has gotten more cumbersome year over year, and while that’s been happening, you have other experiences like native apps and walled gardens that are getting faster and easier. And we think it’s good that those things exist, but we think it’s vitally important that creators and users can have a good, rich, robust, satisfying experience with the open web. That leaves us to feel like, okay there’s a huge challenge here, but we also see the path forward. And so, if you look at that as a large challenge, then you begin to think about, well okay, in order to solve that problem, we need to look at how the web is constructed. Well over 50 percent of websites now are built on a third-party CMS. That number appears to be growing double digits year-over-year, so more and more of the web is built on a CMS. And of course, WordPress is by far the largest. So, you know that very naturally leads us to think: If you want to engage in these ecosystems to help make your web better, then WordPress is a good place to dig in. We have been working with many other CMSs as well.
Micah: So what specific areas are Google looking to focus on within the WordPress space?
Barb: This is a good question. Speed and performance, security and safety, and and what I’ll call creator experience. Speed and performance has a lot to do with the end user experience and we see that, on average, WordPress sites are heavier than non WordPress sites. Looking at averages, obviously, with an ecosystem as large as WordPress is tricky, right? Because you know in that mix, you have extremely performant, beautiful, fast sites. You also have very slow sites. You’ll hear us and you see us doing a lot of work around AMP and progressive web apps. We want to make clear that we see those as tactics to achieve the speed and performance goal. They don’t have to be the only tactics.
On the trust and safety side, we’re working with WordPress and other CMS ecosystems, to understand how Google can help their security goals and challenges. And then the last area that I mentioned was creator experience. And I deliberately say “creator,” which is more expansive, I think, then developer experience. Because you certainly want to help developers achieve first class web experiences on WordPress, but you also want to be able to help non-developers do the same. And so, that may mean supporting heroes and experts who are already working on those things. It may mean offering our insights and observations, looking at the web with a broad scope, as well as trying to understand how we can spark some conversations–or participate in conversations–with the WordPress community about how we make some of these principles more front and center. And also help website owners and developers make make better choices.
Micah: Switching gears a little bit to SEO: We’re in an era where saying, “I’ll Google it,” or, “can you Google that?” is just a normal way of life, now. So new doors have opened for people and and businesses. But as a new user, SEO often feels like a white whale or mystical creature that I’ll never attain. Is there anything that you could say that would help demystify the word, or the the world of SEO?
Barb: Something that Google has always said about SEO is: Don’t be distracted by SEO. Use best practices when constructing your site and create quality content. That very sound, fundamental advice is oftentimes hard for folks to follow because they always are looking for a way to game the system. But, I would say that now more than ever, those things are true. As Google gets better and better at identifying the quality content that best matches a user’s query, the less impact the tricks will have, and the more impact just solid, good website construction practices and quality content will have.
Micah: So as SEO and algorithms are always changing and evolving, what are things that every website or small business owner should be doing to stay on top of their SEO?
Barb: I actually think know that having a fast site is much more of an exercise in prioritization and discipline then a factor of some technical constraint. The largest and best sites on the web, many of them, actually recognized it and almost treat speed and performance as a product in itself. They can actually attribute dollar value–you know, gain or loss–to a second gain or loss in load time. So honestly, if I were thinking about a smaller business or publisher, the prime piece of advice would be: Don’t ignore it; don’t sweep it under the rug. And use your site the way that a user would. If most content is actually consumed on a mobile device, then you would hope that those site owners would actually put themselves in the shoes of the users. So I actually think that the prioritization and discipline are the hard part. Putting it into the practice–compressing your images, limiting the amount of extraneous third-party scripts, just good code hygiene and maintenance–those things aren’t so hard to do.
Micah: Okay, so you had mentioned quality of content, and I would like to get your feedback on what that means. And how does Google judge quality of content?
Barb: So I should be clear that, in that context, the quality is… what the user is looking for. It’s real content. It’s real information that answers a user’s question, or serves their need. It’s not content that was created necessarily just for the purpose of being clickbait.
Micah: Well, that’s pretty much everything I have, question-wise. The only thing I can ask now is that you make some calls and put my site to the top of Google, that’s it.
[laughter, fades out]
Micah: Put simply, SEO is less about search engines and more about the end user. We should create quality websites with quality content so that Google can deliver quality results to their users and your potential quality leads. Google is concerned with making the web easily and safely accessible to all and in order to do that they have to set high standards, and stay one step ahead of anyone hoping to get their piece of the pie. And they do that by continuing to make their algorithms more and more fool proof over time. Oh, and if you fall too far outside of their best practices, they might just punt you.
Josh: This episode of Hello, WP is brought to you by…
Micah: SmartCrawl.
Josh: SmartCrawl Fun Fact:
Micah: Oh, do tell!
Josh: SmartCrawl is not actually a crawler. She makes crawlers smarter.
Micah: [laughs] I’ve always been like, “SmartCrawl? Maybe they’re like a spider…”
Josh: Well, she does wear, black widow-like clothing, but nope. That’s not it at all. Use SmartCrawl get your content in front of a bigger audience. SmartCrawl: SEO made easy.
Micah: SmartCrawl: putting your smarts in front a Google. [laughs] That’s it!
Micah: SmartCrawl makes the technical side of SEO easy, so you can focus on creating meaningful content. Try it today for free at WPMUDEV.com
Josh[background]: You know it, gurrl.
[laughter]
[music]
Segment #2: If You Build It (Correctly)…
Male Voice: Is the audio quality okay?
Micah: Yes, sounds great.
Male Voice: Okay, great.
Micah: Say hello to Pete Walter. He’s currently the founder of an online marketing service called BuzzRamp. I contacted him after coming across an article he wrote for U. K.-based news outlet The Telegraph. It was published in December, 2014, and it was entitled, “Google Penguin Nearly Killed My Business.” I’ll include a link in the show notes.
Now, if you’re like me and you don’t know what Google Penguin is, I did the dirty work for you and Googled it. According to Moz.com, it’s the search engine update that Google released in April, 2014, designed to reward high-quality websites and diminish the presence of websites that engaged in manipulative link schemes and keyword stuffing.
[music]
Pete Walter: I have a company that organizes media training. I just had a website, I was a new business owner and wanted to promote it. I was approached–like a lot of people– by an SEO company that had actually done some other work for me before, so I trusted them to do the right thing for the business. They said they’d done it for lots of other companies and showed me some results and all the rest of it. So, I was perfectly willing to give it a go. But, it transpired that what they were doing was using a tactic of article spinning and putting websites on all sorts of low-ranking directories and sites, which Google then decided–probably quite correctly–is not a good thing to be associated with. And the Penguin, as it was, update happened and, unbeknownst to me, the website just completely fell off Google. That was our main–and still is our main–way of marketing that service. So, I then contacted the company that was “helping me”; they played dumb about the whole thing and continued to think they’d done the right thing. But it was only that I happened to know someone who’d gone through a similar thing that told me that we probably got this Google penalty attached to us as a result of this Penguin update.
It struck me really tremendously unfair that, A. If you don’t play by the rules, you don’t get a warning from Google to say, “We think that your website has had this suspicious activity. We’ll give you, let’s say, two weeks or a month to sort it out. If you don’t, we’ll ban your website.” They just go and straightaway just erase it. Which, for a business like mine, was a real killer. It almost drove me out of business, to be honest. So, if you do fall afoul of the system for innocent reasons, you’re treated, in my mind, in an extremely unfair way. And it’s something that I felt needed addressing, which is why I approached a newspaper in the U.K. and offered to write an article in the hope that maybe someone at Google might see it.
Micah: And what came of that? Did anything come of that article?
Pete: Absolutely not. The only thing that came of it was lots of companies that contacted me, saying, “Oh, I see that you’ve had this problem; would you like to pay me several thousand pounds to stop it being an issue?” Which, ultimately I had to do because I haven’t the first idea about how to sort it out myself.
Micah: So you had to hire another company to get you out of this mess.
Pete: Yes, I think, from initially being kicked off Google to really getting back to the stage where we were previously was about a two-year process.
Micah: Moving forward into your business, did you guys find more effective SEO tactics to show up on Google after all that was fixed?
Pete: Just the usual things that I’m sure you and your listeners have heard millions of times: appearing on podcasts like this, trying to do guest blogging, asking people for backlinks where it’s appropriate, writing good, natural copy that’s well-indexed, and all the reset of it. But we haven’t got any super-duper tactics that we can reveal to you, I’m afraid…[fade out]
[music]
Micah: Hopefully it goes without saying, but for the Pete’s sake of the quality of OUR show and all of YOUR websites…I’m not going to endorse the use of any cheap tricks, or suggest hiring whoever swears they can get you to number 1. We just wanna give you the information needed to help you navigate the wacky marketing world of SEO.
So far, I’ve focused almost exclusively on big picture stuff, but for just a few minutes I thought it would be valuable to zoom in, and look at industry practices and common terms. For this, I called on my marketing / regular life friend, Mike Clute. I met him about a year after he launched his business and had the opportunity to collaborate with him on a few different projects.
Mike Clute: My name’s Mike–Mike Clute. I own a digital marketing agency called Mianna Marketing. Our core services are web design and development, search engine optimization or SEO, and PPC or pay-per-click Google ads.
Micah: What types of services do the average SEO-focused companies offer?
Mike: A lot of companies, in terms of SEO, what you can typically expect is that they’re going to handle everything in SEO from like a comprehensive strategy. They might offer on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Those are really two big things but, it’s kind of a pretty broad description of what SEO is and we can talk about that.
Micah: Yeah, can you give a brief description of what on-page and off-page means?
Mike: So, you have on-page SEO. On-page SEO is anything within you website that talks about who you are, what you do, and where you do it. From a technical standpoint, that might be the content on your pages, it might be your title tags, the keywords that you’re using within that content, it could be how you name your image files. Instead of abc123.jpg, you might want to name it Phoenix-Pest-Control-Company. The equivalent of on-page SEO would be like me walking into a coffee shop in saying, “Hey, Micah: I’m the coolest guy here.” You’re going to be like, “Okay, alright. Guy says he’s cool.”
Off-page SEO is what happens in the rest of the web–everything else. So, the difference with off-page SEO would be me walking into the coffee shop and not saying a word. Then everyone else in the coffee shop pointing to me and being like, “Micah, he’s the coolest guy here.”
Micah: Okay, that’s a great example.
Mike: So off-page SEO, obviously, with that said and within that that parable, one ends up being a lot more credible or valuable than others, right? However, one doesn’t work without the other. You can’t rank a website without any content, right? You can’t rank a website if no one else points to it and says, “That’s a credible website.” So, the two have to work together.
Micah: Okay. On the SEO section of your site you say, and I quote: “Our SEO is a strategy of best practices that have been proven to work to increase a site’s placement in search results.” So, can you speak to what goes into creating a custom SEO strategy for your clients?
Mike: Sure. So, each client is different. For instance, a brand new website, new business and they realize the importance of showing up in search engine result. If they come out of the gate and suddenly have a whole bunch of companies linking to them, that does not really look normal. So there’s kind of this natural story of progression on how a website begins to kind of gain visibility. Our custom SEO strategies are treated as that. The first thing we want to try to understand is: How long has this website been around? Have they done SEO before? If they have, we want to assess what the current SEO state is. Are they ranking? Are they not? Why aren’t they? How does their off-page look? Have they done directories and citations? Have they gone to companies like Yext or Moz Local? Is that information on those websites? Is it consistent–the name address and phone number?
Google’s pretty accurate like a hundred percent of the time, so if the small business has a whole bunch of listings out there with incorrect information, or inconsistent information, Google being like the king of accuracy is probably not going to trust that business. What we really have to look at too is the market in which they’re located and who they’re serving. But what that, I think, really comes down to in a custom SEO strategy is it always includes best practices, which is on-page SEO, off-page SEO, social media marketing, and content. The difference why some people might get different quotes for SEO is gonna be because sometimes one or two of those areas might need a little bit more attention than the other.
Micah: Okay, last question for you: What are the things that all website owners should be doing to optimize their websites for search?
Mike: There is a lot that the website owners–small business owner–can do on their own without hiring an SEO company. Really what they should look at, what they should try to begin to understand: What are the main services that they want to offer, and how do they want to be seen online. So, understanding that and creating content.No one’s going to create content for a website better than the business owner themselves. Also, WordPress is like the best CMS platform out of the box for SEO. And all you gotta do is throw a plugin on there and you can instantly have control of your title tags and your meta tags and your meta descriptions. If we’re talking about Google, it’s easy for a business owner, or any website owner, to go on online, do a Google search for “on-page SEO checklist”. If they do something like that, you’re gonna find plugins like SmartCrawler, Yoast, Altman SEO…that are going to easily provide a way for a business owner to optimize those meta titles and tags and descriptions. I think that’s where they should start. I think they should pay attention to social media.
Micah: That’s great. Oh, one more question: I gotta know. Which SEO plugin are you using?
Mike: SmartCrawl Pro.
Micah: Yeah, baby! There it is!
Mike: Yeah, makes it super easy, man. I’ve been a WPMU subscriber since it was just me and one client, and I wasn’t sure if I could afford it.
Micah: Before I get accused of subliminal messaging and shameless advertising, I actually had no clue that Mike used SmartCrawl before chatting with him. So…sorry not sorry.
This chat with Mike cleared up some of the “mystique” around Search Engine Optimization, but up until this point, I’ve really only talked to professionals and people who have hired professionals. And this left me wondering how attainable success on Google actually was for the “average James”.
So…Josh and I called a real life average James.
[phone rings]
James Farmer: Hello.
Josh: James Farmer.
James: Indeed. Speaking.
Josh: CEO and founder of WPMU DEV.
James: Co-founder, technically.
Josh: Co-founder. Well, that’s your humility.
Micah: No, it’s just facts. [laughs]
James: Yeah, it’s fairly indisputable, I think…
Micah: Alright, James Farmer might not be average according to some standards, but believe it or not, when it comes to SEO, he says he is.
Josh: Well, today we wanted to bring you on the phone to discuss with you the topic of SEO and one of the reasons I thought you would be the perfect person for this conversation is because of the role that content creation has played in the building of WPMU DEV as the brand and marketing and so on. So, I’d like to see to start by just asking you: What role did that play and how you see content creation as a vehicle for all the other cool stuff that we’ve been able to do as a brand?
James: That’s a fair question, and I suppose I’ve been a bit of a dinosaur potentially in the SEO world, so you’ll have to forgive me if I sound a little dated at times. I remember back in the day when I had my first-ever blog, writing about being in ketosis. And all of a sudden, before I knew it, I was top of, or like second, in ranking in Google for ketosis. So WPMU DEV could easily have been a protein shake company.
[laughter]
James: So actually, that’s what we started doing with WPMUDEV.org back in the day: Just writing, I suppose quality-ish, half-decent, keyword-heavy, well-ranked posts that Google picked up and said, “Yeah, this is cool.” I think in that respect we were one of the first real bloggers dedicated to WordPress.
Josh: So like, content marketing obviously…it’s shifted over the years because there was really two camps that formed: people who aren’t as technical that say, “If I create quality content, people will see it,” and then there’s a whole nother wave of people that had kind of gamified content trying to figure out how to just get people to your site even if it wasn’t the best post for the audience. And as Google has improved over the years, or different search engines, how they distribute content, they’re saying, “This is really about the end user.” So, it is a combination now of both of those things and you have people who are struggling who are creating excellent content not being discovered, and then these people who’ve only focused on keyword optimization and are having a harder time. How do you see cutting through the noise now?
James: I think a differentiating factor–having something that makes you really stand out. So, if I was to go back to the WordPress world again. You’ve got blogs like, CodingWP, WPShout of course, who are really producing content that is next level. At the same time, you’ve got WPBeginner–well, the founder of that is more of a technical wizard, more of a marketing wizard, than a writing wizard. The articles on WPBeginner I wouldn’t say are particularly special, but in terms of putting it out there and linking between the different accounts and different opportunities for exposure, he absolutely nails it. So, I would add another thing to that and say, yes you need to be technically savvy. Yes, you need to have content that really adds a different dimension. Ideally, in quality, you can have multimedia aspects–video is one of these things as well. But you also need to be very strategic and you need to pay a lot of attention to marketing, to cross-linking, to promotion, to partnerships, to getting your content featured in other areas. It’s not simply enough to just sit there and write things that are wonderful, because, unfortunately, they won’t come. They’ll come possibly because Google will pick it up and say, “This is wonderful,” but primarily they’ll come because it’s got a real hook. And you need to get out there and let people know what that hook is.
Josh: Yea, in a lot of ways, it seems like it has swooped back around to the relational…you gotta know people.
James: Absolutely, yeah. That’s a huge part of being successful, I think, in any blogging context now: No man is an island. That couldn’t be any more true than it is now. That’s the third factor in addition to technical savvy, and primarily being a great writer. You’ve got to have that leeway, you’ve got to hustle a little bit and find the angles and directions.
[music]
Conclusion
Micah: James credits much of WPMU DEV’s early success to getting an edge while it was easier to rank, but now he believes our ability to last rests in our ability to develop and nurture relationships – relationships with our customers, with each other, and with the community at large. It’s off-page SEO at it’s finest.
Quality content, well built and well maintained websites, and relationships all have 1 thing in common, and that is they all require a whole lot of care. So maybe instead of viewing SEO as a strategy to beat algorithms, we can value it as a strategy to improve how we care for others, and create meaningful experiences for the users of the open web.
Cause at the end of the day, I think everyone would agree that the world could use a little more care.
Credits
Hello WP is a podcast by WPMU DEV. It’s produced by me, Micah Dailey, and Josh Dailey. I did the editing and original score for this episode. Our super design team – Julian, Yudy, and Osh created our show’s art. A big thank you to Barb, Pete, Mike, & James for talking to me for this episode. You made it more special than I could have ever imagined.
Read the full transcript
