5 Things Google Wants You to Know About SEO

Key Takeaways

[Music] and nothing is working today maybe I'll try the hashbrown Ricky do you ever feel like sometimes you just might be using the wrong bait alright our video intros could be getting a little too weird but it's a perfect explanation of SEO when I look at what a lot of people are teaching about SEO it just feels like we're using the wrong bait what's the right bait to get our websites to rank well on Google well I think the best way to answer that question is to go directly to the source so in this video we put together five clips from actual Google employees explaining how to rank better on Google don't be at all surprised semantically if we try to do more query understanding so if you type in you know car battery died and we find we might rewrite that query a little bit and say automobile battery died and then also document understanding so you can have the same sort of words used in a document and we can say oh it's okay if we can match automobile and car or maybe a specific model of car and so we'll keep working on trying to figure out user intent what users are asking not just the keywords that they're using and also document understanding so the first thing Google wants us to know is that keywords are dead keywords as if there's some magic phrase you have to have in your post in order to rank that ended a long time ago on Google instead people have a simple query or a topic that they type into Google and they're going to get results if you type WordPress course into Google but and there's a page about a wordpress class Google knows that it's essentially the same thing and so you can rank for both terms so Ricky and I have for a long time have been saying you know what keyword are you working for on this post and we're working to change that because it kind of reinforces a myth about the way that Google works when we talk about keywords it leads us to do the wrong things in focusing on how we display those keywords on the page to make sure Google knows we could rank for it and the truth is as people are using their phone more and just asking a question Google needs to find many similar searches that you can rank for and so just having helpful content on that topic can mean that you're ranking for multiple different queries so the terminology keywords is something we're gonna try to avoid saying ever again on this YouTube channel and you should call us out when we mess up let's move on to the number two think about not link building that limits you to a certain mindset think about compelling content and marketing if you think about okay first make something compelling some reason why they really want to use your website and then think about the broader area of marketing Google has been crystal clear about this for a decade or more Google does not want you do creating backlinks just for SEO purposes now there are valid ways to promote your content create a YouTube channel reach out to to actual media companies and get more people linking to your site but when you're doing anything just to build a backlink so that hopefully you rank better on Google well essentially you're trying to trick Google into thinking your content is more helpful than it is and they've been just crystal clear that this is a violation of their guidelines there really is no such thing as white hat backlinking there's absolutely such a thing as white hat SEO but if you're building a backlink for the express purpose of ranking better on Google you've already violated their their guidelines so if you're still building links for SEO just know that one of the most powerful companies in the world is after you and what they're trying to do with the most advanced AI and thousands of employees is to find people who are violating their guidelines and drop them in the rankings so that they can put simply the most helpful content forward for the user so you can build your business that way it may we work for a temporary amount of time but it's just not a sustainable way to build your business what we've shown on this you channel is that we've built many many sites that have been extremely successful with no backlinking whatsoever check out this video if you need to learn a little bit more about that WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues instead of doing it yourself you selected WordPress now this is kind of a broad statement WordPress takes care of 80 90 percent of search engine optimization when I say that what I mean is the mechanics of search engine optimization these are the plugins I use and this is literally all the plugins that I use that's how good WordPress is you don't need to modify it that much alright this one may surprise a lot of you but you really don't even need an SEO plug-in if you're using WordPress to build your website I think we all feel like SEO is this mysterious black box and we have to check the right boxes in order to magically appear on on the search results and so we must need this SEO plugin from Yoast that's going to do these magic things on our website in order to get us to rank what Google has already said is that WordPress is already doing 90% of the work for us really all Google needs is a simple hierarchy of how the website is laid out so they can easily find the pages they do need a title they do need a description they need a website to load fast and they need your content that's really it if you do that you've done probably 99% of SEO now there is that 1% of SEO that's working through serious issues you know do we know index our category pages on a massive e-commerce site with thousands of pages because it has duplicate content on that page or rel canonical or a multi page article and how do we properly tag that correctly now that SEO minutia is valid and if you have a massive site with thousands of pages you've got to be paying attention to that kind of thing to get any little bump as possible because when you apply that to a thousand pages it can really help but for almost all of us just building simple websites as an investment if you just have stock WordPress and never even install an SEO plugin you're probably gonna be just fine that's why Matt Cutts from Google said that he doesn't even use an SEO plug-in on his website now can SEO plugins be useful yes but just realize that it's about doing that special little tagging for that 1% 95 99 huge percent of it is already done for you let's move on to step 4 oh boy okay keyword density let's talk about it a little bit a lot of people think there's some one recipe and you can just follow that like you know baking cookies and if you follow it to the letter you'll rank number one and that's just not the way it works so if you think that you can just say okay I'm gonna have 14.5% keyword density or 7% or 77% and that will mean I'll rank number one that's really not the case that's not that's not the way that the search engine rankings work you absolutely do not need to focus on keyword density on your posts anymore years ago a decade ago this was something very valid Google was very early on in its ability to figure out just what your page is about and making it show up for the right search result now Google can do that very very well and so I don't have to say seo seo seo seo a million times in my video in my posts in order to rank for SEO and that's why ricky and i have stopped recommending the Yoast SEO plugin because it asks you to have the focus keyword and it's making sure it just has that old mindset of keyword density instead of semantic search let's go to number 5 the last one is simple you are else so this is important enough that Google has mentioned it in its starter guide if you've never read Google's starter guide to ranking well on Google you really should read it and I put a link in the description for you this is just Google's actual document telling you exactly what you should do to rank well on Google it's the most important SEO document ever and it's so straightforward that at the end I think you'll have the impression that you know if I just create good content and do a reasonable job on the other stuff I'm gonna be just fine and that's what we've always taught so simple URLs rank better then long long URLs when you install WordPress by default it's going to be camper report com you know question mark equals P equals whatever and this number and that's your URL it doesn't tell the user very much about what they're gonna get on that page and so when just the link is shared people don't know what that's about and in the search result it shows you that link so this is a place that you can reinforce to the user that they're gonna get what they're looking for so we recommend that in your Google default settings you you use the post name as the default and then all often change that to be even shorter so if I'm writing about you know RV bathrooms in my post it may be 15 cute RVs with RV bathrooms is the title and I'll just shorten that to be RV - bathrooms then when somebody Google's it and they see that link in the search result it reinforces what that page is about and tells them I have the information you're looking for click on me thanks everybody for watching this video when you're ready to get started with your website go to income school comm slash project 24 project 24 means you're starting a website today with the goal of replacing your current income with passive income from websites and we're seeing some killer results from the people that are in that in that course who are already earning money with their websites check it out income school comm / project 24