Hi, I'm "Penguin"
Pete Trbovich, and you overthink SEO! That phrase is a tag on my own blog, for the occasional content marketing post. Really, I don't measure my expertise by my own website's ranking; I'm a freelance writer for the web who only needs a website as a virtual business card. Instead, judge my SEO expertise by the writing I do for clients - linked from my site on a regular basis. In 20 years of freelance writing for the web, I have had the same argument with the majority of clients. That argument is that clients never stop making demands on how I write, while completely ignoring all the non-text factors on their site that are tanking their traffic, conversions, ad impressions, sales, and so on. I
posted that argument on Reddit's r/freelancewriters forum and
got a lot of agreement, so I know this isn't just me. SEO (Search Engine Optimization if you just started playing along at home) is supposed to be the science/art of attracting web traffic through search engines. But…
Are you an eCommerce entrepreneur depending upon content marketing to gain exposure for your product or service on the web? Do you want to know the secret of having your site rank high on Google? Do you want your website to shoot to the top of a Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page) like greased lightning? If you answered "yes" to all of the above questions, TAKE A NUMBER, because everybody in the whole wide world answered "yes" to all of the above questions too! No, but really, SEO content marketing is the field within which I
have based a 20+ year career in freelance content hacking for the web. And yet, it is the one discipline which is jam-packed with more hoodoo, voodoo, snake oil, urban legends, conspiracy theories, and outdated alchemy than any other tech field. Thanks to this topic being saturated on the web, you can scream about it all day every day and not get heard over the noise. Let's start with some obvious, concrete logic. For once, everybody can drop their wacky schemes…
Hi, I'm "Penguin"
Pete Trbovich, and you overthink SEO! Search
Engine Optimization (SEO) has been oversold for decades as the easy
road to riches, subject to every snake oil tonic shuckster to roll
into town. You shouldn't believe most posts about "best SEO
tools," because they're usually trying to sell you something
they make, and it's not the best. Except you can believe this post, because it's selling nothing. In fact, most of these tools are free or at least "freemium." It's getting no kickbacks, no commissions, just expert advice from an industry veteran. In previous posts, I've covered top
SEO keyword practices that actually work, and the top
SEO tactics that have nothing to do with keywords. If you follow that advice and especially take advantage of the resources I link to, you don't really need many tools in the first place. But, for what it's worth, we'll go over the toolset of apps and online services which you should consider the essential minimum. This doesn't mean you…
Hi, I'm Penguin
Pete Trbovich, and you
overthink SEO. You overthink SEO because everybody has told you that Search Engine Optimization is the only kind of marketing in the entire universe. SEOSEOSEO! Just churn out text copy for the Great Lord Google, because Google gobbles keywords like a goblin. Seriously, why do we even make media visible to human beings? Why do we even have an Internet? They should just have it set up where every morning we all take a bucket of keywords and walk it to Google headquarters and dump it into their volcano, and later they mail us a postcard with our organic search stats for the day. The humans in this equation are superfluous. It's not like there's an alternative way to get visitors to your website. Not like people click links shared to them by trusted peers, confidants, family, influencers, and the occasional hashtag. Oh wait, there is a way to do this! SMO
- Social Media Optimization! Now you have SEO on your eCommerce website squared away, from my…