The web has a content problem. There’s just too much of it.
Search Google for literally anything, and the total number of results will be in the hundreds of millions – and it’s an everyday thing.
What’s more, nobody expects all of those results to be good.
However, users expect to see something good on the Page 1 of Google.
Can you imagine digging through those millions of results to find only a dozen that deserve to be displayed there?
That’s what Google does every day, over 79,000 times per second.
Now, users might not occupy themselves with how Google is getting it done. But you, as a website owner, are different: you need to know the ins and outs of online search because you have content to promote.
How does Google decide which pages deserve to be at the top?
There are over 200 major ranking factors, but it all boils down to one thing: who’s the best at being helpful to users. Or, in SEO terms, at satisfying user search intent.
So how do you pull that off?
Have a Clear Grasp of What Exactly You Are Offering to Your Users
There was a reason you created your site in the first place. This reason is the foundation of your entire plan.
It could be selling products, or spreading information such as news and research, or maybe entertaining visitors with your original content.
What makes the “why” behind your creation so important?
If you can name it with clarity, then it brings you to the next step of the plan: the kind of people you want to come to your site.
Your relationship with them is going to decide your site’s fate – they are your target audience.
Once the “why” and the “who” are decided, they are followed by the “how”. The reason there are many different types of websites is because some of them are better suited for specific tasks than others.
For example, ecommerce stores are the best for selling products, and blogs are great for sharing articles.
If you aren’t using the best way to present your content to users, you should rethink this part before everything else.
Many site owners stumble on this first step because they don’t think about what they are doing.
Be better than that.
Pick Keywords That Will Lead Users to Your Content
Users try out all sorts of search phrases in Google, and only a precious few of them will be any good for your site.
The trick is to find those few phrases and turn them into your chosen keywords. So, how do you know you’ve found what you need?
They clearly reflect what you have to offer. Short, vague keywords like “buy boots” won’t be of any use to you. Even if a miracle lets you outrank the big brands, you’ll still risk bringing in users who don’t want the kind of product you have. Try optimizing for more specific phrases like “winter boots for women”.
They have a high search volume. The more people use a search phrase in a given area, the more people you can turn into your users. Keywords with a low search volume can also be useful, but only when you use many at once to make up for their individual low potential.
In spite of how hard it is, people are getting better at making great content, and the quality standards keep rising.
Fortunately, the core principle remains the same: give users the best version of the thing they are looking for.
How do you make such content?
Research what the users want, as accurately and in-depth as you can. Users always want more details. If they can get those details from you, then you already have an advantage.
Make your content visually appealing. As humans are visual creatures, you should know how to make a good first impression and make it last.
Provide the best user experience you can. Let nothing on your site get on the users’ nerves. You are supposed to be helping them and making them feel welcome.
Address the users’ pain points. If you revive their problems in their heads, it will make them hungrier for the solutions you are about to offer.
Give detailed solutions to the users’ problems. Often users don’t know about all the pitfalls they can encounter on the way to their goal. Be sure to include solutions to those issues too: that’s what real experts do.
Seal the deal with a call-to-action.
And if you connect relevant pieces of content on your site with links, you can turn the user journey into a cycle, ensuring they’ll keep using your site (at a later time, if not immediately).
It will be even easier for them the next time, since they are already familiar with the whole process. Example: “people also buy” on ecommerce sites.
2. Keyword Research & Optimization
Have you figured out how to make your users’ dream content?
Great job! You have a good reason to be proud of yourself if you have pulled it off.
Now it’s time for the next step: helping users find your content in search engines. This part requires keywords.
In the previous section, it was said that your content needs to be tailored to users’ search intent. The same applies to keywords.
Phrasing reflects what exactly users are looking for, so keywords phrased with a specific intent in mind are the best at bringing in the audience you need.
Examples:
Plumber in my city: Your site is for users from your city who need plumber’s services.
How to remove rust off my sink: You provide instructions for removing rust stains from metal surfaces in bathrooms and kitchens.
Sell my old books: You buy books (and likely other things too) from people who don’t need them anymore.
What’s the best way to find such keywords?
Most likely, you will be starting with some ideas of your own. But you won’t know if those ideas are good unless you somehow test them out.
That’s where SEO tools come in. This is a job for a keyword finder like Get Suggestions.
Just enter what you have in mind and press Search. The Google global searches column will show the search volume for every keyword in the table.
Sort the table by this column to make it easier to find the best keywords.
If you plan to rank in and get traffic from a particular region, you can narrow your keyword search down to a specific geographical area in the Settings (or by clicking on Add location).
In this case, the Google global searches will be called Google local searches.
Note the All keywords filter. Clicking on it opens a menu where you can opt to show only regular keywords or only question keywords.
The Question keywords filter is particularly useful if you want to optimize your site for voice search.
There are a couple more ways to find keywords.
From Google Search Console: If you have connected your WebCEO project to your Google Search Console account, it will start drawing data from Google. Then you can check out the Keywords from Google Search Console tool for all the various queries that bring your website traffic after being found in search. It will also show the usefulness of each query through statistics such as click-through rates and average ranking positions taken from global data over the past 30 days.
From your competitors: This is a two-step process. What keywords do your competitors use to optimize their sites? First, enter their URL address in the Spy on Competitors tool to find out. Add the keywords you’d like to rank for yourself to the keyword basket, then open the Competitor Rankings by Keyword report to check their rankings for those keywords. If you see someone rank poorly for a good keyword, start using it yourself – it’s an easy way to outrank them.
That covers keyword research.
Once you have a list of keywords you want to use, it’s time to optimize your site for them. Make sure to include everything from your list at some point!
Page URL addresses.
Titles.
Meta descriptions.
Image filenames, ALT attributes and captions.
H1-H4 headings.
Anchor texts of internal links.
Other text.
3. Competitor Research
How do you measure a site’s success?
You can judge it by its rankings, traffic, conversions, and the revenue it makes.
Ultimately, this SEO strategy is supposed to make you more successful than your rivals in the niche.
I bet you already have your eye on a few competitor websites that you want to beat. And that will be much easier if you can view their metrics whenever you want, too.
There’s also the possibility they aren’t really your rivals, and you need to be fighting someone else.
What’s the word for beating someone at their game only to find out you have won nothing?
“Awkward” is the nicest thing that comes to mind.
Let’s remove all awkwardness from your path to stardom.
Keywords tab: Enter the keywords you intend to rank for.
Search engines tab: Select the search engines where you want to rank.
Mirrors & Subdomains tab: Enter the URLs of your site’s mirrors and subdomains (if you have any). It will let the tool know that they shouldn’t be considered competitor sites.
Competitors tab: Enter the URLs of the competitors you already know.
Search results tab: Check the boxes of all types of search results you want to scan.
Local searches tab: Select regions like states, counties or provinces to show keyword demand for (if you want to rank somewhere in particular and not just globally).
Once you’ve finished filling everything out, click Save.
The tool will generate a graph and a table. Look for the sites that are above yours in the table. They can be your real, most dangerous competitors.
Note the “most likely” part. To be completely sure, visit those sites personally and see if they really specialize in the same field as you.
Irrelevant sites may appear if they happen to rank for the keywords you’ve entered without actually sharing a target audience with your site.
With this, you have discovered your true rivals. Fight them with every trick in the book:
Creating content.
Promoting content.
Providing a superb user experience.
Building a cordial relationship with users.
Optimizing your site.
And watch the metrics which reflect your progress: there’s no better way to find out if something is wrong.
Rankings: compare your ranking positions to theirs for your chosen keywords in the Competitor Rankings by Keyword
Backlinks: check the Competitor Link Profile report for everyone’s link profile statistics, including the total number of backlinks and domain authority.
Traffic: the Competitor Traffic report has everyone’s traffic data for the last 12 months.
Another hugely important matter: competitor backlinks.
If you can look them up, you can find a huge number of sites where you can build backlinks to your own site.
Then sort the table by the Domain Trust Flow column to put all the best potential link sources where you can see them.
4. Page Speed Optimization
Something has been bothering me for the longest time. So, electricity travels at the speed of light, right?
The Internet runs on electricity, and data packets move at the same speed. Then how come there isn’t even a single website which can load at the speed of light? It’s unfair.
Of course, humans cannot comprehend such tremendous speeds anyway. So we are perfectly fine with the next best thing, which we usually describe as “in the blink of an eye”.
That’s how fast we want websites to load, and we get really upset when it doesn’t happen.
Fortunately, some people are slow blinkers. That must be why most users are comfortable with a couple of seconds of loading time. Any more can cause a problem.
Scan your site with the Page Speed Insights tool to check its loading speed. If the score is low (100 is excellent), there are plenty of ways to make your site load faster:
Host your site on a fast server.
Host your site on a CDN.
Optimize your images’ dimensions.
Save your images in the right format.
Compress images.
Use fewer elements.
Merge elements.
Use gzip compression.
Leverage browser caching.
5. Technical Audit
Errors are a nuisance no matter where you encounter them. Users won’t be appreciative if you let your website go.
Would you let garbage pile up in your office where everyone can see it?
Of course you wouldn’t; it would be disrespectful to the people who visit you.
The place where you receive your customers should be kept clean and run like a well-oiled machine. Websites are the same.
What kind of issues on your site could be hurting user experience?
Broken links
Broken images
Broken redirects
Server errors
Missing meta tags
Indexing issues
Crawling issues
Orphaned pages
Dead-end pages
Schema markup errors
Look at how many things can go wrong when you are not even looking. But you can’t possibly keep an eye on your site every waking hour.
Good thing there are fully automated tools for such tasks, isn’t it?
I can recommend a couple. The first is the Technical Audit tool.
You can use it to detect the most common technical issues with your site, and then you can just proceed to fix them.
To make your job easier, you can (and it’s heavily recommended) set this tool to scan your site automatically as often as you want.
Once a week is good, but if you’d rather do it more or less often, it’s up to you. It’s all in the Scan Schedule.
You can even set the tool to send you alerts when you get site errors.
For that, click on Reports -> Email Alerts in the top menu.
This tool detects SEO errors on your site, such as issues with meta tags (short, repeating or outright missing). It, too, can be set for automatic regular scans and email alerts.
What else do you need to keep your site free of errors?
The Robots.Txt File
If you don’t have one in the first place, the On-Site Issues Overview tool will tell you, but there may also be issues with the file itself.
Be sure to check that it’s formatted correctly and that it allows search engines to crawl your site’s content, and prevents them from crawling pages you don’t want to appear in search.
Sitemap
If you haven’t uploaded a sitemap, its absence can be picked up by the On-Site Issues Overview, too.
Use a validating tool to make sure your sitemap is formatted correctly.
Also, if your site has more than 50,000 pages, you are going to need at least two sitemaps.
Schema Markup Validator
If you are using structured data on your site, you should always test your marked-up pages for errors before rolling them out.
This guide was created exclusively for WebCEO users who wish to make the next decade one of their biggest triumphs. Sign up now to enter a bright future!
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Artificial intelligence‘s recent rise to the forefront of business has left most office workers wondering how often they should use the technology and whether a computer will eventually replace them.
Those were among the highlights of a recent study conducted by the workplace communications platform Slack. After conducting in-depth interviews with 5,000 desktop workers, Slack concluded there are five types of AI personalities in the workplace: “The Maximalist” who regularly uses AI on their jobs; “The Underground” who covertly uses AI; “The Rebel,” who abhors AI; “The Superfan” who is excited about AI but still hasn’t used it; and “The Observer” who is taking a wait-and-see approach.
Only 50% of the respondents fell under the Maximalist or Underground categories, posing a challenge for businesses that want their workers to embrace AI technology. The Associated Press recently discussed the excitement and tension surrounding AI at work with Christina Janzer, Slack’s senior vice president of research and analytics.
Q: What do you make about the wide range of perceptions about AI at work?
A: It shows people are experiencing AI in very different ways, so they have very different emotions about it. Understanding those emotions will help understand what is going to drive usage of AI. If people are feeling guilty or nervous about it, they are not going to use it. So we have to understand where people are, then point them toward learning to value this new technology.
Q: The Maximalist and The Underground both seem to be early adopters of AI at work, but what is different about their attitudes?
A: Maximalists are all in on AI. They are getting value out of it, they are excited about it, and they are actively sharing that they are using it, which is a really big driver for usage among others.
The Underground is the one that is really interesting to me because they are using it, but they are hiding it. There are different reasons for that. They are worried they are going to be seen as incompetent. They are worried that AI is going to be seen as cheating. And so with them, we have an opportunity to provide clear guidelines to help them know that AI usage is celebrated and encouraged. But right now they don’t have guidelines from their companies and they don’t feel particularly encouraged to use it.
Overall, there is more excitement about AI than not, so I think that’s great We just need to figure out how to harness that.
Q: What about the 19% of workers who fell under the Rebel description in Slack’s study?
A: Rebels tend to be women, which is really interesting. Three out of five rebels are women, which I obviously don’t like to see. Also, rebels tend to be older. At a high level, men are adopting the technology at higher rates than women.
Q: Why do you think more women than men are resisting AI?
A: Women are more likely to see AI as a threat, more likely to worry that AI is going to take over their jobs. To me, that points to women not feeling as trusted in the workplace as men do. If you feel trusted by your manager, you are more likely to experiment with AI. Women are reluctant to adopt a technology that might be seen as a replacement for them whereas men may have more confidence that isn’t going to happen because they feel more trusted.
Q: What are some of the things employers should be doing if they want their workers to embrace AI on the job?
A: We are seeing three out of five desk workers don’t even have clear guidelines with AI, because their companies just aren’t telling them anything, so that’s a huge opportunity.
Another opportunity to encourage AI usage in the open. If we can create a culture where it’s celebrated, where people can see the way people are using it, then they can know that it’s accepted and celebrated. Then they can be inspired.
The third thing is we have to create a culture of experimentation where people feel comfortable trying it out, testing it, getting comfortable with it because a lot of people just don’t know where to start. The reality is you can start small, you don’t have to completely change your job. Having AI write an email or summarize content is a great place to start so you can start to understand what this technology can do.
Q: Do you think the fears about people losing their jobs because of AI are warranted?
A: People with AI are going to replace people without AI.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration said Tuesday that it would provide up to $325 million to Hemlock Semiconductor for a new factory, a move that could help give Democrats a political edge in the swing state of Michigan ahead of election day.
The funding would support 180 manufacturing jobs in Saginaw County, where Republicans and Democrats were neck-in-neck for the past two presidential elections. There would also be construction jobs tied to the factory that would produce hyper-pure polysilicon, a building block for electronics and solar panels, among other technologies.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on a call with reporters that the funding came from the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022. It’s part of a broader industrial strategy that the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, supports, while Republican nominee Donald Trump, the former president, sees tariff hikes and income tax cuts as better to support manufacturing.
“What we’ve been able to do with the CHIPS Act is not just build a few new factories, but fundamentally revitalize the semiconductor ecosystem in our country with American workers,” Raimondo said. “All of this is because of the vision of the Biden-Harris administration.”
A senior administration official said the timing of the announcement reflected the negotiating process for reaching terms on the grant, rather than any political considerations. The official insisted on anonymity to discuss the process.
After site work, Hemlock Semiconductor plans to begin construction in 2026 and then start production in 2028, the official said.
Running in 2016, Trump narrowly won Saginaw County and Michigan as a whole. But in 2020 against Biden, both Saginaw County and Michigan flipped to the Democrats.
Although no one likes a know-it-all, they dominate the Internet.
The Internet began as a vast repository of information. It quickly became a breeding ground for self-proclaimed experts seeking what most people desire: recognition and money.
Today, anyone with an Internet connection and some typing skills can position themselves, regardless of their education or experience, as a subject matter expert (SME). From relationship advice, career coaching, and health and nutrition tips to citizen journalists practicing pseudo-journalism, the Internet is awash with individuals—Internet talking heads—sharing their “insights,” which are, in large part, essentially educated guesses without the education or experience.
The Internet has become a 24/7/365 sitcom where armchair experts think they’re the star.
Not long ago, years, sometimes decades, of dedicated work and acquiring education in one’s field was once required to be recognized as an expert. The knowledge and opinions of doctors, scientists, historians, et al. were respected due to their education and experience. Today, a social media account and a knack for hyperbole are all it takes to present oneself as an “expert” to achieve Internet fame that can be monetized.
On the Internet, nearly every piece of content is self-serving in some way.
The line between actual expertise and self-professed knowledge has become blurry as an out-of-focus selfie. Inadvertently, social media platforms have created an informal degree program where likes and shares are equivalent to degrees. After reading selective articles, they’ve found via and watching some TikTok videos, a person can post a video claiming they’re an herbal medicine expert. Their new “knowledge,” which their followers will absorb, claims that Panda dung tea—one of the most expensive teas in the world and isn’t what its name implies—cures everything from hypertension to existential crisis. Meanwhile, registered dietitians are shaking their heads, wondering how to compete against all the misinformation their clients are exposed to.
More disturbing are individuals obsessed with evangelizing their beliefs or conspiracy theories. These people write in-depth blog posts, such as Elvis Is Alive and the Moon Landings Were Staged, with links to obscure YouTube videos, websites, social media accounts, and blogs. Regardless of your beliefs, someone or a group on the Internet shares them, thus confirming your beliefs.
Misinformation is the Internet’s currency used to get likes, shares, and engagement; thus, it often spreads like a cosmic joke. Consider the prevalence of clickbait headlines:
You Won’t Believe What Taylor Swift Says About Climate Change!
This Bedtime Drink Melts Belly Fat While You Sleep!
In One Week, I Turned $10 Into $1 Million!
Titles that make outrageous claims are how the content creator gets reads and views, which generates revenue via affiliate marketing, product placement, and pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Clickbait headlines are how you end up watching a TikTok video by a purported nutrition expert adamantly asserting you can lose belly fat while you sleep by drinking, for 14 consecutive days, a concoction of raw eggs, cinnamon, and apple cider vinegar 15 minutes before going to bed.
Our constant search for answers that’ll explain our convoluted world and our desire for shortcuts to success is how Internet talking heads achieve influencer status. Because we tend to seek low-hanging fruits, we listen to those with little experience or knowledge of the topics they discuss yet are astute enough to know what most people want to hear.
There’s a trend, more disturbing than spreading misinformation, that needs to be called out: individuals who’ve never achieved significant wealth or traded stocks giving how-to-make-easy-money advice, the appeal of which is undeniable. Several people I know have lost substantial money by following the “advice” of Internet talking heads.
Anyone on social media claiming to have a foolproof money-making strategy is lying. They wouldn’t be peddling their money-making strategy if they could make easy money.
Successful people tend to be secretive.
Social media companies design their respective algorithms to serve their advertisers—their source of revenue—interest; hence, content from Internet talking heads appears most prominent in your feeds. When a video of a self-professed expert goes viral, likely because it pressed an emotional button, the more people see it, the more engagement it receives, such as likes, shares and comments, creating a cycle akin to a tornado.
Imagine scrolling through your TikTok feed and stumbling upon a “scientist” who claims they can predict the weather using only aluminum foil, copper wire, sea salt and baking soda. You chuckle, but you notice his video got over 7,000 likes, has been shared over 600 times and received over 400 comments. You think to yourself, “Maybe this guy is onto something.” What started as a quest to achieve Internet fame evolved into an Internet-wide belief that weather forecasting can be as easy as DIY crafts.
Since anyone can call themselves “an expert,” you must cultivate critical thinking skills to distinguish genuine expertise from self-professed experts’ self-promoting nonsense. While the absurdity of the Internet can be entertaining, misinformation has serious consequences. The next time you read a headline that sounds too good to be true, it’s probably an Internet talking head making an educated guess; without the education seeking Internet fame, they can monetize.
