TMD 012 : On Site and Off Site SEO For Beginners and “Getting Drunk With Chinese Communist Leaders” with Ray Blakney

LT: So, Ray, thank you very, very much for coming on to the show. I remember reaching out to you and you said you know a lot about SEO. I know virtually nothing about SEO, so I thought not only can you come on and help teach the TMD audience, all those dudes and dudettes, teach them a little bit about SEO, but hopefully I can learn something about this as well. So I’m going to let you take the reins with the majority of this conversation, but first, if you don’t mind, I did give you a little bit of an introduction in the intro but if you wouldn’t mind telling the audience who you are, where you’re from – or where you are now at least – and a little bit of background explaining how you got to where you are and why SEO is something that you love to talk about.

RB: Cool. Yeah. Well, thanks, Luke. Thanks for having me on. It’s a pleasure. My name’s Ray. Where I’m from is a little complicated. I was born in the Philippines; my mother’s from there. My dad’s an American, but I grew up in the Middle East. My dad’s American but he grew up in Africa in Rhodesia. So kind of like multiple passports, and I currently live in Mexico and I’m married to a Mexican. What I do for a living is I use SEO to build businesses; primarily I use SEO to build my own businesses, though I’ve done consulting for bigger websites like tennis.com and adoption.com in the past.

My background’s a computer engineer. I was a computer geek. I worked in Silicon Valley, Fortune 500 companies back in the United States. Got bored for sitting in a cubicle every day, so I joined something called the US Peace Corps which is kind of a volunteer program for two or three years where they send you anywhere in the world to help usually small and local communities to do different things. I thought I was going to go to Africa; they sent me right next door to Mexico, and that’s where I am right now.

I met my wife down here; we’re married; and we run a number of successful online businesses, all of them bootstrapped for $9.99 and marketed with SEO. And the biggest one I run is called Live Lingua. Last year we won Entrepreneur Magazine’s best small business in the United States – one of the best small businesses in the United States. And that was the first business we built online for $9.99 and a lot work with SEO. So that’s where my expertise came from. I’m not kind of a – you don’t study SEO in school; it’s kind of a relatively new field. I learned SEO the hard way; kind of in the trenches, doing it for my businesses. I did it right and I did it wrong. As we go over stuff, I’ll talk a little bit about how I lost five businesses literally overnight. They went from generating six figure incomes to zero in less than five minutes.

LT: Wow.

RB: Because of some grey hat SEO I did, which worked for 10, 15 years and then Google decided that wasn’t allowed anymore, and myself and hundreds of thousands of other websites disappeared overnight. So - - -

LT: So was this during one of those big, like, Panda or Penguin updates that Google (inaudible)

RB: This was Penguin. This was Penguin. I never got hit by Panda, because – well, just for your listeners who don’t know what it is. Google Penguin was a huge Google algorithm update that hit in 2012, the first one, and they’ve had other iterations since. And basically it was punishing people who created links to their website that looked fake, and we’ll go over kind of what links to the website do later in the conversation. Panda’s the other big algorithm update that people talk about, and that really goes to the quality of the content and it was generally meant to hit sites that have either cheap content – which were primarily these big article sites online where people would just literally – and I’m guilty of this – write an article, put it into a software that would spin it and kind of put synonyms for words in there and then repost this article, like, a hundred times and it would get you a hundred links as the same article; wouldn’t even make any sense. And then the other one was kind of the duplicate content. If you had the same article on a thousand different websites, Google stopped giving you credit for a thousand links; they said it was only one. And if it was crap, then it wouldn’t give you a link for any of them, in fact, it would punish you for it. So those are the two big Google things. If anybody’s interested in SEO and reads about it, they’ll definitely come across those two algorithms.

LT: Yeah, I remember how popular, like, the article spinners were. And, you know, you could like, yeah, put one 500 word article in and you get 50 different variations of it, yeah, and then you would post onto all these, like, ezine websites and - - -

RB: You got it.

LT: Yeah, I remember all that and I remember a lot of people complaining about, like, getting hit hard by those updates.

RB: Well, because it worked for like 10, 15 years before those updates, right, so it was kind of hard saying hey – Google was saying don’t do it. But it was working, so why would people stop doing it? Until they did this, and then they kind of dropped the hatchet and now, you know - - -

LT: Exactly. That’s when people started noticing, like, okay, this grey hat or black hat – which we’ll explain what that means in a bit.

RB: Exactly.

LT: But that’s when all these grey and black hat stuff – you know, people started to take notice, okay, yep, I shouldn’t be doing this, not only because Google punished me but it really isn’t the right thing to be doing anyway.

RB: Exactly. Exactly. One of the things I always like to say to my – when I do SEO consulting and also when I do it during my talks is SEO is kind of a mix of a science and an art. So it’s not kind of this is what you do all the time and it will work. The main reason for this is because Google does not provide us what their algorithm is, right. There’s actually a patent people can read, but it’s this formula with, like, a hundred different variables and that’s from, like, 10 years ago. So they change it all the time. So all of us are guessing; kind of, you know, I think this works and I think Google’s okay with this. If you read their terms and conditions, it’s kind of like reading a legal contract. So unless you’re like a lawyer, you probably won’t understand 80 per cent of what they’re talking about. So most of us guess and then we get together in groups with other SEOs and say, “Hey, we’ve all done this and it’s worked for us.” But I could say that and, you know, talk to 10 of my SEO friends and they could say that, but then you try it and it may not work for you. So that’s why you really have to diversify when you’re talking about SEO.

LT: Sure. Yeah. Cool. So what is the first thing you want to talk about when it comes to SEO?

RB: Okay. Well, basically, SEO is broken down into two general categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. The general rule of thumb is that on-page SEO, which is stuff that you do on your website – essentially stuff that you have control over and you could change right now or, if you have a programmer, you’d have them change right now. They say it’s worth about 20 per cent of your ranking. The off-page SEO, which is stuff you have much less control over, is said to be worth about 80 per cent of your ranking or SERP, as we call it. Search engine rank position is what SEO is called; your ranking. And what I’m talking about, you know, where you show up when somebody’s searching in Google. A lot of people – I’m still surprised. A lot of people still think that when you go on Google and you type in “the best marketing blog”, the one that shows up at the top is the best marketing blog. It’s not. It’s the guy who did the best SEO for the keyword “the best marketing blog”. And that’s one reason why it’s so successful in creating businesses online is a lot of people still keep thinking that.

So if you can get your site to number one on Google for a relevant keyword, it’s almost a guarantee that you can make your business a success, with a little bit of backend research first; you have to make sure enough people are looking for it. If, you know, you’re number one in the world for a pink flamingo store in Cancun, Mexico, you might become number one overnight but nobody is going to buy, you know, plastic pink flamingos from you. So it’s not really worth your time. So there’s ways of doing it; the ways of researching that, it’s going to be outside of the scope of our conversation today. I’ll just drop a little line from – go to Google Analytics; use their keyword tool; you can find out all this stuff.

One thing I want to touch on, right before I get into the meat of this, is three terms that I’m going to be using. There’s going to be white hat, grey hat and black hat. You touched upon this, Luke, a little bit earlier.

LT: Yep.

RB: But just so people know what they are. Black hat means stuff that Google says it’s going to punish. Now, the reason people still do it is because a lot of this stuff does work, and it still works for a while or even for a long period of time but Google says eventually it will punish it. As somebody who’s suffered from one of these punishments before, if you’re looking to build a true business, stay away from black hats. I mean, that’s not a true business way of going forward. People who do it tend to be casino sites or sites that get affiliate money from casinos, because they throw it up there; they want to get as many people there for the next three to six months until Google catches them as they can, then Google catch them, then they throw up a new site and then they go through the same techniques again until, you know, they get their site banned. There’s no business, there’s no brand name, there’s no longevity in this, though there can be short-term monetary gains.

Grey hat is a little more vague. There are a few techniques in SEO where if you talk to some people, they’ll say it’s fine; if you talk to other people, they say, “Hey, that’s kind of violating Google’s terms and conditions.” In general – again, because I’ve been punished – I like to stay away from grey hats because that’s what I did in the past that got me whacked. You know, creating backlinks with kind of money anchor text, which I’ll touch on later as well.

So most of the techniques I’m going to recommend here are going to be these white hat techniques. Techniques that are 99.9 per cent chance that Google is not going to punish you. Now, there’s a .1 per cent chance that they still will because Google is not infallible and they might make mistakes.

LT: Google change their mind every five minutes on what they allow and disallow anyway.

RB: Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, down the road – you know, you mentioned guest blogging and I’ll mention that; that’s moving to the grey hat area right now, even though it was entirely white hat in the past, simply because people are abusing it. And that’s why Google’s kind of changing their opinion about that kind of thing. So those are the basic three categories. As I mentioned, I’ll try to stick to the white hat and I’ll just put in little – I’ll mention some black hat one, saying don’t do these. And grey hat I’ll kind of stay away from because they tend to be – it’s too confusing. I don’t want to confuse people who are just starting out. Okay. Do you have anything to add, Luke, or do you want me to just jump right in?

LT: No, that’s about it. I just wrote down a quick note to quickly go and define those three terms. But, yeah, you did that beautifully, man. That was awesome.

RB: Well, okay, then let’s get into the fun stuff, at least – well, fun for me; not for everybody. The first one is on-page SEO. This is kind of the easiest thing, and most people – if you have a website, spend a day or two doing this. It’s not something you should spend hundreds of hours on. It’s something you can get up there, and if you design your websites well it should kind of be in place. Even if you’re designing websites from scratch, which is what I prefer to do, but I’m, again, a professional computer geek by training. I use Notepad to write all my websites. I mean, I use nothing from the back; I use Notepad to do it. That’s not for everybody, but even if you’re using WordPress the same techniques apply.

So basically if you look at your website, even if you’re not technically inclined, the first thing I’d recommend anybody who’s looking into SEO to do is go to your homepage, right-click and do “view source” or the equivalent in whatever browser you’re doing. That’ll pop up what Google really sees when they’re looking at your website. What you see there is kind of the interpretation on the client side; it’s not really what Google, which kind of goes in on the backend, reads. That’s the real code of your website. When you’re looking at the code, there’s going to be a few important sections which is the header section and the body section. And the header section contain what they call generally metatags. There’s also other code in there that you might find, especially if you’re using a website manager. But generally what you’re sticking to are the metatags.

The most basic of these are called the title and the description tag. What those are is what shows up on the top of your browser, kind of up there in the actual tab up at the top when you’re clicking on it. The title tag will determine what shows up there. The description tag you won’t actually ever see unless you have any special software or you view the source, but it’s what Google reads as the description of your website. Those two tags are important because when you search on Google, what shows up for your website and what shows up for the description of your website should be those. And I say “should be” because Google sometimes decides to ignore them entirely and create their own titles and create their own description for what’s on your website based on text on other parts of your website. In the olden days, it was always the title tag and always the description tag which would show up in the Google search results.

For SEO, the description tag is really not that important; they have done numerous tests, and what’s in that description tag, kind of putting certain things in that description tag have no effect on your ranking. So I’m going to start with an example, and let’s stick with the plastic pink flamingos, right. So you’re starting a store to make plastic pink flamingos. So on your homepage, what you want in your title tag – and this is very important – is the word “plastic pink flamingos”. Now, if your brand name’s something else, you can do, you know, “Flamingo Outlet – Plastic Pink Flamingos”. That’s what you want to do. You’ve already done your research and you know that people want plastic pink flamingos and you can provide it for them, so make sure that that’s in your title tag. If you have multiple subpages on your website, for example, blog posts or different items, blue flamingos and yellow flamingos, on each of those pages you want to make sure that your title tag has the words “yellow flamingos” and “blue flamingos” in it as well. It’s very important.

The description tag, as I mentioned, has no real relevance to your ranking, but make sure you have a good and catchy description in there because that’s what really gets people to click on your website. So those are the two most important tags that you’re going to find up in this header section of your website.

LT: Can I just jump in real quick.

RB: Go ahead.

LT: I have a question.

RB: Sure.

LT: So, for example, with That Marketing Dude, in my title tag I have “That Marketing Dude”. And obviously, like, I’m trying to help digital nomads and location-independent entrepreneurs. Would you recommend me, like, changing my title tag to something like “That Marketing Dude – Location-Independent Entrepreneurs and Digital Nomads”?

RB: Yes, if you do the search – if you figure out that people are looking for that. How many people in the world look for location-independent entrepreneurs every month, that word? I don’t know off the top of my head. Do you know?

LT: No, I don’t. That’s definitely something I’d have to go and check to see, like, the exact, like, search traffic for those terms. But I’m just thinking they’re sort of, like, the people I’m targeting. I know they do get searched, especially the word, like, “digital nomad”. I know that one gets searched quite a lot. If it turns out that they do get searched quite a lot, would you recommend putting that in the title tag?

RB: Definitely. Definitely.

LT: Perfect.

RB: And also in your case, with all the blog posts and even these podcasts, if you post them on your website, make sure that the title tag you have is relevant. Usually the way that you do content creation, if you’re doing online marketing and SEO, it’s kind of backwards. Instead of you creating the content and hoping people read it, what you normally do is you go out, look for what people are looking for and you create the content to match that. So, for example, you know, if you were looking for location-independent entrepreneurs, that’s what you’re trying to attract to your site, you either create a blog post or a podcast or a video with that specific topic. And in that subpage – because not only your homepage can rank; every page on your website can rank.

LT: Yeah.

RB: You create a specific subpage for location-independent entrepreneurs, you put that in the title and you go after that. It’s a general rule: you should not have more than – you shouldn’t be going for more than three keywords, usually long-tail, which means, you know, a keyword which is two or three phrases long.

LT: Yep.

RB: First page on your website – and they should be pseudo-related. For example, you want pink flamingos but you shouldn’t have yellow hippos on the same – trying to optimise the page for both simply wouldn’t work.

LT: Okay.

RB: You can do – pink flamingos and blue flamingos you could probably get away with, because they’re similar enough products, that in the title tag you could get away with it.

LT: Sweet.

RB: Does that answer your question?

LT: That’s perfect, man. Thank you very much.

RB: Cool. Okay. Last one I’m just going to touch on is called the keyword tag. I mention this because people used to love this tag and it used to be what you would put in these keyword phrases: pink flamingos, blue flamingos; all the way. And people would stuff them with these keyword phrases, and that actually used to be how search engines would rank your website, the word that appeared in this keyword tag. Of course, as soon as people figured that out, it was spammed. And you look at some old pages that haven’t been updated in 15 years, you’ll find hundreds of keywords in those things. Google has deprecated that. Just keep in mind, when I’m talking about SEO, I’m talking about Google here; that’s the big boy. You know, it’s the elephant in the room.

I’m not talking about Bing. The techniques will not work on sites like Baidu over in China or Yandex over in Russia; they have different algorithms. Yandex is kind of similar to Google, but generally what we’re talking about here is Google. If you get Google, you have 80, 90 per cent of the market already cornered, in the English-speaking world at least. So the keyword tag deprecated, and if you abuse it Google may even punish you for it. Most of the time they ignore it, but they may punish you for it. Don’t waste your time. Even though some website builders still allow you to use that, I’ve still seen people spam that. So those are the three things up at the top; that’s what you want to focus on on every single page. Make sure that, you know, you ignore the keyword tag; get the title and description tag down pat for every page on your website. If you haven’t, go back and do it.

It doesn’t have to be right the first time round. You know, you can change it; that’s the beauty of the on-page SEO is that you can change it later. You know, if the keywords change, you can change the title tag to kind of match new keywords. It’ll take a little bit for Google, you know, to index your new changes, but it’s kind of worth it.

LT: Sweet.

RB: Okay. So we’re going to move on to kind of the part of the website that people see, and there are just a few points I’m going to be touching on in here. I could go on for hours about on-page – SEO is a huge topic. You know, there are textbooks that are 500 pages long written about this stuff. And it changes every day. So that textbook, if it’s six months old, throw it out and buy a new one because it’ll change. There are plenty of blogs; Search Engine Journal. There’s a lot of websites. Moz.com is one of my favourites; you can go out there and you can read about SEO for anybody who wants to keep up to date on that. So on your website, the first tags that I’m going to mention are the H1 to H6 tags which are header tags. H1 are the big ones; H6 are the smallest, and they have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 all the way through.

The one to focus on is the H1 tag, because there have been studies and experiments done that show that that actually still has relevance. It’s kind of usually by default – unless you use kind of CSS to change the way it looks, it’s kind of the biggest text on your website. Make sure your keywords are between the H1 tag. I would say almost exactly the same ones that are between your title tags you could put between the H1 tags. The difference is users are actually going to see this, so sometimes you have to be a little creative with that. For example, my biggest business is the website livelingua.com. And some of the keywords we rank really well for and we get business from, is “Skype Spanish lessons”, for example, right. But that’s not a grammatically correct sentence. You know, you want to say “sign up for Skype Spanish lessons”. So sometimes you might have to go into these H1 tags and not have exactly the same words that you have in your title; simply for grammar, it does not work.

But if you get close enough, that’s usually – for SEO purposes, that’ll help you out. Don’t put bad grammar just to impress Google, because then you’re going to lose the customers. You know, you rank number one, they get to your website and they figure out that, you know, “Hey, this guy can’t write to save his life. I’m not going to buy his product.” So, you know, you need (inaudible) - - -

LT: You know, that is a very, very important point to make. You know, if it doesn’t make sense to the person reading it, then it really doesn’t matter how well you’re ranking because, yeah, people won’t understand – well, people could probably get the general gist. But, yeah, people are going to think that you’re just an idiot and they’re not going to buy whatever you’re selling.

RB: Exactly. Exactly. You got it. So the H1 to H6 tags are very important, H1 being the most important. And the other ones, if you can put keywords – my general rule of thumb is for the H2, H3, H4 tags, you don’t have to have all of them on your website. But if you do, don’t put exactly the same keywords as the H1 tag and your title tag, because that might get into the – look a little artificial to Google and spammy. So if you can put some kind of variation; again, back to the pink flamingos and then the other one you mention the best plastic flamingos on the market. You don’t have pink in there, but you have the word “flamingos” and it’s kind of – they’re plastic, so you’re in the same gist. Part of it is you’re trying to tell Google, because remember it’s a computer; it’s not a human.

You’re trying to tell Google what is this page about, and when I say “page” it’s not even – you want your domain to have a big theme because, you know, you don’t want to be jumping around to all of that. Google kind of tries to figure out what your domain’s about, but also each individual page on your domain what it’s about. So, you know, in this case, if your homepage is about pink flamingos, make sure that you mention pink flamingos in different contexts. Google’s getting super smart; it’s got the best AI in the world. And they have something called RankBrain right now which is apparently artificially learning all the time. Sorry about the noise; if anybody hears it, I’m in Mexico and – you know.

LT: Yeah, something’s definitely going on back there.

RB: Exactly. I’m at a store downtown; it’s the fiesta season. I’m about a block away from a church, so people are there and it looks like somebody had too much (inaudible) an ambulance just drove by. So okay. So sorry if you guys are hearing that. Okay. So that’s the basics of the tag. Next is the other easy things for you to work on, which are, you know, the bold, the italics and the underline. Go ahead.

LT: Before we jump into that real quick, for those of you that are, like, using WordPress or, like, blogging, when Ray’s talking about H1 tags, that’s normally, like, the post title. So that’s going to be your H1 tag. And then if you want to use H3 and H2 tags – which I normally use just H2 tags as sort of, like, my subheadings inside of my posts. So, like Ray said, you know, if you want to get more tags in there, then, you know, you can use them as subheadings and then go on to talk about whatever that subheading is, and that’s a good way of getting some, like, more keywords in there.

RB: You got it. You got it. Again, make it natural; don’t try to stuff them in there just for the sake of using them. There’s got to be a reason for you to do that.

LT: Yep.

RB: The next ones are kind of similar to tags; it’s the bold, underline and italic. Same thing: if you have kind of – there’s a marketing reason to do it. If you bold words, those are kind of the ones that stick out in your text, and whether you believe in neural linguistic programming or not, but, you know, some of those things kind of self-consciously get registered by your users. But also Google realises that, “Hey, he’s bolding these words because they’re important. They mean something.” Italics and underline is the same thing. So make sure you use those, and try to bold or underline your keywords at least once or twice on your page as well. Don’t go crazy and bold them all over the place. But at least that way you’re giving a little more importance to those keywords on your website. Again, all of this stuff can be done retroactively. So if you already have a website, go on there tomorrow; you can do all of this. There’s one other point that Luke asked me about a little bit before our interview, and that’s keyword density. Do you want to bring up the question, and I can go on to answering it.

LT: Yeah, yeah. So I know a while back there was something that we used to call keyword stuffing, and that was, like, whatever keyword you’re trying to rank for, you would try and use it as many times as you could inside of that post because Google would see it and say, “Okay, this word or this phrase is used 15 times in this, like, 600 word article, so this article must be about this topic.” And, like, the old rule was to have, like, two to five per cent of the text to have that keyword in there, you know, and that was how you sort of, like, game Google to – like you said, it’s one of those sort of, like, black hat techniques which later on turned out not to work, not only because Google decided to say, “No, that is wrong. You know, this post may not even be relevant to that,” but also it would seem really weird to have – like, the example, best pink plastic flamingo. If you used that, like, 17, 18 times in a short article, then it’s not going to read right either. Yeah. So I know that doesn’t work anymore, but, yeah, did you have anything that you wanted to bring up about that too?

RB: Yeah. You’re a hundred per cent right. It doesn’t work anymore. It hasn’t worked for – even before the recent algorithms, Panda and Penguin. That hadn’t worked for a while. But that’s one of the most common question I get from my clients. You know, they say, “Hey, I need to get that perfect keyword density and what is it.” Even when it was important, it actually varied so much by industry that, you know, I could say four per cent if you were selling marketing but it was, like, six per cent within the specific niche. Because Google is not, like, an all-encompassing algorithm, they treat everything the same; they have different algorithms for different niches, for different people, for different countries. You know, you’re up in Canada; if you search for a keyword, it’ll give you different results than if I searched from Mexico or, you know, my parents searched from Boston.

LT: Yeah.

RB: So there’s a lot of things to keep in mind there. My advice for keywords these days: write naturally. Write for your users, your readers. If, you know, you’re writing an article about the topic, your keyword density’s going to come up between three to five per cent naturally, you know, because that’s – and it won’t look as artificial where you’re trying to stuff it in there. And, you know, best pink flamingos; the word “best” might appear somewhere else and then “pink” somewhere else and “flamingos”. You know, not necessarily combine together. But if you’re talking about the subject, it’ll happen naturally. Don’t worry about it; don’t stress about it; don’t try to force it. Because Google – you know, they hire the smartest people in the world to work on these things.

LT: Yeah.

RB: You know, anything we can think of, they can figure out a way to do it, especially if it’s artificial and, you know, it’s not natural. They can figure out a way to do that. So yeah.

LT: Yeah. I mean, I was told, like, after that update, you know, yeah, don’t stuff the keywords in, like, trying to get it to appear as much as possible. If you are worried about that or you still got that, like, engraved in you a little bit, I was told, you know, to have it in your H1 title tag or your post title and then also include it in, like, the first paragraph and that’s it. Don’t worry. And then just write naturally after that.

RB: Exactly. Exactly. And then if you’re writing naturally, it should appear.

LT: Yeah.

RB: I mean, you know, if that’s what the topic of the post is. You know, don’t write a post that’s totally off topic and just try to stuff it in there; it won’t work for your readers and it won’t work for Google either. So, yeah, that’s a very important point and it’s probably one of the most common questions I get about on-page SEO is this keyword ranking. Okay. The last – I think this is the last point – one of the last points that I want to – okay, go ahead.

LT: Yeah. We’re, like, two-thirds of the way through already. So I think this has been, like, really good for on-page SEO.

RB: Okay.

LT: The one thing I wanted to bring up, which I told you I wanted to bring up before, was about the Yoast SEO plugin. Can we just talk about that for a little bit?

RB: Go for it. I use it a little bit, but I think you’ve got a lot more experience than I do. So if you want to do the intro and I’ll put some comments in.

LT: Yep. Cool. So Yoast SEO is a plugin that you can use on WordPress, and this is where you can sort of, like – well, when I say “manipulate”, I don’t mean to, like, game Google but to easily, you know, like, edit and modify, like, your posts and your pages on your website, you know, so you can sort out these, like, H1 tags and, like, a few of these other things that Ray has mentioned. So, you know, inside of the Yoast SEO plugin you can, like, see how that page is going to look on, like, the Google search results. And in there you can put, like, your target keyword, you know, and it will say how many times it appears in there, whether or not the post is readable and then you can also go in and edit the H1 tag for how it will appear on Google. So, you know, you can put – you know, you can make sure that the keyword that you’re trying to target for this post or this page, you know, you can make sure that that is what shows up on Google.

And then also the little description that shows up as well, you can go in and edit that too, which is what I mainly use it for is just so I can make sure, you know, whatever this topic is about, whatever keyword I’m trying to go for, it does mention those in the Google search results. But also in there, you know, you can, like, edit how it will appear on, like, Facebook when it’s shared or Twitter when it’s shared. So, you know, I like to do that as well, because even though Facebook’s not technically a search engine, you know, if it does get shared on there, you’re going to see a lot of – you know, a lot of people are going to see it. So I normally use the plugin just to, yeah, edit the title and the description of how it’s going to appear in Google, and then also to make sure when someone does share it on Facebook, you know, it looks good. So, like, you can choose the image and the title and the description for them as well.

RB: You got it. Yoast is the go-to SEO plugin for WordPress. I mean, honestly, there are other ones out there, but they can’t really compete. The only thing I would add to what you said was – going back to exactly what you said. Yoast is a tool; it doesn’t do it for you.

LT: Yes.

RB: That’s the most common error I see people thinking. They think, “I install the Yoast, you know, plugin and it’s doing SEO for me.” No. It allows you to go in and customise everything that Luke talked about, but you have to do it. Don’t just kind of let the defaults run because you will not see the results you want if you just install and think it’s kind of a plugin; forget about it. It’s not that kind of tool.

LT: Yeah. It just sort of, like, helps highlight the things that you should be doing for SEO for that post. So if you’re not using Yoast SEO plugin, I would recommend that you do. And, you know, there’s lots of videos on YouTube that show you how to set it up properly or – because like you said, it’s not just one of those things that you can turn on and it starts working. But also these videos will show you, like, how you can, like, edit specific posts, the title and the description on, like, how it will appear in Google and how it will appear on Facebook as well. So there’s not a big learning curve, but it’s definitely something, like Ray said, you’re going to have to go in and make sure that you do yourself.

RB: You got it. You got it.

LT: Sweet. So we’ve got about five to 10 minutes left on this talk. So shall we go on to talk about the off-page SEO stuff?

RB: Sure. Sure. I’ll do kind of a lightning review of it. As I mentioned, this part is actually 80 per cent of what your ranking factor is. But it’s actually really simple to explain in a very simple overview. Off-page SEO simply means how many links do you have back to your website. This is links from other websites to yours. And this can be image links; this can be text links. That’s pretty much it. That’s what off-page SEO is. Sounds simple. But the problem is how do you get other websites to link to yours. The basic tenant is that you build something cool; people will come to it. Unfortunately, unless, you know, you have a million dollars invested in your business, it doesn’t work. You could write the coolest article in the world on your WordPress blog and if you just leave it there and assume people are going to find it, they won’t. Because it’ll never rank and it’ll never show up.

So in the beginning at least you do have to go out there and get some momentum going. And I’m going to go over some basic techniques that I like to use to get people to link to my site. It requires, again, outreach. So you might, especially in the beginning after you’ve created it, have to go and find emails or contact people on forums and blogs and say, “Hey guys, look, I did this.” And hopefully you can get a few links out of that. Submit your website to Google when you’re starting, just so Google knows you exist, because if you don’t have any links to your website you’re kind of existing out in cyberspace and you’d be surprised how many clients I’ve had who create a website and they have no links and they have never submitted to Google. If you looked for them by their brand name on Google, they simply would not come up. That’s kind of the simplest thing, right. I mean, you know, The Marketing Dude, if I type that into Google – and I know, I type it in – you come up. If I type that in and you didn’t come up, then there’s a serious problem going on in your SEO. Unless you have some kind of generic name like, you know, bestbusiness.com, then that’s a little harder to rank for.

LT: Yeah.

RB: But if you have a good brand name, you should be coming up for that right off the bat. So you need to create links for it. In order to create links, there’s, as I mentioned, a number of different ways to do it. I’m going to do it real quick. The first one is content creation and sharing. Content creation could be anything. It could be, like, blogs; infographics; you can create cool little apps on your website, like mortgage calculators. My wife and I are looking to buy another house and, you know, I’ve been going to those. People link to these because they’re informational and people love to look at that. The idea is making sure it’s free material; don’t charge them for it. Nobody will link to something that costs money. I mean, you know, people will recommend things that are free. So write a cool blog post, put some cool graphics up there, then let the world know in any free way you can think of.

Tied to that, I also love repurposing content. Find an old piece of material that’s old, update it, put it on your website, email the people who link to that old material. If you find some kind of article that was – literally, the internet’s old enough now that you can find somebody’s 20, 25 year old article that has old, out-of-date statistics, for example, right. You go and find the new statistics, you put the article and you email everybody who’s done that, and you might even (inaudible) and say, “Hey, I have the new statistics. Would you like to share it with your clients or your readers?” And you will get some successful links out of that.

My personal favourite and something I’ve had a lot of success with is – read the laws in your country, but if anything’s created by your government, by tax dollars, it’s probably in the public domain, unless it’s under some kind of confidentiality agreement. Go and find these boring government documents, strip out the really cool information they have there and put it on your website in a nice, easy way for people to read. That is gold. I have the US State Department, the US Peace Corps and the US Defence Language Institute language courses on my website livelingua.com. I get hundreds of links a month without doing anything, because people love it. I put it up there in a good, easy way to read; there are audios. I offer languages that I’d never even heard of before, but the US government has created courses for this. I contact the government in a lot of cases; they provided it to me as public domain. They just sent it over to me; I put it up on the web, and it’s evergreen material. I get links for that every single day without me having to do anything. So I love that technique. Go guest posting. We talked about it really quickly in the beginning.

LT: Yep.

RB: It used to be awesome. When you had really quality materials, either in the signature or in the text, you’d get a link back to your website. I put that in the grey hat category these days because it’s been abused. I mean, there are actually websites out there that allow you to guest post on other people’s sites. I get, you know, spam from them regularly saying, “Hey, would you like to do that?” And that Google’s touching on it. There’s Matt Cutts, who was the head of the Google spam team before – he’s on a sabbatical right now – he says, “We know about it and we’re working on it.” That’s very cryptic, but, you know, that essentially means they know that people are abusing this. That’s too worrisome for me. So if you have a valid – you know, you know somebody and you can put a post on theirs, by all means, do it; get a link back to your website; just don’t abuse that kind of thing because Google – you know, if all your links are guest posts, Google will figure that out. So, yeah, go ahead.

LT: The one thing I have about that is Google might not give you any sort of, like, SEO benefits from it, but it’s still a good way of getting, like, eyeballs to your website because the traffic that that website’s getting could come your way as well. So, yeah, you might not get any SEO benefits from it, but I wouldn’t, like, completely cross off doing guest posting, though.

RB: Exactly. And actually, Luke, you bring up a great point. If you’re guest posting on a website where the people theoretically would be interested in what you’re offering, then you’re probably safe.

LT: Yes.

RB: The abuse is going on – these people are – you know, you’re doing The Marketing Dude, and if you’re at a guest post on a, you know, interior design blog, Google will be like, “Hey, what’s going on here?” I mean, don’t get me wrong, Luke; maybe you’re really good at interior design (inaudible)

LT: Yeah.

RB: But, chances are, that’s not valid, right.

LT: Yeah. I wouldn’t go write a post about digital nomading and all that sort of stuff and put it on that best pink flamingo website that we were talking about earlier.

RB: Exactly. And people are doing that, and that’s really what people are going to get into trouble in the future. Another technique is doing stuff like this. Get interviews. And this can be on podcasts, but it can also be on magazines. One of my favourite websites is called helpareporter.com. Sign up for that. I’ve gotten interviews in Ink Magazine, Fortune Magazine, because of that. And pretty much what they do is reporters – real reporters – go on there every day – how do you think they find these people when they’re writing a case study on – I don’t know. I’m in Mexico; ex pats living in Mexico. They go onto this website, they put up something saying, “Hey, I’m with the New York Times. I need to interview three people in the next 24 hours who live in Mexico for an article that’s published on Friday.” I get that thing in the morning; you have, like, a one-hour window to answer it; you answer it; and if they pick you, you get up there and – if you’re lucky. They don’t always do it, because I’ve appeared a few times and they just don’t mention my business; they don’t want to give me any links; or they give me links that are no follow. But you can get some great coverage and links out of that. It’s a paid service, about $19 a month, but it’s definitely, definitely worth it.

LT: What was the website again?

RB: Helpareporter.com or HARO. I think they bought the shorter domain, but type in helpareporter.com and you can sign up. It’s actually a pretty awful interface, but it works really well. They email you about three times a day. So that’s definitely something to do. And otherwise, you know, get yourself out there on forums and everything, and you can – you know, maybe you guys will be next on The Marketing Dude, right. You guys can show up there and he’ll mention you in the show notes and you can get a link out of that, as long as it’s valid and relevant to what you’re doing. Product reviews; great way to get links. If you had a product you loved, tell the person. You know, you read Luke’s eBook and you loved it and it changed your life; tell Luke about it and give him permission to use your profile on his website. It helps him because he’s got a user right there on his homepage saying, you know, “I used Luke’s material and it changed my life”, and it’ll probably say that, you know, “This is Ray from Live Lingua, you know, the CEO of Live Lingua,” on the bottom of that, and that’s a link, maybe even on the homepage, going back to your website.

LT: Yeah.

RB: A hundred per cent valid. But make sure you really use it; don’t just send fake positive reviews to everybody. I mean, you know, make sure you get in touch with the products you really love. If you have money, sponsorship and donations works really well. Sometimes if you donate to causes, they say, “Thank you, this company, for donating to us,” and you might get links out of that. Scholarships, same thing; if you go to your old alma mater, even a $500 scholarship, you can offer it. And we do this for, you know, Asian American students and Latino students. And those universities where you offer it at on their scholarship page will link back to the scholarship program. You create a little page on your blog with the information on how to apply for the scholarship. So it won’t be to your homepage, but it’ll be a link from a university straight to your website. They love university links in SEO.

Contests are always great for link bait. You know, offer free iPhones for everybody that signs up. People will share that all over the web. They’ll link back to the sign up page for your contests. I’ve never done this, but I know people worked really well: post something controversial on your website to start a debate. You know, that’s, like, trolling on forums, but you do it on your website and that – I know people have gotten success out of that. I don’t feel comfortable doing it myself, but hey, you know.

LT: A good thing that would work right now, just write anything nice about Donald Trump.

RB: Exactly. Well, I wasn’t going to go there because maybe there’s some Trump supporters listening to you, but, you know, that would (inaudible)

LT: It would definitely cause controversy, that’s for sure.

RB: Exactly. And that’s the point, right. People link to it and debate. Fake news; it’s all the rage right now. So, you know, you could throw that up there. And then the final one that people forget, it’s just so easy: ask your friends. Your friends probably have blogs; they have websites. You know, they’ll recommend you. They’ll say, “Hey, this is my friend Luke. Go check him out.” You can get some good links, especially if you’re starting out; that’ll at least get your feet wet in the SEO. Last note; quick things to stay away from. Stay away from link directories where you can submit your website and you get posted in a link directory. Especially if they’re paid, that’s even worse. Link exchanges used to work, saying, “Hey, you give me a link, I’ll give you a link.” I used to get hundreds of emails of that every day; I still do. And so don’t do that. Google caught on to that very quickly. Link wheels. People would create fake websites using free sites like, you know, wordpress.com but one of the free domains on wordpress.com, and then they’d put crappy articles up there and they’d link back to the website. They’d do that on, like, 50 domains and they’d link back to their website. Don’t do that.

Do not ever pay for a link in any way, shape or form. If you do – paid advertising works, so you can pay to have your ads up there. Just make sure the link is something called no follow; it’s a special tag they put in the links, which means Google doesn’t give you any credit as far as your ranking’s concerned. Then you can have paid ads, but if there’s do follow paid ads, literally if your competition finds out or your competitor reports you to Google – I’m guilty; I’ve actually reported a competitor and they disappeared from Google – you will get banned from Google entirely. And I’m not talking your rank dropping one; you know, they would look for you by name and you simply would not come up in the Google index. So stay away from all of those. That’s the basic overview.

One last quote I want to leave people with that I like as far as SEO. It’s from one of the most famous SEOs out there; he’s from SEER Interactive out in Philadelphia; his name is Wil Reynolds. And he’s like – he likes to say, “Do real company shit.” And that means, you know, if Coca-Cola is not doing this – you know, Coca-Cola is probably not paying people to write fake guest blogs about their product all over the web. Coca-Cola is not asking people to exchange links with them. So if it’s something that a big company like Coca-Cola, Amazon, wouldn’t do, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it either because it’s probably going to get you punished either now or a year or five or 10 years down the road. So do real company shit. I like that a lot.

LT: That’s an awesome quote to end this talk on, man. Man, my brain has literally exploded with everything that you’ve talked about. I’ve written a crap-tonne of notes here on stuff that I should be, like, paying more attention to. Like I said to you before, like, we hit record, like, I don’t really focus on anything SEO on my website. I think I’ve been pretty lucky that I have been doing sort of, like, white hat stuff; I haven’t, like, done a lot of the black hat stuff. And I never have, but I feel like I’ve been around in this space for a long time that I’ve, like, heard a lot about it and, like, that you shouldn’t be doing it, you know. Like I said before, like, I remember the Panda and the Penguin updates and, you know, hearing all these people start bitching and moaning that they’re no longer visible online.

But, yeah, man, you absolutely crushed it. I’ve got a crap-tonne of notes that I’m going to be putting into the show notes for this episode, and then also stuff that I’m going to be implementing myself. So, dude, thank you so, so much for coming on. Hopefully everybody, like, has learnt a lot; I’m sure they will. You know, this is probably one of the most value-packed episodes that we’ve recorded so far. So, yeah, thank you so much for coming on, man.

RB: My pleasure. I love this stuff. It’s my geek side. So, yeah, I could talk about it all day.

LT: Well, we certainly could. I will definitely have to get you on again in the future, man, to talk some more about this. If you guys do have any questions that we – you know, things that you do want to learn about SEO, leave a comment on the show notes page for this episode and next time we get Ray on – Ray can either come in and comment on them himself or we’ll make sure that those are the sort of things that we talk about on the next episode when Ray does come back on again in the future. But, Ray, before I let you go, my friend, are you ready for your rapid-fire question session?

RB: Yeah, let me just stretch first and then we’ll go for it.

LT: Limber up, limber up.

RB: Yeah, there we go. Let’s do it.

LT: Cool. So I want the very first answer that comes to your head, and here we go. Question number one: what is the favourite country that you’ve been to?

RB: Mexico.

LT: What is the last YouTube video or movie that you’ve watched?

RB: This is embarrassing, but it was The Voice auditions – the best Voice auditions of the year.

LT: No judgment here, man. I love watching those too. What is the weirdest thing that you’ve eaten?

RB: Raw donkey.

LT: Okay. What is your favourite drinking game?

RB: Well, I’m going to say the Power Hour; one shot every minute for 60 minutes.

LT: Yep. And do you want to tell me why that’s your favourite again?

RB: Yeah. I used to do it a lot in college. I was in a fraternity, Sigma Nu, back when I was in college. And so we started doing it traditionally, you know, you do a shot of beer every minute for an hour and you’re ploughed by the end of it. Yeah, but we all tried showing each other up. So we moved up to wine, a shot of wine, for every minute for 60 minutes. Woo, that’s pretty rough. I don’t remember exactly what it is, but it was, like, a bottle and a half of wine per person, you know, in 60 minutes. That’ll get (inaudible). Then one day I had a really rough day; I had broken up with my long-time girlfriend. So one of my good friends Evan, he’s this big Samoan guy; he was, like, you know, 300 pounds, six foot eight; nicest guy you’re ever going to meet but you wouldn’t want to pass him in a back alley. He’s, like, “Ray, you know, I have a solution to your problems; Jose Cuervo.”

So we decided to do a Power Hour of Jose Cuervo. I didn’t make it 60 minutes; I’d probably be dead if I did. We finished the whole bottle off in, I think, a little under 20 minutes. It was actually a show; the whole fraternity went down to, like, a dining hall and they were, like, cheering and chanting around us. We’d finished and I stood up and the whole world started spinning, and I didn’t eat anything for 48 hours. I can’t to this day – it’s been 20 years – I still can’t drink tequila.

LT: And Mexico’s the perfect place to be living right now.

RB: Exactly. So we’re (inaudible) tequila.

LT: Cool. Number five: if you could meet one person, living or dead, who would it be?

RB: Elon Musk.

LT: One book that you would recommend everybody should read.

RB: The Lean Startup, Eric Ries.

LT: Good one. Good one. What is your go-to song when you need to get in the mood to get shit done?

RB: Metallica, Unforgiven.

LT: Good choice. And I’d recommend their new Hardwired album. Absolutely love them. I’ve been listening to that a lot.

RB: The first live concert I ever went to in my life was Metallica, yeah.

LT: Love Metallica. What is your favourite swearword that you’ve learnt in another language?

RB: “Puto”.

LT: And what does that mean?

RB: Pussy, for lack of a better translation. Here in Mexico. Yeah. You want to insult somebody, you say that; you want to start a fight, that’s the way to do it.

LT: What is your favourite podcast, apart from this one?

RB: I’m going to say Pat Flynn, SPI, Smart Passive Income.

LT: Good choice. And, finally, can you give me your best travel story that you have in under five minutes.

RB: Okay. Well, it’s one of those embarrassing travel stories. As always, it was in China. I had actually – about a week earlier, had had to eat raw donkey, but that actually hadn’t affected me as much. So I went to visit my – I’d spent three months backpacking across China. I went to visit my sister in her small village of two million people in the middle of China; it’s not even on the map, so, you know, I can’t remember the name. You won’t find it. And that night, she invited me to eat with a governor, which, of course, the communist governor, mainly because no foreigners ever came to this town. It was the middle of nowhere; it was, like, in the middle of these, like, I think, cornfields they were.

So we went out there, and I had to meet the governor. And, of course, he invited all the dignitaries there. And I’m this bum who’s backpacking, so I have this, like, white T-shirt on with, like, sweat stains under there. You know, I’d just walked the Great Wall of China. I had nothing clean; suit, forget about it. But my sister’s like, “No, don’t worry about it. It’s okay.” So I show up; everybody’s in, like, Gucci suits and, you know, we’re sitting down. And I just can’t speak a lick of Chinese. I mean, I was asking for, like, “iga cha” which I thought meant “one tea” but I think the accent was wrong. So I’d been asking for, like, one dog to eat for, like, the entire trip I had been there because I hadn’t been enunciating the word right.

So we sit down there and he didn’t speak any English; nobody at the table spoke English. Luckily my sister, who had been living there for three years teaching English, acted as a translator. And we’re sitting on one of those round tables with those little things in the middle where you can kind of roll it around so that the plates kind of move closer to you. That’s actually where I had my first experience with raw donkey. It’s a delicacy in that part of it. So they lightly smoke it and they cut them to these perfect squares, so it looks like, you know, a sushi sashimi thing on the top of there. And they put this vinegar that’s so dark that it looks like soy sauce. I thought it was soy sauce, until later they told me what it was.

Next to that they had a thousand year eggs for anybody who’s travelled and tried those; they are the most disgusting things you’re ever going to eat. They’re like fermented eggs they stick under the ground and they let them, like, do something between rot and ferment for, like, a month. And they come up and they’re literally black and look like gelatine. And you kind of eat them and they – awful. Awful. But, of course, I had to smile because they’re a delicacy and I was eating in front of all of them. It’s also related to drinking, unfortunately. Apparently there’s – and they brought out these bottles of something called baijiu, I think, and it’s kind of the traditional – they’re kind of like sake glasses. So they bring it out; it’s kind of a rice liquor. And at that point my sister informs me, you know, “It’s a tradition that you have to have a shot with every person you meet.”

Of course, everybody at this table – there were about 15 or 16 of them – were new. So I had to do – you clink your little glass and you do a shot, and then you move on to the next one and do a shot. And, of course, you know, they’re all dictators – not dictators, but leaders in the government. So there was nobody – there was nobody unimportant enough that I couldn’t do it. So, of course, by the time I finished I was well on my way. The Chinese are no slouches; they did a shot every time I did anyway, so – I’m six foot tall, so I’m kind of big for an Asian. They were a lot smaller. We were all red-faced and karaoking by the end of the night. None of us could communicate with each other, but we have these pictures of ourselves kind of sitting there singing – I was singing Chinese songs. I have no idea what I was talking about. And I think a lot of that I forgot, because I had to be told a lot of this the next day by my sister.

But that was one of my most memorable travel experiences ever. You talk about cultural integration, and I did the Peace Corps which is integrating yourself into a culture for two years. I still can’t think of an experience in Mexico I had that can compare to integrating with, you know, communist party leaders, drunk, karaoking after eating raw donkey. That was one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had.

LT: That’s an awesome story, man. Do you actually have the pictures – you said you had a picture taken with them all.

RB: I have some of the pictures of my China trip. Not those up there; I actually – seriously, since they were communist leaders, I decided not to put them up, because that could – that might cause problems either for them or for me; you know, I don’t know which ones. But I have pictures of me with them before we were all, well, shit-faced. So, you know, after those, not as much – but this was actually back in, what, 2005. So, you know, the whole smartphone where everybody had a camera was a lot less; I had a nice digital SLR and we took a few photos on that, but it’s very different from the selfies right now, right, where everybody’s taking selfies. They’re all over the place. So, no, unfortunately I don’t have too many photos of that, not public ones anyway.

LT: That’s a shame. Dude, that was an awesome story. And thank you ever, ever so much for coming on. This was definitely one of my favourite episodes to record; learnt a lot; awesome story too. So, yeah, before we go, where can people find you online?

RB: Well, my main website is rayvensoft.com. That’s my main business name. As I mentioned, I use SEO to build businesses and I have about 15 online businesses; the most successful of that is livelingua.com. You can email me on both of them; they’re all small businesses. I tend to keep – I like keeping my businesses small. I’m involved in all of them. I even own a chocolate factory in the Philippines which is kind of a random business that I opened about two years ago, and I don’t even like chocolate. But it’s kind of a cool other one. So those two websites, either email – you’ll find my emails on both of those, the main one on Rayvensoft, info@rayvensoft.com; that comes straight to me. Or ray@livelingua.com; that comes straight to me. But if you send it to the generic contact us page, one of my staff will get the email to me. So, really, if anybody has any questions, feel free to contact me there or in the comments on Luke’s page as he mentioned.

LT: Sweet. And I’ll make sure to link to both of those websites, along with everything else that we’ve mentioned; all the resources and all the websites that you mentioned as well as you were talking. I’ll make sure they’re all on the show notes page for this episode. So if you didn’t manage to write any of those resources down, they will all be over there. And, Ray, again, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been an absolute pleasure, my friend.

RB: The pleasure’s all mine.

LT: I’ll talk to you soon, man.

RB: Have a good one.

LT: Take care.

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