Kauffman Founders School, Insights from Neil Patel, SEO
>>> I'm an internet entrepreneur. I've been doing this for over ten years now. I've started
a few software companies for marketers. We help marketers do their job quite a bit easier.
What makes me excited about marketing is that there's always competition. And because of
that, you're always learning more, doing new things. And if you're a creative person like
me, you thrive on the challenge. My name's Neil Patel. I'm a serial entrepreneur. And
I love helping out other entrepreneurs. SEO stands for search engine optimization.
And the reason SEO is important is because Google, whether you like it or not, is the
most popular website in the world. For that reason, you should try to leverage it, right?
You can get a lot of traffic from it. With Google, if you notice, there's ads at the
top and on the right side. Now roughly 30 percent of the traffic goes
to the ads, 70 percent though goes to the free listings. Those free listings is what's
called SEO. Through search engine optimization, you can get your website placed there. And
that can drive thousands, if not millions, of visitors to your site. And that can drive
millions of dollars in sales. If you're looking to get started in SEO there's
a few things that you should do. When you do a search on Google you'll notice that there's
a title of a website and a description. The title is called a title tag. The description
is called a meta description. Now the title tag is code based. So you or your developer
can go into your code and adjust your title tag. Your title tag should be appealing so
people want to click on it. It should contain key words. And it should be roughly 60 characters
or less. The meta description should also be appealing. You want to get people to click
on it. It should contain key words. And it should be roughly 120 characters or less.
You also want to make sure your title tags and your meta descriptions are unique on each
end every page of your site. The second part is links. A link being I take
my website and I link to you or someone else takes their website and they link to you.
Think of links like votes. The more votes you get the higher up you're actually going
to rank on Google. So if Forbes links to you, Google or Bing as a search engine, they're
going to count that as more authoritative than let's say if Joe the plumber linked to
you. And you're actually going to rank higher if you get more authoritative links.
The way you get these links is you create great content, you create a great product.
For that reason, SEO is always ongoing, right? If you're not continually building links,
your competitors are. And your rankings are going to drop. And the thing you should be
focusing on an ongoing basis is adding more content and building more links to your site.
In addition to that, you want to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools
is a free program from Google in which they help you optimize your site for search engines.
It provides reporting that tells you what you're doing right and wrong. It'll tell you
if there's any errors or if you're penalized by Google. If you're a local business, let's
say targeted towards Kansas City, within Google Webmaster Tools you can tell Google, hey,
my business is in Kansas City. And they'll give you preferable treatment within the Kansas
City area. The way you know SEO is working is that over
time you'll see that your search traffic and your rankings should go up. You can see that
your search rankings are going up because within Google Webmaster Tools it reports a
position of where you rank for specific key words. And you can also use Google Analytics
which is a free product by Google that will show you how much traffic you're getting from
different sources. And it will show you how much Google traffic you're getting on an hourly,
daily, weekly, monthly and even quarterly basis. And it maps it all out for free. You
can have your developer put a little snippet code within your website. From that point
on, Google will track who comes to your website, who makes a purchase, what did they specifically
do. And don't worry, that specific code that you put on your website that you received
from Google Analytics, no one can see it. It is not visible to anyone browsing your
website. It's only visible to Google Analytics.