NEW WEBSITE SEO
In my last post, I recommended The Income School as a place to learn SEO. I may have jumped the gun. I based it on a YouTube video I’d stumbled across. When I clicked onto their site, I discover that whilst search engine optimisation (or should that be optimization?) is key to their business (and in particular, new website SEO) what they are actually selling are tried and trusted means to start several websites, each making money for you in a variety of niches (nitches? Neeshes?)
That’s fine if making money is your goal.
Perhaps you think that is obvious. Making money should be everyone’s goal. But if you are like me, you don’t have the option to choose your niche. It chooses YOU.
Chicken or Niche
By that, I mean; which comes first?
You may go to some kind of Google Niche Selector (I made that term up – I think. Let’s call it GNS) to find out WHAT NICHE is trending right now. Let’s say it is YOGA. Possibly, it is. During the lockdown, everyone (well every woman) was doing yoga.
So you start a website about yoga. Easy.
But hang on. You don’t know the first thing about yoga other than it involves impossible stretching and sporty clothes (forgive me if you’re a yoga expert. I use this an an example).
The point is that IF YOU START A SITE ABOUT YOGA, YOU WILL HAVE TO BECOME AN EXPERT ON YOGA.
Because that is what is so clever about Google and their modern code. THAT is the one thing in SEO that has changed since I started looking at it back in the day.
SEO MURDER MYSTERY ONLINE GAME SEO
You see, back then, the MAIN thing to get you ranking higher in the search engines was to include your KEY WORDS as often as possible in your writing.
It IS still an important factor. But it isn’t AS IMPORTANT as it used to be. So, in those olden days, you wouldn’t care too much about your readers. Your main concern would be with the search engines, the ‘bots’. These ‘spiders’ as they were called would crawl your site, looking for the keywords in order to figure out what you did. So you would find sentences like, ‘Our Murder Mysteries are probably the best murder mysteries you will find because we are the best murder mystery company. Murder Mystery.’
Now, I’m of an age where I remember this and, although it is still relevant, it isn’t quite SO relevant any more. Yet I will use my keywords AS MUCH AND AS OFTEN AS I CAN.
But I will try to do so in a way that the reader finds interesting (or, at least, doesn’t see it as so obvious they click away).
So, today, CONTENT IS KING. If you are going to create a site about yoga, you’d better be good at, or interested in, yoga. Because you are going to be writing about it an awful lot if you are going to get it up the rankings.
Murder isn't my niche. Comedy is.
I’m a complex old thing, I guess.
I couldn’t write about yoga. For me, the most important thing about my online murder mystery game (I bet you hardly noticed me getting the keywords in there) is not the murder aspect (I don’t think murder is a great topic to make fun of). For the audience, the most important thing is the mystery.
Because it is the mystery that turns it into a fun game. A challenge. Something to solve. A chance to WIN.
But for me, right from our very first corporate show back in 1990, it has been about the comedy. Comedy within the situation or between the characters. To me, the world is FUNNY. Most things in this world make so little sense. To me, it is simple: we are born (we know not why), we create for ourselves a reason why we are here (maybe religion, maybe to further science, maybe to make money, maybe to destroy, maybe to make people laugh), then we die.
That’s it. Life is a mere 80 years of consciousness twixt billions of years of nothingness.
I think of my life as a wafer thin filling between two very, very thick slices of universal bread.
BUT…here’s the thing. Whilst I don’t want to write about murder (real, horrific murder that is. The sort of murder where someone’s life is brought to a close), NOR do I want to write about comedy (what passes for real comedy; a skinny bloke telling a small room full of strangers about his sex life or, God forbid, Michael MacIntyre! I DO NOT want to write about Michael McIntyre).
I DON’T mind thinking about, and writing about…Writing, Acting, Filming, Editing, Chromakey and, SEO.
So, RULE ONE (in my opinion); WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING YOU LIKE (or, in the modern vernacular, something you are PASSIONATE ABOUT).
But the MOST IMPORTANT LESSON HERE…is to WRITE!
CONTENT IS KEY. Write from your heart. Don’t copy. Write what you know.
Yes, stick in a few of your keywords (and I’m going to be writing about keywords and the ways you can improve your SEO score – from YOAST to RANKMATH.
RULE NUMBER 1.
THAT is the thing the Income School taught me. CONTENT. CONTENT IS VITAL if you are starting a new blog.
If, like mine, your site is new and you just know that NOBODY is going to read this. DON’T GIVE UP. Somebody, perhaps sooner than you think, will find it. But for sure, the Google bots will find it. They will see you are serious about your subject (your niche if you insist), and they will pull you by the shoulders up past those of us like myself and Tom who have a battlefield of abandoned sites behind us.
Before you know it, you’ll be right up there. And you’ll be able to write about that.
LINKS
Lest I forget, remind me that my future SEO blogs should talk about links; external links, internal links, backlinks.