For this week’s video, I talk about how I got started with SEO, and how I have made it my business to help my clients learn how to be better at SEO. I also talk about what it’s like to rank in Google.
SEO has been a part of my life ever since I first started doing it about a year ago. I had to learn it from the ground up as I have been fortunate to have a number of clients who have helped me to start off.
I think I owe most of my SEO success to my clients. As I’m sure many of you know, I started doing SEO when I was in college, and I started doing it professionally about a year ago. It was a fun way to earn a little extra cash doing something I enjoyed. I started doing it because I thought it would be cool to build my own website, and I didn’t want to let a competitor do it.
In the past I have used a few different methods to do my search engine optimization (SEO). My main method was to try and optimize my website for search engines, and then use links to the website from other sites to get traffic from search engines. That was successful for a time, but eventually it failed. I decided to try out a new method, and I used a number of different techniques to do this. One of the methods I used was to use Google Adwords.
Google Adwords is a Google program in which you pay to place ads on websites you run on your own website. Once you have paid for the ad, a link to your website appears in a page of ads that appear at the top of Google’s search results page. The ads are placed by Google to get users to click on your website. I decided to try out Adwords for the first time last night, and I’m glad I did.
The ads that you get appear at the top of Google’s main search page and link to your site. So I took a screenshot of my site (see pic), and clicked on one of the ads. As I was clicking through my site, I got to see the ad link as it appeared in the search results page. I clicked on it and saw the ad. Immediately I saw my site pop up in the ads.
While Google is certainly aware of the fact that your website is ranking in Google’s results, there may be other factors at play beyond the ads. For example, it might be that your site is simply showing up in a higher position to look at the ads because there’s something about your site that Google wants to see.
So I clicked on the ad and saw the image of my site. The first thing I noticed is that I was actually in the page. I can’t help but notice this is a major difference between the search engines. While Google sees the ad as the “first” result, Bing, Yahoo, and Microsoft are only seeing the page. This might help explain why the search engines seem to think my site is actually ranking for my keywords.
This was really funny to me because I had seen the first few ads and wondered if there was something different about them. I assumed they were the same as the rest of the ads. Well, no, turns out they weren’t. The first ad was the first page on the site; the next was the first link in the navigation; and the last was the search box. Now that is a big difference.
Yes, that’s right. The first page on the site gets the click, the first link on the site gets the click, and the search box gets the click. So when you look at the search results, you see the search box first and then a bunch of pages.