80: The Latest SEO Tips with Julian Smit (Part 2)

 

My Guest: Julian Smit

 

Episode Highlights:

[02:51]: I did a degree in Psychology, minor in Philosophy. There’s not much you can do with those. I didn’t really even know what I wanted to do with my life. So I just went to the University Career Center to figure out well, what am I supposed to be doing? I took all of those aptitude tests and interest tests and so forth. And one of them said, Okay, you should either be a marketer or a priest.

[11:03]: 20 years ago, it was like, why do I even need a website? What does that mean? And there were like a handful of ways you could get it done, and only the biggest people did it because it was thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to do anything decent.

[23:44]: But the problem is that you’ve got all these people who are saying you can have this independent lifestyle… And what they’re selling you, is you don’t need to have any experience running a business, nor do you need a product, or a service.

[28:48]: Estie: How would someone know when they get approached for these things? Legit, not legit?
Justin: Okay. Well, for example, the way that I called up pages in pages and pages of these duplicate sites was actually to simply copy-paste some text from the site and throw the whole big thing into a search bar.

[34:25]: For search engines, we call those meta tags and schema markup. And that does a couple of things: that communicates to search engines what your title is, what your description is, what your main image is- what is that image that you want it to come up with, when people do a search for your website.

[41:26]: When you’re setting yourself up for success, even if you don’t know what these things are, and even if you’re not going to be using them today, tomorrow, even next month, and maybe not even this year, this is the stuff is this in the background of your site…. So even if you’re not ready to run with those kinds of ads, if you ever want to be able to, or want to be ready, this stuff doesn’t cost anything, and it’s almost nothing to set up. Any web programmer worth their salt will do it automatically for you. Make sure that it’s in. Not everyone knows how to do it because there are a lot of programmers that are not worth their salt.

[58:29]: Basic SEO is that when people search for YOU, you get found. That’s your baseline, you must have that otherwise you don’t exist…. Advanced [SEO] is if someone looks for the thing YOU DO, you get found. That’s what costs thousands and 10s of thousands of dollars.

[1:07:34]: It’s a global networking event. Your profile is your booth, and every time that you’re posting and every time that you’re engaging, you’re walking the floor, and you need to behave yourself in a way that, you know, you don’t just walk up to people and be like, “Hi, would you like to buy this?” You don’t do that at a convention.