SEO Like Im 5
The Ultimate Beginners Guide to Search
Engine Optimization
by Matthew Capala
Editorial direction by Steven C. Baldwin
Cover design by Natalie Leeke
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be replicated, redistributed, or given
away in any form without the written consent of the author/publisher or the terms
relayed to you herein, expect for the use of brief quotations with appropriate reference.
Published by Kindle Self Publishing LLC, New York, 2014
ISBN-13: 978-1500865207
ISBN-10: 1500865206
Copyright 2014 by Matthew Capala
Praise for SEO Like Im 5
SEO Like I'm 5 is written in a way that is accessible to anyone who
is curious about how SEO really works without spending a lot of time
on theory. The book is perfect for beginners who are interested in
quickly learning best practices and want to understand what they
need to do next to get the most out of their website.
Linda Gharib, SVP, Digital Marketing at Citigroup, Adj. Professor at
Baruch College, Internet Marketing
I've known Matt Capala for years If you ever have an opportunity to
meet him in a professional capacity, you'll find that Matt has a way of
energizing people to believe they can succeed at otherwise
complicated marketing activities.
With SEO Like I'm 5 he's distilled the whirlwind of insights that float
around the Web unfettered and made them actionable for everyone.
Chock full of tools, best practices and action items that help get the
reader started, Matt's done a great job of taking everything he's
learned throughout his career and giving it to the reader in an easyto-digest capsule. While SEO has gotten harder than ever, Matt
explains it in a way that will help you get in the game with a winning
playbook.
Michael King, Featured Author of Inbound Marketing and SEO:
Insights from the Moz Blog, Founder, iPullRank and Quantum Lead
A refreshing look at SEO... In his recent book, SEO Like Im 5,
Matthew Capala emphasizes the need to learn and practice SEO...like
its 2014. He explains effective SEO strategies in a way that doesn't
require the advanced technical knowledge that can become a barrier
for those that generally need it the most.
Jonathan Cho, Managing Director, Head of Search and Social at
Mindshare
Having been in the industry for many years and having read many
books on marketing and SEO, I was skeptical to read yet another
book that claims it will change my business for the better. Matthew
Capala's SEO Like I'm 5 is practical, actionable, and clear. The book
does two things well. It's instructive in case I decide to do SEO
myself, but perhaps its even bigger value is if I decide to hire
someone else to do it for me. I highly recommend this book to any
solopreneur.
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Dino Dogan, Founder and CEO of Triberr, Co-Author (w/ Guy
Kawasaki and Mark Schaefer) of Engagement from Scratch: How
Super-Community Builders Create a Loyal Audience and How You
Can Do the Same!
I've had a chance to interview a number of SEO spammers in my
career as a journalist. Sadly, they all share an obsession with fast
money, contempt for the searchers tricked into consuming their lowquality content, and the strangely irrational belief that they'll always
be able to operate outside the reach of the law.
Today, however, as Matt Capala points out in SEO Like Im 5, the
"Wild West Era of SEO" is over, a new sheriff is in town, and
civilization is about to arrive on the search frontier. The good news is
that marketers using Matt's approach will actually profit much more
over time than those using the crude, risky optimization tactics of the
past.
Stephen C. Baldwin
Author of Net Slaves: True Tales of Working the Web, (McGrawHill), Editor-in-Chief at Didit
Matt Capala wrote SEO Like Im 5 for people regular people like
you and me not doctoral research fellows studying Semiotics,
Semantics, or Information Theory. While it addresses the important
mechanics of how search engines work, how they understand Web
content, and the optimization tasks required for better visibility, its
main focus is empowering you, using an accessible workshop style,
with the SEO tools you'll need to build real influence on the Internet.
Kevin Lee
CEO and Exec. Chairman at Didit, Author of The Eyes Have It: How
to Market in an Age of Divergent Consumers, Media Chaos, and
Advertising Anarchy, Founding Board Member of SEMPO
Having known Matthew Capala for a number of years, he has taught
me a great deal about SEO. In his new book, SEO Like Im 5 he
imparts this depth and understanding in a simplified and straightforward way that one can understand just by reading the material on
how to improve their SEO...and therefore, their revenue and profits.
Kathleen Murray, Angel Investor, Chair of Executive Forum Angels,
President of Harvard Business School Womens Association
CONNECTIONS
Content. Code. Credibility. Theyre essential, but to achieve true
visibility on the Internet, you need Connections, our 4th C.
Today, being connected is synonymous with having a presence on
social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google
Plus. These networks can be used to build a tightly-knit, loyal
community that wants to hear from you on a regular basis, (and
hopefully wants to buy from you as well).
Social networks have also radically changed link-building. Just a few
years ago, most webmasters asked for links via email. Today much of
this process sometimes all of it happens on social media
networks.
While social is a huge force today, due the sheer number of people
on social networks, its also clear that the links that come to your site
from social networks dont convey SEO benefits in the same way that
a link from the New York Times of the Wall Street Journal would. But
to focus on this fact is to miss the most interesting part of this
question, which is this:
How can I convince an editor at the New York Times to link to me?
Very often, the answer to this question begins on social media, in
communities, groups, and forum areas where people meet, exchange
information, and bond with each other.
Want to get connected? Read on. In this chapter, youll be hearing
from voices that have used social media successfully to increase the
influence of their sites, as well as their own influence.
Winning on Social Media
The right approach to marketing on the Internet involves a wide
range of disciplines: psychology, social science, and data analytics.
But above all, you need to be native to the platform you are
communicating through.
Winning Social Media Strategies
Remember that trust is the number one social media currency.
Stand out on social platforms by being human. Users gauge whether
or not your social media profile is authentic or spammy. Can users
trust you based on what you share with your audience?
Keep image and branding in mind at all times. You have a single
chance to make a first impression on social sites. Make your first
impression a powerful impact. Tell an enchanting, continual story.
Weave your brand into the fabric of your story on all social media
websites.
On sites like Twitter, upload a smiling, engaging image of yourself.
Dont be an egg; be a human. Give users a chance to see who you
really are so they can grow to know, like, and trust you.
Optimize each field on your social media profiles. Post a
professional picture of yourself. Craft a descriptive, keyword-rich
tagline. List your experience and education. Craft a short URL on
sites like LinkedIn for a memorable reference and easier viewing.
Do things, tell people. Follow this simple 1-2 punch to build your
credibility on social media sites. Engage in chats and interviews to
expand your presence. Make public speaking appearances and
publish eBooks, blogs and podcasts to appear to be all over the
web. Boost your media mentions religiously.
Expose yourself to as many people across as many platforms
as humanly possible. LinkedIn and SlideShare provide you with
powerful content tools to build your brand and increase your
visibility.
Make Friends Fast. Social media is about making friends quickly.
Follow people, ask questions, and share answers to build friendship.
Retweet, Like, and comment to pay it forward. Generous people
quickly become popular on social media sites.
Think of the Golden Rule; give what you want. Follow others to
be followed. Provide answers to prove that you are listening to your
followers. Sharing answers inspires friends to ask you questions. If
you want to be interesting, express genuine interest in others.
Think through how you can be of use to other people to become an
influencer. Social media stars pay it forward in some way, shape, or
form to become influential in their niche of choice.
Display Your Work Freely. Do not keep your accomplishments
secret. You may just explode by hiding your work. Do things you like
and dont fear telling your friends about it. Teach to learn more about
a topic. If you need experience in any area, dont preach on what you
dont know. Ask niche experts to explain concepts to you.
Create artful content. Patiently hone your craft to publish
influential, compelling work which gets serious shares on social
media sites.
Remember that intensity beats extensity. Focus your creative
energies on playing to your strengths and use platforms, which
naturally mirror your creative talents
The rise of the social media solopreneur
Gone are the days of huge, recognizable brands dominating social
media marketing. Entertainment and information meld infotainment
is the next gold rush. Solopreneurs are hopping onto the
infotainment bandwagon by combining creativity with informationpacked content to rise above social media noise.
Social media dynamo Gary Vaynerchuk has said: Consumers dont
want just information or just entertainment. They want
infotainment.
Demand for infotainment has skyrocketed over the past 25 years.
Consumers have been jaded by boring, listless presentations that are
heavy on information and light on fluffy entertainment-laden
messages. Brands whove found the right mix between the two have
reached into the hearts and minds of sophisticated consumers.
Social Media Marketing: Lessons From the Boxing Ring
In his recent social media bestseller, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook,
Gary Vaynerchuk tells marketers and businesses what boxing can
teach them about marketing.
You should get the book, its great, but let me explain how Gary
illustrates social media marketing.
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A boxer spends a lot of time analyzing his own strengths and
weakness, as well as those of his opponent. When two boxers step
into the ring, they already know each other well from countless hours
of analysis and strategic planning. This step is crucial to win both in
the ring and social media.
Effective boxers use a combination of jabs and right hooks to win the
fight. A knock-out in boxing needs to be carefully set up by a series
of jabs. Its no different than when you tell a good story; punch line
has no power without the foundation that comes before it.
There is no sale without the story; no knockout without the setup.
The right hook gets all the credit, but its a series of well-planned
jabs that come before it that set you up for success.
Right Hooks. Right hooks are the knockout punches. For marketers,
those are the next highly anticipated campaigns that are going to
increase revenue and make users engage in a cult-like following. A
CMOs dream.
Right hooks are calls to action that benefit your business. They are
meant to convert traffic into sales and ROI. Except when they dont.
Jabs. Jabs are a series of conversations, interactions and
engagements, delivered one at a time, that slowly but authentically
build relationships.
Jabs are the lightweight pieces of content that benefit your
customers by making them laugh, snicker, ponder, play a game, feel
appreciated, or escape.
Jab, jab, jab, right hook = give, give, give, ask.
Fortune 500 clients change their agencies frequently. Everyone is in
constant pitch mode, planning the next right hook and trying to sell it
to the c-suite.
Its a dog and pony show, cluttered with credentials and case studies.
Marketing agencies compete on whose right-hook idea is the boldest.
Its all about swinging hard knock-out punches that will take the
brand to the next level. Thats your average social media strategy.
No one really talks about the jabs or what it takes to learn a
platform. Or how to assemble a team that can respond in real-time to
social media opportunities, such as Oreos black-out campaign during
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Super Bowl XLVII.
Here is the usual
Just throw all those ideas under the community management slide.
What?
There is a section about the social media dashboard in the back of
the deck, you can put your ROI slide there. Thanks!
Big brands still get away with ignoring jabs because they can put
large paid media budgets behind their right-hook campaigns.
Facebook ads will bring needed traffic just fine. Look at all the Likes
we got last time!
Most common end result: The campaigns reached the eyeballs.
People saw them but they didnt care.
The chain reaction follows. Another RFP out. New strategy, bigger
idea, more ad dollars. Another pitch, another agency, same outcome.
Know Your Platform, Act Like a User
Jumping on Reddit with your big marketing idea that worked great on
Facebook may be disastrous. Why shouldnt you throw all your TV
ads on YouTube? In theory, it sounds like a great idea to promote
your services by answering questions on Quora.
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You cant just throw your sales pitch and marketing material created
for one platform, throw it up on another one, and then be surprised
that people dont engage or are turned off by your efforts. You have
to take the time to understand each platform and take a long view
approach to developing a community.
If you want to become influential on the platform, you need to act
like the user.
However, no matter how native to the platform you are, your
content has to be amazing. Effective social media marketing is about
engaging your audience in compelling stories. Thats a constant.
Garys little dirty social media secret:
Though I get to things early and can often see the future, I am not
Nostradamus. Im not even Yoda.* Im just the kind of person who
shows new platforms the respect they deserve. I wont predict what
platform will see 20 million users in a year, but once it feels to me
like it will, I will put my money and time there, testing new waters,
trying new formulas, until I figure out how to best tell my story in a
way the audience wants to hear it.
*It should read, Yoda I am not even, should I point out.
Your number one job is to tell a story. No matter who you are or
what you do, your number one job is to tell your story to the
consumer wherever they are, and preferably at the moment when
they are making decisions.
Adding a social media layer to any platform, especially SEO,
increases its effectiveness. Social media is overtaking the search
engines the same way TV overtook radio and the Internet overtook
the newspaper. From now on, everything you do should have a social
component.
There is no 60-day, there is only the 365-day marketing
campaign, in which you produce content daily. Period.
Do not cling to nostalgia. Ignoring social media platforms that
have gained critical mass is a sure way for a brand to look slow and
out-of-touch.
Like boxers, great storytellers are observant and nimble. A
great storyteller is keenly self-aware and attuned to his audience, he
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knows when to slow down for maximum suspense and when to speed
up for comic effect. No boxer uses the same sequence of moves over
and over again.
A story is at its best when its non-intrusive. On social media,
the only story that can achieve business goals is one told with native
content. If you want to talk to people when they consume
entertainment, you need to be entertainment. It doesnt require you
to alter your brand identity you shouldnt.
Content for the sake of content is pointless. Businesses are on
social media because they want to be relevant and engaged, but if
their content is banal and unimaginative, it only makes them look
lame.
Content is king, but context is God. Even great content that goes
onto your social channels can fall flat if you ignore the context of the
platform on which it appears.
In summary, getting people to hear your story on social media and
act on it requires:
using a platforms native language;
paying attention to context;
understanding the nuances and subtle differences that make each
platform unique;
and adapting your content to match.
Marketers who understand social platforms at that fluid level will
succeed. Get out there. Be human. Take the time to understand each
platform and act like a user. Talk to people in ways that are native to
the platform and you will win.
Social Media Automation: HootSuite
Another dirty little secret about social media is that its laborintensive. Just because social media uses short-form content doesnt
mean that you dont have to put thought into it or check links in the
same way you would with a blog article. But automated tools can
ease some of the workload.
I had not used any social media tool until recently, when I realized
how much time I can save automating content sharing and
management of various social networks. HootSuite is a social media
management system for businesses and individuals to execute social
media campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure,
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web-based dashboard. You can streamline workflow with scheduling
and invite multiple collaborators to manage social networks securely,
plus provide custom reports using the comprehensive social analytics
tools for measurement.
While I personally do not schedule my sharing often, I see many
benefits for businesses of scheduling your social content calendar
through a platform such as Hootsuite or Buffer. Social media
scalability doesnt imply looking like a robot maintain a fair
balance of native tweeting, sharing, asking, responding and
scheduling content to be shared.
I manage two Twitter accounts so Hootsuite comes handy for me.
Social Connections in Action
You may not realize how powerful your social media network is until
you reach out to it. For example, when I was writing this book I
needed to reach out for help in the form of editorial contributions and
feedback on important content issues.
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I put some of my concerns out to my social network and didnt
expect much of a response at first. But I was surprised by how many
great people reached out to me in return. Human beings have a
powerful instinct to help each other. Reach out to your own network
you may be as surprised as I was by the helpful spirit that can be
present
in
a
real
community!
A lot of people who should know better have complained that social
media doesnt work, but thats just because theyre looking at social
in exactly the wrong way: as yet another place for them to yell out
their marketing messages to the multitudes (who they apparently
presume will not only accept but cheer this behavior on in the forms
of Likes and Retweets.
Being effective on social media means rethinking your whole
approach to communications to take account of the fact that in
todays world, customers are in control, and brands need to learn to
listen not just preach.
One person whos got a lot to say on this topic is Brooke Ballard, inthe-trenches digital marketer and owner at B Squared Media. Do
yourself a favor and read the following article, which can save you
(or your agency, if you work for one) a ton of trouble when it comes
to marketing on social media networks.
Think conversation, not campaign
If you really want to start understanding your audience, you need to
know what drives them and what their buying behaviors are. You
cant do this by sharing kitten memes or quotes, and you certainly
cant do this by only allowing for one-way conversation.
What are the common social media pitfalls? The #1 most
common (fatal) mistake I see with companies is planning to fail.
What I mean by that is that they dont have a formal strategy or plan
for their social media efforts, and without one their messaging will
probably not be heard over the noise. Constantly sharing memes is
not a strategy. Talking about yourself wont work. Selling
aggressively is laughable. Coming up with some sort of viable plan
for both relationship building and building your lists is the way to go.
Other common social media pitfalls are:
Spelling and grammar errors (this is probably a close 2nd!)
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Linking social media sites to save time
Signing up for sites and then never posting there
Using every social media network
Not knowing the difference between tone and voice
Not interacting with your communities)
Not humanizing your brand
Jargon speak
Not sharing value
How to build a following on social networks? We find companies
have the shiny object syndrome and want to be on every platform.
We encourage them to get focused, and choose only three platforms
to start. Messaging gets diluted or redundant when youre on
Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat,
Foursquare, Google+, etc..
Its also important to choose the networks that complement your
business. If youre B2B, that may be LinkedIn and Twitter. If youre
selling a visual product or service, Instagram and Pinterest are good
places to start.
Identify where your brand best fits first, and then take a look at
where your target users spend their time. This will ensure youre able
to grow a decent following on your chosen platforms.
We also dont get mired in the numbers. Vanity metrics are where
amateurs focus relationships and conversions are where your focus
should be.
How to convert followers to community? If you really want to
start understanding your audience, you need to know what drives
them and what their buying behaviors are. You cant do this by
sharing kitten memes or quotes, and you certainly cant do this by
only allowing for one-way conversations.
Its kind of like dating. You have to woo your target customers with
good content. You have to prove youre more valuable than the next
guy/girl. And you must show them you care.
Two-way conversation also means responding to negative comments.
Youd be surprised at how many companies stick their head in the
sand by ignoring or deleting less-than-stellar feedback.
An Oracle report found that 79% of those that complained about
customer service (online) had their complaints ignored.
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Those complaints as well as the good stuff are your ticket to
finding out exactly what consumers want from you firsthand!
Why use psychographic research for social media?
Psychographics beliefs, opinions, feelings, values can only be
extracted through conversation. Scratch that. Psychographics can
only be extracted when both parties are vulnerable, trustworthy, and
accepting. If you, or your brand, is not those things then you will
probably have a hard time getting people to share self disclosures
with you even if the conversation is flowing.
Imagine, though, being able to take the feelings of your community
and put them to work for your brand. When you know things like
values and opinions, you can make direct correlations with buying
patterns.
Psychographics answer the question every marketer is trying to
answer: What do my buyers want? So have more conversations.
Woo your audience. Be dateable. Eventually youll be able to ask
psychographics-type questions and get answers.
How to measure return on social media investment? With social
media, I dont think you can get to a ROI without a ROC.
ROI = Return on Investment and ROC = Return on
Conversation.
Can deeper interactions (garnering psychographics) and relationship
building happen online (specifically on Facebook), between brands
and consumers?
The answer is YES.
However, to get to YES youre going to have to move past fluff and
memes and get out of your comfort zone. Youre going to have to
think more deeply about the conversations youre having.
If everything you post on social media is clich, your results will be
cliche.
If you only share dull facts, you may only receive factual information
in return.
If you push for opinions and feelings and are sure to share your
own you may start to receive opinions and feelings from your
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community.
Its that simple.
Or maybe its not. But if it isnt, Im fearful of what may happen to
your business as the Consumer Revolution continues to flourish.
The bottom line is that companies can no longer see consumers as
dollar signs. They cant even view them as avatars or User1234. If
they want to stay on top (and in business) they have to start building
relationships with their connected communities.
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