As we’re hitting our stride here at Big Guy on Stuff, we’re starting formulate certain patterns with the content we are releasing. I don’t want to let the side hustle piece of the site slip, so I’ll probably start posting at least one thing a week on this. Also, I’m out of expensive toys to write about for right now :). Today, I wanted to talk about what determines your SEO ranking.
What is SEO?
Good question! I’ve heard the term myself over the years, but over the last couple days, I’ve started looking into it after a Reddit AMA over on r/Blogging. Let’s get the easy part out of the way. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, it’s a way to format, and even word, your content so that search engines will pick your up your published creations and get them to folks who are searching for things related to what you’re offering. Your SEO ranking is determined by a number of things. There are a few SEO ranking techniques that everyone can easily implement while others seem to be proprietary Google magic, because let’s face it, they are the biggest player in the game.
How SEO Works
As I mentioned, there many techniques employed by search engines when they formulate SEO rankings. Does your content have a good title that describes what your article is about? If it doesn’t, that can hurt your SEO ranking. Can a search engine get a good description on what your post is about by analyzing it? This can hurt your ranking as well, and is one of the biggest problems we have here at Big Guy on Stuff, according to the AMA help I received. Whether or not your work has any H1 header tags in it WITH relevant keywords also plays a part in your SEO ranking. These things along with stuff like how much you are linking within your site, how much you are linking out of your site, how many sites link back to you, and whether or not you include images can affect your ranking as well.
Why Use SEO?
So, why bother? Why use SEO techniques to help gain a search engine advantage? I struggled with this. In fact, at first I was a little taken aback by it and thought “Why would I need to re-write my content just to satisfy the search engines?” Well, the more I thought about it, the reason is simple. I want my content to reach those who need it. For that to happen, I have to at least make an attempt to cater to our AI overlords so that they can better match your needs with something we may offer. I’m sure things will get better as AI on these types of things advance, but for now, the search engines need a LOT of help.
Yeah… They still need a lot of help!
Big Guy SEO Ranking Promise
Going forward I will pay more attention to things that will help articles that I write find their way to you, but I will not sacrifice content for the sake of search engine rankings. I will no doubt be trying to find a good mixture as I go forward, so if you see me doing something that seems out-of-bounds, call me out on it. I only want to produce things that are useful and/or entertaining to you.
More to Come
I had more fun than I thought I would researching this and writing on it, so there will probably be more posts on SEO ranking as the topic can get quite complex. As I learn, I will share with you so that you may quickly hit the ground running when you start down the optimization path. It can be hard to filter through all of the garbage that is just trying to get you to pay another service fee to run your blog which, if you’re new like me, isn’t really bringing any money yet. I hope that this and anything we produce here at Big Guy on Stuff helps you be successful! If you would like to find more of our side hustle related content you can do so here.
Share your SEO Tips
Have you already had some fun in SEO land? Do you have any stories or suggestions to offer on helping boost SEO rankings? Let us know in the comments. Help others (including me) with something that maybe took you a while to stumble upon.
Getting quality backlinks is probably one of the best but toughest SEO methods. Right now I’m experimenting with commenting on blogs without sounding spammy. So I actually have to read the blog post and put a decent, well-thought out comment. The only place I normally leave a link is just in the website field, and although it’s a “nofollow” link, I have noticed an increase on traffic from search engines.
You know, I noticed that for the first time actually after I commented on one of your posts. My first linkback showed up in my Google Search tool dashboard. It’s crazy how all of this stuff works, but it seems like if you make an effort to truly contribute, you could be rewarded. I’m sure there are ways to game the system as well though, but I would rather do this via building relationships and adding to the content. Thanks man!
I haven’t done much research on SEO and I really need to, so thanks for the article. I find back linking is great to increase search engine traffic but the links need to be from sites with a higher domain authority.
I think blog posts with media(images and videos) perform better than others. Apart from getting more shares via pininterest which is a good ranking signal, it increases the time your audiences spend on your content.
With Google’s RankBrain Algorithm, media should be part of your content.
Thanks for the feedback! I had read that, and I use media every chance that I get. I don’t have a lot of media to share that I’ve created though, and I don’t have a lot of time to create some on top of blogging usually.