Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: SEO and Content Marketing
Lecture: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) foundations
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You worked really hard on building your business. But prospective customers are not just going to show up for no reason,
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you will have to take a thoughtful intentional approach towards marketing particularly with the content that you create and making sure
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that that content appears as high as possible in Google through search engine optimization. So that is what this chapter is about,
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search engine optimization and a bit of an introduction to content marketing, which will set the foundation for our growth hacking chapter later on.
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Search engine optimization or SEO seems like it's a complicated topic, a dark art, but really, what it comes down to is just making your business
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more likely to be found by prospective customers, if you are the top result in Google or on the first page of Google search results,
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for keyword terms that describe problems that your business solves, then more people are going to know about your business,
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and are going to try your product to see if it solves their problems. SEO comes down to following a few basic principles
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that actually make your content better, and make it more accessible to people who read websites.
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Don't think about this as tricking Google or tricking Bing into making what you write pop up higher in the rankings,
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there is nothing tricky about it, we'll take this nebulous topic known as SEO and we'll have some basic steps that you can follow
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and what it's going to give you is when you put in 10 percent of the effort, you're going to get 90 percent of the results.
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You can read entire books on SEO but what we're covering in this chapter is absolutely the most important parts and there are very simple principles.
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Ultimately, this will make what you create better and because it's better, it's more likely to pop up at the top of search results.
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And what should you create in order to market your business? Well, content can fall into many different categories
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and what we're really going to focus on here is writing, particularly creating useful content that is accurate and helps out prospective customers.
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So for example, let's say I write a book on using Python, with Vim, I will write free information about how to set up your Vim plugins
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or how to tweak your syntax highlighting for Python, that way when people are searching for a solution to a problem they have about Vim,
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they are likely to stumble upon my site and if they have stumbled upon it several times, they may say well "what else could this provide me
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that may make it easier for me to use Python with Vim?" Content marketing provides the first touch point with prospective customers to your product.
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The main thing to remember is that you're helping prospective customers, you are not sales-pitching them, you don't lead with "here is my product,
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use it, buy it", you're assisting them solving the problem that they have using information, and once you write this content,
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you're going to use search engine optimization in order to make sure that content is more likely to be found, so these two concepts work together,
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you're creating content that will be used for marketing so that people can discover you and you will use some basic principles of SEO
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in order to make sure that content appears higher in the search rankings, so what are we going to cover in this chapter,
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first off, when you break down an HTML page, there is certain elements that explain to Google what that page is about,
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and this has been true of any search engine, since the start of the World Wide Web, the title tag, the H1 tags, meta descriptions.
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Titles and H1s have been around since the very beginning and meta descriptions are more recent,
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but each of these is an indicator to Google what your content is about,
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search engines also have a preference on content length and the clarity of the text.
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There are many complicated algorithms on Google side or on Microsoft side,
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when they search an index or content you don't really have to worry about that, all you have to do is make sure that the content length is appropriate
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and that your writing is clear, it's appropriate for the audience that you're writing for.
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Url structure is also important for search engine optimization, what is better for you as a user, if URL contains the exact keywords
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that you're searching for so that you can remember what you're even reading when you just look at the URL itself,
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or a hash with a bunch of random digits, so we'll cover what makes a good URL structure, so you can make sure that your site follows a certain practice
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that is going to be most optimal for search engines to index; and we'll also cover site loading times, page size, mobile support,
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these are all particularly important as people read more on their phones, less on the desktop,
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your site and the content that you create should support any type of reading habit,
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through the next few videos, we'll break down each of these concepts, using Full Stack Python as an example and then you can apply that
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to your own projects to make your content more appealing and more likely to be found by prospective customers.