Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: SEO and Content Marketing
Lecture: Content examples
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SEO and content marketing make it more likely that prospective customers are going to come across your business.
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Let's take a look at Full Stack Python as an example for each of the topics that we're going to cover in this chapter.
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I am just going to walk through the process that I use and point out some non-intuitive points which we'll dive into throughout the chapter.
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You can follow along by just opening up an incognito browser either in Firefox or Chrome, the reason why we're using incognito is
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because Google tailors the search for your search history, which can throw off your results compared to someone else who is searching.
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This is not an exact science, some of your customers are already going to have a search history but we use incognito mode
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to provide a baseline for searching for common terms and keywords that you believe your customers are going to be searching for.
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Let's take a look at a couple of examples, so my book on Python deployments, typically goes along with web development,
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so if someone searches for "Python web development", I want my website with good quality content
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that is going to help that user to appear first, organically. And that is the first thing that we're going to see here,
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we can't necessarily get the top spot on Google, because what you can see is that an ad appears on top,
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from one to four ads can appear on every Google search, there is nothing we can really do about that
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unless we want to pour a lot of money into adwords. What we are really targeting here with content marketing
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is the organic search results, and that is what we can see here, web development for Full Stack Python appears first in this list of search results.
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A couple of things we can see about this, number one, we've got the full title for this web page,
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we've got the specific URL including bolded parts of the URL that matches our search terms, "Python web development".
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That is an indicator, not only to Google but for the searcher that this web page is exactly the content that they are looking for
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and then we have a short description down here, web development, they catch-all term for activities, and learn more in Full Stack Python,
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it has bolded the search terms, now if we click on this result, it's going to bring up obviously the page, and now we're on Full Stack Python,
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now on this page in particular, I have an advertisement for the Full Stack Python Guide to Deployments,
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it's just the first way that someone can see that there is a deployment book that is related to the search term, but it's not in their face,
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there is no pop up, they can pretty much ignore if they want to, and that's fine,
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what is really important here is the content that is going to help them solve whatever problem they have, web development is very broad term
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so the problem that they have is probably they just want to know what it is, maybe someone told them about using Python for web development
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and they wanted to learn more about how Python is used for web development and this is one of the first things with content marketing,
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you do need to make some assumptions about what problem you're solving when you're creating a piece of content, sometimes it will be obvious,
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if you're solving a specific stack trace error in someone's application, obviously there is a solution based on the set of steps that you could take,
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that solve that problem, and fix the stack trace. In this case, we're really just providing information about web development,
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so there is a couple of key pieces here and I am going to pull up a Chrome developer tools.
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Let's highlight this header tag, this H1 tag, it's web development, and this pulls up the source code down here.
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You should only have a single H1 tag on a page, that is one of the first rules. Because the H1 tag is an indicator of what this webpage is about,
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let's scroll through here, and we can see that we've got a bunch of description that explains
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how Python fits into web development and then provides more resources.
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And to be honest, this is not actually one of the better pages on Full Stack Python, it's much shorter in content length than it should be,
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but it at least provides a starting point for Python web development and since this is a very broad search term,
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it's likely that is one of the reason why it appears at the top of Google. In addition, it has all the terms that people are looking for
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related to Python web development and there are many links to other pages with concepts such as web frameworks and specific web frameworks in Python
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that again are an indicator to Google or any search engine that this is a good page on web development.
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Now we've run this search in a desktop web browser, but not everyone is going to be reading or searching for content on the desktop,
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they may also want to find it when they are on the mobile phone, commuting to work, something like that, so let's open up a new a tab
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and we'll again open up a developer tools and here is a little trick for searching on mobile
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when you are just in your own development environment on your laptop. Click this little icon down here, and now we've gone
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into the mobile simulator on Chrome. And we can simulate searches from different phones,
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and what typically this is used for is seeing how your website looks in various browsers.
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It's really helpful for when you're doing your development work you can say "well, how does this look on an iPad, how does this look an an iPhone?"
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And the answer should always be "it looks awesome!" It looks just as good as the desktop version,
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because people are searching both on mobile and on desktop and you want to support both. And you can do that by making sure that your CSS,
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which you learned about earlier, is following responsive design. Now let's try this search term again, on the iPhone 6, simulating the iPhone 6.
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And we can still search up top here, we can say "Python web development", now it's a little small, so let's bump up the size here.
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Now we can see there is two ads, and then again, Python web development pops up. Now the layout is a little bit different here, instead of the full URL
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we're seeing almost a categorization but this actually still follows the URL, saying the site is Full Stack Python and it's one level deep.
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When we click on it, we'll see that there is, and this is the URL structure, it's at the base URL, there is no subfolder for example
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if we were to say blog in here, it's not under the blog subfolder, it is just one level deep on Full Stack Python.
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Now how does this look on mobile? It looks pretty good compared to the desktop version, we've taken away the sidebar, or actually
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the sidebar is down below, below all the choices so if we scroll all the way down, then we'll see the advertisement, for the Guide to Deployments book,
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the email updates and then we have chapters, now the one thing about the chapter is instead of listing everything out,
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like we can see over here, we have every single topic, that is listed out on the desktop version, which is fine on the desktop
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in case you want to just quickly bounce over to different topic. On mobile, that is a real pain in the butt, the way that I've designed this is
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just show the high level chapters, so when you click on any of these, you'll see you can get immediately to that chapter
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and then you would have to click on all topics if you want to go to a drill down page such as postgres. So the general theme is, think about the topics
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that your users are going to be searching for, if you built a business related to selling vacuum cleaners,
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you wouldn't create Python content, you would create content about what the best vacuum cleaners are,
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or common solutions to fix an issue with your vacuum cleaner, like how to clean the bag in the vacuum cleaner, things like that.
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So you'd write content, that is going to solve the problems of that user. Let's take a look at one more thing and we'll do that
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by doing the view source on the web development page, I want to point out some important elements on this page,
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that we're going to dive into further in the next few videos. Now you already know I'll write HTML and there is some important elements here,
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one of which the meta description, meta name="description", is not actually a required element on a web page,
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but it's really important because this is what often sets the description that people see when they search for a specific term,
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so again, "Python web development" and we can see, web development catch all term, if we look at the meta description this actually matches exactly
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what is in this meta description and the search results. Now that is not guaranteed to happen, but if you put the right terms
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into the meta description it's likely that this is what is going to pop up as the description on the search results page.
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A couple of other things, one is the title, and it's a unique title, that is specific to this particular page, web development on Full Stack Python,
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so it has these search terms that are commonly associated with this, in the title itself, and then the title is very similar to the H1 tag
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but the H1 tag has just the header that has exactly what this page is on, let's take a look at one more example.
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Let's say we want to write a book or some guide on monitoring and we want people to be able to find monitoring.
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Now, I have a page on that as well, and you will see it follows the same pattern as the other one, we have a nice, clean H1 tag, good URL structure,
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that is not too deeply nested in a bunch of subfolders, and again, we have a bunch of useful information
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along with links to other projects and services that are going to be useful for someone who is searching for monitoring for a Python application.
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Let's talk about a few things that I have not done on here. First off, if we take a look again at the web development page,
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this is not an H1 tag, if we had this top banner as an H1 tag there would be two H1 tags on the page and that would confuse
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not only the person who have visited that page but it would also confuse the search engine as to what exactly is
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the content that is on this page, so this is just a link and it's styled with a larger font, but it is not the H1 tag.
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Another bit that is important here is that this page when we go to the source it's very simple lightweight amount of HTML and other related content,
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for example, the CSS is minified, which means that it's all compressed down together in a single line or as close to a single line as possible
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and it's been hand tuned to make sure it's as fast as possible and there is no JavaScript outside of one addition here
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and that is just Google analytics, so we do have a Google analytics snippet here but it loads at the very end of when the page loads
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because it's in the last element that appears right before the close of the body,
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there is no other jQuery or React or Angular, nothing like that on this page,
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which means that it loads extremely fast and site speed is really important for appearing higher up in the search results.
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So that is a quick overview with a couple of example pages and example queries, where in my case with Full Stack Python
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it's advantageous to appear at the top of the search results for these search terms.
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So, it's going to depend on what your business is, who your audience is, so you're going to want to write down a bunch of the search terms
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that you want your site and your content to appear at the top, and then you can start writing on that topic.
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If you write consistent, clear, accurate and really useful information, over time, your content will begin to appear higher up in the search rankings,
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and that is pretty much what SEO is all about, there is no dark arts here, it's just a structured set, a fairly simple activities
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to make sure that you have a clear set of keywords for your content.