SEO Search Engine Optimization for Beginners – Talk Like a Marketer Series (Video)

February 20, 2018

In this episode in our Talk Like a Marketer Series, we are defining SEO. We’re also talking about how Alt Tags help Google understand images.

Hey there, I thought I’d start this series, Talk Like a Marketer, to really define some of the key terms and acronyms that are used in digital marketing.

So in this week’s episode, we’re talking about SEO. It stands for search engine optimization. Now, most of the time when we’re talking about SEO, we refer to Google because Google is the largest search engine. Now, there are two types of SEO that you’ll hear about. One of them is white hat, and the other is black hat. Now, personally, I like my black hat better, but when it comes to SEO, white hat is really the only way I go.

2 Types of SEO

  1. White Hat
  2. Black Hat

So what is the difference between white hat and black hat SEO? What that really means is White Hat SEO means that you’re trying to do things the right way. Black Hat is using shady, sketchy techniques or tricks in order to try to rank better with the search engines. An example of this, for instance, would be what’s called keyword stuffing. So perhaps you have a product description. I talk a lot about eCommerce. In a product description, you have a whole bunch of text that is all of these keywords, but maybe you make it the same color as the background.

How Google works?

So if you have a white background and then you use white text, well, people that use techniques like that get all worked up when Google makes a change and then all of a sudden they rank lower in the search engine. Well, and that’s how it actually should be because, think about it this way, when you search online, do you really want to see a whole page of stuff that isn’t what you’re looking for? No. So Google, what they’re really trying to do is have users, like any of us, we’d want to have the most relevant information in front of us. And as marketers, as store owners, that’s our job is to provide that relevant information.

Some things that Google is amazing at, Google can read an entire website in like microseconds, but there is one thing that google is bad at and for … You know, I’m just going to give you a good example of how you can use SEO in your business. So if you have pictures on your website, which you should, because I mean, everything is so image-driven, and especially with eCommerce, our product images are vitally important. But I’d like to give you an example of how Google … or think about how Google sees a picture. Google can only see like boxes of color. That is all Google is going to see. So it doesn’t know what that picture is of unless you tell Google. So to give you an example, I’m going to go online and in Google I’m going to type in red shoes. So there we have some … a whole page of red shoes on the images page, and I’m going to click on one here.

Alt Tag

When I click on that image in order to go to the website, I’m also going to see that same image on the website right here, and if I want to know more about that image, I’m going to right click it, and I’m going to click the inspect button. That’s one of those little tricks that I’ve learned over the course of time. Now, honestly, I don’t understand like 99% of all of what’s going on in this right hand side here, but what I can see is that, where it’s highlighted right there, is that, for the alt tag and the title tag, they have called those red shoes. So that’s why when I looked up red shoes, that’s why this picture or this image ranked so highly.

That’s an example of SEO, and I like to call it Make Google Happy. That’s my own thing. Make Google Happy. Because when we’re designing a website, we’re really doing it for two people. Number one is for our customers, absolutely number one, but number two, in order for our customers to find us, we need to make Google happy.

We’ll be talking a lot in the future about SEO and ways in order to make your site even better. So thanks so much for watching. If you like what we’re doing, please hit that subscribe button, and I will look forward to seeing you in the next episode.