this is grumpy SEO Guy episode 1 the biggest lie in the SEO industry you're listening to grumpy SEO guide the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work I'm the grumpy SEO guy and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO Agency for the last 14 years in this podcast I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience discussing tips and strategies and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry if you listen to this podcast you will know more about SEO than 99
of people on the planet ready let's get started I'm the grumpy SEO guy let me tell you why I'm grumpy today I'm grumpy today because the SEO industry is full of lies and in a minute I'm going to tell you what the biggest lie in the SEO industry is you've probably heard it you might believe it and it might even be the reason that you're not at the top of page one don't worry we'll take care of that but before we go any further let me tell you exactly why I'm making this podcast after 14
years of running an SEO agency I'm pretty fed up with the lack of truth and the lack of accountability in the SEO industry whether that's people posting on forums and sharing SEO methods that don't work whether that's people selling courses that don't give you any specific actionable steps to actually increase your rank or whether that's SEO agencies lying to their clients about what they're doing or not even doing anything at all do you know how many clients we have gotten that said their last agency didn't do anything and they got no result after six months
or after 12 months if you're not at the top of page one your SEO agency is wasting your time and wasting your money in this podcast I'm going to take everything I've learned over the last 14 years and break it down in a way that makes sense and in a way that is easy to understand so basically if you listen to this podcast I'm going to explain everything I've learned in the last 14 years of running an SEO Agency for example we're going to talk about how to rank a website the right way so it
gets to and stays at the top of the search engines for years we're going to talk about how to hire an SEO agency that won't rip you off maybe you don't want to do the work yourself you want someone else to do it for you there's a lot of scammers out there I'm going to teach you how to avoid them we'll talk about how to start your own SEO agency if that's what you want to do basically the goal of this podcast is to get you to a point where you know more about SEO than
99 of people who work in the SEO industry and I'm not kidding and you will be able to easily spot scammers easily spot liars and know exactly what you need to look for and what you need to do to get your website to the top of the search engines and keep it at the top of the search engines all right let's get started my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now a quick disclaimer before we get started everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in
the industry I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience this podcast does not constitute advice or Services what worked for me may or may not work for you okay back to the show the biggest lie in the SEO industry is this content is King have you ever heard somebody say content is King you've probably studied SEO a little bit maybe you've been reading some blogs maybe you've taken some courses maybe you've listened to some lectures and probably all of them said
something along the lines of content is King well content is not really King it's kind of important but it's not important for the reasons you think it is so I'm gonna explain to you what content actually does because it's definitely not King and I know you're probably thinking well if content's not King what is King let me tell you right now Authority is King and Authority comes from backlinks from authoritative websites now I'm pretty sure I just lost some listeners because some people really do not want to consider the fact that content is not King
let me just give you one little bit of information before we go on in 14 years I would say probably 99 of the clients we've had did not have content tent problems they had Authority problems in other words the reason they weren't ranking where they wanted to rank wasn't because their content wasn't good it was because their website didn't have enough Authority let me give you an example of authority have you ever noticed that no matter what you search for certain websites always appear at the top of the search engines do you think that's because
they have the best content that's not the reason the reason is because those websites have more Authority than the competition that's why there are certain websites that no matter what you search for they are pretty much always at the top let me give you an example if you search for like a noun or a person you know I know people are nouns but if you search for like a thing right Wikipedia is probably going to be one of the top three results now would you say Wikipedia has the best content of any website on the
internet no you that's that's probably not a truthful statement but it sure does rank for everything why do you think that is is it's because Wikipedia has more Authority than pretty much everybody else who ranks for that keyword Authority is what drives rank it is not content in fact I wanted to spell two more myths about content before we go any further the first thing is that duplicate content is bad now don't duplicate content on your own website that can cause problems in fact I'm going to tell you a story later probably in another episode
about a client who did that and they messed up their entire like campaign like it was a huge mess but duplicate content because I'm sure you've heard duplicate content is bad don't duplicate content right duplicate content doesn't even matter have you ever searched for the lyrics to your favorite song every single page on the first page of Google has the same content because they all have the same lyrics to the song If duplicate content was bad only one of those websites would rank and none of the other ones would because they have duplicate content now
yes of course like the headers and stuff on those pages are going to be different right but 99 of the content is the same because it's the lyrics to the song duplicate content doesn't matter the second thing that I want to say about content and I'm going to explain more about this later you can rank a website for keywords that don't even appear on the website so in other words you can have a website about one topic and you can have that website rank for a search for different topics mind-blowing again content doesn't even matter
and I'm going to explain to you quickly how to do that because that is the most important factor in SEO like if you understand this one thing if you understand how to do this one thing you will know more than basically everybody and you will probably know more than the agencies you're thinking about hiring so when we do the episode on how to hire an SEO agency that's not going to rip you off this is one of the things that you're going to have to find out if they know it without directly asking them it's
really fun actually okay so anyway content doesn't matter content is not King Authority is King Authority comes from backlinks from authoritative websites but content actually does play a role so I don't want to say the content is pointless I just want to say it doesn't really matter when it comes to ranking so the other thing you need to know is that generally speaking content can hurt you and there are some penalties that you can get on your website if your content isn't the way it's supposed to be for example if you over optimize your website
and that means like using the same keywords over and over again let's say you have a website about blue widgets I just like to use that as an example so maybe you're selling blue widgets okay now if your content sounds like this the best thing about blue widgets is that they are blue and they are widgets you should buy every variety of blue widget because then you will have more blue widgets than everyone else your friends probably have blue widgets do you have more blue widgets than your friend you see what I mean like using
your keywords over and over and over again and it doesn't even sound normal that can actually work against you now like 15 years ago that was actually a good way to rank but don't do that anymore it's a bad idea but generally speaking the content on your website doesn't really do anything I mean it can penalize you if you do it wrong now nobody in the SEO industry wants you to know this okay they always want you to think oh content is king oh how are you going to rank us oh we're going to make
some great content yeah don't hire that agency listen let me tell you kind of what content does though so let's say you have and you should always have good content on your site just because I'm telling you that content isn't as important as people say it is doesn't mean you should have low quality content and this is why low quality content is frustrating to readers and if you want people to stay on your website and purchase whatever thing you're selling or do your call to action you need good quality content because bad content is annoying
all right but with that in mind from an SEO perspective it doesn't really matter but it does matter a little bit so let me explain to you what content actually does okay when a search engine crawls your site it's going to look at all your content and it's going to determine from the content what your website is about is your website about blue widgets is it about something else so the search engine uses the content and I need to tell you there's a big exception to this rule which I'm going to talk about shortly but
first I need to explain what content does so the search engine uses this as content to determine what your website is about and then let's keep using blue widgets for example when somebody searches for blue widgets the search engine goes through all of the websites it has that talk about blue widgets and then it says which one of these websites has the most Authority that one gets to be number one which one has the second most Authority that one gets to be number two and so on that's how the position of websites is determined yes
it's kind of related to content but only as much as content determines what the website is about the rest of it comes down to Authority this is why you can have the best content in the world and not rank for anything thing because you don't have any Authority now let me explain to you the one exception that I was just talking about if you understand this you will understand more than pretty much anyone you will talk to in the SEO industry so content matters to determine the topic of a site yes we just talked about
that but there's one more way to associate your website with certain keywords that has nothing to do with the content on your website and that is Anchor text anchor text refers to the actual words from another website that links to your website so for example if a website links to you and it says check out this site and check out this site is actually the link that you can click on then check out this site is the anchor text okay does that make sense the most powerful thing you can do and I am not joking
the most powerful thing you can do is to get backlinks from authoritative websites to your website with your keywords in the anchor text now there's a definite right and a wrong way to do this so don't run out right now and try and get backlinks with your with the words that you want to rank for in the anchor text because you're probably going to do it wrong and you're going to penalize yourself but just understand the concept that is without question the most powerful thing you can do and that in and of itself has made
up a large percentage of what my agency has done for the last 14 years and the reason our clients get to the top and stay at the top I'm going to do another episode on backlinking so we'll get into more detail on that but just be aware anchor text is the strongest ranking signal I have ever seen in fact the overwhelming majority of clients that I've worked with that was the solution to their problem they didn't have a Content problem their title tags weren't messed up you know they they weren't like they weren't lacking appropriate
headers on their like h110 tags on their page you know like all the things that people think of oh we need to fix we need our H1 tags like yeah I mean it helps but you know they weren't missing an author bio like that's one that everybody loves to talk about oh we gotta you gotta establish your credibility as a as a known author yeah okay but none of this even comes close to giving you the amount of authority that backlinks from authoritative websites do I don't know how to explain it anything that you can
think of doesn't even come close at any rate we'll talk more about this later this is something else that's kind of funny about backlinks so now look I'm pretty good at SEO but I'm not really the best salesman in the world anyway I'm going to talk more about selling SEO in a future podcast I'm going to tell you some of the things that have worked for me and some of the things that haven't worked for me but in the meantime let me tell you this as I mentioned I'm not really the best salesman I have
actually lost sales because when the person asked how I was going to help rank their website I explained to them that we are going to build backlinks and there is such a weird feeling about backlinks in the SEO world because everybody thinks content is King okay and they think that like backlinks is somehow like hurtful and manipulative right and so if you mention them in sales meetings the prospect is like oh you know what I actually read somewhere that backlinks are bad so I don't I don't think we're gonna work with you okay that's fine
look I'm fully transparent everything I explained in this podcast completely truthful I don't like lying to people and I would rather not get a client because I was honest with them then you know like lie to people and get a bunch of sales and not get them results which I feel like is pretty common based on what I've heard so what I tell those people is hey look that's fine I understand you need to you need to make the choice that is the the best fit for you listen in six months whoever you work with
um if you're not at the top of page one please reach out to me and I'm happy to help and of course if they do reach out there's a good chance the SEO company that they worked with didn't do anything but there's also a good chance that they did something wrong and sometimes what you have to do is clean up another agency's mess before you can actually get your client the results they're looking for you know though that's a different topic so I'm gonna stop that for now something else actually that I want to say
about backlinks is this too there's a lot of people that sell backlinks okay I'm sure you've spent some time on some SEO forums or some marketplaces and there's a lot of people claiming that they sell backlinks I will tell you 99 of them are rubbish they will not help you and they will probably penalize your site and I don't have time to get into the specifics of it for this episode but let me tell you this the easiest way to find out well there's a there's a lot of things that you have to look for
so maybe I shouldn't say it that way but a very easy way to find out if it's probably a scam or not is if it's a one-time payment there is literally no way that a one-time payment for example somebody selling lifetime a lifetime link on a page right there's no way that that is a feasible economic model it's not possible I'm going to explain in great detail why that's the case in another episode it is not possible that that is a sustainable model for the seller it does not work if you're making a one-time payment
you are getting ripped off I 100 guarantee you that now does that mean that for example monthly or yearly payments are not a scam no it doesn't mean that but it means that any single payment any lifetime payment is 100 a scam you are being ripped off and I want to mention that because now that you understand that Authority matters you're probably trying to get some Authority and so now you might be rushing out you know oh this guy says they're really authoritative let me buy from him ooh this guy says they're really authoritative let
me buy from him no don't don't do it that way there's a couple things you have to look for I'm going to explain this more in the future when we do the episode on buying backlinks I want to say that in and of itself there's no problem with buying backlinks that's how the SEO industry Works my agency has made most of its money and gotten most of its results from selling backlinks both to clients and to other SEO agencies and that is a whole other topic but in the meantime I just want you to understand
that one-time payment backlinks are always a scam the best case scenario is that you will get a little benefit in the short term and then the benefit will run out the worst case scenario is that you will get no benefit and you will eventually get penalized from it and as you will learn the penalty episode penalties are very hard to recover from you don't want to deal with them and spammy Link penalties are often one of the hardest penalties to recover from so we'll talk about this more later but just for now understand that one-time
payment links are always a scam do not ever buy them I want to be very clear about this because most people don't understand that this is how the SEO industry works I'm gonna do an episode on this but I'm going to give you a little preview now the overwhelming majority of SEO work is done by a very small number of people in the world who actually build backlinks most SEO agencies do not build backlinks for their clients most SEO agencies do not have the assets or the knowledge to build their own backlinks for their clients
there's generally an SEO agency somewhere at the top who got that company as a client and that agency is Distributing that work down a chain to somebody who actually builds backlinks in many cases that's been my agency a lot of our clients as I said are SEO agencies they don't build their own backlinks for their clients there are very few people in the world who actually build backlinks and who actually understand the proper method for doing so luckily for you I've literally made a career out of being that person and I'm going to explain everything
still I will reiterate if you've ever worked with a big SEO agency and they did any kind of backlinking I bet you there's a 99 chance they didn't actually do it but it's likely my agency or one similar to mine that actually have the assets and the authoritative domains and the knowledge to build authoritative backlinks did nobody knows this this is how the SEO industry actually works and I'm going to give you a ton of specifics about this in a later episode let me be clear I'm talking about good quality authoritative backlinks I'm not talking
about the spammy stuff that you see for sale on the different forums in the different marketplaces I'm not talking about the guy who says a hundred backlinks for five dollars I'm not talking about that I'm not talking about most of the stuff that you see for sale commercially I'm not talking about the backlink building experts that you probably found on some Marketplace okay 99 of that is Spam if you're buying backlinks and I'm going to discuss this a lot in another episode there are very specific things that you have to look for and you have
to ask specific questions and you have to get specific answers okay this is literally an All or Nothing proposition you cannot get some of the boxes checked you need all the boxes checked or you don't buy from that person and if you're the kind of person who wants to make your own backlinks and I strongly suggest you do that I'm going to give you another very exact set of criteria for domain acquisition and for building the backlinks it must be done correctly SEO is more of an art than a science but backlink building has to
be extremely precise or you risk penalties and all of this is why real SEO is very expensive all the cheap stuff you see for sale online doesn't even work because it's rubbish to begin with garbage links from spammy websites aren't going to help you but they are going to penalize you do you really want to buy something like that do you really want to buy links from some guy AI who's offering you 10 links 20 links 50 links 100 links for ten dollars they're good quality I promise really okay you know what's gonna happen I'll
tell you what's gonna happen on another episode but it's not going to work real SEO effective SEO is very expensive let me say this I'm not trying to be mean or rude but in 14 years in the industry I honestly think that 99 maybe 95 but I'm going to say 99 of people in the industry are scammers I'm not joking it's really sad I've talked to some people at some very big agencies much bigger than my agency is and they literally don't know what they're talking about I have no idea why their clients stay with
them they literally do not know what they're talking about and that's not even the people like online like online SEO sellers are literally the worst like go to any Marketplace and I guarantee you 99 of them are scammers oh and I'm not I'm not exaggerating when I say 99 I truly think 99 of them are scammers I'm not joking I'm going to explain later once you learn more about how backlinks work and what you need to look for and the difference between a good link and a bad link you will agree with me that 99
nine percent of them are scammers so as I said one-time payment anything like that a hundred percent a scam there's some different methods to getting backlinks and I'm going to explain in a future episode that the most popular methods are also pretty dangerous I guess I can tell you what they are now so two of the most common methods for getting backlinks you have something called link Outreach and then you have something called guest posting they're both pretty dangerous and I know they're very popular I don't really have time to get into why they're dangerous
now but I would never do them I have almost never done either of those in my life because it's just I really want to explain it right now but I don't have time so I'm not going to so let me tell you this because I think that once you learn how SEO Works regarding Authority and all that stuff I think that really I mean it makes sense I think it's understandable but I think it also brings up a lot of questions like why does it work that way so let me explain to you how SEO
is supposed to work now this isn't how it actually works this is how it's supposed to work okay let's say you make a brand new website and it's great you've got good quality content the best content in your industry is on your website the way SEO is supposed to work is other people will see your content they'll find your website and they'll see your content and they will say wow this is good content I'm going to link to this guy this is great content I want everyone to see how great this content is it's really
helpful it's really beneficial it would help my readers I'm going to link to it because think about it you probably only link to good quality websites right like when you're posting a Blog about something you know when you're posting content about something you link to something that helps you you link to something that explains something well you link to something that's useful to your readers you don't link to bad quality stuff okay so they find it they find your website and they link to you and then the next guy finds it and he links to
you and so on and all those links are building authority and they're happening organically here's the problem your brand new website with that great content nobody is ever going to find it because you have no Authority you have no backlinks your website's not even going to be on the first page of Google or the second page of Google it's probably not going to be on the third page of Google nobody's going to find it so even though you have the best content nobody's gonna find it the first part of that is how SEO is supposed
to work you make great content people find it they link to you and that helps you build Authority the problem is that the search engines can't tell quality content just from content so they have to use links and Authority as a proxy the idea being that people only link to good quality websites so that's basically why traditional SEO of oh just make good content and you'll rank really well doesn't work if you ever have like a brand new client or something they're not going to rank for anything in the world and even if their content
is amazing they're still not going to rank for anything because they're a brand new website and they probably have some competition so that's why they need SEO that's why they need authoritative backlinks so they can even show up in the first place it's kind of like the rich get richer right like once you have authority then people find you and then you get more backlinks and you get more Authority but when you're just beginning nobody's going to find your website your great content website with no Authority nobody's gonna find it now somebody listening is going
to say well not ah because Google takes new websites and it puts them at the top of the search engines for a couple weeks so they can become established and determine where they should actually rank okay maybe you're right I've heard that that happens I may have seen that happen are you thinking that in that brief period of time when you happen to randomly be at the top of Google maybe maybe because the people that say that happens say it doesn't even always happen so first of all are you going to just presume that's going
to happen second of all you're going to assume that in that short period that you're up there people are going to find you and link to what if that doesn't happen are you done do you have to start out with a brand new website because nobody found do you now you're going to be at the bottom of Google forever I don't know I don't have the answers to those questions but I can tell you how to not even have to worry about that it's by getting backlinks from authoritative websites something else that I want to
say about Authority is this have you ever ranked a website with no backlinks now somebody is going to say I have I've ranked a website with no backlinks and yes I want to First say that it's possible and I want to say that there's two exceptions to the rule of needing authority to rank I want to be I want to be like honest about everything okay the first case is this if you have no competition for example if you made up a brand new keyword that nobody's ever used before yeah you can easily rank for
that with no backlinks and with no Authority because nobody else is ranking for it if there's one website in the world with a certain keyword on it yeah it's going to show up when people search for that keyword but that doesn't really count because how many people do you know that are trying to rank their website in non-competitive Industries I mean it happens I guess but I tell you what every client I've ever had has been in a very competitive industry or moderately competitive okay so we couldn't rank them with no Authority now the second
exception to that is if you post a new piece of content on an already authoritative website that specific post for example you might not need to build backlinks to it it might be inheriting a lot of authority from the domain that's true I mean in that case those people ranked a web page without building backlinks but that webpage already had a lot of authority because the domain had a lot of authority let me give you two examples if you post a new article on Wikipedia you might not build any backlinks to it but it will
probably rank because Wikipedia has lots of authority and any page on Wikipedia will get some of that Authority this is also the way that news outlets get their stuff to rank so quickly if some news channel posts a brand new story an hour ago it's probably going to rank in the search engines do you think anybody linked to it in the last hour of course not but that new site has a lot of authority so anything they post on that domain is going to get some of that Authority in all of these cases yes you
rank in a page without backlinks but you're not ranking a page without Authority because it's getting Authority from the domain itself and I want to clarify here this only works on pages that are on the same domain so if you make a sub domain you don't get any of that Authority so if you already have a lot of authority then it's not even an issue you don't even need to listen to this podcast because you already have enough Authority and you're already at the top of page one if you don't the reason is because you
don't have enough Authority unless you happen to have like a Content penalty like I described before I'm going to talk more about penalties in the future don't don't worry about that for now you probably don't unless you kind of have to try really hard to get a Content penalty like it they don't just randomly happen they can accidentally happen but as long as you have normal like content that was written by humans you know it's not you're probably not going to have a Content penalty I really wouldn't worry too much about it while I'm talking
about lies in the SEO industry I also want to talk about how long it takes to actually rank a website you've probably seen advertisements out there that say oh get to the top of page one in a week right yeah that's not gonna happen well it could happen but it's probably not going to happen like it's it's probably not going to happen unless you you know like I said you don't have very much competition I've ranked websites for certain keywords in like a couple days but it was extremely low competition and it was like say
you have like a whole bunch of keywords that your client wants to rank for like some of them are very competitive some of them are not so competitive The Not So competitive ones they tend to rank faster because they're not so competitive and we'll talk more about what competitive means and how to determine how competitive something is later but it's possible to rank a website for certain keywords pretty quickly but again it's probably not going to happen some more competitive keywords tend to take months okay sometimes it takes three months sometimes it takes six months
it really depends we have one client in particular who one of their keywords had 450 000 searches per month that's pretty competitive and it took about six months to get them to the top of page one okay it's not an overnight thing but while we're talking about this I do want to tell you and this may or may not be helpful for you but when I go into a sales meeting with a potential client I usually start the meeting like this I say you know SEO takes a long time and it's really expensive why do
you want to do SEO and the reason I say that is for two reasons one it sets the expectation that SEO takes a while and it does and two it sets the expectation that SEO is expensive and it is good SEO is very expensive whether you're buying links good quality links are very expensive or if you're doing it yourself which I'm going to explain to you how to do it it's probably even more expensive at first it's it's very expensive at First Once you have your infrastructure functioning it's pretty affordable but if you're doing it
yourself The Upfront costs are they're pretty big I'm not going to lie so I asked them that question I say SEO is very expensive and it takes a long time why do you want to do SEO and like I said this isn't really a sales episode but it gets them in the mindset of wait a minute it's going to take a while and it's expensive hmm because for some reason everybody thinks that SEO is like fast people that don't know anything about SEO think that if they hire you you're just going to log into their
website and you're gonna like make a couple changes and you're gonna like click a switch that's like the magic SEO switch or something and then all of a sudden they're going to be like at the top of Google I don't know why people think that but like everybody actually do you know why I think that I think it has to do with WordPress SEO plugins like I think people actually think that SEO means just installing certain WordPress plugins and just that's how you do SEO like they think it's like set and forget and you just
you just type in some secret keywords in your WordPress plugin and then that's doing SEO like no no there's a couple WordPress plugins that are okay but that's not how you do SEO and I know you guys all know that but I'm just saying that for anybody who doesn't know anything about seo seo has very little to do with WordPress plugins anyway like I said um this isn't really this episode isn't really a sales episode but one thing you will learn is that managing expectations is very important because if your client comes in thinking that
tomorrow they're going to be at the top of page one for other keywords they're not going to be very happy with you if that's not the case and if they think that it's going to be you know super cheap they're not going to be very happy with you if that's not the case so it's important to put that out there I think at the beginning of the at the beginning of the relationship before they're even a client obviously but good SEO is very expensive and I know I already mentioned buying links a little bit ago
so I told you if it's a one-time payment it's a scam and that's true but if it's cheap it's also a scam good SEO is very expensive okay you can't do it look as an SEO provider as an agency owner I cannot offer it to you for cheap I can't like I literally would be losing money if I were to do it that way like it's not it's not possible and I'm not going to talk about specific prices and what you should pay that's a whole other episode but it's not cheap I cannot offer it
to you for cheap it doesn't work anytime you see cheap SEO it's a scam it's probably going to hurt your website because SEO if you do it wrong will actually work against you and that's going to be a topic that we talk about on the episode where we discuss negative SEO so really quick if you you've never heard of it negative SEO is basically doing bad SEO to your competition to get them out of the search results it's terrible don't do it we don't do it but I want you to be aware that it's a
thing that's the thing that the search engines have denied as being real in the past and then they kind of come out and they say oh yeah you know it might be possible and then they're like nah it's not possible it's possible I had to happen to a client I'll I'll go all into that I'll tell you what happened to them and how we fixed it it's a thing just be aware that it's a thing and if you accidentally do SEO wrong to your own website you can hurt it like same concept like you can
accidentally negative SEO yourself especially if you are buying cheap backlinks so don't buy cheap backlinks but like I said real SEO takes a long time and it's expensive and if you do it yourself it's expensive and if you buy links from other people it's expensive because good links it's not possible for them to be cheap it's literally not possible and I don't want to give dollar amounts because every project is different but but if you see backlinks for example for like a few bucks each don't even talk to that person because they're it's it's not
going to help you at all and it's probably going to harm your website so I I kind of want to do an episode called like how to buy backlinks because I think there's certain things you need to look for and there's certain things that you need to be aware of and if you don't know them you can really mess yourself up so I guess what I'm trying to say is don't go out and buy backlinks until you like have that information because just if you do it now based on like what I've told you it's
not enough you know that buying backlinks is important you know that the way to rank a website is by getting authority and authority comes from backlinks from authoritative websites but you don't at this point really have enough information to go out and do it and like I said I don't have enough time to fit it into this episode so I'm going to do another episode about that but this is the last thing that I want to say about backlinking building your own is the best way to do it and it's the way I do it
and it's the way my agency does it we have a big portfolio of authoritative websites that we use to rank our clients because honestly I don't trust people to buy links from them I've been in the industry for 14 years and I've literally met a couple people who aren't scam artists like I said I'm not saying everybody in the SEO industry is a scam artist but most of them are and I'm not exaggerating most of them are so I'm not trying to say this to sound like a weird sales pitch like everybody else has terrible
backlinks but let me tell you about how good my backlinks are and then like I try to sell you them like I'm not selling them to you they're not they're in use by our clients I'm not doing this podcast to try and sell backlinks no that it's kind of gross actually anyway like I said there are so many scammers in the SEO industry they write these Long blog posts they make these videos it's full of like content is King nonsense like that doesn't help anybody like you know it's like oh you write all this great
content does it help you let me ask you are you at the top of page one oh you're not but you've got great content are you telling me with the great content you're not at the top of page one oh that's weird I can't believe you wouldn't be at the top of page one with great content of course you're not at the top of page one with great content because content doesn't really matter hopefully you know that by now Authority matters if you have more Authority than your competition and I'm generalizing here like that's not
that's not exactly right but that's right enough that it will be the answer that you're looking for if you have more Authority than your competitors you will outrank your competitors again that's not exactly the way the search engines work but it's near enough how the search engines work that you can use it so let's summarize content is not King but it's kind of important but it's not important in the way that you think it's important so that's why I kind of explained what it does it tells the search engines what your website is about but
of course so does anchor text which is why it's possible to rank a website for words that don't even appear on the website so if content isn't King what is King like we said Authority is King backlinks from authoritative websites are how you build authority to your website it's pretty straightforward Concepts I'm going to explain in detail how to do that but for now I'm just going to leave it at that all the other little things like meta tags everybody is obsessed with meta tags for some reason everybody that I start talking to to maybe
become a client they always ask me are you going to do our meta tags like meta tags don't even really do anything I might be wrong about this but I think like five or six years ago Google came out and said that like meta keyword tags don't even do anything like they're not even considered by the search engines so I mean yeah uh okay I'll I'll do your meta tags that's that's cool like but you know of course if you say oh no you know those don't matter but we're gonna get you backlinks then they
say oh I don't want to do that because you know backlinks are bad anyway even though content doesn't matter you should still have good content on your page because if you don't nobody's going to want to read your website and you're not going to have any visitors and you're not going to make any sales or get any ctas whatever I don't know what you're trying to do with your website but whatever they're not going to like it and they're going to leave so let me just give you one more Tip since we did talk about
content so much one of the things that I said can go wrong with content is you can get like an over optimization penalty or sometimes it's called keyword stuffing okay it's when your keywords appear too often on your website and Google thinks that you're trying to manipulate the results it's a thing don't do it here's your tip sometimes people inadvertently keyword stuff their website on their menus so let's say you're selling blue widgets okay maybe you have a drop down menu that says you know info about blue Widgets or review of blue widgets where to
buy blue widgets a comparison of blue widgets right like all these different menu options that have blue widgets mentioned somehow so people don't think that that counts as content because if it's like a drop down menu it doesn't actually appear on the page right unless you click on it but it still counts as content so people have inadvertently keywords stuff to their page because the menu is keyword stuffed and so that means that not only is that page keyword stuffed but the menu appears on every page so every page is keyword stuffed so they might
say my content is just fine I don't have any keyword stuffing what's going on they forgot to look at their menus because the menus are counted as content on the page that's your free tip that kind of thing has occurred before I don't know if you're using menus but if you are be careful of them anyway I think that's everything thanks for listening don't forget to subscribe I hope this episode is helpful and if you have any questions or if there's anything that you want me to talk about on a future episode you can email
me at hello grumpy seoguy.com and I'll talk to you later if you're listening to grumpy SEO guy the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work join us next time when we talk about penalties what they are how to fix them and how to avoid them foreign
