The Same Question I’ve been asked since 1995 is ending.
“Can you get my website on the first page of search engine results?”
Is SEO dead?
No, but it’s dying. The Web began in August 6, 1991. The first search engine came before the first web page in 1990.
One of the first "all text" crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it allowed users to search for any word in any webpage, which has become the standard for all major search engines since.
Then came images in 1992
The first Audio or Podcast came in September of 2003
The first Youtube video was February 2005
The first Vine (6 second video) May 2012
The first TikTok under the name TikTok was August 2018
TikTok surpasses Google as a search engine for Gen Z
3 November 2022
Who wants to read long pages of text?
TikTok has surpassed Google as the most popular website, ending Google's 15-year streak. This reflects a shift in Gen Z's online behavior, with 40% turning to TikTok or Instagram before Google for searches on certain topics.
Archie was launched on September 10, 1990, and developed by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and Peter Deutsch at McGill University in Montreal (Canada)
The first web page, August 6, 1991
The first image posted to the web was a photograph of a CERN singing group called Les Horribles Cernettes posted in 1992. The photo was uploaded by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, as a test for the new technology that could support images
In September 2003, Dave Winer created a special RSS-with-enclosures feed for his Harvard Berkman Center colleague Christopher Lydon's weblog, which previously had a text-only RSS feed.
On February 14, 2005, Chad Hurly, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim purchased the YouTube.com domain. Karim uploaded the first video to it on April 23, 2005.
The first Vine ever made. This was made back in May 2012 by Dom Hofmann, one of Vine's founders.
The first TikTok doesn’t exist because the app didn’t go by TikTok until November 2017 in China and August 2018 worldwide. It went by musical.ly. Musically/TikTok user Ruden uploaded him skating in camo shorts on the platform and it was the first video posted on the platform by a non Chinese user. At this time musically was very discreet and didn’t blow up until 2015. The video had been posted on August 22, 2014 and was in fact the first video on the TikTok Platform to feature a person. He has since been banned( I don’t know why). However the most famous and most known first tiktok(which was actually the first TikTok) was by Chinese user chshssky on July 25th, 2014, it’s just him looking at cars on the street. If you type in 2014–07–25 on TikTok you will find it cause that’s how big it got. The video currently has over 18 million views as of September 15, 2022.
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Last week: Dalle E 3
Coming first to ChatGPT Plus users, I’m not seeing it yet as of today, October 3.
BUT, you can get it on Bing
Last week: Using AI to see your organization
News: Taylor Swift’s Brilliant SEO Hack
When you Google Taylor swift jets. You could get articles about her jet emissions.
I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I said the jets did not deserve all that publicity with Taylor swift. It didn't make sense, but now it does. That is a brilliant take of course. She went to the jet scheme for SEO reputation busting. So when you Google Taylor swift in the jets, you don't get the story about her jet emissions. Which most of those articles were digital articles, by the way, you're going to get Taylor swift at the jets game. Brilliant.
2011 I was working with AirTran Airways
They buried the Value Jet crash associated with AirTran by creating new content and then linking from their most trafficked website properties to the new content effectively burying the bad SEO
News: AI is different than other tech booms
From WSJ’s CIOs Feel Heat From CEOs on Generative AI
The article discusses how chief information officers (CIOs) are under pressure from chief executive officers (CEOs) to adopt generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content such as images, text, code, music, etc. Generative AI is seen as a source of innovation and competitive advantage for businesses, but it also poses challenges and risks for CIOs, such as ensuring data quality, security, ethics, and compliance. The article concludes by saying that generative AI is still an emerging field that requires experimentation and collaboration among different stakeholders.
Metaverse
Blockchain, NFTs
The Merge by Pak, a digital artist who is known for creating innovative and conceptual NFTs. The Merge was sold on for $91.8 million in April 2021.
The cryptocurrency firm Dappgambl has identified 73,257 NFT collections — of which 69,795 were now worth nothing.
My take:
I’m using ChatGPT, Bing & Claude.ai to code like I’ve never been able to code before
I’m using ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Perplexity.ai, Bing & Google Bard to research like I’ve never been able to before
Clean up Email lists
I almost always exclusive search with these tools and rarely use Google Search
Anyone can access these tools vs the ones listed above
So, maybe not earth shattering at the overall corporate level, but definitely earth shattering around many specific tasks.
News: ChatGPT adds back Browse the Web
You have to click feature: Browse with Bing
It doesn’t get past Paywalls but Bing does
News: How AI May Change Entrepreneurship
From WSJ: How AI May Change Entrepreneurship 2 Oct 2023
From Claude.ai — copy paste
Here is a summary of the key points from the article:
AI can help entrepreneurs in many aspects of starting a business, from coming up with ideas to testing concepts, surveying competition, creating pitches, and promoting the company.
AI systems like ChatGPT can absorb vast amounts of information and identify patterns to suggest new business ideas or solutions to consumer problems. They can provide a wider perspective than an individual entrepreneur.
AI can play the role of a simulated customer or industry expert to test and refine business concepts. It can provide speedy, low-cost feedback.
AI can research competition, analyze marketing data, and review past startups to see what worked or failed. This gives a broader view than an entrepreneur's own limited experience.
AI can help create and evaluate startup pitches, identifying factors VCs look for. It can also suggest appropriate VC firms to target.
AI excels at repetitive tasks like creating multiple versions of sites/ads for A/B testing and continuously optimizing them.
But AI has limitations - it can produce false or misleading data. Outputs need verification. It may lack human creativity and foresight.
In summary, AI brings speed, breadth of knowledge, and tireless optimization to starting a business, but still requires human judgment and ingenuity. It's a powerful assistant but not a magic solution.
From ChatGPT plus with Advanced Data Analysis
Key Takeaways:
AI's Role in Startups: Artificial intelligence tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing, and Google’s Bard are poised to revolutionize the entrepreneurial landscape. These systems can assist in nearly every phase of launching a startup - from ideation and validation to market research and marketing strategy development.
Generating Business Ideas: AI has the potential to rapidly identify unmet market needs by processing and analyzing vast amounts of data. Unlike humans, who are constrained by their biases and limited information access, AI can sift through large datasets to spot patterns and predict market demands.
Evaluating the Market: Entrepreneurs can utilize AI to gain insights into market trends, competition, and consumer sentiments. By accessing diverse sources like technical reports, financial filings, and social media, AI can offer a comprehensive market analysis.
Testing Business Concepts: AI can simulate customer personas, allowing entrepreneurs to validate their product or service ideas. This not only accelerates the testing process but also provides a cost-effective means to refine business propositions.
Refining Marketing Strategies: AI can enhance A/B testing by generating multiple versions of a product or service promotion, managing their online presence, and continually optimizing based on consumer feedback.
Aiding in Pitch Creation: AI can aid in formulating business pitches for investors. It can also help entrepreneurs identify which venture capitalist firms are more likely to invest in their startup based on historical data.
Promoting New Ventures: AI can streamline the marketing process. For instance, within 30 minutes, an AI system was able to conduct market research, devise a promotional campaign, design a website, and even draft an email campaign for a new product.
AI's Limitations: Despite its potential, AI is not flawless. It can occasionally produce inaccurate or irrelevant information. Additionally, while AI can identify existing market trends, it might lack the nuance to differentiate between what people say they want and their actual desires. Furthermore, because AI bases its predictions on past data, it might not always be adept at foreseeing future trends.
Entrepreneurs need to be aware of the potential and pitfalls of AI. While AI can significantly optimize the startup process, human intuition, creativity, and foresight remain invaluable in the entrepreneurial journey.
Using AI to re-summarize external news and blog posts in your voice to boost SEO
Use AI tools to create summaries of external news articles
Optionally, add in content that represents “your voice” to have summary sound like you talking
Link to source article
An SEO study
The following was a study and recomendation for SEO improvements for ArtsForEverybody.org
SEO — the biggest question I have is what are people searching for, by which we'd want to be first in the results? Whatever those words and phrases are, what's currently coming up in the results as well — do we fit in the results as we would envision?
Backlinks
A big SEO tactic is being linked to by trusted and heavily trafficked websites. Having the New York Times talking about and linking to the site is a great example. A lot of times getting these types of linking to the site is doing what you're already doing which is reaching out to these sources and getting them to create links to us. It's a laborious process but wanted to call attention to that as another key indicator to Google that this site is important — but again, the ideal backlinking is what people are searching for and then a big site linking with that phrase to us. For example, if people are searching for "therapies for mental health" and NYT has a link going to our site around the phrase "therapies for mental health" — that's the juice we need.
Reviews
5 star google reviews and comments are hugely powerful but I don't know that this site is a situation where reviews apply.
Localization
Reviews are a big part of SEO and kind of go hand and hand with local. Meaning, if someone is looking for say autobody service, Google's going to want to start by seeing if what you're looking for can be served closed by to you. Then within the list of orgs or businesses within your local area, it will prioritize the ones with the highest reviews first.
From the 18 cities standpoint, if someone within range of Utica is searching for events or better yet, events focused on the arts and mental health, then Google will prioritize the Utica page for people from that region and that drives traffic from a local level. One of the best SEO experts I've ever worked with had me build a landing page for each of the key cities they worked with (Real Estate cash back — they were a national firm) so that when someone in the region we were targeting queried a search term we targeted, the visitor would land on a page that felt like the home page but was targeted specifically around that region. If we were to look at each city page as if it could welcome someone to that page but feel like the page told the whole Arts for Everybody story as if it was primarily focused on that town, what would that look like?
THAT BEING SAID
Google has been squeezing down the organic search results more and more and more so that a tiny portion of Google page one search results is actual organic with sponsored links and things like info snippets that deliver content without you having to actually visit the site it got those snippets from, is on the top and bottom of the page. This keeps people on Google and clicking through organic links less and that forces people to buy Google Ad Words.
"TikTok surpasses Google as a search engine for Gen Z"
This was a big story last year and it's why I push TikTok and social vertical video so hard and why I was trying to create short videos for the press releases, for example.
SEO, in my opinion, is on its way out and if it were up to me, I'd focus everything on selling the program through as many short videos as possible and getting those on TikTok, Reels, and YouTube shorts (YouTube videos are strong SEO triggers for Google).
If we were to do short Zoom videos of someone from every city telling us a little about what they are doing and then turn those into 18 short videos pushed out on all channels (add YouTube and TikTok), that alone would most likely do more for us then anything we could do to move the needle via traditional SEO.
And back to the press releases. How many people are going to read a long press release vs how many will spend a minute listening to someone from AFEB telling us about an article she read and what it means?
With AI to quickly write short voice over scripts from the base content — could even be content from papers published — and then having the high profile AFEB folks read those scripts into their phones and then we cost effectively and efficiently feed those into short video templates, those can be another powerful channel of content that gets people to the site and engaged with the campaign and ultimately the grand event.
A video driven SEO blog with minimal AI
Tried writing blog posts with AI rewrites of rough notes
Switched to natural conversations, then AI rewrites from those
Added additional AI research for SEO
We debated the value of more text — does it really matter any more?
“I want to give people a deep dive if they want it”
What you can and should do for SEO
Google Reviews
Google Business
Squarespace Shortcut: mywebsite.com/review
Squarespace -> Settings -> Developer -> URL Mapping
Everyone instructed to ask for a review
Respond quickly to every review
OrbisDesign.com/review — give me a 5 star?
Google Search Console
https://search.google.com/
Submit sitemap.xml
Google often reports indexing issues which resolve by just resubmitting
Post Blog posts with videos
Current blog post dates from high trafficked page — your home page
I’ve been looking for this since 2012
Repurpose.io
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