Table Of ContentSEO WORKBOOK:
S E
EARCH NGINE
O S
PTIMIZATION UCCESS IN
S S
EVEN TEPS
2022 E
DITION
BY JASON MCDONALD, PH.D.
© 2022, JM INTERNET GROUP
https://www.jm-seo.org/
Tel. 800-298-4065
T C
ABLE OF ONTENTS
i) Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1
ii) Basics ................................................................................................................................. 23
1.1) Attitude........................................................................................................................... 33
1.2) Goals ............................................................................................................................... 41
2.1) Keywords ....................................................................................................................... 53
2.2) Keyword Worksheet ..................................................................................................... 81
3.1) Page Tags ..................................................................................................................... 111
3.2) Website Structure ........................................................................................................ 145
4.1) Content SEO ............................................................................................................... 167
4.2) Blogging ....................................................................................................................... 187
4.3) Press Releases .............................................................................................................. 203
5.1) Link Building ............................................................................................................... 217
5.2) Social Media ................................................................................................................. 247
5.3) Local SEO & Review Marketing............................................................................... 263
6.1) Metrics .......................................................................................................................... 317
7.1) Learning ....................................................................................................................... 347
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
~ Voltaire
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I
I
NTRODUCTION
Welcome to the SEO Workbook! Fully updated for 2022, this book explains how to
succeed at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in seven steps. SEO is the art and science
of getting your company, product, or service to show at the top of relevant Google
or Bing searches for free. With most customers turning first to Google, Bing, Amazon,
or other search engines, SEO is your free gateway to more inquiries, more customers,
and more sales.
SEO = F A G
REE DVERTISING ON OOGLE
Free advertising on Google? Yippie! On Bing? Double Yippie! On Amazon? Triple
Yippie! But, here’s the rub: SEO seems really complicated.
Is it “too good to be true?”
Believe me, I understand your frustration with SEO and with the frauds, scoundrels,
and dishonest robbers who plague my beloved SEO industry. I know the complaints,
and I hear them often from students in my classes in the San Francisco Bay Area, at my
popular online SEO course taught via Stanford Continuing Studies
(http://jmlinks.com/34y), and during the many corporate workshops I do around
the country.
Here are some common complaints:
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• We need to get our company to the top of Google for relevant keywords; our
competitors are there, but we’re not!
• We redesigned our website, and it looks fabulous. But now, we hardly show on
Google at all, even for our own company name!
• We hired an SEO company, spent several thousands of dollars, and achieved
nothing. So-called “SEO experts” are just thieves!
• I don’t understand computers, can’t write HTML, and I can’t do SEO. Game
over!
• I pay attention to Google, and SEO seems to change constantly. There’s no way
we can keep up with Penguin, Panda, Semantic Search, and Mobile-Friendly
Website Design. You’ve got to be kidding!
• Here’s a new one for 2022. Google has moved towards “artificial intelligence,” so it
doesn’t matter anymore whether you know SEO. Google will just “figure out”
what your website means. (#NOTTrue)
• Google? It’s not just Google anymore. It’s Amazon. It’s the App Store. It’s Yelp.
It’s Airbnb. The complexity is killing us!
• We hired an obscure third-world SEO firm, they built 50,000 blog links, and now
we have been obliterated by Google’s Penguin update.
• SEO is just too hard for anyone without a degree in Computer Science from Yale
University to be able to do. We give up! (They then start uncontrollably sobbing).
• We’ll just do Google Ads (and spend thousands of dollars). Google clearly needs more
money from struggling small businesses just like ours, so they can invest in self-driving cars and
gourmet meals for their pampered employees!
• And yet another new one for 2022. It’s all about Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, TikTok,
and Instagram. SEO is so “old school” that we should only do social media.
Millennials don’t use Google! (Then they immediately search Google to find the closest
pizza restaurant or best supplier of organic widgets for their business).
I hear and feel your pain. I am just a regular guy, and I have been confronted with what
I call techtimidation probably as much as you have.
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T =T
ECHTIMIDATION HE USE OF JARGON BY
TECHIES TO INTIMIDATE MERE MORTALS
However, I firmly believe that a little education, a lot of hard work, and some common
sense are all you really need to succeed in SEO. The computer nerds (and Googlers)
would like us all to believe SEO is difficult – no, impossible – without a computer
science degree.
Poppycock. Hokum. Hooey. Malarkey, Rubbish, Baloney, and even B.S.!
You can do SEO. You can succeed at it. It is easier than you think.
The purpose of this book is to, first, make you believe in yourself, second, empower
you with the basic knowledge of how the SEO game is played, and third, help you
make a detailed SEO plan for your business.
More on this later.
Let’s return to SEO, the art and science of getting your product, service, or company to the top of the
search engines.
Google Algorithm Updates
Recent years have seen some terrifying Google search engine algorithm updates, such
as Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, and Pigeon. (Google algorithm updates are named after animals
just to be even more intimidating). There’s even been a so-called “Medical Update” and a
public release of Google Search Quality Raters General Guidelines that talk about acronyms
such as E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and YMYL (Your
Money or Your Life) at http://jmlinks.com/47v. Google is aggressively moving into
AI (Artificial Intelligence), on the theory that the search engine can predict what people
want and which websites are best for a given keyword search even if they do not follow
the rules of SEO.
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Yikes! It’s enough to make your head spin. Backward. So hard, you become an Internet
meme.
Among the most important, Penguin has been an algorithm attack against “low quality”
links, and Panda has been an algorithm attack against poor quality content. In addition,
Google now penalizes sites that are not “mobile-friendly” and made major changes to
local search results (Pigeon). The local “snack pack” box on local searches like “pizza”
or “plumber,” for example, has been reduced to three listings, or in some cases, just
two results, wreaking havoc on local small businesses that depend on Google for
customer inquiries. In some markets, such as that for plumbers in the Bay Area, the
Local Pack is being crowded with ever-more-annoying ads, and on the mobile phone,
Google has done a good (SIC!) job of crowding out organic results with ads at the top
and bottom of the page. (Queue my book on Google Ads if you’d like to learn how to
play that game).
Google’s other moves towards so-called “semantic search” via the RankBrain algorithm
update have been efforts to embed “artificial intelligence” into its search algorithm.
They’ve even announced BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from
Transformers), so how’s that for an intimidating mouthful of technological mumbo-
jumbo? Everything seems to be “going mobile,” going “voice,” and getting frightfully
complex for your average small business owner or marketer. Is Artificial Intelligence a
game-changer? Is Genisys Skynet? Will Arnold Schwarzenegger visit the Googleplex as
the Terminator?
Google, in short, has been busy changing the rules of the SEO game. Or has it?
Here’s an important tip: don’t believe everything you read on the blogosphere, and
don’t believe every official statement by Google on SEO. There’s a lot of
disinformation and misinformation out there, and often changes apply to some
industries but not to others.
Have you heard of “fake news?” Well, there’s a lot of it in SEO, and one of the
whoppers is that “SEO is constantly changing,” and implicit to that is the advice to
“Just give up – write content for humans and spend money on Google Ads.”
I beg to differ. I beg to explain, and I beg you not to panic. Yes, there have been
changes, and yes, Google is “going mobile” and moving to “voice search” and
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“Artificial Intelligence.” But here’s the good news: the basics haven’t really changed,
and if you stick to the basics according to “white hat” SEO – you’ll be fine.
Let me repeat that:
the basics have not changed in SEO.
This workbook will explain what not to do and what to do to succeed at SEO in this
post-Penguin, post-Panda world, RankBrain, AI, BERT, New World Order. And it will
also educate you on the unchanged basic rules of SEO success. It also offers a few new
insights on AI and review-based marketing (more on this later).
(If you don’t know what Panda, Penguin, and RankBrain are… don’t worry – I’ll explain
in subsequent chapters).
Back to SEO.
What is SEO? SEO, of course, is the art and science of getting your company, product,
or service to the top of Google’s organic (free) results. If you’re a seller of “industrial
fans,” it means that when customers search Google or Bing for “industrial fans,” they
will see your company’s product at the top of the search results. If you’re a local business
like a pizza restaurant or a probate attorney, it means showing at the top of Google for
searches such as “pizza delivery” or “probate lawyers in Houston.”
Why is SEO so valuable? Simply put, SEO is valuable because nearly everyone turns
first to Google to find products, services, or companies and because SEO costs nothing
(other than knowledge, blood, sweat, and tears). SEO, in short, is free advertising on
Google! And there ain’t nothing better than free, is there? (Well, a few things, but please
keep your mind on the task at hand).
How Search Works
Let’s step back and ponder how the search process works on Google and other search
engines. Customers turn to Google first to find new products and services, new
companies, and consultants. They tend to ignore ads, and they tend to read and click
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