WEBVTT

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back in the day if you wanted to get noticed it meant renting a billboard

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taking out an ad in a newspaper or failing that just standing on a soap box

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in the park and pontificating but now

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with large search engines being the go-to fonts of information for most of

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us to make themselves heard people companies and other organizations have

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been seeking ways to fight and Claw to

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the top of search results you using a

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process called search engine optimization or SEO but what is that

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well you see giant search engines like Google use algorithms to try to push

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relevant results to the top of the page so that when a user types in computer

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mouse they'll get links to buy a new input device rather than pictures of

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Stuart Little trying to use a PC now how

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exactly these algorithms work are usually closely guarded Trade Secrets

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but there's enough public knowledge for web Masters to attempt to tune their

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pages to boost their position in the

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search results in fact Google even puts

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out a search engine optimization starter guide to help website owners improve

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their chances of earning the coveted top

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result so then for starters it's a good idea to optimize your pages metadata

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metadata is all the stuff other than the

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actual content people will see in their browser window and accurate metadata

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things like descriptive page titles or embedding a short explanation of what's

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on the page into your HTML which you can often end up seeing underneath a Google

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result can help push your site up to the top a more recent development is making

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URLs themselves more informative you've

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probably seen this on news sites which have started to use file names that

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indicate what the article is about like tasteless YouTuber wears socks and

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sandals. HTML which is a lot more helpful to a search engine than just

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assigning some random number another Pro

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tip is to Nest your pages in some sort of sensible directory structure

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organized by things like topics and dates but what about the page itself

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well since most modern search engines use how often a page is linked to as a

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key metric of its importance providing descriptive text links in the body of a

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web page to other pages on your site can

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be very helpful and search engines are

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also aware of things like topic headers and ALT text for images to help

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categorize the site the key as with any

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metadata is to keep these as short but

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also as informative and descriptive as

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possible to make it easier for a c search engine to determine that your

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site is relevant to a particular topic

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of course though everything we've outlined so far is a legitimate SEO

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strategy there are plenty of other tricks that might be employed by

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unscrupulous site owners these collectively are known as black hat SEO

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or spam dexing and their goal is to try

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to make the page seem more relevant to a

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topic than it actually is is and these tricks can take the form of anything

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from hiding keywords in invisible text

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that a user would have to highlight to see to buying linkbacks or even traffic

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from other sites to using irrelevant keywords that might just be trending at

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the moment or even just overusing the

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relevant ones this kind of behavior has

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resulted in a bit of a digital arms race between search engine developers who are

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trying to weed out these Pages for their users and spammers or site owners who

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are desperate for clicks and aren't above using Shady tactics so who will

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ultimately win well let me put it this way as search giants like Google deploy

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more sophisticated methods to separate the signal from the noise my advice is

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if you want your website to be around for a long time stick to the honest

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tried and true tactics even if your webs

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s it does feature material of ill

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repute speaking of SEO tricks if that's

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just yet another thing that you don't want to deal with when you want to build

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your own website Squarespace actually does a lot of this stuff automatically

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Squarespace is the way to go if you want to build a simple powerful beautiful

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website it's easy to use you just you

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know click here and go okay I want a picture there you type up your text the

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whole thing has got a cloud interface that is really clean and if you have

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trouble with it they've got 247 support via live chat and email it's just 12

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bucks a month and every Squarespace site features responsive design so your

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website scales to look great on any device features Commerce so you've got a

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free online store and you can even

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publish oh wow no hold on here's a new feature new currencies for Commerce you

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watching guys like dislike leave a comment subscribe and uh ah damn it I'm

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sure I'm missing something but you know the drill anyway