YOU got it down to the essential basics better than all of them. I’ve had Yoast on my site and no idea how to use it. I’ld never heard of Moz Keyword Explorer either. I’ve been just trying to pick out a few words and put them into the keyword lists.

Yay for education!!

What a lovely compliment! I so appreciate it because I put a LOT of work into these.

Ugh I HATE Wix. I can’t help you with that one, Hon. There might be some YouTube tutorials is what I can suggest. Look up how to optimize a Wix site. There are A LOT of lovely people out there who are wonderful teachers and love helping n00bs (yes, you did that correctly, LOL). If you aren’t too vested I’d strongly recommend a WP site. It is much more user friendly, developer-friendly, and most of the plug-ins are designed for WP (think Mac vs. Windows).

My blog is on my website which is WIX. It doesn’t seem as easy to work with as Word Press 🙁 Wix says it has “Structured Data Mark Up” but I wonder what that actually means. Is that the Video Editor (which I can’t find anywhere) and does it mean I don’t need to optimize? Ugh…too many questions! But your blog and information is very useful and at a level that I can work with. Thank you

Ouch. I actually worried about the same thing happening to me when I wrote my comment, so I copied and pasted it to a Notepad file before I hit send, just in case. This is usually my practice anyway since I never trust the Internet to do what I want.

I wrote out a LONG answer to your question and the internet ATE it. I will try again in a bit *weeps* You are spot on for most of this but I’ll rework my answer for you.

But, alas, I’m here for the SEO article, and I think your breakdown of how it works is really helpful. This is especially useful since I’ve recently opened my new author site, after having a free WordPress blog for so long, and am basically starting from scratch. That said, I’ve been researching this SEO thing for a bit as a means to get some traffic to my new site, and here are a few additional things I’ve discovered that your article doesn’t YET cover (but I imagine a follow-up article might), as well as some questions to go with these discoveries:

1a. Some SEO tools caution against keyword cannibalization. You talk about that a little when it comes to linking, but I wonder just how easy it is to make this error. My understanding is that each page or post can rank for a primary keyword, and any post on your site that ranks for the same keyword can actually lead to both pages harming each other. Do I have this correct?

1b. If we write several blogs about the same topic but from a slightly different angle (ex: SEO best practices, SEO no-nos, and SEO research), we could potentially set those articles to rank for keywords that match those angles (ex: “SEO best practices” et al.), but how would we handle multiple blogs that stay within the same general focus (ex: SEO best practices March 2022, SEO best practices March 2022 continued, etc.)?

2a. Apparently, Google hates duplicates, even if that duplicate comes from your waning free WordPress site that you very much want to preserve because it still gets traffic, but also very much want to scrape for your best content so that you can put that best content on your new author site with the fancier design and the more cohesive layout (that isn’t broken in weird places by an irrelevant ad you have no control over because you agreed to it in exchange for blogging on a free site) because your new site is a better central hub for all of your work, and because you’d rather that free WordPress site traffic went to your paid WordPress site traffic.

2b. How would we bring that best content to the site without penalty when we can’t “no index” or archive the original content without deleting it (because it’s free, and we don’t have access to SEO plugins on the free site), which we may not want to do if the original article still gets the traffic? Would it even be worth it to try?

3. This article talks a lot about SEO and mentions plugins like Yoast (I don’t have Yoast, but I do have RankMath, which is Yoast competitor and also pretty good), but it doesn’t mention schema tools like Schema Pro, or even RankMath to a lesser degree, for Google search display information. Do you have plans to write a separate article on schema and how to optimize it for writers (including novelists) and bloggers?

4a. Yoast SEO, RankMath, and others are the common names used in SEO discussions, but they do typically charge an annual fee (if you’re using the PRO features), and it’s worth noting that anyone willing to try out a startup company that specializes in similar features they might find equally competent (and PRO), if not with slightly fewer features or rougher UI, can usually get lifetime deals in exchange for using the beta product and providing feedback for improvement by using “product hunt” style storefronts like AppSumo and PitchGround to buy them. These deals don’t always lead to excellent results, and some outright suck, so it’s often a gamble, but they do on occasion introduce users to true gems that actually take off (Zapier being among the most well-known and heavily used apps today that started on that model–imagine being one of the lucky people to take advantage of that early deal and still get to use all of its existing features without having to give it another dime, though it’s not an SEO tool, so it’s not quite relevant to the current discussion, but it’s not NOT relevant, so I’ll still mention it). New SEO tools, as well as keyword explorers, topic research tools, etc. seem to pop up pretty regularly on those sites.

4b. None of them are likely to be better than Yoast SEO, of course. Yoast is mature and keeps evolving, whereas the others will always have to play catch-up, and some may stop trying. But you’ll also have to keep paying for Yoast (if you need the PRO features). The others you pay for once. Of course, these lifetime models are also metered, so there’s that. The keyword research tools are especially stingy when it comes to meters. But I suppose keyword tracking is yet another topic for another day.

Anyway, it’s definitely a rabbit hole of information, but SEO is a topic worth knowing if we want to be discovered. Awesome post, and thanks for writing it. Now to see how many people find it on Google search. Or Bing. 😉

No because it doesn’t particularly need it. I wrote it to be evergreen and work regardless of platforms then or to be invented. What worked in 2013 for Facebook or YouTube will work for TikTock. Unlike my first book, I didn’t do any walkthroughs or add information that would really date the book because algorithms were changing so rapidly it would have meant updating the book practically quarterly.

I might do an update in the future but it wouldn’t be very different from the current version. The point of ROM was tech changes but HUMANS don’t. Understand HUMANS and the tech is a matter of simply applying these principles and learning any updates probably from THAT platform.

It is like storytelling. The elements of a great story haven’t changed much in centuries. Whether we are telling them over a campfire or listening on Audible makes little difference as to WHAT elements make a great STORY. One might need to learn formatting because of e-books but that holds no bearing on the components of a fab story. That is merely a change in delivery system. Social media is the same. Make sense?

I hope that answers your question?

Dang skippy on that one, though confirmation bias extends to librarians as well. The Dewey Decimal system might be more unbiased. Yeah, social engineering is a WHOLE other post.