< 1 MIN READ

“When a crime is not punished quickly, people feel it is safe to do wrong.” – Ecclesiastes 8:11

I was asked a question during the Breaking Through the Crisis webinar that mentioned their workplace breaking down with rampant gossip even when they would praise and congratulate exemplary workers.

While praising other people for their great work, competence and character, you cannot turn a blind eye to the wrong things.

If gossip goes unpunished in your organization, people will think it’s ok. And since gossip is insidious and dangerously contagious, it will spread like wildfire.

In the end, it will eat up and burn everything you have worked so hard to achieve.

Find out how to fight gossip in your team and how we implement a no-gossip policy at SEO Hacker by downloading the replay of the webinar here.

The 6-Step Hiring Process that Allows us to Hire Great Team Players 99% of the Time

5 MIN READ

April 29, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

Follow the Podcast on iTunes and Spotify

Excerpt

This is a reverse-guesting episode where I was interviewed about my story in starting up SEO Hacker as the leading SEO Services company in the Philippines.

What kind of traits do these people have to have for you to entrust the gatekeeper position to them?

We have two Human Resource personnel. They do all of the hiring and legal work in terms of application. They do a thirty-minute drive-by interview just to get to know the applicant. After which they’re sent home. If we need to talk to them again for a second reason, then we’ll call them.

The second interview is all about the DISC and culture tests. Everyone in the next steps will look at these exams.

The third step is the exam for the position that they’re applying for. The team leader is the one who will interview them.

Was this post helpful? Share it if you feel like others may find it useful too:

The next step is the interview with my wife. She has this amazing gut feel that I listen to. If the applicant is not good with her, then she doesn’t need to bring the applicant up to me. I trust her 100%.

What is the culture like in SEO Hacker?

Culture is the product of the DNA of the founder.

When I was starting out SEO Hacker, I was still a freelancer.

I had to respect what I was doing by respecting my time and efforts. When I did that, I finished everything ahead of time and I was able to experiment after finishing meetings and my legwork.

I would always push myself to learn something new.

I wanted to have a dream team. I wanted us to be united, have one vision, and one direction.

All of these culminated in our core values. That is the direction of our team.

Our core values are Grit, Respect for Work, Challenger, Clarity, Unity, Experimentation.

We depreciated some because we realized that they’re not core values. Integrity is a necessity. Beyond Technology is all about hard work. Empathy was not used correctly.

To live out the core values, it should first be set in your mind so that it will settle in your heart.

Culture is something that you just realize once you step into the room. I think it’s best described in a YouTube video called the Smell of the Place.

I can’t tell exactly describe what our culture is. What I can tell you is that It’s young, dynamic and unified.

How does one cultivate this self-awareness? What are the right questions that you have to ask yourself?

The first time I was able to draft a set of core values was in 2014. I’ve changed them three times now.

The first one was a huge failure. It wasn’t working.

One thing I learned in a podcast I listened to was that it was a gift from the past. It was something that your past self gifts your present self. But it’s your choice whether to accept that gift or not.

My first core values sounded nice, but it wasn’t working, and it didn’t make sense. It was useless.

Jim Collins, in his book “Built to Last” says that you can only have six core values. 7 or more will be to remember and practice.

The first ones that came to mind were integrity beyond technology and empathy. They are so important that if someone doesn’t have them, then they shouldn’t be here.

These became necessities that we set aside. We chose core values that not everyone would have at the get-go.

There are three kinds of core values. Aspirational, Accidental, and Permission to Play

Integrity and Beyond Technology are both Permission to Play. Our core is Grit and Respect for Work. Challenger, Unity, Clarity, and Experimentation are Aspirational values. We want everyone to practice it, but not everyone has it as of now.

These core values are a culmination of a lot of things including my experience and the books that I’ve read. I didn’t give much attention to accidental values.

I learned these things from big mentors like Jim Collins, Patrick Lencioni, John Maxwell, and Dave Ramsey. I read their books, listened to their podcasts, followed their advice, you develop this court sense meaning you’ll know when and who you should pass the ball to in your team.

It’s that court sense and the many experiences that I had over the years that culminated in our core values.

< 1 MIN READ

“When your dreams are vague, it’s easy to rationalize little exceptions all day long and never get around to the specific things you need to do to succeed.” – James Clear (Atomic Habits)

You can never build good habits or identify and deny bad ones unless you know where you want to go in life.

Decide who you want to be first.

Visualize it.

Dream it.

Then make every single decision count to becoming that dream.

The Most Important Skill a Leader Should Have

5 MIN READ

April 27, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

Follow the Podcast on iTunes and Spotify

Excerpt

This is a reverse-guesting episode where I was interviewed about my story in starting up SEO Hacker as the leading SEO Services company in the Philippines.

What are the skillsets that a great leader should have?

Being decisive. Leaders have to be decisive.

If you’re a carpenter, your job is not to hammer nails onto the wood or to paint the fence. Your job is to make decisions.

What am I going to do today? How am I going to do it? Should I put this piece over that wall?

The world may see you as a person who works with stone, wood, and pain. But what you’re really being paid for is to make decisions.

The question now is “Are the decisions you make closer to decimal point or the commas?”

Some decisions closer to the decimal point are being done by our administrative people. Some decisions closer to the decimal point are being done by the grassroots people.

Was this post helpful? Share it if you feel like others may find it useful too:

Picture this typical scene of an animal trying to cross a road. The presence of headlights makes them stop and become roadkill.

That happens because the animal was indecisive.

As the leader, it’s that dangerous as well when you’re indecisive. You paralyze your whole organization. When that happens, people will start to see that you cannot make decisions.

It’s fine if you make the wrong decision because there are no mistakes. Only lessons. Just don’t repeat the lessons until it becomes a fatal mistake.

Singular lessons, however, are important. Failing forward is important but never be an indecisive leader.

Another trait that leaders always need to have is humility. Humility to learn and to listen to other people.

I know leaders with big egos that when you tell them off, they just bite those people’s heads off.

You cannot improve if you’re like that.

If you bite people’s heads off in meetings, then they will not tell you the truth. They will only tell you what you want to hear. Not what you need to hear.

I am an extremely high D in the DISC spectrum and my top strength Self Assurance. In meetings, I can be a big personality in meetings. This doesn’t mean I’m shutting down their ideas. In fact, I want my people to debate with me so that ideas will flow out.

The problem is that some of my people in those meetings will share their opinions outside of that meeting. And then they will tell them to other people who will then tell it to me.

I don’t understand why that wasn’t brought up during the meeting because I want healthy conflict in the team.

Patrick Lencioni says conflict is nothing but the pursuit of truth. The search for the best possible answer.

I am in this business to search for the best possible answer. We are doing the meetings to make the best possible answers to the surface. If you’re not going to have healthy conflict with me, then nothing’s going to happen. We cannot get to the truth.

It goes both ways. You have to be humble enough to listen to people and discuss it with them as well.

Now, we are at the stage where we delegate a lot of things to other people. I really don’t know everything that’s happening to the company. Some people know more than I do. If you’re not humble enough to listen to them, then you will lose touch with your operations.

What are you doing to encourage this free flow of ideas? To encourage people to speak up?

You must realize that how you say things matter.

One example is in a meeting that we had yesterday.

There was something that was suggested that will change one of our keyways of ranking. One of our key strategies would be to change temporarily.

When I heard that, I mentioned to them the implications in my mind. As long as you know this, and you will still push through with that knowledge, then do what you think is best. At least I gave you my opinion.

That was me telling them that I don’t know everything. That they might have found something that I can’t visualize, and that’s fine.

At least I know that you know what I think about it. I can only commit to your decision if I know that you heard my opinions regarding it.

How Gossip Spreads in an Organization and Kills it

< 1 MIN READ

April 25, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

“When a crime is not punished quickly, people feel it is safe to do wrong.” – Ecclesiasters 8:11

I was asked a question during the Breaking Through the Crisis webinar that mentioned their workplace breaking down with rampant gossip even when they would praise and congratulate exemplary workers.

While praising other people for their great work, competence and character, you cannot turn a blind eye to the wrong things.

If gossip goes unpunished in your organization, people will think it’s ok. And since gossip is insidious and dangerously contagious, it will spread like wildfire.

In the end, it will eat up and burn everything you have worked so hard to achieve.

Find out how to fight gossip in your team and how we implement a no-gossip policy at SEO Hacker by downloading the replay of the webinar here.

How do you raise potential leaders in a 50-man Millennial Team?

4 MIN READ

April 22, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

Follow the Podcast on iTunes and Spotify

Excerpt

This is a reverse-guesting episode where I was interviewed about my story in starting up SEO Hacker as the leading SEO Services company in the Philippines.

How do you mentor leaders? How do you cultivate the talent? How do you see this in people?

The first thing that you should do is to qualify them. There are people who want to be leaders because of compensation or recognition.

Most, if not all people want more of these, but not everyone wants to serve other people.

Leaders are called to serve. If you don’t want to serve, then don’t step up to be a leader. It’s not your calling.

You cannot just serve without ambition. You have to have a healthy amount of ambition to rise up.

Serving and having ambition are the qualifications to become a leader.

Was this post helpful? Share it if you feel like others may find it useful too:

I do it differently from most people. Some would want them to go to seminars, some want them to work hands-on.

I focus on discipleship. I bring the person along with me in my meetings, trips, and talks to spend more time with them. That way, they see who I really am.

I do this because you can’t follow a leader when you don’t know them personally.

When you only know a person professionally only and you don’t know what he’s like outside of work, then it will be difficult to follow him as a leader.

Why?

Because you don’t have a holistic approach. For someone to follow you, they have to know if you’re a person of integrity.

Once I have a relationship with a potential leader, they’ve seen my integrity, it will be easier for me to pass on my leadership knowledge to them.

They will accept and believe what I say, thus, they will practice it more. That’s all I need to see.

Leadership cannot really be taught in theory. It has to be lived out and practiced. How your people will be doing it is how you do it.

One of the things that made me realize this is Jesus. He never really taught his 12 disciples every day. They were just there as he taught the masses.

They did everything together. But it was never said that Jesus taught them. He would teach the masses, feed the masses, heal the sick, and the disciples will just be there with him.

That’s how I prefer to do it. Teaching things to someone is not enough if they don’t see you doing it. They won’t absorb it enough.

At the same time, you, as a leader, should always be learning something new. You’re not going to be worth following if you’re lagging behind. You have to stay in front.

I find time to read books and listen to podcasts pretty much every day, I meditate, and I read God’s word pretty much every day. These are the things that I do to grow at least intellectually and spiritually as a leader.

It might sound like a lot of work especially to entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. It is for the people who have certain characteristics that embody the qualities of a great and sacrificial leader.

What are some recommended resources that you would have as a leader?

One of the best podcasts that I listen to as an entrepreneur is the Entreleadership podcast by Dave Ramsey.

You can also lead to John Maxwell’s podcast.

I also read a lot of books. Right now, I’m reading Principles by Ray Dalio.

I read very slowly, contrary to what other people think. But what I read and learn, I immediately apply to myself and my team.

How to Overcome the Biggest Mistake in Hiring

5 MIN READ

April 20, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

Follow the Podcast on iTunes and Spotify

Excerpt

This is a reverse-guesting episode where I was interviewed about my story in starting up SEO Hacker as the leading SEO Services company in the Philippines.

What are the bigger mistakes that taught you some very valuable lessons?

Some people say that when you’re a person standing atop of a mountain, you’re successful.

The reality is no I’m not. I am standing at the top of my failures. These things help me get to where I am.

If I chose to stay below these failures, I’d have nothing. I would be the laughingstock.

I chose to be gritty enough to get back up and try again. That’s why when people see you standing, it’s all because I failed a lot of times.

One of my biggest failures, especially in hiring, is to not take enough time in hiring.

Was this post helpful? Share it if you feel like others may find it useful too:

When I hired before, I would just sit down with the applicant and talk with them. I didn’t have any in-depth knowledge that true HR and Psychology graduates have and use in the interview process.

This is partly the fault of my trusting people too much too early. It’s a strength and a weakness as an entrepreneur because if you give it to the right people, they will bloom. If you give it to the wrong people however, then they will stab you in the back.

When I was the one interviewing. I hired a lot of bad people. There were some gems in the rockpile, but even if you get good people, when you put them beside the bad ones, it’s going to end poorly.

I call the bad people donkeys and the good ones’ stallions. When you put a stallion by a group of donkeys, two things will happen. It’s either the donkeys will try to get rid of the stallions, or they will try to convert them into donkeys.

Stallions make donkeys look bad. They do the job well. On the other hand, donkeys are noisy, they don’t like being told what to do, and mediocre.

The bigger difference can be seen when a group of stallions and a group of donkeys are threatened.

When stallions are threatened, they face each other with their hind legs facing the threat and they kick outward to eliminate the threat.

When a group of donkeys is threatened. They face the threat, and with their hind legs kick each other to death.

A group of donkeys in your team, it makes for a stupid, gossiping and horrible working environment.

You won’t be able to hire and keep good talent this way. No stallion will want to work with you if you have a stable full of donkeys.

Our way of discerning the donkeys from the stallions is by making them endure the hiring process.

In SEO Hacker, we elongated the hiring process into 6 steps instead of just one. We send them home after each step so that they can accept another job offer from another company.

We want people who really want to work with us.

A lot of people apply. We have a huge number of initial applicants. But only around 2 or 3 survive the six-step application process.

It really helps filter out the incompetent, and those who don’t fit the culture.

Are there any other mistakes that have to do with other aspects of the job?

Most other mistakes that I have made are a lot less impactful to me.

Something that could have been done earlier is to hire and train salespeople earlier. I used to do that all on my own. I always thought that it should be the last thing to build on the team.

The operations team was built and running great. But the sales accounts team was just me.

It was very difficult because I had to juggle being the only sales and account manager and being the main SEO specialist in the team.

I should have looked for people who can replace me as the main sales and account manager sooner. I should have delegated to them slowly so that I could have worked on the business instead of in the business earlier.

Now that I’ve done this and am free to work more on the business, I could focus on leadership development. We’ve grown a lot since 2019. By the end of that year, we were around 52 people. We may reach around 80 people by the end of the year, only God knows.

When that time comes, I want us to have leaders already that will rise up to the challenge.

What’s Keeping you Alive is also Killing you

2 MIN READ

April 19, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

Remember that scene from Iron Man 2 where Tony Stark has to replace his palladium core in his chest?

He asks Jarvis, his Artificial Intelligence assistant about how long he has to drink his glass – a mixture of greenish stuff. Probably herbal medicine. Just to keep his toxicity down.

He checks his blood toxicity – 24%

Continued use of his Iron Man suit is confirmed to be increasing the toxicity levels.

Jarvis then says one of the most obvious things: “Unfortunately, what’s keeping you alive is also killing you.”

What’s tragic here is that we, like Tony Stark, also wear cores with palladium in our chest – and it’s killing us with continued use.

Sure we solve problems with the suit, deal with conflicts, take down critical issues in our jobs and businesses – but at what cost?

The only time that Tony Stark was able to get out of that slow but sure path to death is by throwing out the arc reactor entirely. And that meant that he had to stop everything, prepare for surgery and put his life on the line.

Was this post helpful? Share it if you feel like others may find it useful too:

Quit the urgent and work on the important.

We are at a similar scenario today.

I guess that time to stop everything has come forcefully for most of us in the world. We are being operated on right now – it’s quite painful too.

What we don’t realize is that the surgeons are directed by us ourselves. After the surgery we can either come out better or worse.

Truth is, we decide.

Are you learning new things that can help you thrive through this new norm? Are you putting in inspiration, motivation and growth as a lifestyle during the lockdown?

This is the time for growth, thinking and change. It starts with yourself – then it blossoms out to your career, business and identity.

How we get 60k Traffic per Month from Google by using SEO for our Blogs

17 MIN READ

April 15, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

Follow the Podcast on iTunes and Spotify

Excerpt

I’m a blogger. That’s how I started.

Way back in 2009, I was fresh out of college. I honestly didn’t know what to do with my life. I knew I didn’t want to work as an employee for long.

The salary for an IT graduate here in the Philippines, even when you graduate from one of the top universities is just around $500 a month with around 30% taxes. You can get promoted after around 3 to 5 years, potentially doubling your salary to $1000 a month.

But that’s pretty much it.

I didn’t want to live like that and I started blogging, not because I saw it as another way of making money, but because writing was a passion of mine.

The first time I set up a blog, I named it “God and You” and I wrote about my faith, philosophy, apologetics, and even dating.

Was this post helpful? Share it if you feel like others may find it useful too:

Soon enough I saw that no one was really reading my stuff.

I’ve founded four companies. SEO Hacker is my baby. It’s my first company. It was a blog where I would journal everything that I learned about SEO. After a while, people started sharing my stuff.

It grew into a services company and in 2010, I had to register as a sole proprietor company!

Workplays is a coworking space in BF Paranaque.

Sigil is a digital creative agency. Sigil deals with all the creative aspects needed by SEO Hacker and our clients.

Qeryz is a software we use for conversion optimization. It’s free and you can embed it on your site so you can learn more about your audience!

Why Should You Do SEO for Blogs?

There are tons of traffic. There are billions of searches happening every day.

All the eyeballs that see you are very important because they’re already done with the discovery phase.

They know what they want. Now, if they find what they want, there is a high chance that they’re already going to buy, read, download, or convert into leads.

I love search traffic much more than what we get on social media.

This is because people in social media are at the discovery phase. They don’t really know who you are, what they want, or if they want to engage with you.

However, people who are already searching for something are already in the interest phase.

When I started my blog, I didn’t have a lot of visitors. Of course, I asked Google how I can increase my traffic. It kept telling me to do SEO.

I was an On-The-Job Trainee back then. I had to do a lot of things. I was hired to do SEO stuff, but I didn’t know anything. They didn’t teach me anything, the two people with me during the day shift didn’t know anything about SEO as well.

Everything that I wanted to know, I had to learn alone.

I studied. I experimented. I applied what I learned.

In time, I got to rank for a certain number of keywords. They were and still are very important to me.

Right now, we rank number one in the keyword “SEO Philippines” which is a very difficult keyword to rank for. We also rank for SEO services and SEO companies.

This means a lot because we are able to get leads this way. These keywords are how our clients find us.

We had a steady increase in traffic. I started with blogs alone and that was enough to grow SEO Hacker.

It’s a blog that publishes two articles a week.

Recently, we’ve been publishing articles about SEO during the time of this coronavirus pandemic, a few case studies on how it affects certain industries.

SEO does not need to be complicated. It’s a discipline more than anything else. There is no magic behind it. I have no bag of tricks to give you. There are no tactics that will tip the scale to your favor.

SEO is an everyday discipline. You have to keep fixing and producing every single day for your effort to compound. When it does compound, your rankings will solidify in the future.

SEO is a zero-sum game. Only one can take the top spot. And the rest should settle for second all the way to last. The winner takes all.

The lower your rankings, the chances that you get the clicks are really low because Google is becoming so much better in identifying relevant search queries.

Strategies and Disciplines to Apply SEO in your Blog

One Keyword per Article

The first thing that you need to know is that you can only have ONE keyword or keyphrase in your article. A common mistake that I see a lot of SEOs and SEO-wannabes is that they write a long-form article and they try to make that article target three or more keywords.

That is not good.

Your entire post should only be targeting one keyword. It will be a lot of work because if you want to rank in this zero-sum game, you have to be laser-focused on your intent.

With that, landing pages that we make focus on just one keyword even if it’s 2000 or 3000 words long.

Be wary of your Title tag

A title tag is not the title of your article. The title tag is what you see in your browser tag. It’s also explicitly labeled in the source code on the header section.

When you see the title tag, that is probably what they are trying to rank for. It’s like a book’s title in the eyes of Google.

You have to be careful about what you’re going to put as your title tag because there can’t be a lot of words there.

Google will only show 70 characters before it shows an ellipsis. The ideal length of title tags is under 70 characters. Keep it pure and don’t put stopwords in.

The title tag is different from your H1 or your article title. The Article Title is what the users will usually see first. They’re different, but if you want to rank better, you want it put your keyword in both your title tag and your H1. You will want to add stopwords there for it to be journalistically sound. Just try to keep it as pure as possible.

You want to be consistent with your title tag and your H1. The same thing goes with your first paragraph, especially if your H1 loads above the fold. By above the fold, we mean it’s one of the things that show up first when you load a webpage.

In most cases, your first paragraph is included in the content that’s above the fold. So it’s best for you to have your keyword consistently on your title tag, your H1, and your first paragraph—all of which are above the fold.

Keep in Mind All the Articles You’ve Written

Take note of all the articles that you’ve ever written so that you know which ones you can link back to in the future.

If you’ve noticed, my articles are always linked back to some of my older articles. That’s because when people see that article and they click the link they’ll find my older article. Google will give me plus points for that.

Internal links also pass link juice. Link juice is what Google sees in terms of relationships between websites. When I link to another website, that serves as a vote of confidence. That’s because I won’t be linking to a sketchy website because I’m not relevant to them and vice versa.

Internal links are links that I can control. If I link to my older assets, then that’s a vote of confidence to my older stuff. It passes the link juice to that article.

You would want that because you want all of your articles to rank higher.

If internal linking is too much for you, then you could use a plugin if you’re using WordPress. I use YARPP. It adds an algorithm that tries to identify any and all relevant blogs to the one that you’re about to publish.

You can look at it and you’ll find links that you can put into your blog. Bear in mind that the blog’s in-content links are more important than the YARPP links at the bottom.

That’s because Google doesn’t consider the content at the bottom as powerful. Anything found in the lower 50% below the fold matters less to Google.

Your URL must contain your keyword

This is a direct ranking factor.

As you search in Google, you should see that your URL is shown. It’s a click-through factor because people will not clean on any shady URL. The same rules apply. Keep it pure and don’t put any stopwords in it.

I suggest that whatever you have as your title tag, you put in your URL as well.

Write about stuff that brings more weight to your Keyword

2000 words is the best amount of words that you can write and publish if you want to rank in Google. It’s not easy writing 2000 words. Bear in mind that you should not just add more words for the sake of it. instead what you add must bring more weight to your article. You can use extra information like descriptions, FAQs, History, and Resources.

You should also write your keyword only once above the fold. Write journalistically and for human beings. If you have to repeat it. you should use synonyms.

Google generally doesn’t like it if people game their system. Don’t try to do so. Google is made for human beings, so write for human beings.

Make sure you have your author page and you’ll link to that on your author box. I personally have my Author site. I’m a public speaker and I have spoken all over the Philippines and some in Asia as well.

By linking to my author site, I put an effort to increase my expertise, authority, and trust in the eyes of Google.

EAT has gained more traction recently. It’s a guideline for searcher intent. I also link to my social media profiles so that Google can see that I’m a real human being and he has been publishing about Digital marketing and SEO.

It tells the world that I have the expertise to write about these things. Thus, He should rank better than most other blogs.

Reduce Interstitials

Interstitials are anything that hinders the user from immediately fulfilling his or her purpose. These are things such as pop-ups and scroll-jacks.

I have a scroll-jack on seo-hacker.com for the sole purpose of collecting emails for my list. But other than that, I don’t have anything else that will hinder my audience from reading.

Don’t put Ads above the fold. That’s going to damage your rankings.

Bear in mind that the Google Adsense team doesn’t work with the Google Search team.

The Google search team says that ads won’t help, While the Adsense team would say that putting ads will increase your CTR. In this case, always follow the search team.

I don’t have any ads above the fold. The ones that I have on my website is below the fold and all native.

I play the long game. Traffic is more important for me and I don’t plan on making money through my Ads.

So, if you want to rank better, remove your interstitials. Instead, just put something necessary for you. For me, I offer my newsletter through my scroll jack.

Put Ads Below the Fold

This is particularly for Google Ads. I’ve already gone into detail on this on the previous point so I won’t repeat myself anymore.

Make Sure your Meta OG is Setup Correctly for Shareability

The Meta OG is the Meta tag for social media shareability. This is where you want to make sure that the articles you write are shareable on social media. You don’t want it to look weird once you do so.

When people share it, the featured image should show properly for each social media platform. There are practices and plugins in WordPress that will help you optimize your Meta OG.

We have a team of developers who customize our meta OGs every time we publish an article. That being said, if you’re not that tech-savvy, you can easily use plugins to do it for you.

Facebook doesn’t like it when you share a link that makes people go out of Facebook. Your links generally will not rank high on Facebook’s newsfeed.

Even though they said that they’ve deprecated their old algorithm, they haven’t publicized any new one. Their algorithm will make you rank very low especially if you don’t optimize for shareability by ignoring your meta OG.

Check you Schema Markups

You can check these schemas at Schema.org. Schema is something that Google has adopted for them to help understand the web better because by using it, you’re essentially making entities out of your websites.

This is not a direct ranking factor. But it does affect how people see your pages.

For example, when you see star ratings in a SERP, that means that page has a specific schema markup. Whenever you see a knowledge graph pop out, there is a schema markup.

Though it’s not a direct ranking factor, it is still a click-through factor.

Sitemaps

If you don’t have a site map right now, there’s are plugins on WordPress called Sitemaps.xml and Yoast that will automatically generate a site map for you. it will also automatically ping Google whenever you publish a new post.

Sitemaps are important to search engines because they use sitemaps to crawl your site thoroughly. Sitemaps also dictate also when they would come back. They can ping the crawler to come back weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

I’m not talking about an HTML sitemap for people. I’m talking about an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap doesn’t really make much sense when you read it because it’s coding. The only purpose of it is to make sure that Google crawls everything on your website.

I use GoogleXML on my website. It’s a plugin that I use. It takes a load of work away from me and my team.

Avoid Accepting Guest Posts

If you must, make sure that you use the UGC or sponsored tags for outbound links. Guest posts from other webmasters would usually link back to their site or their asset.

Guest Posts are good for you because they can bridge the gap between times when you run out of ideas. Some webmasters are willing to pay, so that can be an extra income for you.

We don’t accept guest posts in seo-hacker.com, but we do accept in seo-hacker.net. That’s because seo-hacker.net is my company site. I don’t personally write there but we do have a community of guest posters that publish their articles there so that we have more content there. We do link them back to their site and we tag them as UGC or “user-generated content”.

Applying the UGC or sponsored tag is the same as applying the no-follow links.

No follow is slowly being disrespected by Google in a sense so make sure that you always use the UGC or sponsored post tags for every outbound link that the guest post puts in.

Post about up and coming blogs

This is a great way to earn links. If there are blogs that are new and promising, If you see them having some nice community interactions and engagement, that’s a good sign that a website is growing really well.

All you have to do is to contact the webmasters and ask them if they would be willing to accept one of your guest posts.

Post Frequently

As I’ve mentioned, SEO is a discipline more than anything else that it needs to be a consistent practice. There are no tricks to it. You should post at least once a week.

Make sure that when you write an article, you should make sure that you keep your title tags and H1 pure, put your keywords in your URL slug, make sure that there no stopwords, do internal linking.

Do all of these disciplines to make sure that Google comes back to your site at least once a week. That means that you’ll have a good crawl budget.

A crawl budget is how many times Google will dedicate to crawling your website. You do want more crawl budget.

When Google frequently crawls your site, the things that you add, or change will always be up to date in their database!

I know that 2000 words are a lot of work even if it does bring more weight to your site. If you can write 800 words at least, that would be enough because that’s sort of like the midzone of what we writers can do every week.

Share your posts in relevant communities

Even if it’s not a direct ranking factor, who knows, there might be someone who picks it up and puts it in their blog where they’ll link back to you. that’s another point for you.

Build your email list

I mentioned my interstitial earlier. When you go to seo-hacker.com you will see that I am just trying to collect emails. The number of emails that we have is around 11,000. It updates real-time so you will see it once you go to seo-hacker.com.

We’ve been building the email list for a decade now. The 11,000 digital marketers we have there are pure. Every one of them has come to seo-hacker. I do not buy a list of emails.

All of those people signed up for my email list.

Build your list, because as digital marketers, we always say that “the money is in the list”. The gold is in the list.

Whenever we have a new article, we blast it to that 11,000 people, they read it and go back to our site. That’s plus points to us again. That’s good behavior points for our blogs as well.

These are some of the things that we have always done for both my website and our clients’ website.

We have 60,000 per month, something that we built up for a long time. It was not achieved overnight.

It has dipped a little bit because of the coronavirus, but we’re still at roughly 52,000 to 58,000.

87% of that number comes from google searches.

We do track our rankings using SEranking. This is our main, go-to software for our rankings. It’s the most accurate so far.

How to Get Good Talent to Join your Team

4 MIN READ

April 13, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

Follow the Podcast on iTunes and Spotify

Excerpt

What Was The Thinking Process Behind This Entrepreneur’s Latest Business?

Thinking of a business is no different than studying for an exam, Check out Charles Sy’s own process of building up a business in this podcast!

How tight is the competition for talent?

In the Philippines, fresh graduates would almost always seem very angelic, and because of that, it feels like they have huge potential. However, if you put them out there, the potential you found during the hiring process suddenly disappears.

To be honest, it’s hard to find real talent. There are many good-hearted people out there. But you need to develop the many factors that are important for you.

The hard part for those who hire fresh talents like Charles is that they’re first movers. They’re the pioneers in the Philippines, and because there’s no real basis for what they’re doing, there will be some who will drop out.

Was this post helpful? Share it if you feel like others may find it useful too:

In the end, it falls on the leader. Charles believed that they could achieve his goals. What’s important is how he and his team execute it—that includes hiring the right people and being patient with them.

How do you keep the right people in your team?

You have to take care of them. Employees can understand this by looking at their CEO. Rarely will there be a CEO who believes that all of his achievements were because of him alone. A person who will say that it’s “All Me” is nothing more than a narcissist.

Charles values people a lot. He has a few people that he treats as the cornerstones of his business. He keeps them no matter what.

Do you have any employees from Cotton Depot that are still with you after you sold the business?

There were some people that handled the back-end operations of Cotton Depot that went with Charles. One of his employees started out at 19 years old. Five years later, she’s now the oldest of his team at 24. She is now one of the cornerstones of Charles and she handles the company treasury.

How many people do you have in your team?

Charles has around 40 people on his team. During peak seasons, he usually hires around 30 to 50 people contractually. In order to keep things on a personal level, he keeps most of his relations between his core employees.

How do you generate ideas?

Charles finds his ideas through a lot of things. Most of the time it’s from wanting to solve a problem.

A good example would be how Dropify was founded. Charles called someone and talked about e-commerce. They got to converse about how Filipinos are very talented. They only needed money to allow them to take advantage of it.

Charles said to himself: “If he could only find a way so that online businesses no longer need capital, that would be great”.

How did you come upon these things? Is it about your experience?

Dropify was based a lot on Charles’ own experience. But the process of coming up with it was long for Charles. He had to think and research about things along the way. The whole process is also a learning experience for Charles because he makes sure to study and understand every piece of information that is needed to start up that business.

This time of brainstorming, building up a business from scratch is incredibly enjoyable for Charles.

This is because he knows that it’s a mixture of luck, God’s grace, and his own efforts that resulted in Dropify.

Do you have an online community for your people?

Charles started a group a few weeks ago that now has over 1,500 members. The boom in the number of members is the result of Charles solving a problem within the community. The group is named: “Pinoy drop-shipping via Lazada, Shoppee, and Shopify”.

The community serves as one big testimonial where drop shippers would share their stories of good profit and great service.

Excerpt

Excerpt

Excerpt

Excerpt

Excerpt

Why Should You Do SEO for Blogs?

Strategies and Disciplines to Apply SEO in your Blog

One Keyword per Article

Be wary of your Title tag

Keep in Mind All the Articles You’ve Written

Your URL must contain your keyword

Write about stuff that brings more weight to your Keyword

Reduce Interstitials

Put Ads Below the Fold

Make Sure your Meta OG is Setup Correctly for Shareability

Check you Schema Markups

Sitemaps

Avoid Accepting Guest Posts

Post about up and coming blogs

Post Frequently

Share your posts in relevant communities

Build your email list

Excerpt

How tight is the competition for talent?

How do you keep the right people in your team?

Do you have any employees from Cotton Depot that are still with you after you sold the business?

How many people do you have in your team?

How do you generate ideas?

How did you come upon these things? Is it about your experience?

Do you have an online community for your people?

Download Chapter 1 of my Book!