Using SEO To Build Your Brand & Get More Customers

Background

Lately I am less and less satisfied with reading blogs or news sites – I’m leaning heavily towards content with immediate, actionable lessons. I joined Mixergy Premium (more on that another day) but hadn’t taken any of the courses. Since Noah Kagan is a better marketer than Andrew Warner, I ended up buying a Startup SEO course from AppSumo without even realizing that it the same course was already available to me through Mixergy Premium. AppSumo has a generous refund policy, but I have to give them credit for actually making the sale – the $25 I spent at AppSumo has greatly amplified the value I’m getting out of Mixergy Premium, now that I see how useful the courses are.

Rationale

For most of my career, my extracurricular learning has been about software development. That’s my job, right? Unfortunately, that left me with a narrow set of skills. I’m trying to fill those gaps strategically, trying to get the first 50% of knowledge of a topic extremely fast. AppSumo courses and Mixergy Premium are great for this – reputable, accomplished instructors, Andrew Warner’s guiding hand and high standards, and easy access to video and supporting materials. The SEO course gave me exactly what I hoped – before the course, SEO was a hazy concept that I was not confident about, and after it, I have a framework to choose and prioritize SEO actions going forward.

Insights

I took a whole bunch of notes, but more important is the summary:

SEO is about finding the terms you want to rank for, and getting strong inbound links for those terms.

The basic process is:

1. Choose keywords based on high volume, low ranking difficulty, and high value to you
2. Do basic, table-stakes optimizations – using search terms in titles and headers, putting alt text on images, helpful internal linking for crawlers and users, etc
3. Use a mix of hustle and creativity to get links that will help you rank

The course goes into much more depth on all of those points, and I won’t spoil the secrets. If you want the details enough to sign up for Mixergy Premium or buy the course from AppSumo, then I just did you a big favor.

Recommendation: Buy!

Bonus: Why do I need SEOmoz’s help? I’m a reformed software developer who’s tired of seeing great software go nowhere because the developers don’t know how to market it. I believe that marketing is an engineering problem and from everything I’ve heard, SEOmoz has the best SEO tools in the business. Help me Rand!