Quality SEO Backlinks : The Only Trick That Actually Works

Hi, I’m “Penguin” Pete Trbovich, and YOU overthink SEO!

This time, I want you to take protective measures. Wear a hockey mask and catcher’s mitt, or at least have a pillow handy. This is because I’m about to tell you an SEO trick that is so BLINDING obvious and yet nobody ever, ever thinks of it.

Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks, everybody wants backlinks! To quote Moz.com: “Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a ‘vote of confidence’ from one site to another.” But they just talk about how important quality backlinks are, not how to get them. Many sites out there pay lip service to this concept, but are vague on how to get backlinks.

I will not be vague. I will be very specific. This blog post is over 2K words long, relax.

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You Overthink SEO – Ongoing Series

Over at 123ish.com, my client has commissioned a series tapping my 20+ years experience in content marketing. I’ve dispensed some hard-won SEO and online marketing wisdom in a steady trickle over there. Here’s a list:

Top SEO Factors BESIDES Keywords – For those website owners who pay all the attention to SEO keywords and no attention to anything else, including whether Google’s crawlers can index the page with all that great content on it in the first place. Yes, I have had to patiently explain to generations of clients that Google needs to FIND the page first, then worry about the keywords.

Amazing New SEO Method Discovered : Write Like A Human Being! – Busting a mass of myths about actual text content in relation to how Google sees and ranks your site. The problem with this field is that 90% of the knowledge about textual SEO you’ll find on the web is either outdated, or was outrageous nonsense in the first place.

The Top SEO Tools For Content Marketing – I just want to point out that I was not compensated nor paid by any of the companies whose software I mention here. Yes, SEMRush is expensive, but it’s such a power-tool that it’s ridiculous not to mention it.

Social Media Optimization – The Other Digital Marketing – Along with SEO, nobody thinks about this other sphere of online content marketing: social media. Yet “influencers” pull down up to seven figures, so there must be something to it, no?

I put these posts up partly for the education of the general public, and partly with a self-serving mission because I’m sick to death of explaining the same thing to client after client over and over and over… This isn’t going to help much, but it’s something.

Of course, watch my own space here as I also post under the category You Overthink SEO, just some addendum thoughts and my snarkier, less marketable thoughts on the matter.

A Content Marketing Career: Expectations vs Reality

Over at 123ish.com, my satellite client, I’ve been asked to start talking about my own line of work. So I detailed how I accidentally became a content marketer for the web starting from a childhood spent reading books. Then I tackled a detail within content marketing for the web, with the top SEO factors that have nothing to do with the content.

Media changed everything over the last two decades, and it’s still changing everything faster than we can track it. In another century, I might have been a journalist, a historian, a columnist, or a hack scrivener for pulp fiction rags. I kind of regret missing the boat on that last one. But I am in this century, and so I am a content marketer.

That SEO post fits into my grand scheme of blog-rant TED-talks about how everyone overthinks SEO. Expect more to come, because there is no end of delusions about this pursuit.

Why Is SEO Marketing For Media Topics So Hard?

Hi, I’m “Penguin” Pete Trbovich… and you overthink SEO!

You have a great idea for a moneymaking website: You’re going to write a fandom blog for your favorite media, be it movies, TV shows, music, video games, books, comics, manga, anime, whatever. And then you’re going to post affiliate links from your site to Amazon, etc., so that fans will read about this stuff and hopefully buy some of it with a commission for you.

What a “passive-income” prospect! All we need is some content marketing, and the rest takes care of itself. People Google for this stuff all the time, so you know it’s a popular topic space.

What fandom do we pick to write about first?

Star Wars is popular, we can cash in on that fandom! Let’s see how competitive writing about Star Wars is:

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eCommerce Marketing For Dopamine Addicts

Recently one of my freelance clients got me onto their SEMRush account. It’s a nice tool, it has its place in Search Engine Marketing. But it’s also important to remember, behind those numbers and algorithms, that there are people behind those screens. I try to always look behind the SEO to figure out what motivates the users in the first place.

Hot new acronym to play with: E-A-T

SEMRush has its own blog to help with content marketing. In their obligatory end-of-year post looking ahead into 2020, they bring up E-A-T a lot. E-A-T stands for “Expertise, Authority, and Trust,” and it’s the latest Google indexing bugaboo which everybody is struggling to ascertain. What everybody forgets is that behind the numbers and algorithms, Google cares about what motivates people too.

Turning to SearchEngineJournal, E-A-T is a human-driven link quality control method, where Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines is “used by humans to assign quality scores to search results for specified queries… In other words, pages that would receive high-quality ratings from raters applying these guidelines are the kinds of pages Google wants to rank well.”

And then those pages, in turn, get stamped with the “Expertise Authority Trustworthiness” seal of approval. That doesn’t change the algorithms directly; instead it guides the engineers in adjusting those algorithms to bring up those pages more often.

The bottom line: Users – the humans behind those queries – want to see results that are actually helpful, engaging, and informative. That’s as opposed to mechanical SEO content churned out to appease the algorithm gods. Now that I’ve humanized the mechanical search process, watch as I mechanize the human angle all over again:

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eCommerce Marketing: How We Misread the Internet Audience

By now the Internet has chewed up and masticated the infamous Peloton exercise bike ad. For you people in the future visiting to soberly learn the lessons from the Ghosts of Christmas Ads Past, here’s what that was all about:

The Internet reaction to this ad is a textbook case of unexpected backlash

Everybody mocked it. And lest you be tempted to think “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” Peloton’s stock actually fell 10% due to bad press from the ad.

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