Common SEO Questions & Answers (#3)

I recently sat down with Kevin Willett of New England B2B Networking to discuss some of his questions about SEO—and I'm happy to answer yours, too! Check out the conversation below, then submit a question of your own for me to answer in a future blog or LinkedIn post!

Does domain type matter?

Kevin: One of the things I'm confused by is people's blogs. So sometimes I see, you know, .com/blog, sometimes I see blog dot, and then the domain. Does it matter?

Emily: It depends. So it's really good question. And it's not something a lot of people think about. So Good going. If you have a relatively small sites, I would say and smallest relative, I would say, under 1000, total pages, I know 1000 Sounds like a lot. But when you think of a site like Amazon, it is expansive. If your site is is like under 1000 pages, you really want to have it structured. So it's like New England B2B dot com slash blog. And what that does is it includes the blog as part of your main domain. So your homepage, and your blog pages, search engines consider them all to be the same entity.

Now, sometimes you'll see some businesses especially really, really, really large companies, like big international enterprises, they'll have, you know, company.com, and then they'll have blog.company.com, those are actually treated as two different websites by search engines. Now, these companies are so big, and they have so many pages on both sites that to them, it doesn't really matter. And it actually helps them. There's certain technologies they can use to manage that high volume of content that work better in that way. But for the average person who's out running a multinational conglomerate, you're going to find it more difficult to get your site to rank for search terms. If you have blog, dot your website instead of your website slash blog. That makes sense. Yes.

The first two positions when searching

Kevin: So we wouldn't be trying to do that to get the first two positions when someone's searching, is that why we would want to have the blog is kind of a separate entity?

Emily: So if you if you're a really big company, and you have the blog and a separate entity, then yes, you could wind up getting the first two positions, because you do technically have two websites, the likelihood of that happening is getting slimmer and slimmer because search engines are getting smarter about figuring out when two sites are owned by the same company. But, you know, that's something that I expect might change some more in the future. But right now, that's what could happen.

Backlinks and how they work today

Kevin: I got a question about backlinks. Cuz I'm dating myself a little bit. I remember 10 years ago, that was the thing, you know, hey, Emily, put it back link to my website, I'll put a backlink to yours. Whether it was websites like hey, these this list of all my friends and it was 30 or 40 backlinks they're valuable is that is a really as important as we thought it was

Emily: 10 years ago, totally right. That was a big thing. I remember having to do that for websites I worked for. And at that time, that was a big thing that was really important. Now, it's less so you know? I get messages on LinkedIn, sometimes from people saying that they're backlink experts, and they can help me get lots of backlinks to my site. Working with those folks can actually hurt your site more than help it in the long run. Because the only kinds of backlinks that are really good for your website today in this year, are ones that come about through more of a public relations exercise. So if you're paying someone to just make sure you get links in a lot of pages, search engines are wise to that they know what's up, they're gonna figure out what they're doing. They're gonna be like, hold on, went from having like 100 backlinks to now 15,000. What what is going on here? Something's not right.

So what you want to do is, you know, backlinks are great, but you only want to get them from people you really know like, you give me a site back up on your website, you give me a link back to my web page. And that's great because we know each other, and we're associated with each other. Sometimes I answer questions from journalists and bloggers, and these aren't my answers go into articles posted around the internet. Those are valuable backlinks because I was engaged in that process. If a news site wants to link back to you, great, if a big company loves what you do, and you work with them, and they want to link back to you also great, but you don't have to take time out of your day to try to seek them out. Only focus on the ones that come naturally.

What does is mean Google is crawling my site?

Kevin: You use an expression that Google is going to crawl my site, and I go okay, okay, no idea what that means. What does it mean?

Emily: Okay, well, you know, how we call the Internet, or at least he used to call the Internet, the World Wide Web. So think of a spider web. Google has these little, I say little they're not really real entities, but they are software programs called bots, crawl bots, and they go out onto the internet and they figure out what web pages exist, how they relate to certain topics, how they relate to each other. So we call it crawling. Because back when we called it the World Wide Web, the idea was that these bots were like little spiders that would crawl out on the spider web and collect this information, just like a real spider might collect bugs in its web. That term has persisted today, even though we don't say a world wide web as much. So what happens is, these crawl bots or spiders go out and they start with a link. And then they go to the next link and the next link, and then they jump over here and look at a new topic. And they map how all sorts of information fits together.

So search engines know that you and I know each other because I'm linked on your website. And I now share these videos that we do on my website. So it's making those kinds of connections, we now have a string of the web drawn between us. But going back to my previous answer, once again, you don't have to worry about amassing the most possible web the most possible connections, you just want to get really strong ones that's based on people you know, and by talking about topics that you're an expert in.