Hi John,

Thanks for another detailed training.

I have a question:
When you talk about an authority white hat site, could that be my band website/blog?  I recently launched a new site for my band. It’s just  a regular band website and blog built on the thesis wordpress theme. I’m using the blog for casual posts about our gigs and also other non-music related interests of ours (like food) and will be posting short video guitar, mandolin and drum lessons and other ideas as they come along. Does it make sense to try and build white hat SEO for this kind of site?  Or are you only talking about sites that appeal to an entire genre? If I build SEO for this site, could certain blog posts be optimized to be found with keywords specific to those posts and would overall SEO help each post?
Here’s the url to my site:  http://hobbyhorseband.com/

PS: I think a live webinar would be great!

Hi John,

Managed to catch your training on post-Penguin SEO. I've been grappling with this issue as well as I'm working with a half dozen different clients in different markets when all of the changes came in.

Right now I'm leaning towards ultra-squeaky clean white hat stuff. Mainly, just creating high quality content and letting the links take care of themselves.

For anyone who wants to experiment with buying links...as John states repeatedly - don't point them directly to your money site. Even if you have a micro-site that you're willing to sacrifice to see how well a particular service works, I'd still recommend pointing the links to a site that is pointing to your micro-site. If say you had a posterous or tumblr account that points to your micro-site, you can point your links to the tumblr or posterous site and since they are trusted by Google they're less likely to be penalized by a few suspicious links.

Just my two cents - I'm being extra cautious these days with search engine stuff. The best recommendations I have is to create the best content that you can, keep building your list and sending them to your great content and diversifying so that you're not depending exclusively on Google to deliver all your traffic. Get podcast traffic, Youtube traffic, PDF sharing site traffic etc.

Thanks John for sharing this very timely info and all the resources. Hardcore Troubadour looks very promising!

John, that was over-the-top!

One of my frustrations has been that, since YouTube has greatly diminished as a traffic source for me due to their changes, I've been looking more and more to paid traffic sources. That's been ok, but it's expensive for me right now as I continue to work on ways to get my subscriber value up (I've now added house concerts to my followup series, and I am getting takers, so I expect that situation to improve).

I really haven't pursued search engine traffic because it just seemed so darn daunting. About the time I heard this new training, I had been looking at the google analytics for my http://www.charleylanger.net squeeze page, and--what do you know--I have been getting pretty consistent search engine traffic for a while now. It's small, only about 6 per day, but it's there all the time. That little squeeze page ranks #4 in google for "smooth jazz download." That didn't get me all that amped up until I listened to this training and realized: (1) I haven't even been trying to SEO that page, and (2) if I had 100 pages or so bringing in 6 visitors a day (very doable over the next few years), that would be a nice little subscriber farm.

Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks, and perhaps give some hope to people who think this SEO stuff is too hard. It's likely that I won't compete with the big boys on the big key words, but I can compete on the "long tailed" key words, and I can multiply a little until it becomes alot. That's kinda cool.

One more question for you. You say that sites with authority are better "votes" when it comes to backlinks. Are google-ranking videos good votes? It's not hard for me to get videos to rank. I'm just trying to figure out how I got a squeeze page on the front page of google. BTW, it's down to the #6 spot, but the sites ahead of me are all huge entitites. I'm the only artist there.

John Oszajca said
And just to clarify, squeeze pages will rank occasionally, but it's tough and I wouldn't rely on that. I would build a blog out to mimic the functionality of a squeeze page, but have a lot more content and links to that content on the home page. This will be viewed much better in the serps. The low content sites that don't have multi-facited user opportunities (like squeeze pages) tend not to rank very well, or for that long.

And building a blog site to mimic the functionality of a squeeze page is exactly what I am starting to work on. I had not been working on that simply because I was thinking that ranking was only possible for the big boys. And then I saw my squeeze page rank, and I thought, "Wow...this isn't going to be so hard after all."

Dang I'm pumped! Yeeeea!

By the way, if anyone else has some insight on this, I'd love to get whatever contributions you might have, too. I've got a bunch of time this week to start building out the site, and can't wait to get started. Thoughts, experienced advice, wild-ass speculation - let's hear it!

Just testing something here - please ignore this post

Just my two cents- adding an 's' for your keyword in the domain is perfectly fine. The main point is that you have your keyword in there and if possible - positioned closest to the beginning. So having http://www.americantroubadors.com is better than "www.bestamericantroubador.com".

Can I substantiate this? No.

I'll also chime in on the SEO searches that you're doing to find your genre. I think there are a lot of 'industry terms' that most people wouldn't think of. For example, when I interviewed John last year he slipped in a term called "active rock" that I had never heard of before relating to bands like Metallica who I would associate with "hard rock" or "metal" or even my particular fave "heavy rock".

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised that there are many industry terms that aren't used by the masses to find what they're looking for. However, it's still worth ranking for keywords like that if you're looking to work with industry people at some point like a booking agent, promoter, manager or an a/r rep - chances are they'll be searching under terms like that.

SEO is part art and part science. There are many keyword searches that come out of left field that are better then the ones most of use initially target. You'll find out which ones they are by using analytics and monitoring which keywords are sending your the best quality traffic.

Pick the best keyword(s) that you can and go from there and it will eventually come together for you.

Best of luck!