My SEO journey to the top - here goes nothing!

Search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO, is something that seems to rule the internet these days whether you are a corporate giant or a small mom and pop company. If you or someone you know has the skills to rank on google no matter the size of your business you will most likely be getting tons of organic leads, ultimately turning into clients, meaning more money in your company's pocket.
If you simply have a small understanding of it, have already mastered it, have just watched one youtube video about it, or this is the first time you are hearing about it (CONGRATS, I'm glad you found me!) SEO can be a powerful tool for just about any business, in any country, in any location. ***Disclaimer: I fall under the category of having a small understanding so if I get something wrong please forgive me*** This phenomenon has peaked my interest for a while now that I have been exposed to this age of digital marketing and wondering how certain companies are popping up on my searches and social media feeds. So I thought it'd be time to start my own blog and start my own company to see how fast I can make it to the top!

So here I am, I'm going to start researching and posting on here the many ways that companies can use to get their products/offerings in front of you using the power of SEO. Without further ado, please keep reading, or don't, you won't hurt my feelings, this is a lot of commas, let's get started. 

How could something as simple as typing in a few keywords a bunch of times help to rank my website to the top of a google search you might ask? Well I have asked that same thing many times. SEO is in interesting beast and there is definitely a lot to unpack when it comes to the nitty gritty of it. For this post I am just analyzing my initial findings that are very surface level and I will eventually go deeper into my SEO journey in future posts. Now I don't know all of google's ranking calculations/algorithms which is why I'm here, and quite possibly, why you are here as well so let's go on this SEO journey together.

Like everything else in life, things take practice if you want to be proficient at them and SEO is no different. So let me share my thoughts about search engine optimization with you and feel free to comment below your thoughts on my interpretations of the topic at hand.

If I were to sit here and type meaningless keywords that I'm trying to rank for that don't make any sense, would I be ranked higher than someone who has a legitimate business that wants to help people and not be spammy? In doing some research on other SEO websites, I've seen a mixture of the two. In the content that I've seen I decided to run a ⌘+F (find) to see how many times a site uses specific keywords. One website homepage that ranks at the top of a "Whittier SEO" search has upwards of 4,000 words on their homepage and 67 of which are "SEO" and 23 of them are "Whittier". To me this is page is successful due to that fact that 67 out of 4000 is only a 1.6% usage of the word SEO but it still comes up A TON on their first page just not in a spammy way. The second company has 10 of the 379 as "Whittier", and 37 uses of "SEO" which, according to my extreme quantum calculating skills is just slightly under 10%, like 9.762533 to be exact. Which seems pretty high and a little spammy, but clearly it works since they ranked second. In third place is 38 ("SEO")'s out of 2,038 words or 1.8%.

So from this fairly basic dice into "Whittier SEO", rankings are definitely not solely based on using the main keyword that you search for.

I did a little more digging on these 3 companies and they aren't specifically based in Whittier. These are huge firms that just do a blast to all the major surrounding cities and rank in them to try and get the most business possible. In retrospect it is a great business model but what other factors are helping them rank so high? In my post next week I will share with you all my findings behind their usage of backlinks (internal, external, and the like) as well as any other major factors that help them standout on google. 

Thank you for reading all the way through if you are still here and I hope you come back next Saturday to see what my findings are and continue on with me on my journey to becoming a top ranking "Whittier SEO" company!

---