April 30

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What are the 3 Pillars of SEO

By Jason Khoo

April 30, 2020


3 Pillars Forbes

Featured on Forbes

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Transcript

Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk and Tea. 

Today's conversation is about the three pillars of SEO. I actually thought I've already made this video because I talk about it a lot in my other videos, but I was kind of looking through our libraries and I realized I'd never made a video about this topic. So, this one was a long time coming and I'm kind of happy to kind of go over with everybody on a video.

Well because this is Zupo SEO Talk and Tea, today we have a special guest. Usually if you watch the show, we have the kettle and we usually have some hot teas. Well if you can tell about the sun today it's going to be a 100 degrees, so I wanted to kind of change it up. I don't want to die of sweat, so I actually prepped this last night. It's a chrysanthemum tea.

When I was a kid, I actually used to have it chilled more so than hot. So, it's kind of a throwback to my younger days, is chrysanthemum tea that I prepped it yesterday. It uses chrysanthemum flowers and I just prepped it last night. There's no caffeine or anything. It's kind of like a sweeter, flowery taste. It reminds me of my childhood. It's something I like to have and I like to kind of mellow down, or when it's really hot, I like to have it iced or refrigerated.

But anyways, let's jump into the three pillars of SEO. The three pillars of SEO are what's considered link-building and referring domains for the first pillar, the second pillar is content marketing and content development, and the third is technical SEO.

Now, I wanted to kind of give a shout out to Paul Shapiro. he's kind of the one that, I think, coined the phrase that I use, the three pillars of SEO. I have seen other iterations or styles of how people talk about this, but I generally like Paul Shapiro's version. I think he hits it right on the head, and so this is kind of his term. But what I kind of want to go into is the three pillars of SEO. What this means is that generally any SEO campaign or strategy that you're running will involve these three pillars.

So if you watch any of our videos, you know link-building is very important, contents important, and also technical SEO is also very important. So, every campaign will have some mixture of these three. Now, your campaign may differ based on your competition, your industry, and what resources you may have. But, lets kind of just jump into each pillar and then I'll finalize it with how they kind of all interact with each other.

So, the first pillar of link-building referring domains, I believe Paul Shapiro calls it digital PR as well. It's about driving links to your website. You need to make sure that you get high quality links of good authority, and you get these referring domains and backlinks back to your website. A part of this requires you to be able to go out there, show value, be a thought leader, or create really bomb, creative content that people will want to link to or great tools or web tools that people wants to link to as part of their blog posts or anything. Generally, digital PR is the action of just trying to drive links into your site.

Now, the second pillar is content marketing, or content development. This is about building authority, or topical authority, on your own website, which is building more content, writing more, and putting them on the site. The bigger your site is and the more content that your site builds out that is a relevant to your topic of choice, or the keyword you're trying to rank, you will be seen more as an authority, as an expert, and you'll have a more thorough library and Google will reward you for that. They want to make sure that the websites they're ranking have a good, sizeable volume of content that they can be sure is relevant to what a search is looking for and then that site is an expert at. So, therefore, it kind of behooves you to have content available on your site.

Third: a technical SEO, making sure that the SEO tags are right, that the keywords are in your SEO tags on a very basic level, on a more technical level, internal linking is there. So, do all the pages on your website that talk about what this one product, do they all intern their line so that Google crawlers can better understand what the different categories of your website are to the most advance? Which is, if your site is over a hundred thousands of pages large, how can we make sure that Google's crawling every single page? When we unveil a new section of that site, how do we make sure that Google indexes that quickly rather than take their own time to kind of do so?

So, those are the three pillars, and generally they're not in isolation. You will do some variation of those three. So for example, if you're doing a LinkedIn campaign, you will most likely go out there and try to garner some thought leadership by guest posting or adding some value to some other person's blog. But when you want to drive links back to your website, generally the rules are you can't link back to your homepage, in the actual body of the text, or you can't drive links to service pages or product pages.

So generally, what they only like to see is you drive links to blog posts on your own site. Which then goes to the second pillar, which is you need to add content to your own website, do content development, and build that library out. Then thirdly is the technical SEO. As you're driving links to your website, to these blog posts, remember they're not your service pages, but you want your service pages to rank usually because those are the highest value.

Well, your internal linking systems might need to be in play where the blogs that are getting these links from these outbound thought leadership posts you're doing need to link back to your service pages so that they can pass the equity. Every SEO campaign, this is just one micro instance or example. We'll have all three pillars involved. Generally, anytime you are doing SEO campaign, they won't involve any of these three. Of course, that may be to it at different degrees, but generally all SEO campaigns fall into these three, and it's up to you to be creative with each pillar to kind of help augment your SEO ability and your rank ability.

So, those are the three pillars of SEO. I think a lot of people overthink SEO. They think of it as multitudes of different things, but generally it will always fall down to these three pillars. When you're feeling confused or you're feeling overwhelmed by all this different materials on SEO, remember: it's down to those three pillars. If you can focus on them, you'll be more successful in the sense that you'll be able to create better plans that you know what you're doing.

But, I hope that was helpful today. Three pillars of SEO is a really foundational concept that we use at Zupo, and something that I want all our viewers to understand as well. If you guys found this video valuable, please like and subscribe. I'm going to go ahead and pour out this chilled chrysanthemum tea on this super hot day. But if you guys found value, I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks. Oh.

Jason Khoo

About the author

Jason is founder and CEO of Zupo, which is an Orange County based SEO consulting agency helping construct powerful long term SEO strategies for our clients. Jason also enjoys multiple cups of tea a day, hiding away on weekends catching up on reading and rewatching The Simpsons for the 20th time.

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