Most important is the creation of rich content people want to read, watch, or listen to. If this content is good, people will bookmark it, refer to it, follow links to more of our content, subscribe to our feeds or social media accounts and generally give us a share of their attention.

If really good, they may even share it with their contacts by posting it on their social media accounts.

As we craft the content it is important to be aware of our use of keywords and leverage them in titles, text, urls, and image alt text as well as in the content itself. But in a natural way of writing. We do not want to do “key word stuffing” which will rank us down in search results.

This is the set of activities that optimize the content and the meta-data that describes the content that search engines used to navigate, evaluate, rank, and index our content. This is how we improve our chances of ranking high, that is coming closer and closer to the top page of search results for any given user search.

There is work that is done at the technical level, usually a one time complete configuration of the SEO software (we use the Rank Math plugin for WordPress) and then occassional tweaks as needed.

There is also work done each time we make a post. For example, every podcast episode, blog post, or any other post done on a page should be tuned using the Rank Math meta-data for that individual post. Rank Math has some AI that guesses at default values but they should be reviewed and customized as needed to achieve a better SEO score (rank).

WordPress dynamically generates the html, styling (CSS), and associates javascript to a web page as it is rendered following a request. Requests happen:

• when a web page is crawled by a search engineis read by a Social Media company when we post the page link
• is requested by a user from clicking a search result, or
• by navigating the website and clicking a menu item or link to a post or page

During rendering the SEO tool inserts all the appropriate meta-data tags into the page so it is available to anything reading the page.

Using an SEO tool keeps us from having to hand write the page head section to insert all these meta-tags and saves us a huge amount of time.

When a podcast episode or blog post is published it should be promoted on Social Media.  Social media creates a network effect that can reach a very broad audience. With each piece of content we promote it through social media feeds and subscribers to those feeds will be notified, keeping NRTH in their awareness, and providing them useful and interesting content for them to consume.

We also want to promote through our key subscribers social media accounts. Most directly from our accounts (e.g., Terry Patten’s social media presence, and each of us willing to promote the content).

But even better is to have our audience be able to promote our content because they found it valuable and worth sharing. This provides a highly trusted channel that often reaches an audience that would likely to become part of our community because they also want to make whole system change.