Redd: Hi and welcome to Fiverrcast. My name is Redd. You can find me on Fiverr as Reddhorrocks.Adam: And I’m Adam where you can find me on Fiverr at Twistedweb123. Today we’re joined by a very special guest Yasha, one of Fiverr’s resident SEO experts. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself Yasha?Yasha: Sure. Hey guys. First of all, nice to be on the show. Thanks for having me. But basically I’ve been doing digital marketing for a very long time, decades in fact and in the past couple of decades when search engines started to pop up, I started to work on optimizing webpages, even for hand picked indexes like Yahoo back in the day and other sites like that and eventually Google as well. So I’ve been doing SEO now for pretty much as long as there has been such a thing. Now I do that for Fiverr.Redd: So in case you haven’t guessed it by now, today is going to be our SEO episode and I’m super excited because I don’t know anything about this topic. So Adam, give me a brief overview about what SEO means.Adam: OK. So first of all, we should probably start by saying that SEO stands for search engine optimization which basically means optimizing a website or a page on the website to try and get it to rank as high as possible inside search engines such as Yahoo, Google, Bing, and a whole host of others and then from that, the idea is that you rank the page highly so when people search for you, they find your more easily which is going to lead to more conversions and more sales.Redd: OK, cool. I got us that far. So the big question is for Yasha, what can you tell us about the way that Fiverr SEO operates?Yasha: That’s an interesting question. Fiverr basically offers SEO or optimization features for users that enable them to get their Gigs searched better by Google and Yahoo and Bing and to have them show up higher in the results.Adam: Yeah, I think there’s quite a lot of different elements to how you can optimize your Gig specifically and I think that’s one of the things we’re going to discuss and cover today because there really is so much to it. There’s not really a one-quick fix, is there Yasha?Yasha: There’s really not. There are so many different elements and SEO is a very dynamic area of online organic marketing. So the things that worked well three years ago don’t necessarily work well today and if they do, they might not necessarily work well tomorrow.Adam: Exactly. Although I think every seller on Fiverr has a great starting point in the fact that Fiverr as itself, as the main website, ranks very well thanks to efforts from yourself.So we’re trying to rank a page or our Gig on a website that is already doing quite well. So it’s easier for us as opposed to if we were trying to start from scratch.Yasha: Thanks. It’s nice to hear that. Yeah. I mean we put a lot of effort obviously into getting the optimization done right for the site and for the marketplace and making sure that the features that are available to sellers are up-to-date so that they basically are ahead of the game and ahead of the pack.Adam: So I think this could be quite challenging to maybe outline simply. So I think the best way that we could maybe go ahead about this is to kind of break the Gigs down and see how we can optimize individual elements to overall boost the ranking of that Gig.Yasha: Sure.Adam: I’m trying to bear in mind Redd here as much as possible as well because I know that SEO isn’t really her thing.Redd: Very, very true. I have a very quick question though just to start off and just so that I understand. So we’re talking about a little bit about two different things. So Fiverr itself is search-engine-optimized for the internet world and then our Gig pages are also optimized in a different way. So we’re not talking about like how to get them higher up in Fiverr. We’re talking about them being accessed by like the whole internet, any search engine anywhere.Yasha: Well, actually both. We want to make sure that not only do you come up well on external sites like Google, Yahoo, Bing and all the others. We want to also make sure that if you search for it internally, that you come up well and one of the ways that that’s done is through the internal search engine optimization and all the algorithm work that’s done by the engineers, et cetera. But the focus that we’re talking about today really is on how to get your Gig page optimized well for the external search engines.Adam: I think a good place to start would be talking about the actual Gig you’re going to offer. So when you decide about setting up your Gig and you’re trying to choose your service, what is the best way to proceed to try and – to have an optimized Gig? Would it be to create a Gig where you’re kind of trying to put everything into one or will it be to try and focus that on individual Gigs so you can optimize them?Yasha: Right.Adam: So to give a kind of example, if I were to do a logo design Gig, or if I were to do a design Gig that had logos, letterheads, business cards, banners, graphics and everything I have inside it, what would be the best way to proceed to start off?Yasha: Right and that’s pretty much the primary question that anybody should think of when they start to create Gigs on Fiverr. If they want to be well-ranked and well-indexed in the search engines, then they should make each Gig individually very focused. So for example what you said, should you offer just logo design or logo design and business cards and letterheads and all this stuff? No, you should offer just logo design and then another Gig should offer letterhead design or another Gig should offer e-book cover illustrations, et cetera.By keeping a tight focus, you enable the search engines to understand specifically what that page offers and to drive highly-targeted traffic specifically to that Gig.Adam: I think that’s also a great tip as well for actual – the internal rank as well. Of course by having the different Gigs, you can make sure you’ve got the most appropriate categories, so logo design can go in logo design where as you say e-book illustration can go in that specific category.Yasha: Absolutely.Adam: So there are both benefits on and off in the guise of those search engines.Yasha: Totally, absolutely correct. I mean we use the same – as just about any search engine work, it’s all – titles are very, very important. They’re probably the main critical element to what it is you want showing up in the search engine result pages.Adam: When we’re choosing our Gig title, I stumbled across something that I’ve been using for a while now where I noticed when we set our Gig title, it sets our URL. So if we set “I will create a really fantastic, awesome-looking logo,” that will create Fiverr.com/myusernamereallyfantasticawesomelookinglogo.Yasha: Right.Adam: What I realized was is if we start off by creating the most on point or optimized title for our Gig, we will get the best URL. So if we set “I will modern logo design,” our URL will have modern logo design and then all the kind of fluff in it. When that’s approved or selected, we then go back and change the Gig title to be friendly for buyers. So you then change that from “I will modern logo design” to “I would create a beautiful modern logo for you”.Yasha: Yes, that is something and it is a very useful tip actually because it enables you to have more words essentially indexed by the search engines. So you will come up for more searches and for more specific searches that are relevant to that Gig and obviously that brings in users deeper into your – essentially your funnel, your process of converting them from prospects to buyers. But that said, you have to be very careful with that because if you start abusing that, for example if you write “I will logo, logo, logo,” the system will pick that up eventually and manually or automatically and that kind of thing is sort of let’s say frowned upon because you’re spamming, if you will, the crawlers with the word “logo”.Adam: Yeah, the thing is as well if I’m right in thinking, that’s also actually going to be poor for your search engine optimization for search engines are quite aware of that now.Yasha: Exactly.Adam: So trying to abuse the system doesn’t actually help you really in any kind of way.Yasha: This is completely counterproductive and that’s why we absolutely advice against it and that’s why when we see that, we do what we can to have the user change that or moderate it because we don’t want it to be – it’s not beneficial to them either on Fiverr or offsite.Adam: Yeah, because unfortunately I didn’t know about this kind of rule when I first created my first Gig and I put a lot of specific details in my title. So one of them was “I will review your website and provide ten tips” and the issue I’ve got is if I ever want to change that to five tips, my URL still says 10. So it would have been a lot better for me to go a bit more vague but more on point with “I will review your website” and then change it.Yasha: And of course the length of the title also matters a great deal. The title, the header, the description and the tags are all very, very good elements for SEO but specifically the title. You want to make them very on point and again, you don’t want to stuff it with keywords because it doesn’t help and in fact Fiverr’s platform has a sort of recommended length monitor. So that when you start typing your title, it tells you when you’ve reached through the right amount characters and that’s a very handy way to measure how long and snappy should your title be for that Gig.Adam: Definitely.Yasha: Yeah.Adam: So coming off from the title, I think the next element you kind of look at is the images of your Gig. So I’m right in thinking I believe when you upload your image, Fiverr keeps the name of your image. So how could we use that to benefit the optimization of our Gig?Yasha: Right, and that’s actually a very, very interesting and big topic for us. A lot of users just let their computer pick a random name for the image and then they will say this so you will have “5X7559.jpg” and they will upload that and it doesn’t help because the search engine has no idea what that means. But if you upload an image for a buyer and the image is illustrationofbluescissorsin3D.jpg or whatever, then that is picked up by the search engine and they can read the text and use it to increase the value of the page in the search rankings.Adam: So really that’s quite important for anywhere you’re kind of uploading the image or the file. So we’re talking your profile photo. Rather than have like selfie.jpg if you had your username as your profile photo.Yasha: Right.Adam: For your Gig images, if you had anything relating to your title, so if you’re logo design, you might have modernlogodesign1.jpg, modernlogodesign2, kind of along those lines. Let’s say your second image showed your extras, modern logo design extras, and then you set for your live portfolio as well. It’s important to name them around what you deliver.Yasha: Yes. It is something that if you do, it is a sort of – not a very well-known tip by the people who aren’t professional SEOs. But if you are, it’s kind of part and parcel of being an SEO is you want to always make sure your images are optimized in terms of the name of the file and the weight of the file and things like that. But definitely the name matters a lot because that’s ultimately the text of the – that search engines are able to read about it.Adam: I think both me and Redd right now are trying to remember the name that we’ve uploaded to our image.Redd: I’m pretty sure that mine is like “headshot42”. I think I’m going to be changing that. OK. But I have a quick question. You said to – for your profile image, you could put – you should put your username. But for me, I only provide voiceovers. So would it be beneficial for me to make the title of my profile picture something related to voiceovers?Yasha: I mean you can make the profile image something like “yourusernamevoiceoverartist.jpg” or dot gif or whatever.Redd: What a good feeling of finding some stuff.Yasha: And then people, they search for your username and voiceover or even just voiceover because your username is associated with that. If the page that you promote that on is well-ranked, then obviously that helps in ranking higher.Redd: I’m learning so much. Wonderful. Keep going, keep going.Adam: So I think the next one after images, you would maybe look at the videos of your Gig.Yasha: Right.Adam: So my knowledge is quite limited when it comes to video SEO or video marketing in general and the only thing that I know is that search engines can rank videos and YouTube videos seem to get a preference in them. But in regards to Fiverr, what could we potentially do with our video to help how it’s ranked or how it’s displayed?Yasha: In regards to – you mean the video on the Gig?Adam: The video we upload on Fiverr, yeah.Yasha: So the video on the Gig page is crawled. It can be crawled by the search engines. Of course YouTube videos are well-liked by Google. I don’t think there’s much of a surprise there. It makes a lot of sense. But videos on Fiverr are really there for the community of buyers to look at and understand what’s in the Gig better or in the case of video intros, it can be a sample of the work. There’s really not much at the moment other than describing it well when you save the file just like what you do with an image. You give the video a name. So you give that name again a very descriptive name and if there are other areas of the file that you can edit, sometimes you can put in another description, a sort of a meta description for the video. There are other things that actually we’re looking at doing that enable users to specify more details about the video. That’s something that we are still doing in the works, but we’ve already applied it in some cases to images that have names and videos that have names. So they come up better internally and externally.Adam: OK. So if Google shows a preference to YouTube videos, obviously because they own YouTube, would there be any benefit in us taking the video that we create for our Gig, uploading that to YouTube and maybe putting the link in the description to our Fiverr Gig or would that be kind of duplicated content?Yasha: It is in a sense duplicated content but of course people post or repost videos to their YouTube account. That’s perfectly natural and the search engines understand that if you’re using a YouTube video, when you have a link to the Gig on another site and that it’s an ecommerce site and you have a very similar video on that site, then of course it takes that into account but that does not hurt the ranking of that Gig. That specifically would achieve anything – that will be a slight benefit to the Gig because you’re making a link from one side to another. You’re giving it a little bit of link juice from YouTube to Fiverr.Adam: OK. So that would be the benefit then of kind of putting that content on YouTube to play to the fact that YouTube likes – Google likes YouTube’s videos.Yasha: Yes. So the people watch it on video, watch the video on YouTube and some percentage of them click on the link that would actually be very beneficial to you in terms of coming up in search engine results.Adam: Would that also benefit in places like – I know Facebook at the moment, they allow you to edit the end of your video to add a link to a point to wherever you want to go. Would there also be benefits to sharing that video across places like Facebook and other social media platforms?Yasha: I would say Facebook is worth your while. There’s some social media that are obviously very good. If you blog on a place like the Pulse, you can also point to the video page or to your Fiverr page from a blog there. But Facebook is very good. It’s not going to get you very high rankings in the search engines like Google but it will possibly drive a lot of people to your Gig page from Facebook itself by sharing and comments and likes.Adam: OK. So if I were to simplify that and kind of sum it up, it’s good to post your video in other locations but try and make sure the locations you’re posting in are popular.Yasha: Absolutely and popular and well-reviewed by the search engines. You want to go to a place that Google considers authoritative and that it considers high quality.Adam: OK, fantastic.Redd: I’m having like a slight problem reconciling the fact that we just referred to Facebook as high quality and an authority. Just based off my current newsfeed.Yasha: Well, let’s say I’m talking about the technology of Facebook.Adam: So coming down from videos, I’m going to guess the next area would be the Gig description. That would be a good place to go. So I believe the Gig description at the moment, actually there’s quite a lot we can work on there to try and make sure that we’re ranking better.Yasha: Yeah, absolutely. The Gig description that’s sort of – that’s where you can score a lot of homeruns because beyond the title, which is extremely important as is the URL, the description allows you to feed many, many words, many, many sentences that are descriptive and that explain the Gig in a very clear and succinct way – or sorry, in a very clear and garrulous way actually. You can use I think almost 1100 or 1200 characters there of space which is quite a lot.So to describe a productized service in about 1200 characters gives you ample ability to tell the search engines exactly what it’s about, you know, kind of different ways to explain your Gig extras, to explain your product features, et cetera, and that’s really where you will get a lot of search traffic from because the page is crawled in its entirety. It’s not just the title that’s crawled.Adam: So I think what you said is it’s important that we try and use as much of that kind of 1200 characters as we can because if we say for example only set a sentence or two, the whole page is read by search engines so they will be reading the category links or the internal Fiverr links, all that other stuff.So if you write quite a very short description, we’re not going to really be given enough to search engines to say, “Hey, look at me. Read me. I’m important,” whereas if we put more content there, search engines would go, “Well, this is what we should be focusing on.”Yasha: Right. And that’s why there’s even I think a 120-character minimum that you have to fill in for the Gig description. Part of that is to make sure that robots aren’t just slapping up automatically-generated kids and part of that is to make sure that the quality of the Gig is higher because by being more descriptive, you’re not just more useful to the search engines. The search engines want to really know how does this page help answer questions from real people and that’s exactly what optimization is all about is helping people who are looking for things get the answers they need in one click and be able to get their solutions solved in one click and obviously as you know, that’s the direction Fiverr is always heading towards is making the entire transaction as few clicks as possible.So by having a rich description, you’re making sure that the engines are reading that more than we will say the navigation bar and that they’re putting an emphasis about your Gig’s search queries on the text of the actual Gig.Adam: That makes a lot of sense.Redd: I think it’s important also at the same time to say that the other benefit to having a really well-fleshed-out Gig description is that you are also more attractive to buyers, not just – so it’s not just about the – getting the people to the page. It’s about them converting them into sales.Yasha: Yes, and one of the ways you do that is by having a very useful and clear description and that means more words. So be it because the more answers you – the more questions you answer in your Gig description, the higher likelihood somebody is going to be comfortable in making the transaction.Adam: From what I’ve noticed in recent times, search engines like more and more kind of like natural content or content that the user is looking for as opposed to content that’s ticking necessarily all of the boxes. So maybe I heard like five years ago, it was a case of if you have a lot of links to your Gig, you would rank high because technically you seem popular whereas now search engines are more focused on is this actually what the person searching is looking for. If it is, they will show it.So I think the great thing about that is, is the better your description as Redd says, you’re going to appease search engines but you’re also making it better to – or increase the chances of buyers actually ordering from you as well.Yasha: Correct. I mean the goal here is for sellers to have buyers place orders and the way that you do that is answering their questions very specifically and very quickly. So that’s why those descriptions matter.Adam: So within the description as well, Fiverr gives us a couple of kind of formatting tools where we can make the text kind of bold and we can also highlight it. Is that shown to search engines in the same kind of way? Do they see that as more important than text that isn’t?Yasha: Absolutely, they do. They see larger fonts. They see bold, highlighting as emphasis on those characters, on those words, so they do place emphasis on them. So if you have a logo design Gig and you might want to bold that phrase, “logo design” somewhere in a sentence where it appears naturally. For example I will make a great logo design for you and you can have a revision or whatever else you put in your description. If you highlight the “logo design” phrase, then the search engines will pick up on that as a keyword in the description.But again, you want to be careful not to overdo it because if you overdo it, it looks spammy or not pleasant and the search engines are very, very smart. They know exactly what kind of tricks people are up to in that sense. If they see unnatural phrases, they don’t rank them well. So you want to highlight really select few keywords.Adam: I suppose technically if you highlight everything, then in theory, nothing is highlighted at all.Yasha: Right. If you highlight an enormous amount of stuff, then it’s basically no differentiating value between any of the words.Redd: So I have a question. Is there any difference between lowercase and uppercase?Yasha: Yes, there is but that one you have to be extremely careful about. There’s no difference in terms of search engine results because people search in lowercase and uppercase all the time. But in terms of how the Gig is seen or the page is seen by the engines, there’s something – if a very strategic word or any important word that’s very relevant to the content is all uppercase, I mean that’s another way to highlight that text but it doesn’t necessarily help you if you start making full sentences all uppercase and things like that.Redd: So basically you don’t shout.Yasha: Don’t shout. People – it’s the internet. Some of us still have manners.Redd: I’m glad I’m not the only one that thinks that. Yay.Yasha: Yeah, etiquette matters.Adam: So I think the last point about the description is the fact that at the moment, Google is programmed. Fiverr tells it to try and use the first kind of sentence or two of your description to show in the search engine results. So it’s important that we try and set the best possible kind of initial couple of sentences to have the best text show in the search engines.Yasha: Right.Adam: So in your opinion, what would be the best kind of text to set for the first couple of sentences?Yasha: Well, having a lot of experience working in journalism before my time doing organic marketing, I can see headlines matter and you want to make sure that the title of your Gig is very succinct and then the first couple of descriptive sentences in the Gig description are basically like a summary of the entire article in one or two sentences. Keep them short. Keep them sweet. Try to communicate the entire gist of what people are about to read in one or two sentences. It should be one or two lines across the screen, no more.The reason you want to do that is because that will basically tell the reader a very high level of review of what the entire Gig is about and that lets also the search engines know exactly what the entire Gig is about and to place emphasis on those aspects of the Gig.Adam: So I’ve seen some Gigs looking around where they kind of – the first thing they will write is say “Do not order before contacting me,” and that’s like the first line of their description. Now I imagine that is actually quite poor because if search engines pick that up, they’re going to see your Gig inside the search engine page and the first thing they’re going to see is “don’t order”.Yasha: Right. Pretty much they’re going to see “do not contact me”.Adam: So it’s taken out of context from that, from the search engine.Yasha: Welcome to McDonald’s. We don’t have any hamburgers for you. Please go away. That wouldn’t be good. I don’t think they would ever do that and neither should anybody who’s trying to sell on Fiverr. If you want to attract more buyers, the best way to do that is in the Gig description, to make sure that the first two lines or maximum three lines of text is really descriptive of what the rest of the Gig is about.Adam: OK. So it’s really important for kind of that being overview and the pitch of what you’re doing as opposed to specific specifications.Yasha: Right. Think of it as like a mini essay. The first paragraph should be extremely descriptive about the whole point of the essay and then the rest of it goes into all the details and at the end, you have a nice little conclusion or summary.Adam: So we’ve talked about that search engines all kind of read the whole page, all the content, which I imagine also means that they’re going to read the ratings left on the Gig as well.Yasha: Yes, they absolutely read the ratings and the ratings matter. Social proof has never mattered more than it does now in terms of the internet because for example if you have links coming to you from Fiverr and thumbs-ups or likes or whatever, those all count as well and ratings on any sites matter very much and in fact Fiverr has a rating system in place that Google is specifically akin to liking. They like the specific scheme or format that we use for that and so ratings that you get, they’re a matter of great deal.Adam: OK. So this may be a crazy thought but imagine if I’ve written my description and I think it’s absolutely lovely and I want search engines to read that. Is there a chance where the more and more ratings that I get kind of take the focus away from the description because there’s so much text below as well?Yasha: No. One of the reasons why that is, is because not only do you have ratings. You also have a lot of feedback and reviews about the Gig and Google can tell that those are reviews about the Gig as opposed to a description of the Gig. It knows very well where it says “Gig description”. The following text is the Gig description and it places emphasis on that Gig since there are some primary text that describes what it is. But the more you have positive reviews and the more you have good ratings, the more that helps you in terms of, if you will, the grade of the Gig.Adam: OK. So Fiverr allows us to reply to our ratings as well and I was wondering if say for example I receive a rating, somebody loves the work. Is there a difference – let’s say I’m doing a logo design Gig. Is there a difference between if I replied “Thank you for your order,” or if I replied, “Thank you. I’m glad you liked your modern logo design”? Is there a benefit to me kind of referencing my keywords or my Gig further inside the ratings?Yasha: So there is a benefit to mentioning keywords inside of the reply and obviously if the buyer does it, that’s even better. But if you have 100 buyers saying, “Thanks for the great logo design,” and they all say the same thing, then after the first three or four, it doesn’t help so much. It won’t hurt you obviously especially if they’re satisfied customers.But if you write back a reply, what you should intend to do is to write back and reply with different variations of the keyword phrase. So for example, you might write back, “I’m really glad you liked your modern logo design,” or you might also write back another reply, “I’m really glad you like the modern design logo I made for you,” or things like that. You might write back, “I’m really glad you liked the logo design. Come back again,” or whatever.Just put a natural English or natural whatever language you’re using on Fiverr. As you know, Fiverr supports more than one language and the more variation you add to those keywords, the better it is in terms of scoring the page because if you just keep putting the same one over and over again, it sounds spammy.Adam: I think that’s a really good point to mention as well actually because I think a lot of sellers, they like to reply to all of their buyers. But when you start doing quite a high quantity or high density of orders, a lot of sellers I believe take on almost like a template reply of “Thanks for ordering. Order again soon.”Yasha: Right.Adam: So trying to be a little bit more personal or switching up those replies could be an advantage to them because it could help them rank higher in search engines.Yasha: Absolutely. I mean it might take you an extra five seconds to add in the phrase or delete a word here or there when you do the reply but it’s worth it in terms of the long term ranking of your Gig.Adam: That’s really helpful to know because I believe Redd at the moment, you try to respond to every feedback or rating you receive.Redd: Yes. I respond to every single rating and I do my very, very best to – I don’t like it when – when I look at people’s Gigs and I look at responses to reviews, I don’t like it when it’s just a cookie-cutter response.So I have like a variation of ones that I use. I would generally go with “great buyer,” “lovely buyer,” “Always a pleasure working with you,” “Thanks so much,” so on and so forth because for one thing, I’m very, very into the idea of customer service and I feel like creating a more personal response is just – it doesn’t take me long and I don’t know. If it was me, I would like to feel like I wasn’t just getting a standard template response every time. They have taken the time to review me. So I feel like I should take a moment to actually review them.Adam: So again as well there, you’ve got the benefit for the search engine but also from just a standard being a good service provider, it kind of goes hand in hand.Redd: Yeah, exactly.Yasha: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a very healthy part of organic marketing and getting the word out. You want good word of mouth marketing of people who are reviewing you. You want them to tell their friends offline and online about you and obviously one of the best ways and the easiest ways to do that is to provide a personalized review or reply to a review.Adam: So in regards to the Gig, I think we’ve pretty much covered all the actual kind of onsite elements. We’ve done the video, the images, the title, the description, looking at the ratings as well. So I think the only maybe other element or aspect to look at is talking about offsite a little bit and from that, I’m thinking along the lines of kind of backlinking to your Gig.Now whenever you normally hear search engine optimization, the first thing you will hear is backlinking or backlinks and before I even got into search engine optimization, that always confused me. So Yasha, can you kind of give us an overview of essentially what a backlink is?Yasha: Yeah. A backlink is basically a link from another site that points to your site and essentially people use these links to increase their ranking that you see uses a lot in the older search engine technologies or older search engine versions when it was a much simpler pattern of just counting the number of links pointing to a page and valuing that page and giving it authority based on the number of backlinks it had.Adam: So it has gone from being a very, very key factor to one factor of many.Yasha: Absolutely. I don’t know how many people know this but every time you type in the character in Google or do a raw search of any kind in Google, there are more than half a million or so calculations happening in their ginormous algorithm. So it’s an extremely complex set of calculations. Backlinks is really just one of them.Adam: So when we’re talking about backlinking, I suppose the temptation may be well, the more backlinks I have, the better I’m going to rank and from my understanding, that isn’t the case.Yasha: Right. It’s not all about backlinks. It hasn’t been for a long time. There are a lot of elements that go into SEO. One of them is metadata and on some Gigs on Fiverr, I think pretty much most Gigs at this point, but definitely on illustration and animation and things like that. You could set a whole lot of metadata tags also on voiceovers. You could set like if you’re a female, what accents you could do, what age groups you cover, things like that.So those sort of meta tags that are actually onsite matter a lot as well as the backlinks that matter and as well as the quality of the content on the page and how well you promote that page. In terms of natural and ethical transparence marketing of the page, it matters as well and how many people respond to the page. That’s called social buzz and the more people that like your page or review it or give it a thumbs-up or commit transactions or place an order, the better.Adam: So I think a way to talk about that, then coming just back to the backlink element of that, it is the case of it’s better to have a few quality things or websites linking to your Gig as opposed to having just a thousand links because you think they’re going to help.Yasha: Yeah. If you can put a thousand garbage links up on low quality sites that have no traffic, you may as well not put them up. If you’re going to put up 20 really awesome links across very well-rated sites, then that’s going to do a lot more than having those thousand garbage links up.On the other hand, if you build a thousand really, really good links or rather if you earn them for people who see your site, then there’s no topping that kind of power. I mean if you have the ability to get people to actually give you links naturally and just because they think your page deserves it, then that’s kind of the highest word of mouth sort of check on the – it’s sort of the verification or the social proof that the search engines are looking for to know that you have a high quality and authoritative page and that’s where they’re going to be motivated to drive traffic that’s relevant.Adam: So Fiverr actually has some help with that built into the Gig where after the buyer orders, they’re prompted to share the URL or to share the Gig somewhere else.Yasha: Yes.Adam: So maybe if you reference to the buyer, kind of say “I would be really grateful if you could help spread the word,” by having them share that more frequently, you’re going to receive not only the traffic benefits of that but a natural SEO boost from that as well.Yasha: Absolutely. Again that’s one of the things why sharing the Gig URL after the buyer is satisfied with the delivery, having them review it on other sites, whether they have a blog or a social media profile somewhere, people doing that are helping the seller a lot to get to a better score in their search engine ranking.Adam: I should have mentioned this earlier but I think it brings us full circle quite nicely because it’s back to the Gig titles. But someone actually told me previously a great way to create a Gig title is to first go into Google and start to kind of like type the service or the kind of title that you wanted to set and Google will bring up kind of most recent or most popular searches based around that.Yasha: Yeah, it comes up with not just the most popular but what it considers to be the best-rated and the ones worth driving traffic to. So if they’re driving people to any logo design Gig that they find particularly authoritative, then you might want to search for your specific Gig type.If it’s logo design, search for whatever kind of logo design style it is and you will come up with the best ones that it considers to be the best and you should also not just look at Google. We should also look at Bing. We should also look at Yahoo. You can also look at whatever local search engine you might use that’s in your region. A lot of towns have local search engines as well. So you might rank well if you’re providing something that’s particularly popular in a specific location and there are sellers who do.Then you can have your Gig come up but towards the top if you – you don’t want to copy obviously. But if you model or structure your title similarly to the ones who are at the top.Adam: So to give you an example of that, I’ve just gone into Google and I’ve just started typing “create a logo” and Google has popped up before I’ve written my queries saying as a top search, create a logo for YouTube channel. So is that something that we can take to give us an idea of actually if I base my service around creating logos for YouTube, that could actually rank quite well or it could be quite popular because a lot of people are searching for it?Yasha: It can but also remember that Google customizes your search results unless you tell it not to, which means if you are searching for a particular logo type, and you’ve been searching for that logo type either on Fiverr or just randomly on Google, eventually you start developing patterns in your searches. So it starts to show you things related to what you’ve seen or have expressed an interest in.If you want to get a certain view of that, then you would open up a browser window that’s not logged in to Google. For example a guest window or an anonymous window or a privacy window with Firefox and then you would search Google that way and it would show you sort of its overall neutral favorite. If you want something that’s based closely on what their interests are, then yes, you can do a search when you’re logged in and they will come up with the phrases that are most relevant to your search patterns.Adam: OK. I think that’s a really good tip. So the Chrome example would be you would go into incognito mode, visit Google and then perform that kind of search to try and get unbiased results.Yasha: Correct. And in Firefox, it would be private window and every browser has its own little privacy option or you could just be logged out of Google and whatever browser you use.Redd: Yasha, we talked a little about backlinks and we’ve talked a little about kind of dispersing your information in places. Does it behoove people to do any of that within the Fiverr forum?Yasha: That’s a great question. The Fiverr forum is a very, very good place to put a link naturally to your Gig if you have a relevant post to put about it up in the forum. The forum is well-rated. It’s well-scored. It’s well-built and very often naturally, people that search for things on Google will come up with links that actually point into the forum. From there, they can find the seller’s Gig.Redd: So not necessarily to like overly spam the forum but maybe just popping something into the My Gig section.Yasha: Definitely the My Gig section would be the place and to not overdo it. You always want to keep in mind moderation. Balance is extremely key in SEO. You want to show that you’re not – that you’re smart enough to know what you need to do but you’re not sneaky and you’re not trying to break the rules or break the algorithm in a deceptive way to the search engines.You want to show them very transparently, “This is what I’m doing. This is what I’m promoting. I have one link here to this Gig,” in a relevant fashion to what I’m talking about in this forum post. You don’t want to start posting 50 forum posts a day with that same link all over the place. You do it where it’s natural and highly relevant and for that, you will be rewarded.Adam: So it’s my understanding as well that search engines love a good aged link. As the link gets older, they respect it more necessarily. So from that then, it will be better to create a post in something like My Gigs, maybe a sales pitch or a letter with your link included and rather than constantly post more and more links as time goes on, instead look to add to or improve that post itself as opposed to posting lots of different ones.Yasha: Right. It’s actually interesting because each of those major search engines does it slightly differently. Bing and Yahoo tend to look at them kind of similarly but even they have slight differences. They tend to look at the older a page is, the more authoritative it is because it has been around longer.Somehow this seems to make it more important to those search engines. Google on the other hand likes to see information that’s really much more up-to-date and so if you have a page that’s ranked by Google, you want to keep that page fresh every 30 to 90 days. You want to add or edit something or remove something. That keeps it fresh. But the URL itself, if it’s – if you have that URL up for a long time, Bing and Yahoo will rank it well and if you keep it updated on a consistent basis, Google will also rank it well or will rank it as well as they should be according to their algorithm. So you kind of need to do both. You need to have the link be consistently there and you have to constantly – not constantly but every month or three, update it a little bit.Adam: I think that’s important for the actual human user conversion side as well. So you focus on one post for your Gig and focus on putting your energy into that to make it the best possible post that you can. So the search engine will like it. As you say over time, but also from frequent updates, and you’re more likely to gain more traction from real human buyers from having a good focused post and rather than 20 different posts over a different period of time.Yasha: Absolutely. It’s better to have high quality in a lower volume than to just spam the internet with millions of pages that are never looked at by anyone and never updated or followed up on.Redd: All right. Well, I think we’ve had so many, many good points made. So let’s wrap it up for now with this amazing topic. Thank you so much to Yasha for joining us. You can actually find him on Fiverr at Laughzilla. Our jingle was made by Customdrumloops and we were edited today by Dansha. Thanks so very much and we will see you next week.Transcription by Transexpert
