SEO for the Rest of Us

Welcome to SEO for the Rest of Us. This is your guide to separating search engine optimization fact from fiction — mythbusting, plain talk, and a healthy dose of “I hate all the crap that’s out there about SEO.” Because let’s face it: there is a lot of crap. Everybody and his brother seems to be a consultant, guru, advisor, or ninja, promising you all sorts of things in exchange for a bit of your time, money, or both to learn their special secret for getting the almighty Google gods to behave nicely. There is no secret. There is no hack, no trick, no magic formula. I want you to print that statement out and stick it on your computer, somewhere you’ll see it when you want to scream at Search Console because your metrics tanked yet again.

How do I know? I’ve been doing this a long time – a very long time. Like, since the internet began to reach the public around 1992 or so. I built my first website in 1999. I’ve been writing and publishing online, on my own websites and clients’ websites, since 2000. (To make things easier, I’ll call any online publishing platform a ‘website.’ You may be a blogger, an Etsy seller, or managing a Facebook page for your business — same difference.)

My goal with this Substack is to make search engine optimization (SEO) and its newfound cousin, AI engine optimization (AEO), easier to understand — for bloggers, small business owners, Etsy sellers, and anyone else trying to get found online without selling a kidney to an agency. I’ll dig through the reports, the data, and the articles, capturing the best information I can and sharing it with you here: what’s real, what’s hype, and what actually moved the needle. Any of my recommendations will be based on my own firsthand experience working with my website and SEO sandbox, Home Garden Joy (homegardenjoy.com).

Feel free to drop me a note with your questions — I’ll try to answer them as best as I can. I anticipate publishing once every two weeks, the same cadence as my YouTube channel, Marketing Motivation, where I talk about content marketing and SEO too. If that sounds useful, hit subscribe so you don’t miss a post.

Welcome. See you soon.