This post was previously hosted on www.mikeeschmee.com in November 2019. The below has been reviewed and updated in October 2023.
The full SEO For The Left Series:
- SEO For The Left: The Case For
- SEO For The Left: Content
- SEO For The Left: Onsite
- SEO For The Left: Backlinks
People are rightfully skeptical of “SEO” and the people who sell it. Fifteen years ago if you tried to find any information about it online you will be inundated with pop-up riddled websites, false promises, and cheap black-hat services that may have gotten you eventually deindexed. Today this isn’t quite the case, but I think the stigma largely continues in the anti-capitalist/left community. And that is to our detriment.
Showing up 1st (first) in the search results for a Google search can be extremely lucrative $$$. But instead of thinking about it in dollars, what if we instead thought: how many people can we properly define socialism to? Or educate what unions have done for the working class? Or why Medicare For All will not overall increase our costs for healthcare? Or who killed Jeffery Epstein? That’s worth more than money.
Google alone (90%+ of all searches in USA) serves results for billions of searches each DAY. People have questions. They ask Google. Let’s make sure they are getting our answers in front of them.
Using the Google Ads Keyword Planner (more on that in Content For The Left), there are at least 100,000-500,000 searches each month just asking “what is socialism” or some variant of it. And these searches will result in links on other websites, shares on social, and links in boomer’s FW:re:FW:fw:DID YOU HEAR WHAT HAPPENS WITH SOCIALISM HAPPENS TO THE FOOD THERE IS NO FOOD AT STORES: Fw: RE: AND EVERYONE DIES emails. So the potential reach is massive for a single search term.
Let’s take a look at the results for my search for “what is socialism” (your search may vary), to show you how much work we have to do. After a dictionary definition from Oxford, four drop down questions google deemed related (more on these in Content For The Left) Here are my results:
These were the results in November 2019. My search in October 2023 included many of the same investment sites, as well as economic and philosophy schools (suspect!), but oddly no videos.
- Three Youtube Videos:
- Now This World: it’s not great.
- Hip Hughes: poorly produced and content probably not great.
- Information Station: This is a site by the “Job Creators Network” (conservative advocacy network run by Home Depot CEO) so you can imagine what it’s like.
- Then The Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post (written by Glenn Kessler, the inept Pinocchios guy).
- Then an investment educational site(!!), Investopedia.
- Then a pro bank/capital site that is owned by the same company as the Investopedia. As far as content it’s not too terrible but sneaks in the fascism comparison to falsely equate.
The rest of the page was Wikipedia entries and then links to similar searches.
Is this what we want people to see? Even if a few of these are technically correct definitions do they help convince anyone that socialism is anything other than an impossible utopia or result in Hilter II, like so many currently believe?
This is just one very broad example. There are thousands of other topics and recent events where we are not showing up on searches either. We are going up against massive legacy media companies, and Koch/bank backed websites. So how can we compete?
- Having websites (we seem to be losing them rather than gaining)
- Having the content
- Having our websites and content formatted in the correct way
- Having backlinks to the websites and content we want people to see
This on-going SEO/Content For The Left series will help answer the above so we can continue to grow the progressive/socialist movement until billionaires no longer exist.
The full SEO For The Left Series:
- SEO For The Left: The Case For
- SEO For The Left: Content
- SEO For The Left: Onsite
- SEO For The Left: Backlinks
If you don’t have the time (months) to wait for me to finish writing these here are some legitimate and good beginner resources for SEO:
- A beginners guide for SEO: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
- For WordPress Blogs, this plugin is probably the best/most popular: Yoast SEO https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo
- For SEO News: https://searchengineland.com/
