{"id":93,"date":"2020-10-27T14:45:28","date_gmt":"2020-10-27T18:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/?p=93"},"modified":"2022-05-25T14:41:01","modified_gmt":"2022-05-25T18:41:01","slug":"why-i-decided-to-learn-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/why-i-decided-to-learn-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Decided to Learn SEO?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>A homework assignment for an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) class I am taking, is to write why I decided to learn SEO. This is something I have decided to do several times and could make for a long story. But an abbreviated version is below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I started making my own websites about 20 years ago. I made a few sites but my most important was a website that hosted the computer games I created. Naturally I wanted to get as many visitors to my website as I could. I mean that was back in the days when most websites had a counter in the visitor saying &#8220;You are the XXX visitor to this site&#8221; so it was kind of a reputation thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"225\" height=\"144\" src=\"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/hit-counter.png\" alt=\"Website Counter\" class=\"wp-image-94\" srcset=\"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/hit-counter.png 225w, https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/hit-counter-150x96.png 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><figcaption>Early 200&#8217;s style website hit counter<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>After making a website for my computer games I started doing affiliate marketing. I would create a website based on a topic I was interested in, create some content of my own and hopefully get some reusable content from the ebook I was selling. Then link to the Clickbank page I was selling. Obliviously the more views I got the better so I spent quite a bit of time learning SEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once I started going to college I didn&#8217;t have time for extra learning and we covered very little (if any) SEO in college. Didn&#8217;t do a ton of SEO in my first development position either. But after I started working for myself I realized that people didn&#8217;t want to pay me to design and develop a website that didn&#8217;t get any traffic. So I had to start optimizing these websites to bring in enough traffic to make it worthwhile for my client&#8217;s. However SEO had changed quite a bit and the things I used to do didn&#8217;t work so well anymore. So I started relearning what I was doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However once again a position change put my in a spot where I didn&#8217;t do SEO anymore. However in the last couple of years I am back in a spot where I work for a company that develops websites for clients that need to increase traffic to justify the expense of design and development. So here I am once again turning my focus back to SEO in order to over a more full service digital marketing menu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A homework assignment for an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) class I am taking, is to write why I decided to learn SEO. This is something I have decided to do several times and could make for a long story. But an abbreviated version is below: I started making my own websites about 20 years ago. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1120,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-search-engine-optimization-seo"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/seo-scaled.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/seo-scaled.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"John Wierenga","author_link":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/author\/john\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1915,"href":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions\/1915"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnwierenga.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}