John Mueller’s Advice On SEO And Making Money Online

John Mueller gives valuable advice for those starting their journey on making money online and SEO.
Marie Aquino
May 6, 2023

In a Reddit SEO thread a user asked a couple of questions on SEO such as geotagging images, frequency of publishing content, and link building.

John Mueller shared his thoughts on the thread and also provided some valuable advice for those starting their journey on making money online and SEO:

“Reading between the lines, it seems you want to find a short-cut to making money online. Unfortunately, there’s a long line of people trying to do the same, and some have a lot of practice. Some will even sell you tools and courses on how to make money online (and *they* will be the ones making the money, fwiw, since people pay them for the tools and courses). The good tools cost good money, and they’re not marketed towards people who just want to make money online — they’re targeted at companies who need to manage their online presence and report on progress to their leadership chain. Meh, corporations.

My suggestion, if you feel comfortable spending nights slaving away at a computer, tricking search engines into showing your pages, reaching for those sweet ad & affiliate monies, with a dark hoodie on, while shiptoasting in forums, would be … to learn HTML, learn a bit of programming, and go for it. 90% of the random tricks you run across won’t work, 9% of the remaining ones will burn your sites to the ground, but if you’re lucky & persistent (is that the same?), you’ll run across some things that work for you. If you want to go this route, accept that most – or all – of the things you build will eventually blow up, but perhaps you’ll run into some along the way that make it worthwhile. And … after some time, you might notice that actually building something of lasting value can also be intriguiing, and you’ll start working on a side-project that does things in the right way, where you can put your experience to good use and avoid doing all of the slash & burn site/spam-building. So many of the people doing mainstream, big-company, corporation-level SEO have grown from hacking away and trying things out – you learn a ton that way.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate seeing spam in search, but I absolutely love seeing new folks active in the industry, trying things out, understanding more than what the “SEO 101” guides explain, doing stupid things, doing unexpected things, and slowly learning what it would take to build something really good. I love seeing big companies complain that some small guy is taking over “their” queries, and I love seeing big companies take them back with great SEO. There’s so much to a successful web presence, it’s not just keywords & links.”

Check out the full thread here.