We want to acquaint you with Cláudio Souza from Brazil. He strives to save people’s lives and spreads information about one of the scariest diseases of our time, HIV, on his blog Soropositivo.

Cláudio is responsible for everything on his website!


WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A HEALTH BLOGGER?

Allen MacCannell: Hello Cláudio! What is your global mission?

Cláudio Souza: Olá Allen! That’s pretty simple. My website was born to save lives. I try to prevent people from contracting HIV. But saving lives also means helping people who are desperate, who have known they were HIV positive, or who were afraid to be and would rather not know. I believe the scope of this goes further.

A: Do you remember your first steps? Did you start with a few tools for different purposes or with an all-in-one SEO platform?

C: I started with Yoast. And it was not easy. But I knew it would be a difficult path, as Yoast gives you some options for website adjustments.

I learned many things at SEO University. After working for a few years, I found WEBCEO and it showed me best what I needed to do. When I implemented WebCEO generated tasks, the site’s visitation went up. And there was a fantastic moment that surprised me: WEBCEO showed me that there were more than 350 posts without a keyword in the “ALT” tags. I started to work post by post to adjust this error. But I realized that it would take months and months, and I started looking for something that would do this job automatically. I found this BIALT – Bulk Image Alt Text (Alt tag, Alt Attribute) with Yoast SEO that made the adjustments in conjunction with YOAST. After a week of republishing the pages and posts, in a surprising way, traffic practically quadrupled overnight! And the only thing that could have changed that were the ALT tag changes!

So, the tip given by WEBCEO was a fantastic suggestion and I’m afraid to say that I would never have known about this flaw and those blog posts would still be lost on the third or fourth page of searches.

A: In this tough matter, what challenges did you face?

C: The goal of my job is to save lives. Well, I’m not a doctor, not even a health professional. I have learned so much in the field of medicine. The good quality of my competitors’ texts forced me to seek to offer better content and to improve my content with better SEO practices, so that I would not only become “more visible”, but highly rated among visitors.

WEBCEO ended up teaching me other things such as how to improve myself in SEO practice, because better content only appears in the hands of a webmaster and blogger who aware of their responsibilities. And I am getting a good rate of frequent attendance and new visits. This is nothing that can be achieved without effort. I have gained visibility with the blog optimization work. Loyalty to my blog happened because I was better able to inform people who searched for a specific type of help, and because the world, starting with Google, treated my content better. I was driven by the vigor of the competition to improve the content of the blog. And I have seen my improvements in Analytics reports and WordPress tools. In a way of saying, the WebCEO tools also improved my level, as a person, as a human being, because you can only keep your loyal readers with reliable content.

A: Speaking about the challenges and obstacles you encountered on your way, tell us also about your most recent success.

C: My blog was in a very bad visibility situation and I was contacted by the WEBCEO team and received a proposal to use WEBCEO and I was excited to do so. I missed a tool like this and the proposal that was made to me made it possible to do useful work at a time when my work, my Blog, appeared poorly in searches.

A:  What was the most remarkable challenge that you’ve faced in SEO?

C: To have gotten into Google’s top three pages with many keywords, gaining visibility and the fantastic return to the top Google position with more than 20 keywords.

A:  Having long term experience in the niche and a lot of work under your belt, which SEO tasks now eat up most of your time?

C: I work alone, my wife revises the texts and I take care of all the tasks by myself.


HOW WEBCEO STIMULATED THIS HEALTH BLOGGER’S PRODUCTIVENESS

A: When was the first time you started using WebCEO? What SEO tasks have you solved with this platform?

C: I got to know WEBCEO around 2003/2004 when a friend explained to me the need to be careful with SEO. It was he who showed me your WEBCEO software. He allowed me to make use of the tool, even for my website, which was built on an ASP platform, and had many problems. This way I saw that I had to correct many errors. I did correct them, always taking into account the advice that WEBCEO gave me.

I took your course at WebCEO University and ended up buying the software and started working for some small companies. I am a person living with HIV and it is very difficult to get a job that is not remote. What made me most happy is knowing that I was, in some way, helping people to accept this new condition. I took advantage of the interview environment to tell people that we need serious media to deal with this subject.

I was only able to do this intervention because I was found on the second page of results. I was there because WEBCEO made me visible and it made a fantastic difference in my work and my life as well as that of thousands of people, I am not afraid to say so! I have this article on my blog and, in the end, I will deliver it to you. This helped me to come to life for 4 years and also generated a visitation to my blog that I never dreamed I could have.

I keep working on the blog and at the given moment I am still working on JOOMLA, because I had left that obsolescent technology, ASP, behind. And it was operating in joomla that I reached around 5,000 users a day and had started to have great difficulty to maintain the blog, which did not always have ads, due to the nature of the subject in question, AIDS or HIV.

In a moment of rare happiness, I received a good offer from WEBCEO and I remember very well that Allen said that they all wanted my blog to return to the relevance it once, helping to save lives. And this has always been the goal of this blog, day after day. So, I reached this number of views without using any secondary tools. All I needed was information that I used on WEBCEO.

A: How did WebCEO help you with your work?

C: Let’s see this:

Technical Audit. To get a good opinion from search engines I must have a blog or site technically optimized.

In order for you to be able to “have a good opinion about your work on the part of search engine artificial intelligence, you need to have a website that is at least almost perfect in technical terms.

One of the sources from which I take content to translate made a change to their CMS, leaving behind their entire directory tree for no reason. This was generating an immense number of 404 errors where, in fact, permanent redirection would have been necessary.

Without the WEBCEO tools I would not see these errors and, yes, I would be completely damaged in these metrics. The technical audit is an important tool and I depend a lot on it, monitoring these errors here, there and everywhere!

The same tool informs me about internal links that I broke or images that, I’m not sure how, are no longer there

WEBCEO tools helped me to “discover nuances of work” purely and simply by observing in a broad way what I really couldn’t see. When you are working on the WEB you must understand not just what you have to say.

WEBCEO has helped me to be found. And I believe in God. Not in the God who punishes. In the God Who Loves. In the same way that he looks at me and, it is strange to have to write something like that, with love, and even happiness, I am aware of His attention to the WebCEO team. There are so many other sites today doing the work that I once did alone! But the WEBCEO team looked at me!

WebCEO helped me in countless ways, with the advice that the software itself provides, including the links I should “disavow”, to the dangerous competitors that surround me and, many times, I wouldn’t even imagine, by the diverse nature in which they work.

A: After all this time, what are your top 3 most used WebCEO tools?

C:

1. Site Health

2. Keyword Research

3. Monitoring of ups and downs in the rank tracking tool!

These systems led me to understand, in the blink of an eye, the problem of having more than 300 pages without having keywords in the ALT text of each image!

A: Have you tried other SEO platforms? What was the decisive factor that made you choose WebCEO?

C: Yes. I tried others. I didn’t see anything really relevant. And there was the poverty of their support, the delay in responses, the necessary upgrades in order to do a simple new type of scan.

WEBCEO itself, as a company, is quite fair in this regard and its tools are not offered in stages of functionality but rather upgrades are offered in terms of the number of keywords or the number of search engines one needs to work with. 50 keywords is fine for me in the Solo Plan.

Everywhere I could find a technical team providing support, but with an emphasis on selling consumer plans “best suited to my needs”. WEBCEO does not have a pushy sales system. It is natural that they can offer something more to corporations than they do with bloggers. However, they always told me how to do things for free if possible. I don’t mean to demean the names of competitors. But the truth is that WEBCEO is simply unsurpassed.

A:  What did you find unique about WebCEO?

C: Support was great. I’ve never seen anything like it. Sometimes I felt I was in a bar, talking with friends while we were actually talking about an issue on my blog.

The software is amazing. But without the very old-fashion human being and his humanity, nothing could be so good

The software is amazing.

A: I am sure you’ve generated SEO reports. Could you please tell us more about that?

C: I sent them to potential sponsors. People who wanted to sponsor the blog. And I’ve used my reports to measure the blog’s growth in visits and send them charts that allow me to say: I’ve grown 350% over the previous month, and I bet I’m going to go up higher every month this year.


PROFESSIONAL SEO ADVICE AND GUIDANCE

A: What SEO tools are a must for you and what tools would you recommend for any SEO specialist?

C: Without a doubt WEBCEO and YOAST and, if necessary, BIALTY – Bulk Image Alt Text (Alt tag, Alt Attribute).

A:  An SEO specialist, especially if he or she works alone, has a lot of work to do. Did you ever miss deadlines with such a busy schedule?

C: Always! 🙁

A:  What advice can you give to SEO professionals to avoid the pain of missed deadlines?

C: Build a good team, take care of your employees like your children and give access to good software with one person for each task. Happy employees with good tools work miracles!

A:  Are there some SEO hacks for gaining high rankings and driving traffic to a website that you can share?

C: Work with white hat SEO tactics and try to adjust each error on your SITE or BLOG and read the articles that are offered by WEBCEO in their SEO blog.

I always learn something counterintuitive and valuable in the WebCEO Blog posts.

A:  Which WebCEO tool really helped your business grow?

C: Site Health. It is good to look over there and realize, after a while, that your work and effort are paying off, being well received. Well received by the algorithms that rank you best.

A:  How often do you recommend SEO & technical audits? How often did you usually schedule reports?

C: I suggest using Site Health once per week. Disavow bad links once a month if you run a blog with comments.

Also, pay close attention to the quality adjustment guidelines for your HTML.

When it comes to SEO, every detail counts. For better or worse. I insist. Do your work. And avoid black hat chicanery at any cost, because the long path guarantees results even in the structural adjustment of your website or blog. And I have to say that the meta Title tag is very important! Not just for SEO. Also, for the user.

A: It was such an interesting interview. Thank you Cláudio for being with us today.

C: Thank you for inviting me.


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