01) Introduction
I'm writing this to share my journey into Semantic SEO - and especially the teachings of Koray Tugberk GÜBÜR. As with every page on my website, the purpose is to share my journey and thoughts on various issues and topics close to my heart - and also to get to know others (in Singapore and overseas) who are interested in this same topic.
I started learning SEO maybe a year or two before 2010. I used more grey to blackhat methods initially. It helped me with my business. Around 2015, I started to learn paid advertising (Google, Facebook, etc.) and that helped my business grow exponentially - especially since I was probably one of the first in my niche to get into this. So I stopped doing SEO as I didn't have much time and paid ads were working fantastically. In recent years (from the Pandemic onwards), because more and more of my competitors started to use paid advertising, it's been increasingly difficult to get a good ROI and thus I decided to get back into SEO. A huge factor too in my decision to return to studying and learning SEO again was the fact that Generative AI (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) started to become popular and thus I wanted to use it to create content easily. I have always loved writing, but I love to write about things I'm passionate about, not things that I am expected to write about for my SEO and content marketing. So the rise of Generative AI enticed me to get back into SEO as I know I didn't have to write so much content by myself!
2) 2024: Year Of Learning AI & SEO
Sometime near the beginning of 2024, I started to get back into learning SEO during my free time. I also started following AI trends closely as well as using various AI chatbots and automation tools. For SEO, I tried out many different AI Writers (basically Large Language Model wrappers) - and loved especially ZimmWriter. I started to get back into using Facebook (was never a big user) just to join various SEO-related Facebook groups to learn from the discussion there and connect with other like-minded people.
The term "Semantic SEO" was something I began to hear a lot. I bought a number of online courses and joined various paid groups - that's how I generally learn things. And I also bought tons of SEO and AI tools to play around with I heard about the idea of Topical Authority and Topical Mapping and Clustering, etc. These weren't new ideas, of course, but I had been away from SEO for the past 10+ years so these concepts were new to me. Or maybe I should say the terms were pretty new to me, though the idea behind it wasn't so much. I learned about SILOing your website for SEO purposes 10+ years ago and this was a very similar concept.
Very few things in life are totally unique - and we all sit on the shoulders of giants. Things can develop and get better even though the foundational concepts may be the same. And somehow I knew I had to learn all about Semantic SEO and Topical Authority if I were going to be able master SEO.
3) Topical Authority, Topical Mapping, Semantic SEO and Koray Tugberk GÜBÜR
Before joining Koray's course, I bought Casey Keith's Treasure Map, a Semantic SEO course. I also saw a YouTube interview of Koray by Andrew Ansley, who studied hundreds of hours of Koray's work and then built Content Sprout to automate Koray's framework. I also followed Jonathan Boshoff, who specializes in using AI for SEO and has also been influenced by Koray's teachings.
Safi, Hamid Khan, Cohort, 2nd Jan sign up, 8th Jan Cohort