Transcripts
1. Ready to learn SEO 101?: Hi everyone. My name is Stephanie
long and I'm so excited that you've
decided to take my SEO one-on-one course, whether you're a
beginner, intermediate, or advanced, this is
the course for you. You'll learn some new tips
and tricks or brush up on some old skills that you
might have forgotten about. So come along and
I'll be happy to answer any questions
along the way. And after each lesson, we'll have a quick quiz just
to make sure that you're on track and you're
understanding the material. So let's get started. One of the first things we'll be doing is a website audit. We need to do this in
order to see what we need to do in the backend
of a website. So make sure you have
access to a backend of a website or a website in general that somebody
will let you use. Then we'll go over
keyword research, content creation, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. All of these
combined together to make a solid SEO strategy. Another thing that's
very important that we'll go over is
customer reviews. Whether they're good or bad, you need to respond to them because they help you with SEO. The other thing that we will go over is that your
website needs to be mobile friendly because this
is how people will find you. And this also goes
into PageSpeed. Your website needs to load fast. And of course you need to
submit your website to Google, how Google find you if they don't even know
what your website is. So we'll go over how
to submit this to Google and are used
successfully optimized, will find out that two. And of course common
mistakes and miss about SEO. And like I mentioned
in the beginning, we will be going over a quiz
at the end of each lesson. So are you ready to join me? Let's get started.
2. SEO class project description: For your class project, it will be really
important that you have access to a
website's back-end. And this is because
we'll be learning about how search engine works, the fundamentals of SEO, keyword research
and implementing those keywords to your content, as well as on-page SEO, off-page SEO, link building
as well, and technical SEO. And then we'll be talking
about the top SEO mistakes. Then part of the class project. At the end, we'll be doing
an audit of this website. So that's why you do need
access to the backend. And as you can see, I'll be providing you with
this template. I have already filled
in some things for you, but you will need to
take what you have learned from the
class and fully fill this in so that I can
see that you understand SEO and you will be able to
implement this on one page. So using this audit, you will add this to
one page of a website. So I really hope that
this excites you and you're ready to join
my SEO one-on-one course.
3. Learn how search engines work: Hello and welcome to Lesson one of search
engine optimization 101. I am your instructor,
Stephanie long, and it's great that
you're here and I'm excited that you want
to learn about SEO. In this lesson,
we're going to talk about what search engines are, how pages are ranked, and how results
are personalized. Search engines work by
crawling billions of pages. That's right, billions
using web crawlers. So understanding how
search engines function is crucial for doing SEL. So what are search engines? Search engines are searchable
databases of web content, and they're made up
of two main parts. The search index. It's a digital library of
information about web pages. And then the search algorithms. These are computer
programs tasked with matching results from
the search index. So when you're
searching something, this is what happens to get you the results
that you want. Search engines have two different types of
search results. And I do want to clarify that there is the paid
search results with the ad logo next to it and organic with no ad
logo next to it. Next, there's crawling, indexing and ranking factors
that go into SEO as well. Google's crawler is
called Googlebot. So what this means is
it's a computer bought, also called spider, that
downloads known URLs. The term ranking in
reference to SEO comes up a lot when we're talking about search engine
optimization. And it refers to the
websites position in a search engine results page. And there are various
factors that go into how well your website
is going to rank, which we'll go over that
in multiple lessons. However, when you search
something in Google, it is using these
ranking factors to bring up the
results that you see. Everything begins with
unknown list of URLs. Google discovers
these in many ways, but the three most common
ways are backlinks, sitemaps, and URL submissions. We're going to talk
about backlinks first. I'm going to use my website
as an example for backlinks. So backlinks are when people
link to each other's pages. As you can see, I
went on a podcast. I linked out to her website so you can
listen to my podcast. But she also linked back to me. And here's another
podcast I went on. And as you can see, I
linked out to them. And then they wrote about me. And then I can share, or you can share, someone can share from there. But you can also see as
we go down that there's a lot of content about me
and then I offer free audit. So they're linking
right back to me. Actually, they're
linking right to my services page,
which is perfect. Another example is I was
a guest blog poster. So when I wrote this post, they are linking from
my name to my website. So that's another way
to get back links is to guest post on blogs. And we'll talk about that
too in another lesson. Having a sitemap
is so important. Sitemaps tell Google which pages and files you think are
important for your site. So you can imagine if you
don't have a sitemap, you're telling
Google ultimately, none of your pages
are important. Here's a live example. I will put these in the
notes for the class two, you go to SEO Site checkup. I typed in my URL, and then you just hit
the enter button. And now you wait and you
see if you have a sitemap. This is very important after you've completed
your website. And along the way, if you update your website, you can see I have completed
this 100 out of 100. But you can also get
a sitemap generator, generator from here too as well. This is free. So I would highly recommend checking to see if you
do have a sitemap. Let's talk about relevance next. It's the usefulness of a given
result for the searcher. So I have typed in places
to hike in Seattle, in Google is showing me now the best URLs that it thinks will match
what I'm looking for. And they've also
optimized their website. So that's why they're
coming up as well. You can also see down
here, there's images, which is great because
images are also very powerful form of SEO because you can
optimize those as well. Google also shows
what people also ask for because they could've asked which you are looking for. You need to have a fast website nowadays, especially on mobile, as Google is very mobile first, as people are on the go, they don't want to wait
for a website to load. Therefore, you could
be losing customers. So there's a great
tool Google has. It's called their page
speed insights to just go ahead and Google
that there's a live example. I am going to use my website so you can
see what it looks like. I'm not gonna go into
the full diagnostics, but you'll get an idea
of how you can check for how fast your mobile loads and how fast your desktop
website loads. So there are two tabs and
you can do it yourself, whatever the errors are, or you can send this
to your developer. It's very easy to export
what the outcome is. Google uses your location to
personalize your results. So wherever you
are in the world, unless you disable your
location settings, it will give you results
that are in the area. Here's an example of somebody
that's planning a vacation. As you can see, there are some ideas that
Google has given you. It's probably based off of
your search history results. As you can see, there's a
little clock next to it. It does know you have
either search these or you are going to want
to learn about them. And then below it also
gives you related search. So that also goes into
Google wanting to personalize and give you the very best
results you can get. So this is why SEO is so important so that you
are in these results. Great job on
completing Lesson one. Here just a few key
takeaways for you. So SEO stands for search
engine optimization. Search engines aimed
to always give people the best, most
relevant results. Ranking factors
include relevance, backlinks and freshness. Freshness means updating
your content consistently. And then Google also
personalize his results. So don't forget to take
the quiz at this end, there'll be a link
in the class notes. You don't have to, but it
just helps to understand if you are on track and
learning the materials. Again, you can reach out
to me with any questions. This is just a mini quiz for
you to see where you're at. I look forward to seeing
you in lesson two.
4. Why is SEO important?: Hi and welcome to lesson two. I hope you got a lot
out of lesson one. Lesson two is focusing on
the fundamentals of SEO. And again, don't hesitate to
reach out to me if you have any questions about
any prior lessons or any lessons coming up. So let's get started
with less than two. The main things we'll be
talking about less than two are setting your
SEO up for success, submitting your
website to Google and tracking how successful
your SEO it. So what is SEO and
less than one, we talked about the basics, but let's dive deeper. So SEO is the process of growing your website's organic traffic. And this is so important. So you come up in
the search results, which is when you
Google a keyword, you want your website
to be top of mind. And a lot of people don't even like to scroll below the fold, which is when you
have to actually use your mouse to scroll down. Let's look at an example. Best coffee companies. I'm looking for the best
coffee company in the area. Let's see what do I get? 0, I have to scroll
a little bit, but you can see that's an
ad there that was paid. But the first one is
what I'm going to click on because I don't want to
really scroll below that. And again, you see what
people also asked for. So I can see what's also being asked about best
coffee companies. So maybe I'll get even more
information about that. But again, you really want
to be top results there. And paid search is something that maybe will be
part of your strategy, but it has nothing
to do with organic. And you can also
get great content. Remember from this
people also asked, the first step is
to create keywords. I've chosen these five
keywords for my SEO business. I usually like to do ten
keywords in the beginning. But just for
simplification sake, I am going to go
ahead and just do these five keywords for now. So out of these keywords, I've chosen best SEO
services to see what is ranking on Google's first page because that's the next
thing you wanna do. It looks like Forbes is
the first page and it's listing all the different
best SEO services. But as you can see, there's people also ask for where I can get a
lot of great content because you're
literally writing for exactly what Google
is looking for. So that's the next step after your keyword research is to get great content around
those keywords. Now you need a hook. What's unique about
your services? This is an example. I am doing SEO audits
on people's TikToks. I'm deciding why I think that they're doing really
good on TikTok. My hook is I'm doing
this in hopes that I can generate more eyeballs
on my services, more inquiries because
this I think is unique to what I'm doing versus what
other SEO companies are doing. Because I've researched this
and I'm not seeing anyone else doing something
that's unique on TikTok. The next thing to do is
optimize for on-page SEO, which we will cover in
a whole lesson later. Then we need to optimize
for search intent, the primary types of
this or informational, navigational, commercial,
and transactional. So we're gonna go
ahead and talk about informational first. This means people searching are looking for educational content. In a lot of cases,
these queries contain phrases or keywords like how to, why, What is, where do i, and best way to? With navigational intent,
these all pretty much follow the same formula
or a slight variation of, so it'll be the
product and service name plus brand
name or vice versa. I'm going to use Clorox in this example just for
simplification rules. Now this is commercial
search intent. So I've typed in best wet wipes because I'm looking for what kind of products
should I buy. So as you can see, it is showing me the top products and also
what people also asked for. Now with transactional
search intent, people already ready to buy, let's say they
already like Clorox. So they're going to
buy Clorox wipes. And then you're going
to see a list of places that offer
Clorox wet white. So now you've done
a list of keywords. You've analyzed
Google's first page, you've added a hook, and you've also optimized for on-page SEO. Now, we need to focus
on content design. Is it helpful, human
connected, clear, and findable, that or your
next questions to ask. Next, we'll be building
links to your page. You really need to have
good relationships for this because you'll
wanna go on podcasts, webinars, guest post
and have others guest posts so you can
link between each other. There's also a platform called
Help a Reporter out Hero, where you can also
submit articles there. So this will be another part of your top things you
need to do for SEO. Another thing that's
as important as SEO is choosing a
website platform. There are hosting platforms where everything
is done for you. And then there are
self-hosted where you can go in and
edit a little code. So really the difference is, do you want to have
to do anything or do you want to
have a plug-and-play? Having a secure website
is super important, especially if you
take credit cards. So make sure you get
an SSL certification. And most website host
platform should offer this. And if they don't, you can just Google where you can get one. Make sure you design a
really appealing design. Nobody wants to visit
an outdated website. You need to make sure the font is readable and mobile-friendly. Nothing is worse than
searching for something on your mobile device and the website is not able
to be used on a mobile. Logical site structure
makes sure it flows. And here's an example
on the screen. You really want to sketch out
a mind map before starting. This will really help you in
how you structure your URLs. Most every website
platform should have a built-in SEO plugin. If not, you'll want
to install it. So this is an example on the back end of my website
and I use WordPress. So I am using Yoast SEO. As you can see,
I'm gonna go ahead and show you what it looks
like on the back-end. So it's already installed
as you can see. And you can also see if
you wanna do auto updates. I don't like to do auto updates just in case it breaks anything. I like to come here
and manually do it. But here we're gonna go
ahead and add a plugin. And then we're going to
search in the keyword. And what we're gonna
do is we want to use exact keywords, SEO plugin. And this is going to pull up all the plugins that I can use that are compatible
with my WordPress site. And I already have Yoast
SEO installed as we know, but I do want to show
you what it looks like. You can also try it for free
or you can install it now. And you also want to make
sure it does show when it was updated and how many stars
that has the reviews. I like to see what reviews are. Now as a reminder, you
will want to either create your sitemap or submit that
to Google's Webmaster Tools. Now, before we dive into what it is to track and measure
SEO performance, will need to
understand how we can do that with the
keyword rankings. So the obvious one is if your organic
traffic is going up, you're obviously doing
something right? So you'll want to track
this with Google Analytics, which is a free tool. You can connect that very
easily to your website. And I will send steps along in this tutorial
on how to do so. Then you can also set
up some free tools. There's a refs, there's moss, and there's Uber suggest. Now they are free at
a very basic level, but you can do the paid version, which I do because
it really does go into how you can better
optimize your keywords. So I highly suggest as soon
as the websites ready to go, you immediately put
Google Analytics on your website so you can see where traffic is
coming from and what keywords and content
are doing the best, you can better track
your performance. And that is the
end of lesson two. And some key takeaways
are, remember, SEO is the process of growing your website's
organic traffic. And as long as you're ranking
for the correct keywords, then it's free traffic
month over month, which will hopefully lead to
new customers or new sales. So you need to really
hone in on those keywords and use one of the tools I
recommended, Google Analytics. That is free. There's also Google Keyword Planner
that is free as well. And then you have a refs, Mars and Uber suggest all these keywords
can tell you what keywords in your niche are doing well and also how your
competitors are doing. You need to see what people
are actually searching for because you don't want
to just write anything. Don't re-invent the wheel, see what is being searched for. Also, do not forget, and this is where I get a
lot of my content is on. People also ask, Google
is literally serving up to you what kind of
content you should write. People are asking for this. So if you craft a content
strategy around this, you can't really go wrong. So remember, those are very
important things to do. Focus on the keywords. Don't just guess. Go focus on what
is already doing well in which your
competitors are ranking for. And again, don't forget to
do the quiz at the end. It's very short. It is not required, but it does help
you see if you're on track and understanding
the material. But of course, always reach
out to me no matter what, if you have any questions. I look forward to seeing
you in lesson three.
5. How keyword research works: Hi and welcome to lesson three. I hope you're enjoying
your lessons, so you've done less than
one and less than two. Now, in lesson three, we're going to be talking about how do you do the
keyword research. So really get into
the meat of SEO. So let's get started on it. Okay, so what goes into keyword
research and what is it? So keyword research is the
process of discovering valuable search queries that your target customers
are going to type into search engines like Google, e.g. there'll be looking
for your products, services, information,
and many more things. So why is keyword research
really the meat of SEO? Keyword research is so important because
it helps you find the keywords that
your target audience is looking for or asking for. So it'll provide you
valuable insight into content that you'll
want to ride around. Potentially webinars
and podcasts that you'll want to go on
and talk about these things. So these are actual
search terms that people in your target audience want
to know about or hear about. So that is why keyword
research is of the utmost important and one of the very first
things you should do. So how do you go about
doing keyword research? I'm gonna give you an
example of how I do it. This is Mars, the tool I use. And I'm going to ask
how to learn SEO. I think that might be a valuable topic people are wondering, so I'm going to see
what Moss has to say. The monthly volume isn't
too high, which is great. It also shows the relevancy, how often it would show
up in the search engines. It's at the highest, so it's one to five. So this will be a
great topic for me to go after and right
content around. And this is what you would
do in any sort of SEO tool. That screenshot of Maus was just a brief overview of my tool and how I would
go about doing it. But I've already found
my seed keywords. Seed Keywords are two keywords and they define your niche. So this is where most
SEO experts start. I'm going to just use an
example of somebody that owns a coffee company or
maybe makes coffee products. So coffee would be one, cappuccino, French
press and Latte. Let's say you own
a coffee shop and you also sell coffee equipment. You're going to want to rank for these different
items that you sell. So let's just use
French press as the example here to
make it cohesive. So what we're going
to want to do is we're gonna Google French press. And then we'll see what competitors come
up in this search. Because this is going to get
you the very best results. And also is really a good keyword tool if you don't have a paid
subscription to something. So I typed French press into the website
or sorry, Google. You can see that the
top ones are ads. But then here we have
people also asked for what is so special
about French press coffee. This is something great to
write on because it's one of the top results people are asking for when it
comes to French press. And then you also get a lot of other questions
regarding French press. You're already getting a ton of content around this product. Now for coffee machines, again, I typed coffee machines into the Google search results and you can see
what is coming up. So I would click through Amazon coffee machines and see what kind of content
they're writing, because that will also
give you content ideas. And then here again is
people also asked for what is the best brand
for a coffee machine. So you can write
about your brands or the brand you offer. And then if you keep
continuing down, you'll get even more contents. So click through and see what kind of content
they're writing. And then that'll
give you even more content ideas because
you'll want to expand on just the seed
keywords to help you rank. Now let's talk about
a type of coffee. So I'm going to
Google cappuccino into the search results. Because remember,
competitors are a great source of keyword ideas. What comes up first? I'm gonna go ahead and click
Open on this because that's gonna give me some keyword
and some topic ideas. So what are the
top ranking pages? Now? How to make a cappuccino? This is one of the top pages, and obviously people love this. So you can write about
how to make a cappuccino, because this is obviously
very highly searched. And if you sell
cappuccino machines, This is great too, to drive
traffic to your page. Based off our last search, we saw what competitors are ranking high in the
Google search results. So now let's take one
of those competitors, which was a couple of cooks. And it'll show us
other competitors that are related to them. Because we obviously
want to see what kind of content is written
about our keyword. So you can go to these competitors and you can
find other content ideas. But another way to do that, if you don't have a
subscription to Mars, is going into the
Google Keyword Planner. So you want to start with a website and you'll
only want to scan this page because we're only talking about how to
make a cappuccino. If you don't do that, it will scan the whole
entire website and give you keywords that are not related to what you want to talk about. So after I've done that, I can now see all these different keywords and we'll want to go after
long tail keywords. Remember, those are three
to five characters. And we'll also want to
go after the ones that are low to medium competition. Remember if they're high, competition is gonna
be so hard to rank for those and you will just be spinning your wheels
trying to do so. It's not something you should go after initially or even ever. So I'm gonna, you can search, I can filter here, and so you can see
the competition. And I'm filtering. I'm gonna do from low to high, because there you can get
your lowest keywords to begin with and start from there
to build out your content, because this is one of the ways to start ranking
for your keywords. Another great way is for Cora. This is an example
from my corner page. People are asking about SEO strategies and I can go
ahead and comment on here. Then people can like and
share what I've posted. And now I have signed up to
get questions asked from me. And so I'll get email alerts
that people are asking me to answer the questions
because they've seen that I'm a thought
leader in the space. So again, if you own
a coffee shop per se, you'll want to sign up
for coffee notifications. So if people are wondering, how do you make the best latte? What are the best coffee
shops in the area? What are the best kind
of espresso machines? You can answer those
questions and be seen as a thought
leader in the industry. And then the more you
let people share, the more you're getting out
there in front of customers. So how do we know which
keywords are the best? We're going to need
to analyze them, then you're going to
need to use one or the keyword tools that you have. And I'm going to use mass
as that's the one I use. I'm gonna look up cold
foam ice cappuccino sticking with the coffee
theme because I don't want to see how often
this is searched and if it's a good topic to
write content around. So I have sorted
this by irrelevancy, and as you can see, it is
actually highly relevant. The monthly searches
aren't high. And as we know, you should go after
low-volume keywords. Because that means there's a niche target looking for that, your customers are gonna
be lower in the funnel, meaning they are
either ready to buy, make a purchase, contact, you would be a serious inquiry. So you can see as it goes down, the relevancy is
lower and lower. But this is how you
can really find what kind of keywords you should go after and if they
have low search volume, because that's again,
what we want to do. We're going to talk about three different types of content now. So type, format and angle, e.g. type is blogposts,
product pages, landing pages, and online
tools that people can access. The next is format. So e.g. these are guides, listicles, reviews,
infographics, comparisons with
other companies, what you offer versus
what they offer, and then case studies
from clients. You'll want to get, I would recommend at least one
of each on your website. And these are good
lead generation forms. And then angle, what
is your unique angle? What do you offer that
your competitors don't? Because you're really
going to need to separate yourself
from them in order to gain more clients because
they want something that your competitors don't offer and you need to
explain what that is. And just to reiterate
keyword research is not the process of finding
easy to rank for keywords. It is the process
of finding keywords that make most sense
for your business. So don't force keywords that
aren't relevant for what consumers would
want when searching for a product that you have. If you don't have a budget
or a very small budget, you will need at least
what keyword tool to use. So I will leave links of some free tools
and the lesson notes. I hope you enjoyed lesson three. And again, don't hesitate to reach out to me
with any questions. I know that was a lot
covered on keyword research. So some key takeaways I
want you to remember is searching for keywords and seeing what
competitors come out, come up in the Google
search results. That's one of the best ways to kick-start your keyword
research because it'll give you some
great content ideas on what is ranking, because this is what
people are looking for. So you can build some keyword and content ideas around that. But don't just
limit it to Google, also use a keyword tool. And again, in the lesson notes, I will put some links to
some free keyword tools. But you will want to use that
as well because as you saw, you can see the relevancy of keywords and if they're
medium, low, or high. Because again, we
want to go after low keyword volume because those are the niche
people you want. They're very serious about buying, purchasing,
contacting you. You don't want a
bunch of leads that have nothing to do
with your business. So being very targeted on low volume keywords
is really important. Don't forget about
search intent. So what is it that you want
them to learn about you? Do you want them to read
case studies, blog posts, all of those different
content topics I mentioned, What do you want them
to know about you? So that will also be part
of your content strategy. So I really want you to be
able to focus on the content. Content and keywords
go hand in hand. So makes sure the intent is what you want the intent to
be for your customers. Now again, I have a
mini quiz after this. It is not required, but it always helps to
see if you're staying on track with what
the lesson is. If you have any questions, always reach out to me. I'm happy to help. I look forward to seeing
you in lesson four.
6. What is SEO content?: Welcome to lesson four. I hope you're
getting a lot out of the other lessons and are
learning so much about SEO. In this lesson, we're going
to be talking all about SEO content and how to find content that works with
your SEO strategy. So let's go ahead
and get started. Why is SEO content so important? Well, not all content ranks and gets traffic
from organic search. Only content that is crafted for searchers about topics
they're searching for, unless you're getting
really lucky. So it's so important
to create content exactly what people
are searching for. And this is something
we've been talking about and all of our lessons. Now you should have
a proven topic. Now that you've done
the keyword research, this topic is something
that has traffic potential, business potential,
and ranking potential. For the sake of clarity, I'm going to stick with
the coffee theme that I have been doing throughout
all these lessons. Now I'm going to use Uber suggest the keyword
ranking tool. And I'm going to look at
espresso machine supplies for keyword difficulty. It's at 51, so it's a
medium keyword difficulty. So I'm gonna go ahead
and search that and see what's coming up. So we can now talk about the top ranking pages
for the three Cs. Now the three Cs you're
going to want to look for is content-type format in angle. Now Content-Type,
these are blogposts, product pages, landing pages, or other types of content
that you want people to usually fill out a form
for then content format. These are tutorials, listicles, how to guides, recipes
and other free tools. And then the last one is content angle is their
dominant selling point, like low prices and
as I show here, are espresso machines on sale. So what will be
that angle to hook a customer to want to click
through your website. So another way to get
even more granular is to see what the top
search content is. I'm gonna go ahead and click
through because this is the top page when I search
espresso machines supplies. Now that you've
got the expertise, you're going to want to get the content people are looking for. So here's a great
way to see that. There was that one website. Here's more you can get
content ideas from. And then you can always
put these keywords into whatever keyword
tool you are using. But look at all
this great content you can see that people are making that
others want to view. As you can see, there's a lot of images
throughout breaking things up. Of course, people want
images and bullet points. It's a lot easier to read. So here's all the
things you can see. Then defined other keywords
related to espresso. I have used Uber
suggest as you can see, and look at the top search term, you want to go after that, because look at
the search volume. So I would choose maybe the top two to three
and start writing content around those
topics and see if they do work with your audience and you are getting
traffic from them. If not, then you'll
need to pivot and find other keywords for
your audience. Now you need to know the
search intent of your user. When people are
searching in Google, they are generally looking
for a specific answer or resource to their question and you want to be that answer. So coming up in the top
search results is imperative. So let's take coffee again, e.g. let's say people are searching for different kinds of coffee, then you want to come up in
the search results and answer the question of different
kinds of coffee there are, and maybe write a blog
post about all of them. And then you could also
maybe break it up into subsections and write about each different kind of coffee. You can see different types
of flavors of coffee. You can get so much
content from here. And then people are looking
for takeout coffee shop. As you can see,
it's going to show coffee shops in the local area. So I can search for
that and find something around me that gets
good rate rankings. Then lastly, the
history of coffee. Now look, I can
find who invented coffee that's up there
on the search results. I can write content around that. Here's what coffee
originally was used for. I mean, Here's many
things people are asking for relating to
the history of coffee. So as you can see, those are three different types
of search intents. You need to be very specific
when you're writing content for what kind of search intent you're
looking for him. Do you want people to
find your coffee shop? Do want people to know that you are a resource for
the history of coffee? Or do you want to be talking
about different types of coffee that you offer? So really hone in on
what kind of content you want and what kind of
user you're looking for. Search intent is super important for SEO because Google
cares about it. And satisfying search intent is the primary goal of Google, which in turn makes it the primary goal for
people doing SEO. So when a user searches for a specific term and finds
irrelevant information, this signals to Google that the intent is likely mismatched. So an example is if I'm searching for how
to build a website, but all I'm getting is content management platforms
and hosting sites. Then I'm going to
keep scrolling. This is showing Google that
I'm not clicking on anything. So again, the intent
is likely mismatched, and this does not reflect what
I'm looking for as a user. So if you're trying to
optimize for content that has nothing to do with what
people are searching for. And then they potentially
click on your site and bounce, which is really bad
for Google as well. You are going to be
deemed as Google sees notch serving
up relevant content. Don't just limit yourself to one search intent to have a successful content
marketing strategy, which in turn is a
successful SEO strategy. You need to broaden your reach
across different funnels. So that could be
writing about recipes, how to guides offering
free downloads. The more specific your content is to the various
search intense, then the more users you can reach and at different
stage in the funnels. So somebody is maybe
just looking at recipes. They're not ready to
buy your product. Maybe you also serve
cooking supplies, but they at least
know who you are now. You are capturing people at the top of the
funnel with recipes, but then they could
come lower into the funnel and purchase
something from you. This is very important to
diversify your content. After you've created
your content, that doesn't mean you should
set it and forget it. You need to go back and see if the keywords that you're
targeting are working. And if they're not
ranking or working well, you need to pivot and see
what other keywords you should target or maybe this
is the wrong kind of content. But makes sure you're always tracking your results because this could make
or break how well you do in the search engines. I do want to stress
that you should not base the entirety
of your content on top ranking pages because you could end up with
copycat content. You want to make it unique while looking at top
pages helps you see what people in your
target audience are looking for and getting
good content ideas. You want it to be unique to
your company, your brand. So this kind of content should get come from someone
in your organization, yourself or an industry expert. But build on what's
already out there. Expand on the keywords, go deeper and give
alternatives that it makes you look like a
novice in your area. And people will want to come
to your website because they know that you will have
the best content out there. Here are some content tips. Keep it simple and avoid complex
words and sentences that confuse your audience and
speak their language. Makes sure to always
write for humans first and search engines second, use terms that resonate
with your readers. Then always check for spelling. This is extremely important. I like to use Grammarly because if people
see spelling errors, that could be a big thing
between them wanting to do business with you and them not wanting to do
business with you. And that is the end
of lesson four. I hope you're progressing
in your SEO knowledge. And some key takeaways
from this lesson, I want you to remember
is search intent. You always need to
write for your user. Google looks at search intent as one of the most
important things. So that means you
need to as well make sure your content is
written for humans though. Don't write it for Google. Google will know this. Makes sure that
your search intent is what your audience will want, is that how to guides,
videos, blog posts. There's many other
things I spoke about that you can get
content ideas from. So makes sure it
is super targeted. Don't just set it and forget it. You need to go check how
your keywords are doing, because this could make
or break how you rank in the search engines if
you just set it and forget it and
you're not ranking, well, that's not
doing you any good. So again, keyword research is what is the guts of
what we're doing? And then writing the
content is next. So I look forward to
seeing you in lesson five.
7. How on-page SEO works: Welcome to lesson five, and I hope you're enjoying all the other lessons and you're learning so much about SEO. And I'm so excited that
you're taking this course and you're on this
learning journey with me. So what we're going
to learn in lesson five is what is on-page SEO? Why is on-page SEO important? And how on-page SEO works? So let's get started
with on-page SEO. It includes the following. We're going to talk about
site content, keyword, title tags, Meta
descriptions, headers, URLs, internal linking,
external linking, alt text, page speed,
and featured snippets. We're gonna go over each of
these parts individually. So what is on-page SEO? On-page SEO is anything you can do on the page itself
to improve rankings. And it focuses on
helping Google and searchers better understand
and digest your content. Why is this important? Because Google looks at things
that can influence on-page SEO to decide if your page is relevant
to the search results, if they are including
the keywords that the query is
being searched for. So here's an example. Best restaurants in Seattle, look what it's giving me. I'm getting the top restaurants and I'm most likely to
click on one of those. Google knows that these
three restaurants I'm seeing are serving up the
correct search results. And as we know, Google looks
at keywords on your page, but repeating these keywords, such as keyword stuffing is
not good at all and will harm your rankings and your website can be
penalized for doing this. So if you're unnaturally
repeating a specific keyword or number of keywords multiple
times in the content. Google's going to
know, and it's also going to sound a natural, right? Because if you're stuffing
a bunch of keywords in the content can't flow. We're going to talk about
this later in the lesson. But as you can see
here is an example of what keyword
stuffing looks like. For this lesson, I'm gonna be
using the keyword example. Seo tips for 2023 is
what I want to rank for. And you want to add this to
your header or H1 title. This will tell Google and searchers what your
content is about. And you don't want to
have anything that is not directly related to
your content in that, because that can be
seen as clickbait. You want Google and searchers to understand
what your content is about by using one
H1 tag per page. Next, you'll want to
create a hierarchy. So then you'll add a
header to header h3, header for, and you can go
all the way to header six. So you're creating a
flow for people to read. And also these are terms you
want to optimize for two, I want web design matters, mobile, optimization and quality content that I'm an expand
on each one after that. And then you want to add your
keyword to the title tag. And this is what searchers
see at the very top, as you can see right here. And you want to make sure that it is your keyword in there. Here are some tips to craft
a compelling title tag. Keep them short.
Under 65 characters. Match your search intent. What are people wanting? Be descriptive and
include keywords. And then again, don't
use them for clickbait. Now you need to write
your meta-description. And your meta-description
should have your keyword in it, which is again,
SEO tips for 2023. Now here's actually
a real life example of what a meta-description
looks like. So I googled
restaurants in Seattle, and as you can see, I am shown a little description of the best restaurants
in Seattle. And they didn't run over
character count because the whole entire sentence fits right in the search engine. Here are some tips for writing a compelling meta-description.
Keep them short. They need to be under
160 characters, as you can see again
from this example, the whole sentence
fits in the search. That is very important, so some keywords don't
potentially get cut off. And then you need to
expand on your title tag. What is this about? And include your keyword to, but also what more can you
offer the person searching, which means matching
it, search intent. Then be descriptive. You want to get that
user to click through to your website and
make it engaging. What is super unique about you? Now you also need to
optimize your URL, and that should be what
your target keyword is. My target keyword again
is SEO tips for 2023. So that is what
should be my URL, because this is what Google
will see when they scan your website and is also part of your backend SEO strategy, matching your keyword,
meta-description and so on. You also need to optimize
for the images on your page. And this is called the alt text in whatever SEO tool you use. So it should also be
the targeted keyword. This tells Google what the subject matter of
the images about. So not only can
rank for web pages. But you can also
rank for images. If people are searching for something that that
page relates to. This is not visible though
on the page itself. So you'll see what it looks like right here in my back-end. And this would be similar to
what it should look like in your backend when you're
optimizing for your images. Now we're going to talk about internal and external linking. And in the first example, this is an internal link. As you can see, it's bolded and underlined. So I know it's a link. And then I'm linking out
to a corresponding page on my same website that relates to what that person
would want to get at. So my underlying was keywords. I want people to
learn more about keywords and another blog post. Next is to use external linking. External linking is
something Google sees as valuable when you're linking
to other reputable websites. And a great way to provide
value to your users. So don't be linking
to a competitor, obviously linked to something that would enhance
your blog post. And people can see what
else is about this topic, but makes sure to always
have it open in a new tab. You never want people to
be taken off your website. That is super important
because they might not come back if it doesn't
open in a new tab. Then my example, you can see I'm opening a tab for more
information on Google. I'm not taking them to
something that's irrelevant. I'm taking them to
a webpage that I think would add more
value to my blog post. One of the best things
for your website is to be featured in the featured
snippets in Google. And a featured snippet answers
The Searchers question with a short answer. So how Google finds this is they're pulling them from
web search listings, and they almost always
come up from when the page is ranking
in the top ten. This means if you are already ranking really well and
you write great content, you can shortcut your way to the top position by
winning the snippet. And here's an example of what a featured snippet looks like. And you will see that it says is the featured snippet
and it gives you just enough information. Google's assuming
enough information that you can get what
you want right there. So this is like the
gold medal for SEO. Now let's talk about
keyword stuffing. So some types of visible keyword
stuffing include writing the same keyword over
and over again in one piece of content and
having it not make sense. And then also using
keywords that aren't relevant to the topic. Google knows that you're not giving consumers
exactly what they want, and this can be very
harmful for your website. And then an example of
invisible keyword stuffing. It's overusing keywords
in the alt texts. We showed you the
alt text where you put your one keyword
but continuously using that is called invisible keyword stuffing and then hiding
the keywords on the page. So putting them in
the HTML code on the backend and doing
that numerous times. And also overusing them in your meta-description that's
hiding keywords as well. So these are things
that you do not want to do that could potentially
demote you in Google. If you do keyword stuff, here are some things that
would happen to your website. Google can remove
websites that rely on keyword stuffing for
search engine results. It will know if
you're overusing and repetitively using
them in your content. Keyword stuffing lacks
user and focus and portrays the same
characteristics of as a typical e-mail spam. You know how we don't
want to click on that. Google knows that, and
we'll know that people do not want to click
on that website page. Then search engines, again, we'll penalize you, whether
it is Google or Bing. You are only doing yourself
a detriment by doing this, again, write for humans first, makes sure it flows, it sounds good and
it's easy to read, and that is the end of
lesson five's on-page SEO. So remember, on Page is
exactly what it sounds like. It's what you do on the page. It's making content
that's written for humans, not search engines. Don't repeat keywords over and over again in the same page. Google will know this, right? Like you would want
somebody to listen. So make sure that it's
easily searchable and people want to continue to read because you'd
make headings, you make it easy to
scroll through people, understand what it's about. You want them to get all the
way through your content. And then add that CTF and the call to action so people
know what to do next. Don't assume they
know what to do, help them learn what to do. So make sure you
have all this in mind when you are doing
your on-page SEO. So thank you for listening
to less than five, and let's get ready
for lesson six.
8. What is link building?: Welcome to lesson six. This is going to be all
about link building. So at this point you've
researched your keywords. You've used these keywords in your content and
you're starting to create other types of contents such as
videos and graphics. But now you need to link build. What is that? Why is that important? We're gonna be learning
all about that. However, Google has confirmed that links and quality content, or some of the most important
ranking factors in SEO. Trustworthy sites
tend to link to other trustworthy sites and spammy sites tend to link
to other spammy sites. So that is why you need to make sure you have quality links. That quality and links
are linking back to you. Link building refers to
the marketing efforts to get links from other
websites to your websites. It seen as one of the most powerful tools to achieve higher
rankings in Google. Because Google sees
this as you having a quality site that other
people are wanting to link to. Why is link building important? Within SEO, link building plays an important role in driving organic traffic via
search engines, especially if you're in
a competitive industry. So when combined with
strong technical SEO and great on-page
SEO, good content, good user experience,
link building can be one of the most effective ways at driving more organic traffic. And this can be
accomplished by earning links from
authoritative websites, building your brand,
and nurturing your audience who will
help amplify your content. So think about link building, not as a standalone activity, but as something
that connects to other parts of your
organization and where the benefit goes
beyond the links themselves. So how do you know where
a link is on a page? Most people know
this as a hyperlink. However, an SEL language is
referred to as anchor text. I'm going to show you an example
of what it looks like on my website and what it looks like on someone
else's website. Both are perfectly fine to do. I just want to show you
two different ways to go about doing hyperlinks
for your website. Here's an example of a
podcast I went on and she has added my link to the bottom
of this podcast text. And as you'll see, there's the link to
what I asked her to do, the contact page and
that will open in another tab and get people
to my contact page, which is a way of getting
links from sites. Now with US Weekly. There you can see that they underline and highlight
them in pink. And this, these will all
open into an external link, but these are what
hyperlinks are. Or as I mentioned, also known as anchor links. There are two ways that
search engines use links. So these two ways are one, to discover new web pages and what they can tell
the search engines. Are they useful? Are they good? The other one is to
determine how well a page should rank
in their results. Do the hyperlinks actually
relate to the page? So the search engines will
know this and we'll understand if the links are
spammy or relevant. So again, make sure
that you don't have any spam links on your website. Once search engines have crawled the pages
on your website, they can extract
the content from the page and add this
to their indexes. Then they can decide if they
fill a page is sufficient enough for quality and
rank well for keywords. And so when they're
deciding this, the search engines don't just look at the content of the page. They also look at the number of links pointing to that page from external websites and the quality of those
external websites. So generally speaking, the more quality websites
that link to you, the more likely you will rank
well in the search engine. How do you get links? Why don't you just ask? I ask all the time. You may get a lot of no's, you make it a lot of yeses. But when you reach out to them, give them a compelling reason, why should they link to you? You both offer similar services and can do link exchanges, but makes sure you grab
their attention and have a conversation about why you are the best fit for
them to link to you. And some other link building
tactics is guest blogging. This is one of probably the best things you
can do because you're posting on another
person's website who will link back to you. And then you would
post the blog also on your website and
link back to them. So it's a mutual linking
tactic and then mention them. Did you review them? That's another way
to build links because then they will
see that you link to them and that could pique their interest and
do a case study. What can you think of
to do a case study on? There's so many great case
studies and then just link out to that company and they will see that you are
interested in them. Then here's Harlow,
Help a Reporter Out. This is a great
website to answer reporters questions
and then they will link back to your blog. And then of course, there are so many different
business directories. I realize this may not
be for every website, but try and get
reviews if you can, on Yelp next door. If you're a travel company,
TripAdvisor, Expedia, whatever service you have, I'm sure there's a
review site out there and try and get
customers to review you. Maybe it's a follow-up
e-mail or even asking them. But reviews also help with
ranking in the search engines. Because again, it's content, new content every time
you get a review. And Google is saying that you're a reputable website who is getting good reviews and
giving good customer service. And now you're going to wonder
what makes a link Good? Well, nobody can be exactly sure because Google will keep
this close to their vest. And I'm sure it's one
of their secret sauce is they'll never reveal. But there are some general
concepts of evaluating links for SEO experts and that
we believe to be true. So authority is one of them. Relevance. Anchor text, as we talked about, hyper linking,
anchor text are the same and then where's it going? So the destination. Then authority means
Google sees this as votes, quote unquote, that a given
page deserves to rank. Well. So keep in mind that a site like CBS that has
been around for a very long time
and I'm sure gets millions of views daily, is going to be a way
more relevant link than just your friends blog. Keep in mind the
relevancy of the blogs. You could have a lot of
people linking to you. Well, what kind of
links are they? Then? Are the links relevant? So let's say you
publish a recipe on how to host the
perfect dinner party. Would you rather get a link from Martha Stewart or Katy Perry? Well, I would say the latter because Martha
Stewart is famous for hosting dinner parties
and her advice would be exactly what your
readers are looking for. Versus Katy Perry, who is
not an expert in this. So remember when you're linking out or having
someone link to you, that it relates exactly to your content and
that your users are getting what they
want and aren't bouncing off or
leaving your page. Of course, you want to get
people to link to you. So you need to create linkable assets that
are interesting, whether that's online
tools or graphs, gifts, studies or research. You've done industry surveys, how to guides or
tutorials or videos. These are all great ways
to create linkable assets. And that is the
end of lesson six. I hope you got a lot out of
learning how to build links. But again, don't
hesitate to reach out to me if you
have any questions. So some key takeaways are ask, ask, ask, ask, ask
the guest post. If you have somebody
that you'd like to work with and you
have similar services, ask them, do they want to
help link back to you? And you can link to them. Also makes sure you
do not buy links. That is very, very bad. Then when you do link out, makes sure that hyperlink is a keyword and that is irrelevant
keyword to that page. So I look forward to seeing
you in lesson seven.
9. The basics of technical SEO : Welcome to lesson seven and the final lesson in this course. I hope you have
learned so much about SEO and that you
are getting a lot that you can apply
to your business or your personal website
or just to learn SEO. So what we're going to learn in this lesson is what
is technical SEO, what crawling a website means, and what schema markup is. So let's get started. By understanding crawling. You understand how to make sure search engines can
efficiently crawl your website. And that also means
understanding what a robot's txt file is. This tells search
engines where they can and can't go
on your website. So you can hide some content that you
don't want them to crawl. E.g. if you are using
a page as a webinar, but that webinar
is now bent over and you don't want it to be seen anymore by search engines, you can hide that page. So that wouldn't be an example
of having a website not crawl that page and hiding
it from the search engines. Understanding crawling
means understanding how search engines can
efficiently crawl your content. This means how many
requests per second the Googlebot makes to your
site when it is crawling it. An example would be five
requests per second. You can not change how often
Google crawls your site. But if you want Google
to crawl your site, if there's newer
updated content, then you can request a re-crawl. I would do this if I have
created a new website. I do blogs once a week, so I ask it to crawl
it once a week just to know that it has
crawled my new blog post. You can see when
Google has crawled your site and also to request a site crawl is by going to
your Google Search Console. This is as easy as Googling
Google Search Console. As you can see in my screenshot, I can see my cross stats. I can see the average
crawl response, and I can see how many people
have come to my website. So this is a really
good free tool to use and you should use
it at least daily. I like to see if there
are any errors because this is also great for
technical SEO troubleshooting. Another really important
part of technical SEO is understanding what
robot's txt file is. This file tells search engines where they can and
can't go on your site. So essentially, if you
need to hide a page, then this is what you would
use is your robot's txt file. Another thing to understand
our robots, Meta tags. Meta tags or pieces
of code that provide crawlers instructions on how to crawl or index webpage content. And you can see the code
there that is used. And it's placed into
the head section of a website page when there are multiple versions
of the same page, which is why it's so important not to create duplicate content. Google will select one,
distort its index. And this process is called
canonical quantization. And the you are selected
as the canonical will be the one Google shows
in the search results. So you are essentially competing with yourself
against the same page. Now you also need to
make sure the pages you want people to find
can be indexed in Google. How you find this out is you go back to Google
Search Console. You'd navigate to the
URL inspection tool. You paste the URL, you'd like Google to search
into the search bar, and then you just wait to
check the URL through Google. And it will tell you whether this page has been
indexed or not. Adding schema markup is
extremely important. And schema markup and
forms the search engines precisely what your content is trying to convey
on your webpage. And adding this markup to your HTML and proves
the way your page is displayed in the
search engine results by enhancing the rich snippets. They're displayed
beneath the page title. So here are some examples
of what Rich Snippets are. For my first example, I picked a random
restaurant in New York. So as you can see, if you scroll down to the right, all of that information
regarding the address, the hours menu, phone number, you can make a reservation. This is an example of
a rich snippet that this company has put on the back of their website so it
shows to customers. The next example is, I decided to find chandelier. You can see the reviews
on their reviews is another example of
a schema markup that has been put
on their website. Then also looking at recipes, it's going to show me recipes that have
rich snippets already on there because they have added this to their website and
you can see their reviews. They're naturally
going to come up first in the search engines. And then I went
ahead and clicked on best sugar cookie recipe because it gave
that to me first. And then I'm looking
at Rachael Ray. This is another example
of a rich snippet, as you can see, four
different links that you can click on. And then you keep scrolling down and the latest news
from hers coming up. So this is a schema
markup that she has put on the backend
of her website. So you see the top links
She wants you to click on, and then you also see
latest info from her. Now let's learn the difference
between HTTP and HTTPS. So HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer
Protocol is the protocol that enables communication
between different systems, transferring information
and data over a network. While on the other hand, HTTPS stands for Hypertext
Transfer Protocol Secure. And although functions
similarly to HTTP, HTTPS works to
protect communication between web servers and browsers with transfer,
transporting data. So if you own an e-commerce
site, specifically, you are using secure
customer information. You need to make sure that
your website is secure. So it's always important to
make sure your website is HTTPS so that it doesn't
give customers that error, that this website is not
secure if it's with HTTP. And as always, you
should remember that your website
needs to be mobile friendly as most searches are now done on mobile websites. To see how this is
affecting your website, you can use Google's
PageSpeed Insights tool and it will tell
you if there are any errors and how
to fix those on your mobile site as well
as your desktop site. That is the end of lesson seven and the end
of this course. So a few takeaways I want you to remember when it comes
to technical SEO is to make sure your
site is indexed and always use your
Google Search Console. It will tell you about most technical errors
and you need to stay on top of these
because they could be affecting your Google rankings. And another thing
to really remember is to have your website secure. You can buy an SSL certificate. It's extremely cheap and easy. And then it will make sure that your website is secure and it's an HTTPS site versus HTTP. So thank you again for
taking this course and don't hesitate to reach out
to me with any questions. And also, you can take
that quiz at the end to see if you're keeping track with what we talked
about in this lesson.
10. SEO class wrap-up. Congradulations!: Congratulations, you have completed the
SEO one-on-one course. We covered everything
from off-page SEO to on-page SEO to technical
SEO and so much more. If there's one key takeaway
I want you to remember, it's that SEO is
not a onetime task. It's always evolving. You need to be
staying up on top of the latest trends and checking
your analytics constantly. I am always in my
analytics every day you need to see if
there's any technical errors such as if people are bouncing off your
website because you're having broken pages or slow
web time loading speeds, you also need to check your keywords and see
how they're tracking. And if you need to pivot
and change them at all. So make sure that you
don't just do this once. You are always on top of SEO because this is
what's going to get your website or your company's website
above the competition. And please don't forget
to upload your project to the project gallery on the class page so
we can all see it. I'm looking so forward to
seeing how you've applied, what you've learned in this
class to your project, then if you really
enjoyed this class, please leave a review. I'd really appreciate it. So I as well learn what
you're looking for, then follow my profile as well. So I look forward to seeing you in the next course that I teach and don't hesitate
to reach out to me at anytime for any questions. I will always be available
again. Thank you. I really appreciate
you taking this class.