Grow your Search Rankings with SEO

1. SEO Course Outline: Are you a website owner who struggles to rank on the first page of Google? Are you a small business and we would like to get more local clients from Google Search. Google is a massively competitive platform these days. You can no longer randomly post articles and hope to go viral and gets traffic. The Google algorithm for ranking has evolved. It's more sophisticated now than ever before. People trying to trick it will likely get penalized and get no rankings. But there are proven methods that Google loves. And when you apply them, you may experience exponential growth in traffic. Now the goal of this class is to demystify the SEO process so that you can optimize your website from the search engines point of view. And I plan to reveal to you a clear roadmap of all the actions that you need to take to fix your website and make it Google friendly so that you get higher rankings on Google and you drive more organic traffic to your website. Whether you are a local business that wants to get more leads, an affiliate website looking for more traffic, an e-commerce store searching for more sales or a blog. This class can reveal to you the next actions to rank on Google. After this class, you will become familiar with the SEO process and know exactly why some websites rank in the top three positions of Google, while others are nowhere to be found. Here's what will be covered inside this class. In the first section, you'll discover the foundation of SEO. You will learn what is SEO, how search engines work? The on-page factors for ranking, off-page factors for ranking and how to make your website technically friendly for Google. In the second section, you'll learn the tools of SEO analysis. I'll introduce you to Google's own set of WIP master applications. The number one tool for professional SEO research, and the Google Chrome plug-ins for quick SEO analysis. Finally, in the third section, you'll learn all about the monthly FeO activities that you will have to share you to grow your SEO rankings. So you'll learn about backlinks strategies, keyword analysis, how to get more local visitors to your business website. And I'll finish off with a summary of the next steps you need to take. Take this class today and let's get busy working on your rankings. 2. Foundation of SEO: Hi, Tom, here. Let's get started with the basics of SEO. Seo stands for search engine optimization. And the purpose of this is to optimize your website in such a way to make your website's rank on the first page of the search engine results page. Once your website is visible on Google, the traffic that you get from the search results is known as organic traffic. You do not have to pay for the search listings. You'll receive this inflow of traffic from having a search optimized website. Here you see the search engine results on Google, and at the top you have listings that are labeled ads. These are generated through Google ads, but SEO traffic is organic and these will be displayed below this. So I have listed here two results below that, which are organic results. That's where you want to have your website ranking. As a side benefit if you optimize your page and rank well on Google, you will also rank well on the other major search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and Dr. go. Google being the main search engine, is the focus of all SEO efforts, but any additional traffic from other search engines is just a bonus. Now let's discuss the mechanics of how search engines work. Every time you search for something on Google, the search engine instantly runs through its algorithm and presents to you the most relevant results based on your search query. Before we get into the ranking factors, you need to understand what happens to your website when it is initially discovered by Google and listed on its search engine. There are three main steps. Step one is crawling, google sense it's spiders to crawl the web. Def can be referred to as web crawlers. They go on a scouting mission to discover website updates and discover new website. Your website will have a robot's txt file that informs these web crawlers which parts of your website to crawl and which to avoid. Additionally, you will have a sitemap dot xml file, which helps these crawlers even more by specifying exactly URLs to crawl and index. But more on this when we talk about the technicals of your website, despite her visits your website, and makes a record of the URLs and the entire structure. Step two is indexing. This involves making a copy of your website and storing it in this search index. This is the equivalent of storing your website in a library of websites and adding your website details to the Search catalog. Parts of the indexing involve collecting data on relevant keywords and recording your metadata for each page. I'll cover these in more detail in the upcoming lessons. And step three involves ranking your website. The web crawler has made a copy of the vitals of your website for quick access. When a search query is made in Google, it can quickly access this information and assess competing websites information and then run the relevant results through its ranking algorithm and display the best results. Now the question is, what is involved in the Google algorithm for ranking websites? There are many factors involved, but they can be segregated into three main categories, which I like to call the foundation of FeO. You need to work on each of these to make your website rank. Our weakness in any could jeopardize your website ranking on Google search. Here's an overview of these categories. Firstly, we have on-page SEO. This refers to the actual content on your website. This includes optimizing your headings, blog posts, articles, product descriptions, the keywords, everything you see on your webpage. The second is an off-page SEO. This is related to how your website appears in the eyes of other websites, the surrounding environment of your websites. So this includes questions like, do other websites perceive your website as a source of authority and link to it? Or are your products getting positive reviews on other websites? And now the question is, are you being listed in all the major site directories? So these are some ways how your website impact on the surrounding environment. The third category of SEO is the technicals. Having a technically optimized website will make the web crawlers job much easier and you will be rewarded with a higher ranking. You will need to identify and solve all the technical issues that may damage your website. These may involve load times, site security structure issues, URL prefixes. I'll talk more about these in the upcoming lessons. But basically, the less the crawlers struggles when going through your website, the better because the WebCrawler recognizes a poorly formatted website. These three categories make up the foundation of SEO. And this will be your focus when optimizing your website for Google rankings. In the next lessons, we'll cover these ranking factors in more detail. 3. Essential On Page Factors: Welcome back. In this lesson, we will be discussing the main on-page SEO factors that help your content rank on Google. And on-page SEO factors is all about your content and how your content is formatted. First is the page title. Each page has a unique page title, and the page title is visible in two areas. Firstly, in the browser tab, as you can see in this screenshot. Now the second place where it is visible is as the heading in the search engine results page. Now if your title is too short, then you won't communicate enough to your potential visitor. And the results could be less clicks. If it's too long, the title will get truncated by Google. So again, it will get less clicks. You want to make sure that when you write your title, it's between 50 to 60 characters. Now a common overlooked issue with a lot of website is when multiple URLs are using the same page title. When this happens, it is very difficult for Google to determine which is the best page to rank. Now this can hurt your rankings because essentially your two pages are competing against themselves. This is an on-page SEO factor that needs to be optimized for Google crawlers. Also, it is a good practice to insert a core keyword in the page title, but more on this later. Next we have the meta-description. Now this is important because it gives a snapshot of your page content and it helps to Google crawler analyze your data. The meta description appears on the search engine results page, and it will show below the URL and below the title, as you can see in this screenshot, the description is within the Meta tags of your website. And this can be easily configured with any CMS like WordPress, especially if you are using an SEO plugin, for instance, Yoast SEO. Now you have to limit the description to a 160 characters. Because again, if it's too long, Google will truncate it. Problem occurs when the Meta description is missing entirely. In that case, the Google crawler will have to crawl and index your website and perform this additional step of generating the meta-description for you. This is worse because on the search engine results page, you are missing out on an opportunity to market your page. If the crawler has to generate this for you, it will be something generic and not related nicely to your page. Hence, you will get a lower click-through rate. You want to make sure that your meta-description not only is active, it is including your page, but that you specify it so that it sounds nicely and it tells the customer what to expect on the page if they click on it. Moving on, we have headings tags, and heading tags are used to optimize the structure of your page. Each page must have a main heading signified by the H1 tag. If you use subheadings, then you can have multiple of these depending on the structure. As you can see, the other headings are basically subheadings and relevant to each subsection. To common problems occur when the headings tags are misused. Firstly, on your website, you may have many pages that use the same H1 tags. This is a problem because the WebCrawler doesn't know which is the main page for a particular keyword or a topic. Another issue is if you have the H1 tag missing entirely. The problem here is that Google doesn't know what the page is about it. We'll have to examine the content and make a judgment for you. So essentially, if this happen, the web crawler gets confused. When confused, there is a risk of keyword cannibalization. That means when two pages rank for the same keyword. Or another problem is that the Google crawler may rank the wrong page for the wrong keyword. Any type of confusion is bad. The web crawler is a bot. You need to make technical parts as clear as possible on your website. The clearer the better. Here are the guidelines for using heading tags. You can only have one H1 tag on each page, and it should be at the top of the page. You can have multiple H2 tags. If you go deeper than you can use H3 tags within each H2 tag, like a subheading to a subheading. Finally, do this in ascending order from H1 to H2, H3 and so on. You don't want to start with a h5 tag and have an H1 tag at the bottom of the page. The purpose here is to structure your article or blog posts in a way that Google knowns the main topic and all the subheadings. Now I want to talk about image alt tags or alt descriptions. These are used within an HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page. Alt tags are not visible on the page, and as the name implies, they are only used on images. They look like this. You have an image and then the source and then an alt tag. Alt tags are useful for those who are visually impaired. For FeO, it is a space to add your target keywords so that Google knows what the image is about. Search engines use it to understand the meaning and context of your image. Common problem is missing data in the alt tags. If this happens, it's a missed opportunity to add your keywords and build on the context of your page. It's a minor step to take, but every little step helps to optimize your content. The next topic I want to discuss is the URL permalink structure. This is the URL a person sees in the address bar. Usually you have the main URL followed by your page name or post name. It may look like, as you can see in these two examples, could be a post name or maybe you have a category section before that and then you have the actual post name. Now this looks good and easy for the WebCrawler. Url structure is only an issue if you have not configured this in WordPress or some other content management system. And the default settings are configured to show page numbers or dates. Then it looks like something like this. This URL looks ugly and it's also not a good way of organizing your website or blog. It is better when you have an actual post name and the postmen could be the title. But keep in mind that actual keywords used in the URLs do not have a huge impact on your rankings. So you should focus more on logical URL structure and make sure that it is aesthetic to anyone who visits the site. So if it looks good and the logic of the structure is understood, then web crawlers will record your website as user-friendly. The last fact that I wanted to mention here is keyword cannibalization. This occurs when you have multiple pages targeting the same keyword. The problem here is that the Google crawler will not know which page to index under that particular keyword. And secondly, you will be competing against yourself. This is a serious issue and leaving it alone could negatively impact your search rankings. So one option for you is to have each page focused on a different keyword. However, if you do have multiple pieces of content, like multiple blog posts, that are targeting the same keyword. While there is a Google friendly solution for this, you can specify the preferred primary page, and that is what we call the canonical URL and use a canonical tag. Here's what you do. In the secondary pages. You'll need to add the following HTML tag. You state the relationship as canonical, and then you show which page is the primary page. This will help your page as it will get some extra link juice or more SEO scoring for having expanded content about your topic by having numerous pages that cover it. But you have to make sure you specify that it's a canonical URL. Well done for making it to the end. This was a long lesson. I tried to break it up though. For now, just let the new information sink in. And later when I talk about the tools for SEO, I'll share with you, I plug-in that can instantly analyze your website and reveal all of these on-page factors that you need to fix. Thanks for watching. And in the next lesson we will go over the main off-page ranking factors. 4. Off Page Factors that Determine Page Rank: Welcome back to your training. The focus of this lesson is on off-page SEO factors. This relates to how your website fits into the Internet landscape, how it is recognized by other websites. So the key factor in this area is backlinks. To better describe the purpose of backlinks, let's use the metaphor of finding a new doctor. You check online and you have a large selection of medical centers with many doctors, you get confused and you don't know who to choose. What do you do? Well, chances are you ask your family and friends for previous experiences and for recommendations now that you have some options that are referred to you, let's say Doctor one gets one recommendation, dr. two gets two mentions. Dr. Three gets five mentions and great reviews. And doctor forgets three highly negative reviews. So you think about it and you go directly to Dr. three for your consultation. And all of this is thanks to the positive reviews from your closest friends and family. When it comes to backlinks, they serve like virtual recommendations. They signal to Google that one website has more authority than another. And the more backlinks you get, the higher you will run because it's like getting more recommendations, like getting more endorsements. But the quality of a backlink is also important. Going back to the doctor metaphor, if a stranger interrupted you on a street and made a doctor's recommendation, I'm pretty sure you would simply ignore it. You think, who is the stranger and why should I trust him? But if a close family member gives you the recommendation, then you will be much more inclined to trust them and take action on their advice. Going back to websites, each website is ranked on IDR value and this is known as a domain rating. And if you get a backlink with a DR1 writing while the website, it's not really old at worthy. The back-end doesn't carry much value. But then if you get a link from a website which has a DR 50 plus value, then this is a much more powerful buckling and it will trigger all the goods signals In the Google algorithm and you will get a boost in your rankings. Later in this training, I'll show you a tool used to determine the DR rating of different websites. For now, just keep in mind that a domain rating pretty much just rates the domains if it's a good quality domain or if it's just like a new domain or about domain. Now you know the importance of backlinks. There are a couple of different types of backlinks. Let's first go over the backlinks that actually bring link juice into your website. So these are SEO focused backlinks. In the HTML of a backlink, there will be the relationship field, just as I showed you with canonical internal links. But over here I'm talking about external links. The first one I want to talk about is do follow backlinks. Do follow links, transfer link juice into your page. A Google crawler can follow the link to your website and see the relationship of your website. If it's a do follow link, It's like you're getting a positive recommendation or an endorsement from the linking websites. These are marked by the relationship equals do follow in the HTML tags. Next, I want to talk about nofollow backlinks because nofollow backlinks are totally opposite. They are marked with the HTML code relationship equals nofollow. Now these links, they do not pass link juice, which means the Google crawler will not go through the link and enter your website. Your website will be visible, but you will not get an endorsement from the website. So Google will not add your page for higher rankings. However, nofollow links should still be included in your link building strategy. If you have this type of link on a page that ranks really well and gets a lot of traffic. Then while humans can interact with the page and they can go through the link and visited your website. So it still means you will get more traffic. In your link building strategy. You need to both types of links anyway. This shows the Google crawlers that you have a mixed buckling profile and your website will appear more natural to Google. There are other types of backlink relationships, but for now, these are the main ones that you should focus on. Next, I want to talk about what anchor text to use for your backlinks. For this, Let's go visit our website. Here we are in our browser window. And I wanted to talk about anchor texts because these are the texts that you have to click on to go visit another website. So these are texts that have our link embedded in them. They are usually highlighted or underlined and they are clickable. So on this page, over here we see this one. This is clickable. You can feed changes the color as well. But this is what I wanted to show you here. Monitors is underlined. This is an anchor text and the keyword involved is monitors. Basically. If I click on it, I get redirected to another page. The best anchor texts have a lot of contexts that when a person clicks on it, they know exactly what to expect. In the next page. Let's have a look at another example. Here's a lot of contexts. Kalman monitor calibration software. I click on it, I will be redirected to a page with monitor calibration soft drawn it. Just like earlier I explained that there were different backlink types. They are also different anchor text types. The best ranking will be achieved when your website has a combination of different anchor texts. Let's review the different types. We have branded keywords. These are keywords, this focus on your company name. In an article, the user clicks on your company name and gets redirected directly to your website. Simple. Next we have organic keywords or generic keywords. These texts do not reference any keyword or branding. The surrounding text lets the user and understand the context of the link. So some examples may be some very, very generic ones like read more. Click here, download this. For example, download this. You only know what you're downloading by the words surrounding it. So it could be like, if you want to get this free manual, download it here or download this, and you know exactly what you're going to get. Next we have exact keyword and cortex, and they should be used when targeting specific keywords on your page. Let's assume your page is targeting the keyword SEO training. You can make an anchor text, which is SEO training. So the anchor text is the keyword that you are targeting. Next, we have partial match anchors. These includes keyword phrases along with other generic random or stop words. For example, get your free Fitness guide here. And the keyword that you are targeting is Fitness guide. It is a partial much as you have words that are surrounding your main keywords. Another really powerful backlinks, anchor text is just the wrong link. So this means the URL of your website. Person sees the URL and they can click on and get redirected. And your goal is to have anchor texts that varies and combines all of the ones that I have listed here in this slide. Now, I want to talk about social media backlinks. Because I'm pretty certain I know what you have been thinking of. Why not just post plenty of links on Facebook, instagram, Twitter, and all of these other major social media platforms. Well, the pros of building these types of links is that you're building your brand and through your efforts you will get more traffic from these platforms. And you will spread the word. People will become aware of your website or your service. But here's the major con, of this. All of the links are no follow. So no link juice will be passed to your website ever. However, you should still have social media links because it does provide more exposure for your business website. And the traffic you get could be quite significant from it. And you could get many more leads and sales. It's just sort of an additional way that you would get, let's say, let's call it organic traffic. However, it's not true Google, but through the social media platforms. So far, you have learned that not all links have equal value. Sample gives you more linkages while others do absolutely nothing for your website. But there is a more troubling factor that I want to raise with you. That's all about the bud backlinks. These are spammy backlinks that can actually negatively impact your SEO efforts. If you have a large quantities of broken links or links coming from suspicious websites or websites known for having spam or malware, then what can happen is your website may be penalized by Google. But not to worry if this has happened to you. There is a solution to this. If you have a well-developed website with a lot of links, it is good practice to perform a link audit once or twice a year to make sure that the quality of the backlinks has not been compromised. This process involves downloading all of your Backlinks and then manually checking all of the links one-by-one and making a record of all of the bud links that are not adding any value to you. Secondly, after the audit, you should create a disavow file. This is a text file that lists all the broken and Bud quality links. Then you submit it to Google via the Google Search Console. Then what will happen is these links there will be disassociated from your web page. Sometimes merely getting rid of all of these bad backlinks from your website profile will result in a boost in your search engine rankings. So how do you develop backlinks? Well, this is a topic for another lesson, and I've created a separate lesson all about backlink building strategies. For now, the most important is that you understand what is a backlink at the different types of backlinks, water anchor texts, all of this information builds like your backlink foundational knowledge. 5. The SEO Technicals that Crawlers Love: Welcome to another lesson on the foundation of SEO. So far we've talked about the on-page factors and off-page factors that impact your page rankings. In this lesson, the focus is on the technical part of your website. I will list commoners that are detected from a technical perspective. Most of these are easily fixable, but you do have to discover them within your website. The reason this is important is because you don't want to be penalized for simple mistakes that the Google crawler discovers. If your website is technically sound and the structure is logical than a Google crawler will not get confused and easily index your website. First, I want to talk about the XML sitemap and the robots.txt file. If either one of them is missing, it creates a problem for the Google crawler. Let's break down both of them so that you understand the difference between a sitemap and a robots.txt file. An XML sitemap is a list of URLs that the crawler should index. And as you can see here, It's an example of a sitemap that's generated by the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin. It's very specific here. It only lists actual URLs. If you have draft pages or unrelated pages, then you do not include them in your sitemap. And the WebCrawler will not be given a direct instruction to crawl them. You can take the additional step in adding a no index meta tag to those pages, but more on that later. The robots.txt file serves a similar function. It also tells the web crawler which parts of your website to crawl and index and which to avoid. But this is done on a more generic level. In this example, you see that it does not list URLs, it just specifies the folders that contains the web pages worth indexing. And also you can specify which parts of your website are off limits to the crawler. Both the robots.txt file and the XML sitemap are auto-generated if you're using Yoast SEO for WordPress. Now that you know what an XML sitemap is and what's a robot file is. If your website is missing either, then it can negatively impact your rankings as it makes the crawlers job much more difficult. Also, if you have an existing sitemap, it may be worth just reviewing what's in the sitemap and updating it. Let's talk about breadcrumb navigation. This refers to the structure of your main pages, sub-pages, blog posts, or product pages. Essentially, this organizes your website per main topics and sub-topics. Correct structure makes sense to the Google web crawler, but also it makes sense to your visitors. And breadcrumbs lets you create an intuitive structure. Here's an example from an e-commerce store. This breadcrumb lists the main URL, the category page, and the product. If a user clicks the category, they know where they will be. Let's do. The WebCrawler will find such a design as intuitive. Navigation is the key. And that leads to the next section of your website that also needs to be properly formatted. So you've got the breadcrumb navigation at the top. So now let's move on to the footer navigation at the bottom. If you look at all great websites, you'll see a nicely formatted footer. Inside the footer, there are always links to the main pages of your website. Footers sometimes contain brief snippets describing your business and it's good practice to include your contact info and social media links. I will structured format is intuitive to use and Google will give you some extra SEO points for this. If you are missing a full term or don't have it setup professionally, it will damage your ranking potential. Now let's have a look at internal linking. When creating the intuitive website structure, you will be focusing on internally linking the right pages. Internal links provide a signal to Google as to water the main pages, which pages are more important than others? The pages must have a natural flow. Like a problem might be that you have a local business and you want to drive visitors to request a quote page, but on your main pages, you do not add the internal link to this. So not only do your visitors struggled to get to the page, but Google Chrome OS also cannot see the relationship between your product pages and they request the quote page. Inefficient linking strategy can result in your main pages not getting enough link juice and not showing Google what is important about your website. Here are a few things to watch out for when analyzing the quality of your technical SEO. Broken internal URLs. These are bad for structure as they lead the WebCrawler as well as the user nowhere. So it's bad practice and it will reduce your page ranking potential. Next, we have broken external links. Now these are not going to destroy your rankings, but there will be a problem to your user experience. A person doesn't want to be redirected to a broken website. It's frustrating and we'll make it seem that your website is outdated. And other major technical part is the usage of canonical URLs. If your website has multiple pages targeting the same keyword, then the Google crawler will not know which page is the main page. You'll have multiple pages there are competing against themselves, sort of like an internal competition. This is not good. The solution is to specify which is the main page and set up a canonical relationship to the secondary pages. This way, the web crawler knows which is the main page and which pages are the supplementary material or secondary content. After you have set up the canonical URLs, the next step is to adjust your XML sitemap so that you only include the main URL and you delete all your canonical URLs. As you can see in this example, the link specifies the main website. This is the HREF that specifies the main website. And then it sets the relationship to canonical. If you do this right, then the pages are not competing against each other. And this will actually help boost the rankings of your main page. Now let's talk about the HTTPS protocol. When you have a website using the HTTPS protocol, it means the connection is encrypted and increases the security of the data transfer. If you are still using the old outdated HTTP protocol, then the connection is not secure for your visitors and you will be rated negatively by the Google crawler. You'll need to check to ensure all of your pages are running on HTTPS and make sure that all of your resources are also using HTTPS. By resources I'm talking about images. Http connections are pretty much ignored by Google these days. When you set up a new website, you have to manually activate HTTPS for the entire website. But as this is a new standard, this should be an easy process to setup with any hosting provider. Moving on, we have indexed pages with no actual value. So this is a technical problem because these pages offer no value. And then Google can also pick up the pages have no value. So what am I actually talking about here? These are like, thank you pages which appear after somebody buys a product or subscribes to a newsletter. It can be admin and login pages, although they should be automatically set to no index if you're using a content management system. Also internal search results on your own website. Now, this is only applicable if a person searches your website and is redirected to another internal page. If you have any of these pages, this can be easily fixed. All you have to do is identify those pages and add the tag. No-index notifies the crawler not to index the page and it will be skipped. These pages offer no value and they can negatively impact your rankings. And if you update the pages with no-index tax, Don't forget to remove the URL from the XML sitemap. Because a common problem is for website owners to forget this step. They will know Index the URL, but the sitemap contains the URLs, and this just serves to confuse the Google crawler. Now let's talk about social media links in your website. Because this is a huge problem and you probably have links throughout your website to all of your major social media accounts. Like in the footer, as I mentioned earlier. Problem is that these links by default, they're set to do follow. This means that the crawler goes through your website and passes into a social media page. The problem is that you are losing link juice by doing this and you are sacrificing your ranking potential. While all the SEO power goes through your page to the social media websites. Like you are literally the middleman redirecting people, the main page, which is the social media page. The solution is to set your social media links with the tags nofollow. You do not want the Google crawler leaving your website and sharing your link juice with social media. You need to scan your website for links and then determine all the nofollow and do follow links. Also keep in mind that by default your links are due follow links. So by default the relationship tag will not be set in your code. So you can assume it's due follow. This is a simple fix and many website owners overlook it. So don't lose your link juice to social media websites. That sums up to this lesson on the technical issues that many website owners experience. The goal here is to identify the technical issues and fix them so that the Google crawler has an EV job in indexing your website. If it finds no errors here, then you can focus on the content of your website. Now there are tools that will help you analyze your website for these errors. And I'll tell you more about one really good tool in the resources section at the end of this course. So stay tuned. 6. Tools of SEO - Part 1: Now that you have been introduced to the foundation of SEO, it's time to get familiar with the tools for SEO work. In this lesson, I will talk about Google Analytics. This is a tool that lets you monitor the amount of traffic you are getting on your website. It's really useful because it collects so much data about your visitors. You can check demographics, devices, operating systems, traffic sources, and much more. You can literally check where your visitors are coming from and what are they doing on your website. In this lesson, I will show you how to navigate through the most useful data and how the data impacts on your Google rankings. The first step is you need to add your website to Google Analytics. You do this by creating a new property. Then you'll get a code that you add to your website. If you're using WordPress or any other CMS tool, there will be a plugging or perhaps a settings option that easily lets you add this tracking code into your website. Here I am in Google Analytics. And just to briefly cover how you add a property to Google Analytics, because sometimes this can be difficult to find. So move your mouse cursor over this bottom left-hand corner, you have admin. You click on it. Then you have the properties here. This is your main account and then the property of here. So you would just click on Create property. Then there are two things, like in the property settings, you may get a Universal Analytics code. So this is the tracking code that you would add to your website. However, there is one thing this type of trucking is going to be outdated. So instead of going to the appropriate effect things, you will have to go to Google Analytics for set-up assistant. And you will have to go through the steps here. And you also get a Universal Analytics code. Just like before. It's a brief code that you would copy and you would paste it into your website. So if you're using WordPress, you would get the Google Analytics plugin and paste your code there. Let's go back to home. The home tab. You see a snapshot of your website performance. And this gives you an insight into the amount of users who have visited your website. Then you also see how many sessions they have had. What is the bounce rate of the website? The bounce rate is how many users have just visited your website and then instantly left it. The lower the bounce rate, the better for your website. Session duration, how long a person stays on your website. If you want more detailed overview, you can just click here audience overview, and that will just redirect you to the audience tab. I will go during a second, but now scrolling down, as you can see, there's pretty much a general overview of all of the activity that is happening on your website. For more details or for more detailed statistics, we go to the tabs that are located right over here. Okay, so let's go to oh, by the way, this is real-time. You don't really have to worry about real-time. This will show you what is happening on your website right now. Now you do not have to worry about this because SEO is a long-term game. What is important for you is that your monthly visitors, monthly statistics are getting better. Now let's go to the audience and I'll click on overview. In the audience tab, you have more detailed data about your website traffic. You see here a nice graph that represents users over a time period. Now you can separate this by hour, day, week, month. This is just a sample website, so there isn't enough data here. But I would click on months in your case and review the data for the last six to 12 months periods. Especially in SEO, because it's a long-term investment. You may do the right work today, but you will only see the results in one to three months. Underneath, you see how many users have visited the website. How many of those users are new users? How many sessions have been created by the users? How many sessions per user? How many page views, the number of pages per session, average session duration bounce rate. So pretty much the details that we saw in the snapshot of the account earlier. But then if we scroll down, we have some more data. More about the language, country, city, different operating systems, the language of the users who are visiting your website. I would just like to comment that the bounce rates should be as low as possible. Because essentially when somebody comes to your website and then instantly leaves it or closes the browser, that is not a strong signal for the quality of your website. It could mean that you have a spammy website or maybe you have a website that is loading really, really slowly in a person just loses interests and closes the browser. Before arriving at your website. Now, these statistics are the bounce rate, the session duration. Of course longer a person is on your website, the more valuable your website. Now all of these things are important for SEO because a high bounce rate signals to Google a low-quality website. Similarly, our short average session duration negatively impacts your website because it means users are not interested, so they leave. And that's how Google will interpret these results. That's why it's also beneficial to have users browse through multiple pages in each session. This would be a clear sign to Google that your website is interesting and worthy of a high-ranking. This is the basic overview of the audience. You can find more details, statistics just going over these sub-tabs right over here. Good way for you to start and get familiar with this platform would be to go through all of them. But the overviews there is the most important. Let's go next to the acquisition overview. Here you can see the different channels of traffic. You have organic search. This is actual traffic from the Google's search engine results page. Direct traffic is when somebody types into the address bar your URL and directly goes to your page and e-mail traffic. Well, that's from an e-mail list. Referral traffic is when somebody clicks a link on another website and gets redirected to your website. An example, it was when a person clicks on one of your Backlinks. In the acquisition tab, you can see how many users you get. And if you are using conversion tracking, you will see the conversions here. Then you get the standard information as in most of the taps here, which is how many users you are getting. The behavior which involves the bounce rate, session duration pages per session. And here are the conversions. But the main difference between the acquisition tab and the audience tab is that the acquisition shows you where your users are coming from. The audience tab gives you an information of who your users are, what device they are using, which were they located? Acquisition tab is all about the source of traffic that they are coming from. Next, we have the behavior tab. Click on Overview. Again, we feed a quick overview of the most important websites statistics. But underneath this time, you can see which of your pages are performing the best. The behavior tab breaks down the traffic based on the individual URL of each page. For instance, let me click on site content and then all pages. Again, we see more data on each individual URL. So each individual page that is on your website. In this lesson, I've showed you the most important sections of Google Analytics. To learn more about the platform, I strongly urge you to set up your website and wait a few days until it collects some data. And then just individually go through and visit each of these tabs, just reviewing it one-by-one. But the most important step if you haven't done this already, is to set up Google Analytics on your website. You want to start collecting data about your visitors immediately. 7. Tools of SEO - Part 2: In the previous lesson, I went through Google Analytics and you learned that the primary focus of that isn't collecting user data. In this lesson, I want to introduce you to Google Search Console. This is a tool that is specifically used to optimize your website for rankings from a technical perspective. You've already learned about technical SEO in my earlier lessons. Well, in Google Search Console, you can see how these factors are used in the platform. You can check your backlinks, submitted, disavow file, review tech errors, and regularly check for automatically detected tech errors. And as of recently, you can check your core web vitals. I will discuss this in detail later on in this lesson. The main focus is about Google Search Console. You can just go to Google type in Google Search Console. You'll be taken to this page. You will have to click on Start. Now, when setting up your Google Search Console account, you will need to verify your domain name with the Google Search Console account. Before when you are using Google Analytics, you had to create your tracking code in Google Analytics and then copy and paste it to your website. In this case, what you have to do is you need to verify ownership of your domain name. You will have to change a texture occurred in your DNS configuration. That do not worry, this step is very easy, but you just have to figure out where that DNS configuration is to take place. Because there are two options depending on how your website is hosted and where it is hosted. You may be able to like this as a name cheap account. So you would go to Advanced DNS host records, then you would have an option to add the text records over there. But if it is not possible for you to change your DNS settings here, it means that you have to go to your hosting provider and directly change the DNS records on that. By hosting provider, I'm referring to the C panel of their hosting provider. Over there you will find the records, the Advanced DNS settings, and you'll be able to add host records. This is just something I want to bring to your attention. And then once you update the text records, then it may take up to 24 hours for this update to take effect. Then you can verify your domain on the Google Search Console. Once you do that, then you have an active Google Search Console account. Here I am locked inside Google Search Console. And among the overview tab. And here you see a snapshot of your whole page and summary information about each of the main tabs. Let's go to performance. Here you see general data, but clicks and impressions from Google Search purchase. Below the graph, you can see a breakdown into what queries are being used to find your pages, which pages at best performing and more informed about the countries and devices and so on. Then you have an URL inspection tool here. This lets you review data based on a specific URL within your website. The coverage tab. You can review if the Google crawler has detected any pending issues within your website. This will inform you about the issues that we described in the technical SEO lesson. Sitemaps. You can manually submit a sitemap if you have nothing here, it is good practice to manually submit a sitemap. But if you're using a CMS like WordPress, then Google will detect your sitemap and automatically submitted here. The removals tool enables you to temporarily block pages from Google Search results. In some cases, even third-party individuals can make a request to have a website removed. You will see this request here if something like this happens. An example is if a webpage display someone's personal information and present a significant risk of identity theft or financial fraud, then Google may remove the page and it will be visible here. Next we have page experience. This section analyses each URL based on core web vitals, mobile usability, and whether you have implemented HTTPS. If it finds any errors, then you will see them here. Next we have core web vitals, and this is relatively new addition to Google Search Console, and it has a very big impact on your ranking potential. Let's go to the slides and I'll show you more about them. The core web vitals analyses performance from actual users visiting your website, and its focus is on user experience. This consists of three components. The largest content, full paint. This sounds big, but actually it just refers to the time it takes for the largest content element to load on the screen. The largest element is typically an image or video, or perhaps a large block of text. First input delay. This refers to the delay between loading the page and when a user can actually interact with the page. An example of an interaction is clicking on a link. So you want to avoid a situation where links appear on the page, but a user cannot click them. Instead has to wait for the remainder of the page to load. That type of situation means there is a lag before I user can interact and it can hurt your page rankings. Finally, we have the cumulative layout shift. This is the shift that takes place to your content while the page is loading. An example is if you have a page filled with ARDS, these could be Google ads. The page content loads first, then the odds start to load after each out loads it most of the content above the ad or below the art. These layouts shifts can decrease your potential for Google rankings. And if any of the above are present, you should focus on fixing the issues. Essentially, the core web vitals is all about fast load times and user friendliness. Here in the Google search console, you will see if there are any current issues that need fixing. Now, we've got mobile usability. This part will show any issues for using a website on a phone. We have breadcrumbs, and these are internal links within your website. It's like a trail that indicates the pages position in the hierarchy. If you're using WordPress, it's possible that the template will generate the required code to create the breadcrumbs for your site. But if there are any pending issues, they will be visible here. Cycling search box. This does not apply to every website. Basically what it does is that in the search results page, you will have a sub-field that allows a person to do a direct search into your website. If Google determines that your website is against their policies, you will find this notice here in the manual action section. Depending on what it is, you may have to contact Google to have the penalty removed. With security issues, this report lists indications that your site was hacked or behavior on your site that could potentially harm a visitor on your computer. The last part I want to go over is linked. Here you will see the top external linking sites and which of your internal pages they link to your most popular linked internal pages. This section here It's useful if you want to do a background coded. So you can export your external links, for example, into Google Sheets, or you can export it as an Excel file and then you can check the quality of all of the backlinks. This concludes the overview of Google Search Console. I recommend you set this up for your business as quickly as possible so that it starts collecting data about your visitors and your website. Once you create your Google Analytics and Google Search Console, it is good practice just to login, browse through all of the sections. Just try to get familiar with it. After a couple of logins, after you're exposed to these tools, a couple of times, it should click in and you'll know exactly what you're doing on these platforms. Let's move on to the next verse specific tool for SEO. 8. The No.1 Tool for Website Research: In this lesson, I want to share with you one of the main tools for SEO analysis. I'd like to introduce you to a stress. This is a premium tool, but the insights you get from using it far outweigh the costs. This tool lets you explore the current rankings of your website. In fact, any website including your competitors. You can do keyword research to find cures that have volume and little competition. These are golden findings that offer you a quick win situations for boosting traffic to your website. You can do a backlink check of your competitors. You'll see what websites they are linking to. And then you can develop a similar buckling strategy. I liked the rank tracker tool here because you can set up your account to track your websites, main organic keywords. Then on a monthly basis, you can review your results and see if you're getting more traffic and which keywords are responsible for it. Here I am in a refs and let's do a quick website analysis. I'm hearing the Site Explorer tab and I'll type in a website here. Let's check crypto potato.com. I'll do a search. I remember the first time that I saw this dashboard, I panicked because there's just so much data to process, but I find the best way is to login site search and then go into all of the individual sections. Once you get familiar with it, you will understand how they all tie in together and what's the significance of them. As a quick intro, we have the HLS website ranking here. This ranks the website based on your backlink profile. And of course, the more backlinks year from better sources, the higher the rank. The UR, this is the URL writing, DR, this is the domain rating, and the domain writing is based on backlinks. This is important when building your own backlinks because a link from a website that has a DR value of one or two, There's nothing compared to a website that gives you a do follow buckling with a DR value of over 25. Then we have the backlinks and referring domains here. To clarify, backlinks are links that link back to your website. And any website can have multiple backlinks linked to your website. But each individual website here would be classified as one referring domain because it refers links to your page. That's why you will always have more backlinks then referring domains in any profile. Then you have organic keywords, and this is the total number of keywords that your website ranks for in Google. The organic traffic. So how much traffic you're getting from the organic keywords. And you have a traffic value. So an estimated value of your search traffic. Moving down, we start with a backlink profile. We have two graphs here, referring domains and referring pages. You can change it to one year to get more relevant statistics for the most recent time periods. If we go down, you get the domain rating value here. So you can see if your website is progressing. In this case, for this website, they're doing very well with a domain rating of 77. Then you see new and loss referring domains, new and lost backlinks, where those backlinks are coming from. Then you have the most popular anchor text for your backlinks. On the right-hand column here, we have some more information. Now, if you recall, we covered this in the buckling lesson. This is the difference between, well, I only covered do follow links and nofollow links. Here you can see a whole list of other relationships that are possible. But in any case, your backlink profile should be mixed up of them, but do follow. They're the most important ones. Now let's go to organic search. I'll change it to one year. You have a visual overview of the organic traffic and the organic keywords. So if you have an uptrend here, that means if you're doing something good in terms of SEO, and especially when you're starting out, you will have to do your keyword research and select keywords that have volume and are not too competitive to rank for. But I'll talk more about that in the keyword lesson. Moving down, you have your top five organic keywords. You can also see the statistics, how much volume there is for these keywords and how much traffic you are getting from this. Then you have the top five pages here. For SEO, the main focus, the buckling profile organic search, paid search is not relevant for us. So this is the basic overview of the domain, but we can dive deeper by clicking on any of the links here in the left-hand column. As you can see, there are many different categories to review and analyze. That's why this tool is so valuable, because you can literally review your close competitors, find out what's working for them, copy them, and then follow the same SEO strategy to build your website. As well. You can examine your own website and you can find the culprit. What is holding you back from having a high ranking in search engines? You may be targeting the wrong keywords. You might not have enough backlinks. Through this panel. You can find all of that out. Now I want to go over the Backlink profile. As you can see, there are many elements here to review. Backlinks, broken backlinks, anchors, internal backlinks, and so on. But let's review the main buckling profile. Here you see the referring page and the backlinks that are created. Now let's click on do follow. Now here's a list of links that are most important to you. You can analyze your competitors and make a list of the different backlink types and which website to target in your link building campaigns. This view shows you all of the backlinks for each referring domain. And if you want to know only the referring domain, then you can click on referring domains here. You can review each website and try to contact the ones that are most relevant. But when analyzing backlinks, you also see the type of content that is being linked for each unique page. I find that this backlinks is more valuable. Here you see they're referring to main is from Reddit. And then in the right-hand column you see all the backlinks. But let me find a better example. Here. You see the page and you see the anchor link here. What you can even do is you can review this page and then you know what type of content is being used to create the backlink. Now another part of the overview is keyword analysis. Let's go to organic keywords. Address is a really valuable tool when it comes to cure analysis. And here you have the organic keywords and ranking pages. You'll see what the volume is of this particular keyword, the keyword difficulty. Now, depending on this value, It's a rough estimate of how many backlinks you need to rank for this keyword. But it's not like, like let's say 86 Q or difficulty means you need 86 keywords. You should always check here how many referring domains and how many backlinks you need. So here's a picture and you should always like checking. It gives you a rough estimate how many backlinks you would need based on the keyword difficulty. Next, in a truss, you can see the current position of the keywords in the search results and the change, whether this is going up or going down. I'll show you how to check how much traffic the website is actually getting from this keyword. So scroll your mouse over syrup, which is the search engine results page. Let's click on it. So this will show you the top performing pages for this keyword and how the results would look in Google. And it analyzes all of their results based on, well, you have all the data here. You can see how much backlinks you would need to rank how much domains. But this is like a really competitive one. Let's try something else. Let's try this one. Let's click on it. Here are the top ten search engine results, results that would appear in Google. And sometimes you can find your page here and then you can see how you compare to other ones. So you can see how many backlinks you need, how many referring domains. The domain rating. So you have a lot of data here you can work with. If you are not ranking in the top ten. Well, this analysis here will give you an indication of what you will need to do to get a better ranking. If you find a competitor here that you would like to compete against? Well, you can just click on the backlinks. And then a truss will generate for you a full-on report with all of the backlinks that they have, all of the anchor text, all of the referring pages. And then you can analyze, analyze these pages, analyze the content that is being used to create the backlinks. And you can reach out, reach out and contact these pages and then try to get the same backlinks. To summarize, in this lesson, I've showed you how to explore our website in a truss. You know the type of information and statistics that are most important. I've shown you how to find competitor backlinks. And I've introduced you to find and keywords that are relevant for your website and your competitors. And you can view the stats to see how many backlinks you will need to rank in the top ten positions of Google. This platform is huge, but I believe in baby steps, learn a few useful tricks, and then move on to more advanced content. In the next lessons, I want to cover backlinks and keyword research as these are the next steps that you will be working on to improve your website rankings. 9. Chrome Extensions for SEO Analysis: Welcome back. Now that you've been introduced to the main tools for SEO work, let me go over a few Chrome extensions that will help make your life much easier. I will include a link to this in the resources pages and you can find more information about that in the summary lesson. Here we have I blog posts. As you can see, we have the headings, texts areas, we have images here, quotes, more headings, bullet points. So it's a long blog post which pretty much everything. But the thing is, we want to analyze it for SEO value. So we go to the plugin SEO meta in one-click, click on it, and then we get a snapshot of the entire page. We see the title, the description. Is it a goods linked? We see any keywords if they've been added, the URL canonical robots texts. Here's a summary of all of the headings. Some more technical information here. Then here we go On headers, we see a summary of all the H1, H2, H3 tags used with the actual content. Here we have an image analysis. We see that there have been 28 images used. Five of them are missing the alt text. So this is a way to optimize it. When you insert an image, doesn't always make sense to add a title, but you should always make sure to add an alt text. Here's a summary of all of the links. This is internal links only, not backlinks, just internal links within the blog post. Here's some data about social statistics, not really relevant here. And then we have some tools information. Most important are the summary header images and the links. This is a cool plugin that just lets you see some of the most basic knowledge for optimizing your content. It can be used for when you're doing some research over some different blogs or reviewing some of your own content. Next one that I want to show you is called local search. This plugin is useful when you want to make a search for a particular keyword in a different country. Let's say I wanted to have the best results for crypto in let's say, United Kingdom, specify which language to do the searching and how much search results. And I click on Submit. So it will show me the actual search engine results page, how it would appear in the UK. If you are a local business, probably not so useful for you, but if you're like an affiliate Website ranking in different countries, then this is an easy way to do local searches. The last extension I want to show you is called check my links. And this one is useful for finding broken links. This can be used when you are trying to find broken links on other webpages or when you just want to check your own page. Here's a page. There's some content and plenty of different backlinks. Click on the plugin, check my links. As you can see, the plugin analyzes all of the links on this page, and then it lists all of the invalid links here. Now unfortunately, you cannot click on this. It will not display you a list of all of the invalid links. But the good thing is it highlights all of the links and it's color-coded. So basically on this page we just scroll down and look for the red highlights. Here's the red highlights. And if we click on it, as you can see, it's a broken link. That's the easy way. Just scroll through the page, find a broken link. You will learn more about finding broken links in the buckling lesson. For now, keep in mind that this tool is very useful in quickly searching a page for broken links. Especially if you do the search on our resources page that has hundreds of links. To summarize all of these extensions, they only work on the Chrome browser. I recommend you get them. They can make your SEO analysis easier. I've included instructions how to get these links in the resources page, which you can find out more about that in the summary lesson for this course. Thank you for watching. 10. Backlink Building Strategies: Welcome back. In this lesson, I want to move forward and reveal to you the main backlink building strategies. As you know, uh, websites, authority in reputation depends a lot on the sources of backlinks. These are the off-page ranking factors. And the more backlinks you have from reputable sources, your website will get a high domain rating and you'll be rewarded by Google with better rankings. So what makes a good link, a link that passes so-called link juice into your website. This is one that essentially it endorses your website. An example of such a link is one that has the attribute do follow, contained into it. Do follow, meaning that Google crawlers follow the buckling and enter your website. If the link is null, follow, then you do not get any benefit for Google rankings. You should still have these links because you will get additional traffic from it. Just keep in mind that they will not influence your rankings. Now finding the best sources for potential backlinks can be a long process. That's why this lesson is focused on popular link building tactics. The first one I want to talk about is guest posting. This is an old method, but it's withstood the test of time. And guest posting means that you will write an art school for another blog and in that article you will embed your link. This helps to blog owner gets new content while you get yourself a new buckling. But finding the right blogs to offer gifts posting can be time-consuming. You can search for relevant blogs in your industry by Google, this is a simple method and you may find many good fits for it. But the method that I recommend is analyzing your competitors backlinks. You'll find many guest posts and suitable blogs that way. And you will also see the type of content that is being used for guest posts. Another good strategy is known as broken link. Building. Broken links, they damage your reputation. It makes your content look old and outdated. Any website with many links will over time, experience more and more broken links. The reality is that website owners are busy and don't always have time to do a backlink audit and remove these links. And that's where you come in. You can search our website and report broken links to the owner. And as a favor for finding the broken link, you can ask the owner to replace the link with your own. Here are the steps involved. First, find pages or blogs that are relevant to your business. Next, go to the Resources section. Because in resources section they are usually plenty of links here. Use the Chrome extension, check my links. Find all the broken links, then reach out to the blog owner and inform them about the broken links. Also suggest that they replace the link with your page. It's also worth mentioning that this approach works best if your content is a good fit for the replacement link. So that it makes sense for the blog owner to add your link instead. Broken link building takes some time and research, but downright, you can get some free links from good websites. Let's move on to the next link building strategy, which is testimonials and review websites. If you are a local business or an e-commerce store, while your business will be listed in Google and customers can give you a review. This is helpful as it builds your business reputation. But Google is not the only place to get reviews on. There are many websites that offer customers a chance to review different businesses products and offers. And these provide you with an opportunity to build a backlink. Sometimes you can add your business for free and insert a link to your company. On other websites you need to pay a monthly or an annual fee. So essentially this is the fee that you get for a backlink. It's worth considering because you build your reputation with a new backlink and you can get some more traffic from the websites as well. For instance, trust pilot, That's a good website. You can create a listing for your business and other link back to your website in this page, there are other examples such as Yelp, Zillow, BBB reviews. There are actually plenty of other websites that you can use. It all depends where you are located, in which country. Just go to Google and do a search for review websites. And you'll find plenty of different options that are based on your location and relevant to your industry. Local business directories. This is another good strategy for listing your business. Thanks to these listings, you get more traffic from the directory and Google will rank your page higher so that you get more organic traffic from Google search. Wherever you are, just doing a search for a business directory and you should find many good sources for links. By business directory, I'm referring to pages like Europe, pages.com, Yellow Pages dot ca. I mean, you could have whitepages as well. That's another directory. They just list many different services and businesses and provide a good backlink opportunity. Sometimes you can list your business for free. Other times you may have to pay a yearly fee. But if the business directory is getting enough traffic, then it's totally worth it, especially if the directory has a high DR. volume and the domain rating can easily be checked when you are searching for backlink opportunities in HFS. All of the methods mentioned above can be made even easier when you examine your competitor backlinks. Do the research why reinvent the wheel? And you can easily check this through a competitor site audit on a waitress. You can check what are the competitive backlinks? Where are they embedded? It in? Articles, listicles, images, local directories, review websites. These insights make your SEO work much easier. You can just follow a proven template and get the right backlinks to your website. Because the truth is, is something is working for your competitors. Chances are high, it's going to work for you as well. And, AH, refs, backlink research will provide you with a shortlist of websites that you can contact and try to build links. At the very least, they will provide you with websites that are open to communicating and selling you backlinks. One more thing before we finish this lesson. Backlink building can be free, but most good backlinks are a paid service. If the website has high DAR value, the money paid for it is worth it. The results will not be instantly visible, but in the long run, you should get higher rankings and more traffic. For this very reason, it's good practice to set a monthly budget to spend on link building campaigns. Okay, that sounds up this lesson. Thank you for watching. 11. Keyword Research Beginnings: In this lesson, I want to talk about keywords. You'll learn the significance of keywords and different types of keywords. Then I'll walk you through how to find suitable keywords for your content. Let's start with the basics. Keywords are crucial because it's essentially the only way a user communicates with Google what they are looking for. Then Google determines the best results that will match the user's search query. Certain keywords give hints as to the context of what a user is searching for, whilst others are two generic for Google to give good results. For this, you need to focus on the search intent of the user. So each search term has a different intent behind it. Another way to explain this is each search keyword represents a different context to a person search. Some people want to buy a product, others are doing research and want to read articles. Sam, just want to quickly access your website without typing the full URL. So they do a quick search in Google directly for your company name. Alternatively, a person may be looking for a restaurant or some nearby service. All of the above represents a different search intent. And depending on the intent, different types of web pages will be displayed. By types. I'm talking about product pages, blog posts, Google Maps, results, new pages and so on. Why is this important? Because the clearer the intent, the more specific the keywords, generic keywords have the most volume. But this does not mean that you want them because the intent is so unclear. So even if you get traffic from them, you will see really low conversions. To further understand this concept, let's go over the main types of keywords. There are generic keywords. These are made up of one to two words and our core keywords, they are not very specific and have a large volume of Google searches. You should not be targeting these keywords because there's too much competition. The search intent behind these keywords is too vague. Traffic from these keywords will have really, really low conversions. If you are an e-commerce store, it's better for you to target keywords that are used by people who are ready to buy your products. I different intent, which is much more specific. Here's a better keyword targeting option. Long tail keywords. These are phrases of keywords. They're made up of multiple keywords. The search intent is easy to identify as the phrase adds context to the search query. For example, a generic keyword is lose weight. These generic keyword describes a whole industry. It can refer to pills, foods, exercises, programs, courses, diet shops, and even more. A long-tail keyword would be exercises to lose stomach fat. The long-tail keyword is very specific. You know, it's not about pills or dieting. The user is searching for exercises targeting the abdominal region. This long-tail keyword will have much less volume than the generic lose weight keyword, but the search intent is known. You could have a stomach exercise e-book for sale or for free. And you know, the user will be interested. As a takeaway from this lesson, your keyword strategy should be focused around long-tail keywords because they are more specific. The conversion rates are higher as you know, the search intent and it's easier to rank for less volume typically means less competition. There are more keyword types, but as a starting point, these are the most relevant that you should be focusing on. The best tool that I have used for this type of keyword research is a HFS. There are other keyword research tools, but I have a preference for this one because it gives you so much more information and it's a tool that professional SEO agencies use. Let's go over that tool right now and I'll show you how to get started with keyword research in a truss. Head over to the keyword explorer section. Let's type into the search something generic like chocolate. Don't forget to set the country you are targeting and then click on search. As you can see, chocolate is a generic term and the keyword difficulty to rank for it's super hard. We also see the amount of volume for this keyword and the traffic potential. But I want to focus on keyword ideas. Because in this section you will get ideas about keywords that are worth targeting. Keywords that have less competition and less volume while still being relevant to your niche. You can click on any of these to get more ideas, but let us click on questions. So View All. You get a list of the long tail keywords that are most popular here. And you'll see the keyword difficulty. All of these keywords are pretty difficult to rank. But if you see anything like this keyword difficulty under ten, it could be worth considering. But it also depends on your budget for link building. Higher cure difficulty means you need to build more links to your page. Here how to make chocolate crackles. Keyword difficulty is for volume is 600, that's fine. Now let's have a look what search results look for. In Google. We go over here and click on SERP. This is very valuable because not only do you see the pages that rank in the top ten, but you also see the type of content that is ranking for each particular keyword phrase. You can visit these websites and reviewed content that is ranking here. In this view, don't forget to check the domain rating for the top ranked websites, as well as the number of backlinks they have and how many referring domains they have. Then you will get a general idea what you have to do to build up your webpage so that you are ranking in the top ten results of Google. Let's go back to the top. We can close this. Now let's review the search suggestions. Again, you have a table full of potential keywords. Your job is to analyze these keywords and make sure that you are targeting ones where the cure difficultly isn't too high. I would aim for as anything up to ten to start with. Of course. While doing this, you can also filter the results. So here's keyword difficulty. Let's say from 0 to ten, Let's apply it. Now you can see many keyword opportunities here with different volumes. The best way forward would be to copy these keywords into a separate spreadsheet and then create a content plan based on those keywords. Another way of finding keywords is just to go to the site explorer tab here, typing your competitor website here. So I'll use the example as before. In a previous lesson. Then we can go over here and click on organic keywords to see what keywords they are ranking for. Then if you find organic keywords that are highly relevant to your website and have a low difficulty. Add them to occured list and then prepare content around it. That's sums up what I wanted to show you in this lesson. Basically, I wanted to introduce you to keywords and how to do some keyword research in headdress. Came thank you for watching. 12. How to Rank your Local Business: Hi Tom here. Now, there are different actions that you can take if you're an affiliate website and you're targeting different countries. But if you are a local business like a factory, shop or restaurant, while this lesson is aimed at you. Here's what I'm talking about. Let's say you want to see the different restaurants available in Prague. You just do a search for it. Now let's click on the map. And over here on the left-hand column, you have all of these different listings for restaurants. I click on them. And then here you have the reviews for the restaurant and then different information about the restaurants such as service options, address opening hours, manual reservations, a lot of different details. Reviews are particularly important here because the more positive reviews you get, it helps with the ranking, but also people see good reviews. There will be drawn to it. And this doesn't just apply to restaurants, it applies to many different businesses and services as well. This listing in the map, it's visible here and then you have information here. This doesn't happen automatically. You have to add your listing for free, but you have to do it through Google, My Business. And here's what you need to do. You just go to Google, type in Google My Business. Here. On the first result. You can create an account. Once again, when you are creating your Google My Business profile, make sure you are logged in or you login using the same Gmail account that you use to create your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts. Here's a quick overview of setting up your account. You can do a search for your business. On this screen. It might be that your information is already present, so you'll just have to identify your listing. If nothing turns up, then you can add your business to Google. Once you fill out all your formalities, you'll be taken to the Google business profile manager page. Just like before, you have all the navigation tabs on the left-hand side. This is the page of a local business of one of my start-up clients. So I'll use screenshots as I cannot reveal the actual information of this page. But Google, My Business is the easiest tool to use and I don't need to go into any great details here. The Home tab will show basic statistics. What you will need to do first is change your Google listing. Click on the Info tab on the left of the screen. Here you can edit the name of your business, specify the exact location, your serviceable areas at your opening hours. Scrolling down, you can add more contact details such as your phone and e-mail website address, then you can specify the relevant attributes to your business. Once you have the info section setup, your listing will look better on Google. While you're setting up your account. Don't forget to go to the photos tab. You can add relevant pictures, but most importantly, at your company logo and a cover photo, these will be displayed on your Google business profile page. That's pretty much all you have to do to get your business listed on Google and have the location specified on Google Maps. This is really useful for any business that has a physical location. That's all that I wanted to mention about this. It really is easy. You just have to be aware of it and make sure your account is set up. Thanks for watching. 13. Summary and Where to Next: Congratulations for making it to the end of this training. We've covered a lot of content in this class. You have learned the foundational knowledge of how search engines work and what is involved in making your website SEO friendly so that you can build Google rankings and get more traffic. As a valued student, I've prepared for you a bonus page. You can visit it by going to search operative.com forward slash FeO bonus. On this page you'll find a list of all the tools and browser extensions that I discussed in my training. Additionally, I've prepared for you a quick lesson on how to audit your website for technical errors. We discussed all the technical aspects of your website earlier in this training. But in the bonus lesson, I will show you an easy way to automate your website audit and find all detect errors that needs to be fixed. So go to this page to watch that lesson. It's been a pleasure having you watch all my content. Now it's time to get your hands dirty, figuratively speaking, of course. And get to work on building a website that rungs on Google. I wish you all the best in your efforts.