Learn SEO to help grow your website

1. Introduction: Welcome to learn SEO to help grow your business. My name is Tony Townsend and I'm just going to go through what you'll be learning in this course. There'll be 11 lessons to go through. If you're a beginner to us, this is the perfect course view. It's a nice introduction into what it is and a bit information about certain other aspects you might need tonight. If you've done a CI for a while, but just not sure about certain things, this is probably a good refresher for you. First of all, we're going to cover what SEO is, how you know what the importance of it is, how it benefits your business. And then we're going to cover more in-depth topics like PageSpeed, mobile friendliness on page SEO, keyword research, how search engines work, right, calls to action. So CTAs, backlinks and domain authority. So I hope you enjoy this course and let's get started. 2. What is SEO: In this lesson, we're going to look at what is SEO. So you've heard the term, but not really sure what it stands for or anything out this SEO stands for search engine optimization. What it is is the practice of optimizing your website to be font on a search engine results page, SERP. But you probably notice search engine as high as it can be. The higher end results you are, the more traffic you're gonna get to your website. So I'm just going to show you an example. I've typed in what is SEO? And these are all the terms that all the searches that come back is all this that you've just seen. Basically, you want as high up as you can. Ideally on the first page. Even if it's not as high up as you can go, as long as it's on the first page. That's the important thing. Because most people don't go to any, like 23 or four pages. Most people wouldn't even get to tend to be honest because they've already found what they're looking for. This is why SEO is so, so important. So good SEO, we'll drive targeted search traffic to your homepage, your products pages, your blog content. So by understanding a bit more about SEO and what it does for your website, then you'll get more traffic to the places you want it to go. So that's a CEO. 3. What is SEO so important: So why is it so important? Well, did you know that 75% of people don't look past the first page of results. Think back to a time when you looked into something and you've, you've kind of gone away, I need to find out something useful. You go into Google. And usually what most people do is they first page, because usually between the bus to the fifth, you get some sort of answer, don't you? So this is why SEL matters. It gets you seen by the 75% of people. Seo does what it actually does. Vue website helps your website become more visible. So that means more visible means it's going to go higher up in the searches. It's going to build trust and credibility. So people are going to trust what they're buying from you. They're going to look into what you do and things like that. And if they can find where your company is about through Google Search and through SEA, then they're going to trust that they can buy through you and use your service and things like that. And it builds that credibility up. Basically. Thirdly, it increases engagement traffic. If nobody can see you on any search engine or they can't find you easy, then you're not gonna get the engagement you want. And it's not going to build traffic. It's not going to lead to the generation is now fairly two people basically doing your products, downloads, anything that you're basically promoting about yourself and your website and your brand, people aren't going to find it. So that's why SEO is important for that aspect because it does boost your engagement, the better SEO engagement basically, I'm finally, it helps people learn about your brand. So if people can find you, they can see you. They're more likely to find out more about your brand. Your brand is not going to get noticed. More. People are gonna be like, oh, I remember that. So you might have websites that you kinda go, Oh, I always go there for this information. Like e.g. if I wanted to find out anything about SEO, I might go to websites like a breath or I would probably go to moles because of their familiar to me. So it's building up that brand. So I don't need to search for them directly. I can type them into Google and I'd find them that way. But I know that branding and I know what they're like. But they do, right, quite high up as well. That's what SEO does. It basically gives you these for really good reasons as to why it matters to get it right. 4. 10 benefits of seo for your business: In this lesson, we're going to look at the ten benefits of SEO for your business. First of all, it helps boost your credibility. If you think about it this way. If you go onto Google search and you type in a time, the first page is where you're going to conduct your answers, aren't you? You're going to trust these websites because aided probably put the effort in when it comes to SEO so they know what they're talking about. B, they've got brand awareness. So most of the sites that you go on up, you're quite familiar or they're quite big. And see. If you think about when you look for yourself, look at anything, you're really not going to let you something. I'll say page ten or 11. Most of us don't. It's just because they're probably less relevant to what we're looking for. Some of the sites might not look as clean cut as some of the ones on page one. So that's why it's important too. Have really good SEO. Just to get on the first couple of pages, It kinda boost your credibility. Number two, it doesn't actually have to cost you much in terms of SEO practice, you actually don't really pay for anything. If you want to get an SEO expert in gray, that thought will cost you vary quite a bit. Or you might find you subscribe to certain sites that help you monitor and look at competitors, that type of thing that will cost you, but it doesn't have to cost you an arm and leg. So that's quite good. But other than that, it's it's more like a daily upkeep. Keep on top of so it's more of your time, not money, which is great. Number three, it supports content marketing. So what SEO is good? When it comes to content marketing is that the two actually work very hand in hand. So if you put out original content all the time and is quite consistent, that then helps your SEO because it offers more terms, more useful content. This all goes into Google ranking. Google would be like, Oh, this is really useful. So for it ranks up higher and higher. So when you're searching for whatever topic in Britain about, say, in a blog, it will come up higher because it's more relevant. This all works in helping your, basically your website stuff because all this content is gonna be on your website, is going to be linked to you, your brand. Everything connects back to your website. So that's why it's really important to think about your marketing in general and how it can all work towards SEO, which is really good. That's probably a topic that you might want to look into outside this course. Have a look into content marketing, the benefits, and basically how to do it. Maybe putting together sort of strategy. It doesn't need to be really, really like that. Basically maybe you just decide to do blogs couple of times a month, or you're going to actually try different marketing channels. It's entirely up to you, but it's worth doing. Now before it maximizes your PPC campaigns. So when we say PPC, that's a paperclip. So when you go into Google, you'll find sometimes at the top there's like these adverts of sorts, but they're relevant to what you're looking for. These are the PPC. So these are what people have paid for to be on the top, top. So it's really, it's kind of like a different type of SEO. So instead of organically grown your website without paying for things, this is basically helping boost at base cream. Number five, it gives you a competitive advantage, which is great. Everybody wants to be the leading expert, or they want to be out there capacitors. So if you think about this, say e.g. if you're a physiotherapist and your website is liberal friendly, it loads really fast. And the keywords throughout it really relevant to say the local area and your profession. You're going to find the compared to say, say ten other sites, ten of the physiotherapists, if they've not put that type of effort into the room, websites and their own activities. You're going to have an advantage over them when it comes to when people search for your area of expertise. Because you have all these factors. That's what can be really useful in obtaining new business and basically giving people a sense of a good impression of who you are. So that's why it's really good. Number six, it can help reach more people. And this is always important when it comes to business anyway. You want to market not just a select number of people, you want to spread it out. So everybody knows about your services. This is what SEO, SEO does. It can help attract anyone with the intent of being interested in what you are. Providing, I'm basically buy through three using keywords you can attract people in. So if you can get your keywords spot on, on your marketing activities, sought to the top good standard, then you are going to reach more people. You are going to hit those people looking for those times. It's really beneficial and you can reach audiences. I say if you're an online business, you can reach people in other countries that are interested in what you have to provide. So that's really important. So your market could grow even more than you expect. So that's really important. Just a few more reasons. So number seven, it helps you rank better and local searches. So think about when you're like, oh, I need a plumber. You type in the word plumbers near me. And you will see most of them come up on the side basically saying, here's a list of the most local, local to you and you just flick through them, don't you? Having a local SEO strategy is really important if you are a local business, say if you do a sharp or a business that is local to that area, you're not like a UK wide or you could be anywhere. This will help in basically pushing you up that list. So making sure that you have a good practice of being very mobile-friendly. Making sure you optimize every aspect of your listing on Google. You're making sure that every all the information is correct as well. People will go on there and if they find out, say e.g. they're trying to contact you and your number is not right? Yeah. That's that's not going to help you get business anyway. So make sure that you've thought about and using local keywords. So that means when I say that, that's kind of like using locations, I like saying that you are Bristol base. You could even do it down to the village or anything like that that will help you in. When people search though, you'll pop up on the Bristol basically listed plumbers, which has been important. Number eight, it improves your website usability. Seo is literally about being site search engine friendly. So people, people want to go onto the website and be able to find what they're looking for pretty easy. So that's where our SEO comes in. So basically when you're thinking about your navigation on your site structure, SEO has a main part in this because it works towards your customer journey and what they're looking for and enhances the experience of your user. So that's why it's important. Number nine, you can get quantifiable results. With SEO. You can track the changes in ranking conversions and your website traffic. This is all really, really important in helping you develop an SEO strategy. By keeping on top of these, you can see what works, what doesn't, what keywords are. Actually people looking at this month? Or maybe a couple of months ago. There. It wasn't very important. People weren't really looking. It might be the fact that it's season thing could be like, oh, you're a plumber, must use our example again. The boiler is broke or something like that. It's that time of year where people actually using the boilers now. So the SEO keywords and stuff will change to match those interests are basically all. You can actually just track everything, which is great because it means you stay on top of those trends and things, which then leads to people finding your business of Asia. And last but not least, it improves user engagement rates. So if you think about it, I really optimized sites brings in your quality traffic and that's what you want. You want to have people genuinely interested in what you have to sell and what you produce IT, services, that type of thing. If you find that your website has a lot of useful content units such as looking and what they were actually looking for. They're more likely to stay on your site because you've got the information that they need and they might start exploring. So it's just basically grabbing them on that first little interest bubble. And then they'll get into it and then from there they'll find out more about you. And then it also helps build up more of your credibility in that type of thing as well. Because people's thoughts get to know your brands and they start to trust it. So if your website, e.g. and you're all about advice and guidance, Sr, every time they need that help, they'll come to you. They'll always go to your website. They'll, they'll type in your website rather than doing a Google ranking. So it kind of defeats. It gets rid of Google in a way because they come directly to you and this is what you want. And then that can spiral into more business leads. So hopefully this has given you some insight into the various aspects of SEO and the reasons why it's so important. It covers every aspect of your business. I think it's one of those parts that can actually doesn't need to take a lot of time to do. But once you've got into the rhythm and you've got, you know, what's working, what isn't. You can actually grow your business quite a lot. So hopefully you found this lesson really helpful and hopefully you enjoy the rest of the course. 5. Page speed matters in seo: In this lesson, we're going to look at page speed matters in SEO. So what is PageSpeed? Page beat is the amount of time it takes to request the page and have it loaded in your browser. So it's the time it takes for you to click on that website link to the time it's fully loaded on your screen, That's your page speed. The faster the page speed, the better for your SEO and for your visitors experience. Ranking. This is one of the biggest aspects they will look at, is how fast your page will load, the faster you can get it, the banner. Here are some reasons why increasing your page load time is essential. Well, first of all, it reduces bounce rate. And what I mean by that is it's the time that a person spends on your webpage. So it basically you don't want people to go straight onto your website and come straight off. You're trying to keep them there. So it reduces that effect. It increases page views. So if something takes too long, you're going to see a very big decrease on patriots because your website is taking too long. So this is another good reason. I increases dwell time, improve your conversion rate. So these aspects are looking at basically generating credibility in your website search. So if your page is really fast, people are more likely to continue what they're looking at and things like that. So if you go looking for something on our website, say clothing, and you hit a website and so soil, the time you're less likely to buy from them because of the time is taking to do everything. So this is why it really matters. Also, it helps your ranking in inorganic such as well. So when people are looking, they'll find your page because You're all the other aspects of SEO. But including your page beats. If it's doing really, really fast, then it's going to help get you found easier on search engines and things like that. So what your page B should be? Roughly 1-2 s, is what it should be. This is a really good goal. There are tons and tons of tools out there online to check your website page. And once you've kinda looked into it and you kinda realizing, Wait a minute, this is taking too long. Then you need to start looking into why it is. But this is just a general idea. So if you could get under 2 s, does amazing. That's going to help your customers and help you on Google as well. So this is overall just the basics of page speed. If you want to look into it a bit more, that's absolutely great. Have a look online tools, check-out some webpages of your own if you've got them. All, try different websites just to see what the differences are between different sites and things and how quickly they load up. 6. Mobile friendliness: So in this lesson we're going to look at mobile friendliness. First of all, did you know 62% of all website traffic comes from people using mobile devices. Quite a lot. The importance of mobile friendliness uses you'll find don't interact with pages on a mobile device. As they would on a desktop. They're very different the way they use them. They are, they're usually looking to get faster answers or how goal they want to achieve when they use a mobile device over a desktop. When people tend to use desktop is because they want to research something a bit more. They need a bit more detail, that kind of thing. Whereas a mobile device, when they're using it, they just want fast answers. You've all done it. We all just nip on a phone, typing something and we get an answer. We don't attend to the caudal means right up top for the exact same purpose. So they've both got different purposes. So that's why it's so important that your website is easy to use on a mobile device as any other device through it as well. We're going to look at what is a mobile-friendly website. So I'd mentioned the purpose of it, the purpose of it being easier. But we're going to look at how is easier. So mobile-friendly website is one that is designed to work the exact same way across all devices. So that's what we mean by my mobile friendly name. What it is, is it static content that doesn't change? It has simplified navigation, so it makes it nice easy for you to move around. Images display are smaller. So you've got, you can read, scroll a bit easier, that type of thing. And not relying on mobile operating system to function properly. This is what makes up a mobile phone website. So how do you make your website mobile friendly? So we're just going to go through four key tips to do this. First of all, always include accessible menus so your site is easy to navigate. So you will see on most websites, when you go on them, There's like the little hamburger sign in the corner which is three little lines. You just want to make sure that that's in the same position as most of them, and it's the right size as well so people can find it quite easy. Remember to have a responsive site that automatically resize this to fit the device. What I mean by this is you might be able to design your website onto a mobile device, make it simpler version. But one is if somebody is using a tablet or not everyone's phones, the exact same screen. So some iPhones or app so huge. Or you might have a smaller screen phone. Jeremy, you need to make sure that the site is responsive no matter what device you're using. So that's the second one. Number three, use large fonts for easy readability on a smaller screen. So you just want to make sure it's just a bit larger than say, on a laptop or anything. It's just because people are using a smaller device and you don't want to hurt her and her eyes are straining. Or if someone finds an article or blog and it's just too small, they will give up because our zoom in, zoom out, all of that. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to engage with the device. Three, number four, ensure that essential content isn't hidden my ads. So you might find your website has ads in certain areas. But what sometimes happens is when you're developing it to be mobile-friendly, you're forgetting that placement is covering up, say you navigation or it could be key information is being hidden and stuff and you don't want lab, especially if you've got some messages and stuff underneath. Those aren't. So when you develop your website, mobile friendly version of your website, play around, see what works, trying adjusted your ad spaces are In reasonable places. It's really important for users. We all expect ads on certain sites. So as long as you can put them in a way like isn't hiding anything, then you're okay. So we've kinda come aboard. It is mobile-friendly, is how it should interact. So I'm just going to go through a few examples of some really good websites and how they've done my bot made their website very mobile-friendly. The first one is quite culminates at sea. You may have heard of this very popular sites for a lot of people. Maybe people who are making homemade stuff and things like that. But they do their website really well. So what they, what they've designed mobile version is they pushed important features to the top. As you can see on the right-hand side, there's little circles with images. They're big enough so you can see them, can't you? But they've done some writing that's just about the right size as well underneath it. But this is the key information straight there. Soon as you open the app, That's what you can see, which is exactly what you want to see. You also see at the very top, they've made it very easy to switch the sign. So nice big search bar. They've done categories with thumbnails, which I've just mentioned. So you can actually see what it is you're looking for people. Most people are visual learners. Visual people. They look at things and go, Oh, yeah, Okay, That's what that is. So you can see it's D cluttered. So you can see it's very simple. So from the websites, the websites very similar to this. It's just got more, more options and things, but they've declared it in a way that's really clean design. And all the images are a great size, though. They're not too big and not too little. And they're evenly spaced, which is nice. I see you've done this really well. So we're gonna look at another site. This is called BuzzFeed. It's a very new story, psi, fun quizzes, that type of thing. It's not proper news news, but it's got some stories and stuff in there. So the layout of this is very different. It will be very different from e-commerce where I basically, you can clean, you can design a bit better, whereas this is a lot of information. There's lots of titles. So it's kinda harder to design it, but they've done it really well. So what they've done is they've laid it out anyway with popular in for the top. They've got a collage format of the other stories. The big one. They've used, the right size images. So the main feature stories quite cross the screen, but these ones are very little. And it worked really well. And they've also done, they've got a menu at the top, and they've got a search one as well. There's a very similar features that you'll find with every mobile-friendly design is that there'll be like the hamburger menu and then the search is always at the top. So they're very easy time. But they've done really well with this website. So that's another really good example. Then the next example is from a clothing shop. So they're a little bit different in style they've done. It's more about showing products. They'll sort of key featured products and offers quite easy to see in very visible on this Express website. This is called the product viewing experience is different. So they've done lots of swiping and scrolling. So the minute we've got picture of somebody at an outfit and you can just scroll cross. So it's a different experience, but it's a nice, easy one. They have done the same thing again. If you look in the top, you've got the menu and you've got search. And then directly Anthony, that they've got the yellow box which is bold, the right sort of text size with the offers and the buttons to kind of go off at. Look at shock womens or shop at men's. It's very clean cup. It is difficult to try and get the balance of everything. But once you've tested it with different users and things like that, they can give you feedback on what's working, what's not. When it comes to developing your website into mobile-friendly, it isn't just very straightforward. It is a lot of trial and error. But hopefully this has given you some insight into some of the key features. Why it needs be many mobile-friendly and the types of features that worked for other sites. So that if you are developing your website into mobile friendly or you're doing that kind of aspect. You're understanding the images needs to be sent size and the layout, and the experience that you've given to users as well. So hopefully it's helped. Give me some perspective on that. 7. On page SEO Factors: In this lesson, we're going to look at on-page SEO factors. What is on page SCO? Well, it's the practice of optimizing your website using first quality content. And two elements such as keywords, tie tools, Goodyear of images and so forth. So there are six important on-page SEO factors that we need to, we're going to cover now. We're going to look at quality content, title tags, and Meta description. Proper formatting image use for on-page SEO. While compose your hours. Don't worry, this all sounds a bit scary, but I'm going to break it down nice and easy for you. So first of all, quality content. This is the most important on-page SEO factor. You have to look at. All the content that goes on your blog, on your website should be the original and should not be rewritten or even worse, copied and pasted from another website. It takes away your credibility when people are searching, they find out that you've copied an article from, say, like a bigger website. It doesn't help your brand or your image or so, and it definitely doesn't help your SEO. Google will pick up on the fact that you've copied and pasted onto your website. So they will rank you down for it. So the more original you can be, the better. Don't forget to identify both the keywords and you relate to keywords in your texts. So when you put up, log out, or you're doing some content, put on your website. Think about the keywords that you want included. So always make a list of them and include them into it. It could be. Good. Practice is always to put some in the title. You put it in your first paragraph, but you just want to make sure that they are going to be found. It helps people find your content easier. So that's quality content title tags. So simply put, the title tag is the title of your webpage as seen on a search engine. So whenever you're looking at something on Google, the part that contains the number of the auto that you click on the title page. So try and keep your title tag to under 60 characters. Avoid trying to use too many keywords. A couple do. I click numbers or words? So e.g. the five top tips on how to get ready for Christmas. You know, something that's really very catchy and tracks people. That's the most important thing. And try to avoid using all caps. People tend to not read these very well, or it sounds like it's shouting at you and that can be a Parsi off-putting. Title tags, metadata descriptions. You probably heard this term. You may have come across it right underneath the title tag. And the role of a search result is a so-called Meta description. So basically, to sum up, is a summary of your webpage and it's usually about 160 characters long. So in a way, it's like a tweet if you have to think about it, but a little bit shorter. Just summing up what the page is about. In this sort of med scripting, you still need to do some of the keywords in there. But you want to keep it nice and short and really attracting your audience. So when you're doing these, spent a little time thinking about the types of sentences and basically reflecting what is each of the pages are going to be sharing. This is quite important. I've done a example at the bottom, which you can show is a normal search subscription that pops up the very two bottom lines. That is your meta-description. Proper formatting is actually a lot more important than you actually realize. So for this, it's the headings are done as H1 and H2, H3, H4, H1 obviously being the top one. So this there'll be your title of your page. If it's a blog, that will be H1. And then any subheadings will go H2, H3, H4 is just breaking down those subheadings is so, so important because when it gets accruals by Google, they'll pick up that you've got headings. They know exactly what topics about. And all the other subheadings can actually be categorized on Google. If that's what people were looking for, it might bring them to that particular article or blog or wherever it is. It's important to do it. It's also a way to signify new paragraphs for people, for readers and stuff. And it's a great way for, for navigation reasons. You've got maybe a content chart at the top and somebody wants to read the last part, the rest. I can click and they'll know exactly to go to heading, say four or five. It's just a good practice in general to do this anyway. Just spend some time making sure that you put your headings and you will text is set as a paragraph texts. Just because the 22 are very different and you don't want Google to get confused. So it's really, really important to have a look at your structure and make sure you've got all the headings. Every single page does need a heading one. Just so you know, it will get picked up on SEO side of things as being a bit of an error. So it's always important to go through every single page you have. Make sure you've got them. Image use. Original images will boost your on-page SEO. But if you have to use source images, you, it's really important to say what sources are. It's just a big scene is a good thing. Just to say basically where you put the images from. Not many people will use every new images just because you don't often have photographs of certain things. So you probably look at stock images. But it's important to say where your sources are for these images. I'm trying to make sure that there are high-quality. You don't want any pixelated images. It also reflects on your brand. If it's a bit pixelated pupil, be that maybe this isn't the real deal. It's also has to be relevant to your text, well-positioned and a decent size. So you don't want a massive image on a web page, like scrolling forever, you need it just a good size in mixing with a copy at a good point so people know it's relevant. Otherwise there's not really much point in having the image. Images are nice to break up text, but they are really good for inflammation and things like that. So Google quite likes it if they are related to what you're talking about. So it's worth thinking about. Well, compose your hours. So this is quite an important one. So the first three to five words, €1, are the ones that really matter. So it's good to keep them short and accurate. So I've done some examples here. So e.g. you can see the website and at the end it says services slash. Then the next one below it will say web design slash. And then the one below that you can clearly see is something do with blog because it's got a longer title. So the first two are more services. So when you're going onto a website, it clearly, if you're a bit confused on the page where you are, you can look at the URL. I'm on the web page, web design. So if page, that's why it's important to have your URLs and made sure that they're actually accurate to what they are. And they're short as well. It's also good because you can, sometimes people will copy, copy them as well for sourcing on their own website and things like that. But it's just important to try and keep them nice and short, sweet. You can don't worry about the blog articles. They tend to be the full length question. They're absolutely fine. But yeah, that's something worth thinking about. So these are the general ones. If you've got website that you want to look through, Wix, WordPress, or any of those. It's worth looking at all the key things that we've discussed and making sure you've got them in place because it will help your ICI. 8. Keywords: Welcome to the lesson on keywords. So what are keywords? Well, a key word is a word or words that describe the content on your page or on a blog post the best is a search term you want to be ranked on. So that when people search for the keyword search on Google or Yahoo or Bing, they will find your content is the main purpose of a keyword. Or keywords, so important? Well, keywords are basically the linchpin between what people are searching for, the content provided to them. The types of keywords you use determine the traffic you will get. E.g. if your nightclub, dance, club, that type of thing, you might want to use buzz like new club dancing. You might put club in whatever area you're in, that type of thing that if you described your club is something different. Like a ball e.g. rather than a club, your audience is gonna be very different. It might not be the right audience, so people are probably typing all I really want to go to a nice bar and not yours comes up, then there'll be a bit confused, won't know. You're not gonna get the right traffic. So keywords, getting them right is important. So what is keyword research? This is probably the most important aspect when it comes to developing your keywords. Keyword research is the process of finding, analyzing popular words and phrases entered in search engine. By taking the time to do your research, it will help optimize your efforts. So if you spend a lot more time figuring out what words are popular, which phrases people are using. Rather than just kinda guess walking, you're gonna get better results. Which is really important for your website. You just need to find some time to do this. And we'll go over in a minute on how to do some keyword research. So don't worry, just yet. Another aspect of keyword research is it isn't just a one-off task. You often get. The question is, how often do I actually do keyword research? Well, it's not just a one-off thing. You won't just do it and leave it. You will have to reevaluate it probably every few months. Some businesses do it monthly. It will depend on your type of business and if you've got someone to help you do it or you know how to do it. It all depends on that. But I would say if you're doing keywords and you're really focusing on them, you've got to be consistent and your efforts, and you will see results. So it's important to keep doing this task and putting it in your to-do pile every month if you can find time to do it. So the next thing that we need just needs to cover is how do I do keyword research is done in four steps. First of all, make a list of the most important relevant topics based on your business. So spend some time, yet put a piece of paper and write down as many words that relate to your business. The topics for it, e.g. and write them all down. The next thing you need to do is identify keywords from these topics. So you could have five topics that relate to business. And then from these you need to narrow down each of these topics with keywords. So you just need to spend some time trying to figure these out. You can look on websites and stuff for inspiration. You can do a lot of online research in this top area. If you're not sure what kind of words work for your topics. It does take a lot of time and skill to learn this kind of aspect. But once you've got it, it's great. The point number three is research related search terms. So when you do this, typing the words into, the search engines, tries to typing it into Pinterest is a really good place to do it. You'll be surprised that the keywords that pop up from that, it can actually help you with identifying new keywords as well. So I advise doing those two and see what kind of Tom's what type of content comes up and see if it's related to what you were doing. So that's the best way of doing it. And then the final one is use keyword research tools to help you as much as it is. You could do everything like all the research, thinking of all topics yourself. These online tools will really, really help you. So the top ones I've got is SEMrush and malls or to the big ones and a roughs. I would start with these three first, they are offered trials. They're really some of the top websites when it comes to SEO. Go on to them. You can look up at times popularity of keywords. So if you've gone massive lists, this is a place that can help you narrow down that list and actually give you some good solid keywords to choose from. At the end of the day when it comes to SEO, you don't want to be using like 2030, 40 keywords. You want a consistent amount, say ten to 15, throughout everything you do. Otherwise, you're going to end up finding that you're struggling to remember which keywords you're using and it gets really tricky. So that's why using these online tools, they can help. If you're looking to find out more about keyword research, go on to Google and type in. You'll find loads of guides and some other pieces of advice that might help a bit more. But this is just a general idea where you can start. Hopefully this lesson has helped you a lot. And hopefully you can get looking into the keywords that you can use for your business and things like that. 9. How search engines work: So in this lesson, we're going to look at how search engines work. First of all, what is a search engine? Well, what it is, it's a web-based tool to allow users to search into for content using keywords. In layman's terms is basically when you go online and you're typing in keywords, you use websites, e.g. like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. You're searching on a search engine to basically that's what it is. How does the search engine work exactly? Well, there are three key steps to how most search engines work. First of all, they do some cooling, then the index, and then they rank. So we're going to break these down and look at them in a bit more depth. So first of all, crawling search engines use programs called Spiders box or crawlers to scour the Internet. And basically what they're doing is they're looking for the information. It is possible for content to be out of date until they crawl your website. Again. If we've only done it once before and they've not really found your information or anything like that, then it is going to be out of date until they're cool again. Then indexing, the search engine will then try to understand and categorize the content on a webpage through keywords. Finally, the information now indexes the next part worth basically catalog, categorizing it and making sure that key words connect to it. So this is a very important step. So most of the time, well, it's very important for your website to be indexed so that when it comes to crawling, they'll understand what it is. When it comes to this aspect of the search engine. With good SEO, it will help your search engine understand your contents so you can rank for the right search queries. So this is a very important step when it comes to SEO. Because this is basically categorizing it. If this is done wrong, then the likelihood you contents can be missed. Garcia, or it's going to be quite low down on your page. And then finally the last stage is ranking. You may have heard this when it comes to SEO, you might be like, oh, we need to be number one ranking or we need to rank up quite high. This is what it means. So basically what it is, is search engines are ranked based on a number of factors. So after they've done the cooling and the indexing, so they've got the information, they know what it's about. This is the final aspect, what Google will do, e.g. As I look at certain aspects, first of all, the lookout, high-quality content. Is it mobile? First? Look at the page experience, the page speed, on-page optimisation, internal links, external links are just a few of the main factors. So these are all aspects are very, very important. So the search engines aim is to provide the user with the most relevant result when they go and type in a query. So that's basically the whole point of a search engine basically. But there are some steps for the Internet to the search engine to find out the right information for you. But hopefully this helps you understand what search engines are vowel. And it will help you understand basically, when it comes to your own SEO, e.g. ranking, these are the sort of aspects you need to be looking at. You. You want a high-speed page. You want to, you want your page to be mobile friendly as much as possible because it all has an impact on your SEO. So hopefully you've learned a lot from this and already for the next lesson. 10. The right CTA's to use: In this lesson, we're going to look at the right CTAs, so calls to actions to use in your content and your social media and on your website. So first of all, what is a CTA call to action? Basically what it is, it's a signal or prompt for users to perform. So e.g. sign up here by now, find out more. Those types of words are a form of encouragement. And these encouragements, or CTAs, and they can lead to new leads for you and for products sells all that type of thing. So if you can get this right, um, it's really good for your business in general. The benefits of call to actions, a well-crafted one can be very encouraging to users as it helps direct your audience to the right place, to your blog, to your website, to the offer that you've got available. There's so many directions, but it helps direct your audience to the right place. It improves your conversion. Tells your clients where to go to simplify their journey. It's quick navigation and it's less decision-making. So those are the five points of the benefits of their actions. So here are just a few examples. There are tons and tons and tons out there, but here are just some basic ones really. You've probably seen these on websites that you've been on, say e.g. by now is a popular one. View sign up installed. Join us is actually popular with email subscriptions. Submit, you've probably seen that on filling out forms or anything like that. Apply kind of job referencing, Add to Cart, purchase, grab, Get Started, Creighton account, try premium, discover, Krishna. So they all don't have to be like by now, download now. They can be very simple like creating new count, try this, register now, sign up for this. So there are different meanings, different types of actions. So I'm just going to go through a few examples of cool directions and the type of purpose they have. So the first one we're going to look at is, you probably notice this is from Amazon. So this is a user acquisition type of call to action. So it attracts users directly by turning a visitor into a paying customer. So you'll see this on e-commerce websites that would purchase a product. So you will see that the call to actions are to add to cart all by now with one click. So it makes the journey very, very easy for a customer. So they get to have these options, but they're very clear on what they're doing. The next thing we're going to look at is a lead generation. So the call to action is a board one to generate a lead. It enables this is the fill and contact form. Sonnet Tunis are all just keep him foams. So this particular examples from HubSpot, It's a sign-up sheet for subscribing to e-mails from them. And it's very basic, very easy and very simple. And at the bottom you can see button just about saying the word subscribe. This is a lead generation. So this is basically your obtaining the e-mail and the e-mail that will then be used for newsletter. And potentially a particular leads to natural lead. So this is why it's called link generations. All leads to somewhat. The next one is lead nurturing. This call to action is the process of leading customers who are really committed to a purchase, um, and it offers them downloadable resources. So e.g. you can see to this, this examples from vivid fish. And basically it's giving them an opportunity to download a document checklist. As you can see in the blue little button is download. Now, it's very simple. It's giving someone a freebie. But in return, you're getting solve an e-mail or you're getting some sort of contact from them, some sort of interests before they find out more. So this is just nurturing them in the journey. The next one is promotional. You might have seen this is called Bitly. It's a website that generates euros on children's them. On this particular one. This signposts to promotion or on a website or a tunnel through a button or link. And some of them, this type of promotional call to action. You can use call to action such as read more. Finally, find solution, start for free. In this particular instance, it says get started for free. So it's basically asking the customer to click on the link. They know what they're getting. They're getting access to this website for free. So that's the whole point to this call to action. So this is another one. So hopefully this has given you a better understanding, of course action. How important they are. Spend some time looking at cost actions on the normal websites you use. You'll be surprised how many there are. And make note of the ones that you think are useful. It's always interesting to grow one of businesses that are very similar to your walls or sites that interests you just to see what kind of language you're using and what type of things and encourage people to click on the buttons. Because that's all you in theory, you're doing with the call to action is you're taking someone from a page and sending them somewhere else. And that's the goal with a call to action. So hopefully this is provide your insight and enjoy the rest of the course. 11. Link building: Welcome to link building lesson. So let's get started. First of all, let's cover what is linked building. It's an essential part of SEO. You'll hear it everywhere. But people thinking about how to do link building at some point, if you're a marketing or you're looking into boosting urine SEA, this topic will crop up what it is. It involves the process of getting links to your website from other pages and about links from you to other websites. It is one of the best ways to help boost your ranking once those links are in, because it is a continuous loop of other websites. If you've, if you think of it as like a spiderweb and you're the center. And you've got all these other websites coming to you. It will lessen your load when it comes to people trying to find your website. Because they've got all these other, say, 1015 websites with your link on it that can point them to where you are, is a great way to boost your SEO. Another important reason, probably one of the most important when it comes to link building. And Google ranking has certain factors to it. On one of them, one of the three major ones is about linking. So if you want to get a higher ranking, you need high-quality links. You will need plenty of them, and you also need to link to other websites. What this tells Google basically is that your high-quality website and other websites, thank you-all to not any old website is going to link to you. Unless you have the right information. They find your content really useful. There's a purpose behind it. So you might offer a service that they think that that actually ties in to what we do, but we don't offer it, but this person is great at it. It just shows the quality to Google by having all these links. There are seven key benefits for link Berlin. The first one is about credibility. It shows that you are, like I've just said, about the high-quality, it shows that you're a good source of information. So that's number one. Number two, Google uses links to rank your site. Like I've mentioned, is one of the top ways the Google rank you out of three major ones, but there are loads of other stats, but they tend to kinda push good quality websites and content to the top of the search engines and things like that. If they think that you're doing really well and your information is really good, they will keep ranking you higher and higher and higher. And that is what you want. Overrule. So that's a really good benefit to link building. Number three, they will increase your web traffic, which is great. That's what you want before. It leads to higher site metrics. So that's the analytical side of your website. You'll see more visits to certain pages. If that's the type of links that you've been handing out, you might find your homepage is going through the roof all of a sudden because they're getting from other sources. But you can see where those sources are and see if you can reach out and give them different links to different articles and things that are, if it's working, it's a good way to manage IT. Metrics is a great way to see how things are going. It also gives you more of a revenue opportunities that you may not have thought of. It helps you stand out as an authority voice and it increases your visibility. So all pointing in the direction of basically, you're a great website. Basically, that's what link building does. How do you actually go about building links? There are four key tactical strategies that they can fall under. First one is manually add links to the website. Amber to reach out to website owners directly to ask for link. Three, exchanging money for links. And four, get organic links from people who visit your page. What we're gonna do is we've broken these down, so we're just going to quickly go through each of them. So you have a bit more in depth understanding of them. So I first of all, adding links. Basically what is involved with adding is going to website and adding new link manually. So common sites you'll see is business directories and related forms. Basically these types of links or low value for Google, because pretty much anyone can do them. It doesn't really tell Google your website is really good, is nice to put them on some directories because you never know the traffic's is showing that your businesses out there. It might show increase your visibility, but it isn't the best way to do it. The other way of doing it. To ask for links. So basically, asking for links is basically the title where you talk to website owners and basically give them a reason to link to you. The ways you can do this is by being a guest blogger, giving positive feedback. So, you know, when you're reading a blog and it says like a little comment section at the bottom, maybe popping in a really interesting piece of feedback. How not just any old comma and just to actually show that you've actually read it and you understood it and you really loved the stuff. You know, that can lead to more opportunities. Maybe doing a link exchange. You can reach out someone saying they might be relevant to your audience and vice versa. So there might be open for a link exchange. It easier way for them to get the link without asking themselves. So you say Remember job, Sheriff, good resource. So you might have a free download or an offer or something that's really useful. So they might be interested in that. Or you can share an expert article. So any reason that you can provide them with information, seem like an x-bar. Provide them with something that's relevant to them. Something we find useful is a great way to open that door, hover, have that discussion, and see where it leads. So that's a really useful way of doing it. You could spend some time writing down some key websites. Do you love going on or like have spend some time researching about basically some really websites that relate to your business and see if there's a way to contact them. So most people have contact forms or an email or something. Just test the water or share your latest blog that you think that was a really good idea. They haven't really written about this, but this relates them. See what happens. But this is a great way of doing it. Buying links. So I wouldn't recommend this that you buy links. But just so you know, like people in the business industry, sometimes by their lengths. So you might see like, yes, Sarah has gone really well on certain websites. But it's a very risky thing. And you need to really know what you're doing with SEO. Like you need to be in it for a few years. But there is a downside is that could be a waste of money, zero impacting your website, and you can be penalized by Google for it. So I'd probably advise about doing this. So I just wanted to share that this is a thing that can be done. So you do get come across someone saying I can find legs and things. I'd advise that you stay away from them. It might not help your business at all. It could actually damage it more, which is not what you want to do. It's just so you're aware. The fourth tactic that we're going to cover is earning links. So when you earn an ink, it's when someone links to your page without you having to ask them to do it. So this doesn't really happen. Unless you give a grid, you have a great website. So you do need to spend lot of time investing in website, promoting your site. The more people you get on it, the best that, the better you'll find that people will come to you with a source information anyway. So you've probably seen like when you go on other blogs that they're linking to multiple different sites, They probably not even been asked to do that. They probably just Google the M1. This is actually a really useful result, but it depends on your rankings. So if you're ranking is quite good, then they're probably going to find your content. I'm more than likely link to you. So spend that time on your website and make sure that it's easy to navigate. It looks professional, it seems informative. And it would be interesting to people if they came across it. I think that's worthwhile doing, but this is a really good way of doing it. You can get your website right. People coming to you asking, can I put a link on your link on your website? You look back. I mean, you could be opening those doors by spending that extra time making sure your website has done a really good avenue to do as well. So what makes a quality link? Quality backlink is a link that comes from a high domain authority. So when I said earlier that your credibility, Google, they loved the quality of a website. This is actually the staff for it is a domain authority, which is DA, which is what this is about. Basically, if your DA is 60-100, It's amazing. It's really good. And Google, if you're linking and that website is linking to you from that da of 6 ft 200. It's showing the quality of information. That's what that is. That's just an indicator of how good of a website you actually have and you know how resourceful it is and Google thumbs up, love it. Okay. So then you've got other starts. So 40 to 50 is okay. And anything lower is kinda like, it's not great. What you can do is go online. You can Google, type in the word domain authority. You can check websites when you're growing on them to see how high they are. So if you do want to have high-quality links on your website, have a look. If it's above 40, then it's great. It's good quality, and that's what you want. We are doing a lesson on domain authority. So check out one of the next lessons. I think it is to understand a lot more about what domain authority means. But overall, this is a good way of understanding your links and working out which ones are good quality and which ones are bad. 12. Domain Authority: This lesson is about domain authority. So what is it? What it is? It is a search engine ranking school. That's what it's all about. That measures how likely your site will appear in a search engine results compared to the competitors. So basically what they're doing is they're ranking your popularity in your industry, your business, against everyone else. And then it's giving you a score. One is a good domain authority schools. So I've just covered over briefly what they are. If your score is 20-30, you're kind of getting that most new sites will start off zero for awhile until they start picking up more authority schools. They might have more links to things, more blogs, more content or visitors. And then that ranking will go up. If you're around the 2030 mark, that is, you're getting there, you might find that you need to do different activities to help boost that. There might be other areas you need to look into. But this is a great indicator because if you are there, that means you're doing something is better than zero. But you just need to work on a few things. 40 to 50 is average, which is actually pretty good. You can get 40 to 50 if you're running a business, but you've not really gotten much of a time. Be still having 40, 50. That's great. I mean, you're still getting noticed by people. Your website is coming across as good quality. So that's the main thing. 50 to 60 is really good. And then above 60 is excellent. So this is probably where you'll find that websites above 60 are like really professional. A lot of content, very medium to big businesses, small businesses, you'll probably hit under 50 usually. So don't worry if you're not hitting these as of yet, you can reach them. It just needs some different activities to help you boost this ranking. So we've discussed the kind of the scoring. So here are some actual interesting ideas on how to increase your domain authority. So first of all, follow SEO best practices. When I say this, I mean, basically looking at your metadata, you're looking at how frequently you put blogs out there. You're looking at your wording, your keywords. In some of the lessons we've talked about your best practices. If you're not sure and you can't remember them, go back to some of the other previous lessons about SEO and some of the aspects that you need to look into all the videos that I've done in this course or relate to SEO best practices. So have a look through them again. Or if you've, you've written notes, just go through them and maybe make your checklist. That's probably the easiest thing. Make the checklist of what you need to do and double-check that you've covered all those areas. So that's option number one. Number two, create linkable contents. So that means like you've got a blog, make sure there's a link to a course that you're doing. Or there's a link to one of your channels. Make sure there's links everywhere to keep people on your site as much as humanly possible. So basically people they love what you're writing, don't want to know more. Or if there's something that they had thought they might be interested in. So try and make sure that you've got a lot of links in that way you can, number three, remove bad link profiles. So this is kind of down to making sure your links are relevant to you. You might find on your social platforms, you might have changed your website page. So I'm white.com.co UK. Make sure that they're accurate and stuff because that can decrease your authority because Google's going, Hey, this doesn't link up. Same as directories. If the information on directories is wrong, you will find that Google weren't like it. There'll be like it's nothing is consistent and that's what it wants. Consistency. So best place to do this is go on to yell.com. Look at business directories or type it in, you will find that they give you a massive list of all the directories you're part of. And if your links and your information is correct, it's a great resource. I will pop it in the comments section so that you can all look at resource. Number four, improve your internal linking. This is just making sure that all your links are, they work properly, that easy to navigate and they're very obvious. So you can put your links even in the text, in your images. In a blog, e.g. you can include the links halfway through the coffee. Doesn't need to be at the end. But just making sure that the links are to the right places. And so rather than write relevant things is important. Number five, make your site mobile friendly. This has been covered in one of the other lessons. If you go back to your notes or go back to lesson, and making sure it's mobile-friendly is so, so important because you will find that majority of people will use a mobile phone when they're looking for quick answers. Or they found a really interesting website or blog or resource or anything like that. We'll tend to use our phones. So it's so important that your website is reflecting really well on a mobile device. So these are five key things to look into to help boost your domain authority. What you will find though, is you can do all these activities, but it will slowly increase. But you still need to make sure that you consistently putting content out there, update your website all the time, and posting on social media and making sure that you are link building from Office websites. And really just getting to know is by everybody as much as you can online. Okay, so this is a great way to increase it. So we've talked about it. You're probably wondering, what is my domain name and how do I check it? I've put on here three websites that are the most common ones. So you can check your own website. Most Link Explorer, aircrafts and SEMrush are the three biggest ones. Even if you type it into Google search engine, d3 will pop up. They are great websites to look up. Your domain authority. They will explain it. There's some, I think one of them will tell you exactly what you need to work on, which is great for you. But if you want to figure out what yours is, make a note of it and then in three months time, check it again, months time, and check it and make sure you're on the right track. Try one of these websites. They're all free as well, just so you know, paying for subscriptions or anything. If you do have to pay, just type it into Google search engine that you want to check your domain authority. And there will be resources that you'll find online tools or you're typing you overdress, does it for you. So truthful, hopefully this has helped give you an oversight of the importance of Da, how to do it, how to increase it. And hopefully you start increasing your website authority soon.