SEO for Your Brand: A Step by Step Guide

1. Intro - SEO For your Website: Hello and welcome. This is John Valentine and welcome to the class SEO for your website. In this class, I'll be going through the step by step guides on ranking your website and how to get started with the SEO, how to use it, and how to fully implement it. In order to get your website, get your website out there and get the traffic that you need. I understand what you hear. You search SEO on Youtube. You want to understand what it is. There's a bunch of classes out there. Just like with many things, there's always a different answer. With SEO, I have a specific SEO guide that I will be putting out for you now. I will be sharing a multitude of concepts. As you can see here on the screen, these are the contents that will be covered. First, we're going to start with the word research, then move on to creating the content. Then talk about on page SEO optimization. Then talking about optimizing for search intent. Then talking about more technical SEO. Then going over to the off page optimization. And then last but not least, talking about your general content and talking about how you can improve and updating your content. The general topics of each unit of this class, there will be a topic and a video for each unit, as you can see on the right hand side and at the end, in the conclusion, I'm going to wrap everything up, give it a summary and make it a nice ending to the course. Sit back and take your notes. And of course, in the discussion form, put any questions that you have. And I'll be going through them continuously and answering questions as best as I can. Here we go. 2. Keyword Research: As we move on to the first topic of keyword research. Now, keyword research is of course one of the most important parts when it comes to SEO ranking in your website. Because SEO really begins with the keywords as its foundation, Thorough keyword research can really help you build that solid foundation, almost like building the first layer of your house. You can use various tools to start your keyword research. You can use keyword Planner from Google. You can use Mas Keyword Explorer. There's really a few you can look. These two are a good way to start. If you just loaded type in SEO keyword research tool, it will give you a good list. But the best way to really do that or one of the other best ways to find keywords is also just using Google Suggest. Google Suggest. Of course, when you go to Google.com you will type something in. Things down in the box will pop up, there will be descriptions, there will be other words that add to it. For example, if you type in soccer ball, then you will see soccer ball Portugal. Soccer ball by soccer ball Red. There will be other things. If you type in controller, you will see controller, Xbox controller, Playstation control, console controller for PC, things like that. These are the Google suggestions. It is really wise to study those. Look at the things that you need on your website. Consider the words that you use. Consider the themes and topics that you have. And then just go to Google and type in your various things in Google. Then you can just find whatever keywords really resonate with that audience. A good to do this to do is because these will help you directly come from Google. They originate from Google. Of course, you can use some of these tools as I said before, but these keywords will come from your own research and they will come directly from Google. That's just a perfectly fine way to go ahead and find some of those keywords that you might need. Now, of course, there is other things that you can use in terms of actually typing stuff in. There's ways that you can type in single words, for example, which are short term keywords. You can use whatever it is, bicycle, TV, soccer, ball, as I said, single items, or you can type in full on phrases and those will be suggested and they will be fulfilled. For example, how to bake a cake, how to build a PC. How to do this. Then it says how to build a PC in 2023. How to build a PC on a budget, how to build a PC, and so on and so forth. Basically, the main idea is for you to just go to Google and search that own thing, and search that keyword, search for those keywords by yourself in the Google suggestion. That would be a great place to start with that keyword research that will help you place those keywords in your own website. That'll be it for the first unit. Let's move on to the next. 3. Creating Content: Now moving on to the next topic, which is creating content. Now this, of course, builds on top of that base that we just layer down. As I said, you're building a house. The keyword is the base. And now we got the content, which is the mass of the material. Of course, creating the actual content on your website is what's going to get you those clicks. It's what's going to help you with that SEO ranking. Now when you think of content building a website, let's focus on text, for example, when you become a blogger and you build a website and you want to rank it with your SEO. Then when it comes to SEO content, they are generally thought of two different directions you can go on. Either you can create something very unique and it will be very niche and it'll be quite different to most people. Or you can create something that's just really high quality. Of course, you can also do both, but those two avenues are what are most standing out in these things of let's say you want to focus on your quality content, you want to focus on things that are actually really good, writing articles on a certain topic, and you just keep building that content well, as always, even in 2023, content remains king. Whether it's a text, blog, videos, or whatever it is, You want to have compelling content that keeps your viewers engaged and keeps your viewers on your site. Because when it comes to ranking, when it comes to getting those viewers on your site, the actual content that they are greeted with actually matters. Of course, on top of that, what they actually see also matters. Not just does the content itself matter, for example, the quality of writing and the quality of text, but also, of course, how your website looks. I suggest spending quite a significant amount of time and money and making sure your website actually looks good. Your pictures are crisp, everything is in order. You made the website as good as possible because it's one thing to get customers or people on your website, it's another thing to keep them there. And you do that by having that high quality content presented in a great manner. Because even if you have good content, but the website looks like it's from 20 years ago, or it just looks not good, doesn't look good. Well then it will be really hard to take in the quality of the content because they'll be distracted by the UI. They'll be distracted by the pictures or absence of pictures or just how that website is designed. I mean, you wouldn't create a wonderful product and then put it in really poor packaging, right? You wouldn't create the most beautiful high quality pair of headphones and then put it in a really bad product and bad looking packaging. You want to make it look good because a people are going to think of your content as high or immediately just by looking good. And then if the content is actually good and of high quality, it'll be a double whammy. Another basically we're adding to that important fact of actually creating good websites with good SEO rankings is having that quality content. 4. On Page SEO Optimization: Now moving on to the next step on page SEO optimization. Now what does that exactly mean? Well, on page optimization refers to the process of enhancing a specific web page in order to boost its visibility on search engines and therefore drive more organic traffic. It's to enhance the websites relevance and user friendliness for both the search engine as well as human visitors. There's various elements of the page that are optimized. I'm going to go into all these now. Some of the key components of on page optimization include, for example, title tags. Now, title tags to craft distinctive and informative titles for each web page. Incorporating relevant keywords to eight search engines, and understanding the page's content. Now the next one would be metadscriptions. Now you should develop engaging metadscriptions that succinctly summarize the page's content and entice users to click through from search engine results pages. The next section are heading tags, Employee heading tags to organize your content and emphasize crucial sections, incorporate pertinent keywords in your headings in order to provide clarity and context for search engines. Next one, short and descriptive URLs. Now, URLs of course generate concise and easily readable URLs that integrate relevant keywords and accurately represent the content hierarchy of the page. If you're writing about pancakes, you want to write the pancake blog.com slash about. If you want to click on about section slash contact, if you want them to contact you team. If you want to know more about the team of the company slash services to write about what you're actually offering, what services you're actually offering. Make it clean, intuitive. Don't have 1,000 letters and numbers in a link A, because if people want to share that link, it looks not very appealing because it's a long link and it just looks cleaner. It looks smoother and it's more organized. Now next section, outbound links. Make sure to include pertinent outbound links to trustworthy and authoritative websites aiding search engines in understanding your contents topic and establishing credibility. Next, interlinking, internal interlinking internal links act as clickable references to web pages within the same domain, differing from external links that lead to pages on other domains. This is internal. This is all your website. Now the last thing that you should focus on is image and video optimization. Enhance your images and videos by utilizing descriptive file names in all tags and compressing their size to improve page load times. A make sure pictures are titled, have a clear file name, and have a tag under the picture along with the picture in order to give it a little description. See what it's about. If you were to, for example, download that file, that file would say if it's a picture of an ocean, ocean, picture one, right? Something like that. Of course, compressing the size without compromising quality will help your website load faster. And not one person on the Earth that likes slow loading web pages, especially in 2023, going to 2024, right? Nobody wants to wait 30 seconds for a website to load because they have huge pictures or videos. They are way too big in order to load fast, compress them to an appropriate size. Of course, you don't want to make them look bad either. You don't want low quality pictures. But there are ways to compress files without compromising quality to a certain extent. Find a nice middle ground. 5. Optimize for Search Intent: Now moving on to the next topic, which is optimizing for search intent. Now in this topic, we're going to be discussing the need to align your content with users search intent by researching keywords and creating relevant and comprehensive content. Let's break that down into three topics. First of all, let's talk about researching and analyzing keywords. You want to start by researching these keywords that are relevant to your content, right? Look for keywords that align with the search functions that your audience has, right? So if you have a target audience of people looking for video games, look for keywords that have that intent, right? So if they type in Game of the Year, they type in game for Xbox, game for PC, whatever it is, Look for keywords that align with the intent of that target audience. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner and so on. Or of course, as we discussed before, you can use the Google Suggest function and find your own keywords. Now second, want to understand the search intent, right? You want to sit back. You want to look on your notes. You want to analyze those search results for your keywords and your target keywords in order to really comprehend that intent behind those words, right? What do they mean? Ask yourself questions. Are these top ranking keywords informational, right? Are they transactional? Are they educational? What does that mean? If somebody types in PC, what are the first ten things that happen? Games on PC? Is it educational as in how to build a PC? How to do this? Or is it how much does it cost? How much does this, Is it cost driven? Is it transactionally driven or is it educationally driven? Right? If you type in something like baking, most likely that will be more likely to have educational value, right? How to make this pie, how to cook this dish, how to make this recipe, right? And if it's other things, then of course they will have that commercial background. So look for those patterns and try to really find the target audiences intent when looking for those keywords. Next finally, let's talk about creating relevant and comprehensive content, right? Once you understand that intent, once you have your target audiences intent, you can create content that directly correlates and addresses that need, right? So for informational search inquisitions, you can provide information, you can provide guides, you can provide tips and tricks, right? Again, if you're writing about baking and your research has shown that a lot of people are looking how to make a lemon cake. You can try making a lemon recipe. These are just really random examples, by the way. Of course, you can apply to whatever you're having to do, but look for that intent and then address that intent with the content that you have, right? For more commercial inquiries. Right. You can focus on actually showing the products, which one's best better? Which one's best? Which one's better you can compare. Right? A lot of articles that you see type in holiday deals, for example, Black Friday deals. People will compare monitors. Define best monitors and how they compare, right? That kind of article is relevant to someone who's looking for a monitor and you can identify that need by somebody having that research going on your target audience and going for those suggested keywords, right? For something that people are just looking for in general, maybe they want to find a general niche, right? They want to look at whatever you're writing about, car parts, you're writing about cars. And in general, they are not necessarily looking to buy an engine. They're not looking to buy a car. They're not looking to buy a specific part, but they're interested in that subject matter. So make it easy for them to find whatever topic they like on your website and so on. So these are the most general ideas behind that whole intent, right? Look at your website and optimize it for intent. Who is your target audience? What do they need? And most importantly, what are they looking for? And then answer those questions, right? What are they looking for? And how can I give them the answers that they are looking for? Right? That's what you want to address. 6. Technical SEO: Now moving on to the next unit. Here we're going to be talking about technical SEO. Now technical SEO addresses the mobile optimization page speed optimization and user experience in order to enhance the website performance and visibility, right? Thinking about it more on a technical level, overall, there are a couple of techniques involved in order to improve that user experience, right? So let's look at a few of them here. And I'm going to be breaking it down. First of all, let's talk about mobile optimization, right? You want to make sure that your website is optimized for mobile users. I mean, it's 2023, about to be 2024. You don't want your website not to look good on your phone. Most people will be browsing the web on your phone nowadays. Of course, laptops, computers, PCs are all still big, but a lot of the traffic nowadays comes from mobile. So you don't want to make sure that your website works on everything, right. It works on your phones, on tablets, ipads, PC's big and small. Whatever it is, you want to make sure that it works on all platforms, right? This will just make it easier. And search engines actually give websites that are mobile friendly higher priority, right? Because of that increasing use of mobile devices. So when you think of mobile optimization, you want to look at responsive design, right? Look at a website that creates your website, adapts it to the different screen size resolution. You don't want to have one website where it's stuck. You want to go on a website on your computer, and you look at a website. And as big as nice, it fills up the screen. But then when you look at it on your phone, it adjusts that size and resizes itself to look good on the phone as well, right? So you want to make sure that it is there have that mobile friendly layout. And of course you want to have something called Accelerated Mobile Pages or A and P, which is a framework that optimizes page loading speed on mobile devices. Of course, that's another topic that we can go to a deeper level on another video, but to keep it sweet and short again, it's just a framework that helps your website speed up. So make sure to take note of that and look up that. If you are looking to increase your technical look at accelerated mobile pages AMP. Now let's look at the page speed optimization, right? Page speed basically describes how quickly, how fast the web page loads in your specific browser. Whatever it is, both your X and of course your search engine rankings actually are tied to it. Make sure you have, because low search engine visibility and high bounce rates, film websites actually are also caused by slow loading websites. How many times have you go in to a website and it takes 30 seconds to load because it's so big, has so many data files on the videos, whatever it is, pop ups and whatever you're like. You know what, I'm just going to go back and try something else. Really keep that in mind. You want to have a website that people want to stay on and not just click off, right? Decrease that balance rate. Decrease that rate at which people leave. So you really think about your minimizing your server response time, which means the time it takes for your server that the website is on to respond. So make sure you with a reputable source. Some examples include square space and those kind of websites now at your browser caching, right? And make sure that enabling your caching to store specific elements of websites locally on those devices, right? Which will help make it run faster. Now, also compressing your files. Minimizing and compressing your files. Make sure those files aren't huge. If you have a video, make sure it's not 20 gigabytes, right? If you have a big, crystal clear HD picture, make sure it's not hundreds and hundreds of megabytes in order to just have a good looking picture. Of course, make sure it still looks good, but compress it to where the quality isn't compromised but the file size is adequate. Right? You don't want a huge file. Now, overall, of course, looking at your X, you use the experience just basically defines the whole impression that somebody gets when they look at your website. Right? And it's the most crucial part of retaining visitors. Right? You don't want to have people look at your website and think it's disgusting and then leave the website because they don't like a website. You know, you always say, don't judge a book by its cover. But with websites it matters, right? Until you get to the content, you see what you get, right? So if you don't like a website and how it looks, you will click off. I mean, just think about your own experiences, right? So you want to make sure those bounce rates are low. You want to make sure that your conversion rates are higher, that they click on it, they stay on it. Click through your website and so on. Right? Make sure that's all well done. Make sure that your readability and your structure is up to par. Make sure that the mobile friendly experience is really working and that it looks good on everything. And of course, make sure to have clear click through actions. Make sure people can click on things and they're click call to actions such as Read more buy, now you subscribe more info, that kind of thing. Make sure to place them adequately and prominently for people to click on them. And make sure to make it intuitive in order to, for people to click through your websites, right? You don't want people to try to look for something in order to get more information. If they have a product, click on Learn More. You want to make it clear and easy to see for people, right? You don't want them to go through your website, be like, what does this product actually do? What do these guys do? What is this talking about? Who made this? And so on and so forth. At some point, some people look, some people will just give up and therefore leave your websites right. Make those clear, make those easy to look. And make sure that it all looks nice and well. On a technical level, it all works. And of course, on all that surface level as well, to make sure to increase the retention, lower those balance rates, and keep those users on your sites. 7. Off Page SEO: Now let's go on and talk about the next topic here, which is off page optimization and link building strategies, right off pagEO. Basically what that means is we can use guest posting, social media marketing, and broken link strategies in order to improve your website authority and reputation, right? So there's a difference between On page SEO and off agEOpageSEOs. Basically what we have been covering, it's your actual content on the website, right? It's still strategies we discussed in the previous units. Now talking about off page SEO is basically a kind of optimization method that's used in order to raise your search engine ranks and your online visibility just through external signals and external website authority building, right? So getting those higher links from other websites is the process of link building, right? Which means you can plant those links on other websites, right? And they kind of Google, for example. Other search engines use back links as endorsements of your website's reliability, right? What does that mean? It means if your website is linked on other websites, it means that a lot of people are linking your website on other websites, meaning, oh, it must be a trustworthy source, right? So that's basically the gist of it. And you can accomplish that by doing a couple of things. So the first one would be guest posting. Posting basically just means collaborating with other people, right? It means guest blogging and guest posting, whatever it is you want to call it, collabing with other influences. Collabing with other people, with other companies. It's creating content, whether it's text, video, whatever it is on other people's websites and then having a link back to your website and driving traffic from their website to your website. Right. Not only does it give you direct exposure to their audience, but it also is noted in the search engine in the back end, actually, because it gives you that authority, right? And it's really a great way to not just gain authority, not just gain visitors, but really build that whole idea of off page optimization right? Now the next thing that we could be talking about is just social media marketing, right? It's marketing on all kinds of social media website, right? You should be using those anyways. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube or X now, sorry, not Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube, shorts, Instagram, whatever it is, all social media websites. It's important to use at least one or two of them. You can't overload yourself, but it's important to whatever it fits in your niche. Right? Whether it's Instagram, whether it's linked in, whether it's Youtube, but use that. You can post organically and post Link and of course also pay for marketing to be done. Right? You can pay for Facebook ads, you can pay for Instagram ads and so on. And that helps you get those back links back onto your website, right? If people start clicking on your website, they will start popping up more when people Google and search for the same thing, right? So that whole concept of social media marketing as always is also a great idea and also a great way to grow your website. Now, of course, it always depends on the kind of budget you have, right? If you have a big budget, it's easy to do that if you have a low budget and you're really just working on sweat activity and you're just working on spending your own time on it. Then of course that is a little bit less of a availability. But of course, again, you can use that to post organically and of course get those links in there, right? The next thing you can do is have a broken link strategy, right? This is kind of a sneaky method to use. And the idea of it is basically you can identify dead pages, dead websites, and request those links basically to change links to your website, Right? Basically, people have de websites have links they don't no longer need. You can have those websites and let them guide back to your website. Right. Because it's basically for real estate, nobody's really using those. Those resources aren't being allocated to January, so you might as well have them linked to your website. Of course, this is kind of like a interesting far fetched idea, but you can use that as another way to improve that a third party off page SEO optimization. 8. Improve Content: Now for this last topic that I wanted to touch on, I just wanted to mention a couple of things. And that is the idea of improving and updating your content, right? Because regularly updating old content with new and unique information will help enhance your website's ranking, right? It just, well, of course some people will have evergreen content, right? The recipe of a pie is never going to change. But what you can do is you can find new pies. You can find the variation of the same recipe updated for 2024 version, for example. So the idea of updating and really keeping your content fresh, it is quite important when it comes to actually enhancing your website ranking, right? Everything will come into play and this will help it of course as well. All right, so you can have your website and you can have your content there. But just remember if it's not something that you're constantly updating every week, every month or whatever it is, right? It's just sitting there for a year or two. It's not going to keep stay in that same website ranking, right, Once you have it to whatever the first page, second page, third page, it's not going to stay there forever because other people are going to keep updating. There's new information every day, right? So make sure that your content is new and refreshing and you can even have updates, right? Maybe you have a blog and you talked about something and you learn some new information. You can update that blog, right? You can add a footnote. You can add more information. Just try to include more unique information. Maybe you can add some photos. If it's an article about a certain event, for example, you can talk about the update of the event. You can talk about how it turned out. You can add some more pictures and so on. Right? This will help boost your blog, this will help get those websites ranking enhanced as well. I hope this has been wrought, and now I'm going to be giving some final words in the conclusion here. 9. Conclusion - Closing Thoughts: This has been with this class on improving your SEO for your website. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned a lot. If there's anything that you need to you watch, you can go ahead and skip around to the lessons. You can leave some comments and I'll be doing my best to answer them. I have a lot of classes, they always spread out a little bit. Always have to keep up with all the comments and questions. Make sure to also go on my channel here on Skillshare and look at the other videos that have pretty much everything to do with digital marketing. Whether it's blowing up on Tikto, whether it's optimizing your twitch site, whether it's digital marketing, or any of the things in that nature, you know, looking at, for example, SEO websites. So check it out and look at some of the videos. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you leave a positive rating. And other than that, I've been John Valentine. Thank you so much for joining me today and I hope to see you again soon. Thank you and see you next time. Bye bye.