SEO Made Simple: SEO Mini Course for Beginners

1. SEO Mini Course for Beginners: What would it mean to you if your website ranked at the top of the search engines? If people consistently saw your website in the search results for keywords that are important to you? That would drive a lot more traffic to your site, meaning more leads, more customers and more revenue for your business. How to achieve this? By applying SEO or Search Engine Optimization. With SEO, you can rank your website higher in major search engines like Google. SEO is one of the most effective forms of online marketing and best of all, it's free. Once you start ranking high in the search engines, traffic will keep flowing to your site on autopilot and completely for free. In this SEO mini course, you will learn how to get started with SEO to make your website more visible in the search engines. You will learn more about keyword research and how to find the best keywords for your site. How to optimize your website for search engines and useful tools and plug ins that make SEO easier for you. How to get started with link building and the best strategies to build links to your site. You won't find any difficult explanations or fancy terminology in this course. Everything is laid out in simple, easy to understand terms. Sign up to the course if you want to learn more about SEO and make your website more successful. Let's get started and I'll see you in the course! 2. Introduction: The Internet is crowded. Very crowded, as you can see from this graph, the number of websites has exploded since the year 2000. There are now over 1.5 billion websites on the Internet, and this number is growing every year. With such a huge amount of information on line, it would be near impossible for users to find what they're looking for. Fortunately, we have tools now that do this for us. Search engines. With the help of a search engine, you can find any type of information that you need very quickly. Just type in what you're looking for, and in less than a second, you are presented with the most relevant web pages on the Internet. I use search engines almost every day like you probably do too. They are indispensable to find the information you need. And with an Internet that keeps on growing, search engines will become more and more important in the future. Of course, search engines are not only essential for users, they are also essential for businesses. If someone is looking for a web designer in New York, in most cases they will use a search engine and search for web designer in New York. If you own a web design company in New York, you want to be on the first page of Google. Users can then click through from the search results to your website, and this will lead to more clients for your web design company. The question now, of course, is how can you get your website to rank higher in the search engines? Well, that's what SEO is all about. SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a form of online marketing that makes your website more visible in the search engines. By ranking higher for keywords that are relevant to you, this will drive more traffic to your site and will result in more customers and more revenue for your business. In short, SEO makes your website and your business more successful. To be clear, SEO is focusing only on the free unpaid search results. These are also called the Organic Search Results. As you can see here on a standard search results page in Google, at the top, there is an ad. So this website is paying Google a certain amount of money every time someone clicks on this ad. Below that, you see the unpaid organic search results. So this SEO course is all about the question, how can I rank my website higher, unpaid search results? As you can imagine, SEO is a very effective form of marketing your website. Everybody uses search engines, so your website will be much more visible on line. And the best thing about it is that SEO is totally free. Once you start ranking high in Google, you will automatically get visitors to your website without having to pay for it, and those visitors also keep coming to your website over and over. On the other hand, if you advertise, you pay for the traffic to your website, and if you stop paying for your ad, you won't get that visitor traffic anymore. These days, SEO is essential for websites. In this chart, you can see that SEO is by far the dominant traffic channel. No less than 53% of all worldwide visitor traffic to websites comes from SEO. Then we have 27% from other sources like for example, direct traffic and referral traffic. Then paid traffic from advertising is only 15%. And also the free organic traffic from social media is relatively small, with only 5% of all website traffic. So as you can see, SEO is really an essential form of online marketing as it is the dominant source of Internet traffic. Because search engine optimization is such an important form of marketing, it can have a tremendous effect on the online success of your business. As an SEO consultant and SEO copywriter, I've helped dozens of clients rank higher in the search engines. Also, from my own website, I managed to increase my visitor traffic sixfold from 500 to around 3,000 visits per month. I did this mainly by applying SEO. In this course, you will learn all the fundamentals of SEO and how you can apply it yourself to rank higher in the search engines and make your website and business more successful. You will learn more about SEO fundamentals like keyword research, how to optimize your website for keywords and link building. But first, we'll take a look at how search engine works. This will give you a better understanding of what search engine optimization is all about. I'll see you in the next video. 3. How a search engine works: If you want to get good results with SEO, it is important that you know how a search engine works. So what are Google's secrets? How does it work? In the world of search engines, Google is a real giant. They are by far the largest search engine in the world, with a global market share of around 92%. Google is by far the biggest search engine in almost every country. The only two notable exceptions are Russia and China. In Russia, Google is still the biggest search engine with a market share of 55% But the second largest search engine, Yandex, is also very popular, with 42% In China, Baidu is the biggest search engine with 71% market share. Google only has 3.42%. But for the rest of the world, Google is by far the dominant search engine that almost everyone uses. So in this course we will often talk about Google, but all the strategies mentioned in this course also work for other search engines. Okay, so how exactly does Google work? How do they ensure that they provide users with the best, most relevant search results? Google's search engine is based on a so called crawler, also called a spider or a bot. This crawler is a computer program that does nothing more than follow links on the Internet. Those links take them to all different kinds of web pages. And the web pages it comes across, it stores in a database called the index. So the Google index is kind of like a copy of almost the entire worldwide web. You can compare it with a table of contents of a book, where you can see on which page in the book, a particular topic is discussed. As you can imagine, the Google index is huge. To store all that information. Google has large data centers all over the world, and they developed a technology that allows them to search all that information in a split second when someone types in a search query. When you go to Google and type something in the search box, Google looks in its own index of the worldwide web for all the web page is relevant to that query. Google then ranks the search results based on relevance. The best and most relevant search results for your query will be ranked first. Google uses an algorithm to rank web pages. This algorithm is a complex mathematical formula that determines which web pages from the index are displayed for a particular query and in what order. In summary, we can say that Google works as follows. There's a crawler, also called a spider, or a bot, that follows links on the Internet and thus cans the entire worldwide web and saves the web pages he comes across in an index. This Google index therefore consists of a copy of almost the entire worldwide web. And finally, we have an algorithm, a complex mathematical formula, which based on a search query that someone enters into Google, determines which web pages from the index are relevant for that query, and in which order they should be shown on the search results page. The algorithm also has to make sure that the best, most relevant search results are shown first. Now we arrive at the most interesting part, the algorithm. How does that work? How does Google determine which web pages are most relevant to a search query and how are those web pages ranked? If we know that, we can, of course, use that knowledge to make our website rank higher in Google. Unfortunately, we don't know exactly how it works. Google's algorithm is top secret. You could compare it to, for example, the recipe for Coca Cola. Of course, Google does not want everyone to know how their algorithm works. It's the foundation of Google's success, and they obviously don't want to see it in the hands of competing search engines. But we do already know a lot about how Google works. Some obvious factors are: How often does the keyword appear on the web page? Is the keyword in the title of the page? Is the keyword in the URL? Is this web page on a quality website or not? All these factors then lead to a total score for the page. And on the basis of that score, you will be presented with a search engine results page for your query with web pages ranked in order of relevance and quality, and all of that in less than a second. Amazing, right? Google uses more than 200 ranking factors in its algorithm. So those are all factors with which web pages are ranked in the search results. The algorithm is a secret, but we know a lot about how it works already, and we roughly have an idea of what those 200 ranking factors are. In this course, you will learn more about the most important ranking factors. Our goal is to get the best possible score with our web pages in order to rank as high as possible in Google. We will begin our SEO campaign with doing keyword research. I will tell you more about that in the next video. 4. Keyword research: Steps 1-2: SEO is all about optimizing your website for the best and most relevant keywords. When you target the right keywords, you will start to rank high into the search engines and drive more traffic to your site. First, it's important to note that in the world of SEO, we commonly talk about keywords, but that doesn't necessarily mean just a single word. A keyword can also consist of multiple words. Everybody in SEO uses the term keyword, but in fact, a more suitable term would be something like a search query, a search term, or a keyword phrase. So keep that in mind when we speak about keywords, it can be a single word like SEO or multiple words like SEO consultant London. Good keyword research is crucial. It is the basis of your SEO campaign. If you don't do keyword research correctly, you will target the wrong keywords and you will not have much success with your SEO campaign. Good keyword research is time consuming. If you want to get the best results, you have to put time and effort into your keyword research. Keyword research is a bit like looking for gold. We'll come across lots of worthless, rocks, mud and junk. But if we do our research properly, we will end up with our golden keywords. These are the keywords that are the most interesting and that we will eventually use for our website. To find our golden keywords, we are looking for three things. A keyword should be relevant and attract the right visitors for your website. Good search volume. This refers to how many people are searching for this keyword in Google every month. Of course, you would only want to target a keyword that a substantial number of people are actually searching for. And thirdly, you can beat the competition. We only want to target keywords where we have a chance of beating the competition that is currently ranking in the top ten or 20. Okay, we now know what kind of keywords we are looking for. Let's get to it and start with our keyword research. Step one is to make a list of set keywords First, use Excel or Google sheets to create a list of all the seed keywords for your website. These are very broad general terms that describe your website, your products, or your services. We're looking for keywords consisting of one to a maximum of three words. For example, if you have a cleaning company, think of general terms such as window cleaning or cleaning services. Make a long list of relevant keywords. How to find these set keywords. You can start by brainstorming. Write down all the keywords you can think of that relate to your business. Ask colleagues to help you, or ask your customers which terms and keywords they use to search for services or products in your market. Look at your own website and write down all the set keywords you come across. Take a look at your competitors. What kind of keywords do they use on their website? Check Google Search Console to see the keywords that people used to find your website in Google. Google Search Console is a free tool that you can use to get extra data about your website. If you link it to your website, you can go here to Performance. Here you can see the keywords that people used to find your website. Click average CTR in average position. Then here you can see the queries that people used. Here you see the number of clicks from the search results to your website, the number of impressions for this keyword in Google, the CTR, that is the click through rate, and the average position. This will give you plenty of ideas for keywords that are relevant to your website. A list of seat keywords depending on the size of your site and how many products or services you offer. This list can be quite long. Dozens, hundreds, or maybe thousands of keywords. That's okay. The more relevant seat keywords we have, the better we'll get to filtering and selecting the best keywords later. Now, in step two, we're going to take the seat keywords we found in step one and enter them into tools to find other related keywords that people search for in search engines. If, for instance, window cleaning was our seat keyword, we can find related keywords that people search for, such as best way to clean windows or telescopic window cleaner, et cetera. See what keywords the tool comes up with and go more in depth with your research. If you get interesting keyword suggestions you hadn't thought of yet, you can use these as new seat keywords to find more related search terms. For example, suppose you get more keyword suggestions around office cleaning and floor cleaning. You can then use these terms as new seat keywords to find even more keywords related to these two topics. A good free keyword tool you can use is the Google Keyword Planner. To go to the tool I just searched in Google for Google keyword Planner and then we see it right here. Then click on Go to Keyword Planner. If you are already logged into your Google account, you will go directly to the tool. If you don't have an account yet, you will have to create one first. The keyword planner is part of the Google Advertising Program. You can use the tool totally for free, but it does ask you to set up an ad campaign. You can use the tool without running an ad. You just have to jump through some hoops when creating your account. This article on.com shows exactly how to create an account. So you can use the keyword planner for free. Just follow the instructions in this article to create your account. You can find the link to the article and the resources. If you are logged into the keyword planner, you can start your keyword research. Click on Discover New Keywords. You can then enter one of your seed keywords from the list you compiled in step one. For example, window cleaning. Check whether your language in country settings are correct. I'll change it, in this case to English and I'll select United States. Then click on Get Results. You will now see all kinds of suggestions for related keywords. In this case, we have 429 keyword ideas. We get keywords such as window cleaners near me, full crystal, best way to clean windows, et cetera. These are keywords that we could potentially use for our website. This column average monthly searches as the search volume or how many people search for this keyword on average per month. So on average, there are 10000-100 thousand average monthly searches for the keyword window cleaning. Unfortunately, we cannot see the exact search volume. You only see a range. You will only see exact search volumes if you have a paid advertising campaign running with Google ads. That's also the disadvantage of the Google keyword planner. You have to pay for ads to see the exact search volumes. There is a hack, however, to get an indication of the exact search volume. And you can see that here in the same blog post on Hf.com that I showed you earlier. I tried this out myself, and it doesn't always give good results, especially for keywords that have a low search volume. So it's not always the best option, but you can try it out for some of your keywords if you'd like to get a more exact search volume. Okay, so back to the keyword planner. In the next column, you see the competition low, medium, or high. Note that this is the competition for advertising. If the competition is high, it means that a lot of people are advertising for this keyword. And so you probably have to pay more for an ad. So this doesn't say much about the SEO competition for the unpaid search results. You can't just say the competition for advertisements is low, so I automatically have a good chance of ranking high in the unpaid search results. Don't use these competition indicators to determine whether a keyword is worthwhile for SEO. The other columns also all have to do with advertisements and are not that interesting for SEO purposes. You can use filters here at the top to filter your keywords. So for example, if you only want to see keywords that contain the word washing, you would select that. Here I would go to keyword, keyword contains, and click Apply. I now only see keywords that contain the word washing. I'll remove the filter again. For now, you can download this entire list by click. Download Keyword Ideas here on the right. However, I prefer to first pre select keywords here that I think I can actually use for my site. That will give me a cleaner list to download. We will go through this list and select the keywords that we think are interesting for our website. If the keyword is relevant and it matches what you offer on your site. Selected. If you think all keywords in this list are relevant, click here above to select them all at once. Once you've selected all the keywords that you like to include, click on Add keywords. They will then be placed on a separate list. You can then enter a new seat keyword from your list to continue with your keyword research. Another seat keyword that we had on our list was office cleaning. I'll remove the first seat keyword, but you can also just leave it there to get results for both of these keywords. Then click on Get Results. Now you'll see keyword ideas related to office cleaning. Go through the list again and select interesting keywords. Then click Add Keywords to add them to your list. Once you've done this for all of your seat keywords, you go to keywords here on the left, you will find that list of all the keywords you've selected. The data that we need is under the tab Historical Metrics. Here you see all your keywords with the corresponding range of average search volumes. We're going to export this data. Click on the arrow at the top right here, then go to Plan Historical Metrics, where you can export to CSV or Google Sheets. This will give us a nice list of all the keywords that we could use for our website by using our set keyword list and Google keyword planner. The next step is to structure our list by grouping and filtering our keywords. I'll show you how to do that in the next video. 5. Keyword research: Step 3: In the last step of our keyword research, we are going to filter our list of keywords to find the best ones for our website. First, let's start by going over our list and do a quick check for irrelevant keywords. Removing keywords we are not going to use. So if your cleaning company does not do office cleaning, for example, we can remove all keywords related to office cleaning. Normally, this is just a quick check because you already did this in the keyword planner by only selecting and exporting keywords that are relevant to your website, but maybe there are still some keywords on your list that should not be there. So now is the time to remove these. Then group your keywords to make your list more manageable, we are going to divide the keywords into groups according to topic. Suppose, for example, that you have a lot of keyword suggestions in your list relating to floor cleaning and window cleaning. Then you group these together in your list, or you create separate taps for these terms in your spreadsheet. When we group our keywords, we get more structure. And we can use these groups to create content for our website around a certain topic. Select the keywords you are going to use by looking at the criteria for good keywords. So they should be relevant and attract the right visitors for your site. They should have good search volume and you should be able to beat the competition. Relevant should already be okay, because we already looked at this before and removed all the keywords that are not relevant to our website. For search volume, we can start sorting keywords by search volume. Prioritizing keywords with a higher search volume. However, we must also pay close attention to the competition. If our keyword is relevant and has good search volume, we still have to skip the keyword if we can't beat the competition. If the competition is too strong, we will never be able to rank for that keyword, and it makes no sense to use it for our website. Being able to beat the competition is really an absolute basic condition for a good keyword for our website. Okay, so how can we evaluate the competition? Well, first we need to know who our competitors are. The answer to that question is simply the first ten search results in Google. That is where we would like to rank as well, the first page of Google. So we will have to look at the top ten to evaluate the competition and estimate whether we can beat them. Suppose that professional office cleaning is a keyword that we would like to use. Then we search for that keyword in Google.com to see who our competitors are. Google shows search results that are personalized to you. For example, based on your location or your search history in Google, you will see different search results than other Google users in a different location. And of course want that because that way we don't get a good idea of exactly who our competitors are. We're going to look at the un personalized results. You can do that by signing out of your Google account. We first see some results from Google Maps. Below that are our ten competitors. Obviously, we don't have to beat all of these competitors to get to the first page, we have to see if we can beat one or more of these competitors. The easiest way to evaluate if we can beat the competition is to use the Z bar Chrome extension. You can find a link to this tool and the resources. To use the tool, you need an account at Z. You can create this for free by clicking on Create Account. If you've created an account, you must set the correct search profile first. This way, you can set the correct search results for the specific region where you are located. Go to Search profiles and add new profile. Select, Google, Select, show non personalized results because we only want to see the non personalized results for our competition research. Then choose your country. In this case, for example, United States. You can select your region, so the state that you're in, but you don't have to. You can also just leave it to the entire country and give you a profile and name and create profile. If everything is set up correctly, we can see additional information about the search results with the Sbar extension. If you don't see this data, make sure you have Mozbar turned on by clicking the icon with the M at the top of your Chrome browser. You will now see some data for each search result, PA, or page authority. That is the authority of this web page. The higher the PA is, the more authority this page has. In Google's eyes, links is the number of links to the page. The more links, the stronger the page. Da stands for domain Authority. The authority of the domain in the eyes of Google. The higher this number, the stronger the competitor is. Now you can compare this to the data for your own website. Suppose this is our own website, then we see that our website has a PA of 27, 173 inbound links and a domain authority of 11. If you don't see the number of links here, go to tools and settings and check link metrics. Okay, So you now know how strong your own website is in the eyes of Google comparative data, with the first ten search results in Google, are your page authority, domain authority, and number of links higher than those of one or more of these competitors. Then you stand a good chance to beat your competitors and end up on the first page of Google. So now we can assess all relevant criteria for our keywords. This allows us to prioritize the best keywords. Being able to beat the competition is by far the most important factor. Then you can prioritize keywords with the highest search volume and the ones that are most relevant to your website and attract the right visitors. An important question, of course, is how many keywords should you use per page? Google is getting a lot smarter, and that means that singular plural synonyms, strongly related keywords, they can all usually be on the same page. In the past, you had to create separate pages for that, but now you don't have to because Google understands that they are all about the same topic. So something like fitness schedule, fitness schedules, workout schedule, these are all keywords that could, for example, be on one page. That means that one page can rank for multiple keywords according to a study by HF, the average page ranked number one in Google also ranks for about 1,000 other relevant keywords. That is quite a lot. It is, of course, very difficult to write a landing page or blog post and optimize it for dozens or hundreds of keywords to make it easy on yourself, a good starting point is to use one to three main keywords per page. You can then add additional keywords, so singular plural synonyms and strongly related keywords. As long as you make sure that you only group keywords on the same page if they have the same search intent. If you write a block post about the keyword window cleaning tips, this is a purely informational article, so keyword like window cleaning services near me would not fit in this post because that is more of a commercial type. Keyword only combine keywords on the same page that have similar search intent. This way you can create a nice structure for your site where you assign all your keywords to different pages. Okay, So now you have the best and the most relevant keywords for your website. You have also divided them into groups and assigned them to different pages on your site. The next step is to optimize your web pages for your keywords. That's what we're going to look at in the next video. 6. Optimizing SEO content: In the previous lesson, we looked at how to do keyword research. You should now have a list of the best keywords for your website. The next step is to optimize your website for the keywords of your choice. We do this by writing SEO content. This is content like blog posts and sales pages that is optimized for the keywords we want to rank for in Google. We have to let search engines know that our content is relevant for a certain keyword. We can do this by including our keyword phrase in the following places. First, the SEO title tag, which is also called title tag, SEO title or page title. The SEO title tag is a so called meta tag, an element in the HTML code that provides information about the web page. The user will not see the title on the page itself, but it shows in your browser tab, like you can see here. When you hover over the title, you see the full title in a tool tip. So the SEO title of this page is how to write meta title tags for SEO with good and bad examples, the title can be a maximum of around 60 characters. This is because Google will often show your title in the search results as the blue link that users can click on, like you can see here in this screenshot from the search results. If your title is too long, Google will truncate it in the search results. That is exactly what happens with this title. It is too long and Google cuts it off. Also put your keyword in the meta description. This is a meta tag as well, that is in the code of the page. You can see how that looks in HTML. Here, the meta description can be a maximum of around 155 characters. Google often displays the SEO title and the meta description of a webpage as a title and a description in the search results. So make sure not only include your keywords here, but also that you write some good copy that makes users want to click on it. To check the length of your SEO title and meta description, you can use the SEO **** snippet optimizer. Just enter your text in the appropriate fields and you will immediately see what it will look like in the Google search results. You can find a link to this tool in the resources. Also, put your keyword in the URL of the page. That would be, for example, mysite.com slash my keyword. Next, put your keyword in the H one heading. This heading is visible on the webpage for users. It typically is the first heading on the page for this article. The H one would be the first title that you see here at the top of the page. How to write meta titles for SEO with good and bad examples. Okay, so how do we know that this is the H one? You can see that by checking the page source. So we go right click and select page source. And then we can search for H one on this page. As you can see in the HTML code here. This is indeed the H one title for this article. You can also check this by using the Mozbar Chrome extension. Just open the bar and click here for page analysis. Here you can see that the H one for this article is how to write meta title tags for SEO. This is another way to check what the H one for a certain page is. Also, put your keywords in the subheadings in HTML code. You can use H two to six for this. You can also optimize images on the page by including your keyword in the file name and the all text here. For example, I have an image on my Wordpress website. On the right you can see the file name which is Core Web vital state. On the left you see the image and below that the all text. In this case it is core Web vitals. You can use your keywords in these strategic places to optimize your images as well. Finally, of course, the body copy of the article, the main text itself. Make sure you mention your keyword throughout the text, like in the beginning, the middle, and the end of the text. The beginning is especially important. Users as well as search engines can immediately see what the article is about optionally. You can also use bold or italics to emphasize your keywords a little more in certain places. To summarize, these are the places where you can include your keywords, the SEO title tag, the meta description, the URL, the H one heading, subheadings H two to six images, and the body copy. There are quite a few things to keep in mind when you see this list. If you are using Wordpress, there's an easy way to quickly check if you've included your keyword in all the right places. And that is with the Plug in 0, 0. So in your Wordpress blog post, you can enter your focus key phrase. So that as the keyword you're optimizing your page for the plug in will tell you if you've optimized your content properly. Here you can see the title and the metadscription. My metadscriptions, bit long as it displays an orange hair. Then we also have the SEO analysis. Here I can see that I need to mention the key phrase in the subheadings more often some image all texts that I can still add that reflect my keyword. Here are some points that Yost says are good results. Like putting the key phrase in the introduction, a good keyphrase length, et cetera. A plug in like Yost SEO makes SEO optimization a whole lot easier. And you can quickly check if your article is well optimized. There are a few more things to keep in mind. First, don't start keyword stuffing and mention your keyword too often in the text of your article. This will annoy your readers. It won't help you rank any higher in the search engines. And if you overdo it, Google will actually see your article, a spam, and rank you lower. So don't overdo it and mention your keyword in a natural way throughout your text. Always write for your visitors. A search engine does not buy your product or service after all, so always write your text for your visitors. Write good and compelling copy aimed at conversion. Conversion means that a visitor does something you would like him or her to do on your site, like order a product or a service, or subscribe to your newsletter. Use clear and simple language and write content that is easy to understand for everyone. Make sure your articles are well structured with headings and subheadings. Use plenty of white space, so it's easy on the eyes and easy to read. Write short sentences and paragraphs. This makes it easy for visitors to consume your content. Okay, so now you've optimized your web page for your keyword when you have good compelling SEO content on your site that is well optimized for the keywords of your choice. You will start to rank higher in the search engines. In the next lesson, we will look at link building. Creating more back links to your website helps your SEO a lot. I'll see you in the next video. 7. Link building: In this video, we're going to look at how you can build links to your site to rank higher in the search results. So far for our website, we have done our keyword research and we've written SEO optimized content focused on those keywords. Our website is now targeting relevant keywords that people are searching for. And we also made sure that we can beat the competition for those keywords so that we can rank for them. But how does Google know which web page to rank higher in the search results? They do this mainly by looking at which website is the most popular. The website and the web page that is more popular on the Internet is ranked higher. Google mainly determines this by looking at the links pointing to that website and the web page. Links are a little bit like votes. If site A links to site B, then site A is recommending site B to its visitors. The more links point to a website, the more popular that website is. Google will rank more popular sites higher in the search results. But not every link has the same value. You can imagine that a link to our site from a small and insignificant website that no one's ever even heard of is worth a lot less than a link from a big, well known website, like, for example, Harvard University or the BBC. How does a search engine determine the value of a sites link profile? Google uses various factors here, like first of all, the quantity, the more links the website has, the more popular it will typically be. Relevance is also important are the links from related websites. A link to our cleaning company's website from a website that reviews cleaning companies is worth a lot more than a link from an unrelated site that has nothing to do with cleaning companies at all. Authority and popularity. How much authority and popularity this website linking to us have? If the site linking to us has a lot of inbound links itself and is thus popular, a link from that website is much more valuable than a link from a website that is not popular at all. Diversity also counts how many different websites are linking to our website. 100 links from one and the same website are worth less than 100 links from 100 different websites. The anchor text is also important. The anchor text is the visible clickable text of a link. If a website links to us with the Anchor Text cleaning company, London, Google knows that the referring website apparently finds our website relevant for that keyword. A link with the anchor text, click here, on the other hand, does not say much and is therefore a little less relevant. But beware, Google pays strict attention to anchor text these days. If your keyword appears too often in the anchor text of your inbound links, you run the risk of Google thinking that you are spamming and your rankings will be lowered. Suppose you have 1,000 incoming links to your website, all with the same anchor text cleaning company, London. Of course, that looks very suspicious. It is very unlikely that all those websites decided to link to you with exactly the same anchor text. Google also sees this and will lower your rankings. So make sure that you have diversity in your anchor texts. You shouldn't have lots of links with anchor texts that are stuffed with keywords, having back links with natural anchor text like for example, just your company name or the text. Click here, make sure backlink profile a lot more natural. So how do you get more links to your website? There are lots of different methods that you can use for link building, but generally, there are two main types of link building you can do. First, content marketing. This is the creation of good content on your website that provides a lot of value to users and will attract links. Then there's traditional link building, which is creating links on other sites yourself or reaching out to other sites to ask if they want to link to you. Obviously, these two methods are strongly connected to one another. If you invest in content marketing and create lots of valuable content on your website, it will be much easier to ask other websites to link to your content because you really have something valuable to offer to them. Okay, we'll start with content marketing. For this to work, we have to provide good and valuable content. You usually put this content on your blog, where you provide good and free information that will help users to go back to our example of a cleaning company. This could be blog articles that explain how to best clean your windows or your carpet. Content marketing leads to more links and also more customers. If you provide good information, you build up expertise. You show that you know what you're talking about and people will start to trust your company. Don't be afraid to give away free information because content marketing pays off tremendously by generating more back links, higher Google rankings, and more trust in your business. Types of content that do quite well are how to articles, case studies, reviews, and giveaways. Also, don't forget to promote your content via social media and your newsletter so you reach more people who can share your content and start linking to it. Traditional link building you can do in several ways, like listing your business in business directories like Yelp, you can publish press releases, Blog comments are a good way of traditional link building, and of course, outreach to other websites. If you've written a great block post, you can outreach to other webmasters and ask if they would like to link to it. There are many possibilities to build links to your site. Link building is an excellent way to promote your website, get more exposure, and boost your rankings in the search engines. So far, we've looked at three important steps to SEO, your site. First of all, keyword research. Then optimize your site by creating SEO content. And thirdly, link building. But there are also many ways you can make mistakes when applying SEO to your site. In the next video, I will show you the five most common SEO mistakes and how you can avoid them. 8. The 5 most common SEO mistakes: Seo is one of the cheapest and most effective forms of online marketing. It can boost the success of your website and generate more traffic and sales. That is, if you know what you're doing, many people make mistakes when applying SEO. This can lead to wasting a lot of time and energy on things that don't work. Not seeing any results from your efforts is bad enough as it is. But in the worst case scenario, some SEO mistakes can actually get you into trouble with search engines that can give you a penalty and lower your rankings. This is definitely something you want to avoid. Let's take a closer look at the five most common SEO mistakes that people make and how you can avoid them. First of all, a common mistake is targeting the wrong keywords. This can be really disastrous for the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. If you focus all your efforts on trying to rank for the wrong keywords, this will get you nowhere. The wrong keywords could be keywords that no one is searching for, keywords that are way too generic. For example, if you are a small local car rental company trying to rank for rental car is probably aiming too high. Such a keyword is too generic and too competitive as well, so you probably can't rank for it. Instead, look for more specific keywords that have less competition keywords with a search intent that doesn't match your content. Let's look at an example. Suppose you're an SEO copywriter and you want to write a sales page on your website where you promote your services. You do keyword research, and you come up with the keyword SEO copywriting. That looks like a great keyword, doesn't it? Well, not so much. If we look at the top ten in Google for the keyword SEO copy writing, we see that these are all informational blog posts that explain how to write good SEO copy. You don't see any sales pages here. The search intent of this keyword simply doesn't match that of your sales page. People want to see informational content for this keyword and not a sales page. This makes it highly unlikely that Google will ever rank your page for this keyword. Instead, a better keyword would be something like SEO copywriting agency, as you can see in the top ten for this keyword phrase, we mainly have sales pages here. This keyword phrase is a much better fit in terms of search intent and you can actually rank for it if you would write a sales page for this keyword, put a lot of time and energy in keyword research. This is very important because keyword research is the basis of your SEO campaign. If you make mistakes here and you start targeting the wrong keywords, this will undermine your entire SEO campaign. Look for keywords that are relevant, have good search volume, and that don't have too much competition. Aim for specific keywords that are not too competitive. Don't rely on the information in the Google keyword planner alone. If you see the keyword SEO copy writing, it might seem like a good fit. It has good search volume and it is relevant. But you can't see whether the search intent also matches the content that you intend to write. Double check the top ten in Google to see what kind of search results Google shows. If your content has a different search intent, then this keyword is not suitable to use. Another common mistake is over optimization. This is a trap that many people fall into. They have their keyword and then they think if I just mentioned this keyword in my content, as often as I can, a search engine will definitely see that my content is relevant for this keyword. This is called keyword stuffing. This results in a negative user experience. Search engines don't like it, and it can harm your site's rankings. As Google also says here on one of their support pages. Always write for your visitors and not primarily for search engines. Make sure your content looks natural and don't stuff your keywords in it. You can use a plug in like so to check whether you are over optimizing. If you mention your keyword too often, it will warn you that your key phrase density is too high. Plug ins like this are pretty useful to avoid over optimizing your content. Third, a very common mistake that you see a lot is having no or no unique SEO title tags and meta descriptions. Many websites use the same title tags and meta descriptions for every single page on their website, or they just skip them entirely. Every page on your site should have a unique SEO title and meta description where you also include your main keyword for that page. This helps for SEO and better optimizes your page for that keyword. It also helps for click through rate. Google often takes your title and meta description and shows them in the search results. If you have a unique, well written title and meta description, this will result in more clicks to your website from the search results, write a unique SEO title tag and meta description for every page on your site. Include your keywords in them. Make sure your titles and descriptions are clear, descriptive, and persuasive. This will result in more clicks from the search results to your website. Use a tool like Yosso or the SEO Moo snippet optimizer to make sure your title and description have the right length. Google will truncate titles and descriptions that are too long. The fourth common mistake is copying content. Creating valuable, good content takes a lot of time and effort. That's just how it is. Some people think though, that they can skip the hard work and do it faster and easier. They just copy an article from another website and publish it on their own website. I see this quite a lot, but please don't do this first, this is plagiarism. You take content that someone else wrote and publish it on your own website without their permission. You can face legal action if they find out about this. Secondly, Google doesn't like duplicate content. They are not going to show the exact same content and the search results multiple times. If you copy an article from someone else, Google will typically only show the original content from the other website. And it simply won't rank your copied version In the worst case scenario, if you copy a lot of content from other websites, Google could even give you a penalty. So make sure your content provides answers and has actionable information. Trustworthy sources give examples to make content easier to understand. Add images and videos to make your content more engaging. In short, create unique and valuable content. That really helps users invest time and energy into creating great content yourself or hire an SEO copywriter to do it for you. The last common mistake is poor mobile design. Having a poor mobile design is a common mistake that many websites make. Don't make this mistake, because good mobile design is more important than ever already. Way back in October 2016, internet usage by mobile and tablet devices exceeded desktops for the first time. Since then, the use of mobiles and tablets has only been rising in December 2020, mobile and tablet use combined accounted for 58.54% of internet traffic. This number will likely keep rising in the future. Google now also uses mobile first indexing. That means that Google is using the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking. In other words, it is essential for users and search engines that your website looks good on mobile devices. When developing your site, make sure it is mobile friendly. For example, by using a responsive theme. Check how your site looks on mobile devices. You can do this by right clicking in Chrome and selecting Inspect, or just press F 12. As you can see, this website has a poor mobile design. The font size gets really small and provides a bad user experience. You can check how your site looks on different devices like the Pixel, the iphone, or the ipad. Another way to test your website is to use the Google Mobile Friendly Test. Enter the URL of your website here and Google will check the mobile friendliness here. I can see that my website is actually mobile friendly. Also, check your site on your own mobile phone. Visit multiple pages and see how your site looks. Click on some buttons and links to see what happens. Is everything working like expected? Do pages display properly? Can you make a purchase on your site while using a mobile phone, et cetera? This is a good way to test whether your site looks good and works well on mobile devices. These were the five most common SEO mistakes and how to avoid them. To summarize, targeting the wrong keywords over optimization, no or no unique title tags and meta descriptions, copying content and poor mobile design. In the next video, I will tell you more about the complete blueprint to SEO success. I'll see you in the next video. 9. The Complete Blueprint to SEO Success: SEO is the essential ingredient for online success. It can make the difference between a website that gets tons of traffic and sales and a website that just sits there collecting digital dust. Do you want to apply SEO to your website to rank higher in the search engines? With this free course, you already know the fundamentals. But I can imagine that you would like to learn more about SEO and how to apply it to your website. For those of you who are serious about SEO and want to take the next step, you can check out my premium SEO Course. This is the complete step-by-step plan for better rankings and more traffic and more revenue. It will take you from SEO beginner to SEO pro. In short, it is the complete blueprint to SEO success. My premium course takes you by the hand and shows you step-by-step how to apply SEO to your site. You will get a clever method to find the most successful keywords and outsmart your competition. An overview of the best SEO tools that help you rank faster and higher in the search engines. A secret strategy to get faster results in Google, hardly anyone uses this. All the steps to make your website SEO proof. A complete module on local SEO. This is very important as 46% of searches in Google today have a local search intent. And much, much more. So if you want to make your website more successful and boost your traffic and revenue, sign up to the full course SEO Made Simple today. You can find a link to the course in the resources. Thanks so much for watching my videos. If you have any questions or feedback, send me a message, I'm happy to help. It would also be awesome if you could leave a review for my course, I would really appreciate it. I wish you the best of luck with your website. Have a great day and take care!