SEO Made Simple: The Complete Blueprint to SEO Success

1. SEO Made Simple: There's one problem that many people run into with their website, and maybe you have experienced it as well. You've put a lot of time, money, and effort into creating your new website. But when it finally goes live, you don't see any results at all. Your website hardly gets any traffic and doesn't bring in new customers. It feels like all your hard work has been for nothing. Or perhaps you are still in the process of creating your website, but you have no idea how to get traffic to your website. Just putting your website online is really not enough anymore these days. There are around 1.7 billion websites on the internet. People won't magically find your website. You have to do something to drive traffic to your site. One of the most affordable and effective ways of doing that is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. With SEO, you make your website more visible by ranking high in the search engines for keywords that are important to you. This drives more traffic to your site and increases the revenue of your business. But what are the secrets to ranking high in the search engines? How does this SEO stuff actually work? My name is Michiel Brand and I'm an SEO specialist and copywriter. With my marketing agency, based in the Netherlands, I've helped dozens of clients drive more traffic to their website and increase their revenue by turning visitors into customers. I have also successfully applied SEO to my own website. I managed to increase traffic to my site from 500 to 3,000 visits per month. These days, I get almost all my customers through my website thanks to free traffic from Google. What is so great about SEO is that you can learn and apply it yourself. You don't need a lot of technical knowledge or hire expensive SEO experts. Anyone can learn SEO. But that doesn't mean it's super easy to rank high in the search engines. SEO can be pretty overwhelming and there are a lot of different things that you have to think about. What you need is a complete, step-by-step plan from A to Z that tells you exactly how to successfully apply SEO to your website. That is why I created the course SEO Made Simple. A complete program that shows you exactly how to rank high in the search engines, drive more traffic to your website and increase the revenue of your business. This course gives you everything you need to be successful with SEO, all the tips and tricks to rank high in the search engines. Extensive video lessons with clear and easy explanations, the step-by-step blueprint to SEO success, helpful summaries, useful checklists and spreadsheets. And finally, the best SEO tools that help you get faster and better results. If you want access to a step-by-step system to boost your website traffic and revenue, and if you are ready to make your website a real success, sign-up to SEO Made Simple today. Let's get started and I'll see you in the course! 2. Introduction to SEO: In the first section, you will get an introduction to SEO. The end goal of this section is that you know what SEO is and what you need to work on to rank high in the search engines. In this section, you will learn the true power of SEO and how it can boost your traffic and revenue. The differences between SEO and SEA and which form of search engine marketing is right for your website. How a search engine works. I'm going to tell you all about the secrets of Google and finally, how to get your website to the top by using the three pillars of SEO. OK, let's get started with this section and I'll see you in the next video. 3. Traffic Explosion: The True Power of SEO: In this lesson, we're going to talk about the true power of SEO and how SEO can lead to a real traffic explosion. In other words, a lot more visitors to your website. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is all about optimizing your website to rank higher in the search engines. This leads to more traffic to your website, as well as more customers and more revenue for your business. To be clear, SEO is all about the free, unpaid search results. These search results are also referred to as organic search results. For example, for the search term "what is chocolate?", we see a search results from Wikipedia here, which is an unpaid organic search result. The query "buy dark chocolate", on the other hand, has more of a commercial intent. At the top, in the red box, you see advertisements. These are ads from Google shopping. The web shops that are displayed here are paying Google a certain amount of money every time someone clicks on their ad. Below that, in green, you see an organic, unpaid search result again. Ads come in different shapes and can also be normal snippets with a blue link you can click on and a short description text. For example, here I searched for "hire SEO expert" and the first result is an ad from Fiverr.com. Below that in the green box is the first organic result from Upwork.com. So now you've seen a difference between ads in Google and unpaid organic search results. SEO is all about the free, unpaid organic search results. SEO is one of the most important marketing strategies for a successful website. In the past, when you needed a product or service, you would look in the Yellow Pages or ads in a local newspaper. Nowadays, the first thing that most people do when they need a product or service is to use a search engine. No less than 81 percent of Internet users search online for products and services to buy. You've probably done it lots of times yourself as well. The real power of SEO is shown when looking at the sources of web traffic. We can see that SEO truly is the worldwide dominant channel, with 53 percent of all trackable website traffic worldwide coming from SEO. In other words, the organic free search results. Other channels pale in comparison with social media providing just five percent of web traffic and paid search 15 percent. This goes to show how important SEO is these days. The process of purchasing a product or service often goes as follows. Suppose you live in Amsterdam and you're looking for a plumber, you go to Google and you search for "plumber Amsterdam". You look at the top results, see which websites look reliable and whether there are any reviews. Finally, you pick up the phone to make an appointment. If you start applying SEO and follow the steps in this course, you will experience a real traffic explosion. I've seen great results with my clients, with traffic to their websites increasing spectacularly. Also for my own website, SEO has led to a big increase in traffic. The number of visits to my website increased six fold from 500 to 3,000 visits per month. For a relatively small language area like Dutch, these are pretty good numbers. I achieved all of this by applying SEO to my website. Nowadays, I get almost all of my customers through my website, thanks to free traffic from Google. Depending on how much effort you put into SEO, you can double, triple or maybe even 10x the traffic to your website. With more traffic, you will also increase your revenue. The more people visit your website, the more income you will generate for your business. This way, your website will really work for you and deliver sales and customers on auto pilot. Are you excited to learn more and would you like to discover yourself how SEO can make your website more successful? In this course, I'll show you step by step exactly how to do that. Everything will be presented in simple and easy to understand terms. Sometimes SEO might seem like a bit of a mystery and very hard to do, but in this course you will find out that you can do a lot of things yourself to make your website rank higher in the search engines, even if you have little or no technical knowledge. Plus, the great thing is that you can apply SEO with a small or even no budget. In this course, I will show you how you can get started with SEO for free. SEO is one of the cheapest and most effective forms of online marketing. That's what's so great about it! But there's more to search engine marketing than just SEO. There is also SEA. I will tell you more about these two forms of marketing in the next lesson. 4. SEO vs SEA: This course is about SEO, but it is important that you also know a little more about another method of search engine marketing, namely SEA. That way you can make an informed decision which marketing method you're going to use for your website. You could use one of them or both to get more visitors to your website. But what is SEA exactly? SEA stands for Search Engine Advertising. In this case, you pay for showing your website in the search results. Here we see the example of a search results page in Google, again with an advertisement at the top of Fiverr.com. These ads are Pay Per Click. So every time someone clicks on this ad, Fiverr.com has to pay a certain amount of money to Google. In addition to the search results pages, ads can also show up on other websites as part of the Google Display Network. Here's an example from a blog post on Search Engine Journal.com, where you see an ad here in the middle that is displayed via the Google Display Network. So if you use SEA and advertise via Google, you can also choose to show your ad on other sites such as this one. In order to be able to properly choose whether you will use SEO, SEA or both. Let's list the pros and cons of both marketing methods. The pros of SEO, first of all, is that it is cheaper. Typically it's free and doesn't have to cost you anything. You have to put in time, of course, but you can get started with SEO without spending any money. You can also choose to outsource some SEO work or buy tools, but you can also just get started with SEO completely for free. It is a long term source of traffic. If you advertise, then of course you only get traffic as long as you pay. If you don't pay any more for your ad, your ad will no longer be displayed. With SEO, once you are visible in Google on certain keywords, that traffic keeps coming to your website over and over. SEO is also more powerful than advertising. Research has shown that 70 to 80 percent of searchers ignore ads and focus only on organic results. The cons of SEO are that it, first of all, takes more time. In the past, you could launch a new website and be ranking in the top of the search engines within a few days, or sometimes even within a day. Today, that is no longer possible. It usually takes longer to start ranking well, especially if you have a brand new website. With a website that has been online for some time and has built up some authority, this goes much faster, but with a new website, or when you just start out with SEO, generally you will have to wait longer before you actually see results from your SEO efforts. Also, this means that you do not immediately know whether you are doing things right. It takes time to see results. So at first it is difficult to know whether you're doing the right things or not. You also need more knowledge for SEO than you would need for SEA. Fortunately, with this SEO course you will have all the SEO knowledge you need! The pros of search engine advertising are, first of all, that it works instantly. If you create an ad and spend enough money, your website will instantly be shown in Google and or other websites within the Google Display Network. So you can quickly get traffic to your website as soon as your ad is online. You can also test quickly. Results are in quick, so you can check whether your ad is generating sales and you can adjust if necessary. Also, there's less knowledge required. You can get started faster with advertising. The cons of SEA are first of all, obviously that it costs money. Of course you have to pay for an ad. It's also easy to lose money on your ad. So when the cost is higher than the extra revenue. SEA can also lose you money. when it turns out advertising in your specific niche doesn't work that well. Or it turns out later you didn't advertise with the right keywords or that the text of your advertisement wasn't good, etc.. Constantly measuring ad results can be tedious. You have to constantly monitor how many people click on your ad, how many orders your ads generated, and you need to A/B test different ads to see which one works best. Many folks don't always enjoy doing this type of stuff. And it's also less powerful than SEO. As we just saw, 70 to 80 percent of all searches ignore paid ads and focus only on the free, organic results. So now we come to the key question. What should you choose SEO, SEA, or perhaps both? You are now well aware of the pros and cons of SEO and SEA, making it easier for you to choose which one of these search engine marketing methods to use. But here are some useful tips to help you make the right choice. I would suggest to always do SEO. This is useful for almost any website. SEO is a powerful form of marketing and it always pays off to apply SEO and get free search traffic to your website. SEA can be interesting for brand new websites. SEO is a long term strategy. So if you just launched a new website that has no authority yet in the eyes of a search engine, advertising is a good solution to get visitors to your website fast. SEO and SEA works well as a combination, and they can reinforce one another. Using both allows you to draw even more visitors to your website. Also by advertising, you can test quickly and find out which keywords are the most profitable for your website. You can then use those keywords for an SEO campaign to try and also attract visitors through the unpaid search results for those keywords. With these tips, you can decide for yourself which search engine marketing methods you will want to use for your website. 5. How Does a Search Engine Work: 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 percent. Google is by far the biggest search engine in almost every country. The only two notable exceptions are Russia and China and Russia. Google is still the biggest search engine, with a market share of 55 percent. But the second largest search engine, Yandex, is also very popular with 42 percent. In China, Baidu is the biggest search engine, with 71 percent market share. Google only has 3.42 percent. 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. OK, so how exactly does Google work? How do they ensure that they provide users with the best, most relevant search results? Google 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 World Wide Web. You can compare it with a table of contents of a book where you can see on which pages 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 World Wide Web for all the web pages relevant to that query. The Google then ranks 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 scans the entire world wide web and saves the web pages he comes across in an index. This Google index, therefore, consists of a copy of almost the entire World Wide 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 the 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 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. In the next lesson, we're going to narrow down all these ranking factors to a few main categories, the three pillars of SEO. I'll see you in the next lesson! 6. Get Your Site to the Top: The Three Pillars of SEO: In the previous lesson, we saw that Google uses as many as 200 ranking factors to rank web pages and search results. Those are quite a few factors to take into account. To make it easier on ourselves, we reduce all those factors to three main elements, the three pillars of SEO that you have to work with to get your website higher in Google. These three pillars are content, technical SEO, and authority. Let's take a look at those three pillars, one by one. By content, we mean the content of a web page. Everything you see in a website as a visitor. The main form of content is, of course, a text in a web page. But there are also other elements like hyperlinks, images and videos. Content is king. It is the most important element for Google and other search engines. Obviously, the same goes for users. If you want to have a successful website, you will need to provide your users with information about your products and services in the form of content. And if Google has to assess which web pages are relevant to a particular search query, they, of course, first look at the content of that page. If someone searches on Google for plumber Amsterdam, for example, Google will look in its index for web pages that match that query as closely as possible. In terms of the content on that page, web pages that contain the words plumber and Amsterdam are relevant to the query and will be shown in the search results. So if we want to rank high in Google, we need to know which keywords users are searching for and then use those keywords in our content. The second pillar is technical SEO, which also plays an important role. A search engine has to be able to crawl and index your website. It is therefore important that your website is well structured from an SEO perspective. You can think of things like a good, well organized website structure, a website that loads fast, a mobile friendly website which displays well on mobile devices, and a good internal link structure. We will talk more about these elements later in the course. Finally, the third pillar is also very important when ranking search results: the authority or popularity of a website. We can measure this authority by the number and quality of backlinks to a website A backlink simply means a link from one website to another. If someone searches in Google for a nice, interesting museum in the Netherlands, the chance is much higher that they will end up at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam than at the garden gnome museum in some little village no one's ever even heard of. Why is that? Because the Rijksmuseum is a lot more popular and well known. This plays an important role for Google. Websites that are popular and have a lot of authority appear higher in the search results than less popular websites. Popularity can be measured by looking at how many people talk about something on the Internet. This is done by means of links. So when website A links to website B, they are talking about website B. They basically say to their site visitors: "hey, check out website B if you want to know more about this particular topic". If a total of one hundred websites all linked to website B, then in the eyes of Google, this is a strong signal that website B is popular. There's a lot of talk on the Internet by website B, and so we can say that his website is clearly popular and has a certain authority. Suppose there's a competitor website C, which is about exactly the same topic as a website B, but there is no other website on the Internet that links to websites. Nobody talks about website C, and that website is therefore not considered popular. When Google starts ranking the search results, they prefer the more popular website B. It will be ranked higher in search results than the not so popular website C. How to get backlinks to your website to gain more authority in the eyes of Google is a topic that we'll discuss later in this course. Finally, I would like to point out two common terms, namely on-page and off-page optimization. On-page optimization has to do with your own website. This, therefore concerns SEO pillars one and two: content and technical SEO. Off-page optimization, on the other hand, is optimization that you do outside of your own website. In other words, pillar three - getting backlinks to your website. In the next lessons, we will dive into the first pillar of SEO: content. We start with the basis of your SEO campaign: keyword research. By doing keyword research, we can find out which keywords are the best ones to use for our website. 7. The Basis of Your SEO Campaign: Keyword Research: In this section, we're going to talk about the basis of your SEO campaign. Keyword research. This is the most important section of the course. So pay close attention to the lessons ahead. Keyword research is one of the most difficult and time-consuming parts of SEO. So make sure you learn properly how to do it. If you start your keyword research unprepared, chances are you will make mistakes without knowing what you are doing wrong. Now, why is keyword research so important? If you don't do keyword research properly, that means a lot of wasted time and money. It takes time to start ranking in Google for the keywords that you're optimizing your website for. If you choose the wrong keywords and then put in a lot of time and effort to optimize for those keywords. It may later turn out that you have done all your work for nothing. Keyword research is the basis of your SEO campaign. If you don't do this right, you will not get anywhere. All other SEO work is much more effective if you choose the right keywords. Suppose you start with link building, but you have used keywords for your website that you cannot rank for, then you will spend a lot of time on link building without seeing any results. If on the other hand, you have chosen keywords that you can rank for, then all your other SEO work will also be much more effective. Also, knowing which keywords to target gives you a lot of inspiration for your content. You basically never have to think about which topics you are going to write about for your website. Let's first clarify what we mean exactly by keywords. A keyword is not a single word. A keyword can consist of one word, such as bicycle, but also of several words such as buy secondhand bicycle London. In fact, as we'll see later in the course, were mainly looking for those longer keywords that consist of 2, 3 or more words. It is common in SEO to talk about keywords. So that's a term we'll mainly use in this course. But other terms are perhaps a little more suitable, such as search term, keyword phrase, or search query. So just keep in mind that when we talk about keywords, that can also be terms that consist of more than one word. The end goal of this section is that you know how to do keyword research so that you can find the best keywords for your website. In this section, you will learn the properties of a good keyword. Why long-tail keywords are the key to SEO success, how to conduct a traditional keyword research, and how to steal the best keywords from your competitors. Let's dive right in and start with this section on keyword research! 8. What Makes a Good Keyword: Before we really get started with our keyword research, let's first discuss what a good keyword actually looks like. What are we looking for? Which keywords are the best ones for our website? There are three things that we're looking for in a good keyword. Keep these in mind, as they will help you determine whether a keyword is suitable for your website. First of all, you should focus on keywords at your target audience is looking for. Of course, you only want to attract users to your website who are specifically looking for what you're offering. This, first of all, means that the keyword is relevant to your website. If you have a bicycle shop in Amsterdam, you want to focus on keywords that match what you're offering as closely as possible. You only want to get people to your website who are interested in cycling and everything related to it. Secondly, the keyword must attract visitors who have a certain value to your website. For this, we have to look at the search intent behind certain keywords. People can search for a variety of reasons, knowledge or general information. For example, the history of the bicycle. This person is looking for general information out of personal interest. Then there's more concrete information, how do I fix a tire? This person is looking for specific instructions on how to do something. Then we have comparison keywords, mountain bike versus race bike. This person wants to buy a new bicycle and is comparing different options. Finally, purchase type keywords, 'buy mountain bike Amsterdam'. This person is ready to buy something. He compared mountain bikes and race bikes, decided he wants to get a mountain bike and is looking for a shop in Amsterdam where he can buy one. The person in the first category is perhaps not the most interesting one to get to our website. He's looking for general information and is probably not very interested in buying a bicycle. He's rather looking for an article on Wikipedia than a bicycle shop in Amsterdam. The person in category four represents the most value to us. This person is specifically looking for a bicycle shop in Amsterdam to buy a mountain bike. From a commercial standpoint, this user has the most value for our website. If this person comes to our website, there's a good chance that he will buy a bike from our shop. Users in category two and three have less value in that regard. But these keywords can certainly also be interesting for our website. For example, the person looking for how to fix a tire, initially wants to do it himself and does not need a repair shop. But if he doesn't manage to fix his tire, there's a good chance he will come to our store to do it for him. If we have a good article on our website about how to fix a tire with a clear instructional video, for example, he knows that we can solve this problem for him. By showing that we have expertise in our field, users will start to trust us, and if they ever have problems with their bike, there's a good chance that they come to our store. For example, you could also offer a free ebook on how to best fix your tire. You send this e-book when people subscribe to your newsletter. Then you could send specific offers to your newsletter subscribers and for example, give them a discount in your shop. Information type keywords like 'how do I fix a tire' may therefore also be very interesting. Assess the value of a keyword to your website to see how interesting that keyword is to you. Information type keywords may be just as valuable to you as transactional keywords. The second quality we're looking for is good search volume. This means the average number of searches per month for this keyword. Of course, you want to target a keyword that people are actually searching for. If there's no one who searches for a certain keyword in Google, then of course it makes no sense to use it on your website. If, on the other hand, there are 1,000 people every month who enter a certain keyword phrase in Google, it starts to get more interesting. If we rank high in the search engines for this keyword, we can drive a certain percentage of those 1,000 people to our website every month. You would probably think the more search volume, the better, right? We would rather have ten thousand people searching for a particular keyword than just one hundred. This is what you might think at first, but those very popular keywords are usually not the ones that you should pick. That's because of the third quality of a good keyword, and that is you can beat the competition, meaning you can rank for it. Only the keywords you can rank for are interesting. We want to be in the top ten search results and if we have no chance of even getting there, there's no point in targeting that keyword. If you have a keyword with a very high search volume, say one hundred thousand searches per month, that usually means that the competition is very hard to beat. A lot of people are searching for this keyword, so there's a lot of demand. If demand is high, then it usually means that there's also a lot of supply. In other words, there are many websites that target this search query with more competitors. It's also a lot more difficult to rank high in the search engines if there are only twenty competing web pages for a particular keyword, you obviously have a much higher chance of ranking than if there are 100,000 web pages that all specifically target that keyword. Another factor, of course, is the strength of the competition. If the top ten and Google mostly consists of websites with a lot of authority, like big companies, big players in the market, sites that have a lot of back links, then they will be very difficult to beat. So we're looking for keywords that have a good search volume, but that don't have so much competition. that we have no chance of ranking. In summary, these are the three conditions for a good keyword. The keyword attracts the right visitors to your website, so the keyword is relevant and attract visitors who have a certain value to your site. It has good search volume, meaning the average number of searches per month. Higher search volume is better. But beware and think of point number three. You can beat the competition. This means the number of competitors and the strength of those competitors. The fewer competitors and the weaker the website of those competitors are, the more chance we have to rank high in the search engines. In the next lesson, we will look at a type of keyword that gives the best results for your website. Longtail keywords. 9. The Key to Success: Longtail Keywords: In the previous lesson, we discussed the three most important qualities of a good keyword. In this video, we're looking at a specific type of keyword that is the key to SEO success. Longtail keywords. This dinosaur represents all possible keywords. At the top of his head are keywords with a high search volume, meaning a lot of people are searching for those keywords. Usually this means that there is a lot of competition for these keywords as well. In other words, many authoritative websites that already target these keywords, which makes it more difficult for us to beat the competition and rank for those keywords. These keywords are often very broad and general. The further we go down and to the right, the more specific the keywords become and at the same time the lower the search volume and the competition. In the tail of the dinosaur, we have very specific keywords with low search volume and low competition. This image represents the search demand curve and is similar to the image of the dinosaur. At the top of the graph, We have very broad, general keywords that millions of people are searching for every month. The competition for these keywords is high. An example of such a keyword would be 'bike'. There are more than 1.9 million searches every month in Google for the keyword bike. My keyword tool KWFinder indicates that the keyword difficulty for this keyword is high, it will be hard to rank for. The graph ends in the long tail of the search curve. Here you will find more specific keywords with low search volume and competition. For example, the search query 'cheap mountain bikes Glasgow'. There are only 10 searches per month in Google for this keyword, but the competition is low and KWFinder gives it a keyword difficulty of 18, meaning it will be relatively easy to rank for. It is often said that longtail keywords always consist of multiple words, but that's not true. The correct definition of longtail keywords is simply keywords with a low search volume. This will often be several words, but this is not necessarily the case. More words does not always equal a lower search volume. For example, in this screenshot you can see that 'how to lose weight' has a search volume of 90,000, while lose weight has a search volume of 35,000. More words in a search term usually means lower search volume, but this is definitely not always the case, as this example illustrates. If we go back to the graph for a moment, we see two more interesting things. The first is that the keywords in the head and the middle together represent 30 percent of all search traffic, while all the keywords in the longtail account for 70 percent of all search traffic. Of course, a lot more people search for the keyword bike than for the key phrase cheap mountain bikes Glasgow. But the long tail contains many, many more different keyword combinations. For example, second hand race bike Glasgow, BMX bike for sale near me, used mountain bikes for sale and so on. There are an infinite number of longtail keywords that you can think of. Each one individually has a low search volume, but all of those longtail keywords combined account for 70 percent of all search traffic. Secondly, and this is very interesting, oftentimes also the conversion rate increases once keywords get more specific. Conversion means that a visitor on your website does something that you would like him or her to do, for example, signing up for your newsletter or buying a product. If someone types in a very general keyword like 'bike', we really don't know what that person wants. It is a very broad search term and we don't know whether this person is interested in buying a bike or maybe watching a video of a bike race or information on how to build a bike. On the other hand, someone who types in the query cheap mountainbikes Glasgow, we know exactly what he or she is looking for. If this person ends up at the website of our bicycle shop, there's a much higher chance that we will actually sell a bike. Longtail keywords are the key to SEO success. There's a lot of search volume for broad search terms in the head and body of the dinosaur, but generally that also means there's a lot more competition, making it difficult to rank for those keywords. In the long tail, we find more specific keywords that usually also have lower competition, making it easier to rank for. In many cases, these keywords are also more interesting from a conversion perspective, as they are more specific and we can more easily see what the search intent behind the query is. The conclusion is that head keywords are usually not the best ones to pick. They tend to be very broad and have a lot of competition. Longtail keywords, on the other hand, have less search volume. But they also tend to be more specific, have less competition and often have a higher conversion rate. Over time, as your website gains more authority, you will see that you will also start to rank for more general competitive search terms. If you optimize a web page on your site for a longtail keyword, you can also eventually start ranking for more general search terms. For example, if your web page targets the search term red golf shirts for men and that page offers a wide choice of products and becomes very popular, there's a chance that you will also start ranking for the keyword red shirts. You start small and once your website gains more authority, you can also start ranking for more general and more competitive keywords. So if you want to reach SEO success, focus on the longtail keywords. These keywords have lower search volume but tend to have a higher conversion rate and low competition, meaning it will be easier to rank for them in the search engines. In the next lessons, I will show you how to find the best longtail keywords for your website. 10. How to Find the Best Keywords for Your Site: Alrighty, it's time to start with our keyword research. I'll show you exactly how to find the best keywords for your website. There are two different methods of keyword research. We'll cover both of them separately. The first method is the traditional way of doing keyword research. Here we take seed keywords as our starting point to find suitable related keywords for which we can rank. The second method is competitor keyword research. Here we go the opposite direction by looking at what works for our competitors. Which keywords do they rank for? Which keywords do our competitors have the most success with? We take their best keywords and use them for our own website. The question now, of course, is which method are you going to choose? Well, you can choose one or both of them. If you have limited time available and want to get started as quickly as possible. Pick one of the keyword research methods. It doesn't really matter which one you choose. They are both equally valuable and you can find great keywords for your site using either method. So choose the method that you think is the most convenient for you. Do you have more time available? Then, do both methods. In combination with each other, these methods are extra powerful. They complement each other really well and by using both methods you will find more keywords that could work well for your site. In the next lesson, we'll start with traditional keyword research. 11. Traditional Keyword Research: Traditional keyword research is the method that most people use. Here we go from seed keywords to the final keywords that we will use for our website. Traditional keyword research is done in three steps. The first step is to make a list of seed keywords. These are very general, broad terms that describe your site, your products or services. The seed keywords are a starting point to find a related relevant keywords for our website. In step two, we will enter our seed keywords into tools to find other related keywords. We are going to add more specific key phrases to our list, often containing two, three or more words. So these will usually be the specific longtail keywords that we're looking for. The third step is filtering. We now compiled a long list of keywords related to our website and our products or services. From this list, we're going to filter the best keywords that we will eventually use on our website. So the process for traditional keyword research looks like this. In step one we will make a list of keywords. In step two, we're going to find related keywords with tools and in step three, we're going to filter those keywords. I'll show you how to do each step of traditional keyword research in the following videos. 12. Step 1 – Make a List of Seed Keywords: In the first step of our keyword research, we're going to make a list of seed keywords. Seed keywords are very broad, general terms that describe our products or services. It's important that you don't get too specific here just yet. We are going to list keyword combinations of one, two to maximum three words. You can think of it as a main topics you want to write about on your website or the different categories of your products or services. There are several methods you can use to make your list. Suppose you are a personal trainer with a fitness blog. On this blog, you write about fitness and nutrition, and you recommend certain products that you sell in your web shop, such as supplements, e-books and fitness gear. The logical first step is to start brainstorming different keyword ideas that relate to your website. Use an Excel or Google Sheet or grab a pen and paper and get to work. Think about what exactly you are offering and what you would like to write about. Here are a few questions to get you started. What kind of service or product do you offer? What are common pain points your customers are experiencing? What do customers want to achieve with your service or product? And how do you solve the problems of your customers? In the case of our personal trainer, you can think of general terms such as fitness, fitness supplements, fitness gear and fitness exercises. Then a common pain point, for example, overweight or out of shape. What do customers want to achieve? You can think of lose weight and get in shape. And how do you solve problems of customers, like fitness tips or workout tips. This way you can make a nice list of different seed keyword ideas. Another method is to look at your own website, as well as competitor websites and list the main topics you have or would like to have on your website. The main navigation menu is a good place to start. For example, on this fitness website, you see all kinds of keyword ideas in the main menu. Here you have workouts, which is divided into several different workouts that you can use as seed keyword ideas, workout tips, fitness exercise videos, these are all seed keyword ideas that you could use. And here, for example, the menu nutrition. You can see seed keyword ideas like gain mass supplements, lose fat and healthy eating. If you have a blog on your website, the different categories on your blog are all seed keyword ideas that you can put on your list. If there isn't that much content on your website or you don't have a website yet, check out your main competitors. What are they writing about? What are the most important main topics on their websites? Another useful source of inspiration to find seed keyword ideas is to use Google. Let's take a look at how that works. For example, in Google, I search for fitness and then I immediately get some suggestions of keywords related to it, such as fitness, blog, fitness, how to get fit. These are keywords that I can add to my list. There are also additional search terms related to fitness at the bottom of the page, for example, fitness workouts is a great seed keyword that I can add to my list. I can also search for this keyword and then do the same process again. Here I see some excellent other seed keyword ideas like fitness workouts, online, fitness workouts for beginners, fitness workouts near me, et cetera. And at the bottom of the search results page, I can see searches related to fitness workouts that I can potentially use again as seed keyword ideas. Eventually this will give you a list of all kinds of seed keywords related to your fitness blog. Do you have a big website or are you planning to make a big website, then divide your list into themes to categorize your keywords. That way you work with a lot more structure and you can link the keywords you find to the content structure of your website. For example, the seed keyword fitness exercises is a separate tab here in my Excel file. Here you can add all seed keywords related to fitness exercises, such as exercises for arm, back, abs and core, shoulder, leg and chest. In step two, we're going to plug these seed keywords into tools to find related keywords and longtails that we're going to use for our website. I'll show you how to do that in the next video! 13. Step 2 – Find Related Keywords With Tools: In step two, we're going to use our list of seed keywords to find more related keywords with the help of tools. Seed keywords are your starting point, a general topic on the basis of which you can find more specific keywords. The seed keywords in step one were mainly very broad terms, like search terms of one or two words. Now we are going more in-depth and looking more for body and longtail keywords, usually like two, three, four or more words. To find these more specific keywords, we're going to enter our keywords into tools. Using those tools, we can then find additional keyword suggestions. One tool you can use for this is the Google Keyword Planner. This is a handy free tool that you can use to find keywords. To go to the tool, I just search in Google for Google Keyword Planner, and then we see it right here in the first result. Next, click on Go to Keyword Planner. If you're 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. Please note that 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 Ahrefs.com shows exactly how to create an account so you can use the keyword planner for free. This is important because otherwise you might be pushed in a direction of a paid ad campaign. To use the tool for free, just follow the instructions in this blog post to create your account. You can find a link to the article in the resources of this lecture. It is super important to follow these instructions. Otherwise you might have trouble using the keyword planner. Once you follow these instructions and create your account, you can start doing keyword research with the keyword planner. To do this, we click on Discover New Keywords. Here you can enter one of your keywords from the list you compiled in step one. For example, one of our keywords was fitness exercises. Check whether the language and country settings are correct. In this case we choose English and United States. Then click on Get Results. You will now see all kinds of suggestions for related keywords such as workout, abs workout, shoulder workouts, et cetera. We may be able to use these keywords for our website. For every keyword, we can see the average monthly searches in Google in this column. So for the keyword fitness exercises, there are between 1,000 and 10,000 searches on average every month in Google. Unfortunately, we cannot see the exact search volume. We only have a range. You can only see exact search volumes if you pay for an advertising campaign through Google ads. That's also the disadvantage of using the keyword planner. You have to pay for ads to see the exact search volumes. This range does give an indication, but there is, of course, a significant difference between 1,000 or 10,000 searches per month. And we therefore only have limited insight into the data. That ultimately makes it a little bit more difficult to pick out the best keywords. If you want to see the exact search volumes, you have to set up an ad campaign. In the next column you see the competition, which is low, medium or high. Note that this indicates how competitive ad placement is for this keyword. If the competition is high, it means that many people advertise on this keyword and that you probably have to pay more for an ad. So this doesn't say much about the SEO competition for the unpaid search results. So you can't just say the competition for advertisements is low. So I automatically have a good chance of ranking high in the organic search results. Therefore, do not 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. We will go through this list and select keywords that we think are interesting for our website. If the keyword is relevant and it matches what you are offering on your website, select it. Click here at the top to select them all at once. Once you've selected the keywords you want. Click on add keywords. These keywords will now be placed on a separate list. This way we can continue with the other seed keywords from our list. Let's go back to the top and remove our first seed keyword. I type in another seed keyword from our list. For example, lose weight. I click on get results and again we can check all keywords and select the interesting ones to add to our list. So these are all related keywords to the seed keyword lose weight. Again, keep relevance in mind, if you don't have anything on your website about the keto diet, for example, you can ignore keywords related to that topic. You can also use filters to get rid of the keywords that you don't want to see. For example, I could filter for a keyword that does not contain the word keto and I click on apply. Now, I only have keywords that do not contain the word keto, so if this is not something that you offer on your website, this is an easy way to filter your list of keywords. If you selected your relevant keywords, again click on add keywords to add them to your list. This is also a nice point in your research to start digging deeper. Don't limit yourself to the list of keywords you compiled in step one. With the suggestions you get in the keyword planner, you can find nice keywords to use as new seed keywords to find related search terms for it. For example, if yoga for weight loss is an interesting topic for you, you can grab that keyword and enter it as a new seed keyword. Click get results. And now you get a list of 564 keyword ideas, all related to yoga for weight loss You can select all the interesting keywords again and add them to your list. This is the way to get the best results. If you want to do keyword research. well, you have to put a lot of time into it. Some of your competitors are also doing keyword research, and many people want to be done as soon as possible and don't really do this in depth. Maybe they just enter fitness as a seed keyword, select some suggested keywords and call it a day. Don't make that mistake, but just keep on going with your research. If you put more effort and time into your research, you will get the best results and you will come across great keywords that your competitors have not found. It takes some time, but it definitely pays off. OK, once you're happy and you've added all the relevant keywords to your list, go to keywords here on the left hand side. Here you will find the list of all the keywords you selected. The data that we need is under the tab historical metrics. So click on that. Here you see all your keywords with the corresponding range of average search volume. We are going to export this data. Click on the arrow at the top right here. Go to plan historical metrics. Where you can export to CSV or Google Sheets. I'll go with Google Sheets this time. You now have your entire list in a Google sheet. Remove the data you don't need, such as here at the top. And also remove the columns that you don't need, such as currency, segmentation, average monthly searches that are not available. Make the columns a little bit wider so you can see all the data. And there you have it. What we now have is a nice list of keywords for our website, we have the keyword in the left column and the minimum and the maximum search volume data for each keyword. So this is the range of search volume for average monthly searches in Google. So for 10 minute ab workout, there are between one hundred and one thousand searches per month in Google. By using our keyword list and Google Keyword Planner, we've now got a nice list of all the keywords that we could potentially use for our website. 14. Finding Keywords With KWFinder: When I do keyword research, I always use KWFinder. This is my favorite keyword tool. KW Finder is a much better keyword research tool than the Google Keyword Planner. It shows exact search volumes, whereas with the Google Keyword Planner, you only get the exact search volumes if you're running a paid advertising campaign. KWFinder is completely focused on SEO, while the keyword planner is focused on ads. You also get a keyword difficulty score to quickly identify the best keywords. With this tool, you can do better and above all, faster keyword research. You get better SEO results so you will rank faster and higher in Google. KWFinder is a paid tool, but they have a free trial where you can try to tool free for 10 days. There's a limit to the data you can request per day, but in those 10 days you can still go a long way with your keyword research. The free trial makes it a very handy tool to use in combination with the keyword planner. You can also take out a subscription. This is very useful for keyword research and you then get unlimited access to the tool and the data. And when you sign up to a monthly plan, you can cancel whenever you want. Here we are at KWFinder.com and at the top, right, you will see a button for the free trial to try out the tool for ten days. Now, let me show you how I use KW Finder to do keyword research using the traditional keyword research method. First of all, I'm going to enter my seed keyword, for example, fitness exercises. Select your location, for example United States and your language. Then click find keywords. Here we get a list of related keywords, just like we saw in the Google Keyword Planner, but you have additional data now that is very useful. First of all, we have the column search, which gives the exact search volume for this keyword. In the Google Keyword Planner, we saw a range of between 1,000 and 10,000. But here we see that the key phrase fitness exercises has an exact search volume of 5,200. This is very useful information to have because now you can immediately see how many people search per month on a certain keyword. Then we have cost per click, which is the amount of money that people pay per click when advertising for this keyword. Then we see the level of competition for advertisements with PPC. This is not so relevant data to have when you're doing SEO research, but it could provide some nice information if you ever want to advertise for these keywords. And then the last column KD stands for Keyword Difficulty. This is really pure gold. What you see here. You can select keywords much faster and better with this keyword difficulty score. When we get to step three filtering keywords, I will show you how to use this keyword difficulty score to select the best keywords. You can also use KWFinder in combination with the keyword planner. So if you have keywords that you found with the keyword planner, you can then use KWFinder to check the exact search volume and assess the competition. If you have a list of keywords already, you can import them by going to import and then choose a file or copy paste the keywords here. Doing keyword research goes with the same procedure as I showed in the Google Keyword Planner. So here as well, it is important to dig deeper and look for new seed keywords that you can use to find related keywords. So if aerobic exercise is something that you really want to have a separate section on on your website, you can use this as a new seed keyword to find related ideas. Just click on this arrow to search for related keywords. Now you get a whole list of keyword suggestions that are related to aerobic exercise. To make your keyword research easier, you can use filters like you can search for minimum and maximum search volume and also for CPC, PPC and Keyword Difficulty. This is very useful because you could filter down your entire list. For example, only show keywords that have a certain keyword difficulty. You can also use included and excluded keywords to quickly filter out your keyword list. Other useful features include autocomplete and questions. This will give you additional keyword suggestions you can use. For example, if you only want to see questions, you can use this option to only see suggested keywords that are questions. Any keywords that you like, you can just select or you can select all of them by clicking here and you can add them to a list, I can add them to an existing list or I can create a new list here. Then you can go back to your list. You can select all your keywords and click export. You can copy to clipboard or export to CSV. You might see all the data in this way so that you can't really see what's going on. To get the data showing correctly, just select the first column, then go to data, text to columns. Delimited, select comma and finish, now you have all the data in a nice list. Again, you can clean up all the columns that you don't really need, such as location, cost per click, PPC, keyword difficulty of course is very important to have, average search volume as well. Here you see average search volume for 12 months, six months and three months. That is a good way to see different trends in search volume for a certain keyword. These are search volumes per month, which you don't really need, in my opinion. So you just can get rid of these. And once you're done, you have a very nice list of keywords with in the left column, the keyword then the average search volume for different time frames. And lastly, the keyword difficulty score. If you work with different tools and add new keywords to your list, make sure to remove duplicate entries. For example, if you have compiled a list with the keyword planner and you are adding keywords from KW Finder to that list. Click on data, remove duplicates. I select column A for all the keywords and I click OK, but no duplicate values were found, obviously, because I've got all these keywords from one tool. This is how you do keyword research with KW Finder to get the best keywords for your website. This is a much better tool than the keyword planner, and it's very useful for doing SEO keyword research. In the next video, I will show you some more tools to use for doing your keyword research. 15. Some More Useful Keyword Tools: With the Google Keyword Planner and KW Finder, you can do your entire keyword research. But if you're looking for even more keywords, there are also some other tools that you can use. The first one is Keyword Sheeter, or you can select here what type of keywords you'd like. The default is classic, but you can also choose for YouTube, products and use images or books. We'll just leave it at the default for now. And then here you can choose your country, United States and language English. That's all good. And then you can simply enter your keywords here. We'll just go for fitness exercises. Then you can click on this button sheet keywords or here on start sheeting. Now what the tool does, it goes out and starts to generate lots of related keywords. You will get a ton of them in a very short period of time. We already have 91 and the tool just keeps on going. You have enough keywords, you can click the Stop button right here. We now have a lot of related keywords and we can select all of them. I'll just put my cursor there and press Control A, and this will select all of them. And now I can copy paste them with Control C, Control V, and copy paste them to, for example, an Excel file or Google spreadsheet. This will give you lots of related keywords. So this is a very handy tool. Then there's another cool tool that you can use called Answer the Public. This is a great tool to find specific questions that people are having around a certain topic. So let's enter our keyword here again. Then we select the country, United States, language English, and then we click on Search. Now we get all types of questions, in this case, 42 questions around fitness exercises. We have when, what, where, why, et cetera. For example, what is fitness exercises? Why gym exercises? Which fitness work out how to get fit with exercisers? Tons of questions you can use potentially here for your content. Then there's also some other sections like prepositions. And you will see Fitness workouts near me, fitness classes near me for adults, etc. You have comparisons. So this is comparing different things like gym exercises and names. Fitness exercises for golf. There's so many ideas here that you could use. Then there's also alphabetical. This just lists all the different keyword ideas based on the alphabet. So it starts with A and goes all the way down to the Z. And then there's some more related keywords. So there's a ton of information that you can use here. You can download all this data via this button, download CSV, and now it will save as a CSV file that you can open an Excel. If you collect more keywords through these other tools, you don't get any search volumes with those keywords, but you can retrieve those with the Google Keyword Planner. To do this, go to get search volume and forecasts into Keyword Planner, then paste your keywords into this box or Upload File, and then click on the button. Now you get all your keywords with the average monthly searches here in this column. You can export those by clicking here on this icon. And then go to plan historical metrics and then save it as either CSV or Google Sheets. The only downside again is that the Keyword Planner only gives you ranges if you have no paid advertisements running, but you can request the exact search volumes easily with KW Finder. To do this, go to Import. Then you can upload your CSV or a .TXT file. But you can also copy paste all your keywords here and then go to Process keywords. Now you get all the extra data from KWFinder, so you get the exact search volume. For example, for fitness exercises, there's a search volume of 27,900. You get your CPC, your PPC, and especially this one is very important. Of course, the keyword difficulty. There's allows you to easily gauge whether a keyword is really worth it in terms of competition and whether you can actually rank for it. So KWFinder gives a lot more useful data than you can get in the Google Keyword Planner. So this is how you get the exact search volumes for your extra keywords that you find via other tools. Also note again that if you add keywords from multiple tools to the same list in Excel, you will have to remove duplicates. For this, you go to the tab data, then you go to remove duplicates. You click Okay, and then the duplicates are removed from the list. Alright, you now have all the tools to do your keyword research. You can use the Google Keyword Planner KWFinder, and optionally also keyword sheeter and Answer the Public if you like. And all those tools will give you a ton of keyword ideas. Now let's move on to step number three, where we are going to filter our keywords. We're going to select the best ones that we're going to use for our website. 16. Step 3 – Filter: In the third step of traditional keyword research, we are going to filter our list. We now have compiled a list of keywords related to our websites and our products or services, and we are going to filter that list to pick the best keywords that we will eventually use on our website. And this Excel file, I've put together a list of possible keywords with regard to one category on our website Ab exercises. I have taken these keywords from the Google keyword planner. Here we have the keyword and the next two columns indicate the search volume range. So 10 minutes, six pack workout has an average search volume of between ten and 100 searches per month. Then I added a ranking column myself where we will enter our current ranking for this keyword. If you already have a website online, you should always check this. It may be the case that we are already ranking for this keyword, I'll show you how to do that later. In order to find the right keywords, we have to evaluate them based on the three qualities of a good keyword that we discussed before. To refresh your memory. These are the qualities that a keyword must have. First of all, it attracts the right visitors to your website. This means a relevant keyword related to the topic of your website. Keywords with a commercial search intent are important, but information related keywords can also be very interesting. A keyword must also have good search volume to be interesting. The more people search for the keyword, the more interesting it can be for us. We must pay attention to quality number three, however, namely, that we can also beat the competition. This is by far the most important quality of a good keyword. If you cannot beat the competition, this keyword is totally useless for us. A keyword could be very relevant to our website. It could have a very attractive search volume. But in the end, if we cannot rank for it, there's no point at all to use it on our site. In our Excel file, we can start filtering our list on the basis of the three qualities of a good keyword. First relevance. We don't really have to pay attention to that anymore because in steps one and two, you should have only selected the keywords that are relevant to your website, but maybe keywords have ended up on the list that are of little use to you and you can now remove them. Secondly, we look at the columns with the average search volume per month. We can prioritize the keywords with the highest search volume, which are in principle the most interesting ones. But beware, keywords that are too general and have a high search volume are most likely not suitable for our site. For example, Abs exercises has a search volume of between 1k and 10k a month. Depending on the authority of our website, if we have like a new website that is just starting out, this might be too competitive and too general. So if we look at another keyword like 10 minute six pack workout, that is a much more targeted key phrase with a search volume of between 10 and 100 searches per month. This keyword will most likely have a lot less competition, making it a more suitable keyword for a new website that still has little authority. This brings us to the last important characteristic of a good keyword, and that is that we can beat the competition. The best way to check this is to just grab a keyword that we think is interesting. In this case, 10 minute six pack workout and search for it in Google. Your competition does not consist of all the websites on the internet that want to rank for this keyword. The real competition is Google's first page, the first ten search results for this keyword. You want to be on this page yourself on the first page of Google. So these are the competitors you have to beat. It is important that we use the unpersonalized search results. Google shows search results that are personalised for you. For example, based on your location or your search history in Google, you will see different search results than another Google user in a different location. And of course, we don't want that because that way we don't get a good idea of exactly who our competitors are. So the first thing we do is log out of our Google account. Now we get a better picture of the unpersonalized search results. You can also use an incognito window for that. We can now look at how strong the competition is with the help of a tool in our browser called MozBar. This is a free tool that you can download from the Chrome Store, so you have to use Chrome for this. Once you've added this extension to Chrome, you'll see some information in the search results. Added a link to this extension in the resources of this lecture. To use the tool, you must first create a free account with Moz. To do this, click on Create Account. Once you've created your account and are logged in, the first step you need to do is adjust the search profile to the country that you're in. As you can see, it's still on Google NL, but if you're located in a different country, you need to adjust this. This is very important because if you don't, you will get to see the search results for the wrong country. I'll go to the dropdown and select Add New Profile. Here you can select your search engine. In this case, Google. Select also show non-personalized results, this is very important. So you see the results in your search engine results page that are non-personalized. Then select your country. In this case, I'm going to pick the United States. You can also select a region here, like a specific state that you're in. But I'm just going to leave it as is right now. And finally, you can give the profile a name. I'm going to make it Google us and click Create Profile. Now I select my profile, Google US. And as you can see, there are some different search results or appearing specifically for Google US. So if you select that the correct search profile, you can see some additional data here in the search results. You can see stuff like PA, which stands for Page Authority. In this case, the first result has a PA of 73, and this indicates the authority of the particular web page or in this case, a video. The higher the PA, the stronger the web page is and the harder it will be to beat that particular competitor. You also see the DA, which stands for Domain Authority. That is the authority of the entire domain. So the entire website that is web page is a part of in this case, we're looking at a video on YouTube.com, which has a domain authority of 100, which is the highest authority that a domain can have. Again, the higher the the a the more difficult it will be to beat this particular competitor. You can also see here now how many links a particular web page has, web pages that have many links. In other words, there are many other websites linking to that page are harder to beat. For example, the first search result here has 1266 links pointing to that page. Now we can compare this data with our own website. Suppose that this is our website about fitness. Then using the MozBar we see that we have a domain authority of 14. You also see that we have a page authority of 23 here. But note that this is the PA of this specific page on our website, in this case, the home page. The home page is very popular. So it also has a very high PA usually. Obviously, if we create a new page to try and rank for the keyword 10 minutes, six pack workout, that page will not have the same authority as our home page, which is much more popular. It will take a while for the page authority of our new page to increase. We could look at a specific article on our blog to see what kind of page authority our new page could have once it's published. Let's go to a blog article. Let's refresh the page to see the correct page authority. Now we see that this page has a page authority of 12. So the power of our new SEO page will maybe have a page authority of around 12 as well. Now, as we go back to the search results, we can see if there are any Web pages that rank with a DA and PA lower than ours. This is an indication that we can beat the competition. You can also see how relevant the search results are. In this case, we see 10 minutes six pack workout in each title of the search results. So they are all relevant. You may sometimes see a number of search results that are less relevant to the keyword, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. Also, the type of search results is relevant here. There are, for example, quite a few YouTube videos here. So it seems Google has a preference for video type content. This is something we need to keep in mind. If we want to rank high for this keyword, we might have to make a YouTube video ourselves. There are also some blog posts ranking here and that's what we are looking for initially. Also, check whether there are sites that are comparable to yours. Are there any fitness blogs with the same or lower authority in yours? That is a good indication that you could rank. In this case we see here a search results with a DA of 10 and a PA of 12 which is kind of comparable to our own website that we just looked at. However, if we look at the other search results, we see a DA of 58, a PA of 29 and also here DA 85, PA 44. So these are all quite strong websites that will be very hard to beat. Of course, it's also worth clicking through to these websites to look at their content to see if you can do it better. For example, is the article perhaps poorly written? Very short with not much information? The design of the website could be outdated. The content could not be so nicely formatted. If you think you can make a better web page in some of the results you see here, there are opportunities. You can also see if Google has a certain preference for certain sites. For example, suppose you see a ton of web shops in the search results and you don't have a web shop yourself. Then it will be very difficult to rank for that keyword. In this case, we see quite a lot of YouTube videos ranking on the first page. So it seems that this is not really the right keyword to try and target with a blog article. There are some blog articles ranking on the first page, but there are mainly from quite competitive and authoritative websites. These will be very hard to beat. So looking at the search results page here for this keyword, it seems better to just either make a YouTube video and try to rank on YouTube for it and otherwise just pick a different keyword. So this doesn't really seem like a very suitable keyword to pick. So let's summarize these factors to see if you can beat the competition. First, you're going to look at the page authority and domain authority. If these numbers are lower than yours, you have a good chance of ranking. Secondly, you can look at the number of links that that particular Web page has to see if you have a good chance of ranking. Relevance is important. So do to titles in the search results mention the keyword that you're looking for. Do you see a particular preference for one type of site on the search engine results page, such as web shops or YouTube videos? Are there any weak sites in the top ten like forums or pages with a low DA? Are there any sites in the top ten that are similar to yours? And what does the content of those web pages look like? Can you do it better than the pages that are currently ranking in a top ten? On the basis of these questions, you can estimate the chance that you will rank for this keyword. It's obviously a bit of an estimation and you get better at this the more experience you have. If we go back to our list, we can mark all the keywords that we think are interesting for our website. Ten minute, six pack workout is not one of them. It is better to look at a different keyword. Suppose that this one is interesting. We can mark it green. So this way we go down the entire list. Does a keyword meet the first two properties? Relevance and search volume? If it does, then we're going to assess the competition by looking at the top ten search results in Google to see if we can beat any of the Web pages ranking their. If a keyword meets all three qualities of a good keyword and you've selected it, there's only one last step. Check our current ranking. If you already have a website, it may of course be the case that you are already ranking for this keyword. It is important to check this because that way you avoid unnecessary work and you also achieve faster results. If you're already ranking, you do not have to create a new page for this keyword, but you can improve the page on your website that already ranks. You can check your current rankings with Google Search Console. Later in this course, I will go into more detail about this tool and how to set it up for your website. For now, I will show you how to check your rankings in Google Search Console. For this, you go to performance and then search results. Now you can click the search type, which is default on web, but you can also choose image, video or news. But we're going to go for the standard web results by default. The date range is for the last three months, which will give you the most recent data. But you can also choose a longer time frame, if you like. Now we have to click the average CTR and the average position as well. So we get that data in the graph here in the table below as well. And now here we have all the keywords that my website is currently ranking for. So you see the number of clicks, you see the number of impressions, meaning the number of times your website appeared in the search results. For this particular query, we have the CTR, the click through rate. And lastly, we have the position of the keyword. This is the average position in Google for all these different queries. So as you know, Google uses personalized search, which means that everybody gets different search results depending on their location and their search history. And this position is the average across all those different positions. So here you can quickly see what your ranking is for a particular keyword. If you want to check a particular keyword to see where you're ranking, you can go to new, then query. You can choose for queries containing or exact query, and then you can type in your keyword. For example, Abs exercises, you click apply and now you see the data for this particular keyword. So everything is filtered. Now you see that here at the top. The query app's exercise is the filter that is used, and obviously my website doesn't rank for that keyword, but if it would, you would see all the data here. So two clicks, the impressions CTR and a position. This way you can quickly check whether your website is currently ranking for a certain keyword. If you haven't set up Search Console yet or if you are doing keyword research for someone else's website, you can also use other tools to check your rankings. For example SERP robot. On the site we go to free SERP checker. Then we choose our region, our device which can be desktop, our domain. And then our keyword. Then we click the CAPTCHA and click on the button. And now we can see that this website ranks on position five in Google for the keyword apps exercises. You can use this tool for a number of times for free per day. So this is also a useful tool for checking your rankings. You now know how to filter and pick the best keywords. Go through your keyword list and sort them by relevance, search, volume and competition. Assess relevance and search volume first, which is the fastest, and then take a closer look at the remaining keywords to see if you can also beat the competition. If the keyword is suitable and you already have a website check whether you currently rank for this keyword. If you already have a good ranking, you can further improve the page that ranks for your keyword. With this method, you can filter for the best keywords and select the ones you are going to use on your website. 17. Filter Keywords Better and Faster With KWFinder: In the previous video, we saw how to filter your list of keywords to pick the best ones. The method with the Google keyword planner and manually checking the search results for each keyword works well. But it takes a lot of time, especially if you have a long list of keywords. There's a way to do it faster and have better results as well. And that is with the keyword tool that I personally use. KWFinder. They have a 10 day free trial, so you can always try out the tool to see if you like it. OK, so we're looking at one of our seed keywords again, like fitness exercises, the country, United States language English, and we go to find keywords. With the data that KWFinder shows you can filter much faster and better. First we see the exact search volumes here instead of the ranges that a keyword planner shows. This way we know exactly which keywords are the most interesting ones. The keyword difficulty score in particular helps us to evaluate the competition of a keyword much faster and easier. This number indicates how difficult or easy it is to rank for that keyword. The lower the number, the easier it is to achieve SEO success with the keyword. KWFinder calculates this score by evaluating the power of each URL in Google's top 10 search results for that keyword. The nice thing is that you also get an overview of the top 10 in Google for each keyword, with a number of metrics. For each search result in the top 10, you can see how strong the domain authority and page authority is. You will also see scores for citation flow and Trust Flow that also indicate the authority of the URL. You can see the number of links to the page, the number of Facebook shares. The link profile strength as well as the estimated number of visitors you can expect to come to your website from this position in the search results. This is very useful because you can immediately have a rough idea of how many visitors a certain keyword could bring to your website. So if, for example, you would rank number one for fitness exercises, you see that the expected number of visitors each month coming to your website on the first position in Google would be 1.8k visitors. If you want to have an even more detailed view, you can click on Analyze SERP, where you will see more data about the top ten for that keyword. Some nice features are that you can see how the SERP actually looks like. In this case, we see that there is a top carrousel, a featured snippet, and a people also ask section. This gives a very good idea of the anatomy of the search results page for this keyword. You can click here on the snapshot to see how the page looks like in real life. At the bottom of the page, there's a useful box where you can enter your own website to compare the metrics of your site with your competitors. This is very useful because you can immediately see how your site stacks up against the competition. So we could enter our domain here and click compare. Now we see the metrics of our own domain, so the link profile strength, domain authority, page authority, et cetera. This way we can immediately see if we have any chance of ranking for this particular keyword by comparing our metrics to those of the top 10 search results. I always look first at the keyword difficulty score to quickly find the best keywords on the list. Next, I can dig a little deeper by looking at the actual top 10 search results in KWFinder. Not all keyword difficulty scores will already be calculated. That depends on whether or not a user has done it before recently. For example, this keyword difficulty still hasn't been calculated. So you can do this by clicking on the icon here. The tool now calculates the keyword difficulty and in this case we see that body fitness exercise has a difficulty score of 60, meaning it will be very hard to rank for this keyword. You can also quickly check interesting keywords to see if you are already ranking for them with your website. To do this. select and copy a few keywords. I go to export, then copy to clipboard, and then I go to the rank tracking tool here by going to SERPWatcher. I can create a new tracking, enter my domain here, the location, the search platform, and here I paste the keywords that I just copied. If I click start tracking, the tool will calculate the ranking positions that we have right now for these particular keywords. This is a great way to quickly check your rankings and add them to your keyword list. With KWFinder, you can filter keywords much faster and better by looking at the exact search volume and the competition. You can also easily check your rankings and keep track of those rankings over a longer period of time. All in all, this is a great tool for doing keyword research faster and it also gives you much better SEO results for your website. 18. Competitor Keyword Research: The second method of keyword research is to look at the keywords that our competitors are ranking for. This is a very effective way of keyword research that can be a nice addition to the traditional method of keyword research. With competitor keyword research, we take the opposite direction. We start at the endpoint to see which keywords are already successful for our competitors. We will spy on our competitors and copy their most important and most successful keywords, which we will then use for our own website. We will do this by using the following three steps. Step one is making a list of competitors. We're going to look at some of our most important competitors and list them in a spreadsheet. In step two, we're going to spy on our competitors and see for which keywords there are currently ranking, we will list all the keywords that are generating the most traffic for our competitors. The third step is filtering from the list of keywords that we now have. We are going to filter to keywords that we will eventually use for our website. So in a nutshell, the process looks like this. Step one, make a list of competitors. Step two finding successful keywords that our competitors are ranking for. And step three, filter those keywords to find the best ones for our website. In the following videos, we'll look at each of these steps individually. 19. Step 1 – Make a List of Competitors: The first step is to make a list of competitors. This way we can come up with keywords that have already proven themselves to be working well in practice. It is important to first clarify that we are specifically looking for competitors with a website that has a similar authority to that of your website. If they can rank for certain keywords and their website has about the same strength as your website, you could also rank for those keywords. If you don't have a website yet and you're doing keyword research for a website you still have to build, look for competitors with a low domain authority like from zero to 10 and a maximum DA of 20, or target the competitors with the domain authority that you think you will achieve with your website in a few months. If we have a list of competitors with a similar authority, we can see what works well for them, which means that there's a good chance that it will work well for us to. We're aiming here for a list of at least 20 competitors with similar authority. Do not make the mistake of limiting yourself to one competitor. If you only copy the keywords of one competitor, you are essentially copying their entire site. And that is certainly not a good strategy. We can find our competitors by using Google. For this, we need the MozBar again. With this Chrome extension, you can see how much authority certain websites have. The first method is to search in Google for your niche plus blog. In this case, for example, fitness blog. Also, make sure once again that you have the right search profile selected in the MozBar. Now you can check the search results and look at the domain authority of the sites that are ranking. Look for sites that have a similar domain authority as your website. These are the competitors that you can add to your list. If you can't find any that have a similar DA to your website, for example, these websites will have a high DA and your website maybe has a lower DA, then go to the subsequent pages in Google. The further you go down the rankings, the lower the domain authority of the websites will usually be. You can also search for potential keywords that you might want to target with your website. For example, six pack exercises at home. Here we can look at the results again to see if there are competitors with a similar authority. Look for competitors within a close range of your own domain authority. For example, if your website has a DA of 30, look for websites that have a DA of between 25 and 35. We can enter all competitors with similar DA into a spreadsheet. I included three competitors here as an example, you see the competitor, the URL of that website and the domain authority. Make a list of at least 20 competitors. This list is an important tool for SEO, but you can also use it very well for other purposes. Think of it as a business asset. Here you have a nice list of competitors with websites of similar authority and this gives a lot of information. You can look not only at their keywords, but also at how they have set up their website in terms of design, layout, use of colors, how they try to convert traffic into customers, the products they sell, the topics they write about, et cetera. That gives great opportunities to see what they do and use this as an inspiration for your own website. In the next video, we'll get to the interesting part, finding out which keywords they're actually ranking for. I'll see you in the next video. 20. Step 2 – Finding Successful Keywords: In this video, we're going to look at which keywords are working well for the competitors we've put on our list, then we can use these key words for our own website to try to rank for them as well. Let's look at the first competitor on our list, Coastal Fitness. You can find out for which keywords your competitors are ranking with the Google keyword planner. So I just copy this URL. In the Google keyword planner, click on Discover New Keywords, then go to start with a Web site, paste your URL and make sure you select the right language and country. Also, make sure you select use the entire site so you look at keywords that the entire domain ranks for. If I select the use only this page option, I would only see the keywords for this particular page, in this case, the homepage. All right. So now we can click get results. You now see all the keywords that this website is ranking for. You also see the range of average monthly searches. I could then download all these keyword ideas by clicking this blue link. You can choose either for CSV or for Google sheets. Eventually, you can end up with a list like this, I cleaned up the data that I downloaded from the keyword planner and I listed the competitor here at the top with the corresponding domain authority of 17. You can sort this list as well by search volume, if you like. Now we have a list of a whole bunch of interesting keywords for our website that we can potentially use. You can also do this with Keyword Finder, which shows you more data. On the home screen, select search by domain, fill in the URL and the region. And click find keywords. Now you get some of the keywords that this competitor ranking for and you have some additional data in comparison to the keyword planner. First of all, you see the position here. This is the highest SERP position, so the highest position in Google for this particular keyword that this competitor reached. So, for example, for coastal fitness, the highest position was two in Google.com, we see the exact search volume, which we don't see in the keyword planner. So, for example, we see that for coastal fitness, 4,500 searches per month in Google on average. . We see the estimated visits per month for this keyword for the last 12 months. Then we have CPC and PPC, which is not so important in this case for SEO purposes. And then in the final column, we see the keyword difficulty, which is nice, because then we can also see the difficulty for each keyword to reach good positions in Google. At the top here, you also see different domains that you could use, so different competitors that you could also use to check for their keywords. You can select interesting keywords and then add them to your list right here. Or you can directly export them to CSV or copy them to clipboard. This method of keyword research is a strategy with great advantages. The keywords you find already work in your markets, and because competitors with similar authority already rank for them, you can rank for these keywords as well. Also, this method generally gives you a ton of interesting keywords. If you have a long list of competitors, you can really discover a huge amount of keywords. Competitive keyword research can give great results. You start at what is already working in the market and this way you can come up with keywords that you might not otherwise have thought of with traditional keyword research and competitor keyword research. You have two very powerful methods to find the very best keywords for your website. There's only one step left now. Step three filtering. That's what we'll look at in the next video. 21. Step 3 – Filter: In the last step of our competitor keyword research, we're going to filter for the best keywords, We can do this the same way like we did with traditional keyword research. Here we have a Google sheet with data from the Google keyword planner. This is a list of keywords that one of our competitors is ranking for. In this case, MPcalisthenics.com. Com. We're going to filter these keywords based on the three qualities of a good keyword. To refresh your memory, these are the three qualities we're looking for. First of all, it attracts the right visitors to your website. Secondly, it has good search volume. So that's the average number of searches per month. And thirdly, you can beat the competition. So let's filter our keywords based on these three qualities. First, we can check whether the keywords on this list are relevant to our website, we can remove keywords that do not match what we offer. There will probably be quite a few ones that you can delete because your competitors will not typically offer the exact same things as you do on your website. Secondly, we can look at the search volume. A higher search volume is more interesting, but at the same time, the search volume should probably not be too high because then the competition is most likely too strong. With data from the keyword planner, we unfortunately only see ranges for search volume, but we will have to go with what we have. You can sort search volumes from low to high or vice versa. Thirdly, we look at whether we can beat the competition. Our competitor has a similar domain authority as our website. That means that if their site ranked for one of these keywords, we will have a good chance of ranking as well. However, when using the Google keyword planner, we have one big downside, and that is that we cannot see the position of the keyword a competitor is ranking for. Obviously if our competitor is ranking in position 75 in Google for a certain keyword, there's not much point going after that keyword. So we will have to look more closely at the actual top 10 search results to see how much chance of ranking we have for a certain keyword. Let's take a keyword from the list which looks promising like one month workout program. It is relevant to our website. It has a relatively low search volume of between ten and one hundred. But that could mean that the competition is not so strong and we could rank for it. Let's take a look at the first 10 search results in Google to see how strong the competition is. To do this, we use the following factors that we saw earlier in the traditional keyword research as well. So we're going to look at page authority and domain authority, the number of links for certain search results. Relevance. Does Google prefer one type of site? Are there any weak sites like forums or sites with a low DA. Are their sites that are similar to yours? And you can also look at the content of the web pages in the search results. Can you do it better than the pages that our ranking currently in the top 10? So let's look at Google, what the search results look like for the keyword one month workout program, I use the MozBar on the search profile, Google U.S. We have some search results here, some videos, some images as well. Some people also ask questions. And looking at the search results, we see that the PA and the DA so the page authority and the domain authority are pretty high. We see like domain authority of 80 plus, 88, 87, and also very high page authorities. So these search results look pretty competitive. It's going to be hard to beat those websites that are currently ranking in the top 10. Also, when we look at inbound links, we see that they have a high number of links, like the first result has 107 links and the other ones also have a fair amount of links pointing to that to that web page. If we look at relevance, we can see that not every title here has the keyword one month workout plan in the title. So that could offer some opportunities. So if we create a web page that does have that exactly in the title, then we might have a little bit of a better chance to rank. Preference for one type of site... We see some videos, some images and some normal blog posts that are ranking. Here's also a Pinterest search result, but for the rest, it seems mostly blog posts that are ranking. We don't see any weak sites around here. So no forums, no sites with a low domain authority. These are sites that are similar to ours if we have a fitness blog. But as you can see, they have very high authority. And lastly, we could also look at some web page content for each of these search results to see if we can do better. But the main thing is that the domain authority and a page authority is quite high. So if our domain does not have such a high domain authority as the websites that you see here, then this would not be a suitable keyword to go after and we would have to focus on a different keyword. Also, note that our competitor that we got this keyword from MPCalisthenics.com has a domain authority of 15 and it doesn't rank in the top 10 here for this keyword. So that's kind of the disadvantage of the Google keyword planner that we can't see which position our competitor ranks for certain keywords. So there could be a lot of keywords on our list that our competitor ranks for at position like 50 to 100. And those are not really relevant to go after for us, because if our competitor cannot rank for it properly in the top 10 or 20, then it's a little point using that keyword for our website. So then we go through this list and look at the three qualities of a good keyword, and especially the competition is relevant to see if we can actually rank for it. And if you did your research and you find a keyword that meets all the three qualities of a good keyword. The last step we have to do is check our current ranking. Of course, if it turns out that you are already ranking for this keyword, you can further improve the page that currently ranks so you don't have to create a new page. As we saw before in the lesson on traditional keyword research, you can check your rankings with Google search console or SERProbot.com. So if you selected a keyword and you think it's suitable, first check your rankings to see if your website is currently ranking for that keyword. Like we also saw in the lesson on traditional keyword research, you can filter keywords much better and faster with KWFinder. You can check this by going to the KWFinder website and then you go to the tab Search by Domain. I'm going to enter in my competitor MPcalisthenics.com country is United States, and I'm going to click find keywords. Now I get a list of keywords that our competitor is ranking for. I can filter the best keywords in his list a lot faster, because you can see the position that our competitor is ranking for with this keyword in Google that is indicated in his column. And here you see the highest position of this keyword that our competitor reached. So for this keyword, we can see that the highest position that our competitor reached for pike pushup was position six in Google.com. We can also see the exact search volume, in this case, 7,200, the expected number of visitors to that page if we rank on this position. So that would be 234 visitors per month, CPC, PPC, that has to do with advertising, so it's not really important. And we see the keyword difficulty here again, which is a very nice thing to have because with that score of keyword difficulty, we can see whether that keyword is easy or difficult to rank for. We can also short these columns so I can sort on position. Showing the keywords that have the highest position in Google for our competitor and with all this data, I can filter my keyword list much better. I can immediately see which keywords are good to go after. So, for example, calisthenics stretching, we can see that our competitor is ranking in the top 10. We see that there's one hundred and forty people searching for that keyword and the number of expected visits that we can expect to our website if we rank for that keyword. And here you have the keyword difficulty so we can immediately see that this would be a very good keyword to go after, because if we look in the top 10, we see the other websites that are ranking and they have relatively low domain authority, like 15, 13, 19 here, two strong ones, though, 45 and 56. But that way you can immediately see whether you have a good chance of actually ranking for keyword by quickly comparing a different domain authorities and page authorities of the different search results that are ranking in the top 10. So KW Finder, as far as that's concerned, is much better and more accurate way of doing keyword research. And you can much more quickly see which keywords are good to use for your website. If we select one of these keywords to use, then all we have to do is check our own ranking. And we can do that with either search console or as we saw also with KW Finder, because they have different tools that you can use. You just click here and you go to SERPWatcher. And here you can track rankings for your keyword so you can enter multiple keywords here, create a new tracking, and you can immediately see for a number of keywords what your positions currently are in Google. So we've now seen how to do keyword research with traditional keyword research and competitor keyword research. The end result that we now have is a nice list of keywords that you can use for your website. We've taken the first step towards SEO success. In the next video, we're going to look at a smart strategy for even faster SEO results. I'll see you in the next video. 22. A Smart Strategy for Faster SEO Results: In this bonus lesson, I will show you a smart strategy to achieve faster SEO results. This way you can boost your rankings and quickly drive more traffic to your website. For this strategy, we use the current SEO power of our own website, so you must already have a website online for this to work. If you're currently still building your website, you can go back to this lesson later when your website has been online for a while. The strength of this strategy is that you build on what already works for your website right now. We are going to look for the pages on our website that perform best in Google and improve them even further. This allows you to get results much easier, faster and better than when you would start writing new content based on your keyword research. We're using Google search console to find our most successful pages, go to performance and then search results in a left hand sidebar. And here you will see for which keywords your website is currently ranking in Google. The search type can be left on web. We can leave the date range for the last three months, but you can also choose a little longer period. But I like to keep it at three months to have the most recent data. Then click on average CTR and average position to add these two metrics to the graph here and a table below. And then we can see the queries that our website is ranking for, but we can also go to the tab pages. Here we see an overview of URLs on our website. They are currently sorted in the column clicks, so we have the pages with the most clicks on top. So that's the clicks in the search results from Google to our website. But we can also sort this data on the basis of the column impressions. So that means the total number of impressions into search results for these pages. So now at the top, we have our most successful pages, the pages that get the most impressions in Google. Let's just start with the first page and click on it. This is one of my blog articles. And what happens now is that you only see data with regard to this particular page. You can verify this right here at the top because this page has now been added as a filter. Now when we scroll down again, we go to queries and now we can see all the queries that this particular web page is ranking for. If we scroll to the bottom, we can see that this page ranks for 876 keywords. We're now going to look for keywords that we can give a boost. We obviously don't need to improve keywords that are ranked number one in Google. So we look at keywords that are at position two or lower. Focus initially on keywords in the top 10 and possibly the top 20. We don't have to go any lower than that because as you can imagine, it makes little sense to further optimize a keyword that is ranked number 50 in Google because there is little chance that we will get in at a top 10 soon. So if I look at this list, these keywords would not be good candidates because they already rank at number 1. But this one could be really good fit. It ranks a position 2.4 on average, and it gets a decent number of impressions 6,498 and it has a good CTR and a good number of clicks. So this would really be a perfect keyword to boost. If I can get this keyword to position 1, for example, it can drive a lot more traffic to this web page. Now you can go through this whole list and select the best keywords to boost. So we're looking at keywords between, let's say, position 2 and position 20 with a decent amount of clicks, impressions and CTR. If you selected all your keywords. The next question, of course, is how can you give keywords a boost so they go up and ranking? This can be done in several ways. First, specific improvements for the keyword that you want to improve. Check whether you can optimize your blog article better for this particular keyword. Later in this course, you will learn more about this in the lesson about optimizing content for keywords. You can look at the text, so for example, mention it more often or add a few paragraphs. You can change the title in a meta description and you can change or add some headings. Next, you can look at general improvements to the blog article to make it perform better in Google. Overall, we don't focus on our specific keywords, but more on how we can make the page as a whole perform better. We can do this by improving the content, so the quality of content plays a big role in the search results. Google wants to show the best web pages in the SERPs so we can achieve that by, for example, updating the article, expanding the article. And a good tip is to just check the top ten and Google to see what Google finds relevant, to see what Google finds important. And then you can see how you can adapt your own article to reflect this more. Also, you can do some link building for your blog article. You can get more backlinks, so that means external links to your website from other websites. So you can contact other websites if they want to link to you. But you can also create internal links to your blog article to make it rank better because also those internal links pass PageRank. So with more internal links, your blog article will also start to rank better in Google. So now you have a smart strategy to get faster SEO results by building on what already works for your website right now, you can quickly drive additional traffic to your website. This is a super handy tactic for fast SEO results. In the next section, we are going to take a look at how to optimize your website for the right keywords. 23. Optimizing Your Website for the Right Keywords: In this section, we will start optimizing our website for the keywords we found in our keyword research. With optimization, we can start ranking in the search results for the keywords of our choice. The end goal of this section is a good content structure for your website and powerful SEO copy that does well with both users and search engines. You will learn: how to organize your keywords for a good content structure, what SEO content is and what conditions it must meet, how to optimize your SEO content for keywords, and the best way to write and format your SEO content. Let's get started and I'll see you in the next lesson. 24. Organizing Keywords for a Good Content Structure: In the previous section, we did our keyword research. That eventually gave us a list of keywords that we will now start optimizing our website for. We must first organize these keywords into different types and categories. It is important that you use a good content structure on your website. This means that there is a logical categorization of the information that you provide on your website. First of all, this is important to yourself, because you are now more structured and can make a good strategy for the content on your site. For example, you can divide your keywords into commercial and informational content so that you can create a good mix between the two. Commercial pages then end up in your web shop, for example, or as separate pages where you promote the services you offer. Informational pages, on the other hand, are placed on your blog. But it is also important to your visitors that your website is put together in a logical and structured way. This will help every visitor to quickly find their way around your website and click through to the topics he or she wants to read about. I've made a list in Excel here for the keywords that I want to use for my fitness website. I got these keywords from KW Finder. In the first column is the keyword in the second column, the average search volume. The third column is Keyword Difficulty. So again, the lower to score, the easier it should be to rank higher for this keyword in the search engines. And as you can see, our keywords are on various topics and have different search intent. We will now organize our keywords more by dividing them into keyword types and categories. For keyword types, I made 4 different types, each with its own color. You can use these colors to highlight the keywords in your list. With the help of keyword types, you can make a good mix in your content. For example, if you only have commercial content on your website, it can be more difficult in some markets to rank high in Google. This way, you miss out on a lot of traffic for all the users that search Google for a purely informational content. On the other hand, if you only focus on informational content and don't use any commercial keywords, you might not be able to sell much of your products or services. If you organize your keywords into different types, you can create the right mix of content. Red is commercial, these are the keywords that primarily target sales in our list, for example, here I've marked these keywords in red: treadmill and exercise bike. These are all commercial keywords that are aimed at sales. Yellow is informational. These are keywords that provide information to the visitors, such as tips about fitness exercises. Here in the list, for example, I have stomach exercise and tummy exercise. Blue is social. These are keywords that are suitable for social media, for example, fitness motivation and exercise motivation. We could write a nice blog article like 25 Essential Tips for Great Fitness Motivation, for example. This type of content generally does well on social media. Green is epic content. By that I mean well written, long, high quality articles that could do very well in Google and that many other websites will link to. As an example of this kind of content, I've marked the keyword fitness schedule in green. I've also divided the spreadsheet into different categories of keywords. This is useful for further organizing your content by topic. For example, you could use these categories on your blog so that visitors can easily click through to an overview with all blog articles on a certain topic. You can categorize the keywords in your spreadsheet by labeling them in a category column. On the second tab in the Excel sheet, there's an example of how to do this with an existing site. If you already have a website with different categories on your blog, you can categorize your keywords into those categories here. If you already have an extensive site with lots of pages, it is useful to use this method and tailor your keyword research to the already existing categories. Then, for example, you can do specific keyword research for the category workouts. You can find this Excel sheet in the lesson resources, so you can use it if you are going to create a content structure for your own website. All right. We have our structure. The next step is to create content that is optimized for your keywords. You will learn how to do that in the next lesson. 25. Creating Successful SEO content: In this lesson, you will learn how to optimize your website for the keywords of your choice by creating successful SEO content. This lesson is divided into three parts. In this first video, you will get an introduction and learn more about the basic principles of successful SEO content. We'll look at what exactly SEO content is and what conditions it must meet. The second video is about how to optimize your SEO content for keywords. And finally, the third video deals with the best way to create great content and great usability. First, what is SEO content exactly? SEO content is nothing more and nothing less than a web page that is optimized for certain keywords. You take one of the keywords from your keyword research and optimize a webpage for it. We'll look at how to optimize a web page later. It's important to first point out that search engines rank individual web pages, so URLs, and not an entire site. There are some misunderstandings about that sometimes. So it's important to be clear about this. When we look at a search results page in Google, those are all individual web pages. So individual URLs that rank. I once spoke to an entrepreneur who had several web pages on his website, all targeting the same keyword. His reasoning was, if I have a lot of pages on my site that are all about the same keyword, then I'm very relevant for that keyword. And Google understands that my website should rank for it. After all, a large part of my entire website is targeting that keyword. However, it doesn't work that way. In fact, this can even work against you. Suppose that Google's search engine is going to crawl a website and it comes across a page about buy secondhand mountain bikes Glasgow. And then he comes across another and another and another page on exactly that topic. Google generally ranks only one page on a given website for a certain keyword. Google will therefore also typically want to show one page about 'buy second hand mountain bikes Glasgow' for this website. Which one should it now choose? What is happening here is that you are competing with yourself. This is called keyword cannibalisation. You have several web pages that all want to rank for the keyword 'buy second secondhand mountain bikes Glasgow', and these are competing with one another. This reduces the power of each individual page. If you only had one page about 'buy second hand mountain bikes Glasgow', you would have had a much stronger page than if you have multiple separate web pages. As we have seen, links play an important role in SEO. So if you have multiple pages on the same keyword, there could be a website linking to page A, a website linking to page B, one to C and so on. Then you are spreading the power of those links. While if you only had one page, then the power of all those links would be combined. So stick to one page per keyword or a group of related keywords. I should also note that I'm obviously talking about very specific keywords in our example. When we talk about the keyword bicycle, it will of course appear frequently in almost every page of our website if we have a website about bicycles. But when we talk about very specific keywords, such as 'buy second hand mountain bikes Glasgow', it is best to create only one page for it. Even if we have a web shop with many different product pages showing second hand bikes, it is best to only have one overview page for this keyword and a link from there to all individual product pages for our bikes. Another important question is how many keywords do you need to target per web page? Unfortunately, there's no clear answer to that. It depends. It can be one keyword, but also five or more. For example, if we look at one of the top pages on my website, we see that this web page ranked for no less than 1,000 keywords. Obviously, I did not optimize my web page for each and every one of these 1,000 keywords. That would be almost impossible to do. Instead, I wrote my article with a few keywords in mind, after which the page started ranking for all kinds of other keywords that are strongly related. Some things to keep in mind when deciding how many keywords to use for one page are: The longer your poster page, the more keywords you can include in it. If you have a text of 200 words, you cannot discuss that many topics or keywords in detail. However, if you write an article of 2,000 words, you can discuss a lot more topics in it and therefore also use more keywords. My blog post, for example, that we just looked at in search console, has over 5,000 words and also a lot of links to further information. So it is a very extensive blog post that can also rank for a lot of different keywords. Only use multiple keywords on one page if they are similar and have the same search content. For example, if you have an informational blog post about the key phrase 'ab exercises you can do at home', you would not use the key word 'buy a rowing machine'. These keywords really don't match and the search intent behind them is completely different. Ab exercises you can do at home is purely informational, whereas buy a rowing machine is a transactional keyword with commercial intent. Another common question is how long should an SEO optimized post or page be? Unfortunately, there's not a very exact answer to that either. If you really want to hear a specific number of words, I would say that as a general guideline you should aim for 350 words or more. But it is much better to look specifically at your website and niche to estimate how many words your SEO page should have. Here are a few general factors to consider. First of all, the traffic source, for example, do you have a lot of traffic from social media? In that case, short content can do quite well. Secondly, your niche, are you in a super competitive niche? Then you often need longer content to be able to rank well. Also, your target audience plays a role. If your target audience consists of 16 year old teenagers, you probably need shorter content than if your target audience consists of people over 40 who are looking for detailed information on a particular topic. The authority level is also important. If your website has a lot of authority, you can already rank well with shorter content. In the eyes of Google, your website has a lot of authority and Google knows that what you write on your website is of high quality. On the other hand, if you have little domain authority, you will often have to write longer content. Taking account of these factors will give you a general idea of how long and as your articles should be on average. In addition, you can look at some specific factors related to the keywords you want to use to figure out how long your SEO page has to be. Such as the type of keyword. What do people who search for the keyword want to know? There are questions that can be answered very quickly, something like when did World War Two start? But also questions where you need a lot of information to be able to give a good answer, something like how to write SEO content. There's more than enough to say about that. A good tip is to just check the search results. For example, if you want to rank for 'ab exercises you can do at home', look at the top 10 search results in Google and see how long those web pages are. That's a good indication of how long your text should be. The next question we have to answer is, do you write for the search engines or do you write for your visitors? The answer is clearly for your visitor. Remember, a search engine does not become your customer. He does not buy your products or services. There's also no real dichotomy here either. What is good for a user generally is also good for a search engine and vice versa. After all, Google wants to show search results that the user likes. So if a user likes a website, Google will typically also like it. So don't make the mistake of writing specifically for search engines. I sometimes come across SEO copy that is way too focused on the search engines, then you read things like we sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you're thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at, well, et cetera, et cetera. And this is from the Google support pages. And this seems like an extreme example, but you will find plenty of these types of over optimized pages on the Internet. As you can imagine, this is not really user friendly and someone reading this will be annoyed by it. And for a search engine, it doesn't help much either. In fact, you can run into serious trouble if you over optimize a page like this. If you overdo it, Google will view it as spam and you could get a penalty. Then Google kicks you out of the search results because you try to manipulate the search engines. Google wants you to write for your visitors and not for the search engines. Finally, I'd like to talk a little bit about LSI keywords and how to use them. LSI stands for latent semantic indexing. This is a bit of a complex term, but it simply refers to words that relate to the keyword that you are writing about. LSI keywords allow Google to assess the relevance of a webpage. If there are many LSI keywords in it, then that web page provides the correct context to a user. For example, if you write an article about trains, it makes sense that it includes words like station, locomotive, conductor, railroad, et cetera. If you're writing an SEO optimized piece of content on this topic, those LSI keywords will often automatically appear in your text. If you don't have much knowledge of the topic, you could search in Google and check at the bottom of the search results page if there are related searches. These could be your LSI keywords. Keep LSI keywords in mind when you're writing an article and sprinkle them through your text to improve the relevance of your web page. All right. These were some of the basics of how to create successful SEO content. In the next video, we'll look at how to optimize your article for your keywords. 26. Optimizing Content for Keywords: In the previous video, we saw what the most important general principles of successful SEO content are. In this video, we're going to take a look specifically at how to optimize your content for keywords. Google assesses the relevance of a web page based on the content of that page. So you have to make it clear to Google that your web page is targeting a certain keyword. In this lesson, I will show you the best way to optimize your SEO content for your keywords. Let's get started. First, let's look at a search result in Google. This is what a standard search result looks like. And here we see three elements that you can fill in on your own website and where you can optimize for your keywords. First, the URL that you see here at the top, in this case, fitness superstore. co.uk. And then the SEO title tag, the clickable link in the Google search result. And finally, the meta description. You can fill these elements in on your own website. I have to add here, though, that Google sometimes adjusts the title and a meta description if they think that is more appropriate. But often they just pick what you have entered here yourself on your website. So this already gives us the first three places where we can optimize for our keyword. Let's take a closer look at them one by one. 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. A user will not see the title on the page itself, but it shows you your browser tab like you can see here in HTML code. The SEO title tag looks like this. You can check this for a page by looking at the source code. So on this website, for example, you would right click and select few page scores with control f we can search for the title and here we see the title at the top. So the title tag of this page is Fitness Superstore, Sale on Fitness, Gym and Exercise Equipment, fitness- superstore.co.uk. So this is the title that they gave to this particular web page. Put your keywords in the title and put them at the beginning when possible. Google gives a little more weight to the words at the beginning than two words later in a title, but it also makes it more clear to a user that this page is about the keyword there. Just search for if you have it at the beginning of the title, but only do this when it makes for a good title. Of course, that is the most important thing. If your title looks much better and is more compelling to users when the keyword is somewhere in the middle or the end, just go with that. Give each page on your website a unique SEO title. Write an easy to read and attention grabbing title. This is the link in the Google search results that people can click on. Think of it like a newspaper headline. So you want a title that grabs attention and that people click on more quickly to continue reading. And remember, don't spam. You sometimes see titles such as My Keyword, Tips for My Keyword, order my Keyword, all in the same SEO title. This looks really over the top and spammy. A user is not going to click on this and Google can see it as spam which can get you into trouble. Use SEO title tags of maximum 512 pixels wide, which is approximately 60 characters. Your title should not be too long. Otherwise Google will truncate it. You have probably already seen titles in the search results that were truncated and you want to avoid this as much as possible. So make sure your titles are not too long. Secondly, the meta description. This is also a meta tag that is in the source code and it looks like this. Let's get back to the source code of the web page that we just saw. Here we see the meta description right beneath the title. So in this case, the meta description reads Fitness Superstore, UK's number one fitness equipment retailer, etc.. So this is the meta description that they filled in for this web page. It's important to note that the meta description has no direct influence on rankings, but there is an indirect effect. With a good meta description, you ensure that people click through to your website more often and that gives a positive signal to Google. If people often click on your website in the search results, it can improve your rankings. Put your keywords in the meta description as well to increase the relevancy of your search results to users. Make the description easy to read and attention grabbing just like the title. Make it a maximum of 920 pixels wide, which is approximately 155 characters. Again, if you go over this limit, Google will truncate your meta description. So try to avoid that and keep within these 155 characters. Thirdly, the URL. Make sure that the URL is short and clear and that it has your keywords in it. Use hyphens instead of underscores in the URL. This is because Google indicates on their support pages that they recommend using hyphens instead of underscores to separate words in the URL. If you use WordPress, you can easily enter these elements using the SEO plugin. I'll show you how that plugin works later in this video. If you don't use WordPress, you can use online tools like the snippet optimization tool by higher visibility. Here you can fill in all the elements of the snippet, title, URL and meta description. Once you enter some text, you can preview how it looks like in the Google search results. This way you can check whether your title or meta description fit within a maximum number of pixels so that it won't be truncated in its search results. You can find a link to this tool in the resources. Fourth. We have the H1 heading and this is what it looks like in HTML. In contrast to the SEO title and the meta description, the H1 heading is actually visible on your page. So, for example, on this Web page, the H1 heading is this one. So F 60 folding treadmill. You can check that again by going to the source code of this page. So right click show source code. I'm going to search for H1 and you see it right here, the H1 tag Sole F 60 folding treadmill. So this tag is actually visible on the page itself, whereas the title tag is not visible. You can't see the title tag, however, here in the browser tab. So the H1 is visible on the page and you should include your keywords there, preferably again at the beginning. This puts a little bit more emphasis on the keywords, but only do this when it makes for a good title. Of course, that is the most important thing. If your H1 looks much better and is more compelling to users with the keyword somewhere in the middle or the end, just go with that. Usually the title of your page will be the same as your H one heading. However, these two do not necessarily have to be the same. You can also make a different H1 heading if you like. It doesn't really matter. This can be useful. For example, if you want to make a longer H1 heading than the title tag because the title tag is limited by a maximum number of characters to display. Well, in the Google search results, the h one heading, however, can be as long as you like. I would advise, however, that if you make your H1 different from your SEO title tag to make sure they are very similar, the user often sees your SEO title tag in the search results. If he or she clicks through to your website and all of a sudden there is a completely different H1 heading at the top of the page that would be very confusing. Also use one H1 heading per page. This is a best practice. Google has said that it doesn't really matter that much and you can also have multiple h once on a page, but still it is best practice to keep only one H1 per page. You can add these headings in your CMS here. You can see a screenshot from the WordPress editor and as you can see you can select an H1, H2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 heading to give it the specific header tag that you like. Also use your keywords and the other header tags like the subheadings H2 to H6. Usually you use H2 for each subheading in an article, but you can also use 3 to 6 if you want. In a CMS like WordPress these headings usually have a certain formatting, so your H1 heading is usually displayed with the largest font size, the H2 a little bit smaller and so on. This is useful to a user, so you can immediately see the structure of your article with a different headings and subheadings. Of course, you also put your keywords in the main text, i.e. the body copy of your page. Put your keywords in the beginning. The middle and the end of the text, especially at the beginning, is important, just as you preferably put your keywords at the beginning of your title. This also applies to detect itself. Google gives a little bit more weight to words that appear at the beginning of a title or text, and this also immediately makes it clear to the user reading the article what the article is about. Don't forget your LSI keywords either. These are the keywords that provide more context. Think of synonyms and related words. Use bold and italics. This won't affect your rankings that much, but you can give a little bit more weight to your keywords and any other words in the content that you would like to emphasize by using bold or italics. This is also useful for readers as they can quickly spot the parts in the text that are important. Do not exaggerate by using bold and italics a lot throughout your text. That is not pleasant to read and looks like spam. Use your keywords in a natural way. Don't mention your keywords too often. This is not pleasant for your readers and also won't help you rank any higher. Yoast SEO recommends to have a keyword density of between 0.5 and 3%. Keyword density means how often you mention your keyword in a text. A text of 100 words in which you mention your keyword just once, therefore has a keyword density of 1%. One keyword in 100 words. Do not focus that much on these numbers, though. Sometimes you see outdated SEO advice saying that you have to have a keyword density of x percent to rank. But search engines are so clever these days. This is not really that important anymore. The only reason that a WordPress plugin like your SEO uses this range of 0.5 to 3% is to give some kind of a rough indication. If you have less than 0.5%, you might not have used your keyword often enough. So you can look whether you can mention it a little more. And if you have a density of more than 3%, maybe you mention it a little too often. If it's over 3%, it certainly doesn't mean that you should start deleting mentions of your keyword. The most important thing is that you mention keywords in your text in a natural way. If a reader reads this text, does it look natural? Does it look good if you mention your keywords more than 3% of your text? That's totally fine if your text reads well and looks natural. Don't overdo it to the point it doesn't look natural anymore and might annoy readers in search engines. This will get you into trouble. If you use images on your page, you can include the keyword in the file name such as my keyword.jpg. You can also use it in the alt text. The alt text is a tag that you can add to the image describing the image. If you include your keywords in the file name and the alt text, Google knows that the image is about your keyword. This helps to increase the relevance of your web page. All text is also important for accessibility. The purpose of all text is to describe the images to users who are unable to see them. This could be because their browser blocks images or when they use a screen reader. By including alt text for your images, users who are visually impaired can also know what is in the image by using a screen reader. Again, don't overdo it. Don't put your keywords into every file, name and alt text for every image on your web page. If you start spamming, you will run into problems with Google. So keep it natural and don't overdo it. Internal and external links also increase the relevance of your article. At first this might seem a little bit counterintuitive because you're linking to other web pages, so how can that increase the relevance of this web page that you're optimizing? That's because you show that you want to give the user as much good information as possible about the keyword, i.e. the subject of this page. If you have a web page about, for example, the keyword SEO copywriting and you link to other pages on your website, so internal links as well as links to other websites, external links where the user can find even more good information about SEO copywriting. Then you increase the relevance of your page in the eyes of Google. Google will see that you offer a lot of good information by also linking to other sources. It is not absolutely necessary to add links to other sources, but if it's useful for the user to learn more about the topic of your keyword, be sure to include them. This way you increase the relevance of your page in the eyes of Google. This was a lot of information to take in. So let's summarize the elements once again. Put your keywords in the SEO title tag, the meta description, the URL, the H1 tag, subheadings. so that's H2 to H6, the body copy of your article, images. and lastly, also use internal and external links to other useful sources. All in all, you have to take a lot into account when you're optimizing a web page, but there are tools to make it all easier for you. One of those tools is Yoast SEO, a free plugin for WordPress that helps with SEO. So when you're in the WordPress editor, you see a blog here at the bottom that helps with SEO. So for example, on this WordPress post, I go to the bottom of the post and here I see some data that you can fill in with your SEO. First of all, I can give a focus keyphrase to this particular blog post. In this case, the keyword deep links. Here I can fill in the title and the meta description, so I will be able to fill that in right here, the title and the meta description here. And then you see a preview of the snippet, how it would look like in the Google search results. So the plugin also automatically tells you if you stay within the maximum number of characters for the title in the meta description and here you have the SEO analysis. So it would tell you exactly how well you optimized your block article for this particular key phrase. So for example, it says the meta description could be a little bit longer. It's not under 120 characters, but you can go until 156. Put the keyphrase in the title, here it says, I've included outbound links and internal links, so that's good. And you see some other recommendations like the key phrase density, is the key phrase in a meta description, have you used it before, etc.. So this is very useful to just use a plugin to go over all the elements that you need to take care of when optimizing a blog post for a certain keyphrase. This makes it a lot easier to not forget anything and to have a well optimized page for your keyword. All right. This brings us to the end of this video. And in the next video, we will talk about the content and usability of your SEO content to make your pages rank as high as possible. I'll see you in the next video. 27. Content and Usability: To create successful SEO copy, we have to look at content as well as usability. Our SEO content is supposed to bring in visitors from Google to our website, but that's only the first step. Ultimately, of course, we also want those visitors to become our customers or at least take the desired action on our site. We call this conversion. So a desired user action could be requesting a quote, subscribing to your newsletter, ordering a product in your web shop or picking up the phone to make an appointment. In order to achieve higher rankings in Google and achieve a higher conversion rate as well, by turning your visitors into customers, you need good content as well as good usability. Give your readers a lot of value in the form of good content so that you show that you're an expert in your field. Good, powerful SEO copy goes a long way. It is not only important for your site visitors, but also Google loves good copy. Google is most likely looking at user signals in their algorithm. I say most likely because not everyone in the SEO world agrees on this. But there are several reputable SEO specialists who say that Google looks at, for example, bounce rate and dwell time. Bounce rate is the number of users who come to your website. view only one web page and then leave. Dwell time is how much time a user spends on your website. If Google sees that there are many users who click on your website in the search results, but click back to Google only after a few seconds, that is not a good indicator. Apparently, users do not find your content relevant enough. So if this happens all the time, Google will rank your web page lower in the search results. So you have to provide good content that engages users and keeps them on your website longer. In addition, of course, good content also yields more backlinks. If you have well written blog posts on your website with good content, then you deliver a lot of value to your visitors. This, in turn, will get you more backlinks to your content and people will share your article more often with others. Backlinks are very good for SEO and you will start to rank higher in the search results with more backlinks. . In other words, good, valuable content is important for your visitors and the search engines. So how do you create powerful SEO content with good usability? First of all, it's important to know that people on the Internet usually do not read but scan Web pages. It is not as easy to read from a screen as it is from paper. And there's a ton of information on the Internet as well. So most people scan an article looking mainly at the beginning of the article and the headings and subheadings. Studies have been conducted in which people had to look at Web pages while simultaneously recording their eye movements. That resulted in these images, these heat maps, where you see a kind of pattern. People first read at the top of the article from left to right and then move down vertically. Now that we know how people read or rather scan pages on the Internet, it is important to adjust your content accordingly. You have to make sure your content is easy to read and scan. Here are some useful points that help you to create successful SEO copy. First of all, use an inverted pyramid. That means that you put the most important information at the beginning. That is actually the opposite of how articles on paper are usually written. On paper, it usually goes from an introduction to a conclusion. So you work towards the most important information. On the Internet, it is better to put the most important information at the beginning. That's the first place that users start to read. And it's important that you grab their attention right away and show them why it's worth reading the rest of your article. Use lots of headings and subheadings every two to five paragraphs on average. Looking at only the headings, a user can immediately see what topics you're discussing. If you just scan the headings first, you get the gist of the whole article. Using lots of headings with descriptive text helps to motivate users to read your entire article. Apply the KISS formula, keep it short and simple. So write in short sentences with easy to understand language. For example, don't use complicated jargon. If your text is too complicated, people are not going to bother reading it. So just keep it short and simple. That also means using short paragraphs of about 50 to 70 words. I sometimes come across websites with articles with very long paragraphs. That is really a wall of text on your screen and it is not pleasant to read at all. Also, use plenty of white space between your headings and paragraphs. That makes it a lot easier to read. Use a clear, pretty large font size and line height. This also improves readability. Use bullet points and tables to break down information in a concise way, and this allows readers to quickly see the most important points. So use these in your SEO content where appropriate. Also use bold and italics. Do you have words or phrases that you want to emphasize, then use bold and italics. This is ideal for readers scanning your web page as they can immediately see the important points in your article. Also, in terms of the content itself, make sure it is compelling to keep visitors and Google happy. You have to provide readers and search engines with good information. So make sure you have compelling content and the right writing style. If you write an informative article, for example, you can write more neutral and objective, whereas if your page is more sales oriented, you have to write more like a copywriter for an advertisement to convince people to make a purchase. It goes without saying that you should also use correct spelling and grammar. Users will not like your content if it's poorly written and full of spelling mistakes. Decide whether you are going to write yourself or hire a copywriter. If you are a good writer, you can write your own SEO content. In that case, it's still smart to get feedback and have someone else proofread your article. If you prefer to outsource it, get a good copywriter, preferably someone with experience in writing SEO copy. Also use multimedia in your blog posts to make your content more interesting, like videos, images, gifs, screenshots and infographics. This offers more value to the user and you will get a lot more shares on social media and more backlinks from other websites too. Also make sure you have an attractive layout and design. With nicely designed content you make a much better impression. Users will enjoy reading your articles and you get more links and shares. You can think of things like call outs, blog quotes and columns. Let's take a look at one of my blog posts now as an example to see how to structure and format your SEO content. First of all, I use the inverted pyramid and start with what the reader will learn from this blog post. Then I have a download for a checklist to make my article even more valuable for readers. I use short paragraphs with a large font size and plenty of whitespace. I created nice looking headings with these big numbers and blue boxes around them. I use call outs by having some paragraphs with a yellow background. There are plenty of images and screenshots in the post as well. Here is another callout to show a specific tip. I use nicely designed bullet points. And here's another callout with a different design, using an orange box and an exclamation mark. There are some bullet points here with different icons. And as you can see in the right sidebar, there's also a table of contents that is crawling along with the article. This is very useful for readers, so they can immediately go to each section of the article. Then at the end of my blog post, I also have another download button for the checklist. This offers a lot of extra value to any readers of the article. As you can see, I also use very short paragraphs that sometimes consist of only one sentence. If you want to know how I designed this blog post I used to plug in called Thrive Architect, a nice page builder with which you can make beautiful layouts and WordPress. But you can also you just use the standard WordPress block editor, which allows you to make nice designs as well. This brings us to the end of this lesson on SEO content. There are quite a few things to take into account if you want to create good SEO content. To make your work a little easier, I've made a checklist for you. This gives you an overview of the most important elements of successful SEO content, and you can just check these elements off. You can find this checklist in the lecture resources. Download the checklist, save it on your computer and print it. This checklist will help you to create successful SEO content that does well with your visitors as well as search engines. Good luck with creating your SEO content! 28. Technical SEO: Make Your Site SEO Proof: In this section, we'll look at the technical aspects of SEO and you will learn how to make your website SEO proof. In the previous section we discussed the first pillar of SEO and we looked at how we should optimize the content of our website for certain keywords. Now we've arrived at the second pillar, technical SEO. In order for Google to work well with our website, we must ensure that our web site is well structured from an SEO perspective. You will learn how to do that in this section. The end goal of this section is that you have a website that is search engine friendly and SEO proof. You will learn what the ideal website structure is for Google, how to make your website search engine friendly, how to set a preferred domain, and how you can improve your website's SEO health with Google Search Console. Have fun and good luck with this section on technical SEO! 29. The Ideal Website Structure for Google: In the previous section, we've already seen that it is important to create a good structure for your website. This is important for yourself because your site will be easier to manage, but also for visitors who can find things more quickly on a well-structured site. And lastly, it's also important for SEO, a good website structure leads to higher rankings. In order to understand the importance of a good web site structure, we must first look at how Google gives authority to web pages. Page rank is one of the factors Google uses to rank web pages in search results. The higher the page rank, the more authority a web page has and the higher it will rank in the search results. The page rank of a page is determined by the number of links to that page and the quality of those links. Every link on the Internet passes a certain value. We call this link juice. The link juice that a web page receives determines the page rank of that page. The more links that transfer value to that page, the higher the page rank of that page will be and the better it will rank in the search results. Page rank is passed from page to page on the Internet by means of links. It kind of looks like this. Suppose you have a web page with a page rank of 20. On that page. there are four links to other web pages. Each link now passes five page rank points to those other four web pages. The amount of link valued at a link passes on thus depends on the page rank of the referring web page, in this case 20 and the number of links on that page. For example, if this page would have ten links on it, each link would have only passed two Page Rank points. Google used to publicly display the page rank of a page, but they stopped doing that at some point, they now only use page rank internally, so you cannot see how much page rank a page actually has. We can have an indication of the power or authority of a web page using the MozBar that we already saw earlier in the course. Moz doesn't call it page rank, however, but page authority. For example, we see here that the home page of Amazon.com has a page authority of 92. PA is a number that represents the authority or the power of a web page. So that's the same idea as Page Rank. A link from the home page of Amazon.com passes a ton of value because a PA of 92 on a scale of 100 is very high. Page rank is passed through links, whether external or internal links, so also on your own website page rank is passed on via internal links. What does all this have to do with website structure? Well, every website has a certain hierarchical structure. I've sketched out what that looks like here. Here at the top, you have the homepage, which is the basis, the foundation of our website. On that homepage, there are links to three categories. So three main topics that we write about on our website. Under each category, there are blog posts on that specific topic. The homepage usually has the most authority and the highest page rank. This is because most of the external links, so other websites linking to our website will be to our homepage, but also internally our homepage is at the top of the hierarchy and therefore receives the most internal links as well from the home page. The page rank is passed throughout our website. So page rank drips all the way from the top to the bottom via links. The further down we go, the less of that page rank is left. So pages are getting weaker there. We can put it to the test by looking at a website. We are here on the home page of Search Engine Land, which has the highest authority on the homepage. We see here that the home page has a page authority of 70. We can also see here that the home page automatically has the highest number of internal links. The logo here at the top left is an image with a link back to the home page. This header with the logo is on every single page of this website. That means that each web page on this website contains an internal link back to the home page. The home page, therefore, has a very large number of internal links. In addition, the homepage also has many external links from other websites because back links often point to the home page of a website. If we now go to a blog post on this website, for example, this one, we see that this page has a page authority of 46, which is a lot lower than the PA of 70 that the home page has. That's because this page is further down the website structure. It has fewer external and internal links while the home page gets internal links from every other web page on the website. This blog post doesn't have the same amount of internal links. If I click on a page that is also high in the hierarchical structure, for example, the link SEO here in the menu. We see that this page has a page authority of 59, which is already a little bit higher than the blog post, that's because it has a link pointing to it here in the main menu. So every web page on the website also contains a link back to this particular page. It is also because the home page, which is the strongest page, contains a direct link to this page, because it is in the main menu. Because the homepage links directly to this page, a lot of linked juice is also passed from the homepage to this particular page. If we go back to our website structure, that means that web pages that are at the top of our website structure receive the most page rank and therefore have the best chance of ranking high in the search engines. After all, these web pages are stronger due to a higher page rank. What lessons can we learn from this for our website structure? I have three smart tips that you can use for your website structure. First of all, design a website structure and keep the most important pages as high as possible. For example, if we go back to our fitness website, such a structure might look like this. You have the homepage of your website and on that homepage you have three different categories: workouts, motivation and fitness gear. Under each of these categories, you have separate blog posts on that specific topic. So for workouts, that would be dumbbell exercises, motivation, you would have fitness motivation, and fitness gear, you would have a page with the keyword buy rowing machine. How can you design such a website structure? Well, first of all, you can just use a spreadsheet, for example, to map out a good structure. You could also use a tool like Mindmeister, which you can use to create mind maps. An example you see here on the website of Mindmeister.com. That way you can make a nice structure that looks pretty visual and you can use these mind maps to create a nice website structure. Put your categories, your most important web pages at the top, as these should be the highest in your hierarchy of the website structure. The second tip is make use of internal links to pass link juice to pages that you want to rank higher in the search engines. Suppose you have a web page with an important keyword and you would like to rank higher in Google for it. . Then you make that page more powerful by making internal links to that page and preferably links from pages with a lot of page authority. So we first have to look at which pages on our site have the most authority. Then we place links on those pages to pass a lot of link juice to our page that we want to rank higher. To find these important pages, we can use Google search console. We will go more into detail about this tool later in the course, and how to set it up. But if we go to links here in the left sidebar, we can see which pages have the most external links. So links coming from other websites. So here I have a list of the top linked pages from other websites, and I can see a list of all these pages. So, for example, I see that my homepage is the most powerful page on my website because it has 428 incoming links and 121 sites linking to my homepage. So this way I can quickly see what the most powerful pages are on my website, so the pages that have the most incoming links and probably have the highest page authority, and I can use these pages to place links to my pages that I want to rank higher in the search engines. These pages, with a lot of authority, can also pass a lot of link juice. We can also see in search console which pages have the most internal links, so, for example, we also see here that my home page also has the most internal links. So 83 other pages pointing links back to my homepage. The pages that have the most external and internal links are the most powerful ones. You can use these to create a link back to the page you would want to rank higher. I would like to emphasize here that you have to place only useful links. So only links to pages that are more or less about the same subject. The link must be relevant to the user. Don't just add irrelevant links with the sole purpose of passing link juice. Tip number three is to link related content to each other for passing on link value as well as creating relevance. We can do this, for example, by using a plugin that displays related articles. For example, if I look at the end of one of my blog posts here, we see some related articles. These are nice internal links to other blog posts that pass on link juice and they create more relevance at the same time because these posts are related to this one. Our visitors will appreciate being able to click through to related articles and Google also finds this valuable as you create a kind of a knowledge database with related information that is linked together. Of course, this is just a plugin and it won't always show the most relevant related articles. So when you write a blog post, also make sure to add internal links manually to relevant and related web pages on your website. That brings us to the end of this lesson. By setting up a good structure where you put the most important pages at the top of the hierarchy, and by making smart use of internal linking, you can give a real boost to your website. This will help your most important pages rank higher in the search engines. 30. Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly: In this lesson, we're going to look at the ways how you can make your site search engine friendly to rank as high as possible in the search engines. As we saw in the introduction to the course, Google uses a spider, a bot that scans the Internet and stores web page in its database, Google's Index. It is important that you help the search engine in its task and ensure that it can crawl through your website without any issues. For example, make sure to offer your most important content in the form of text on your website. Videos, images, flash animations, they're all very nice, but a search engine cannot understand it as well as text. When you right click to view the page source, you will see the HTML code of the page. This is roughly how the Google spider sees the page. I have an image on this page and in code it looks like this. You can see that the image has alt text. That is text that I entered myself that describes his image. Googlebot sees this too. But what is actually in the image? The robot does not understand that well. Google is getting better at dealing with images, but the robot cannot understand it super well yet. So if you want to rank a web page for a specific keyword, it probably won't work if you just put a few images there. You need text. If the content of your multimedia is important, you can give a description in text. For example, you could include a transcript of a video on your webpage. Then Google can read everything that is talked about in the video. In addition, your content will also be more accessible to people with, for example, a visual impairment. Blind and visually impaired people often use screen readers where the text on a screen is read to them. If you only use images and text, your site is not accessible to blind and visually impaired people. It is also important that you use search engine friendly URLs. If you use a content management system, your URLs can sometimes be displayed dynamically. Then they look like the second URL you see here with all kinds of numbers and characters in it. A search engine or a visitor cannot see what the page is about looking at this URL. The first URL on the other hand, looks much better. It has your keyword in it. And search engines as well as users can see what the page is about. By using search engine friendly URLs, your website will rank better in the search engines. Another useful thing you could use on your site is breadcrumbs. These are links at the top of your page so that you can see exactly where you are on the website. You can see an example of that here on the site of Amazon.com. Here at the top, you have the breadcrumbs showing exactly where you are in the site. So this keyboard is part of electronics, computer and accessories, computer accessories and peripherals, et cetera. This is good for the usability or user-friendliness of a website, because a user immediately sees where he is on your website. Breadcrumbs are also useful for SEO. The breadcrumbs are internal links that the search engine can follow when crawling your website. The internal links allow you to pass page rank to the parent pages. And through the breadcrumb trail, the search engine can also see how your website is structured. Breadcrumbs are especially useful if you have a very large site with lots of categories, like, for example, Amazon. For a smaller site, breadcrumbs are not strictly necessary as a user will find his way around quickly anyway. Another element to consider is that you can steer the search engine in the right direction on your website. . You can indicate that there are parts of your website, the search engine is not allowed to crawl. You can do this at page level by including HTML code in the page with the meta tag robots. For example, the meta tag that you see right here indicates that the robot should not include this web page in the Google index. This is determined by the instruction noindex. And that it may also not follow the links on that page. This is the nofollow instruction. You can do this for an individual page, but you can also block entire parts of your website to the search engine by using the robots.txt file. This is a text file that resides on your website server. You can see an example of robots.txt here. It starts with the instruction user agent asterisk, which means that the instructions that follow apply to all search engines. Then you see the instruction, disallow /wp-admin. This means that the search engine is not allowed to crawl the admin folder. This is a folder containing all kinds of WordPress files, and the search engine does not have to go there. In this case, I also applied that to a specific folder /go. This way you can exclude search engines from certain parts of your site. This could be individual web pages or entire folders. You could use such a disallow instruction, for example, if you offer free ebook for people who subscribe to your mailing list. You probably don't want your e-book to be found on Google so people can just download it without signing up for your newsletter. Then you could put your e-book in a folder named, for example, "secret" on your website and then use robots.txt to block search engines from accessing that folder using the instruction "disallow secret". You can also give your site an SEO boost by using SSL. That is an encrypted connection via https. Secured sites display HTTPS in the address bar of the browser. A small lock icon displays as well that the website has a secure connection. Google announced in 2014 that they are using https as a ranking signal. So if you have https on your website, you have an advantage over websites that don't. At the moment, it does not have a major effect. Other ranking factors such as good content are way more important. But it does give you an advantage in the search engines. In addition, users see at the top of the browser that the connection is secure and that provides more trust in your website. If you want to implement https on your website, you can check with your web host. Some web hosts offer free SSL with their shared hosting plans. But you can also install a security certificate yourself. If you are switching to https, get help from an expert because such a switch is pretty complex if you do not do it right. For example, because you do not create a good redirect from http to https, you can actually drop in the search result rankings. Another important aspect of optimizing your site to rank better in Google is to make your website mobile friendly. Your site should look good on smartphones and other portable devices. That is, of course, very important for your users because more and more people are using their smartphone to surf the Internet. But the mobile friendliness of your site is also a ranking factor for Google. In search results on mobile devices, Google prioritizes websites that are mobile friendly. There are three ways to make your website mobile friendly. Using responsive web design, dynamic serving or separate URLs. Responsive design is the most convenient of these methods, and it is also the one that Google recommends. All you have to do is use a responsive theme. Most WordPress themes, for example, are responsive nowadays. So if you use WordPress, your website will be mobile friendly immediately if you use a responsive theme. The URLs and HTML code stay the same and your website adapts to the size of the user's device. So the website is automatically displayed properly on desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile. A handy tool to check whether your website is mobile friendly is Google's mobile friendly test. Enter your website here and Google will give you an assessment of the mobile friendliness. So if I input my site, I see that this page is mobile friendly. Finally, don't forget either to check how your website looks on different mobile devices. Even though your website is mobile friendly, you should always check that everything looks the way you want it. Perhaps there are elements that do not work well on a certain mobile device and that you would like to adjust. The most convenient way to do that is through the Chrome browser. On a Web page in Chrome, right click and click inspect. Now you can see how your site looks on different devices. Here at the top, you can select a different device. For example, this would be how my site looks on an iPad. And here you have different mobile devices like the Galaxy S5 and the iPhone six, seven or eight plus, for example. So with this tool, you really have a good way to quickly see how your website looks on different mobile devices. So let's review what we talked about in this video. There are some important things to look at in order to make your site search engine friendly. First, offer the most important content on your site in text format. Videos, images, flash animations, they're all very nice, but a search engine cannot handle them as well as text. So if you want to rank a web page for a particular keyword, it probably won't work if you just put a video and some images there. You need text. Use search engine friendly URLs. Also use breadcrumb navigation for large sites. This is good for usability and SEO. Give instructions to the search engines, which parts of your site it is allowed to crawl. This can be done at page level with the meta tag robots or at site level via robots.txt. Use SSL or https for your website. This gives you a ranking advantage and a secure connection is also better for users. Make sure your site is mobile friendly. A responsive theme is the easiest way to do this. Finally, it is also important for SEO that your website loads fast. I'll show you how to do that in the next video. 31. Improving Your Site Speed: Another important factor is the speed of your website. Users expect a website to load fast. If it takes too long to load a webpage or, for example, place an order, people can leave your site. A fast website means happy users and more customers. For the same reason, speed is also important to Google. Google wants to give its users the best search results. The loading speed of your website is therefore a Google ranking factor and counts for SEO. So how can we increase the load speed of our website? That's what we'll cover in this video. First of all, you must, of course, test the speed of your own website. This way you can see how your website is doing in terms of load speed. A useful tool for this is Pingdom. On their site, you can enter your own website and then choose a server that is closest to your location. In my case, the closest location would probably be Frankfurt in Germany If I select the right server, I can click start test. Now I get a performance grade, which in this case would be 81 or a B, the size of the page, which is 702 kilobytes, and the load time, which is 1.81 seconds. Note that the tool checks the speed per web page. In this case, I entered the homepage. But you can also take another page of your website to check its load speed. The load speed will be different every time you test it, and that also depends on how busy the server is. But this gives a good indication. Down here, you will also see some suggestions to improve the speed. For example, use cookie free domains, add Expires headers and make fewer HTTP requests. You can get started trying to implement these suggestions. Another useful tool to gain more insight into loading speed is GTmetrix. You can create a free account here on this site, which gives you some more options, but you can also use the tool for free without creating an account. If you run a test through GTmetrix, you get a score for two different tools, the Pagespeed score and the Yslow score. It's pretty useful to have both these tools as you can compare them and see the different suggestions they give. Note that GTmetrix uses fully loaded time. This includes loading time for elements, including things like advertisements and below the fold elements. So a user might already see your Web page in the browser, whereas some elements are still loading in the background. So loading speed for a user typically is lower than the number you see right here. Again, you see some useful things here to work on to improve load speed. For example, I could try and defer parsing of JavaScript and serve resources from a consistent URL. If I look at the Yslow tab, it gives me some more suggestions to improve my load speed. Another useful feature of GTmetrix is the waterfall chart. Here you see the different elements that are loading and how much time it takes to load each one of them. If you see elements that take a long time to load, you can adjust or remove them from your web page. So use these tools to check how fast your side loads and start implementing the recommendations these tools give to improve your load speed. In addition to the specific recommendations that these tools provide in this video, I want to give you some important tips to increase your site speed. First of all, your web host is one of the most important elements in speed. After all, your website is on a server at your web host. The better and faster your web host is, the faster your website will load. So what should you be looking for when choosing a good web host? I've listed a few points here to consider. First of all, of course, the speed of the web host. You can find out how fast a web host is by reading reviews and checking comparison sites. Price. Oftentimes, the higher the price, the better the speed of your web host is, especially if you have a large website with a lot of visitor traffic, you will soon end up with more expensive hosting to get the load speed up to par. I'd like to add, though, that price is not everything. There are cheap web hosts out there that are very fast. The location of the servers is also something to consider. Choose a web host that has its servers in the country or most of your website visitors are coming from. My website gets almost all visitors from the Netherlands, so that's why I chose a web host with servers located in the Netherlands. Your website will be faster if the web host uses SSD. SSD stands for Solid State Drives and websites stored on those drives load much faster. HTTP/2 is a new protocol that makes websites load significantly faster and the successor of that is HTTP/3. So check if your web host support these newer protocols. One other good method you should definitely use to speed up your website is caching. By caching pages, they only need to be loaded once. So if a visitor returns to the same page, the cached version is fetched, making the page load much faster. There are several caching plugins for WordPress and a nice free plugin is W3 Total Cache. Another way to speed up your website is to use a content delivery network. This is especially useful if your site has visitors from different countries. A CDN is a worldwide network through which your website is loaded from the server closest to the location of the visitor. This gives every visitor around the world the fastest loading time of your website. A good free CDN is CloudFlare. And finally, a very important factor for loading speed is the correct use of images. With many websites, images are one of the biggest reasons why the website loads slowly. Images have to be loaded, and especially if you have several images on a page, it takes up more time to load. So you have to make sure that your images are as small as possible in file size. First, it's best to use JPEG or PNG for your images. These are the file formats that are best optimized for online use. You can also use Webp. It is a little less well known, but it's a newer type of image format which gives even smaller sizes for your images. Also, it's important that you crop your images to the correct dimensions. A common mistake when adding images to a blog post, for example, is that someone adds an image and then resizes it. For example, if I insert this image, I can make it smaller in the WordPress editor. This may seem convenient, but what is happening here is that when a visitor views this web page, the browser has to load the full image and then displays it at a reduced size. So this means that the total number of kilobytes has to be loaded by the browser while the image itself is displayed at a much smaller size. So make sure to crop the image to the dimensions you'd like to display it at. You can do this with free software, such as, for example, IrfanView. That is an image editor that you can use to, for example, change the dimensions of a certain image. Another useful method to reduce to file size of your images is compression. When you compress images, you reduce the file size without seeing a real difference in image quality. A useful free tool for this is Kraken.io. You can see an example on their website of such a compressed image. The original image is 467 kilobytes and the compressed size is 172 kilobytes. So that's a 63 percent reduction. That is a huge difference in file size. And if we look at the quality, we see the original image on the right and then we move our mouse here and we see the kraked image, the compressed image on the left. And as you can see, there is not really a difference in quality that you can see. So the image on the left is much smaller than the image on the right. And you basically see no difference in quality of the image. To compress these images, you can go to 'Try free web interface' and here you can upload your image and compress it with the online image optimizer. If you use WordPress, you can also use free plugins for this, such as Shortpixel. With this plugin installed, every time you upload an image to your website, the image is automatically compressed. To conclude this video, this is a brief summary of how to speed up your website. First of all, use tools like Pingdom and GTmetrix to test your website speed and get specific recommendations on how to increase the load speed of your website. Choose a good fast web host to host your website. Make use of caching on your website. Use a content delivery network if you have visitors from different countries. Optimize your images by cropping them to the correct dimensions and applying compression. If you follow these tips, your website will load much faster, which will give you bonus points for search engines as well as users. 32. Set a Preferred Domain: For SEO, it's important to set a preferred domain for your website. We are going to do that in this video. A website normally has two domains, one with www and one without. You can also have different protocols. If your website has a secure connection with SSL, then it also has two protocols, http and https. In this case, your website is accessible via four different addresses. You can see those here. A search engine considers all these variations of your website as separate versions. This is an undesirable situation for SEO. Google now does not know which of these versions to use if you let multiple versions of your site co-exist. This is not good for SEO. To avoid this, you have to choose one of these versions as your preferred domain and forward the other versions to that preferred domain. You can do this with a so-called 301 redirect and that way you concentrate all your SEO power on a single website version. It doesn't matter which one you choose. You can go with www or non www. If you have https on your website, you must of course choose the https protocol anyway. That is a secure version of your site. In WordPress, make sure you have the correct version you want in the general settings of your site. To do this, go to settings, general. Here you can choose the preferred version at the WordPress address URL and the site address. In this case, I chose the version https with www. If the redirect doesn't work or if you don't use WordPress, create a redirect via the .htaccess file. Here you see, for example, the code that you can add to that file to redirect to your preferred domain version. The first line is a 301 redirect from www to non www. And the second one is the other way around from non www to www. Finally, to put it to the test, simply go to your browser and type in one of the other versions to see if you're automatically redirected to the correct version. For example, here I put in the version with http without www, and if I hit the enter key now, I see that it's automatically redirected to the https with www version. So there's an automatic redirect from one version to the correct version. If this does not happen correctly, get the redirect shorted or ask your web host to do this for you. With one preferred domain and a 301 redirect, users and search engines are automatically pointed to the preferred version of your site, which is good for SEO. 33. The SEO Health of Your Website: Google Search Console: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at Google search console. This is a free tool from Google that is indispensable for website owners. So it is important that you know how to use Google search console. It is not only an important tool for SEO, but also for the quality of your website in general. In this video, we will discuss how you can use Google Search Console to monitor and improve the SEO health of your website. To get to the tool we search in Google for Google Search Console, we click on the first result and then on this button start. Now here you have to log in with your Google account. If you don't have a Google account yet, you can create one first here. Once you are logged into your Google search console, the first thing to do is to add your website. For this, we go to add a property. Here you can select a type of property that you want to manage and choose between domain and URL prefix. The most convenient one is to choose domain for a Google search console. We have to verify all versions of our website and the domain option takes all your URLs across all subdomains at once. If you choose the domain option, this requires verification via das. To do this, you need to log in to the back end of your domain name provider and then copy and paste the code into a DNS record. Ask your web designer or web host to do this for you if you can't figure out how to do it. If your domain is verified, you will see all kinds of data about your website here in search console. You will start on the overview page as kind of the home page of search console. And here you see some data that is coming from different reports within search console, so coverage, experience, enhancements, etc.. So you have like a broad overview of everything that is important. Then the next item on the list is the URL inspection tool. And here you can input a certain URL of your website and then you can see what the status of that URL are. is within the Google search console. So if I choose, for example, my home page, I get some information. I see that the URLs in google, page is indexed, mobile usability is OK, breadcrumbs, Sitelinks search box, so everything is OK here. If you have changed this page, you can also request indexing. So then you would click this button and you basically request Google to come to your website and crawl and index this page again. This can be useful if you change the page and you really want to have that change reflected in the Google search results as soon as possible. Then the next section is performance and you can see the performance of your website and the search results and in Google Discover. So let's go to search results. And here you see all the kinds of data that how your website basically is performing in the search results. You see the number of queries that your website is ranking for, so the number of clicks and press and CTR and position and also the pages, countries, etc. We will look at these reports more in detail later on in the course. Another important function of search console is that you can check whether Googlebot has encountered any problems crawling your website. You can find that under coverage. So here you see a brief overview of all the URLs on your website and you see whether they are indexed. 74 URLs are indexed and 144 URLs are not indexed. So this is always interesting to check why these URLs are not indexed. There are seven reasons why that is. And if we scroll down a little bit, we see those seven reasons why pages aren't indexed. And there could be a variety of reasons, such as it could be a page with a redirect, it could be an alternate page with proper canonical tag. And it's important that you go through this list and see what's going on and why these pages aren't indexed. One important category, for example, are the 404 errors. So these are the URLs that Googlebot encountered that gave a 404 status code, which means that they were not found. And it's always important to check what is going on for these URLs. So if I click on this. I get all the URLs that are giving a 404 status code and I can immediately see that these are not so important because this, for example, was a category that I had on my website, but I later deleted, so that's all okay. It's interesting to see whether there are any pages on my website still linking to this 404 page, because if there are any links on my website to that 404 page, then I want to delete those links and I can check that by going to this magnifying glass. Inspect your URL. And then I can check. I see here that there are two referring pages to this 404 page, and this one was from a staging website that I once had. And this is a URL. This is a blog post that was already deleted before. This is often what happens is that Google search console still reports, pages and URLs that are already gone from your website. And it will take a little while for these to disappear from the reports. So this is not really a big deal. I know that these URLs no longer exist anymore and they will just disappear from these reports at some point. So this is something to keep in mind that even though I see 144 URLs not indexed, actually, all of them or most of them are there for a specific reason. They will disappear from this report at some point. So not every error within Google search console is relevant, let's say. It's not something that you should panic straightaway and you just need to check everything to see if there is anything in particular that you need to take action on. So let's look at another one. For example, the excluded by no index tag. And these are all URLs that are actually put on no index by myself. So that's perfectly fine. I don't want these URLs to be in the Google search results, so I excluded them myself. But always check these kinds of reports because there may be some URLs here that you do not want to be on no index and that you actually want to have in the search results. So that's something that you maybe did wrong on your website and you have to fix that. So just go over all these notifications and see if there's anything fishy going on. You can also check more specifically, not only for all the known pages, but only for the all submitted pages. That's like a smaller selection of the URLs on your site. And here you see that there are 67 indexed and only 1 not indexed. So from the pages that I submitted myself through the sitemap, this gives a much better picture. There's only one URL that has a potential problem. If I go down, I have discovered currently not indexed. And this URL is actually a blog post on my website. So for some reason Googlebot discovered this URL, but it currently didn't index it. If you scroll up, you always have this notification. So these pages aren't indexed or served on Google and you can always click on Learn More. And basically then you get an explanation of what's going on, what this error notification actually means and what the reason could be that you see this error within Google search console. If you fix the error, you can click here on Validate Fix and then Googlebot will go out and check your website again to see if you fix the error. And then at that point, this error will disappear from the reports. Next up, and this is very important, one, two, we're going to add an XML sitemap for that. We go here to site maps and then we can submit a new sitemap to Google. An XML sitemap is an overview of all the URLs on your website, and this is a perfect way for a search engine to crawl all the pages on your site. Such a site map is very useful for SEO because it helps the search engine crawl your website. Of course you must first create such an XML sitemap and if you use WordPress you can do this, for example, with the Yoast SEO plugin. So this is a slide map of my website that I created with Yoast SEO, and it's divided into all the posts and pages. So if I click on posts, I see a nice overview of all the posts on my website. So all the blog articles, this is perfect for a search engine because here you have all the URLs on your website listed on one page. A search engine can follow all the links in this sitemap and crawl all the pages on the site. This is really an ideal tool for the search engine as it now has a map of your entire website. Once you've generated a sitemap, you can submit it to Google via search console. For this, you copy the last part of the URL of the sitemap, then you go to Google Search console, you add it right here in this box and then you click submit. So this is really an important step to take in Google Search Console. Always generate an XML sitemap and submit it via search console. Then next up, we have removals and here you can have content on your site removed from Google Search. This could be useful if you no longer want certain URLs appearing in Google search results. Like for example, an event page for an event that already happened and you don't want to have it in the search results anymore. So here you can submit those URLs and request them to be removed from Google search. Then we have a section on experience with three different reports page experience, core web vitals and mobile usability. And here you can see some reports whether Googlebot finds that your website is offering a good page experience to users. I actually have no URLs with a good page experience, so that's not really good. Let's see what's going on. Well the core web vitals I don't have enough data for this for the mobile site. Mobile usability is good, https is good, so that's no problem. And if I go down here for the desktop, I see that I have 55 failing URLs for core web vitals. And core web vitals are basically like also experience metrics for how users see your website, how fast your website loads and all that sort of stuff. So if I click on it, I can see why URLs aren't considered good. I see that they need improvement for 55 URLs. And there's one issue, the LCP issue longer than 2.5 seconds. So some of these pages have some loading issues or they have or they are a little bit slower than they are supposed to be with regard to LCP. And if I click on it, you also can see what is this LCP issue? I can click here to learn more. And LCP stands for largest contentful paint. It's an important user metric for measuring perceived load speed. So this is really a technical issue that you would need to look into. And sometimes these are things that you can fix yourself, but other times you would generally need a web designer to fix this for you. Somebody that has experience with coding, for example, that can really look under the hood of your website and see what's going on to fix these sorts of things. It can also have to do with your web host, for example, that maybe you have a cheap web host that is not really that fast and this can give you some issues like this. So go over these reports and see if you can fix these things, but don't really panic if you see a lot of these errors because not all of them are super relevant. Like this LCP issue, for example, is not that much of a big deal. It says that it is a little bit slow and it needs improvement, but it's not like a critical error or anything. Also, if you are fixing this, you can again press this button, validate, fix, and we'll go out and check. If you have fixed the issue. Then mobile usability that looks at how good your website displays on mobile devices and there are no issues here. All of the URLs are usable, so there's nothing to do here. Then we have some enhancements that may or may not be applicable to your website. For example, the breadcrumbs. There are no issues here, products that you may have on your website. There is one valid product here, but there are some things to improve. So just go over all these reports and see if there's anything particular going on review snippets that are also valid. So no issues detected. The same for sitelinks search box. So just go over all these reports and see if there's anything going on. Then security and manual actions. In some cases, there could be problems with your website. For example, if they find that you have been hacked or that you have some spam on your website or whatever, and then you will get a manual action saying something like Your website has been removed from Google Search or something. Hopefully you won't have anything here in your search console and you will never have any errors here. But if you do have a security issue with your site or Google gave you a manual action, they will show up here and you will also get an email notifications. If that is the case, then there's some legacy tools and reports that's not really important anymore. These are reports that used to be in the old Google search console. Then we have one very important report here and that is links here. You can see all the links to your website. So the external links to backlinks pointing to your website. From other websites, you can see the top linking sites to you. You can see the top linking anchor text. And you can also see the internal links on your own website. Later in this course, we will look more extensively at links, which are a very important part of SEO, and we will also cover these reports more in detail. So as you can see, you can find a lot of data in search console. Just go through all the reports here on the left hand sidebar and see if there are any errors that you need to fix on your website. Here, I've listed the most important things in Google search console and a step by step plan. So first of all, verify the ownership of your website. Add all of your properties. You can do that also all in one go via the domain option, generate an XML sitemap and add it to Google Search console. And finally check the coverage report and check for potential errors such as 404s. These are the most important steps that you should, in any case, do in Google Search Console. It is an indispensable tool for site owners. Install it, submit a sitemap and check for any errors. This way you can make sure that the health of your website is in top condition. 34. Link Building Blueprint: More Traffic to Your Site: This section focuses on link building. We'll look at how to build links to your website to improve your rankings and drive more traffic to your site. The previous sections were all about the first pillar of SEO. Content and technical SEO are related to your own website, i.e. on-page optimization. Now we have arrived at the third pillar. Links. It is no longer about our own website, but about links from other websites. This is off-page optimization. The end goal of this section is to have more backlinks to your website, you will learn what the value of backlinks is, how to build base links the easy way, and the 4 best and most effective link building tactics and how to use them. Let's get started and I will see you in the next video! 35. Link Building for Higher Rankings and More Traffic: Earlier in the course, we already saw that links are very important to rank higher in search results. That is why in this section, we are going to take a look at building links to your website. With more backlinks, we increase the popularity and authority of our website. As we briefly discussed earlier in the course, links determine the popularity of a website. A link to a website as a kind of a vote for that website. When website A links to website B, website A votes for website B, as it were. Website A tells its visitors, go and have a look at website B, because it is relevant and there's nice information there. If a website has a lot of links pointing to it, then that website is considered popular on the Internet. And Google ranks this site higher in the search results. In fact, using links to measure a website's popularity is the biggest reason that Google has become the leading search engine. Google was the first to use links in the 1990s to measure the quality and popularity of a website. This allowed them to provide their users with very relevant and good search results, much better than competing search engines could. Competing search engines such as Alta Vista only looked at the text of a page, but that did not always give good results. For example, if someone search for the keyword Microsoft, it could happen that web pages of stores that sold Microsoft products would appear higher in the search results than the website of the company Microsoft itself. This was simply because those stores sold dozens of Microsoft products and one web page could have the word Microsoft on it dozens of times, making the search engines think that the web shop apparently was more relevant for the keyword Microsoft than the company Microsoft itself. By being the first to index links and measure the popularity of websites, Google managed to become the best and largest search engine. By looking specifically at links and popularity, Google was able to show much better and more relevant search results than competing search engines that only looked at the text of a web page. Links are actually valuable in two ways, and it is important to realize this. First, link building has value for SEO in a sense that you will rank higher in Google if you have more links pointing to your site. But additionally, every link on the Internet is an extra opportunity, an extra gateway for someone to reach your website. If a website links to your site, it is not only good for higher rankings into search engines, but also new visitors can come to your website via that link. Sometimes people lose sight of this and they are only working on link building to rank higher in the search engines. But it is important to keep in mind that Iinks can also directly attract new visitors, and this direct referral traffic can be very valuable as well. Of course, not every link to your website has the same value, some links will help you rank much higher in Google than other links. So we first have to figure out how a search engine determines what the value of a link is. If you can estimate the real value of a link, you can set up a more efficient link building campaign. You then have an idea how much time and effort it is worth to get a certain link. First, the authority of the referring domain is important. Additionally, the authority of the referring web page also counts, i.e., the page containing a link to your website. For example, a link from Amazon.com is very valuable, the domain authority is 96, which is very high. If you have a link from the homepage here, then it is also worth a lot because the PA or page authority of this web page is 92. If you get a link from another web page from Amazon.com, for example this one, this would be slightly less valuable because the PA of this page is 51. Amazon.com is a website with a lot of authority and a link from this site is therefore worth a lot more than a link from a small local website that nobody's ever even heard of. Also, the number of links on the referring page is a relevant factor. As we've seen before, Page Rank is passed through links and page rank is an indicator of authority. Here we have a web page with a page rank of 20. And on that page, there are four links that all pass five page rank points. If there had been ten links on this page, each link would have only passed two page rank points. For example, if we look at this resource page on fitness, we see that there are quite a few links on this page. That means that each individual link passes less link juice. On the other hand, this page has a decent page authority of 49 and has a good domain authority of 71. That means it is still well worth getting a link on this page to our fitness blog. Although there are more links on the page making each link a little less valuable, this page still has a lot of authority, which makes it worthwhile to get a link here. Again, keep in mind that a link is valuable not only for SEO, but also in terms of direct traffic. This is a popular page with fitness resources, so a link on this page can get a lot of direct referral traffic. Also, it's important to see whether the link is follow or nofollow. A nofollow link, as the name already shows, is not followed by Google. These links do not typically pass any page rank and in principle have little effect on your rankings in the search results. With the Moz toolbar that we already installed earlier in the course, you can see which links are followed and which are nofollowed. For that, we go to this pencil icon, then select followed and nofollowed, and now we see all the links on the page with a certain color. The ones in purple are nofollowed. A nofollow link has less value than a followed link, but it is certainly not useless. First, think again of the double value of a link. Every link is an extra gateway to your website and can attract visitors. Also, a nofollow link can lead to more followed links. Each link puts your website more in the picture. You can attract visitors to your website via nofollow link, and they might like your website and decide to link to you themselves. And finally, you also create a natural link profile. It is completely natural that you have nofollow links to your website, especially since almost every website nofollows the links in blog comments. So if you have nofollow links to your website, that's a much more natural link profile than if you didn't have those links at all. So the conclusion is: a followed link is more valuable than a nofollow link when you talk about SEO, but nofollow links are also definitely worthwhile to get for your website. More recently, Google introduced new link attributes, namely rel sponsored and rel UGC, which stands for user generated content. Website owners now can mark links with rel sponsored to identify links that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements. Rel UGC stands for user generated content, and this value is recommended to use for links within user generated content, such as comments and forum posts. Both these attributes work the same as nofollow in the sense that they do not pass any link juice, so they don't have a direct effect on rankings. Google does treat these links as hints that can help them to improve search, for example, by looking at the anchor text. So these are the words in the links to describe the content they're pointing at, so they can definitely have some effect for SEO. The relevance of the referring website is also important. If you have a fitness blog, a link from another fitness website is much more valuable than a link from a website about gardening, for example. Gardening has nothing to do with fitness, and Google will give a lot less weight to such a link. Finally, you could say that the harder it is to get a link, the more value it has. A link from the homepage of Amazon.com passes a ton of value, but is also very difficult to get. A link to your website in a blog comment that you post yourself on another website is very easy to get and therefore has a lot less value. You now know what link building is and how it can help you rank higher in the search results. In the next lessons, we are going to talk about how to get links to your website. I'll show you the easiest ways to get links and I'll tell you more about the best and most effective link building tactics. I'll see you in the next video! 36. Base Links: The Easiest Ways to Get Backlinks: If you've just launched a new website or when you're first getting started with link building, the best strategy is to start building some base links. Base links are the easiest types of backlinks to get for your site. They are the low hanging fruit. Easy to get, it doesn't take too much time, and anyone can build links this way. As we saw in the previous lesson, links that are easy to get are less valuable than harder to get links. So you should not expect absolute miracles from base links. But they are certainly valuable for your website. It is a good basis to build on. You will rank better in the search engines and every link is a nice promotion for your site. Each link can bring new visitors to your site and provides more visibility for your website on the Internet. In this video, we will look at some ways to get base links for your website. We start with one of the fastest and easiest ways to build links to your website, and that is social media. For example, if you have a Twitter account, include a link to your website in your profile. That way, if people want to know more about you, they can click right through to your website. So include links in your profile on your social media accounts. Also include links to your website in the messages you post on social media. If you've written a new blog post or if you have a special discount promotion in your web shop, post a message about it on social media with a link back to your website. Finally, make sure that users can easily share your website on social media. Every time someone shares an article on your website on social media, you will get a link back to your website. For example, you can use a plugin to automatically display share buttons in your article, like you can see here at the bottom of one of my blog posts. This makes it very easy for users to share your article on social media platforms. I have to mention here that social media does not have a direct influence on SEO and your rankings, but it does give you direct referral traffic from social media. So users clicking through from social platforms directly to your website. Links on social media in this way gets you more traffic to your website. Indirectly, it can also have a positive effect on your rankings. Someone sees your content on social media, thinks your article is interesting and then posts a link to it from his own website. This way you get more back links to your website and this will lead to higher rankings. Posting on social media also gives you more authority. You can share your knowledge, you get better branding and you can build relationships with other people in your niche. Another type of base links that you can get started with easily is blog comments. Comment on a blog article and include a link to your website. To find these blogs, you can use the following searches in Google: keyword blog, keyword leave a comment, and keyword reply. For keyword, you can enter the keywords you want to promote or the general market in which you operate. For example, for our fitness website, we can go to Google and search for 'fitness blog', we then click through to a blog about fitness, for example, gymjunkies.nl. From here, we can click on one of the blog articles. If we scroll down here, you can see that we can indeed leave a comment on this article. This way you can quickly create links to your website. All you have to do is fill in your name, your email address, and here you fill in your website so that you will get a backlink to your site. A few things to keep in mind when leaving blog comments. First, don't spam! For example, you saw in the comment form that you can enter your own name. Some people start spamming here and instead of using their own name, they would write something like the best fitness blog in the Netherlands or something similar like that, or worse, they put a link to their own website in the comment itself and aggressively advertise their own website. You will be immediately blocked for spam. Instead, just provide relevant comments on the blog post, make a useful contribution to the discussion and show that you read the article and have something useful to add or ask a question with a useful blog comment. You draw attention to your website in a positive way and people will click through more often to your website. Also, you can start building relationships with other bloggers in your niche this way. This is useful for possible cooperation and partnerships. And if you build a relationship with someone, they may also link to your website someday! So this would be a more valuable followed link, whereas blog comment links are typically nofollowed. Next, forums are also a good place to build links to your website. Some forums offer the option to include a link to your website in your profile. Of course, you can also mention your website in a message that you post on a forum. You can search for forums in Google with the query keyword forum. So for our fitness website, we would search in Google for fitness forum. Then there are resource pages where you could request a link to your website. Searches you could use to find resource pages include: keyword resources, keyword best resources, keyword intitle links and keyword helpful links. For a nice guide on resource page link building, you can check this article on Ahrefs.com. You can find a link in the resources for this lecture. Then the last type of links are directories, these are websites that provide an overview of companies in different industries. You can register your website for these directories, like, for example, Yelp, Bing places, Foursquare, Chamber of Commerce sites, Hotfrog and local directories. In summary, this is an overview of the various types of base links, you can start with. Social media, so that would be profile links, posts and shares. Blog comments, forums, resource pages and directories. Base links are the easiest types of links for your website and work especially well if you have just launched a new site or when you are just getting started with link building. They are low hanging fruit and easy to get links. This way you can get the ball rolling and get the first links for your website. In the next lesson, we will take it a step further and we will look at links that take a little more effort and time. I will show you the best and most effective link building tactics to get more backlinks. I'll see you in the next lesson. 37. The 4 Best and Most Effective Link Building Tactics: In the previous lesson, we discussed base links, easy to get links. In this lesson, we'll take it a step further and look at building links that take a little more effort and time. That also means that these links are generally more powerful and valuable for SEO. So there are many different link building methods you can use. In this lesson, we focus on the four best and most effective link building tactics. If you really get started with link building, these are the methods that give the best results that can result in valuable back links which will help you rank better in the search engines. Let's get started with the first tactic. First, it is a good building tactic to start your own blog. This will result in lots of backlinks to your site. A blog is a place on your website where you publish informational blog posts. On a blog, readers can usually also leave a comment which allows you to interact with your visitors as well. Blogs gather lots of links. A blog is a place for informational articles, videos and images that provide value to your visitor. You give them free tips and valuable information on a specific topic. As you can imagine, it is easier to obtain links with informational content than with purely commercial content. People are more likely to link to an article with useful free tips than a web page that is trying to sell something. For example, if we take another look at one of the most popular pages on my website that drives the most organic search traffic, we see that this is a purely informational article. This is a long and super valuable article that really helps people. It gets backlinks from other websites, ranks high in Google and attracts lots of visitors each month from the search engines. When you post valuable articles on your blog, you show that you are an expert in your field. This increases trust and leads to more visitors becoming a customer. A blog is a form of content marketing. Content marketing is all about publishing great, valuable content that results in more backlinks, more traffic and more customers. The second link building tactic is link bait. This is also a form of content marketing that is specifically aimed at obtaining back links. You create some good link bait, throw it in the digital ocean and then reel in the backlinks. Link bait is an extension of the first link building tactic content marketing through blogging, but it is more specifically aimed at getting links. The goal here is to create popular content that is widely shared. You can think of how-to articles. So an example would be a blog article on our fitness site about training at home. Someone who wants to know how to train at home gets a full instruction, including a training schedule. Controversial articles. This works fine, but you also have to be a little bit careful here, of course, that you don't overdo it and that you don't write like a click bait article headline where the content of the article doesn't really match with the headline itself. So be a little bit careful. Controversial articles work well, but you have to know what you're doing. Unique promotions and giveaways. If you give something away, that is of course interesting for a lot of people. An ideal way to get people to link to your give away and share it on social media. It can also be a great way to get more people on your mailing list like you see here, you can enter the contest if you enter your email address. You can also use giveaways to get more social shares, like, for example, here on the thank you page, you can get three additional entries to the contest if you share it with friends via social media or email. So a giveaway can not only result in lots of backlinks, you can also get more email subscribers and social shares. Giveaways are a great way to get more visibility online and more links to your website. Tools are also a nice way of link bait that could be practical or just funny. This will require you to have a good idea and a programmer to create it or maybe a handy WordPress plugin or something to help you with that. An example would be the snippet optimizer of SEOmofo that we've seen earlier in the course. This is a very useful tool you can use to create an SEO title and meta description. As you can see, this page is very popular. It has a pretty high DA and PA. So a domain authority of 48 and a page authority of 46. And as you can see, the page has attracted no less than over 50,000 links. This is such a useful tool that people will share and link to it a lot. Infographics are also nice to use as link bait. An infographics is a visual representation of information. That way you can present information in an easy to grasp visual manner. Infographics are shared a lot on the Internet and therefore receive many links. You can hire a designer to create an infographic, or you can make one yourself using, for example, the free tool Canva. On Canva you can find several templates for infographics that you can use to make your own infographic. So here you have some different templates that you can use and you can just use these templates to fill in your own text and make your own infographics. This is really useful to put some complex information in a visual infographic that makes it easier for people to understand. List articles do well and tend to get lots of shares and backlinks, so this is also a good idea for link bait. Think of, for example, blog posts like the 5 best fitness exercises to do at home or 7 ways to lose weight without starving yourself. List articles like these are popular and tend to get many backlinks. They often give good tips summarized in a number of points. And then we have quizzes. This type of content also works very well on the Internet and is shared very often. For example, this simple quiz on Buzzfeed.com, where you have to say which colors you think this dress has. This quiz went viral and got shared millions of times. People just enjoy taking quizzes and with a fun quiz, you can generate a lot of links and get a lot of attention on social media. If you have a WordPress website, you can easily create a quiz with the Thrive quiz builder plug in. You can find a link to this blog in the resources. This list gives you a lot of ideas for link bait. Articles that get a ton of back links. Keep the following things in mind when creating link bait content. Create content worth linking to. Put enough time and effort into creating your content. Don't forget to also promote your content via press releases, social media, your newsletter, ads, etc. This way, more people see your content increasing the links and shares you get from it. The third link building tactic that works well is guest blogging. With this tactic, you write blog posts for other websites and in this post you include a link back to your own website. This is one of my favorite link building tactics. This method has a number of advantages. Guest blogging is a very powerful and relatively easy way of link building, simply because there are many websites that are desperate for good content. This gives a win-win situation. The site that posts your guest blog is happy with a well-written new article, and you get a nice link back to your website. Also, these are links from relevant websites that match the topic of your own website. As we've seen before, links from related websites have more power than links from unrelated sites. Guest articles also bring the right visitors to your website. For example, if you have a fitness website and you post a guest blog on another fitness site, you can get people to your website who are interested in fitness and who liked reading your guest blog. Via the link you place in your guest blog article or bio at the bottom of the post, these people can click through to your website and these are exactly the type of visitors you want to have to your site. And finally, guest blogging is a great way to network. If you write a good article for a website that operates in the same niche as you do, you can quickly build relationships and who knows what might come out of that. Maybe a co-promotion where you each promote the other's websites or products. Here are some useful tips for guest blogging. Write guest blogs on reputable sites with a good authority. Look at the site's domain authority, the higher the domain authority, the more a link from that site is worth. Use Google to find good guest blogging opportunities. You could use search terms like keyword guest blog, guest blogging, guest blogger or write for us. These queries will give you a lot of sites that accept guest posts. Check what their requirements are, and send them an email with an idea for a nice guest blog post. The final link building tactic we'll discuss in this lesson is to copy links from your competitors. We have previously copied keywords from our competitors, but we can also do the same with their links. We can use the free Moz link explorer to look at our competitors' backlink profiles. With the help of this tool, we can see which websites are linking to our competitors. And we can then contact those sites to ask if they also want to link to us. To use the link explorer, you need a free account with Moz. Then you can do 10 searches per month in the link explorer. If you're using the Mozbar we reviewed earlier in the course, then you already have a free account with Moz and you can use the same login credentials here. So here we enter one of our competitors in the Link Explorer, for example, the website Coastalfitoc.com . Make sure you have root domain selected here and then click Analyze. Now we get an overview of backlinks to our competitor. We see that our competitor has a domain authority of 18 and there are 46 domains linking to their site. They have 2.4 thousand inbound links and 136 ranking keywords. If we scroll down, we see the top followed links to this site, so here we have all the sites that are linking to our competitor. Let's click on this link to see more of them. So here you see a number of websites that are linking to our competitor. These are all sites that we potentially can also get a link from so we can click through to these websites and see what their contact details are and send them an email to request if they could also link to us. Always look at the backlink profile of multiple of your competitors so you get more ideas for link building. You can also use KWFinder to check the backlink profiles of competitor sites. With a subscription, you get access to several tools that are made by the company Mangools that created KWFinder. One of them is LinkMiner. So we fill in the domain of our competitor and here we can choose whether we want to see all links, the new links or only lost links. When you click find backlinks, you get an overview of all the links that are pointing to our competitor. We also get a lot of extra data on these links. So, for example, the Citation Flow, Trust Flow, the number of Facebook shares, the Alexa rank and the page they are linking to. Here we also see the anchor text that they are using. And if you select one of these links, the nice thing is that it immediately goes to that page and shows you where the link exactly is. So in this case, if we select this link, we see that this website has an image of coastal fitness that contains the link back to our competitor. So we immediately see what kind of link they have placed to one of our competitors. This is very useful to see very quickly if you could also get a similar link like that on that website. So we can use Moz Link Explorer and LinkMiner by Mangools to find out which websites link to our competitors, and then we can contact those websites to ask if they would also like to link to our website. Copying links from your competitors is a super effective way to quickly get a whole list of relevant websites that you can request a link from. In summary, these are the four best and most effective link building tactics that have already proven themselves in practice, they are easy to implement and give great results. So, first of all, start a blog. This is where you share interesting content, informational articles that people like to link to. This also increases your status as an expert in your field. Link bait. Here you focus specifically on creating popular content with the aim of attracting more links. Guest blogging. Writing guess articles on other websites with a link back to your own website in the article. And finally, copying links from your competitors. We've reached the end of this section and you now have a powerful link building blueprint at your disposal. You now know that links have a double value. They are good for SEO and links from other websites can bring visitors directly to your website by means of referral traffic. You know how to determine the value of links and you know which links have the most SEO power. Also, you now know how to obtain base links for your website. This will get the ball rolling with the first links. The next step is to take advantage of the four best and most effective link building tactics we've discussed in this video. Get started with this link building blueprint to build backlinks to your website. Link building improves your rankings in the search engines and brings more traffic to your website, directly via those links or because of higher rankings in the search results. Good luck building those backlinks! 38. Link building Excel sheet: It's also important to keep track of all the links that you request. This will prevent you from requesting a link again later from the same website. I've made a useful Excel sheet for this. You can download in the resources of this lesson. In the first column, you enter the website you requested the link from. In the second column, the date on which you requested the link, then the category of the link, for example, it could be a directory or a guest blog. And these columns also have a filter so you can filter to only see a specific category. Then we have the page on your own website to which the link points, whether the link has been placed or not. And lastly, any specific notes that you have for this link. Use this Excel sheet when you're doing your link building. It's a nice way to keep track of all the links you requested and their status. You can download the sheet from the resources in this lecture. 39. Measuring the Results of Your SEO Campaign: If you're doing SEO for your website, of course, you also want to know what the results of your efforts are. In this module, we'll look at the most important website's stats and how you can track and analyze them this way you know how your website is doing and what the results of your SEO efforts are. Also, by looking at your stats, you can more easily and more quickly adjust your SEO strategy where appropriate. For example, if you see that your traffic from Google is going down lately, you can figure out what the reasons may be and take action. Or perhaps you've seen your stats that you're ranking on Position 11 and Google for an important keyword. Now you could focus more on that keyword to try and get it to the top ten. Just one position up brings you to the first page of Google and this could lead to a lot more traffic. The goals for this module are that you know what the most important SEO stats are for your website and that you know which tools you can use for this. We'll start off with Google Analytics, how to install it and set it up and how to use it. Next, you'll learn more about measuring the most important SEO stats of your website: search traffic, links and rankings. Let's get started and I'll see you in the next video. 40. Google Analytics: Tracking Your Website Statistics: Google Analytics is a free tool that gives you detailed insight into all kinds of statistics about your website. For example, you can see how many visitors your website gets, how those visitors ended up on your site, and what they did on your site. So which pages they viewed, whether they ordered a product, etc.. This way you can measure whether to work on your website is really paying off. In this video we will look at Google Analytics 4, this is the latest version. I will first show you how to install and set up the tool and then we will take a look at how to use Google Analytics and where you can find the most important data. Google Analytics 4 is in full development. This means that screens and menus often change. So don't worry if your screen looks slightly different than in a video. Let's get started. You can find Google Analytics by searching for it in Google or by going straight to analytics.google.com. Here you can log in with your Google account and if you don't already have one, then you can create one here. If you're using Google Analytics for the first time, you will have to create a new account first. Here you can enter your account name, which can be, for example, your company name, and then you can set up a new property. So you create a new property, you can give it a name. I already have one, so I'll just put test here. Then you can set the time zone. You can set your currency and then you click next. Here. You can provide some business information. This is optional so you don't really have to fill it in. I'm just going to skip it for now and click Create and then you can set up a data stream. This is normally your website, but in the new Google Analytics 4, you can also collect data from your apps. So if you have an Android app or an iOS app, you can also fill those in here. But I'll just go with web for now. Then you can enter your website URL here. You can give your stream a name. For example, my website. And then you can indicate whether you want to use enhanced measurement. With this option, you can measure some extra things. Page views are always tracked, but if you turn on improved measurement, you also get data about scrolls, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement and file downloads. If you click on the gear icon, you can indicate per item whether you want to measure it or not. Then you click on Create Stream. Now you will see your measurement ID here at the right. You have to put this in the code of every page on your website, and this way you link your website to Google Analytics so that it can collect the data. To do this, you can go to view tag instructions. And here are some instructions to install your Google tag. Here are some instructions for installing with a website builder or CMS like Drupal Duda Monster Insights, TypO3 and Wix. But there is also the option of installing it manually. And here you have the code that you have to insert in every page on your website. You can do this via Google Tag Manager. There are some instructions here for that, but for WordPress it is also very easy to do with a plug in a personal use Google Site Kit for that and just with a few clicks the plugin will add the analytics code to your website and it will be done in no time. You can find an install Site Kit from your WordPress dashboard. It's also useful to filter out any internal traffic from your own IP address because you will often visit your own website and you'd rather not include these visits in your stats. To do this, go to configure tag settings, then click show all and then go to define internal traffic. Create a new rule. And here you can give your rule a name. For example, corporate headquarters. The traffic type value, which you can leave at internal and then you have the option to put your IP address here. You can put it in a range, you can put it like an exact address or begins with or ends with. These are some different options. And then you put your IP address here and to find out what your IP address is, you can click this link. What's my IP address? Just note that if you have multiple devices within your network, for example, you have a PC, a laptop and a mobile phone, and you use those to visit your website. They all have their own IP version six address, so you could add them all separately with IP address equals. But the most convenient option would be to choose IP address begins with because all those IP v6 addresses start with the same series of letters and numbers, so you can just fill those in and all your devices within your IP address network will be filtered out. If you've done all that, you fill everything in. You can click here on the button create. Now the filter has been created and you just need to activate it first. We go to admin data settings, data filters. Then here's your internal traffic filter. You can click on it. The current filter state is testing and then you can put it here to active and then click Save and then all internal traffic will be filtered out of your stats. If you've done all of this, you can now check all the settings of your property here in the admin section. And here you can set up everything per property. You can select your property right here, and you can also use the setup assistance to go through the most important things in terms of privacy. You should, in any case, pay attention to turn on Google signals, which you can find right here. If you turn this on, you share data from your users with third parties for advertising purposes. If you want to enable this, you will have to include this in your privacy policy and you will have to ask your visitors permission for collecting this data. So keep that in mind if you want to switch this on. Finally, you can also link to other products such as Google ads, and you can also here on the left hand sidebar you can connect to, for example, Google search console. And this can be handy because then those products also exchange data with one another. All right. We're now done with installing and setting up analytics, and now it's time to see what we can actually do with this tool. We're going to take a quick look at the most important data that you can find in Google Analytics. First up, we go to the home page. I don't have any data in this property, so I'm just going to select the property that I'm using for my website. And on the homepage you will find an overview of the most important statistics. There are divided into different cards, and for each card you can then click through to the Associated Report. For example, this link right here will take you to the report so you can see all kinds of different things here, like the number of users of your website over a certain period of time, for example, the last seven days. And you can adjust that period over here by selecting another one. You can see the number of users in the last 30 minutes here. You have some recently viewed items, cards that you view frequently in a carousel, and you can click through and also open one of the reports below that you will see the insights which you can use to track your most important stats, and you can see important changes and trends so that you can gain more insight and take action quickly on your data. I don't have anything here yet because I only recently set up Google Analytics for. You can also go to insights here at the top, right? And here you can see all kinds of useful data based on questions. For example, you can go to basic performance and you'll see questions like, How many users did I have last week? And What are my top pages and screens by views? And if you click one of those things and then it will give you the answer on that specific question. So here you have a nice overview of the top pages. You can also type questions yourself here in the search bar. At the top, for example, I could type something like. How many users from Belgium? And then I see that I had 23 users from Belgium over the last couple of days. So this is really interesting that you can really use any type of question that you have about your stats from your website, and you can just put that in the search bar and you will get the answer straight away. So the homepage gives you a nice overview, and if you want to dig a little deeper into your data, you can do that via the reports here on the left. And the first one you get is the reports snapshot. This is a general overview of all the data you have collected. It's a little bit similar to the home page again with all kinds of cards with specific data about your website. So you have the users coming to your website. The real time stats you have. Where do you users come from? What are your top campaigns users by country? You have all kinds of data here on this page. On the top. Right. You can also start comparing data by adding new comparisons right here. You can share your report with other users. Here again, you have the Insights section that we looked at earlier. And this one is also a nice one, the pencil icon right here, you can use that to customize your reports. So here you can remove cards, you can add them, you can move them around. And this way you can really create your own dashboard with all the data that you want to see. So this is quite handy. And then the next report is real time. And here you can see data from the last 30 minutes. This gives you a nice insight into the most recent statistics. Then there are all kinds of other reports here. Under a life cycle, you have, for example, acquisition. That is quite an important one. We can go to traffic acquisition, for example, and here you can see how many users came via organic search, how many users came to your website direct. Then there's referral traffic, unassigned and organic socials. That's the traffic from organic social media. These stats paint the picture of how successful your SEO efforts are, especially if your organic search traffic is going up. You're doing a good SEO job. Then we go to engagement. And here especially conversions is an interesting report. Here you get an insight into all your conversions, for example, sign ups to your newsletter, and you must first set up your own conversion events so that they are counted as a conversion and are included in the stats. On this Google Help page, you can see exactly how to set up and manage your conversion events in Google Analytics and you can find a link to this page in the resources. Then you can see exactly how to actually do this and set up your conversions. Then there's also monetization reports. This is relevant. If you are selling things on your website, then you can see, for example, what your total revenue is here under monetization overview. So this is quite handy. Retention is also a nice report here. You can see how many users are coming back to your site. So the number of new users and returning users. Then next up, we have user statistics. So demographics, demographics, overview. And here you can see your users by country, you can see users in the last 30 minutes. You can see also users by city, which can be interesting to look at, especially if you're doing local SEO. And then there are some other data like users by gender interests and age. I don't have that data because I switched that off because of privacy reasons. Then we have users by language. So there's a ton of data here on your users and you can also go to demographic details there. You have some more charts and data about different countries that your users are coming from. You even have stats on the tech. So let's go to tech overview and then you can, for example, see what kind of platform they are coming from. It's all web because I don't have any Android or iOS apps. You see the operating system that they are using, you see the device that they're using desktop, mobile or tablet. Then you can even see the browser that users are using such as Chrome, Safari, etc., the screen resolution. So there's a lot of data here that you can look at and also potentially use to improve your website. So that's some interesting stuff to look at as well. Then there's the next section here on the left, Explore. And here you can dig even deeper into your data. You can create custom reports yourself here. And as a beginner you don't really need this, I would say. But if you really want to do a thorough analysis of specific data, you can go absolutely wild here. Then we have advertising. So if you advertise in Google, you can see all kinds of interesting data here, such as conversion paths. This will help you to analyze and improve your ad campaigns. And then finally the configure section here. You can set up conversion events for your site. So the help page we looked at earlier explains how to do this. All right. This was a quick overview of Google Analytics. We looked at how to install and set up the tool and how to use it. Analytics gives you all kinds of valuable statistics with which you can measure how your website is performing. In the next lesson, we'll take a closer look specifically at key SEO metrics. See you there. 41. Measuring Search Traffic, Links, and Rankings: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at some important SEO metrics that indicate how successful your SEO efforts are. This way, you can make adjustments to your SEO strategy when and where necessary. We're going to look at organic search, traffic links and rankings. First, the organic search traffic. It is important to know the number of visitors coming from organic search to your website. Second, we would like to know which keywords people used in the search engines to get to our website. This way we can see which keywords are important for our website. We can find that data in Google search console. For that, we go to performance and then search results. And now we get a detailed look at how our website is doing in Google search. Here you can select the search type, which is default web, but you can also select image, video or news. We're going to leave it at default for now. You can select the date range. It's default on the last three months, but you can also select a shorter or a longer time period. I just leave it at three months to get the most recent data and then we click these two boxes, average CTR and average position, so that they are added to the chart here as well as to the table below. So here we have the total number of clicks. This shows the total search traffic from Google. It is the number of clicks from the Google search results to your website. Then the total number of impressions, that is the number of times your website was shown in Google. Search results for certain queries. Then the average CTR or click through rate, which shows that of all impressions in the search results an average of 0.7% clicked through to my website. And finally, the average position for all keywords in the Google search results. Positions are always an average because Google uses personalized search results based on location and search history. So a user in London gets to see different search results than someone in Manchester, for example. And this shows you the average position in the search results for all those different impressions. Then if we scroll down, we can see the queries that people searched for in Google. There's only ten per page, but we can increase that to more. So let's say 500. And now for each of these queries, we get all kinds of data. So for example, for the first query here, we see that we have 107 clicks, 6,534 impressions, which means that there was a total CTR of 1.6%. And the average position in the search results for this query was 2.4. This is a very useful overview where you can see for which keywords your website is ranking Google and which keywords drive the most traffic to your site. Check this data from time to time because this is very valuable info about your site's SEO. You can also see the pages that get the most traffic. For that, we click on this tab pages. And now we see the top pages here that get the most traffic from Google search. So this page here gets a combined total number of clicks of 1169 over the past three months. Impressions 140,000, CTR 0.8% and position 34.7. So that's the position of all the queries that this particular Web page is ranking for. If you want to see the queries that this page is ranking for, you just click on it. And then here at the top you see another filter added for this particular page. And then when you scroll down again, you can go to queries and then you can see all the queries that this particular web page is ranking for. If you want to see all the stats again, we just remove this filter. There are also some more tabs that we can look at regarding our search traffic, for example, countries. So here you can see from which countries your search traffic is coming. So for me, this would be the Netherlands, the most number of clicks, more than 3,000. And then we have Belgium, Turkey, Spain. So you can see which countries the search traffic is coming from. We also have devices. So which type of devices that people use to search in Google Desktop is the most favorite one three over 3,000 clicks from desktop devices that mobile and tablet. We also have search appearance. So here you can see that my website appeared as a review snippet in Google search results over 54,000 times. So these are the impressions and that led to 194 clicks and then you have videos and web light results. So this can be interesting to see in which way your website appeared in the search results. And finally, you also have the dates here. You can see your stats per day, which can also be very useful. So overall, you can find lots of detailed information here on your search traffic. You can see how many users clicked from the search results to your website and which queries they used. The second category to keep an eye on for SEO is links. If you are doing any link building, it is smart to keep track of your link building in a spreadsheet. For this, you can use the Excel sheet that we already saw in the section on link building. You can find this Excel sheet again as a download in the resources. In addition, links are obviously also created to your website without you having asked for it. For an overall picture, it is therefore useful to see which websites link to you. You can check this with Google Search Console or LinkMiner. For an overview of your link profile in Search Console, you can click here on links in the left hand menu. Here under external links, you can see how many links are pointing to your website and which sites link to you. This will give you insights into the success of your link building campaign. In this case, 1,090. External links to my site have been registered. Note that this is just what Google search console registered. There may be more links than this. If you click on more, you will see the entire overview of the top target pages on your site. For example, the homepage has 428 incoming links from 121 different domains. Of course, it is also useful to know which sites are linking to you. If I now click on this URL of the homepage, I see which websites link to my home page. For example, this domain has 25 links pointing to my home page. If I click on this site, I can also see which sub pages on that domain link to my home page. Search Console provides a nice overview of links to your website. You can also see the top linking sites, meaning the domains that link to your website the most frequently. Mangools, the company that makes KW Finder also has a tool called Link Miner. Let's check it out what it looks like. You can fill in your domain here. And click on Find Backlinks. The big advantage of using Link Miner is that you get to see all kinds of additional data that you don't see in Google search console. So for example, I get all kinds of different metrics on every link to my website. I can also see what the link strength is of any particular backlink, so I can immediately see which links are the most valuable to my website. Clicking on one of these links, I can also see on which part of the page the link to my website is actually placed. This is very useful to get a quick overview so you don't have to click through to those sites to immediately see where the link is placed. The last important piece of data to keep track of is your rankings. In other words, how high do you ranking Google for the keywords you have optimized your website for? If you've optimized a web page for a specific keyword, you obviously want to know if it's ranking in the search engines. The higher you rank for it in the search results, the more traffic you get to your site. Many people think that the most convenient way to check your rankings is to just go to Google typing your keyword and then see where your website ranks. That sounds logical, right? Well, maybe that makes sense, but I would definitely advise against using this method. The reason is that Google uses personalized search results. The search results you see depend, for example, on your location and your search history. So, for example, if you regularly visit your own website on your computer, your site will also rank higher in the search results. Google sees from your search history that you are often visiting that website and will show it in a higher position on the device of someone else who has never visited your website. In short, if you check the rankings of your keywords in Google, you will not get a reliable picture. In addition, it obviously takes a lot of time to type in keyword by keyword to find out exactly where you rank. A better way to look at the position of your keywords in Google Search Console. As we've just seen, you have to go to performance for that. So again, make sure to select the CTR and the average position and now you can see your rankings for your top search queries. Note that these are average positions and also Google only measures the positions of your keywords if an impression occurs, that is, if your web page has appeared on someone's screen in the search results. So if you have a keyword that is on page two of Google and someone searches for that keyword and looks no further than page one, then a position in Google search console will not be displayed. So it could happen that you are in position 11 for a keyword, but you do not see it in Google search console because no impressions have been tracked. In short, the average position in search console is useful information to have, but it's not the complete picture. If you want to check rankings for specific keywords, you can use the free tool SERP robot. You can find this tool at serprobot.com, just go to free SERP checker. Then here you can choose your region, global US, choose your device, desktop, mobile or tablet, your domain name that you want to track the keyword for. And then you can enter your keywords here. So let's see where this domain ranks for the keyword apps exercises, click to capture, click the button. And now we can see that this domain ranks on position five for the keyword apps exercises in Google.com. Personally, I like to use the SERP Watcher rank tracking tool of Mangools. This is part of the KWFinder suite. So go to the SEO tools and then go to SERP Watcher. I've set up some tracking for different websites and when I click them I can see the historical statistics for every keyword. I can immediately see the top gainers and the top losers and the general performance index. If I want to have more information on a particular keyword, I can select it and see my historical position history. At the bottom, you can also see the search volume history. So you can see for this particular term, if the search volume increases or decreases, you can also preview the SERP to see what it exactly looks like. In this case, I can see that I'm currently ranking on position two in Google for this particular keyword. So in this video we looked at three important SEO metrics: organic search, traffic, the backlinks to your website and keyword rankings. With these statistics, you have a clear picture of how your website is performing in terms of SEO. Keep an eye on these statistics to measure your SEO success and adjust your SEO strategy when and where necessary. 42. Local SEO: Ranking High in Local Search Results: So far, we've looked at general SEO. In this section, we focus on a specific part of SEO, namely local SEO. Local SEO works in a slightly different way than general SEO. And that's what we'll look at in this section. The goal of local SEO is to have good visibility in search engines for local searches. This means that your website ranks high for local queries of people who are searching for products or services close to the location of your business. Local SEO is very important these days. 46 percent of searches in Google are local in nature. And the advantage is that many websites don't do much with local SEO, meaning there are more opportunities for you to bring in more visitors and customers. The first question to ask yourself is, does it make sense for me to apply local SEO to my website? Who can benefit from local SEO? Well, ultimately, it is interesting for a lot of different websites. First, this naturally applies to companies that receive customers at their location, like hairdressers, dentists, lawyers, bicycle shops, etc. Companies that deliver products or services to customers in their area. Think of plumbers and cleaning companies as well as painters. It is also useful for companies with a bigger service area, which could be national or even international, but still with a local component. Consider, for example, a web designer or a copywriter. Even though they work largely online and can provide services, sometimes even in multiple countries or worldwide, many customers still prefer a service provider in their area. For example, someone who lives in Amsterdam will often still prefer a web designer who's also based in Amsterdam so they can make an appointment to discuss the details of the project. So also for these types of entrepreneurs, local SEO is very important. As you can see, local SEO is interesting for a lot of different websites. Even businesses operating nationally or internationally can benefit from local SEO. Are you not sure whether local SEO is also relevant for you? A nice test to see if you should start with the local SEO is to search in Google for your keywords. For example, if you are a web designer, just go to Google and search for the keyword web designer. And as you can see here, I get local search results for web designers in my area. That means that Google sees the search query web designer as a query with a local search intent. In this case, local SEO is certainly relevant. So just use Google to see if local SEO is relevant to your website. Only if you don't have any local component in your business, such as a website that is completely online and has no physical stores such as Amazon, then local SEO is not important for you. OK, so the end goal of this section is that your website ranks well for local searches. And finally, you will learn in this section how local SEO works and the four steps to improve visibility in local search. I'll tell you more about local SEO in the following lessons. 43. Improve Your Local SEO in 4 Steps: Google is getting better and better at providing the most useful search results to its users. Searches that have a local component return specific local search results. Of course, this applies to searches with a city name in it. So when I search for physiotherapist Amsterdam, I get search results of physiotherapists who are based in Amsterdam. But Google also knows your physical location. If you use a mobile phone to search something on Google, the search engine knows exactly where you are located and if you have a laptop or PC, Google sees your location on the basis of your IP address. So if I now search for physiotherapist without the location, then as you can see, I get results from physiotherapists in Tilburg, my hometown. Google sees from my IP address that I am currently located in Tilburg and when I search for something like physiotherapist it is of course obvious that I need a physiotherapist who is close to my location. In other words, Google understands that a keyword like physiotherapist has a strong local search intent and thus returns results in my immediate vicinity. If you live in New York, for example, and you would search for the keyword physiotherapist, Google would return different search results and you would only see physiotherapists located near you. There are two components for these local search results. First, the local pack. These are the three results that you see here. They are featured results from physiotherapists in the area and I immediately see how far they are away from my location. The address, phone number, reviews, a link to the website and a Google Maps image indicating where the physiotherapists are located. There's even a directions button that I can click to immediately navigate to the physiotherapist via Google Maps. I can also click on View All and then I get to see more physiotherapists in my area. If we go back to the search results below the local pack, we can see the second component of local SEO, namely the localized search results. These are the normal search results, but these are specifically aimed at my location. So these will typically be physiotherapists in my area. So how do you manage to be visible for local SEO, so that you appear in the local pack and/or in the localized search results for local searches of people in your immediate vicinity? You can improve your visibility in local search by following these four steps. First, claim and verify a Google Business Profile. This is essential for local SEO. Second, local citations. These are mentions of your name, address and telephone number on the Internet, especially in online business directories. Third, on-page and off-page optimization, meaning local SEO optimization of your own website, on-page, and building backlinks, off-page optimization. And finally, reviews for your website. These will be shown in the local pack, as we have just seen. And if you have a lot of good reviews, it will lead to more clicks on your listing. You can also find these four steps in the Worksheet that belongs to this section. Here you can see all the steps with an explanation for each step. That way you don't have to log back in to the online course every time to see which steps you need to take. You can download the Worksheet from the lesson resources and use it to get started with local SEO. In the following lessons, I will show you how to perform each of these four steps. 44. Google Business Profile: The first step to improve your local SEO is to create a free Google business profile. Google business profile is essential for local SEO. It will lead to higher rankings in Google Maps and local searches. If you don't have a Google business profile yet, you will first have to add or claim your business profile. You can easily do this via Google Maps. Just enter your address in the search bar and then add your business from there. If the profile already exists, you can claim your business through Google Maps. And finally, you will also have to verify your profile. If you have trouble setting everything up, you can check the instructions on this Google Support page. You can find a link to this page in the resources. Pay attention to the following things when registering. Enter all your company details like name, address and phone number and also don't spam and always use your real company name. Some people think that they will rank higher if they enter all kinds of keywords instead of their own company name. But definitely don't do this. If Google see this, they will remove your listing. And of course it also doesn't look professional. People should be able to find you using your real business name. If you don't serve customers at your business address and you visit or deliver to customers directly, remember to also set your service area. Of course you have to enter your website address and the business category. You have to verify your profile in order to get listed on Google Business Profile. And finally, you have to complete your profile with images, a logo, opening hours, etc.. Google Business profile is essential to local SEO. Once you've set up everything and created a profile, your local SEO gets an immediate boost. Let's look at all the benefits you get from having a Google business profile. First of all, with a business profile, Google knows everything about your business. Your address and phone number, your website, your opening hours business category, you name it. Google now knows exactly who you are and what you do. You are now also visible with your business information in Google Maps as well as Google Search. For example, if I search for physiotherapist in Google Maps, then I immediately see a few physiotherapists in my immediate vicinity on the map. If I click on one, for example, physiotherapy Wilheminapark, I will see their business information provided by Google Business Profile. And also in Google Search. If I search for physiotherapeut Tilburg, then I get to see the local park again with the same physiotherapy Wilheminapark right here. As you can see, the Google business profile listing of this physiotherapist gives them much greater visibility in Google. Third, with a Google business profile, you are also visible to people who search for your business name. So if I search for physiotherapeut Wilheminapark, I immediately see their business profile in the so called knowledge panel to the right of the search results. I have to add here, though, that Google does not always show a knowledge panel for every business. Therefore, it is possible that your knowledge panel will not be shown. But if you promote your site and get reviews, you will get a knowledge panel at some point. You can now see all relevant information taken directly from Google Business Profile. So you have the address, opening hours, telephone number, reviews, etc. For customers, this is very useful. If your business shows up in Google like this, for example, they can immediately see your opening hours. You can provide your customers with useful information about your business directly in Google search results. And this also increases the trust that people have in your company. Another advantage is that people can write a review for you if you have a Google business profile. Reviews are also very important for local SEO, and we'll talk about that a little bit more in a later video. Here in the Knowledge Panel, you can see that this physiotherapist has 54 Google reviews with an average rating of 4.8. If I click here, I can also write a review for this physiotherapist myself. This is a great way to get more reviews for your business. You can easily update your own profile by searching for your own business name. So if I search for my business name, I can see the knowledge panel that I manage this business profile and I can directly edit my profile from here. I just click on edit your business information. And here I can update my info. Make sure that all of this information is always up to date. For example, your opening hours. So if you go on a holiday, then update your opening hours so that people can see this directly in Google. Another benefit of a business profile is that you can also add posts to your knowledge panel. This is great for promoting events, discounts, or products to your customers. For this, you click on add a post and then you can add a description, optionally a button like book or order online. You can add some photos and then you can post your message. This will then show up in your knowledge panel. Finally, your business information is also easily accessible in Google Search if people specifically search for it. So if I search for Physiotherapist Wilhelminapark telephone number, I immediately see the telephone number right within Google search results and when I search for their address, I also see their address right here in the search results. This information is taken directly from their Google business profile. As you can see, Google business profile has a lot of benefits and is really essential for local SEO. You become much more visible in local search. You are listed in Google Maps. You get a knowledge panel and you start showing up in the local pack and localized search results. With a business profile, you increase your visibility in local search as well as the trust that people have in your business. Creating a Google business profile is the first important step to improve your local SEO, but there's more work to do. In the following videos, we'll take a look at steps 2 to 4 to improve your rankings in local search. 45. Local Citations: The second step to improve your local SEO is to work on local citations. These are online mentions of your local business with your name, address and phone number. That's why they are sometimes also called NAP citations, so name, address, phone number. For example, these will often be citations on business directories such as Yelp and Foursquare. It is important to have correct and consistent local citations. First of all, it is an important local ranking factor for search engines. So you will rank higher in the local search results if you have local citations. Each citation lets search engines know that your address and other business information is correct and match the information on your Google my business account. Secondly, it can also bring you more customers as users often search in local business directories for local product and service providers. If your phone number and address are listed correctly on these types of sites, people can find your business. And that in turn brings in new customers. To improve your citations and thus your local SEO, take the following two steps. First, make sure that your current citations are correct. And secondly, create additional citations on relevant sites. Step one is especially relevant if your business information changes at some point, maybe you move to a new location, maybe you got a new phone number or changed your business name. Then it is important to check if there are any listings of your business with the old, incorrect data. For this, you can use the following searches in Google. So for example, company name old phone number, address old company name, company name old address. So these are some searches you can use to find the old, incorrect information online. If you find any incorrect and outdated listings, contact the website and ask them to update your business information. Let's move on to step two, creating additional citations on relevant sites. There are lots of interesting business directories where it could be useful to request a listing to your business. Some of the largest and most important ones can be found in the local SEO worksheet that you can download in the resources. The nice thing is that you usually also add your website URL in your business listing, so that gives you additional backlinks to your website. You can also search for specific local business directories or websites. For example, there may be local business associations or websites that specifically list companies in your industry. You can use the following searches in Google and see if there are any suitable websites where you can request a listing. So this would be city business directory, seed keyword business directory. So for example, if you have a fitness blog, that would be fitness business directory and seed keyword city. For example, when I search for physiotherapist Tilburg, I see a website here in the search results that lists various physiotherapists in Tilburg. This would be a great website to request the listing. It would improve local SEO and at the same time it can bring you more customers who land on this website and are looking for a physiotherapist. In summary, local citations are important for local SEO. Follow these two steps. First, make sure that your current local citations are correct. And secondly, get additional citations on relevant sites. If your business information is listed on various websites, you will rank better in local search results. Start with the most important directories to create a citation. Then if you have some more time, see on what other websites you can also request a listing. Also make sure you keep track of the sites you have requested a listing on, in a spreadsheet. This way you prevent that you later request a listing at a site where you've already done so. For this, you can use the link building Excel sheet that we already saw earlier in the course. You can find this Excel sheet as a download in the lesson resources again. Now you know how to use local citations to improve local SEO. In the next lesson, we'll look at step number three, on-page and off-page optimization. 46. On-Page and off-Page Optimization: Okay, so far we've looked at steps one and two. Now let's move on to step number three of local SEO: on-page and off-page optimization. We start with on-page optimization. As we have seen before, on page means everything related to your own website. We will send clear signals to Google on our site that we have a local presence. We can do this in the following ways. First, we are going to mention our company name, address and telephone number on our website. In any case, you put this information on your contact page. And you could also include it in the footer of your website. This allows users to see where you're located on every page of your site. You can also optionally include a Google map with your location in the footer and/or on the contact page. This is especially useful for brick and mortar businesses that receive customers at their location. An example would be this physiotherapist again who on the contact page shows this Google map. You can also optionally apply normal on-page optimization, in this case by including the city where you are located in the title of the page, the H1 heading, the URL, the body text and the meta description. You could also link on your website to other companies and places in the area. This gives a strong signal to search engines that you have a local presence. How strongly you optimize here depends on how locally active you are. For example, for physiotherapist or dentist who only receive clients at their business location, it is definitely useful to include the city name in the title tag of the home page, for example, in order to send a strong signal to search engines and users where they are located. Also, for other pages on the website, it may be useful to consistently mention the city name in the page title and things like the headings and body text. If you have a company where a local SEO is less relevant, for example, a web designer who provides services nationwide, but who also wants to rank well locally in his own city and region. You could limit that on-page optimization to just your address in the footer and maybe the city name in the title of the homepage. The more local SEO is relevant to you, the more you would use on page optimization for your location. If you have multiple business locations, then you can create multiple pages, each focused on a specific region or city. You can see an example here from Europcar, a car rental company. They have various locations that are listed on their website. Each location has a separate page that is optimised for that location. For example, if I click on London Heathrow Airport, I get a separate page for that location using the MozBar. You can see that the page title is London Heathrow Airport Car Rental. The meta description names the location and also the H1 mentions London Heathrow. So this page is clearly optimized for the keyword London Heathrow Airport car rental. When we go back, for example, select Manchester Airport. Then we see that this page is optimized for the keyword car rental Manchester Airport. With multiple locations, you can therefore also create more pages that are each optimized for a keyword plus the name of the city. There are also websites that do this without actually having multiple business locations. For example, this collection agency only has one branch in the city of Eindhoven, but what they have done is create a whole series of web pages that are all optimized for their main keyword collection agency, plus the name of a city. Even though they don't have a location here at all, they created these pages only to rank in Google for multiple keywords collection agency plus the name of the city. These pages actually rank quite well, but you'd better think twice about using this strategy because it could work against you. First, the visitor may not be happy when he arrives at the website. Someone can search and Google for collection agency Amsterdam and then he arrives at this web page and sees the business is not located in Amsterdam at all, but in Eindhoven. This user was not searching for that. So the question is whether this visitor would ever become a customer. Secondly, Google is not happy about this either. In the case of car rental company Europcar, all location pages have added value for users because they can see the opening hours and the address and a telephone number of the rental location they are searching for. But for the collection agency we looked at, that's not the case. They aren't located in any of these cities and those location pages are only there to get into Google search results. They have no added value for users and in this case, each of these location pages has exactly the same text and only a different city name in a text. These pages are of no use to visitors, and Google calls this doorway pages which according to their guidelines, are not allowed. So in short, this tactic can still work for local SEO, but it does not necessarily result in more customers and it is against Google's guidelines. So think twice before you're doing something like this. Next, we can also use off-page optimization for local SEO. In other words, link building. You can review the link building section in this course and here you will find all kinds of general tips about link building that you can also use here. But more specifically for local SEO, we mainly look at locally relevant backlinks. For example, you could think of writing guest blogs for local websites. A link from a local newspaper or news site. For example, if you have a special event coming up, you could contact a local newspaper or news site to write an article about it. Contact other local websites in your area, for example, if you're organizing an event. See if there are websites that list events in the area. You could ask local business associations if they want to link to if you are involved with a local sports club or if you're sponsoring an event, you could also ask them to link to you as well. With these tips for on-page and off-page optimization, you will improve your local SEO and you will start to rank higher in the local search results. In the next video, we are going to take a look at step number four: reviews. 47. Reviews: Let's talk about the final step for local SEO. Step number four: reviews. In general, reviews are very important for your business. They provide a piece of social proof that is important for your trust factor, increasing the chance that someone will become a customer. People value the experience of others and are more likely to buy products or services if they have positive reviews. Since users value reviews so much, they are also important to Google. If people are very satisfied with their products and services and leave positive reviews about your business. This can lead to higher rankings in Google. If you have a lot of positive reviews as a company, Google sees that you are popular and this can lead to higher rankings in local search results. There are a few factors that Google likely uses when looking at reviews. First of all, the number of reviews. Companies with a lot of reviews are more popular in Google's eyes. The content of reviews. Google sees what customers write about you and takes this into account when assessing the reviews. Diversity in review platforms. People can leave reviews via Google, but there are also countless other review websites, and if you have reviews on many different platforms, that is also a positive signal to Google. The star rating of the reviews. If you get a high rating from customers, you get more bonus points in the eyes of Google. The status of the reviewers, there can be reviewers who have a special status because for example, they have written many reviews that other users liked and how often you get new reviews. If you keep getting a lot of new reviews, that's a positive signal to Google. So what are the best places to get reviews? Well, first of all, there's Google, of course, which is a very important one. But as we have seen, diversity is also important and it helps to get reviews on different platforms. Facebook, for example, is a large platform where people can also leave reviews for your business. Some business directories like Yelp, for example, have the option for users to leave reviews for companies that have a listing on their site. There are also industry specific review sites that can be important to you. For example, a site like TripAdvisor. And if you have a restaurant, for example, there are also some restaurant review sites that are worth getting reviews on. This restaurant in New York, for example, has reviews in Google, as you can see from the knowledge panel where it shows over 1000 Google reviews, but it also shows that they have reviews from OpenTable, Kayak and Zomato. These are sites where you can search for restaurants and read restaurant reviews. There are also specialized review sites that you can use for your business, such as trustpilot and reviews.io. These types of sites offer extra services such as the option to display a review widget on your website or automatically have review requests sent to your customers once they purchase a product in your web shop. These are paid services and they can be a worthwhile investment if you have a large website or web shop. Not sure what the best review sites are for you? Well then just search in Google for the names of some of your competitors to see on which platforms they have reviews or search in Google for your seed keyword reviews, like restaurant reviews or plumber reviews. Then the next question, of course, is: how do you get reviews? Well, first of all, very simply, just ask! After finishing a project or sending a product, make it a habit to ask for a review. This seems very obvious, but you would be surprised how many entrepreneurs do not do this. To get the ball rolling, you could ask your loyal repeat customers to write a review for you. There's a higher chance they will write a review for you than a customer who ordered for the first time. You can also include a review request and a link to leave a review in your email signature or on your invoice. Make it as easy as possible for your customers. Send them a direct link they can use to write a review. For reviews on Google, you can create such a link in your Google my business account. For instructions on how to do this, check this Google Support page. You can find a link to this page in the resources. By creating a direct link, customers can easily leave a review. If you always ask your customers for a review, you will see that you will quickly start getting some nice reviews. You will probably also get negative reviews. Many review platforms, including Google itself, allow you to post a reply to a review if you get a negative review. Always respond and offer a solution if this is possible. Don't start arguing or act out of emotion that will usually only make things worse. If you write a good response to negative reviews, other users will see that you are customer friendly and that's you're doing your best to resolve any complaints that customers may have. This lets people know that you're taking any complaints seriously and that you try to find a solution. This increases their trust in your business. We've reached the end of this section on local SEO. To summarize, here are the four steps to improve your rankings and local search results. Create a free Google business profile. Second, work on your local citations. These are online mentions and listings of your business data, and can be found, for example, in business directories. Third, apply on-page and off-page optimization, meaning optimization of your own website and also build more links from other local websites. And finally, make sure you get reviews for your business. Follow these four steps and you will notice that you will start ranking better in the local search results. Download the worksheet Local SEO to make it easier to work on these four steps. You can find the worksheet in the resources. Good luck with your local SEO. 48. 7 SEO Use Cases for ChatGPT: Chat GPT became very popular in a very short period of time. Only two months after its launch, the app already hit 100 million users. As you can see in this image, other popular apps like Tiktok and Instagram took much longer to achieve this. What is ChatGPT and why is it so popular? ChatGPT is a smart chatbot that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing. You can use it as a virtual assistant for various tasks like copywriting, SEO, or even writing code. To use the tool, go to chat.openai.com. Here you can create a free account. There's also a paid subscription which has some more features, but that's not necessary. The free version works very well too. The tool is straightforward to use. You simply enter a task or a question in the chat window and you receive a response. ChatGPT is the ultimate SEO assistant. You can do lots of interesting things with it, but where do you start? In this video, I'll show you seven SEO use cases for chatGPT. Let's go. The first one is keyword research. You can use Chat to create a list of seed keywords. For example, give me a list of ten seed keywords about dog training and voila, you get a nice list. You can then input these into a keyword tool to find related keywords. Note that you should use this primarily for brainstorming ideas. Use keyword tools for search volumes and keyword difficulty, because you cannot get this data from ChatGPT. Chad can also help you with clustering keywords. For example, clustering keywords by search intent. Here I have a list of keywords, and I ask Chat to cluster them into groups based on search intent. ChatGPT does a very good job and divides them into keywords with informational intent, transactional intent, navigational intent. Note that you still have to check the search results whether it's actually correct. Also, keep in mind that search intent can sometimes be mixed within the top ten search results. Chat can even write code for you, for example, code for specific SEO use cases like redirect rules, hreflang tags, and structured data. Here I asked Chat to write structured data for a recipe for vegetarian lasagna and it immediately gave me some useful code. Note that you have to check whether the code is correct before adding it to your site. You can of course, also use a plugin, which is easier, but sometimes there is no available plugin for what you want to do. And a plugin can also slow down your site. In these cases, manually adding code is better. Chat can also help you with writing SEO titles. Here I ask chat for five SEO titles of maximum 60 characters for a blog article with the title ChatGPT. and the future of SEO. The titles have to be well written, make the reader curious, and increase click through rate to our site. And there you go, you get five great options. This gives you plenty of inspiration for a great SEO title. You can do the same for your metadscriptions of course. Here I ask Chat for five meta descriptions of maximum 155 characters for a blog article with the title Chat GPT and the future of SEO. Chat nicely gives me a few options for a meta description. This is great for inspiration, you get a lot more ideas and you can write a strong meta description more quickly. Moving on to link building. You can ask Chat to create a list of popular websites in your niche. You can then contact those sites to ask whether you can write a guest post. I ask Chat for the name of the website, the URL and a short description. Moz, Copy Blogger and Search Engine Journal are definitely good picks. And you can also of course, ask Chat to write a good outreach e mail that you can send to those websites. ChatGPT can also assist you with recycling content. Content takes a lot of time and money to create, so it's smart to recycle it. For instance, if you've written a blog post, turn it into a video for Youtube, a Powerpoint presentation, a series of tweets, et cetera. I ask Chat to write three tweets about a blog post that I copy pasted in the chat window. And there you go. Within a few seconds, Chat gives you three tweets. It even includes emojis and hash tags. Of course, you still have to tweak these a little, but you already have a good starting point. This saves you a lot of time. All right, so in this video we've seen seven great SEO use cases for ChatGPT. But don't stop there. Be creative and I'm sure you can come up with many more ways how ChatGPT can help you with your work. 49. Tips to Get the Most Out of ChatGPT: ChatGPT is a great tool. However, many people don't use it correctly, leading to poor results. That's of course, not what we want. So in this video, I'm giving you some useful tips to get the most out of ChatGPT. First and foremost, prompts are crucial. What is a prompt? It's simply the question or task that you give to ChatGPT. When it comes to prompts, remember that garbage in is garbage out. If your prompt is not good, you will also get a poor response. This is where many people go wrong because their prompts are too short and too general. Here are some tips to create a great prompt. First, describe the role that Chat should have. Provide context. Finally, specify your question or task. For instance, your prompt could be: You are a professional copywriter. That is the role. You write for websites about online marketing in a clear and understandable style, without jargon, that's the context. Write a 200 word introduction for a blog post titled SEO for Beginners. That's the task. By describing the role, context and task, you will get a much better response from Chat. Secondly, be super specific. Describe in detail what you expect. If you want Chat to write some copy, specify the target audience, the goal, the style and the tone of voice, the formatting like sentence length and headings, the language, et cetera. Here's where many people make mistakes by providing too short and too general prompts, like write a blog post about topic this or that. This will give you very mediocre results. A nice trick is to pretend that Chat is human. This sounds a little weird, I know, but it works really well. Give the tool the same instructions that you would give to a human assistant or copywriter. When you ask a human copywriter to write something for you, you don't just say, write a blog post about SEO. You provide a much more detailed explanation what kind of blog post you need, who the target audience is, et cetera. If you pretend that ChatGPT is human, you will automatically give the right instructions and you will get much better results. ChatGPT is a chatbot and it remembers previous conversation. This is the real strength of ChatGPT, so make sure you use it. If you are not happy with the response you get, ask Chat to clarify, simplify, improve, rewrite, and so on. Another option is to change your prompt and try again. You can also click the regenerate button, then Chat will respond to the same prompt, again with a different output. Make use of these options to get a response that you're happy with. Here's another tip. To get better output, ask for unique information like: what is something that many people don't know about growing vegetables? Or give me three controversial opinions about Ai. Chat often provides very general and superficial answers. But asking for unique information makes the output much more interesting. Also be original and creative. For example, write a tweet in the style of Ernest Hemingway or write an introduction for my blog article about ChatGPT and use sarcasm and humor. The more original and creative your prompt, the better the output. Another useful tip is to ask Chat to rewrite and improve your prompt. This is how it works. First, write a simple, general prompt. Then ask Chat to improve the prompt. And then run the new prompt. For instance, improve the following prompt. Write a blog post about podcasting for beginners. This is too generic, so we ask Chat to improve it. Now Chat will give you a more extensive prompt with clear instructions. You can adjust it to your preferences and then use it as a new prompt. Tip number six, always check Chat's output. If it provides facts, stories, or statistics, be very careful. Chat can sometimes hallucinate, which means it can simply make things up. For example, someone asked Chat for the world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot. And Chat responded with a name, a date, and the record even claiming it was in the Guinness Book of Records. This is of course complete nonsense, but ChatGPT presented it as fact. So be very cautious and check the output carefully. You don't want to publish inaccurate information on your website of course. Also never copy paste output from Chat directly to your website and always finetune and rewrite it first. Your content should be in your own tone of voice based on your experience and expertise. Remember, Chat is the assistant and you are the expert. Also, make use of the many handy browser extensions for chatGPT. They extend the functionality of the tool. Check out the Chrome store to see if there are any that suit your needs. One useful extension that I like to use is A I Prompt Genius. With this extension, you can save your prompts and find new ones, allowing you to work much faster and much more efficient with ChatGPT. Finally, an important question is, what does Google actually think of AI generated content? Will AI content on your website get you into trouble? Google states that appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines. This means that it is not used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which is against our spam policies. Google also emphasizes that using AI doesn't give content any special gains. It's just content. If it is useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of E-E-A-T, it might do well in search. If it doesn't, it might not. E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. So if you simply copy paste from ChatGPT to your website, you probably won't rank well in Google. AI content tends to be quite generic and may not meet E-E-A-T criteria. So always rewrite content and put your own experience and expertise in it. If you make your content useful, helpful, original, and satisfying E-E-A-T criteria, you're good to go and you will rank well in Google. 50. SEO Strategies: White Hat and Black Hat: When you're doing SEO, you can use two strategies, white hat and black hat. There's also actually a third strategy in between gray hat, and that is a mix between the two. In this lesson, you'll learn what the differences are between white hat and black hat SEO and which one you should pick for your website. So what are the differences between white hat and black hat SEO? Search engines want to provide users with the best and most relevant search results. Obviously, they don't want websites trying to rank higher by manipulating the search results and using certain tricks. For that reason, Google created webmaster guidelines with rules they expect webmasters to follow. White Hat SEO is a strategy that complies with search engine guidelines. Black hat SEO, on the other hand, violates these guidelines. So which of these two should you choose? White hat SEO is an ethical and safe way to do SEO. You're aiming for long term results and you don't run the risk of running into issues with Google. Black hat SEO is against search engine rules and is a lot riskier. It focuses more on the short term by trying to trick search engines and taking shortcuts to rank higher in the search results. This is riskier as it could result in a penalty from Google. If they find out what you're doing, they can lower your rankings or even kick you out of the search results entirely. Some companies have gone bankrupt after receiving a penalty from Google. If your online business relies mostly on traffic from search engines and you lose that traffic overnight, you have a serious problem. To me, white hat SEO is the obvious choice. That's why this course is all about white hat strategies and techniques. Black hat SEO can certainly work for the short term, but in the long term there's a great risk that Google will find out and then you could be in a lot of trouble. The big question now, of course, is how does Google check whether everyone complies with the rules and what are those rules? I'll tell you more about that in the next lesson. 51. About Pandas and Penguins: How to Stay on Google’s Good Side: In the world of SEO, some people still get the shivers when you start talking about pandas and penguins. These are the code names given to important updates to the algorithm that Google uses to rank search results. Panda and Penguin both target websites that use SEO tricks that violate the guidelines. With the addition of these updates to the algorithm, Google can thus largely automatically penalize website that do not follow the rules of the game. Panda was launched in 2011 and mainly focuses on the content of websites. The goal of Panda is to reward websites with quality content by ranking them higher in its search results and to punish websites with low quality content by ranking them lower, especially websites were hit that publish lots of content that they copied from other websites. Penguin was launched in 2012 and mainly looks at a website's links. The goal of Penguin is to penalize sites that don't follow the rules of the game. When it comes to link building, for example, you can think of buying links to try to rank higher in the search results. Google checks whether everyone adheres to the rules of the game via the algorithm, and Panda and Penguin are part of that algorithm. But there are also manual checks. There's a Google web spam team that can manually check whether websites comply with the rules. So we now know how Google checks whether everyone is following the rules. The question remains, what exactly are those rules? If we know the rules, we also know what we can and cannot do in the field of SEO. Google created webmaster guidelines that explain the rules of the game. First of all, you'll see the general guidelines you need to follow to allow Google to find ,index, and rank your site. But the rules of the game mainly concern the quality guidelines. You must follow these guidelines if you want to practice white hat SEO. So the quality guidelines first state some basic principles. So here you can see make pages primarily for users, not for search engines, don't deceive your users, avoid tricks to improve your search engine rankings and think about what makes your website unique, valuable or engaging. So these are the basic principles that you need to comply with. Then we also have specific guidelines here that indicate which techniques you should definitely not use. So it says to avoid stuff like automatically generated content, participating in links schemes, creating pages with little or no original content, cloaking, sneaky redirects, etc.. Then you also need to follow good practices like monitoring your site for hacking and preventing and removing user generated spam on your site. If your site violates one or more of these guidelines, then Google may take manual action against it. If you remedied the problem, you can submit your site again for reconsideration. For most of these points, it is quite obvious that this is not allowed, but it can certainly happen that you have good intentions but still do things that are actually not allowed. In the rest of this video, I'll show you some examples of things you should definitely avoid, but that not everyone knows are against the rules. First, putting paid links on your website without using nofollow or rel=sponsored. Paying for links is quite common on the Internet. If website A has an advertisement that is placed on website B with a link back to website A, that is a paid link. Of course, these paid links should not be able to affect website A's ranking in the organic unpaid search results. In other words, those paid links are not supposed to pass page rank. That's why Google requires paid links to always have a nofollow attribute or the attribute rel=sponsored. This means the paid link has no effect for SEO. So if you pay for a link on another website, for example, in the form of an advertisement, always make sure that that link has a nofollow or Rel=sponsored attribute. Ask the website owner who places your advertisement to add one of these attributes to the link. Of course, this also applies to paid links on your own website. So if someone advertises on your website add Nofollow or Rel=sponsored to those links. Affiliate links are links where you recommend a certain product and you get a commission if someone buys that product through your link. This is also a form of a paid link and you have to add nofollow or rel=sponsored to it. In HTML, these attributes look like this. Make sure that all page links, including your affiliate links, are nofollowed or have the rel=sponsored attribute. Secondly, you also have to watch out for over optimization, this happens when you get carried away, optimizing for your keywords. We've already discussed this in the section on SEO content, make sure not to include your keywords in your copy too often. Google gives an example on their support pages. So we've seen this example earlier in the course as well. So something like we sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you're thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact, et cetera. So every sentence here has custom cigar humidors, which is the keyword that this copy is optimized for. This is not really good practice for users as well as search engines. And you could get a spam penalty if you used this kind of over optimization of your SEO copy. This also applies, for example, to the anchor text of backlinks. The anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink and this counts for SEO. So suppose you create a press release that is distributed on many other sites and it reads something like there are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress and all these words, all these key words, they are actually hyperlinks to certain pages on your website that are optimized for the specific keywords. And you're now using a ton of keywords in the anchor text of these links to web pages on your site. So this is clearly a case of over optimizing. If many of the links pointing to your web site have a lot of keywords in them, then you are manipulating things a bit and you could run into trouble with Google. It is OK if there are keywords in the anchor text of back links to your site. But if this is the case for virtually all links pointing to your site, then something is up and you are spamming in the eyes of Google. Duplicate content is another thing that you should try to avoid. Duplicate content is exact or near duplicate content that appears on the web in more than one place. This can be internal duplicate content, meaning that you have multiple web pages on your own domain that have duplicate content or external duplicate content where you have content on your website that is copied from another domain. So from a different website. First, let's talk about external duplicate content. Many people tend to think that everything is public on the Internet and you can copy paste content from other domains on your website without any problems. This is really a misconception. Copyright also applies on the Internet. And you cannot just copy blog posts or, for example, images from other websites and put them on your own website. If you do this, you're violating copyright. If the creator of the original work finds out, he can claim damages. So only copy content from other websites, if you have permission from the original author. If you get that permission, you also have to mention the original source. So include a link back to the original article or add a so-called canonical tag to the article. A canonical tag lets Google know that this is a copy and that the original is on a different website. You have to add this canonical tag in the head section of the page that contains a duplicate content. Such a tag looks like this. You can add it to the code or use a plugin to do this. Also, keep in mind that you don't get any benefits from external duplicate content, Google does not want to show multiple versions of the same content in the search results. So Google will typically only show the original article in the search results and not to duplicate copied version on another domain. Also, make sure that you don't copy too much content from other websites. If virtually your entire site is a copy of other websites, you'll be in trouble with Google. Then your website offers no added value and you could get a penalty from Google. Now let's talk a bit about internal duplicate content on your own domain. An example of that you can sometimes find online is websites consciously creating duplicate content by having multiple pages on their own website with exactly the same text. So it could be the same text optimized for different keywords. For example, web designer with different city names. We've seen this example before in the course here, we have a collection agency that only has a branch in the city of Eindhoven, but what they have done is make a whole series of web pages that are optimized for the keyword collection agency plus city. And all these pages have exactly the same text and they only replace a city name in each page. As you can see, it's a long list of pages with all kinds of different city names that have exactly the same text on the web page. This kind of duplicate content is against Google's quality guidelines. These pages are only intended for search engines and have no added value for a visitor because all of them have exactly the same text. However, at the same time, this tactic can still work in some cases, like the website that we just saw ranks well with several pages on the keyword collection agency plus city name. Even though it is against Google's guidelines, the search engine apparently cannot check whether everyone complies and can still rank sites that violate the guidelines. A better approach in this case would be to just combine different keywords on one page or create multiple pages with unique content. Finally, also, stay away from excessive link exchanges. This will get you into trouble with Google. If you link to me, I will link back to you, I often get these kinds of requests via email. Maybe you've received these types of emails as well some time. Reciprocal links on the Internet are quite common and not really a problem. They happen frequently in a completely natural way where just two websites happen to link to one another. However, if a lot of your back links are reciprocal, Google will see this and realize that you are doing excessive link exchanges to get SEO benefits. If Google finds out this can really hurt your rankings. If you do this occasionally and if a link to that on our website is also relevant to your users, then that's OK. But if you do this frequently and on a large scale, you could get into trouble. So be careful with link exchange and don't do it excessively. Panda and Penguin patrol the Internet and punish websites that don't follow Google's guidelines. If you want to stay on Google's good side, always practice white hat SEO. If you use any black hat techniques to try and improve your rankings, this may work in the short term, but in the long term, you're putting the future of your website at risk. Focus on creating a valuable website for your visitors. Don't use any tricks and stick to Google's quality guidelines. This way, Google will love your site and you will start to rank higher and higher in the search results. 52. Conclusion + SEO Action Plan: All righty, that's it! You've reached the end of the course SEO made simple. We've covered a lot of ground in this course and you now have a complete blueprint to SEO success. You know all the fundamentals and what it takes to rank your website high in the search engines. Now that you have a good grasp of the theory, it is time to put it in practice and take action. Start applying SEO to your website to get more visibility in the search engines and boost your traffic and revenue. You now have all the tools and knowledge to make your website a success. Now it's up to you to make it happen. There are many different aspects of SEO and a lot of different things you can work on. Sometimes that can feel a little bit overwhelming. Where do you start? Where do you go from here? That's what we'll cover in this video. I will quickly summarize the most important points of the course and you'll get an action plan on where to start and which areas to focus on to get the best results as quickly as possible. Your first step is to start with keyword research. This is the most important first step of your campaign. Follow the steps in the keyword research section to find the best keywords for your website. You can use traditional keyword research as well as competitor keyword research to steal the keywords of your competitors. You can use both methods to get the best results, but you can also use just one method to begin with. As a reminder, look for keywords that meet the following conditions. First of all, keywords that are relevant and attract the right visitors for your website. Keywords with good search volume and you can rank for them because you can beat the competition. Also, don't forget the smart strategy for reaching fast results that we talked about in the course, namely using the power of your own website. So if you already have a website, check in search console, what your most successful pages are that get the most organic search traffic. Check which queries they rank for and then improve your page for keywords that rank in the positions 2 to 10 or the top 20. The second step is to optimize your web site for the keywords of your choice by either creating new SEO content or by improving content you already have on your website. Use one keyword per page or multiple keywords as long as they are similar and have the same search content. Always write for your visitors and not just for the search engines. So don't over optimize your content, mention your keywords in the right places like the SEO title tag, the meta description, the URL, etc.. Good, well-written SEO content with great usability is the key to success. So go for easy to read texts with short paragraphs, etc.. Step number three is link building. Links are very important for your rankings, so start with building base links. This is the low hanging fruit like blog comments, forums, resource pages and directories. Then apply the 4 best and most effective link building tactics. These are blogging, writing link bait articles, guest blogging and stealing links from your competitors. Keep track of the sites you reach out to in a special link building spreadsheet. Step 4 is technical SEO. Check for and fix any technical issues your site may have. Make sure your website is mobile friendly, apply SSL or HTTPS. Make sure you have a good loading speed, fix errors like broken links or 404s. So in summary, these are the 4 most important steps that you should take next when you start working on your website. Before I send you on your way to start working on your website, here are some useful tips to get the best results. First, look out for bad SEO advice. There's a ton of information on the Internet about SEO. A lot of it is good, but unfortunately there's also a lot of terrible or outdated SEO advice. This could lead to wasting time and or money on things that do not work. In the worst case scenario, it could lead to a penalty from Google. So always check whether the source of information is trustworthy and reputable. Some of my favorite sites that I know are very good and provide good articles on SEO are Ahrefs.com, Backlinko.com, Moz.com, Yoast.com and Searchenginejournal.com. Secondly, apply the 80/20 rule when you're working on SEO. This is the Pareto Principle and it is a very powerful method. It means that 20 percent of your SEO efforts are responsible for 80 percent of your results. This means that there are a handful of SEO elements that will improve your website results drastically. But it also means that around 80 percent of your SEO efforts only give 20 percent of results. So make sure you don't put too much time and energy into things that don't make any significant difference. For example, your image compression could be slightly improved or the dimensions of the images on your site are not correct on all pages. This could take a ton of work to work on this and adjust for just a very small load speed improvement. Or maybe all the images on your website don't have alt texts and you start adding it to thousands of images. This will cost you hours and hours of your time for just a very small improvement in terms of SEO. Only focus on these things when you have the time for them and start with the 20 percent of things that really move the needle. And when you have finished working on those, start working on the less essential things. Also, take it step by step. Your website and your SEO takes a lot of time. SEO is a long term process. It can sometimes feel overwhelming if there are a million and one things you want to do with your website. Don't try to do everything all at once. Just improve your site and your SEO step by step and you will see huge improvements down the line. The Japanese call this kaizen. Continuous improvement, usually in small steps that have a tremendous effect over time. Oftentimes we think that massive success requires massive action, but the reality is that tiny improvements can make a tremendous difference over time. For example, if you get only one percent better every day for one year, at the end of the year, you will end up being 37.78 times better than the day you started, meaning an improvement of over 3,700 percent. So take SEO one step at a time and keep working on your SEO action plan. Small and continuous improvements on the areas that really matter will have a huge impact on your site's success. Fourthly, don't be afraid to ask for help. We all have stuff that we like and don't like to do as well as stuff that we are good at and not so good at. Maybe you are good at content writing, for example, but technical SEO or making changes to your website is really not your cup of tea and you don't like doing it either. Then just ask for help or outsource it to a web designer or SEO specialist instead of forcing yourself to do things you are not really good at or you don't really like doing. It is a much better idea to ask someone for help who has expertise in that area. OK, now you're ready to SEO your site and make it more visible in the search engines for more traffic and revenue. And if you enjoyed this course, it would be awesome if you could leave a review. Reviews help me to keep making new content. And I'd also love to hear what you think of this course, so I can keep making it better and better. Thanks for taking this SEO course, and I wish you the best of luck with your website!