Transcripts
1. 1 Intro SEO Skillshare: Hi there and welcome to this video where I will be explaining more about search engine optimization or in short, SEO. This will be a walk-through that will go in depth into all the aspects and all the essentials of SEO search engine optimization. So that you can either go into a company, a start-up, a tech business or anything, and optimized SEO. Or if you are a startup owner, business owner, that you can look at your own business and see where you can improve. Because at the end of the day, if you leverage SEO properly, that is unpaid, the glory coming your way and growing your business without US spending a dime. So without further ado, I want to jump straight into the actual most requested questions that I get so that you can start off with a ton of value.
2. 2 Most Asked Questions around SEO: Let's talk about the most requested questions first. What is SEO? Seo stands for search engine optimization, which is the art of ranking high on a search engine like Google or YouTube in the unpaid section, also known as the organic listings. Now question, how long does it take for SEO to work if you are targeting competitive keywords in large cities, SEO can take upwards of six months to a year. Of course, this depends of location and content and keyword that you're targeting. If you're in some rural area, you might notice that you can get results in days or even weeks on non-competitive keywords. Does duplicate content hurt your SEO? Search engines do not penalized for duplicate content. So if by accident you click Duplicate or anything, don't worry too much about that. What factors in link building matter? Search engines look at the relevancy of the site linking to you. How well-known is the linking site? How many links do you have in total and the anchor text of each link also, which type of web sites are linking to you? Government websites, educational websites, these all matter. Now why does SEO matter? The vast majority of online experiences begin with a search engine and nearly 75 percent of searchers starters search on Google. Wordpress users alone published over 2 million posts every day, and that's only counting wordpress users. If we were to count all blog posts, that number would surely be higher. This makes a kinda tough to stand out, but you have to, if you want to make your blog or website a successful one, my team spends anywhere between three to five hours writing our blog posts. The 10 minutes spend optimizing each posts are easily the most important. And that's why millions of people google the term SEO each month. On any given day, people conduct more than 2.2 million searches, and that's just on Google. You still have Bing, YouTube and many others. Therefore, showing up on the front page of Google can be the deciding factor between a business that's thriving and one that's going out of business. What does SEO even mean? You probably know that it stands for search engine optimization, but what do you need to optimize? Is it the design? Is that the writing? Maybe it's the links. So that's a yes to everything. It's all of that and more. Before we dive straight into the actual topic of SEO, I want to go over the definitions. First week you.
3. 3 Search Engine Optimization: Essential Definitions: Seo, like I said, stands for search engine optimization, which is the art of ranking high on the search engine than the unpaid section, also known as the organic listings. We've already covered that, but translated means that it is a process of optimizing your online content so that the search engine likes to show it at a top result for searches of a certain keyword. So even simpler way comes to SEO. There's you, the search engine, and the searcher. If you have an article about how to grow a startup, you want a search engine, which in most cases will be Google to show it as a top result to anyone who types in how to start a startup, or even the word startup. Seo is the magic you have to work on your article in order to make Google very likely to include your posts as one of the top results whenever someone searches for that key words, we're going to dig deep into SEO, but feel free to jump to any video that might fit you better. The sections that we will be covering is a global overview of it, white hat SEO versus Black Hat SEO. And eventually we're going to cover on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
4. 4 SEO Course: Main Overview: So first the overview, why does it even matter? Like I said earlier, the vast majority of online experiences begin with a search engine, and nearly 75 percent of searchers dark there searches on Google. Combine that with the fact that the first five results on Google get almost 67 percent of all clicks. And you get an idea of why search engine optimization is so important. There's a joke going around the web that highlights how crucial it is to hit the first page of Google. If you ever need to hide a dead body, you should place it on the second page of Google search results. If your blog posts, article, or product is on any other page of the Google search results than the first event. It's the equivalent of it not ranking at all. But to understand how to show up first in the search engine results, you first need to know how search even works. So how does search even work?
5. 5 White hat vs Black hat (+Grey Hat): Now that you have an idea of the basics of SEO, let's take a look at some of the components in detail. While Google guards there search algorithm pretty well and not all of the over 200 factors are public. Backlinks. Did a great job of compiling as many of them as possible into one big list. But first, I need to get one thing clear. There are two sides of the SEO force and you need to choose yours right now. I hope you choose the right one, white hat versus black hat. As you know, as a business owner, I'm playing the long term game. And that's mostly because I've been in business for over a decade now. But there are some people that just start a business and just want to get a quick buck. So that is the same with search engine optimization. Some people are in it to make a few grand really quickly, while others are in it for a long time. If you want to work SEO like a get rich quick scheme, you'll probably end up doing Black Hat SEO. This type of SEO focuses on optimizing your content only for the search engine, not considering humans at all, since there are lots of ways to bend and break the rules to get your sites to rank high. These are a prime way for black hat SEOs to make a few thousand dollars fast. Ultimately, this approach results in spammy, crappy pages that often get banned very fast. Well, often lead to severe punishment for the marketer running their chance of building something sustainable in the future. You might make a few grand this way, but you'll continuously have to be on the lookout for search engine updates and come up with new ways to dodge the rules. White hat SEO, on the other hand, is a way to build a sustainable online business. If you do SEO this way, you'll focus on your human audience, will try to give them the best content possible and make it easily accessible to them by playing according to the search engines rules. Inbound marketing does a great job of explaining the difference. Black hat in short is duplicate content, invisible texts and stuffed keywords, cloaking or redirecting the user to another site or page. Links from sites would non-relevant content, whereas wide had is relevant content, well labeled images, relevant links and references, complete sentences with good spelling and grammar, standards compliant HTML, unique and relevant page titles. Needless to say, you only hear and see me talking about white hat SEO. Unfortunately, it's not always that easy. As you know, life's not always black or white. The same holds true for SEO. There's actually something in the middle of the white versus black had debate that I kinda want to talk about, which is gray hat SEO. Like its name implies, it's a little white and a little black. That means it's not quite as pure or innocent as the widest of wide hands, but it isn't quite as egregiously manipulative as black hat can be. You're not going to trick anyone or intentionally game the system with gray hat. However, you are trying to get a distinct advantage. See, Google standards aren't as clear cut as they'd like you to believe. Many times they might even say contradictory things. For example, Google has said that they're not a fan of guest blogging to build links. But what about guest blogging? To grow your brand? What if you do it to build awareness, generate high-quality traffic back to your website and become a household name in the industry. Those are all legitimate reasons to guest post and why I still recommend that. Other people might disagree with me on this point, and that's completely okay. That's what makes online marketing and SEO in particular so fun. It's kinda like a game like building a business. And to opponents can try different methods to win as your changes all the time, the rules are often ill-defined. Besides most of what we know as the rules are simply just SEOs, making predictions, or looking at correlating data trends. That's why there's so much room for gray hat SEO to sneak in. Many classic link building techniques like using scholarships to build links, can also go either way. Some people say it's still works, others say it's dead. It often depends a lot on how you do it. Super smart SEO artists like Ross Hudgens of CJ media talk a lot about scalable link building tactics. All marketing tactics need to be scalable at the end of the day if they're going to generate any return on your investment. But here's a problem with that. Almost every scalable link building tactic is borderline black hat, depending on how you do it. Ross shows examples of this time and time again where even massive brands you visit daily, like the New York Times have built links. You could technically considered that this goes against Google's own rules. Now it might be easy to build links in some industries like technology or nutrition, there are thousands of blogs online that talk about this stuff daily. But what if you work for a supplement company? The genome Mailchimp won't even let supplement companies use their e-mail marketing service at all. How are they supposed to create connections, reach out to customers and increase revenue, let alone build a few links on some blogs. The same holds true in other less savory industries like gambling, for instance. The chances of a journalist linking to your site in a flattering way or are slim to none. So many times you're going to have to take your chances. Law firms also find trouble with building high-quality links. That's why they often use scholarships link building tactics like we addressed earlier. Another problem is that search engine ranking still aren't as good as they should be. Sure new algorithm evolutions like Rank Brain help dramatically, but we're not out of the woods just yet. That's why people like Glenn alza have openly admitted to doing gray or black hat tactics like creating their own private blog networks, despite Google's repeated warnings against this approach, his site ranks at the bottom of that example, but he points out that he has more links to the page than the competition. It has a higher domain authority than the competition. He has better on page markup than the competition. So what's happening there? What could possibly be the explanation? Google generally admits that those three indicators are the most important. Seos all agree on that too. And yet that's not happening in real life. You can still gain or manipulate the system to a certain degree. It's not as bad as it used to be, but the problem still exists. Last year were stirring founder Larry Kim gave a few unique SEO predictions for this year. And one of them focused on increasing search engine results page click through rates to get more traffic. He predicts that engagement tax like this one will become a new Gray had tactic. Another example could include driving up your Facebook engagement to help give your organic reach a little boost. I'm not saying gray hat is good or bad. That's for you to decide. But I am shining a light on something you rarely hear people discuss in public. Seo is a zero-sum game. Many of your competitors will do whatever it takes to reach the top that displaces you, pushing you further down into obscurity. So you need to decide which path you are going to take and what degree of risk are comfortable accepting.
6. 6 On page SEO vs Off page SEO: Let's talk about cleaning inside your house and outside on-page SEO versus off-page SEO, there are two broad categories of SEO, on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO concerns all of Google's ranking factors that they determined by directly looking at the page you try to optimize, such as your headlines content and page rupture. Off-page SEO refers to all variables Google takes a look at, and they aren't exclusively in your own hands. They depend on other sources such as social networks, other blogs in your industry, and the personal history of the searcher. There are different, but you need to get both right in order to do well with SEO. To give you a better idea of what that means here, as an example, let's say you have a house with a garden in the front yard and a little pathway that leads through your front yard to your house. Imagine these two scenarios. The first one, your house is super clean on the inside, but your front yard is a mess. What happens in this scenario? Well, even if you have the cleanest house on the inside, if your garden looks like trash, no one will come into your house in the first place. It's the same if you haven't optimize your page around on-page SEO. And we have great content and look stunning, but it's likely that no one will give you credit for it or point to your page. No one will ever see your beautiful masterpiece because you won't get any traffic. But what about the other way, which is a second way? Let's say your house has a neatly trimmed lawn, but the inside of your house is a mess. Turn things around and they look similar. Having a nice lawn will attract plenty of people to come visit your house. But if your living room reminds your guests of a war zone, they'll leave quicker than you can pronounce SEO when a visitor leaves your site after viewing only one page, Google considers that as a bounce. The higher your bounce rate, which is a number of visitors who leave your site instantly, the worse your page will rank on Google. That's why you need to do both on-page and off-page SEO. You can do several things on your page to get the former right and then even more things outside of that to really get the ladder. Great.
7. 7 On page SEO: Content: Let's take a look at on-page SEO first, there are three big categories of on-page SEO that you'll need to take a look at. The first and most important is contents. You've probably heard it before. Content is king. Bill Gates made this prediction in 1996, and it says true as ever today. Why? Because a Google search engine customer is happy when he finds the result that serves his needs and the best way, when you Google quick and easy homemade mac and cheese, Google will put all its energy into delivering to you would Google believes is the best recipe for homemade mac and cheese. What Google believes is the best recipe for homemade mac and cheese on the entire web. It doesn't look for just the quickest recipe, just the easiest recipe, or throw out a bunch of online shops or frozen dinners. It tries to give you exactly what you asked for. Google always tries to give you the best experience possible by directing you to the greatest content it can find. This means that your number one job to do well with SEO is to produce great content. That's a bummer, right? You still have to put in a ton of work as CEO is no different than any other skill. Grade results will always come from big effort, just like the best marketing in the world won't help you sell a bad product. Super-advanced as CEO will be useless if your content just sucks. Here are the factors that make a great content in Google's eyes. First is quality. While the times we're just delivering the best quality content would make you stand out from the crowd, are long gone. It is still the starting point for any successful SEO effort and technically any business. But coming up with great content is not always easy. After all, it kinda means that you have to become a teacher and a good one at that. Yet you don't have to start from scratch. You can often start by piggybacking off of content that others have created and then making it better, longer and more in depth. Or maybe you have your own ideas already. If you do, then it might be worth brainstorming for awhile and then coming up with a compelling headline to start out with. Once you start writing, make sure you include all the important ingredients of great content in your blog post. Even if you're a complete newbie, you can always take a professional approach to great content by simply committing to make writing a daily habit and work your way up in increments from there.
8. 8 On page SEO: Keyword Research: Keyword research, doing your keyword research upfront is a crucial part of great content. Since you ideally want to include your targeted keyword in your post headline and throughout the article, you need to choose your keyword before you start writing. If you've never done keyword research before, you might want to take a look at HubSpot guide for beginners. Out of all on-page SEO factors, this is the one you should spend the most time learning. You don't even need to buy a book. Use of keywords. Google has gotten smarter over the years, while you should of course, use your keyword throughout your content. Jamming your keyword into your text as much as possible will hurt your ranking surrendered and improve them. Keyword stuffing is an absolute no-go these days. Today, the use of keywords, it's much more about semantics. Google has gotten so good at interpreting the meaning of searchers keywords that It's kind of creepy. And not only looks at your keyword, but also synonyms of it to understand what you mean when you type in something like KFC in Amsterdam, Google will know that you're probably not looking for a random KFC acronym, but probably the restaurant and the actual city in Amsterdam, by looking at similar searches that may include the keywords Kentucky Fried Chicken and Amsterdam. As long as you make sure your keyword is present in strategically important places like headlines, URL, and Meta description. There's kind of no need to mention it tons of times in your text. Just focus on the reader and seamlessly integrate your keyword a few times.
9. 9 On page SEO: Freshness of content + direct answers: Freshness of content, HubSpot has done a benchmark this year that showed once again, the posting more frequently improves Google rankings. However, posting new content is only one way to signal Google freshness. There are plenty of things that you can do with content that you've already published to make it more up-to-date. Brian Dean from backlink of, for example, has only published around 30 posts and two years. Yet he keeps all of his posts up to date by rewriting them and adding new information as he finds it. It is important to publish regularly. You can still get great results by posting once a month as long as your content is thorough and in-depth. Finally, Google will sometimes provide searchers would direct answers right on the SERP. If your regular content clearly enough for Google to recognize it as an answer to a particular question, it will show up directly beneath the search bar. Matt Cutts, former head of Google spam team and often public voice for the latest in SEO and algorithm changes, announced last year that people who are cutting the jargon would be right on track. That's why detailed guides and long how two's have become more and more popular. So make sure you clear up your writing. Fancy buzzwords and complex sentence constructions will neither make you sound smart nor help your SEO game. Mas MOZ has listed out all critical aspects you have to keep in mind if you want to do well with direct answers.
10. 10 On page SEO: Keyword selection: Keyword selection, we just briefly touched on keyword research, but it's such a massively important topic that it deserves its own section. The reason is that a lot of SEO often revolves around keyword selection. Keywords dictate what each piece of content is about. It dictates what you call your site or how you describe your brand online. Keywords even dictate how you build links, including everything from the tactics you choose to how you plan on implementing them. Another common mistake people make is that they stop maybe the redesign your website or come out with a new marketing campaign. They do it for a week or two, update their pages and then stop. They think keyword research is a one and done thing. In reality, it's the exact opposite. The best SEOs are constantly doing keyword research. There are also constantly re-evaluating if the keywords on their existing contents still make sense. Here's how smart people make bad keyword decisions. The first common keyword research mistake is picking the wrong key word. Let's say you sell consulting services. Your service might cause customers ā¬10 thousand over the course of a year. That's a little less than 1000 bucks a month. So it's not out of the question, but it's still fairly expensive. Now if you're ranking number one for free business growth tips, guess what kind of audience you are going to attract. You'll bring in people looking for free stuff. And that means that they probably wouldn't hand over their credit card the moment they hit your site, that one keyword could send her sight thousands of people each month. However, it's probably the wrong audience, so it doesn't make sense to rank for it. You'd be better off picking and different keyword, even if it means giving up thousands of visits a month. Think about it. If just one or two people who read that convert, you're ready ahead. This isn't the only common mistake I see though. In fact, the next one is even more common, common keyword research mistake number 2 is ignoring the competition. You've selected the right keyword from the get-go. It's contextually relevant to what you do and in better aligns with what you're trying to sell. So what does the very next thing you should do? You open up a keyword volume tool like the Google Keyword Planner or even a paid one like SEMrush, I really loved that and they have a free trial as well. You type in a few ideas and get the results back. Naturally, you start gravitating towards the ones with the highest number of searches. But here's the thing you're missing. Your ability to rank for a keyword often depends more on the competition you're up against. The problem happens when you compare your own site to the ones currently ranking. Do you see that the main page authorities for those sites do see the number of linking root domains they each have. It would take most websites months, if not years, to get anywhere close that music, your chance of pushing one of us out of the top three is slim to none. So what happens next? People go straight to long-tail keywords as a result, they assume that just because the volume will be much lower for these, the competition will be two. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. Check out the content marketing agency search query to see why the volume is way less at only around a 100 visits. It seems like the perfect long-tail keyword, except there's just one problem. Check out the competition. All of the sites have been around for years. They all have hundreds, if not tens of thousands of links to competition for this query is just as competitive as the first popular one. So this one is worse than the first one. If you were to somehow rank at the top of this one, you'd barely get any traffic. The man for this query is just too low given the high competition level. So once again, it doesn't make sense. So what do you do next? How can you possibly find keywords that are relevant to your business, not to competitive, but still provide enough traffic to be worth the effort. And that's the golden question. The answer is that you have to think outside the box and here's how.
11. 11 On Page SEO: Tools + Search intent: The first tip I can give you for keyword research is focused on search content. Most people focus on keywords counter-intuitively, That's now what you want to do. Instead of looking at what people are typing in, you should be trying to identify what they're searching for. This is what search intent refers to. And it's the difference between getting a tiny bit of traffic and driving real revenue. Let's kick things off with a basic scenario to highlight the difference. You own a job site, you make money by getting companies to run job posts listings on your site. That means that you need to get job pages ranking well so that people come to your site instead of Indeed or somewhere else. The more people who find jobs through you, the more you'll get paid. But watch what happens when a keyword like engineering jobs, the results are all over the place. Some referred to mechanical engineers, while others focus on software or entry-level positions. The intent behind each search is completely different. That's what you need to pinpoint. What exactly is this user looking for? Which type of engineering job are they interested in? Fortunately, this problem highlights how we can eventually solve it by coming up with good keywords that aren't too competitive. Indeed.com might be a tough competitor right now. So you need to find different alternatives based on search intent. First, look at Google's own suggested searches for that query. These are other common searches that people perform already. You have a few potentials like mechanical, civil, and industrial might be highly competitive. But what about environmental or audio? Scroll down to the very bottom of the SERP to get even more suggestions from Google. The aerospace one is especially interesting. Let's look at one last example to see the roles search intent place in keyword selection before moving onto another tool. What is someone looking for when they type best marketing automation tool into Google? They're looking for a marketing automation tool, except they aren't ready to commit to one just yet. Instead, what they're doing is looking for a way to evaluate alternatives. They're looking for a side-by-side comparison so they can compare apples to apples. Now watch what happens when you run that search query into Google. I highlighted the first page of results and organic ranking because they're going after search intent. They're trying to understand what people are looking for and not just what they're typing in, then they're giving it to them. The other paid results in the middle are just trying to sell you a tool despite the fact that people searching here, one to look at multiple options, those companies are looking at a list of keywords without considering the underlying motivation of the users. It's like tunnel vision. You pull up a list of keywords and some tool rank by search volume and run down the list. Instead, you need to expand your options like you saw a second ago with Google's own suggestions and sorta public is another one of my favorite tools to do this because it uses actual search queries to build the list search for best marketing automation tools and it will break the list down even further. One of my favorite graphics will even help you segment exactly who's searching for this. For example, this graph shows that the falling people are searching for best marketing automation tools, wordpress users, B2B, professional, small businesses, start-ups. Each of these is a completely different audience. Each might have their own budgets. A venture-backed startup is willing to pay more than a small business, for instance, each also has their own needs were press users will want a simple plug-in to run campaigns directly from inside the application. Whereas a B2B professional might be platform agnostic, or they might want to run their website through the automation tools so that there's less to manage. See the implications of that. It changes which keywords you target, the pages you build or a blog post you create will address subsets of each one to compete for the best keywords in each space. But it even impacts the campaigns you're eventually going to run. If you're trying to get press mentions and you're going after wordpress users. That means you're going to target WordPress specific sites and bloggers. You're going to pitch or advertise on WP beginner instead of Inc.com, even though their readership is less, your odds of success will be higher due to less competition And the site's audience will be far more interested in what you have to sell. That means that you'll not just get better links or search rankings, but also a lot more revenue.
12. 12 On page SEO: HTML: Html, once you've made sure your content is evergreen, the next big chunk you have to take care of is HTML. You don't have to be a professional coder or get a degree in programming by any means. But running an online business without knowing the basics of HTML would be the same as driving without knowing what the colors of traffic lights mean. Thankfully, would places like Udemy skillshare Code Academy, or khanacademy, there are more than enough possibilities to learn everything about HTML that you need in the blink of an eye and for free, you can even learn it on the job by using a simple cheat sheet. Let's take a look at the four parts of HTML you should optimize for each and every single piece of content you produce. First one is titled tax. Title tags are the online equivalent of newspaper headlines. They are what shows up in the tab of your browser when you open a new page, the HTML tag for them is called tidal. But when it comes to blogs, it often becomes an H1 tag, which stands for heading of the first order. Every page should only have one H1 tag to make the title clear to Google. Meta description. Meta descriptions are would show up as an excerpt when Google displays your page as a result, to searchers, It's easy to spot who's done their SEO homework and who hasn't by the meta-description, if you optimize a meta description result, Google will never cut it off and end with three dots or make it seem like it ends mid-sentence, optimize Meta descriptions also often mentioned the contents keyword upfront, don't overthink this 160 character text snippet though when writing it, you should keep the searchers in mind much more than the search engines. My favorite way to edit both of these is by using the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin. I use it on every single one of my websites because simply it's the best plugin on the market. It's the most popular. They updated almost weekly, and it includes a lot of advanced time-saving features. It will not only help you quickly edit your titles and metadata, but it will also help you set metadata for each social network so that Facebook, Twitter, and so on will properly format you're rich data such as the images. And it will dynamically create an update your XML sitemap as your side evolves, integrate, which are Google Search Console out of the box so that you can quickly find and fix the biggest problem areas on your site. There's lots more, for example, instead of having to customize each page or post manually, you can create default settings for your titles and metadata. You can even add extra features. Two of my favorites are the readability and keyword analysis tools that help give simple benchmarks to people you're working with or outsourcing to that way, there are clear indicators for them to hit before ever publishing directly to your site subheads, not only do they help format and structure your content and give your readers easy reference points, but they also affect SEO compared to your H1 tags, your H2, H3, H4, and all others have less SEO power, but they still matter, so you should use them. Plus it's one of the easiest SEO wins you can get on WordPress. Now if you've done all of those, how do you diagnose these HTML improvements? Google's Search Console, which was formerly called Webmaster Tools, has an HTML improvements report that will help you spot some of the issues that are highlighted. Google uses your site's metadata, including the title tags and Meta description to figure out exactly how to classify your site and then tell users about it. Inside this report, you'll be able to quickly diagnose if you have duplicated them across other pages or posts on your sides, they are too long or cutoff before people can fully read them. They are too short so that they're not descriptive or helpful enough or they simply aren't informative enough and are lacking keyword intent, the report will give you a sitewide analysis. Then you can click on the number by each one to dive into the specific page or post issue.
13. 13 HTML & Site architecture: Solving duplicate content and broken links: Let's talk about the architecture. The third and last part of on-page SEO that I'll cover is site architecture. While this part gets super techie really quickly, there are a few simple things everyone can and should take care of to improve SEO rankings, a good website architecture leads to a great experience for the user when he or she navigates your page, it focuses on things like fast loading times, a safe connection, and a mobile-friendly design. Ideally, you'll map out the architecture of your site before even buying the domain that allows you to really get into the head of your user and reverse engineer your way to a great user experience. You also need to optimize a few things for a great search engine experience. The more accessible your website is to Google, the better it will rank. Easy to crawl. Remember the spiders from the introductory video. These are programs that crawl from one page on your site to the next through links, depending on how well they can index all the pages on your site, there'll be more likely to report back to Google that you are a good result. The thicker the web of links between pages of your site, the easier it is for the spiders to reach all of them, giving the search engine a better understanding of your site. You can make this job easier for Google by creating a sitemap with a simple plug-in if you're in WordPress or an online XML sitemap generator, duplicate content. There are a lot of myths ranking around duplicate content and how it hurts your rankings. It common mistake is to think that everything on your page should be original. But the fact is search engines do not penalize websites for duplicate content, re-posting your content on other websites or publishing your guest posts again on your own site doesn't hurt your SEO unless you do it in the wrong spammy way. For example, if you repost your exact same content to a big outlet like medium, it might hurt your rankings because Google indexes your medium article first, since it's on the more authoritative domain, we often refer to this as a cannon equalization problem. And many times it's already happening on your site without you even realizing it. Here's a perfect example from my site. This is the blog category page that displays the most recent posts. Each post features a title and image and a share or common count here to recent posts feature an image and a title, but they also include a short description of the post. This is pretty common across all blogs. That's because the theme you're using like on WordPress often pulls this excerpt automatically and it's pulling it from the first few lines of the blog post. Like I said, this happens automatically. This feature is typically built in by the themes developer because it can help readers see what the post is about. However, it also has the potential to create canonical quantization issues. Technically speaking, that's duplicate content. The same exact information is showing up in the individual blog posts and the blog category page. Multiply that by thousands of blog posts and you have an issue. All of a sudden. There are several ways to fix canonical quantization issues like these, but the exact solution depends on what's causing the original issue. For example, removing a few lines of code from your block theme will fix the above issue in about 30 seconds if you know what you're doing, of course. So even though Google Search Console or another tool says you have thousands of duplicate content errors, you really just have one big root cause if you have multiple versions of the same page, the canonical tag and help you specify which content is the original. All you have to do is drop in a single line of code that references the original page URL like this. Fortunately, plug-ins like Yoast SEO make this simple. Set the default page or post version as the canonicals so that it's always adds this line by default. Alternatively, you can specified manually under the Advanced Settings option for each page or post. Another time-saving WordPress tip is to use a quick page posts redirect plugin. This one is helpful if you've had old pages morph into new ones. This often leaves behind a wave of broken links to install the plugin and you can add the old URLs in bulk and then the new version of each page, use this one with a broken link checker plug-in to see which URLs you need to redirect. Most SEO focused tools like Moz will also crawl your site like search engines to audit these common issues. Duplicate content and broken links or 40 for errors are the two most common Crawl Errors plaguing most websites. If you're not on a content management system like WordPress, you're going to have to edit the dot HT access file of your site to include 301 redirect, I'd strongly recommend educating yourself about 301 redirects and getting some professional help in this case, you can, of course, always ask questions because our team is available.
14. 14 HTML + Site Architecture: Mobile friendliness + Page speed: Mobile friendliness, let's face it, if your pages and mobile-friendly your loss over 54% of Facebook users access the network exclusively on their mobile device. Considering that Facebook now has billions of monthly active users, and out of those billions, more than half is on mobile. That is pretty tremendous. You simply have to keep mobile devices in mind these days, while there are several ways to make your pages mobile-friendly, I recommend you start by checking with Google's tool how you hold up right now, most WordPress themes are mobile-friendly from the get-go these days. And if not, you can always install a plugin to take care of that. You can also just implement Google suggestions from the tool yourself or hire someone to make the changes. Let's talk page speed. Don't fool yourself. This is incredibly important. Remember how angry you could get if the Wi-Fi didn't connect and it took you longer than 20 seconds to load a page. Today we value our time more than anything long loading times can absolutely kill your conversions. Google's recent speed industry benchmarks proof this point. Their research shows that the probability of someone bouncing from your site increases by 113% if it takes seven seconds to load. And based on their findings, the average loading time was over 22 seconds. That's over three times longer. You can use Google's test my site tool to get a quick read on how well you're doing or how much work there is left to tackle. Another one of my favorite tools to track page speed over time is Pingdom. This will monitor site performance in general, including uptime. You can even track your site from different locations around the world to make sure it's in tip-top shape for international and multi-lingual users. But here are some of the biggest issues to watch out for start by reducing the number of average requests to fewer than Google's recommended 50 if possible. When someone types your web address into their browser, they're requesting that your servers send over information. The smaller the data they're shipping out, the faster your servers will send it. Both the GID network and G zip will help you figure out how to compress the information on your pages to reduce requests, you should also minify your site's code to reduce size. Though, WP Super minify WordPress plugin can do it for you automatically so you don't even have to know how it combines style sheet data. Content, delivery networks or CNNs for short, are another fast and easy way to reduce requests. Most websites today are full of high resolution images. However, the better they look, the bigger the size. A CDN like Cloudflare will take images of your own servers that will host them on their global network and deliver them to users from the closest point possible to decrease loading times WP smush or compressor dot io non WordPress can also help you reduce image sizes prior to uploading. They'll compress the file to reduce the size without sacrificing any visible quality keywords in your else, including your targeted keywords in the URLs of your blog, blogposts is a must. You shouldn't squander knows SEO points. You might have to change the structure of your permanent links on WordPress and you should certainly keep your human users in mind. But including your keyword in your URLs is a no brainer.
15. 15 HTML + Site architecture: HTTPS & SSL Explained: Https and SSL SEOs have considered security to be a ranking signal for some time now. However, Google's not stopping. There are also now actively warning people when websites are not secure. These warning notifications will essentially tell people not to give your website their personal information, or worse, their credit card numbers. This is a big problem considering that Chrome is the most popular browser in the world. The last thing you want after working so hard to get traffic to your site is for them to bounce immediately because a big red notification from Google is warning them away. There are two common security protocols, https, which is a secure version of HTTP and SSL, Secure Socket Layer. Both of them work and are worth considering even if they won't up your SEO game too much. Moving from a non-security connection to HTTPS or SSL is a bit of work, but it's worth your time. If you're starting out with a new domain, consider purchasing it as an option from your domain register or web hosting service. I definitely recommend name keep for this. Technically there are five different SSL options to choose from. The first SSL option to choose from single domain. This option protects one single domain name. It won't however, work on subdomains. For instance, blog.js lead EKG.com, that won't work multi-domain. Your second choice will cover multiple domains. For instance, we have elite X mentor.com and we have startup funding of n.com. But once again, it won't cover sub-domains of individual sites. Wildcard. This one will cover subdomains. So if you have blogged on elite X mentor.com, you're good to go organization. This one is similar to the first, but it doesn't cover as much security for e-commerce transactions extended. And finally, this one will give you a few extra benefits like the name showing in the green address bar, but it also requires a bit of extra work. Technically speaking, each one of those options is secure. The difference lies in how you're going to use it. You can purchase these direct from your domain register. Otherwise, many other hosting companies like WordPress engine will help you set them up. There are also WordPress plugins like really simple SSL that will help you quickly set one up as well. Okay.
16. 16 Off page SEO: Essentials: Finally, off-page SEO. All right, Time to step outside your house and take a look at the front yard. I'll now show you four big areas of off-page SEO. Number 1, trust page rank. The famous formula that the founders of Google invented certainly isn't the only measure they take on ranking pages in the top 10 search results, trust is getting increasingly important and most of the recent Google updates have hits spammy and obscure websites. Trust Rank is a way for Google to see whether your site is legit or not. For example, if you look like a big brand to Google is likely to trust you. Quality backlinks from authoritative websites like.edu or.gov domains also help. There are four parts to building trust. First is authority. Google determines the overall authority of your site by a mix of two kinds of authority that you can build. Domain authority, which has to do with how widespread your domain name is. For instance, Coca-Cola dot com is very authoritative and that's because everyone has heard of it. Page authority which relates to how authoritative the content of a single page, for example, a blog post is to other popular authority metrics are the domain and page authority numbers from Mars. Mars also bases this score out of 100, but it's a weighted scale. That means that it's relatively easy to go from 0 to 20. However, anything over 50 to 60 is pretty high and 80 to 90 is often the highest in a particular industry. To improve your authority, the simplest way you should go for high-quality and editorial tutorial links because they almost always reign supreme. For example, tried to do things that will encourage mainstream media sites to feature you. This isn't easy and it does take a lot of time, but it's worth it because links like these are virtually algorithm proof. Remember earlier when we spoke about how guest blogging could be white, gray, or black had depending on how you use it. Getting third party validation like this from top publications is as white hat as it gets bounce rate. Your bounce rate is simply a measure of how many people view only one page on your site before immediately leaving again, content for loading times, usability and attracting the right readers are all part of decreasing your bounce rate. The math is simple. The right readers will spend more time on a site that loads fast, looks good, and has great content. Video is another great way to do so, but you need your video content to stand out in the liver. If you're looking out there to develop more and video, you can go of course on platforms like YouTube, but we also have specific courses tailoring to dat tools like InVideo, iMovie, make it very easy to edit amazing videos, even if you don't have a ton of experience, these Website Usage Metrics give Google indications of quality. For example, let's say you're looking for pizza near your home, you click on the first three results to compare each one. The second, third options look good. So you browse around for a bit. You spend at least five minutes checking out each of those sites. But the first one didn't meet your expectations for whatever reason. Five seconds after clicking you hit the Back button to open the other results. That tells Google something about that site and it isn't good. They'll factor that information into their results. They'll see that users aren't finding that first result helpful for this query. And they won't hesitate to drop them. That's why click-through rates are becoming as important, if not more important than rankings, domain age. Remember the times before young entrepreneurs like me were all the hype who were the most respected businessmen around. It was the old guys, who was the Jack Welch's and the Warren Buffett's of the world. With domains on the Internet, it's similar. Domain age matters, even if they only matter a little. If you haven't gotten your site up and running yet, consider finding an affordable expired domain and using it. The main trust authority and H often have one other thing and common your brand identity. Having a brand or personal identity online is a huge trust signal for search engines, but it takes time to build, you know, your brand when you Google yourself and something relevant pops up, you don't have to have a brand name. Creating your personal brand works just as well. What's more building brand signals prevents you from future penalties through Google updates. This partly explains why Google gives big brands preferential treatment. It's not just a crazy conspiracy. It some more often than not, people prefer brands they recognize over ones they don't. One study from Search Engine Land and Survey Monkey found that 70 percent of US consumers look for a known retailer when deciding what search result to click, having a recognizable brand name was even more important than the price or quality of the product in question. Think about this scenario for a second. You need tires badly, your personal safety is at risk on the road. So who are you going to go with? Well, you pick the one that you recognize has been around for decades, has a blimp and appears in commercials, or would you take a huge risk on the unknown one?
17. 17 Off page SEO: Links & Geotargeting & other factors: Let's talk about links. If you've made it this far, I commend you, this already has shown you that the common conception of backlinks are everything is just wrong. There are only a part of SEO just like all the other areas I covered already, there are plenty of ways to get backlinks, but no matter what you do, don't just wait for people to link to you. That's a fool's game. You're going to have to take the initiative and ask for them. Consider these three factors when trying to get backlinks. First, the quality of the links. While links are not everything. When looking at links, their quality is everything. The quality of your links matters much more than the number of links that you have. Building quality backlinks is all about reaching out to the right sources and offering value in exchange for a solid link. Most people only look at the total number of links and that's a huge mistake for a few reasons. First, search engines might ignore the vast majority of links if they're low quality or spammy. Links from brand new sites are worth more than repeat links from existing sites. Links from other websites are worth more than a bunch of links from your own site from one page to another anchor text. The anchor text is the text and other sites use when they link to you. And yes, it matters. Differentiating between the types of anchor text is part of the nitty-gritty, but a good rule of thumb is the more natural the link text sounds, the better number of links. Lastly, the number of total links you have matters as well. And you need to build high-quality backlinks that scale over time. We just touched on this. It's not just total links that you're after. However, at the end of the day, the side with the most high-quality links will usually have the better edge. And it also depends on the pages you're getting links to. Here's what I mean, links to your homepage or good. However, most natural links won't be too homepage unless they're mentioning your brand name. Specifically. What you often find is that people will link down to pages or posts on your site. If possible, you want to make sure the right sources are linking to the right pages, which you don't want is for your privacy policy to be your most linked to page. Why? Because there's nothing to buy from that page. Visitors can give you their information or subscribe or Bye. That's the first mistake. The second is not considering how and where those links are coming from. One of the most important features you can then solve from Crazy Egg or how jar is a heatmap. It helps people pinpoint which site elements are 18 conversions and which are distracting people from converting by actually using a heatmap that you can see and discover to see where people click and sometimes even move their mouse. So if you're trying to get links to this page, you want to get links from landing page or conversion related sources that might change for other feature pages like recordings. Here, a design-related link wouldn't make as much sense. It's not as contextually relevant. However, if the patriarch posts were speaking about usability or interface design, then it would be a decent fit. So the quality source of the links you get matters, but so too does the place they're linking to. The third category of off-page SEO that's worth taking a look at is personal factors. While most of these are out of your control, there are a few things to increase your chances to reach a certain audience country. All searchers see results relevant to the country they're in. Open times have recommended stores and restaurants appear according to your time zone. Search engines interpret words differently. Someone searching for comforter in the US, we'll see blankets for their bed. Whereas someone in the UK might see pacifiers because that's what the term means there. A way to tell Google that you want to target certain countries is of course by including them as keywords. But first, ask yourself if it's worth it to go multinational. There are also different competition levels from country to country. Remember how keyword selection depends largely on the competition already ranking. Well, Google Canada is going to have different results in Google South America, that means that each country might have different levels of difficulty. A multilingual site not only exposes your information to more people in their native language, but it could also help you rank easier in other places. The two languages I recommend the most would be Portuguese for Portugal and Brazil, which are huge markets. And Spanish, which is Spain and pretty much a lot of the places in Latin America, creating multilingual content is hands down. One of the easiest quick wins I've seen. So what's the catch while pulling it off isn't easy. Most of the web's translation plug-ins aren't very good. Menu will promise to automatically translate your content into almost any language, but the end result isn't natural personally, I'd rather pay a little more to have a native speaking help translate the content because the quality and accuracy increase and that means that people stick around longer. And that means that my side usage data and rankings go up to city. The geotargeting goes even further. It goes down to the city level. That's why you usually see results from right around the block when you search for a fast food chain. Again, using city names has keywords, helps, but don't paint yourself into a corner or you'll end up looking like you're only a local authority searchers history. If the searcher has been on the same page before or even if they've just visited your site in general, you're more likely to show up because Google thinks you're irrelevant result for them, socialization. Let's talk about that. Do you have a YouTube channel or a Google Plus profile for your brand? If so, the more people like you, the better. When Google sees that someone like some brand on a social network, they're more likely to show them results from that brand or from personal contexts that they have.
18. 18 Off page SEO: Social Factors: Lastly, let's take a look at the social factors of off-page SEO. Besides social signals directly from the searcher, there are other ways good results on social media will help you rank better. Whether that's directly through more links or indirectly through a PR boost social matters, there are two main factors of influence, quality of shares, as with the quality of backlinks, who shares matters more than how often Google recognizes influencers and when they share your content, their share has more SEO juice then your neighbors. A great way to get influencers to share your content is by giving them a heads up before you even publish it. Or better still include them by quoting or interviewing them. Of course, you should also tell plenty of online celebrities who are already interested in your topic. There are a few ways to find those people. The first is with Followerwonk. It's an analytics tool for Twitter that can help you find influencers just by searching for keywords in their bios. I like this tool because you can sort the influencers by different metrics, just like total links can be deceiving. So two is total followers. Instead, I find engagement metrics like social authority, a much better indicator of value. New influence or marketplaces are also popping up to make this even easier, tribe will let you search through a massive database of content creators. Again, you can sort them by metrics, but this time you get their costs as well. So you can find ones that overlap or influence your audience and pay them to help promote your stuff. And best of all, you can get all of the fine print ironed out before spending a single dollar number of shares. The secondary social metric is the number of shares landing a viral hit is every marketer's dream, but it is overrated. There are a lot of tips and hacks out there, but the truth is a little simpler. Make awesome content. That means different things to different people. For example, in the marketing space, I've found that long form content almost always outperforms short form. But think about celebrity gossip sites for a second. No one wants to slog through a whole bunch of words. The opposite is almost true there. Their audience wants something really short with a lot of drama. They want more videos and images with less texts. Just browse buzzfeed.com or TMZ if you don't believe me, and it makes sense when you consider what makes content go viral. Jonah Berger released a study years ago in the Journal of Marketing Research that found the following. Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal. Content that evokes high arousal, positive or negative anger or anxiety and motions is more viral. We started this video by talking about how many millions of posts people publish each day. There is a ton of competition. So the stuff that sticks out is often at one extreme or the other. That's why fake news stories often go viral, even though many of them are bogus, some of the top fake news sites could pull in ad revenue topping more than $0.5 million in just a short time because they get so much traffic. Of course, I'm not recommending that you post fake news. I am, however, suggesting that you need to think long and hard about the angle of something before publishing it. If you tap into the emotional triggers of your audience, you will almost always make your content get more attention in the long run. O and promoting it like crazy helps too.
19. 19 Last words - Course Outro: Congratulations on making it to the end. I hope this walkthrough helped you realize that search engine optimisation isn't optional anymore, while it doesn't take a lot of effort to get a few basics, right? It might kill your online presence if you don't. Don't worry if you've already made some SEO decisions in the past and might not have been the perfect choices. Just commit to getting started today as it can take you six months to a year to see results. Do your keyword research before you write your next blog post. Then use your keyword data to optimize the basics such as your title tags and descriptions. And who knows? Maybe the next time you press publish, you'll stand out after having gone through this module and experienced everything. How will you change everything you've done so far? Please share it with us if you have any questions, definitely let me know. Thank you so much.
ELITEx Mentor, High Quality Course for Impactful People
