SEO: The basics

1. Intro: Welcome to SEO for beginners. My name is Dr. Townsend and I'm going to be teaching all about SEO, and I'm going to keep it a very beginner's level. So it's just the introduction to the basics of what it's all about. So in this course, we're going to cover what SU is, why SEO is so important. The ten benefits of SEO for your business. Why page speed matters and SEO, mobile friendliness and on-page SEO factors. So these are just a few of the areas we're going to cover. It's just to provide you a basic level so that you can go on to learn a bit more if you're interested. Let's get started. 2. What is SEO: In this lesson, we're going to look at what is SEO. So you've heard the term, but not really sure what it stands for or anything out this SEO stands for search engine optimization. What it is is the practice of optimizing your website to be font on a search engine results page, SERP. But you probably notice search engine as high as it can be. The higher end results you are, the more traffic you're gonna get to your website. So I'm just going to show you an example. I've typed in what is SEO? And these are all the terms that all the searches that come back is all this that you've just seen. Basically, you want as high up as you can. Ideally on the first page. Even if it's not as high up as you can go, as long as it's on the first page. That's the important thing. Because most people don't go to any, like 23 or four pages. Most people wouldn't even get to tend to be honest because they've already found what they're looking for. This is why SEO is so, so important. So good SEO, we'll drive targeted search traffic to your homepage, your products pages, your blog content. So by understanding a bit more about SEO and what it does for your website, then you'll get more traffic to the places you want it to go. So that's a CEO. 3. Why is SEO so important?: So why is it so important? Well, did you know that 75% of people don't look past the first page of results. Think back to a time when you looked into something and you've, you've kind of gone away, I need to find out something useful. You go into Google. And usually what most people do is they first page, because usually between the bus to the fifth, you get some sort of answer, don't you? So this is why SEL matters. It gets you seen by the 75% of people. Seo does what it actually does. Vue website helps your website become more visible. So that means more visible means it's going to go higher up in the searches. It's going to build trust and credibility. So people are going to trust what they're buying from you. They're going to look into what you do and things like that. And if they can find where your company is about through Google Search and through SEA, then they're going to trust that they can buy through you and use your service and things like that. And it builds that credibility up. Basically. Thirdly, it increases engagement traffic. If nobody can see you on any search engine or they can't find you easy, then you're not gonna get the engagement you want. And it's not going to build traffic. It's not going to lead to the generation is now fairly two people basically doing your products, downloads, anything that you're basically promoting about yourself and your website and your brand, people aren't going to find it. So that's why SEO is important for that aspect because it does boost your engagement, the better SEO engagement basically, I'm finally, it helps people learn about your brand. So if people can find you, they can see you. They're more likely to find out more about your brand. Your brand is not going to get noticed. More. People are gonna be like, oh, I remember that. So you might have websites that you kinda go, Oh, I always go there for this information. Like e.g. if I wanted to find out anything about SEO, I might go to websites like a breath or I would probably go to moles because of their familiar to me. So it's building up that brand. So I don't need to search for them directly. I can type them into Google and I'd find them that way. But I know that branding and I know what they're like. But they do, right, quite high up as well. That's what SEO does. It basically gives you these for really good reasons as to why it matters to get it right. 4. 10 benefits of seo for your business: In this lesson, we're going to look at the ten benefits of SEO for your business. First of all, it helps boost your credibility. If you think about it this way. If you go onto Google search and you type in a time, the first page is where you're going to conduct your answers, aren't you? You're going to trust these websites because aided probably put the effort in when it comes to SEO so they know what they're talking about. B, they've got brand awareness. So most of the sites that you go on up, you're quite familiar or they're quite big. And see. If you think about when you look for yourself, look at anything, you're really not going to let you something. I'll say page ten or 11. Most of us don't. It's just because they're probably less relevant to what we're looking for. Some of the sites might not look as clean cut as some of the ones on page one. So that's why it's important too. Have really good SEO. Just to get on the first couple of pages, It kinda boost your credibility. Number two, it doesn't actually have to cost you much in terms of SEO practice, you actually don't really pay for anything. If you want to get an SEO expert in gray, that thought will cost you vary quite a bit. Or you might find you subscribe to certain sites that help you monitor and look at competitors, that type of thing that will cost you, but it doesn't have to cost you an arm and leg. So that's quite good. But other than that, it's it's more like a daily upkeep. Keep on top of so it's more of your time, not money, which is great. Number three, it supports content marketing. So what SEO is good? When it comes to content marketing is that the two actually work very hand in hand. So if you put out original content all the time and is quite consistent, that then helps your SEO because it offers more terms, more useful content. This all goes into Google ranking. Google would be like, Oh, this is really useful. So for it ranks up higher and higher. So when you're searching for whatever topic in Britain about, say, in a blog, it will come up higher because it's more relevant. This all works in helping your, basically your website stuff because all this content is gonna be on your website, is going to be linked to you, your brand. Everything connects back to your website. So that's why it's really important to think about your marketing in general and how it can all work towards SEO, which is really good. That's probably a topic that you might want to look into outside this course. Have a look into content marketing, the benefits, and basically how to do it. Maybe putting together sort of strategy. It doesn't need to be really, really like that. Basically maybe you just decide to do blogs couple of times a month, or you're going to actually try different marketing channels. It's entirely up to you, but it's worth doing. Now before it maximizes your PPC campaigns. So when we say PPC, that's a paperclip. So when you go into Google, you'll find sometimes at the top there's like these adverts of sorts, but they're relevant to what you're looking for. These are the PPC. So these are what people have paid for to be on the top, top. So it's really, it's kind of like a different type of SEO. So instead of organically grown your website without paying for things, this is basically helping boost at base cream. Number five, it gives you a competitive advantage, which is great. Everybody wants to be the leading expert, or they want to be out there capacitors. So if you think about this, say e.g. if you're a physiotherapist and your website is liberal friendly, it loads really fast. And the keywords throughout it really relevant to say the local area and your profession. You're going to find the compared to say, say ten other sites, ten of the physiotherapists, if they've not put that type of effort into the room, websites and their own activities. You're going to have an advantage over them when it comes to when people search for your area of expertise. Because you have all these factors. That's what can be really useful in obtaining new business and basically giving people a sense of a good impression of who you are. So that's why it's really good. Number six, it can help reach more people. And this is always important when it comes to business anyway. You want to market not just a select number of people, you want to spread it out. So everybody knows about your services. This is what SEO, SEO does. It can help attract anyone with the intent of being interested in what you are. Providing, I'm basically buy through three using keywords you can attract people in. So if you can get your keywords spot on, on your marketing activities, sought to the top good standard, then you are going to reach more people. You are going to hit those people looking for those times. It's really beneficial and you can reach audiences. I say if you're an online business, you can reach people in other countries that are interested in what you have to provide. So that's really important. So your market could grow even more than you expect. So that's really important. Just a few more reasons. So number seven, it helps you rank better and local searches. So think about when you're like, oh, I need a plumber. You type in the word plumbers near me. And you will see most of them come up on the side basically saying, here's a list of the most local, local to you and you just flick through them, don't you? Having a local SEO strategy is really important if you are a local business, say if you do a sharp or a business that is local to that area, you're not like a UK wide or you could be anywhere. This will help in basically pushing you up that list. So making sure that you have a good practice of being very mobile-friendly. Making sure you optimize every aspect of your listing on Google. You're making sure that every all the information is correct as well. People will go on there and if they find out, say e.g. they're trying to contact you and your number is not right? Yeah. That's that's not going to help you get business anyway. So make sure that you've thought about and using local keywords. So that means when I say that, that's kind of like using locations, I like saying that you are Bristol base. You could even do it down to the village or anything like that that will help you in. When people search though, you'll pop up on the Bristol basically listed plumbers, which has been important. Number eight, it improves your website usability. Seo is literally about being site search engine friendly. So people, people want to go onto the website and be able to find what they're looking for pretty easy. So that's where our SEO comes in. So basically when you're thinking about your navigation on your site structure, SEO has a main part in this because it works towards your customer journey and what they're looking for and enhances the experience of your user. So that's why it's important. Number nine, you can get quantifiable results. With SEO. You can track the changes in ranking conversions and your website traffic. This is all really, really important in helping you develop an SEO strategy. By keeping on top of these, you can see what works, what doesn't, what keywords are. Actually people looking at this month? Or maybe a couple of months ago. There. It wasn't very important. People weren't really looking. It might be the fact that it's season thing could be like, oh, you're a plumber, must use our example again. The boiler is broke or something like that. It's that time of year where people actually using the boilers now. So the SEO keywords and stuff will change to match those interests are basically all. You can actually just track everything, which is great because it means you stay on top of those trends and things, which then leads to people finding your business of Asia. And last but not least, it improves user engagement rates. So if you think about it, I really optimized sites brings in your quality traffic and that's what you want. You want to have people genuinely interested in what you have to sell and what you produce IT, services, that type of thing. If you find that your website has a lot of useful content units such as looking and what they were actually looking for. They're more likely to stay on your site because you've got the information that they need and they might start exploring. So it's just basically grabbing them on that first little interest bubble. And then they'll get into it and then from there they'll find out more about you. And then it also helps build up more of your credibility in that type of thing as well. Because people's thoughts get to know your brands and they start to trust it. So if your website, e.g. and you're all about advice and guidance, Sr, every time they need that help, they'll come to you. They'll always go to your website. They'll, they'll type in your website rather than doing a Google ranking. So it kind of defeats. It gets rid of Google in a way because they come directly to you and this is what you want. And then that can spiral into more business leads. So hopefully this has given you some insight into the various aspects of SEO and the reasons why it's so important. It covers every aspect of your business. I think it's one of those parts that can actually doesn't need to take a lot of time to do. But once you've got into the rhythm and you've got, you know, what's working, what isn't. You can actually grow your business quite a lot. So hopefully you found this lesson really helpful and hopefully you enjoy the rest of the course. 5. Page speed matters in seo: In this lesson, we're going to look at page speed matters in SEO. So what is PageSpeed? Page beat is the amount of time it takes to request the page and have it loaded in your browser. So it's the time it takes for you to click on that website link to the time it's fully loaded on your screen, That's your page speed. The faster the page speed, the better for your SEO and for your visitors experience. Ranking. This is one of the biggest aspects they will look at, is how fast your page will load, the faster you can get it, the banner. Here are some reasons why increasing your page load time is essential. Well, first of all, it reduces bounce rate. And what I mean by that is it's the time that a person spends on your webpage. So it basically you don't want people to go straight onto your website and come straight off. You're trying to keep them there. So it reduces that effect. It increases page views. So if something takes too long, you're going to see a very big decrease on patriots because your website is taking too long. So this is another good reason. I increases dwell time, improve your conversion rate. So these aspects are looking at basically generating credibility in your website search. So if your page is really fast, people are more likely to continue what they're looking at and things like that. So if you go looking for something on our website, say clothing, and you hit a website and so soil, the time you're less likely to buy from them because of the time is taking to do everything. So this is why it really matters. Also, it helps your ranking in inorganic such as well. So when people are looking, they'll find your page because You're all the other aspects of SEO. But including your page beats. If it's doing really, really fast, then it's going to help get you found easier on search engines and things like that. So what your page B should be? Roughly 1-2 s, is what it should be. This is a really good goal. There are tons and tons of tools out there online to check your website page. And once you've kinda looked into it and you kinda realizing, Wait a minute, this is taking too long. Then you need to start looking into why it is. But this is just a general idea. So if you could get under 2 s, does amazing. That's going to help your customers and help you on Google as well. So this is overall just the basics of page speed. If you want to look into it a bit more, that's absolutely great. Have a look online tools, check-out some webpages of your own if you've got them. All, try different websites just to see what the differences are between different sites and things and how quickly they load up. 6. Mobile friendliness: In this lesson, we're going to look at another aspect of SEO, which is mobile friendliness. So did you know 62% of all website traffic comes from people using their mobile phones. This is because most people tend to use their phones when they're out and about. If they're just chilling on the sofa downstairs, they use it just for convenience compared to say, a desktop. Desktop, they might not have to have two hands. So that's why this figure so high. So users don't tend to interact with page on mobile device the same way that your desktop, you might find on a desktop, people tend to use them moms, the touchpad. But when it comes to your phone, it's usually the whole screen is your touchpad in a way because you've got to scroll up and down. But with a desktop, you can use a mouse, so it's a different way of interacting and navigating you'll find when it comes to desktop versus immobile. That's why it's so important. Your website is easy to use on your mobile device as it is on your desktop. There's a lot more thought probably gone into your mobile device layout than there is probably on your desktop. Just purely for fact, you've got to think the number of factors like how people scroll, how people navigate, is everything easy, the right size? So there are elements that you need to think about, but we're gonna go through that. So what is a mobile-friendly website? Basically, what it is is a way that your site is designed so that it works exactly the same across many devices. So it's not just on your mobile, it could be on a tablet. There is different size phones as well, so some will be a lot bigger than most, like half a tablet size. Some can be a lot smaller. Being mobile friendly is basically being able to adapt to all of these different sizes. Well, it also is, is the static content on it doesn't change. It has a more simplifying navigation. So you might see on a mobile device you'll have three little lines, like a little hamburger. You click on this and you know, that's the menu. You also find like images despite a lot smaller, or they might be moved or they might be cut out a little bit differently, just because the screen size is a lot smaller as well. That's another part of being mobile-friendly. And it's also not reliant on the mobile operating system to function properly. So all of these aspects are to do with being mobile friendly. So making your website mobile friendly. So how do you do it? You just need to include some of these key things. So e.g. you need to include accessible menus. So it has to navigate. You might even include certain buttons so that people go back and forth. You might have a way adopting a menu into it. Like not the three little lines, but different style. It's all down to what your website is about and the target information and what your users are used to. And you might have to try this for a little while to see what works. But that's all trial and error with most things anyway. You also have to have a responsive site that will automatically resizes to fit device. Like I said, all devices are different sizes. So you will have a giant tablet. You might have a really, really big or really small phone screen. So not all devices are the same. So it needs to be able to adapt to those screens but not lose what the content is all make it difficult for people to use it. It's all about thinking about that sort of thing. Also, tend to use larger fonts just to make it more readable. You might find that you might exhibit testing yourself to see you get the right size. Nobody wants to be kind of zooming in, zooming out, or struggling to read what you've put on there. Because it'll just, people just come through out your website. If it's not user-friendly, they're not going to like it. If they can't see what you're trying to talk about all the content. They are going to come off it. Rc, ensure that essential content isn't hidden buyouts. This is kind of a bit of an issue. Sometimes some websites, the feature ads. It's great that you have ads. But sometimes on a mobile device, they do hide the content and sometimes they're not that easy to close. So you just need to think about positioning of where those ads could go. Maybe just do between paragraphs, but it's just something you need to think about. Because if somebody is looking for an answer and it's hidden by an ad and they can't get that the ad, the more than likely just going to come show off your website. So those are the main ones. So I'm just going to go through just a couple of examples to show you mobile-friendly websites. First of all, you might be familiar with Etsy. Etsy website on a mobile device. As you can see. If you're all familiar with, that's the website. This looks very different from a desktop in the fact that desktop is a lot bigger and there's a lot more menu choices and it's out very different. So on this, they've got the important features. At the top. You've got, you've got a basket in the top right corner. You sign-in. Very clear as day, big search bar because they knew customers will search for things. More than likely they've gone on there, They've gone I know, like present for dad. I'll type it in. So that's why they've done it. And then they've put the menu to the left. So the hamburger is always the icon used for menu. So everyone, most people are familiar with that anyway. But it's nice and clear and it's the top. The rest of the layout, you can see the headings are big. So I can meet that easy on a phone. It's the same. They've obviously, for the categories instead of having met menu Headings, what they've done is thumbnails, so like little pictures. But they've put under each some texts to say what they are. It all looks clean. Easy to click on that type of thing. But it's not clustered anyway. And I think the images are large enough so they don't take up the entire phone, but not too small that you can't see what they're about. So you can see like the jewelry aspect of things and you can just about make out what they're all about, which is good. So this is a really good clean cut design. This is a different kind of website. This is called BuzzFeed. More information focused. So it's a bit harder to adapt to a mobile apps, but they've done it quite well in this example, e.g. your sample, they put popular information at the top. So nice, it's a lot bigger. You can see the title of 48 toilet jokes. That's nice and big. So that's the feature. Popular articles there. Above this. They've got you've got your trending staff, so it's got a small heading and above that's a bigger heading. And above that you can obviously see on the left is the hamburger symbol for the menu. On the right, they've done sign-in and the research. So you tend to always find the search tool and you're the hamburger menu are always at the top of a mobile device. Because everybody automatically knows where to go when they go on a mobile device. So having that consistency will help your customers massively. Next, they've done like a collage format. So they've got below the main feature is they've got story with an image. Images are good size. It's not too big, it's not tiny. The image at the top, they've cut down as you can see, so it fits across nicely at the top, but it's not massive. But the layout of it is not too cluttered. It gives me enough information to make me want to scroll because there's lots of stories, but there are very eye-catching. Obviously they've done really well with the writing size as well. They've kept it to a reasonable size as well. The final example I'm going to show, this is a different website compared to the other two. We're going to look at more of a product-based one. So this is called Express website. This is new to me as well. But on this, what they've done with this is same format as the other ones. Top-left is the menu. Top right is the search with the bank. So very clean cut. The rest blow it is very bold information about the sales and the more important information which is highlighted really clearly. People, it sounds out, doesn't it? So that's what kind of what customers will want to see the latest offers when it comes to shopping, and that's what they've done. They've all, the pictures below it is the slideshow. So it makes people, it makes it easier for people to just kind of swipe, which is a good thing for this type of user journey when it comes to buying. You didn't want to be like scrolling down. Sliding is a little bit easier. And then if you further down on this website, on the mobile device, if there are options for categories and things as well. So the whole thing is just clean-cut, very easy to use. When it comes to products, images are bigger. It's just because of the device size and they know that the user wants to see more. Or it compares to the two people are gonna wanna see less than images. They're not as important when it comes to clothing. It's a lot bigger deal. So this is the journal guide when it comes to mobile friendliness. Take some time to have a look between a website and how they interacting your phone. In the Activities section, there, there was a booklet you'll be going through. And this will be one of the main activities, is just to help you understand what are the key elements when it comes to being mobile friendly. 7. On page SEO Factors: In this lesson, we're going to look at on-page SEO factors. What is on page SCO? Well, it's the practice of optimizing your website using first quality content. And two elements such as keywords, tie tools, Goodyear of images and so forth. So there are six important on-page SEO factors that we need to, we're going to cover now. We're going to look at quality content, title tags, and Meta description. Proper formatting image use for on-page SEO. While compose your hours. Don't worry, this all sounds a bit scary, but I'm going to break it down nice and easy for you. So first of all, quality content. This is the most important on-page SEO factor. You have to look at. All the content that goes on your blog, on your website should be the original and should not be rewritten or even worse, copied and pasted from another website. It takes away your credibility when people are searching, they find out that you've copied an article from, say, like a bigger website. It doesn't help your brand or your image or so, and it definitely doesn't help your SEO. Google will pick up on the fact that you've copied and pasted onto your website. So they will rank you down for it. So the more original you can be, the better. Don't forget to identify both the keywords and you relate to keywords in your texts. So when you put up, log out, or you're doing some content, put on your website. Think about the keywords that you want included. So always make a list of them and include them into it. It could be. Good. Practice is always to put some in the title. You put it in your first paragraph, but you just want to make sure that they are going to be found. It helps people find your content easier. So that's quality content title tags. So simply put, the title tag is the title of your webpage as seen on a search engine. So whenever you're looking at something on Google, the part that contains the number of the auto that you click on the title page. So try and keep your title tag to under 60 characters. Avoid trying to use too many keywords. A couple do. I click numbers or words? So e.g. the five top tips on how to get ready for Christmas. You know, something that's really very catchy and tracks people. That's the most important thing. And try to avoid using all caps. People tend to not read these very well, or it sounds like it's shouting at you and that can be a Parsi off-putting. Title tags, metadata descriptions. You probably heard this term. You may have come across it right underneath the title tag. And the role of a search result is a so-called Meta description. So basically, to sum up, is a summary of your webpage and it's usually about 160 characters long. So in a way, it's like a tweet if you have to think about it, but a little bit shorter. Just summing up what the page is about. In this sort of med scripting, you still need to do some of the keywords in there. But you want to keep it nice and short and really attracting your audience. So when you're doing these, spent a little time thinking about the types of sentences and basically reflecting what is each of the pages are going to be sharing. This is quite important. I've done a example at the bottom, which you can show is a normal search subscription that pops up the very two bottom lines. That is your meta-description. Proper formatting is actually a lot more important than you actually realize. So for this, it's the headings are done as H1 and H2, H3, H4, H1 obviously being the top one. So this there'll be your title of your page. If it's a blog, that will be H1. And then any subheadings will go H2, H3, H4 is just breaking down those subheadings is so, so important because when it gets accruals by Google, they'll pick up that you've got headings. They know exactly what topics about. And all the other subheadings can actually be categorized on Google. If that's what people were looking for, it might bring them to that particular article or blog or wherever it is. It's important to do it. It's also a way to signify new paragraphs for people, for readers and stuff. And it's a great way for, for navigation reasons. You've got maybe a content chart at the top and somebody wants to read the last part, the rest. I can click and they'll know exactly to go to heading, say four or five. It's just a good practice in general to do this anyway. Just spend some time making sure that you put your headings and you will text is set as a paragraph texts. Just because the 22 are very different and you don't want Google to get confused. So it's really, really important to have a look at your structure and make sure you've got all the headings. Every single page does need a heading one. Just so you know, it will get picked up on SEO side of things as being a bit of an error. So it's always important to go through every single page you have. Make sure you've got them. Image use. Original images will boost your on-page SEO. But if you have to use source images, you, it's really important to say what sources are. It's just a big scene is a good thing. Just to say basically where you put the images from. Not many people will use every new images just because you don't often have photographs of certain things. So you probably look at stock images. But it's important to say where your sources are for these images. I'm trying to make sure that there are high-quality. You don't want any pixelated images. It also reflects on your brand. If it's a bit pixelated pupil, be that maybe this isn't the real deal. It's also has to be relevant to your text, well-positioned and a decent size. So you don't want a massive image on a web page, like scrolling forever, you need it just a good size in mixing with a copy at a good point so people know it's relevant. Otherwise there's not really much point in having the image. Images are nice to break up text, but they are really good for inflammation and things like that. So Google quite likes it if they are related to what you're talking about. So it's worth thinking about. Well, compose your hours. So this is quite an important one. So the first three to five words, €1, are the ones that really matter. So it's good to keep them short and accurate. So I've done some examples here. So e.g. you can see the website and at the end it says services slash. Then the next one below it will say web design slash. And then the one below that you can clearly see is something do with blog because it's got a longer title. So the first two are more services. So when you're going onto a website, it clearly, if you're a bit confused on the page where you are, you can look at the URL. I'm on the web page, web design. So if page, that's why it's important to have your URLs and made sure that they're actually accurate to what they are. And they're short as well. It's also good because you can, sometimes people will copy, copy them as well for sourcing on their own website and things like that. But it's just important to try and keep them nice and short, sweet. You can don't worry about the blog articles. They tend to be the full length question. They're absolutely fine. But yeah, that's something worth thinking about. So these are the general ones. If you've got website that you want to look through, Wix, WordPress, or any of those. It's worth looking at all the key things that we've discussed and making sure you've got them in place because it will help your ICI.