The Beginner's Guide to SEO

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to the Beginner's Guide Toe s CEO in 2019 and beyond. If you're looking for a low cost and proven method to increase your website traffic, you've come to the right place. My name is Brandon Kid. I'm the founder of Fulsome Creative, a digital marketing agency in a practitioner of S E O. In this video, Siri's you'll learn how to increase website traffic using search engine optimization. The series will cover the following seo basics on page optimization, off page optimization, website performance, keyword research, seo tools and report. Together, we'll logger changes in track key performance indicators so you can see how search engine optimization improves Website traffic over time to begin. Join me in the next video. We'll see you there. 2. Prerequisites: before we get started, you may want to set up a website, although it's not required for this Siri's. It can be helpful to see how these things play out in the rial tools that you're going to use for me. I use WordPress, but you could use squarespace or wicks as well. There plenty of website builders out there and almost all modern website builders have some sort of tool to aid you in S E o. So if you have a website great, let's get started. If you don't, you have the opportunity to do all of these tasks website free with the exception of a couple items that will go over Maurin just the theory of how they work. So you get the idea of how these optimization is and how the tools will help. You will see in the next video 3. On Page SEO: Page Structure: in this video, we're gonna talk about on Page s CEO and focus on page structure. Every Web page has certain elements that make up its structures, such as titles, descriptions, the actual copy put on the page, media elements, lists, links and other items. Every page needs to start with a title. A good title should be specific or intriguing. Draw the user in It should contain the keywords or key phrases that you are focusing on for this article or page, and it should use common words that are easy to understand and not be too technical or too difficult to spell. Pages should include headings. The title usually is. The H one were heading one, and you should only have one of those per page. When you use headings, you should cascade the headings in each section. So while the page has won each one, you might have multiple sections of content in each of those would start, for example, within each to if there's content that's related to each section than NH three and so on, making sure that you re cascade every time you go to a new section. For example, Section one would be H two h three Section two would have in each two h three so on and so forth you can have as many age twos, threes and so on as you want. Just one each one each heading should focus around your keyword or key phrase and should be within the same topic area that this article or pages talking about adding lists helps build richer content. This helps convey benefits to your users where your visitors it provides Richard Data for search engines, for example. You've ever done a Google search for something, and it had stepped 1234 as the featured answer lists can help build that kind of context, as well as heading levels in numbering and things like that, and they could be used as indexes with anchors. Adding media also helps the page. Media, such as images or videos, gives the user more visual appeal to the page and keeps them there longer. It also search engines built a better profile for what your pages about, and he creates nice breaks between each section, which makes articles or pages a little bit more inviting and easy to consume. As faras content length goes that can vary quite a bit. A good page generally will have 800 to 1000 words. However, the best pages air always tend to be on the word here side. That doesn't mean you have to drone on and on and on just to hit that target. But you should be complete in your thought. A typical blawg post, for example, might be between 1000 and 10,000 words as long as it's informative, and it's all about one topic. You've hit the target. If you've gone overboard and tried to create AZM, any block posts about your topic is possible. Generally, you've probably ran into the trap of creating two or 300 word blawg posts that are just built to create more pages and more content on your site. It's a good habit to get into, to trim that content down, and to make one master article were one complete article or page about that content. So before we hop into our project, we're gonna I'm gonna show you a little bit of what I've done that follows all of these key principles. So I've set up Ah blawg Post on. This is just a Travel Blawg about going to Disneyland. It's something my wife and I and my kids are all interested doing. We go every couple of years, so it's kind of topical for me. So in this block post we have a title. We have just, ah, quick snippet of media at the top of the page just to add some visual appeal. In a quick introduction, I've used a list to give this article in index. This list is anchored to different sections. Symbol to copy. There will cover that a little bit later, but each section is divided within H two. So you're planning we have some copy and overview some copy, more or less so on and so forth. An article like this is easy to consume because there's nice break Senate and the content is displayed in different ways. Instead of just one long run on paragraph or sentence. Getting back to our project in your project, we're going to create 1000 words sample blawg posts. It could be about anything you want. It could be instead of a blogged post service page or ah product page that you might be working on whatever interests you in your project. You want to include a title that's also going to be your H one. You include Some sections in each section is going to use in each, too, and then at least one bullet list could be an order. Doran ordered list so bullet points or numbers in front of the list and then an image for each section. Try to create an article with 3 to 5 sections. That way you can include enough images. Once you're done, go ahead and hop on to the next video. See there. 4. On Page SEO: Links: in this on page s CEO video, we're going to focus on links there two types of primary links on page or on site and off site links. So on site links or links from your website to your own website. So from one page to another within your website, an offsite link is theon visit of that. It's a link from your website to someone else's websites, a resource that you might have found it one of the link to in both cases, you want to avoid using the word click here or link or just pasting the U. R L. Is the link within the copy. You want to focus on things like keywords as the link itself. So in the case of my website, I might use something like where to stay as the anchor to ah Hotels page For Disneyland, you might use something like our services or some more specific key phrase actually link to a different page. There's 1/3 type of link, which is an anchor link, so an anchor link can link either to the same page already on, and it would just take you to a different section on that page. or it could take you to a specific section of another page. So again, when you're linking to another page on your website, you might be linking to a section on a page, and an anchor can help get your visitor to the right page or the right spot on the right page. This is also really good for when you're creating longer format block posts or longer content by giving the user some type of index that they can click on to get to different sections of your page. So I've set some of this up already. I have an anchor on my blood posts that I'm working on. For example, if I hit overview and just scrolls me down to this overview section, I've used my anchor link, uh, recommendation. So, for example, these three Disney hotels this just opens the Disney Hotels page instead of just saying to find the hotels, click here and then linking click here. And then I've added different links to different blawg posts within the same page. All of these links just go to different pages on the same website, so what you should do next within your project is to add to external links and to internal links and then add an anchor link. So adding an anchor link might be a little bit confusing. If you do a quick Google search on Link formatting Type and anchor link, you'll get some recommendations. Is how to set that up? Essentially, an anchor link is just a link to a HTML element on the page with an I D. And then you would just linked to that I d. When you're done, go ahead and hop on to the next video. 5. On Page SEO: Titles & Descriptions: in this video, we're gonna talk about titles and descriptions. We talked about titles. We're not actually talking about the article title in this video. We're talking about the meta title. A meta title is what you see whenever you do a Google search and you see the title of the article in a description, which would be the meta description. These are little bits of HTML that accompany a Web page to help give search engines and readers a better understanding of what the content is about. Many people don't actually create these, and they just kind of let Google figure it out. Or they let whatever s CEO software they're using just kind of put it together for them. But if you make custom titles and descriptions, you can actually get a lot better results because you're speaking to your audience or you have the ability to speak to your audience rather than just having some kind of jumbled mess of text. That was just the first half a sentence from your article. So meta title is kind of your opportunity tow hook the reader in before they've actually made it to your website. So just like our page title. The Meta title should be intriguing. It should draw the user in should be the proper length. Google titles have to fit a specific width, so it's not necessarily a character limit. That's a different with, and those things change quite frequently. So it's good to stay up today on Google's recommendations on titles and descriptions and actually branded. So if you can make sure that your website name is included in the title, this helps all of your search results for maybe similar articles. Sometimes you come up for two or three to really stand out amongst the crowd. A description just like the title should be intriguing as well. It should be the proper length. Again. There's a width of characters that you're allowed to have, and then it showed include a call to action. You should hook someone in with that title, but then ask them to take action with a call to action. So let's take a look at how this is formatted. So in my situation again, on using WordPress, you could use any number of seo tools. If you're using a different platform than sa WordPress, be sure to do a quick Google search to find recommendations and ratings about different ASIO tools that might be beneficial in your platform. For me, I'm using Yost. It's popular. S E O Toole WordPress on It's pretty easy to use, so I have a matter, title or description, and Joost actually formats. It's similar to a Google search result shows me what my euro will look like. My title description. So on and so forth. So with my title, first timer's guide to Disneyland and the brand of this website, with of the title of the website DIA gone in Maine and then the slug itself, that's typically going to be something you'll see in a search result. Another description. Read this guide about traveling to Disneyland before booking your stay. We've packed this article full of valuable tips and tricks. Check it out So the call to action is actually twofold, asking for someone to read this guide to get this content in them, to check it out, to take the action to click the link. There's a bit of S E O. That kind of gets overlooked, and it's an important part to think about because usually when you're setting your titles and descriptions. You can also find this setting nearby, and it's a canonical link, so canonical link is a way of giving credit to the original source. And this is something that gets overlooked when people typically blawg on multiple platforms. So if you use a service like medium, or if you have a website and then a WordPress, blogging as well, you might get asked to create the article and then to share it on the medium are blogged or somewhere else. And what happens is you create duplicate content, and duplicate content is frowned upon on the Internet from both a user standpoint, but most likely a search engine standpoint. Google doesn't like to see people essentially copying and pasting. What a canonical link allows you to do is to copy the your L from the original source, paste it into the new source. In that way, one of the others will get credit. Original gets the credit. I also use this strategy when I create a website with landing pages that all have similar copy. What I'll do is I'll create a parent landing page with sub landing pages for little individual tweaks. To my copy that I might be using for advertising or other reasons where the copies 90 toe 95% the same Salah's me to make sure that I don't Kip duplicate content on my website. I'm telling Google. Hey, all of these articles are all these pages are essentially one in the same. So if we look at this on a Yost specifically of this conduct economical you, Earl and a little description here, this is for this tool. But again, most s yo tools will have that setting nearby as well. So, in your project, all I need you to do is create a title in description. For your example Block post. Once you're done, go ahead and hop on to the next video. 6. Off Page SEO: Backlinks: in this video, we're gonna talk about off Page Seo specifically back links. So a back link is a link from someone else's website to yours. So remember, in an earlier video, we talked about off page links Were our websites linked to resource is that we found useful in this case, Our resource that we've created has actually useful enough for somebody else toe. Want to link back toe us? Ah, back link is typically a non non follow link or no follow link. So there's two kinds or there's ah, away. A link can be formatted that basically tells Google, Hey, don't give this Lincoln in credit. It might be found here, but we're not interested in passing any of our value over to this page. We're not endorsing this content. Good example of this is if you post on social media most of those links or no follow if you post comments on people's blog's or message boards, generally those air no follow links, so you don't get any credit for those those air typically spammy places to just be pasting your link Anyway, those back links should just like the links that we create our own websites use our keyword or key phrase when a website has ah high authority, those back links are more beneficial to us. So, for example, if we were getting back links from an industry source for an industry leader, typically we're going to see more value from those links than just any random website we found on the Internet. Back links are really hard to get, but they give you so much of value and that's kind of the point. Google and other search engines they kind of rate your website based on who's linking to you, who's endorsing you. And since those air harder things to get organically, it kind of shows Ah, more natural scorecard, if you will, as to how it valuable your resource is which pull effect where you rank with in search. The more valuable your website where your resource of your pages, the higher your rank. So in this case, you're gonna want to reach out toe website authors, people who write on these websites you're going to want to give them some sort of value. I've found that the most effective way is building a relationship with that person before just asking for the link, so I might converse with them on Twitter. Or LinkedIn might get to know them a little bit. Might just even ask them for some advice for schedule A call. The reason is, is people just don't give away links for free, and most the time they're getting one or two or maybe 10 emails a week for people trying to pitch them content. So you got to go a little extra just to get that that link. There's a lot of strategies you might see out there where people are sending out thousands of emails a month or a week trying to get just a small percentage of them to put their link up. I certainly don't know thousands of high value websites in my industry that I would want links from, so that's really not a viable option. I need to find a few dozen targets where I can create a good relationship and get multiple links ongoing from those people. Typically, I'll provide them the content. I generally won't ask someone to link to me without providing content unless they've already written really good content and I could just tweak of paragraph a little bit and add my link in there and I wanted to be compelling. Ah, and organic. So that way it would get shared. So anything we write on our blawg is compelling as possible. So that way other people will just find it and they'll share it and create back links to it without us even asking. So what? I want you to do this. I want you to create a sample email requesting a back links to your content. You want to include a sentence or a paragraph for the author, and some sort of value may be a link in return. So typically, when I write something I might say, Hey, Dave, I was reading your article on Seo optimization and I noticed you talked about website performance. I actually wrote a blawg myself, all about website performance, and I think it would be a good resource toe link to Here is a short snippet of text that you can include in your posts includes a link back toe, our post a swell. I've gone ahead and already included a link from my blawg post on website speed to your blog's Well, thanks for taking the time to read And if you have any questions, go ahead and shoot me an email and leave the email back. Be sure to If you do do this in real life, be sure to follow up one or two times. But not to be two annoying. If they don't want to share the content, they're just not going to share it. So move onto your next target. Once you've done that, go ahead and hop into the next video. 7. Off Page SEO: Social Media: in this off pay Jesse a video. We're going to talk about social media. Social media is super powerful and can be a really good way of attracting new visitors to your website. There's a few things you should remember when you're sharing content on social media, my go to is to manually share all of my content. Ah, lot of website CMS is allow you to automatically publish a block post, for example, and then it just shares out to the world. Typically, you miss out on a lot of optimization is that you can utilised make your content more engaging for the user. That doesn't mean you can't automate. It just means that you should have the ability to manually create your content. If you wanna automate, I suggest using a tool like buffer. It's a social media posting tool that allows you to post on pretty much everything, including linked an instagram Facebook twitter so on and so forth. It allows you to essentially manually create your posts, but then just schedule them for later and then you should also when you're creating your content to make social sharing more beneficial to you. To include open graph data when sharing, just like armada title and description. There's open graph data, and that's used by pretty much all social media platforms. Ah, specifically Facebook. But Twitter and LinkedIn also use it. We're just gonna review what that looks like. So if we go back to our post that we had created before we go into the meta again, I'm using Yost s CEO. But you might be using a different plug in or tool within your content management system that allows you to do these things. But this allows us to set the open graph data so I can actually tell Facebook. But my title and description will be as well as what image I want to use when I publish this to Facebook. So if I copy and paste the link, Twitter also exists here. The reason there's Facebook and Twitter is Twitter has a character limit, so it kind of allows you to be a bit more trimmed down for Twitter's platform. Also, Twitter as some different image dimensions pretty much everything for Facebook works good everywhere. Everything for Twitter just works good on Twitter. Just to show you what open graph data would do actually have a block post. I wrote about this exact topic called the Ultimate CEO checklist. You'll notice that there is a featured image at the top of this that just says S E O. Because I have my title down here. But if I up over to Facebook and I just go to write a new post, I just paste that Lincoln Facebook will automatically grab all that open graph data all of that data from the post and paste it in for me. So it grabbed the new social media image that I wanted to share. So in this one, I actually include the title on the image versus the original post that just had the image itself. So it allows me to add a little bit more context to make it more engaging, especially when on social media there is a lot to look at. It just allows someone to know exactly what I'm talking about on, and then the title of the Block post. If I were to share this on, let's say LinkedIn or Twitter, I'll get some of those other features like the description to show up a swell, and Facebook will still show the description, just depending on where it shows up in the feet. But what's cool about this is I don't actually need this link. Someone could just click on this title here. And this is why I think it's important to share something a little bit extra and to do these things manually so I can actually just delete my link. And I can say Check out this article on S E. O and then publish can add Hashtags. Other things in there generally would be. It may be a little bit more descriptive about this blood post, but it gives me the opportunity to do something I couldn't quite do if I was sharing automatically. Another thing that you can get out of social media is brand mentions. So brand mentions is just really anybody who is mentioning your handle. So whether it's on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, people that are talking about you when I create content, I try to get as many people talking about me and mentioning my brand as possible. That shows me that I've created content that's highly engaging, which is exactly what I'm trying to achieve, and it also helps me trend a little higher in the search results. Social media profiles that are more popular, just like websites that are more popular, show up higher in the search results. And almost all social media platforms have some sort of search tool. And people spend a lot of time on social media and search a lot, so being able to come up higher in the search is important. This improves your likelihood of trending as well. Many social media platforms, including Facebook, allow you to write some kind of review or the post content to that person's brand to review eso. It's important to use social media as kind of a way to engage your audience and get some feedback from them. It establishes credibility outside of your website. Most websites have a testimonials page, which is great, but who's going to say anything negative about their own company? So being able to have some kind of brand recognition or review outside of your website, it's important. Typically, I go to third party review sites. Facebook. Google has its own set up as well. That allows people to review our brand, and I actually solicit those reviews. Most people won't leave a review unless you ask him to. So it's good to ask as much as possible, especially those clients who you've worked with for a long time or business partners so on and so forth. A lot of those reviews have a rich data attached to them, and those things will show up in Google's If you do a Google search and you see a story of you next to result that will show you or trust within that result. But it will also build within the knowledge panel for your brand within search where your reviewed at. So if you search reviews for a company, you'll probably see there, some from Facebook's and from Yelp, some from Google on and so forth. So in this project update, all we're going to do is to create a sample Facebook post. So include a title description, a photo and story. So the title of description, or those open graph titled Descriptions just like the matter title and description. But try to use something slightly different, a photo to go with the post and then just a short little story or update that you'd like to share with that post that tells people about the content why they should read it, Maybe as solicits a comment or a share from that post. Once you've done that, go ahead and update your project and I'll see in the next video. 8. Off Page SEO: Guest Blogging: in this off page s you video, we're gonna talk about guest blogging. So what is a guest? Blawg? So a guest blogger is a couple of things. One. It's when you create content for other people's websites, but you get the credit as an author. Typically, that's when you were a thought leader, an industry leader who has been invited to a different website to create some content. Collaborate. It could be collaborating with other blog's where you're creating pieces of content. I frequently write snippets of content for other blog's authors on, and I get quoted on that and therefore get back link. And then it's also inviting other thought leaders and experts to write content for your blog's in any way. You're able to get some kind of back Lincoln some kind of benefit from doing this. So, for example, if I'm offering content someone else's blawg, generally I'll compare that with my author by line, which has a link back to my website, and it gives me a little bit of credibility with that person's audience if I collaborate pretty much the same thing. But I might just get quoted by my name and then by bringing other people to my website. Typically, they might share that article and bring their audience and their followers to my website. So when I want to find opportunities to Blawg, typically I'll do exactly what I do for creating back links, and that's creating relationships. So I like to find authors and thought leaders in my industry, so other S seo experts and writing experts who are able to help kind of curate content around the same types of content that I create. So in my example, blogged about Disneyland, I might find a travel blogger or travel influencer who can write some content for us or who has a blood that I can write content on, find people that complement your industry. So if you do each PC, you might find a construction company, Blawg, to write your content on or vice versa and then find people who can wring their audience. You're struggling to get traffic to your website. There's nothing better than reaching out of creating relationship with a thought leader who has a massive audience and who could bring in new visitors from their audience. So if they can write some content and then they can share that article out to their their following. That could be a really huge impact on can get you going. It's a really good way to energize things. So in this project update I all I want you to do is find three thought leaders who would make a good guest bloggers either to write content for you or for you to write content for them. Once you have those, just give us their name and link toe their website. I'm an addict in the end of your project. Once you've done that, go ahead and hop into the next video. 9. Website Performance: Website Optimization: this next set of videos, we're gonna talk about website performance and specifically optimization in this video website. Performance is one of my favorite areas because it's often overlooked by search engine optimization experts. Most people focus on content and back links and page structure and things like that, and tend to not look so much at performance or at least not enough. So I really like to talk about website performance because it's a key factor that can help really boost the way your website shows up in search results. It's also good for the user to so the first thing that I typically look at his page speed. How fast does my website operate? Not just the home page, but other pages within the website. Typically, any time I read a blogged post or create a new page, I run it through a page speed tool to make sure that it's fast and I have done everything right. So typically those tools will be GT metrics, Google Page, speed insights, Ping DM, feed the baht. Those are my favorites. Generally, I'll just use one of this mix. I don't use all of them to see what's going on pick one and I stick with it. GT Metrics seems to have some of the best insights from several tools and feed the body is pretty good if you are looking for some or technical recommendations that you might pass onto a Web developer. So I'm just gonna hop over toe GT metrics will real quick to show you how this works, So I'm a big fan of hockey. So I'm just going to test the NHL's website. Put in the Euro ad test air I entered to test, and it's just gonna cue this up real quick. Generally, these tests take just a few seconds, probably 20 or 30 seconds. If your site slower, it might take longer, and I have seen GT metrics get bogged down. Usually it's in the morning when I hop in the work, I do a test on a few things and I'll get kind of a slow Q. We'll just wait for this to wrap up real quick what we do that we'll talk about some of the Common S CEO issues that we find so common issues are cashing image compression scripts and style sheet. I see these three things as being the most common issues that I come across when I'm helping a customer of mine try toe resolve side issues or search engine ranking issues and things like that. So cashing is, ah, method that we used to serve either a static file so we could take a Web page that might be dynamic and just make it static. So instead of it having to use server processing power and things like that, it can just send the HTML directly to the browser or by telling the user, Hey, save these images and these style sheets that we're giving you. We're going to use them later so way they don't have to read. Download them. Image compression is a big one. Making sure images their size properly is always important. Most digital cameras take pictures that air several 1000 pixels wide. How are most monitors are several 1000 pixels wide, for example. 1920 by 10 80 is a fairly common monitor size, and within that you really aren't going to get much more than 800 pixel by 800 pixel wide image to work, unless it's a banner that's meant to be full screen. But even then it still doesn't need to be several 1000 pixels wide, and it could be saved, optimized and compressed. So that way you can save on file size. So it's small. Been images, possible inscription style sheets, these air What makes your website interactive and visual thes things. Sometimes there's several of them, or they run optimized. There's ways to actually combine these things so you can have one script in one style sheet in that it could be optimized where there's no white spaces and the file size has modified as much as possible. So that way it loads as fast as possible. All three of those things combined generally contribute to the overall performance of a website, so it's look on our test real quick. So as I figured this websites definitely not optimized, they get a lot of traffic. Obviously, it's the NHL, but it gives you a really good example off where optimization is can be had. So things I look at typically are gonna be the page size. So 5.78 megabytes is pretty large. It's not crazy, but it's definitely up there. But what is crazy is 387 requests. Ah, typical oversight I build is 22 50 requests in each request is essentially every image refile. Anything that is getting requested from a server is one request. So too many images, too many scripts, too many style sheets. Those kind of things will cause issues. In this case, they're probably using a lot of ad trackers. So there's probably a lot of software from Google ads and all sorts of different ad platforms that are feeding in and tracking user behavior, as well as just some general site functionality. And that's caused the overall page load to be about 23 seconds. Now this page does render pretty well within that top above the fold section, so when a user goes to the site might not feel like 23 seconds. But by the time it's really done loading, it did take that long. You could see uh, GT metrics gives us a whole bunch of different areas that we can optimize in so minimising Reader X. They're using a lot of different ad platforms, and that causes a lot of issues with redirects. We go down, we'll find some of the issues that we talked about. So one is browser cashing. So Brad browser cashing is literally just telling the user, Hey, you can save this content. It's it's going to get used to somewhere else, so you don't need to just load it once and then loaded to get next time. Just save it and we'll come back to it later. That means that someone like Donald at once. But when they go to the next page and see that content again, they want to download it again, optimizing images again. They could save lots of file size 23% on average. It looks like here by just compressing these images without losing inequality and then things like men. If I ng javascript, that's what we talked about with taking those files, contaminating them together and then men. If I ng such a small file as one file is possible, these things are always realistic. You know, I expect anybody to get ah, 100% on these tests, but the better you can get generally a B or in any score. It's going to be what you're looking for. I always say, as long as you're at 80% you your optimized enough for Google. The rest of that is optimizing just for the user. So this project, we don't have an update, since it's more about theory. But it's something to start considering. How does performance impact your search results? And how does performance impact your user? Once you've tested out your website using GT Metrics or one of the tools that I've provided , go ahead and hop on to the next video. 10. Website Performance: Hosting: this video. I want to take a moment to talk about Web hosting, so it's pretty common when we set up a website for the first time. We just kind of choose the hosting That's the cheapest. Or that we've heard of the most host Gator or Go Daddy, for example, these air common hosts that I see a lot of people hosting their Web sites on. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're the best host, especially when it comes to website performance and speed. So in our last video, we talked about optimizing files and scripts and scripts and style sheets and testing our website. But that's how good is longer. Web site host is actually quite fast. If it's not, those optimization aren't gonna help us Aton. So there are two kinds of hosts that we typically look at. There's 1/3 type. If you're using squares base for wicks and that's a hosted platform. You can't change your host, but when you can, when you're using wordpress like me or another hosted platform O. R. Another self hosted platform, you can choose your host. So budget hosts air often slower there on shared servers. So it's your website and several other people's within kind of the same group, so you're kind of sharing band with with them, there's fewer optimization is you can do. You can't get in there and tweak and tune things up. You don't have any control over the actual server environment on generally, there's a little bit less support. So when you do have one of these questions, you might not be talking to someone who can even answer that question for you. Where is managed hosts? So hosts that allow you to install either faster software or tune your server or give you a level of customer support for a specific platform? Those kind of hosts are typically going to be faster. They're gonna have more optimization, is available and generally have expert support. When you're looking for a host. You might also look for a host that makes it easy to integrate a cdn cdn zehr generally typically going to be one of those things that are kind of difficult to install. But being able to work with host that just builds that in for you can save you a lot of time in headaches, especially if you're not the technical type of person, so Cdn stands for content delivery network. Essentially, what that allows you to do is optimize how you serve different types of files on your website. So when someone goes in the Web browser in the load, your website, if the same part drive from the disk that's loading the website is also serving the images and the scripts and the style sheets. It's got a kind of find all of that stuff at once so it can only go forward so fast, whereas a cdn can help pull those files from a different servers. So your server is gonna just load the Web page itself, while the images and different types of files like Javascript and CSS might load from a cdn . Typically, I'll even load cached files from a cdn as well, so it gives you kind of two pipelines for your website to load from, which makes it a little bit faster. CD ends are also generally optimized just for serving these files, and they're highly available these air on large servers that have redundancies, so you're likely to not have a broken image or missing link. It's gonna lower really quickly and serve those files. Cashing is another big opportunity for improving your speed. Generally, those budget hosts don't typically allow you to cash war. Don't allow you to cash well more manage hosts, and higher and hosting allows you to cash your files. I recommend it because it allows you to basically take a huge dynamic page load where you're rendering the page in real time and distills that all down to just one HTML file with images. And then there were assets. This improves your page load times helps deliver that static version vs your dynamic, and it reduces the band with the use. So when you cash pages, generally they're compressed as well, and that means that you use up less bandwidth. And if you're paying for hosting based on the amount of visits or band with you get, that can help out quite a bit. There's no update for this project. Just take that in mind when you're choosing a host, or if you're thinking about switching your own host, what features do they have to make my website faster? And what value do I get out of that? Typically, a manage show's gonna be a little bit more expensive, but you get what you pay for, and I recommend spending anywhere between 25 $50 a month for your hosting. If you're not spending that much, you're definitely in the budget hosting territory. And, you know, it might not be getting as much as you need from it. You have a small block, and you're not really concerned about traffic. Um, you know, ah, budget host might work for you, but keep in mind, it might be difficult to move your site later Once that becomes a different topic, right? When When you do want that traffic and you do want that speed, you should think about the future first. So that's all for this video. Once you're done reviewing your hosting situation, go ahead and hop on to the next video. 11. Website Performance: Security: in this website performance video. We're gonna talk about security. Security actually does impact your search rank on Google for various reasons. One from just being hacked and having malware in your site to just from being using the right tools and technology to make sure that your visitors are safe and secure. So the first item that every website should have its 2019. We need these things. Eyes an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate essentially just encrypts the link between the browser and the server. So when someone is in putting form data or any kind of personal data, credit card those kind of things and encrypts that data that way, it can't just be read and plain text by someone who might be listening. This adds the https that you've probably seen in front of the domain name. In depending on your browser, you'll see a green padlock or a padlock symbol, or or some version of that on. This is a sign of trust. When you go to a website with an SSL certificate, you see these things you know that you with, uh, with some reservation that you can at least trust this websites encrypting your content on SSL certificate is recommended by Google and improve search rink. Google's more likely to display results for websites that contain a society that using SSL versus websites who don't keeping your website up to date, especially if you're using a CMS. For example. In my case, WordPress repress has a terrible track record because people's websites have gotten hacked or broken in. Typically that could be resolved by just updating whenever you see those updates most of the time there. For security reasons, eso apply those updates. If you don't already maybe set up a staging server where you can test your updates if you're running e commerce and those kind of things to make sure things will go smoothly. But you should not be afraid of updates. This will generally improve performance your website as well. Ah, lot of updates bring incompatibility with newer versions of server technology like PHP 7.1 or two more. Three. Those things are quite a bit faster and it might just remove some overhead and some additional bloat as well and could improve speed. It improves your search rink and it gives people the best ongoing experience if you're like me and you've been to a website a few years ago and then you go there today and everything kind of seems broken. It's probably cause there are updating things. It's not that the website got worse. It's that it just didn't stay up to date and therefore a few things just aren't as performance as websites that you've come used Teoh come accustomed to using. I also recommend as a security process to back up. I know the backup backing up doesn't actually add any security to your website, but it adds security to you. Sometimes things go wrong when you're backing up your website or if your websites not secure, it could allow hackers to get access. Those kind of things and backups are great little insurance policies to make sure that if something happens, all that hard work that you've built up doesn't just vanish overnight. It makes it a lot easier if you can back up to migrate from one host to another, which is always nice. For example, if your server goes down, you're hosting company that you trusted just goes belly up overnight. You have a backup that you can take to the next host and allows you to maintain versions. I've seen it a lot where someone said, Hey, we used to have this honor site. We don't anymore and I don't know how to get it. This is a great way of being able to kind of back up something. Get back to something that you might have had a couple of years ago so you can explore that something you can reincorporated into the website. I like to work with hosts that can do those things for me. So that way I don't think about it. If the host can offer automatic backups and it doesn't cost too much more at all those air always good things. And if you do make a major update to your site, you sure back up first. You never know plugging updates, and those kind of things can cause issues. Eso using creating your backup before you go and do those things will give you peace of mind again. There's no updates for this in the performance section. I want to make you aware that performance and security and backups and those kind of things are all very, very important things to the overall health of S e O helps you rank better, helps you continue to drink better and it gives you insurance for if anything goes wrong that you can get back up on the net and make sure that you're not losing any rank While website might be town Once you're done, go ahead and hop on to the next video. 12. Keyword Research: Phrases: in this video, we're going to start talking about keyword research, and that's where we start getting into some of the more complex areas. S CEO. So far, we've talked about page structure and all the elements how to share all of that, how to get people the lean can talk about our website how to make sure websites fast, but at the end of the day, it's keyword research that really makes or breaks our content. When I look at keywords, I don't actually call them keywords. I call them key phrases because no one actually puts in one word or two words into a search engine. At least I don't. I usually put a partial sentence. I'm pretty descriptive when I'm searching for something because I want something specific. I've got a specific issue. I need a specific solution, and that's the context that you can think of When creating keywords were key phrases, so a keyword is usually short. It's not super specific. It's not a lot of intent, right? So it's not searching cars. If I want to buy a car, I'm going to say where to buy cars for the lowest price in my town so on and so forth. Key phrases Have you ever heard of a long tail keyword? That's what a long tail keyword is. So I want Caribbean restaurants in my town. That's a long till keyword or Internet of things for boating cos I want to know about coyote type of technology but specific to boating companies, and that's exactly what it is. It's specific, and there's intent. Generally, people are in different stages of, ah, buying process, where a research process will usually add their intent when you want to research something and then to you want to buy it so you can use key phrases to decipher which intent the user's gonna have and what kind of content they might want to consume. Without that, you're just writing really general type of content with no specific intent or no specifics involved. So to discover your key phrases, typically, I start with a Google search. So if you do a Google search, um, and when we'll do one in just a minute, you'll notice that there's all sorts of little data that comes out of the Google search. That kind of tells you what other people are searching for and that is exactly the data that we want to use. We might use a competitor website, find headlines and titles that they might be using for the block, post or other content. Ah, and then there's Maceio research tools. One. We'll talk about a little bit, Helps us kind of spy on our competitors and find new opportunities as well. So key phrases are used everywhere are titles? Are you or else so in the slug of our your own section headings and links. So let's take a look at how we can utilize a search in Google to find new searches. So we're new key phrases, So I searched real quick within our blawg just Disneyland Travel tips for spring. It's almost spring coming up here s I want to look at tips for me and I found a good resource. But I also found this box. Google has a suggested search, but also people ask also ask search eso What is the cheapest time of year to go to Disneyland? I might be some good content right about or is Disneyland crowd crowded during spring break ? These are all article topics or key phrases you could use For example, I might write a NAR tickle about when is the best time of year to go to Disneyland. And I might talk about, um, that crowded times in spring break, how to avoid lines so on and so forth with all one article. If you scroll to the bottom, you'll see this searches related and you'll find out that Disneyland attendants char or Disneyland, spring break or crowd calendar. A lot of people are looking for that specific content. So these air related searches to the content I created that can help me and determine what I should write about what kind of context I should add to the content I'm creating. So in this project, I want you to do a Google search, and I want you to come up with 5 to 10 key phrases. And a key phrase should be at least three words. That is the beginning of a phrase. So five find 5 to 10 key phrases and then add that to the bottle in your sample, blogged topic and then hop over to the next video to continue 13. Keyword Research: LSI Keywords: in this keyword research video we're gonna learn about ls I keywords? Ls I keyword where l s I stands for latent semantic index. These keywords are keywords related to the key word or key phrase that you're using. Sometimes they include hitting meanings or different meanings and oftentimes slaying or other kind of jargon that you might see associated with the topic. There's a tool I use called Ellis I graph. You go there by Ellis siggraph dot com that you can plug a keyword or key phrase into, and they'll help you find more topics around that or other key phrases you could use within your article. So, for example, Disneyland travel to keep on topic with our block post that I'm creating, I might see things like Disneyland vacation packages with flight Disneyland vacation packages that are all inclusive. So I can take a few of these that are similar and build on article and use these as maybe sections within my article. Alice I keywords a really good to help improve the quality of your content. Overall, make sure you're expanding far enough just from one keyword or key phrase and including different content that gives your article. That greater context, having better contacts gives your content of broader voice means you conserve other audiences. People that might search differently in Google to try to find the similar answer LS I keywords will help you find those users. For those visitors on it might give you clues about what kind of content you should add. If I'm ever getting stuck on writing an article, I've got one or two sections planned out using that ls I keyword tool. Help uncover maybe a two or three or four more sections I can add. So I want you to do is use the L A Siggraph website to find five different keywords or or else I keywords that are related to your blawg post that you might use as section headings . Once you have those five, add them to your project and we'll see you in the next video 14. SEO Tools & Reporting: Google Search Console: Now that we have our website set up, our content created, it's working optimally, and we've added in keywords and really just ramped up the quality overall in the entire website. We want to make sure that we can actually record our performance mean without recording a performance. We really don't know how well we're doing. One of the best tools for monitoring your S E. O is Google Search Council. It's a tool provided by Google that's free, that allows you to see what keywords your site ranks for and approximately how many people are searching for him. It doesn't give you 100% accurate data, but some data is better than no data. In this video, we're going to look at creating an account linking your site, adding a site map and then understanding the reports in the features. So first things first, we're gonna want to set up your Google Search Council head over to search dot google dot com, and it should bring this page up. I will redirect to the search council about Paige. If you have a Google account already, I recommend logging into that Google account and using that or creating one specifically for this project. When you get here, you logged into Google hits start now. Now, I've already added my sight and many sites added, But if you don't have a site added, a prompt will come up and tell you to add your site. If you have used Google Search Council in the past and you're adding a new site, you can just click this drop down and hit. Add property at the bottom. Google Search Council does require you to verify that you're the owner of the site. It will do so by giving you a few options. One is by using Google analytics. If you have already had that installed on your site, you can vote uploaded HTML file to your site, and you can also upload a meta tag to your site. Typically, I'll choose to go the meta tag route. This allows me to just take a quick snip it, put it on the website in the header, and I will be off to the races. If you're not sure about how to do that, contact your Web developer or if you're using a hosted platform like Squarespace or Wicks toe, consult their documentation to find out how it's quite easy, for example, using even tools like Joost. In our test case, I can link Webmaster tools in the verification code for Google can go here as well as some other search tools. So it's pretty common thing to have to add when you set up a Google search council. The first thing you should do after verifying is to add a site map. Most website Seo Tools will create a site map. Generally, it's just site map dot xml, which is the file format of site map comes up in. If you don't have a site map, you should look into the tool or platform you're using to see how to add a site map or, if there's a plug in you need in order to enable a site map, that tool will give you your site map. You Earl, we come back to our site and just hop in into site map. No, it'll give us Are you were on this in this case that redirected us to site map. Underscore index underscore dot XML site map index is just like a site map, except it, thanks to all the other site maps that you have. So you hop over into Google Paste that in hit submit, and that would load your site map. I'm showing you the search council for a different site. My company's website, fulsome creative dot com, and I have a site map already uploaded. It automatically will update as I add content to it, and search council will search for that site Map. Last time was the 22nd of February, and it discovered 39 you or else. So once all that's done and Google's had a little bit of time toe, review your site and how it performs in search, you'll be able to actually see a few reports that give you better context of how your contents doing so in this report, you have a few different data. Attributes you can filter by. One is the amount of clicks, the amount of impressions. So this amount of times that your site was viewed in search and an impression is kind of misleading because you might been on the second or third or fourth page. So it doesn't say me that the person that searched for a key phrase sought, but your website did come up in the listings. The click through rates of the amount of times that a click happened, divided by the amount of times impression was registered and then the position. So, out of all of the search pages, where did you come up? And this is actually the numbered position. There's about 10 search results per page, so this means that my average position is worth page 4.6 pages. D. That's actually pretty good, because there's gonna be some key phrases that I don't rank well for and others that I rank on the first page all the time. For you can filter based on how you come up in search for images and video, and you can also filter out different dates so you might only be interested in the last seven days. Or maybe you're interested in comparing this blast 28 days compared to the 28 days before, and you could see if you're improving or not improving. Let's just go back to this and look at the last seven days for me. So in seven days I had 83 clicks, 6.4000 impressions. My click through rate was 1.3% and I had an average position of 46 which all things consider these air pretty good targets for my goals. Your targets might be a little bit different. You might want more clicks. I'm trying to get very specific types of traffic and users to my site scroll down. You'll be able to see what queries people are searching for. So in our case, a lot of people are coming to our site based on Facebook business type advertising queries the pages that ranked the highest. So that s CEO checklist I showed off earlier. Disappear what countries people come to your website from. So for me, mostly the United States and the types of devices they use. You can also use this tool to look at things like mobile Usability gives you an idea. There's any issues on your pages. Typically, you'll have one or two issues, and that's pretty common. This is more of a warning that says, Hey, there's a couple elements that are too close together, some content that might have got whiter than the screen. That happens when sometimes you embed content like a video that doesn't respond on mobile devices as well on these air areas that help you find issues on your site that maybe you can resolve that will help improve any kind of search performance issues. So for our project, if you have website, go ahead and create a Google Search Council account. Verify your website and get everything set up in at your site map if you have one. Once you've done that, just put in a no on your project that that step is complete. If you don't have a website, that's okay. Others. Tons of re sources, including this video about setting up this in the future. A great way to figure things out with Google. Just Google getting started with Google Search Console. They have great documentation on all the individuals steps in All of the additional features that you might find within the tool. Well, we're focused on is just getting a view of our search performance where we come up in the search results and what keywords were ranking for 15. SEO Tools & Reporting: Google Analytics: in this video, we're gonna take a look at Google Analytics will go through account set up, creating a goal and understanding reports to start goto analytics dot google dot com and click Sign up. It will ask you for some basic information and for us, we're gonna just to create an account for our dia gone in Maine Disneyland Blawg and for the account on the website name, you can typically just use the same name. If you have multiple websites, you might have apparent website Group on. You could use that parent name for Thea Accounting Paste in the domain name and will also make sure that we switched to https for us. We're using travel. If you can't find your category, you can just select other at the bottom of the list and our time zone, where in the Denver Times own there are some data sharing options. I do recommend enabling these. These will help with future settings that you might want enable likely marketing on it overall just helps make sure that you get all of the features of analytics. The last bit just had her get dragging a T, and there's some general terms that you can accept and then you'll be presented with your tracking I d. This needs to go in the head of your website. Your website, depending on what software you're using, may or may not have a place to put this code automatically. For example, if you're using squarespace or wicks or website builder like that, generally there's a settings panel where you can enter this tracking I d. So this you a code. If you're using WORDPRESS, you'll probably need to install a plug in or configure your theme. Plug ins typically are monster insights, or there's a few other Google Analytics plug ins. There's new cool plugging that just came out. They can help get this tracking code. Or, if you're a little bit more tech savvy, you could just copy and paste this JavaScript simple into the top of your website. If you don't know how to do any of those and you can't find a settings panel, just refer to the documentation for whichever website platform you may be using. Once you have this code on your website, Google will start tracking all of the website visitors that come your website and what they do on the website. Typically, you're gonna wanna have a goal set up first. You could do so by hitting the admin panel. That's it. Still gear icon in the bottom left. Going over two goals and create a new goal. You can create several different types of goals. One of the most common goals I see created. It is selling out a contact form you want to track how many people came to your website and how many people tried to contact you. So I'm just going to hit custom for this goal. Then continue contact form, and I'm going to track whenever they get to a destination. So I set up my contact forums. I usually set him up at forward slash contact dash us and then I usually set another page up after that called Thank you. And I think you pay Just tell someone once they filled out the form what they should expect next. So are there other resource is they could read Should they expect me to reach back out within a certain amount of time, so on and so forth. So I usually configure my forms to go to this page. And when you're using a website. You should have some kind of some type of form builder software, and that will be an option to build a redirect some on two different page after they submit their form. So I'm just gonna put in contact us, thank you. So when they get to a page that is this destination, you don't necessarily need to put the root of the domain in. Just having this trailing forward slash pattern works just fine, and you contract any time someone makes it to that page. If you want to make sure that people don't get tracked, if they just somehow stumble upon this page without filling out a form, you can make sure that there's a step. Then you just set that to required. So I make sure that someone's gone through the proper steps to get to this page. So they had to go to contact us, then to the thank you page. Then it's safe. One. Someone's taken that action. You'll start seeing your conversions track here and then into the conversions tracking page so you can see what pages are meeting different types of goals and if you have multiple goals set up how they compare to each other. You can really start understanding how people are funneling down through the site. We'll take a look at this a little bit more in depth, with a different website that has some tracking data attitude as well. So in analytics, it's pretty daunting. Most people we talked to don't really understand what all these reports and all these buttons really dio, and that's okay. You don't need to understand all of those things. There's this home panel here that allows you to track some basic stats. What's going on right now, So many users or currently on the site in the last seven days? Or you can click to filter for more days. How many users sessions about what you're about, what's Ray and what the session duration ISS. Where your traffic comes from times of day, people view your site. This could be handy for understanding what time of day is a good time to post a block post . How many of your goals air getting completed and what your top pages are. A few other options in here, but sessions my country device so on and so forth, so forth that could be helpful. A swell, but typically all of the data you really need is all in this one page. If you're trying to understand a little bit more about one data point, that's when you use thes options to the left to really drill in and figure out. For example, what are the top pages? And how are people getting their Where they exiting on your site? How long do they spend on a page after the enter your site? Those kind of things Where, what, what what social media channels air bringing in the most traffic in tow articles? And if you're using paid advertising or anything like that gives you a little bit better idea of how that paid advertising is working for your site drink and how the traffic that's delivered from that may be good or bad for your situation. So we're gonna take a look at just what this looks like with some actual data inside analytics profiles. This is my website. It just shows me some basic stats. So what channels traffics coming from, and what proportion are active users that time of day traffic sources by device and our goals so I can see yes, and people are downloading. Resource is clicking our phone number on our website or contacting us in a few of the pages that air ranking at the highest level, it just gives me a better inside is to how my contents performing and where it's not performing well so I can go in and fix any issues that might exist. So in this project update what I want you to do if you have a website is created Google Analytics account, install your tracking and confirm that everything's complete within the project itself. Once you're done, hop on to the next video. 16. SEO Tools & Reporting: Spyfu: in this video, we're gonna cover 1/3 party tool that you could use to take your S O to the next level tool I like to use is called Spy Fu. It's an inexpensive tool to do seo research and to spy on your competitors. You can also discovering keywords and back link opportunities. If you head over to spy for dot com, you should be able to run a few free searches. But if you find this sort of tool useful, go ahead and create an account within the website. You can run a search into ah s CEO search, So I'm gonna enter a competitors and I'm actually just gonna use ah, hosting company that we prefer to use for WordPress sites called flywheel. I'm gonna put in their domain name and then I'll get this report back so I can see the ring for over 4500 keywords that they have improved in rank of her last three months and that they get estimated 61,000 s CEO clicks per month and that traffic would be valued if are paying for about $32,000. I can see that some of their length pages have improved in rink or keywords have improved in rank, while others have lost strength and some have stayed the same. I can also see who's some other competitors are and how they stack up against those competitors. You can also use this tool to add a custom competitors. So I might had go Daddy as 1/3 host for an extra house, and I can see goto him pretty much takes the cake. As faras competition goes, however, people like Fly Will are both more focused on the WordPress community, and I can see kind of the market share of these websites. When you're looking at how many keywords they rank for, I can see what they're most valuable keywords are and newly ranked keywords as well as some other stats regarding their keywords. One really helpful component to this tool is just looking at the key words of sites ranking for. So let's say I have a competitive and I'm trying to rank for the same or similar keywords is them. I can go in, put in their information and then find out how their ranking for different keywords. So, for example, he ranked really well for templates and WordPress, so I might create a block post that talks about that. So that way I could drink well in that category as well and maybe outrank them, especially if my content is better. I could also see where they get a lot of their back links, so a lot of them are blog's, and I can see the websites that they might be mentioned on. What's beneficial here is I can see what they're battling. Strategy is who they're reaching out to or who's excited about this service. And then I can reach out to those same blog's. Neither ask for a link update or Lincoln some new content they might be publishing. This helps me better refine or find new back link opportunities that I might not have considered before. There's some other features within this tool that we're not going to talk about, but that can be helpful. Some of those are the PPC research, so other doing in paid campaigns and the ability to track this performance over time. So if you have multiple competitors and you want to track how you compare to them over the course of, let's say, a year This would be a really good tool to help track those things. Spieth, who also makes some tools that allow you to spy on people's real time analytics and other things that could give you a better insight into how a site where competitors performing in what you can do you don't have to think of those is just trying to outdo your competitors. Sometimes it's just nice to know how other websites in your industry that might actually be friends and not competitors of yours are ranking. So that way you can maybe use some of those strategies for yourself as well. So I want you to go over to Spieth, who on their home page you should be able to put in you or l. I'll give you a few free tests. Go ahead and put in one of your competitors and put in a few of the keywords that they ring for the amount of clicks that they got for their website, organically and what the top competitive websites are. Once you have that through that in the end of your project and then hop into the next video , we'll wrap things up 17. Project Review & Conclusion: in this last video will do a quick project review and we'll talk about our next steps. So in this project we learned about on page optimization how the structure of your website impacts S seo off page optimization how links from third party websites and social media can help bring your side up in the search rink website performance. How having a fast website that's well optimized can improve your search performance key phrases. The types of keywords strings that you can research and build to create content and tools and reporting how you can measure your performance in your project. You should created one sample block post with a meta title and description. In example, Social Media Post A sample email requesting a back link from a contributor, a list of three industry thought leaders. Five key phrases five ls I keywords. You should have set up Google Search Consul and Analytics If you have a website and you should have put in your competitive s CEO analysis that you generated on Spy Fu ongoing, I'd like you to use these lessons to improve the S e o of your website into post a progress report every month for the next six months. I want you to include your website traffic. The amount of keyword impressions you got so that will be measured in Google Search Council and how many goals you completed. It will be measured in Google analytics. Come back every month and post your progress. That way I can see that these tips and strategies are working for you. And that way you have a record of how your websites improved over time. If you need to get in touch, go ahead and leave a comment on the videos or find me on Twitter at Smash Brando. Thanks for watching. And I hope these lessons about S e O will help improve your websites performance in your knowledge of S e o, Good luck.