Writing SEO for beginners | Chris Viola | Skillshare
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Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      1:21

    • 2.

      What is SEO and why is it important

      0:51

    • 3.

      Things to be aware of

      3:37

    • 4.

      Keyword research

      3:50

    • 5.

      Writing the article

      3:02

    • 6.

      Review

      1:33

    • 7.

      Class Project

      0:29

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About This Class

If you want people to see your site before they see your competitors. If so, this class will give you the basics on how to do that with your writing.

Meet Your Teacher

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Chris Viola

Writer and Marketing professional

Teacher

After spending years studying Writing and Digital Marketing, I love teaching classes about these things on Skillshare so that others can build their skillsets. I have several years of experience and education in these subjects, have read many books and seen many videos on the subjects. I also love teaching classes about some of my hobbies, allowing you to get the ball rolling on some new ways to enjoy yourself, most of which are budget-friendly, so anyone can enjoy them.

I'm a graduate of the Digital Marketing Institute and a Published Author looking to teach others these future proof skills that I love to use. Looking forward to teaching you. 

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Intro: Now something that's been trending a lot in both marketing and business as a whole in the past number of years, has been what's called SEO. Seo stands for search engine optimization. And it's trying to get stuff from your website to appear high up in the Google search results for a related term. Now this is a very multi-faceted issue. But one of the simplest and easiest to understand aspects that's also possibly the most important is content writing aspect. Where you write content such as a blog. In order to both a, gain links and B, have that particular article appear higher on Google results. Now, this is time-consuming, but it's something that can be done with very little budget. So whether you're trying to start a big business or your own personal blog. It's a really good tool. And I'll teach you how to do that in this video. 2. What is SEO and why is it important: Now, SEO is something that is important for the long-term health of a company, especially a company that's primarily based online. Lot of this is because search engines such as Google, have a lot of trust. And the vast majority of people use them to find what they're looking for. So if you can appear near the top, you'll get more traffic and more customers. That is basically the gist of it. And there are some things you need to be aware of that I will talk about in the next video. 3. Things to be aware of: Now, when writing for SEO, there's a few disclaimers. The first one is time. Seo takes a long time, even if you go to an agency and outsource it, that agency will almost certainly tell you that it will take between three to six months, at least before you see any results. And if anyone tries to sell you anything that can do it unless they're probably just trying to scam you. You have to be willing to use patients when it comes to SEO. Also, since getting people to link to you is something that can enhance the speed of SEO growth. People are often tempted to buy links from other people. I'll give you 20 bucks if you permanently put a link to my site, on your site, or I'll link to you if you're late to me. Well, both helping each others, SEO, Google, and other search engines such as Bing. They are onto this. And if you engage in this kind of behavior, these search engines will penalize you and your site might never recover. You might never be able to get top spots again in the search engines if you engage in these actions because these search engines view it as cheating. Other things that you should be very wary of that could be considered cheating are called keyword stuffing. Just putting the keyword that you're trying to rank for in the article. A whole bunch. Let's say you're trying to rank for how to run a marathon. Let's say you're trying to rank for tips for running a marathon. If you put tips for running a marathon in the article ten times, these tips were running a marathon will help you win marathons every time. The following five tips for winning a marathon or gray. Here is the first tip for running a marathon. Our first tip for running a marathon is the debt, the debt that you're obviously stuffing it too much with the keyword. And people just don't naturally write or talk like that. So once again, these will either cause that one article to disappear or once again, your whole site could be punished. Another thing is called invisible keywords, where let's say you have a white background on your website. You put your keywords such as tips for running a marathon in white so that people don't see. But it also appears for the search engines. And once again, the search engines don't like that. And basically writing for our machine where if something appears over-optimized, it's not good. So you do have to have your keyword in the article, but just having it in the title, as well as mentioning it in the entire article once or twice, is probably enough. 4. Keyword research: Now, there are a couple of ways to do keyword research. One of them is to login to your Google Ads account, which you may or may not have. And actually look at how many people search for your keyword and how easy it is to rank for you want something that's low competition. But has a lot of searches. That is your ideal scenario, but you might not always find it. And sadly, the only real way to find a keyword light that is trial and error. Again, they're probably going to be a fair number that are very low competitive with a medium amount of searches or a very high search volume with a medium amount of competitiveness. These two are also good. Now, another way is to just type stuff into Google that you think is relevant. Let's stick with our tips for running a marathon idea. And look at the websites there. And then you put the URL of the domain into a domain analysis tool. One that I'm gonna be using is on a website called malls and can be found at the following URL. But there are other ones out there that work just as well. I just personally like Mao's. If you want to use another one, that's perfectly fine. And in fact, here's a list of a few other ones. So what you do is you type in what they're looking for. And then you put the URL of each of the responses into Mars and see what their domain authority is. Generally, if top results of your search have really low domain authority, that should be a great sign for you because it'll be easier to rank near the top. Even if the top one or two have a really high domain authority. A lot of the times, especially early on, you'll have to settle for just getting onto the front page. So getting that third, fifth, seventh, or eighth result is often good enough. And once again, this is just something you'll have to do through trial and error. But I like to do it with typing questions into Google. One example that we're doing for, let's just say a fitness side, because I've already got that theme going with these keywords. How many reps should be in one set of arm curls? Let's type that into Google. And if you feel comfortable with the domain authority of your competitors and comfortable in your ability to answer that question. You would write an article with that is the title. And then you would answer that question in the article. Again, change the topic to something that is relevant for your blog or niche. And if you're able to get the time, do a whole bunch of keyword research all at once. This should give you a whole bunch of keywords and a whole bunch of topics to write blogs on. 5. Writing the article: Now we will discuss the most important thing. Actually researching and writing your article. When you do your research, you can use pretty much any source you want. You can use the internet. You can also use books, videos, your own experience, anything, but it's best to cite whatever you use. You also want to make sure that what you're writing is accurate. As, again, you want this to appear at the top of Google. You want people to link to it. So it actually does have to be good quality information. You generally start with an introductory paragraph or two, then get into the meat of it and come to a conclusion. Once again, you should have your keyword in there once or twice, as well as having in your title. But don't overdo it. Tried to write naturally. Generally you want to answer the question that was asked in the title. For example, in how long should I train for a marathon? Probably provide a few ranges, such as averages in advance. How long the average marathon runner trains born in advance. As well as recommendations from people who have run marathons in the past. You might also get into details on things they've done to train. This is stuff that would be valuable for your audience. Who is asking the question, make sure that all spelling and grammar is proper. Once again, if there's mistakes, people will simply look at your content as not being good. Overall, your articles should be natural and sound written for our human, not for a computer. Just the SEO stuff are very little changes you have to do that are subtle but will help you significantly. Generally recommended to have about a thousand words for an article. But that's not exactly mandatory. If it's a bit more or a bit less, that's okay. Now you will want to use some pictures with relevant alt texts to help as well, as well as any graphs or infographics to help with making your article more visually appealing. And to help summarize it quickly for people who just want to glance. Now, we'll get into the review. 6. Review: So to review, writing for SEO is writing contents such as a blog that will appear high up on Google because it answers a specific question. And because people link to it, it's something that will often take a long time to see a drastic improvement in your site. And if you can think of a possible shady tactic or exploit, Google's probably already thought of it and will punish you beforehand. So it's best to just be patient and wait out the number of months until you start to see results. You want the keyword, which is the word you want to rank for. Something that there's not very much competition for, but a fair amount of search traffic. You want to research and article of in the general area of about a thousand words, if possible, that answers this question with as much data and examples to back it up as possible. Getting any of this information into a visual display, such as an infographic is also very helpful as his writing alt text, especially alt texts that contains the keyword. Now onto the class project. 7. Class Project: Our project is very simple, right? An example of such context, this can be either on your personal blog where you show a link or you can just use a word document to write an example. Please be sure to include the keyword that you are trying to rank for, as well as any sources of the information you have in your article. Thank you.