SEO Tutorial For Beginners | Learn SEO Step By Step | SEO Tutorial | Advanced SEO 2020 | Simplilearn

welcome everyone this is Rob Sanders from simply learning today we're gonna talk about SEO tutorial for beginners so let's get right to it and in this recording we're gonna talk about a lot of topics related to SEO so what's in it for you we're gonna start with YF Co what is SEO we're gonna talk about keyword research how does a search engine work then we're going to go into on-page and off-page SEO and techniques and tactics related to both of those we're gonna dive into how Google algorithms work the types of SEO website architecture local SEO how to measure your SEO performance ie analytics and then we gonna have a little quiz at the end so a lot of information in today's tutorial so let's get right to it and start with why SEO and some of you with a website maybe your bloggers maybe you just have a website with a lot of content probably have this conversation before where you said hey look I got all this content but I can't be found on Google search engines and the first reaction somebody might have is well why don't you optimize your website for SEO and some of you may know what SEO is some of you may not know what SEO is and the natural question would be what is my website need SEO what is SEO well there are a lot of inherent benefits to SEO which stands for search engine optimization and the first benefit is it increases visibility on search engines so all the techniques we're going to cover today in today's SEO tutorial are going to be techniques to boost your visibility on the search engines so we're not talking about Google per se we're also talking about Bing and Yahoo and Baidu and some of the other search engines that are out there so that's inherently the first benefit to doing search engine optimization is we want to increase our visit ability on search engines and today's tutorial is going to cover that the second benefit is it will rank help you rank higher for relevant keywords so the idea behind search engines is we want our websites to be found our pages on our websites to be found when somebody does a search and so ideally when somebody does a search you want to be found for the keyword queries that are most relevant to your business so we want those keyword queries to match the content that we have on our website and so that's a benefit we want to be found for what people are looking for and so that's the beauty of SEO is that your content could be found for those relevant keywords the third benefit is it helps to increase traffic to your website so the idea here is a lot of people go to search engines on a daily basis around the world depending on what search engine they use Google is one of the most popular but if you look at China Baidu is a popular search engine nonetheless what's common around the world is people do use search engines to find information and so what we want to do is we want to be found in search engines because that's what people use to find content and so we're found on search engines people are going to find us for relevant keywords and if they see our content is relevant and the search engine results after they query a keyword then they're going to click on our link and go to our website so if you can imagine all that content you have on your website and all that content is able to be found on the search engines and a lot of people are using search engines with relevant keywords then naturally you're gonna get clicks that's going to drive traffic to your website and so that's in summary how it works and that's what we want we want to increase traffic to our website from search engines because that's what people use and then inherently because of that it will help people find our website so an optimized site helps your target audience find your website increase brand awareness so that's the idea if we could drive traffic to our website from search engines and multiple traffic sometime from the same users it's going to naturally also increase our brand awareness people are going to know more about us if we're found in the search engines and then another benefit here is it helps to convert a local business into a global business what we mean by that is if we're found in the search engine results if somebody types on a relevant keyword and our content shows up in the search engine results on google or Baidu or Bing or any search engine ideally our business can be found all over the world our content can be found all over the world it's not necessarily local per se we may have a local business in a particular city or locale but that doesn't stop anybody from around the world from finding our content so the idea behind search engines is look the contents available to anyone around the world and to me this is one of the biggest benefits because it can boost traffic it can boost brand awareness it can boost traffic and the whole idea is taking your business and taking it and elevating it to more of a global brand versus just a local print and so that inherently is one of the key benefits to search engine optimization so let's move on to what is SEO and we're going to talk about SEO and how do you define it so SEO again stands for search engine optimization it's basically the practice of getting traffic from the organic search results on not just Google but really any search engine so depending on the keyword that somebody types in regardless of what search engine they use that search engines going to rank websites based on the relevancy of the keyword so if you have a website and you have a blog and you have a lot of content in your food blogger and you write about let's just say restaurants and you're doing restaurant reviews and you happen to be doing a restaurant review about Italian restaurants well somebody typed in Italian restaurants you may want to come up for that keyword okay so it's all about relevancy does that search engines see that particular blog post as the most relevant for that search query so that's what SEO is all about we want to be able to rank our websites for certain keywords on search engines so if our website is ranked on search engines then there's a lot of benefits to that we talked about those benefits in the why SEO but the biggest benefit is the visibility that comes with that so the higher your ranked on a search engine the more traffic you're going to get and it's a snowball effect because the more traffic you get the more conversions you're gonna get so here you can see the percentage of Google traffic the higher you rank so generally there are 10 results per page on a search engine so if you're ranked in the top three or even in the first or second position you're gonna get a majority of the clicks and search engine optimization starts with the keyword because we want to be found for relevant keywords and so the first step and search engine optimization is always going to be keyword research so it is the most important step and so what does keyword research all about well it's process of identifying keywords we want to be found for on the search engines so millions of people use search engines on a daily basis we want to be found for those keywords that people type in that are relevant to the content we want to be found so going back to the Italian restaurant example if we're writing a blog post about Italian restaurants if somebody types in the best Italian restaurants or Italian restaurants in a specific city we want to be found for that content if it's relevant to what we wrote about so keyword research should be done based on two factors really it's based on the factor of how much traffic or volume a particular search engine query has and it's based on competition and really the underlying factor here is that all keywords in your keyword research should be relevant so you need to understand what those keywords are so are they relevant to the content that you want to be found for if they are then really the two you want to look for is the volume how much volume or traffic each keyword has associated with it and then the competition how many other websites are trying to be found for the same keyword so those are the factors involved with keyword research you always want to choose relevant keywords and then once you find or choose those relevant keywords you want to be able to find out exactly how much volume and how much competition is associated with each of those keywords and so when you look at keywords you're always going to choose relevant keywords but there are two types of keywords there are short tail keywords and there are long tail keywords and we're going to talk about both of these here so let's start with short tail keywords so short tail keywords are generic keywords generally they're less than three words in a keyword phrase for example Italian restaurants so short tail keywords generally have very high search volume that means that if somebody types in Italian restaurants then there's going to be a large amount of volume with that meaning that generally a lot of people type in the keyword Italian restaurants however with high volume always comes high competition so if you want to be found for Italian restaurants know that you are ranked number one or number two or even on page one of Google you're going to get a lot of traffic however to get to page one of Google or even position one or two it's going to take you a while because they're probably a lot of websites who are in front of you who want to be ranked and found for the same keyword so the whole idea with short tail keywords is it's a lot of visibility it's a lot of traffic a lot of volume but also a lot of competition and generally the underlying factor here is that if you are ranked for a very broad or short tail keyword like Italian restaurants then chances are it's not going to be as relevant so if you get the traffic to your website then chances are the conversions not necess really gonna happen because we don't necessarily know the mindset of somebody typing in a very short tail generic keyword like a tie in restaurants they could be doing research on Italian restaurants they could be a chef who's trying to get recipes for Italian food it could be worse looking for Italian restaurants in a different City or it could be a person just looking for Italian restaurants near their location or where they're living and so there's a lot of different factors with short tail keywords so you just don't know because it's so generic and because it's so generic if you do get the traffic for that generic keyword then the chances of the conversion are going to be lower than say if it's a more specific relevant keyword so let's take an example of a short tail keyword let's just stick with Italian restaurants so I'm gonna go to a tool called Moz and while Moz has a tool called the keyword explorer and within Moz so if you go to Moz comm and then use the keyword explorer you can get an idea of how much volume and competition are associated with a particular keyword so in this example we're using Italian restaurants it's a very broad keyword we could see that the monthly volume is between 70,000 and 118 thousand per month okay so that means for a particular keyword in the United States on a search engine you're going to get about seventy thousand to one hundred eighteen thousand people who type in that keyword and so if we were looking at the difficulty of that keyword you can see that it's fairly difficult because out of one to one hundred it's going to score forty three so it's fairly difficult however if you notice to click the rates very high so Moz estimates that we'll have a forty percent organic click the rate for that keyword if we're rank for it so if it's relevant to us and we want to get some visibility to our site then yeah we want to use that generic short tail keyword however if we're interested in conversions then we really want to turn our attention to longer tail keywords however if you want the visibility then you want to use short tail keywords if you want the conversion then you want to switch over to longer tail keyword so longer tail keywords are more specific they usually consist of more than three keywords so tie-in restaurants very generic if we add a few more keywords that keyword phrase it then becomes longer tail so compared to short tail keywords longer tail keywords are generally less competitive and the search volume is not as high case in point so if we go back to Moz and then we look at the keyword explorer and we'd actually type in a tie in restaurants and let's just say Orlando Florida Moz is going to generate some monthly volume for us and they're gonna allow us to understand how difficult that keyword is and so here you can see very very little search volume in fact so little volume there's eleven 250 ok so that means on average that this keyword generates 11 250 queries a month so very low compared to our short tail keyword Italian restaurants the difficulty here didn't necessarily lessen but it is less competitive so if you're interested in conversions and you have an Italian restaurant and say Orlando Florida then this is the keyword you may want to use so there's a trade-off between longer tail and shorter tail well when visitors land from longer tail keywords they're usually ready to make a purchase they're usually more specific intent there's more intent involved with a longer tail keyword so best restaurants in a time in Florida branded shoes in Florida something very specific is going to generate probably a higher conversion rate than something more generic so that's the trade-off and so when to use long tail keywords well we want to use long tail keywords and for targeting pages with a product or specific article so if we're interested in that particular conversion then longer tail keywords are likely more the way we want to go versus something more generic which means if you're using a generic shorter tail keyword you're more interested in the visibility and the traffic not necessarily the conversion how does a search engine work so let's talk about that for a minute so we know that means people use search engine we know that we want to be found on search engines but how do we actually get our content in the search engines so that's the important part that we need to understand if we have our own website and we have our content so these search engines want your content in their search engine index so how do they get your content well they send out BOTS or files and we'll just call them spiders so they send out these spiders to crawl your website and the whole idea behind using the insect spider is because we're talking about the world wide web and so if Google for example sends a bot to your website they're gonna crawl your website and spider your web so the creating a web of pages so all they're doing is following link and every page and link that they hit they're going to bring back to their server so these spiders scan your web sites they just follow links and they take all the pages and content that they're able to gather when they hit your website and they're going to pull all that information back into their own index so if you think about Google they're crawling or spidering millions and billions of web sites all those millions and billions of web sites are sitting on Google servers so when somebody does do a search query Google because they have all these websites and their index are able to quickly determine which website is the most relevant for that search engine queries so that's generally how search engines work so let's talk about the types of SEO so if we want our website to be found on these search engines and Google or these search engines have crawled our website then what we want to do is we want to basically look at it from a two pronged perspective it's a two prong strategy so the first strategy we're gonna talk about today is on-page SEO so those are on page SEO is defined as what we do on our website to be relevant for search engine query on a search engine so again on page SEO is what we do to our own website off page SEO is the other the second part of that SEO strategy and off page SEO determines what we do our website to be relevant for search engine query and so off page SEO generally is synonymous with link building and we'll talk about that a little bit more as we go forward but really when you want to do SEO when you want to be found for a keyword on a search engine you're going to have to apply but with on-page SEO and off page SEO so let's talk about on-page SEO and so this is the first part of our SEO effort we want to focus on on page SEO first and so on page SEO is the method of optimizing elements of web pages remember these are all the items we want to do on our website to be relevant for certain search queries so it's basically the idea behind this is to make our web pages more relevant for specific search queries on search engines and so there are a number of different elements on our website on a particular web page that we want to manipulate or optimize if you will to be relevant for search engine query and so let's start around the idea that you know you there's a number of things you can do so let's start with schema first and so schema is nothing more than it's a collaborative effort between Bing Yahoo Baidu Google and the idea is really they want to understand more about the content of your website and so the idea behind this is that you want to be able to provide snippets of information to these search engines so they understand a little bit more about what your web page is trying to portray or convey so that they can find out exactly what's relevant to that search engine query so it's nothing more than micro data or bits of information that you can add to your website or web page in order to provide a little bit more enhanced information to the search engines so if you think about it's collaborating with the search engine so the more basic information you share with the search engines that the better off they have to under and what your webpage or website is all about and so the more information they have the better of an opportunity you have to be ranked for that search engine query and so if you have a website with reviews if you have a website with images if you have let's say a website with products with prices in other words you have an e-commerce website and you're trying to sell product well to me you want to employ schema because in schema is snippets of information that are provided to the search engines so they can better understand so you can certainly provide snippets of information in the terms of images or prices or particular products and how much is left in stocks so all this information these bits of information you can provide to the search engines so that they can better understand what it is you're trying to sell how much it caused how much is in inventory what people think about the product etc so if you have a website that's sub products you probably want to employ schema and so when you do employ schema again snippets of information provided to the search engines the search engines are going to better understand and then they're going to present that information in the search engine results so if you have ratings and reviews you can provide snippets of information to the search engines the search engines in turn are going to present that information in the search engine results so if you have positive reviews then somebody typing in in this example shoes they're going to be able to see that you have positive reviews for your websites so that's the whole idea behind schema is to provide snippets of information so again it's not just related to reviews also for images so if you have images you can provide snippets of information to the search engine so they can see you know what the shoe actually looks like when they type in in this example Puma shoes or like I mentioned inventory snippets of information about your inventory the search engines are going to provide that information search engine results so if somebody's looking for women's training shoes or women's Puma shoes and they see your product and they see how this is in stock great let me go to this website and purchase these shoes so that's the whole idea behind schema is making sure you present information critical to your website so that the search engines better understand what your website's all about it also house with relevancy because the more those search engines know about your website the more relevant your website becomes and the better chance you have to rank for a particular keyword there's also some other information here involved with schema and those are site links so site links additional pages on your website ok that's show up in the search engine result and so again the more information a search engine has about you the better chance you have to be found the better chance you have to get it clicked so site links are just additional links on your site that appear in search engine results and that's all a benefactor of having schema so here you can see in this example we have additional web pages that show under certain search engine results and so by having more links in the search engine results you have a better chance of getting the click so if you want more information about schema I would recommend going to schema.org so when you go to schema.org you can actually click on a link that allows you to see all the information you need to get started with schema.org okay so it's got a lot of information available to you it describes what it is you have to do in order to get your information and set for these search engines to better understand Ghassan for on page SEO is title tag and so title tag is which shows up and the search engine results so if you've ever done a search engine query meaning you've gone to Google typed in a query using a keyword like Italian restaurants you're gonna see specific search engine results and the title tag is what appears in those search engine results so a title tag is important because it's the title of a web page that appears in those results and so the title tag is something that's important because if we want to be found for specific keyword we want to make sure that keyword is in the title tag because that keywords gonna describe what the page is all about and so if we want to be found for that keyword let's just say Italian restaurants in Florida for example that's going to be part of our title tag so when somebody types in that particular keyword query Italian restaurants in Florida then we have a good chance of showing up because the title tag which is the title of the page is going to have that particular query in it and so you can edit the title tag and when you edit the title tag you want to be able to put that particular keyword in the title tag so if we do a search on Google for example so if I go to google.com and I type in Italian restaurants and Florida here I can see under the local search results and here I can see Italian restaurants in Florida Central Florida ten restaurants in Miami so you can see that these are highlighted so the title tag is not only stands out but allows you to you know showcase exactly what your page is all about and it helps with the relevancy of that keyword query so when you're trying to optimize your website using the title tag for specific keyword you want to keep it in mind a couple parameters because title tags show up in the search engine results but certain search engines particularly Google has character limits around the number of characters you can use in the title tag and so we want to keep that in mind so ideally we want to format our title tag appropriately and so to me the most optimal way to optimize a title tag using a particular keyword that you want to be found for is to use that keyword in the title tag and then separate that with your brand name so if you actually have two keywords then you can use the primary keyword first then the secondary keyword and then the brand name so to me this is the most optimal format but keep in mind there are character limits but if you look at this format to me it's the most easiest format to abide by because it makes your title tag more relevant you don't have to worry about necessarily fitting in excess keywords in the title tag because again the title tag is character limits so if we take a look at our example in Google search results if you go over those limits and the title tag is generally between 60 and 65 characters long and so if you go over those limits let's just say your title tag is more than 65 characters Google in this case is going to cut off big characters and so here you can see the ellipses after the title tag now if you follow the format that you know we at simply learned recommend you can see if our keyword is Italian restaurants in Florida and then separated by the brand name this gives you an optimal format for title tag it also makes it relevant for the keyword query so you want to keep that title tag probably no more than 60 characters because you'd flirt with putting more than 60 characters then the search engines are going to cut off that title tag and then that's not going to look good and it's gonna also become less relevant so we want to keep the character counts in mind so if you abide by that format of the keyword and then maybe the secondary keyword if you have one separated by the brand name then you should be good to go with making sure your title tag is relevant for that keyword query so let's then turn our attention to the Meta Description so the Meta Description is just a short description about the content on your web page so if the title tag is the title of the webpage the Meta Description describes the page okay so it's a description about what that page is so the meta description appears under the title tag and then the URL so if we go back to our Google search results we look here Italian restaurants in Florida Maggiano's Little Italy is the brand or the restaurant we could see the URL which is underneath the title tag and then here we could see the Meta Description and so with the Meta Description you have a little bit more room to work with in terms of character counts but the Meta Description just like the table tag is just as important because one it shows up in the search engine results two it describes what the page is all about and three it allows you to optimize the Meta Description so the Meta Description becomes more relevant for that search query that somebody types in to that particular search engine so the optimal length for a Meta Description you can go up to 300 characters but I would not even recommend even flirting with that limit because just like the title tag search engines in the case of Google will actually cut off the Meta Description so if we look here back at our search results if you go over those limits you'll see that the search engines will cut off the copy of the Meta Description width and they'll just put ellipses so we don't necessarily want to go over those limits so my recommendation is to keep that Meta Description probably a hundred and sixty-five characters two to no more than 200 because we're trying to describe not only what the page is all about but we're also trying to optimize that Meta Description so it becomes relevant for the search engine query and so you want to keep it short and concise so if we look at our example here Italian restaurants in Florida Maggiano's is a good job it's a book an event space make a reservation at Maggiano's in florida to enjoy delicious few maps menus and more so very concise Meta Description it includes their keyword query that they want to be found for Italian restaurants in Florida and so to me it's short and concise describes what the page is all about and allows them to fit it all in within the character limits so here in this example we want to be found for Amazon Puma shoes so the brand here is Amazon so Amazon wants to include you know Puma shoes not only in the title tag but they want to try and fit that into the Meta Description however the whole idea behind the Meta Description more than anything else is describe what the page is all about okay you want to be relevant for the search engine query but you also want to sound natural as well you want to be able to really the whole idea between the tail tagging amount of description is to get people to click on your link because remember there are nine other listings on the Google search engine results page for page one so we want our Meta Description and our title tag to stand out so we want it to be relevant who we want it to stand out so it's important you write that Meta Description according to what the page is all about but you want it to stand out uniquely and accordingly so once you've done the title tag and the Meta Description you want to focus your attention on a header tag and so header tags are used on a web page to really separate out content and so you have headers and sub headers and so ideally you want to be able to optimize the header tag and sub-header and so if we think about a headers there's a hierarchy for headers so there's between a header one and a header six and so we'll just shorten the word header and we'll call it an h1 so h1 is really at the top of the hierarchy for headers and so if we use that h1 on our webpage then what we're trying to explain that the search engines is listen this particular keyword phrase in our header is is a header and we're emphasized what it is we're trying to say and that's how really the search engines interpret headers they see an h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 and h6 they know that if you're using an h1 you're trying to really emphasize something so if you put that keyword in the header tag what you're telling the search engines is hey I'm really emphasizing this particular keyword and so the search engine will interpret that as important and if you use your keyword in that header then really what you're saying is hey I really this keyword is really relevant to that query so naturally the other benefit of a header is it really breaks up the page as well so the header you can use sub headers and sub patters are nothing more than say a lower H tag so if you have a header that's an h1 you can use an h2 and h3 as a sub header and so forth and so on because what you're really trying to do is not only organize the content in your webpage but you're trying to emphasize that for google so if something's an h2 or an h6 you're basically telling Google or the other search engines this is not as important to say an h1 so if we take a look at our example that we've been using for tallien restaurants in Florida and if we click on Maggiano's we could see that they're using headers so if we click on Maggiano's we can see that this is a header here we want to bring everyone together Maggiano's Italian restaurant in Florida so they're using that header to break up the text here you can see they're using another header here excellent Italian food and an excellent experience to match so that's a header to break up the content ok they're not using sub headers they're using headers but that's fine they're really trying to emphasize the content by putting in that header and so headers help not only organize the content but they help emphasize the actual keyword it is you want Google to recognize so if we're not sure if something is a header we could simply just mouse over what we think is a header and we can just right click and if you right click on something you're gonna see a menu and if we click inspect element then basically what that browser in this case Firefox is going to do is show us the HTML of that particular thing of that item that we right-click so here we could see in this particular case this is an h2 tag so it's an h2 so if we scroll down and we mouse over this we could see this is also an h2 as well so this particular page is using h2 tags not h1 but an h2 so what they're explaining or trying to convey to the search engines is listen this is an h2 it's still relevant we're still trying to put emphasis on it but not as much so we want to be able to use our H ones and our h2s accordingly so remember an h1 is you're providing the search engines with information by telling them hey this is the most relevant this is we're putting emphasis on this keyword and h2 nuts as much as an h1 and h3 not as much as an h2 so use your headers accordingly not only just to break up the text not only for styling but for emphasis for the search engines so headers are very important elements for on-page SEO let's turn our attention to the URL structure okay so URL stands for Uniform Resource locator and so our URL is the specific location of a webpage on the Internet so basically if we're found in the search engine results one of our web pages are gonna go along with the title tag in the Meta Description in the search engine results page so if I go back to our search engine results for Italian restaurants in Florida we could see that the particular URL in question here is occations Maggiano's dot-com / florida so that's the URL that shows up along with the title tag in the Meta Description so if we click on that link that's exactly where we're gonna go so URL structure is important for on-page SEO so why is it important because not only does it show people where they're going but we have an opportunity to optimize that URL for the search engines to make our URL more relevant for that search query so just like the title tag just like the Meta Description just like the headers we can also manipulate the URL so if we look at a URL it consists of really the protocol and the protocol means it's either a secure site or non secure site so in this example we can see it's HTTPS and that means it's a secure site and so ideally search engines like web pages or web sites that are secure so after the protocol you're gonna see the domain and then after the domain you're gonna see subdirectories okay so that's generally the breakout with a URL structure so you have the protocol the domain and subdirectories and then you may have more subdirectories so if we go back to the example we've been working with if I go back to you Maggiano's you can see here this is a secure site HTTPS you can see the domain in this case it's actually a sub domain so Maggiano's com is the domain but they decided to put locations dot Maggiano's com and that's okay we call that a subdomain and then here you can see they have one particular subdirectory after the domain and that's Florida so a well-structured URL not only provides the users with information about where they're going when they click on your link in the search engine results but more importantly it also provides the search engines and some information about what the page is all about so going back to our simple example with Maggiano's the search engines know that hey if somebody clicks on this link they're going to a page about Florida pretty simple the URL structure is pretty simple to understand we know it's a secure site we know its Maggiano's calm and we know the sub page is Florida with subdirectories Florida you want to be careful like everything else since in SEO there are parameters just like the title tag has parameters up to 65 characters the Meta Description tag has a limit of up to 165 characters a well structured URL also has character counts but the idea here is we don't want to get into numbers when we talk about character counts for URL structure really the rule of thumb or the best practice for you URL is to keep it short and understandable okay if we keep it clear and concise not only does the end user know where they're going but the search engines know what the page is all about so the rule of thumb is always if you don't understand the URL or what it means then the search engines are likely not going to understand what the URL means we want to keep the number of directors and subdirectories to a limit so ideally here you can see in this example xyz.com if we want to optimize that URL we could put the targeted keyword in the URL if we'd like to but we want to keep it probably to a minimum of one to two subdirectories the shorter this the amount of subdirectories the better off we are because that means that not only the end user will understand the URL but the search engines will understand the URL as well so we always want to make sure that URL is readable again for the end user and the search engine and so in this example you can see amazon.com slash men's - shoes slash sneakers slash Puma very easy understand as an end user I know that I'm going to a puma page for men on amazon.com now when you get into your rels with dynamic parameters in them then ideally you as an end user is not going to really know where you're going to go so in the example here the middle example I can see that I'm going maybe to a shoes page but I have no idea with the rest that URL means and in the other example where you have a very low URL readability I have no idea as an end-user where I'm going to go so as an end user I need to be able to have confidence in knowing where I'm gonna go once I click on a link in the search engine results so if I don't have that confidence if I don't understand what the URL is then the you then the search engines aren't going to understand as well and it's not going to bode well in terms of relevancy and again the URL structure is important factor for being relevant and if we're not relevant then the chances of us are ranking higher is not going to be as good because our URL is not readable so ideally what we want to do is make sure we're using keywords that the end-user in the search engines understand and if we need to separate out those keywords in the first example we could see men's shoes we want to separate that out with a hyphen and so ideally if you have a URL that's readable and it's short and concise then again your chances of ranking higher on the search engine results page bodes better than if you have a very long antiquated unreadable URL so let's focus our attention on image alt text or alt tags if you will so alt tags or text tags as they're also known as allow the search engines to understand a little bit more about what's on the page in terms of images so images are a prominent part of every webpage on the Internet unfortunately images are you know usually files that are not readable by search engines so we want to be able to provide some alternate text so that the search engines understand what those images are all about so again it gives us an opportunity to communicate with the search engines so that they better understand what the image is all about to make the page more relevant so generally if an image fails to load on a web page as an example well if you have an alt tag then the alt tag is going to show in place of the image not loading more importantly if we have an alt tag and the search engines have spidered our website and somebody's actually searching for images then the alt tag is used as a descriptor for the image so it Hustle helps us get found for the images on search engine results pages and so like everything else we've talked about with on-page SEO there are character limits to alt tags you know generally the rule of thumb is 125 characters for an alt tag and the alt tag is used in the HTML so we want to surround our image with an alt tag by putting in a descriptor and so ideally if you're trying to be found for a particular search engine query then you want to use the search engine query as part of the alt tag and so let me show you an example here going back to Maggiano's we look at their web page and we actually inspect one of their images on this web page if we look at for example a Pinterest or Facebook we can actually see in this example that the image here has an alt tag as Pinterest and so you want to be able again to put in alt tags for all your images so it better communicates with the search engines what the image is all about it also allows the search engines to rank images in the search engine results based on that alt text and what the keyword query was so alt tags play an important role because again if the image doesn't load on the webpage for some reason then the alt tag is there as a replacement it's also there to help the search engines rank those images and understand the page a little bit better so you always want to be able to put in the keyword query that you're trying to be found for in the alt tag and so be as descriptive as possible you have a hundred and twenty-five characters to use so be as descriptive make it easy to read because again this is what's going to show up in the search engine results just for images okay let's turn our attention to internal links so when it comes to SEO internal links also play a vital role because basically an internal link which is a link from one page of your website to another page of your website allows Google to or other search engines really to follow the pages as they index your entire website so it serves that purpose of allowing search engines to index so it definitely improves the indexing but internal linking also has many benefits and one of the other benefits is it helps spreads what we call link juice and so link juice is basically a way another way of saying you know this page is important because it has links from other pages on our website so if we link I have a link from one page to another and a couple of other pages on our site linked to that same page then search engines tend to take notice and they tend to note that you know if one particular page has a number of different links pointing to it then this page may be important and so that's what we mean by link juice it's a signal for the search engines to determine what pages on your website are important because of the links that point to it and so if we look at this example here we could see that you know there's usually a navigation on a website that point to pages and every page on a website tends to have a link but if more than one page has multiple links then again that signals to the search engines that hey you know this particular page seems to be important because it has a lot of Link's pointing to it our attention to site maps so sitemaps basically allow us to list all the web pages on our website so we could do that in a couple of different ways but when we do it it basically is going to and help the search engines find our page is easier just as I mentioned a minute ago about internal linking when you have one link point to another page on your website it helps the search engines find these pages quicker well sitemaps do same thing except sitemaps are an entire list of links on your website and it allows the site search engines to find all your pages and you would say fairly easily but it also helps the end user to so if you have a big website like Amazon has a huge website with a lot of different products well if you're looking for a particular product you can do a search for it or you can look at the site map and the site map will list all the particular pages on the site and so it's also good for the end user as well so when we talk about the end user and we talk about search engines there are really two different types of sitemaps you got the HTML version which is for the end user that's gonna be nothing more than a link on the website usually in the footer and so when you click on that sitemap link you'll get a list of all the links on the website ok so that's an HTML sitemap then we have the sitemap for the search engines you know the spiders that want to crawl our site so that's the XML sitemap and in XML is just a different format it's just a way to format all the links on our website so the HTML sitemap is HTML written in hypertext markup language designed for the end user if you click on it it helps the end user navigate the website quickly because they can find what they're looking for and so generally that is an HTML now if we turn our attention to the XML sitemap that's basically designed for search engines and thing about the search the XML sitemap is we work with Google to go ahead and and and submit the sitemap to Google so Google can quickly understand what pages on our website so for example if I went to a website let's just say valley fig com so if I went here and if I'm a search engine I'm gonna want to know all the URLs that are on this website well as an end user I can also just type in sitemap dot XML usually that's the XML file where all the URLs are located and here I can see all of the URLs on Valley fit com and so the idea behind an XML sitemap is we want to communicate that XML file to the search engines and so Google in particular has they call a search console in search console if you go to google.com slash webmasters so search console is a way to communicate with Google and one of the ways to communicate with Google is to submit a sitemap so we want to submit our XML sitemap so if our XML sitemap is located in the root directory so after our domain valley fig comm slash sitemap XML we know that that file is sitting in the root directory I can go into search console and I can submit my site map and when I submit my site map then I'm basically communicating with Google telling Google hey Google instead of trying to find all our web pages on our website when you crawl the website we're going to go ahead and submit the sitemap to you so we're gonna tell you all the pages on our website and so by doing that by submitting our sitemap XML file to Google it speeds up the process because Google's able to now understand all the pages on our website that have been submitted and then once we submit those pages then Google is going to quickly index a majority of those pages if not all of those pages and so that's the benefit of having an XML sitemap for the search engines is that we can quickly submit that file to the search engine so our pages get submitted and indexed quicker so continuing on with on-page SEO we now turn our attention to PageSpeed and so PageSpeed also known as page low time of a particular page of a particular website is important for SEO why is it important because Google has millions of users use their search engine and Google wants their users to have a good experience and so if Google ranks websites based on relevancy they also want to take into account PageSpeed because if a website does not load fast or a web page doesn't load fast then it would be detrimental for Google to rank that page high because what's going to happen is that page is going to get a number of clicks and then the user experiences not to be that great and so therefore it's gonna have a negative impact not only in the end-user but Google as well and so page load time then becomes important for on-page SEO so really when it comes to page load time we really want to pay attention to how long it takes our web pages to load in terms of seconds because if a page loads slow then chances are the user experience is not going to be good even from an analytics perspective meaning if I go to Google type in a query click on a link and then it's that link takes me to a website where the webpage loads very slow chances are I'm not gonna spend a lot of time waiting for that page to load I'm going to leave that page and if I leave the page then it's gonna cause up what they call a bounce so I'm going to bounce from the page and that's just not good for the entire search ecosystem and so we want to pay close attention to page load time because the faster a site or page loads Google's going to recognize that and that's going to help with ranking and so how do we understand how our pages load well we can look no further than web analytics tool like Google Analytics for example so if we turn our attention to Google Analytics if I go to say valley fig comms analytics account I can look over the last 30 days and I can see ok on average our page average page load time for the entire site was 5 seconds around 5 seconds and ideally we want our pages load as quick as possible I would say the rule of thumb on page load time is probably no more than 3 to 4 seconds ok but there are factors involved with page load time so a couple of factors are the browser that people use so some browsers load pages differently than other browsers the other factor involved with browsers is the device so you could be on a mobile device and say Internet Explorer versus on a desktop using Chrome and you're going to have variation in terms of average page load time so definitely browser device plays a role but also country plays a role the infrastructure how much bandwidth is available so you could be in say San Francisco United States and be on a high-speed network versus another city or another country where you're not necessarily on the same high-speed network you're on a lower bandwidth or lower network and that's going to affect the page load time as well so in analytics you can actually see the breakdown of time per country and then of course the page itself so when we talk about an average page load time for a website we're talking about the average for the entire site but we can actually look at in Google Analytics the average load time for every page on the site so ideally if you have a particular page you want to rank organically in the search engines and the average page load time is not suitable or it's very high then you want to address what the issues are and so the great thing about Google Analytics is you actually have speed suggestions so if I go to speed suggestions in Google Analytics I'm going to be able to see the average load time for certain pages on the site and then what Google's going to do is actually give me some feedback so for example I can see that the home page loads about five point five nine seconds and so if I click on PageSpeed suggestions then Google is going to give me suggestions on how to speed up the page load time not only on desktop but on mobile as well so when you click on its page speed suggestions you're actually going to go to a tool a Google tool called PageSpeed insights and then PageSpeed insights is going to allow you to see how quick your page loads and then it's going to be able to give you feedback on what to do in order to speed up the page load time not only for the page but for the site and the great thing again is you can see it for desktop and you can see it from mobile so PageSpeed is important we want to be able to keep our page load time low no more than probably again three to four seconds because if it's any more than Google's going to take notice the other search engines are going to take notice and they're not going to want to rank that particular page high on Google so some ways to increase your page speed you always want to optimize your images you never want to have images that take a long time to load you want to use the simple website design now I know flash as an example has long been disbanded but you don't want to use other technology that's really going to slow the page load time of course where your website is hosted does matter so the server it's hosted on could be shared with other web sites and so that may eat into how quick the server responds to people trying to load your web page and so you want to keep that in mind so server response time does play a factor in loading and then of course optimizing your code you want to never have unnecessary code on your website and when I say unnecessary code some examples could be tracking code if you're doing any search advertising let's just say on Facebook or Bing you try to want to minimize the amount of extra code you put on a site because that code has to execute and that eats into the page load time so you want to be cognizant of how much code you put on your website because that will eat into the page load time so let's talk about featured snippets so featured snippets is the search result that generally shows up at the top of the search engine organic results so it's informational content and you'll see it above organic results but you'll also see it below search advertising and so some of the common features that you may see are in the form of a paragraph a table or a list and so paragraph snippets tend to be the most popular and let me show you an example of a featured snippet so if I go to say google.com and type in machine learning here you can see some paid search ads okay and why do I another paid search ads because I can see ad next to them but if I look below the paid search ads but above the organic search I see a paragraph featured snippet and this is nothing more than again just some informational content about machine learning and really the whole idea behind featured snippets is really they're just informational and really it's informational and and what Google likes to do is pull content in there that really answers a question so if your content doesn't necessarily answer question then you can't expect your content to show up as a featured snippet so the whole idea is with the search engines is really Google searches through a number different sites to find content that will best answer a user's question like for example what is machine learning okay so if we ask the question what is machine learning we can expect to find a feature snippet and so really what users do a lot when they type in a query they use prefixes like how does or how do or how to or what is and so those types of questions are normally asked as part of the search query so if you can answer those questions then generally Google is going to recognize that and if it's relevant it's gonna show up as a featured snippet so the whole idea is to really create truly high quality content so about feature snippets is if you have true high quality content that answers a question then chances are your content may show up as a featured snippet so the whole idea is you know work to create high quality content that provides a really good answer to really basic question it could be anything what is machine learning what is a fig you know how to ride a bicycle how do I surf all these are related questions that content can answer and Google wants to make sure as part of a feature snippet that they provide content that answers that question and not just content the best content that does the the best job with the most relevant information answer that person sir very so here we could see our three examples you have a table format so if we want to type in Aviation jobs we can see snippets of information about the latest job listings for aviation you can see in the middle screenshot what is machine learning so that's our paragraph featured snippet and then if you type in something like building a fence it's gonna give you a list of you know ways to go about building a fence so these are all answers to questions the query may not necessarily be in question form but the snippet is there just in case you want to know more information about that particular query so generally that's how featured snippets work and the great thing about featured snippets it's open to everybody the key is to have quality content if you have quality content that provides answers to questions then chances are your content can show up above organic search results which will give you more visibility drive a lot more traffic to your site and quality traffic because likely it's answering somebody's question so let's do a a recap of everything we talked about with on-page SEO so before we move on off page remember on-page SEO is what we do to our website to enhance our website to be found in the search engines for relevant keywords so it's all about relevancy and remember before you do anything to your website you need to start with the basics of keyword research you need to find keywords that are highly relevant that have volume and low competition and so when you can focus on your keywords and you find out and finalize what keywords you want to be found for then you're going to conduct on-page SEO on page SEO consists of number of different factors some of which we talked about today starting with schema remember we want to have structured data to better communicate with the search engines what our web pages are about then we talked about title tags so title tags appear in search results remember 65 characters we want to make sure our keyword is in the title tag followed by our brand name and then we talked about meta descriptions meta descriptions allow us to you talk specifically about what that page is all about meta descriptions fall under the title tag in the search results we talked about headers h1 through h6 h1 being the biggest and the hierarchy of headers and having an h1 tag with your keyword provides the search engines with an identity of how strong or how important something is on a page it also organizes the page with headers and sub headers and it breaks up the content so it's easily understandable by the end user we also talked about alt tags so remember images on its own are not recognized by search engines so we want to surround those images with alt tags with words that help the search engines identify what that image is they also serve a purpose in the browser if an image doesn't load then we can actually see what the image is all about with the alt tag we talked about feature snippets there are lists ok their paragraphs ok they're there different types of snippets and really the whole idea again behind snippets is answering a question with quality content we talked about Page Speed identifying how quick our pages load in Google Analytics so if your pages don't load very quickly then Google actually provides suggestions to speed up the page load time of a particular page and some of the culprits that you want to look at are making sure you have images that are good quality but also not a lot in size you want to make sure they're optimized you want to look at your server response time you want to make sure you optimize code so there's a lot of different factors of page load time you just want to keep an eye on what pages are not loading quick enough and remember we want to keep it as low as possible but no more than 3 to 4 seconds we talked about internal linking internal linking to a particular page from one page to another provides link juice and link juice is nothing more than an indicator for the search engines to identify what pages tend to be more important than another based on the number of Link's pointing to that page and then we also talked about sitemaps so we talked about the two types of sitemaps HTML and XML HTML is for the end user XML is primarily for the search engines XML generally is going to be a file called sitemap XML and we could take that XML file and submit it to Google search console and so that expedites the process of indexing your site and helps your site not only get indexed faster but will help Google understand how many pages are on your site and then get those pages indexed so that they can be found so that you generate traffic so all these are factors with on-page SEO that you want to address before you move on to off page SEO ok let's turn our attention to off page SEO now that we covered all the essentials for on-page we still need to focus our attention on off page remember earlier I mentioned that SEO is a two-pronged approach we have to focus on on page SEO first and then to complement our efforts and to continue our efforts and to continue the effort of being relevant for certain keywords we need to do what we call off page SEO and those are actions we take that don't involve our website directly meaning we've already updated the title tag the Meta Description the alt tags the headers etc we want to do things off our website that's going to allow Google and other search engines to recognize that hey we are relevant these pages are relevant for certain keywords on our website and so really when we talk about off page SEO it's really the technique promoting your website using link building when we say technique of promoting our website using link building that means establishing links on other websites that's what we mean by link building and so establishing links on other websites really as our SEO efforts because it improves first and foremost and improves the credibility of our website so if we're on a you know a very popular website that is known to be reputable than having a link pointing from that website to ours just improves the credibility of our own website not necessarily in the minds of the search engine but in the minds of the end user the other benefit here is it increases our domain Authority and let's take a minute to talk about domain authority so domain authority is simply just a score between 1 and 100 and so in digital marketing even including SEO is a marketing channel everything is measurable and we want to be able to measure everything we do digitally and so off page SEO is measurable one of the metrics involved with off page SEO is domain Authority in other words it's a score between 1 and 100 for our domain so how does Google how does bi do how do these other search engines see our domain how authoritative is our domain how reputable is our domain and so having links on other websites pointing to our domain increases our reputable bility increases our authority and so I'm going to show you an example so if you remember back on on-page SEO I when we're talking my keyword research we used a tool called Moz Moz calm and I would recommend using Moz calm to measure domain Authority so if we go to Moz calm and Moz calm has a tool called link explorer so if you put in your domain using their tool link explorer you're gonna be able to see your domain Authority and domain Authority is a score between 1 and 100 and basically it's simply just scoring your website in terms of authority how does the search engine see your site out on the World Wide Web the higher the score the better and so recommend using Moz comm link explorer to measure the domain authority so the more links we have on external sites pointing to our own site in theory the higher the domain authority so we're going to come back to Moz calm quite frequently as we talked about off page SEO because we need a tool to help manage our efforts so we're going to come back to Moz combo woods let's talk about some of these other benefits too off page SEO so we know it helps with the credibility and increases our domain Authority but what are some of the other intangible efforts that are also measurable well it increases our referral traffic and by increasing our referral traffic meaning if we're on a reputable site that gets a lot of traffic and there's a link point in our site then naturally we're probably going to see traffic coming from that site and we can measure that in tools like Google Analytics we can measure referral traffic and so that's an inherent benefit to doing off page SEO because we're trying to create the relevancy of our own website we're trying to be found for relevant keywords but yet at the same time we can increase traffic to our website and then certainly not lost in all this is improving our page rank so the idea here is you need on-page and off-page SEO to work together to improve our rankings and improving our rankings in the search engine results will inherently increase our rankings and drive traffic to the site from search engines and that's ideally what we're trying to do we're trying to accomplish traffic from search engines by improving our rankings but at the same time we improve our credibility and we accrue improve our standing in the search engine world and we also increase traffic to our site from all these other websites and so there are a lot of benefits to off page SEO it's just let's talk a little bit more about some of these other benefits because according to a backlink Oh a web page with more backlinks is going to rank higher than a page with fewer backlinks but let me just say this with back linking especially from sites it's all about credibility it's all about quality over quantity so we want to pay attention to quality over quantity so let's harken back to Moz and here we can see we have a domain Authority of 35 but we have a lot of links inbound links from other websites pointing to our website we have five hundred and seventy five domains out there on the internet pointing to our domain Valley fake com and so if we want to take a specific look at these domains we can just simply click on linking domains and here we can see all the different domains pointing to our website now again it's about quality not quantity so if we look at the domain Authority and that's a score that measures the credibility of a website we could see the domain Authority on some of these domains like npr.org has a domain Authority of 93 and so to me that helps boost the domain Authority for our own website our own domain it also has the chance of driving that traffic it also increases the credibility but in the end having quality links from other quality domains is going to increase our own rank on search engines and that's the whole idea behind it so we could actually see that we have quality websites of quality domains linking to our domain now you can also use another tool I mentioned this earlier with on-page SEO when I was talking about sitemaps so if you go to search console so that's a Google tool we can also look at a link report and see what other websites are linking to us so this is Google's way of communicating to us what websites are out there linking to us and so here I can see the top linking sites to our website valley fig calm is the crumby kitchen has fourteen hundred and forty-three links pointing back to our site cookscountry.com Whole Foods magazine mind perfect kitchen these are all sites with links pointing back to our site so search console is a good tool it's a good alternative tool especially the links report is a good alternative tool to get an idea of the types of sites that are linking to your site now what you're missing here in search console is the domain Authority but you can use the link Explorer tool in moz.com to measure the domain Authority for any domain it's just a matter of going to the tool itself going by going to moz.com by going to the link explorer report and just typing in the domain and from there you'll be able to see the domain Authority so it's all about quality over quantity I can't stress that enough so when it comes to off page really it's synonymous with link building so it's the most effective method for off page SEO and it's simply just getting links from other websites to your own so it's not as easy as it sounds especially when we're talking about quality over quantity but building these links to our website will help our rankings and that's the whole idea behind off page SEO we want to be able to link from other websites to ours so that we can help our rankings in addition to some of the other benefits I just mentioned so Google recognizes backlinks as one of their top ranking factors so in addition to some of the on-page SEO tactics that I mentioned earlier including title tag and Meta Description and URL structure and headers all those are important but at the same time it's a balance so Google wants to know hey yes we understand you've optimized your title tag for keyword but how does the rest of the internet see your website or is your website worthy enough to add a link from a particular quality website to your website so if there are a number of quality links then your site must be a quality as well and so that's the whole idea behind link building being an important factor because again it's about from a Google's perspective it's about the user experience they want to make sure that sites ranked on page one of Google are quality sites quality sites that load well that have good content that have fresh content not just sites that have a gazillion links pointing to them with you know keywords stuffed into the title tag so it's an ecosystem Google's and other search engines want to protect that a good system with quality so that's why link building is an important factor and so there are different types of links so when you have a link pointing from one website to your own ok the link could be a follow a link or nofollow link and the whole idea behind follow or nofollow is simply hey we know that Google and other search engines they're spidering the entire web the whole idea is for them to collect as many pages as they these search engines can to bring them back to their servers so they can serve them up in their search engines well as Google and these other search engines spider these sites they're following what they're doing is they're following links that's as simple as it gets they're following links from one link to another so remember we talked about internal links earlier on on-page SEO internal links are just links on your web pages pointing to other pages on your own website well when it comes to external links so links pointing from one website to your website that website that's linking to your website has an opportunity to say hey Google you can follow this link or don't follow the link and so if they choose to not follow the link meaning they put a nofollow tag into the anchor text then Google's going to follow the link but not recognize the link itself and what I mean by that is hey if you have let's just use Valley fig has a link from Wikipedia if Wikipedia has a link pointing to Valley fig calm but the link itself is nofollow then what Google's gonna do is not recognize the link itself they're not gonna recognize the link so therefore you're not going to get credit or link juice as we say you're not going to get any juice from Wikipedia - Valley fig but if it is a follow link then what Google's going to do is recognize the link and give you credit for the backlink and by giving you credit for the backlink that's going to inherently increase your domain it's also going to likely increase your rankings so you want to pay attention to the types of link-building that's out there nofollow and so any time you try to establish a link on an external website just make sure it's a follow make sure it's not a no follow because if it's a nofollow link then you're not going to get the credit from the search engines and so the whole idea behind link building in terms of SEO is to get some credit from a quality website to your website and so if we look here a follow link in this example is one where the H ref or the link itself doesn't have a nofollow in it but if a hyperlink does have a nofollow in it then that means you're not gonna get the credit for the back link so remember no follows they don't allow search engine crawlers to follow the link so if that's the case it's not gonna pass any link juice when you don't pass quote-unquote link juice you're not gonna get credit for the back link and so if you don't get credit for the back length then if we go back to our tools that we have available for measuring off page SEO so if I go back to let's just say Moz or even let's just say search console you know I'll be able to see all these links here these links that are showing up are follow links why because Google's recognizing the link if they were nofollow then we wouldn't see the link in here so that's something to keep in mind as well and so just keep in mind if it is a no fall you'll see in the hypertext itself the nofollow tag and you can always check that the HTML of any particular link and so when we talk about link building we talked about off page SEO really we're talking about how to get links on quality websites and how do we do that well I've listed here a few ways to do that so you could do guest blogging or blogging in general is a good off page SEO / link building strategy and I'll talk about more of that in a minute but we can list our way sites in reputable and trustworthy directories I mentioned Wikipedia as an example even though Wikipedia may not be classified as a directory but there are other directories out there you could ask for testimonials so if you're working with clients or other websites you could ask for testimony or they can provide it a link pointing back from their site to your site it's about relationships really is what it comes down to its relationship building and that's what a link is relationship building or you could do content on social media so these are just examples of ways to generate links but let's go back to the blogging part because blogging to me is an essential part to off page SEO and why is that because anytime you are part of a blog you're generating content and not only you generating content you're generating fresh content that's likely to be interesting to the end-user and with that content yes you can optimize that content but the beauty about blogging is really anybody can do it but if we want to connect blogging with relationships if we're a food blogger then we can write on other food blogs as a guest writer and we can have that blog post link back to our own blog as an example or we can have other bloggers in the same industry write a guest blog for us on their own blog and point their link back to our site blogging creates a lot of opportunities for link building because again it's a fresh canvas with interesting content and when you have interesting content then the opportunity for backlinking is going to be there because if you're writing about something that's interesting the natural are you're going to want to link to something else related to that that's interesting and so that's the opportunity that blogging creates so again it's vital to get links from authoritative webpages then multiple links from low-quality webpages so going back to the link Explorer report we want to be able to pay attention to those domain authorities or those websites with low domain and really you should pay attention to really quality sites okay you want to pay attention to quality sites and so when we talked about links there's inbound links there's outbound links we're interested in those inbound links we're interested in getting links from high quality web sites pointing to our own website and again that could be in the form of a blog it could be social media it could be a partner site okay these are all inbound links they just need to be followed make sure they're not a nofollow so it's simple just getting a external link that's a follow to your to your own website and so the one thing I want to mention here though on inbound links from external web sites and that's making sure that not necessarily every inbound link points to the home page we want to be able to have links point to internal pages so let's park and back to search console as an example so search console our links report shows us links pointing from external websites to our own website but what are those link pages so if we look at some of those link pages here we can see the top link pages we can see I'm Vali fig comm slash recipes is the topped link page then the home page then the about us then slash international so we want to make sure that if we're trying to generate backlinks from external websites to our own website we want to make sure that they're pointing to interior pages not necessarily the home page and why do I say that because one of the benefits to link building and off page SEO is ranking so the whole idea about ranking is to get some of our other pages rank not necessary the home page the home page is just a doorway into your website if we have interesting content out there on the web and it's a food blogger as an example and they're talking about a particular food item well they're gonna want a link to a page that's related to what they're blogging about the food item they don't want to link to the home page the home page is just a doorway and so that's the whole idea behind link building we want to link to multiple pages on the site why is that because if I take this particular page Valley fig calm slash recipes and I just put that into Moz and I look at the link Explorer report for this particular page the domain Authority is still going to be the same 35 that's what Valley fig com is 35 however there's also another metric called page Authority so page Authority is likewise with the domain Authority to score between 1 and 100 and so the more external links pointing to an internal page with high domain Authority that's likely going to increase the page Authority of that page so in other words if we have good links from other websites pointing to that page then it's going to increase the page Authority for that page and ultimately the domain Authority for that page and so just like the domain authority in this case Valley fig every page under the domain has a page authority score so the higher the score the likelihood that that page is going to rank in the search engine results okay so that's the whole idea behind link building is we want to improve the authority of the pages not just the domain but also more importantly we also want to keep the end user in mind so if it's from a blog or social media the link pointing from that blog or social media platform should naturally point to something related to what you're talking about not just the home page because again the home page more or less is the gateway into the website so we want to get people to where they want to go we want to naturally create a link from good content to some other good content so that's the whole idea behind backlinking so outbound links will direct a user from our own website to another website so the idea here is it's okay to have outbound links on your own website the natural ecosystem of the world wide web okay what I would recommend ear is to have so many in a century located place for example don't have one page when nothing but external links on it now sprinkle these external links these outbound links throughout your website but also if it's not a reciprocal link meaning if a guest blogger is not linking to your website but you're just linking to theirs and they didn't ask you to then maybe consider a nofollow tag maybe you know ideally you want to make sure that these links are just natural in nature so don't just have a habit of putting outbound links because the whole idea behind outbound links is you want to keep people on your website but if it's a natural link going from one content to another and you think the end user is going to benefit then no problem but just don't get in the habit of putting external links on your website because that means that hey that user that's on your website may click on that link and leave your website and not come back so keep that in mind as well because you don't necessarily benefit from an SEO perspective by having outbound links on your own website you want to do it as a courtesy if somebody else is linking to you want to do it for the end user if you feel the benefit from additional content under the website but from an SEO perspective it doesn't necessarily directly enhance your own website in terms of ranking sort of our attention to duplicate content so a lot of us have websites with a lot of content sometimes we go ahead and take our website and revise it create a new one or register a new domain and put content on that new domain and so we may find ourselves in a situation at one point or the other where we have two websites with the same content or could be the same website with a lot of content but some of that may be duplicate as well so we want to try and stay away from duplicate content but for some of us we may stumble across it accidentally we may find ourselves having content that's duplicated and so we want to try and prevent that because that's a no-no in the world of SEO so if we have duplicate content appearing in more than one year there are ways to rectify not having the search engines recognize the content twice so some examples of duplicate content are for example a spammer takes an article and post the same content on his web site or like I mentioned before you create another website or register another domain and have that particular content on the old website stone or you're writing a blog post and you tag it or categorize it and the content shows up under the tags under the categories and just shows up in general so there are a lot of scenarios where you can find your cells with duplicate content and so we want to rectify that we don't want duplicate content we want the search engines to recognize the original source of the content and so basically if you have two versions of a webpage you may result in duplicate content issues another example that would be for example if you have products you may find that that same product may be under two different categories so how do we rectify that well there are a number of different ways and so the simple way is what they call a 301 redirect to the original URL so if you find yourself in a situation where you have a new website with the same content you could simply set up a redirect and we call it a 301 redirect because 301 refers to permanent so it's signifying to the search engines that you're permanently moving from this page to this page the other way is through a canonical attribute and so the word canonical may not register with some of you so let's just take a minute to talk about what a canonical is a basically canonical tag it's a page level meta tag so remember that meta tag description we talked about an on-page SEO well think about this as another type of meta tag and it's placed in that HTML header of your web page so basically all it does is by placing this meta tag it tells the search engines which URL is the original version to be displayed in index so it's the per purpose of a canonical is to keep the duplicate content out of the search engine index so we want to consolidate our page rank or page authority or domain Authority all to original content that's the whole idea of having a canonical and it's a quick solution so all you need to do is add a canonical tag to the header so let me show you an example if you have a site let's just use CNN as an example cnn.com has a lot of content sometimes giving the umbrella that they have they may run into duplicate content so they simply just put a canonical tag into their their header and so by doing that they're able to tell the search engines hey this page this domain is the original if you find yourself with multiple sites well you can also use Google search console so remember we use Google search console in earlier examples when we talked about links to your site or we talked about that sitemap on page SEO well if we go in a search console we could basically say look Google because search console is a Google tool we want to confirm that this is our domain so this is the domain you should be focusing on so you can leverage search console to communicate with Google regarding which site is important which is the one that should get indexed you can use the canonical you can put that on any page of your website or you can set up a 301 redirect so those are ways to fix duplicate content issues 301's are the easiest Canonical's tend to be temporary because they're just the page level and then search console is a good method because it communicates with Google directly and it allows Google to crawl various web pages differently than if you didn't tell them okay so if you didn't tell them they're just going to grab anything they can so by communicating via the Google search console tool it allows you to tell Google this is the domain I want to focus in on so let's talk then now about how the Google algorithm work so we'll shift gears here and we'll talk about how these algorithms work on Google so Google uses advanced concepts retrieve data so what they do is they're spidering their spidering they're collecting webpages and they're taking all these webpages back to their server and anytime somebody does a query they're delivering those webpages within milliseconds they're delivering results based on your query so that's in general how it works so it uses a combination of different algorithms to deliver the best results they want the best results and so some of the most popular algorithms below are Google Panda Google penguin and Google ranked brain so these are all things that Google has done and to make sure that they're constantly tweaking their search engines to deliver the best results so let's talk about some of these these popular algorithms and before we talk about these popular algorithms so let's just make one thing clear that Google is always tweaking their algorithms on their search engine and so if you want to get an idea how often they do it well we do it every day we're constantly tweaking it but then what they do is they release major changes to their algorithm a few times a year so if you want to get a sense of what those changes look like well you could go to Moz comm and you can go to Google - algorithm - change and you can see here that hey Google changes his search algorithm around 500 to 600 times while most of these are minor Google again rolls out major changes like panda like penguin that affects search results in significant ways so you can go here and you can go all the way back to 2000 and see some of the algorithm changes that have occurred over the last few years and you can see here the last major one was done in August of 2018 that was the medicore update so they're constantly making changes to their search engine to deliver a more concise more better ecosystem for the nu so if it's a better search engine for the end user and users are going to come back so the whole idea is continuing to tweak the system that the algorithms to better show more accurate results and so let's take a look at some of the major algorithm changes that they have done in the past so the first is we'll talk about Google Panda and panda was an algorithm that was released back in 2011 so here we are in 2019 s a few years ago but still significant in that really this algorithm emphasized high quality content because before panda there was oh there's just a lot of content out there on the internet and there was a lot of spam content there a lot of duplicate content and so really the idea behind panda is for Google to really deliver in their search engine results pages high quality content so what it did was it removed web pages that had low-quality or duplicate content so that was the whole idea behind you know the algorithm nicknamed panda it removed low-quality and duplicate content and that kind of cleaned things up a bit where if you did a search query now you'd actually see better better results and one thing about panda is because there's so much quality because Google's indexing so much there on the internet that it's constantly being updated it's updated regularly so the next one we're going to talk about is Google penguin so penguin was released after panda and what that focused in on was low-quality links so remember we talked about link building we talked about quality links over quantity so naturally you're going to have links naturally from all web sites whether it be high quality or low quality the whole idea behind this algorithm is to sever the links that are low quality and so the idea behind that was they focused on two areas so they focused in on link schemes and keyword stuffing so that's what penguin focused on was link schemes were basically linked almost linked farming where you produced mass amounts of backlinks and not all of them were good quality weren't natural links links should be natural from one high quality site or blog to another high quality site or blog and by creating links games you've created an ecosystem where links just went to irrelevant low-quality spam related pages and so Google's Penguin's algorithm update focused in on that effort to remove or combat pages that had poor links from being indexed in their search engine results and then they also combated keyword stuffing keyword stuffing is nothing more than taking your targeted keyword and stuffing it into the content of your page or title tag your Meta Description so any sites that were caught up doing that basically suffer the consequences because what penguin did was take care of sites that basically were accused of keyword stuffing or had characteristics of keyword stuffing and they removed sites that had a lot of links pointing to it from poor quality sites and vice-versa sites that really had a lot of external links pointing to other poor quality sites so that's what penguin did they took a look at those two areas I mean so we talked about link schemes again Penguins aim was to decrease the ranking of web pages that created artificially by using black hat techniques and basically what I mean by black hat techniques that artificially creating length that just didn't make sense just for the sake of getting the backlink just for the sake of passing link juice and so that's what a link scheme is or was and so Google basically tweaked their algorithm to combat those poor link schemes and so keyword stuffing as I mentioned a minute ago it's just repetitive usage of the same keyword and that just basically suffers the content is the thing that suffers here and when the content suffers the end users suffer so Google is all about quality content and when you have quality content and that quality contents indexed and users find what they're looking for chances are they're gonna go back to the search engine to continue to find what they're looking for with the end result being with quality content so keyword stuffing really dilutes the quality of the content and then let's talk about the third algorithm which is ranked brain so rank brain is a processing algorithm that uses machine learning and what that does that machine learning interprets search queries that users search on google so for example if ranked brain sees a word or phrase it isn't familiar with basically the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly so basically take these search engine queries and present them in a way that's logical so that the end result can be something that's relevant to what you're looking for and so for example if you're searching for online marketing you will get results related for digital marketing on search engine result pages why because rank brain will interpret that particular keyword and they're trying to basically match based on all the data they collected what words or phrases might have a similar meaning so online marketing digital marketing have similar meanings now that we've talked about some of the different algorithm changes that Google has made over the years and continues to make let's Segway into the types of SEO and so when we talk about the types of SEO we're really talking about doing what's right what's expected versus doing something that you know is trying to cheat the system and so you may hear the terminology black cat I see a white hat SEO or grey hat SEO and so the whole idea behind these terminologies is that hey what are we supposed to be doing here in terms of following best practices in order to get our pages ranked on the search engines for the keyword queries week of it and so let's talk about what not to do first and that's always black hat techniques so I just mentioned a minute ago with panda and penguin algorithm updates you know penguin took into account you know link schemes poor linking techniques keyword stuffing so those are considered black hat techniques so black hat is a technique used to improve page rank by violating search engine rules and policies so it's clearly Google's made a clear line in the sand they don't like links gains they don't like keyword stuffing so if you take into account those practices then your practicing black hat techniques to treat this cheat the system to try and rank faster and so some other ways of blackhat or you know redirecting fishing having duplicate content all these are are things that are frowned upon by search engines so the result of not only algorithm changes is you could get your website blacklisted from the search engines if you are caught in violation of their policies it's pretty clear-cut so that's why the algorithms are in place the algorithms try and create a system and environment where you know good quality content is shown so if your keyword stuffing or creating lots of duplicate content that's not in adherence with you know Google's policies for creating good quality content and as a result you could get blacklisted so with black hat techniques you run the risk of being penalized and you don't want to be penalized by the search engines so white hat contrarily used to improve search engine rankings by following those rules and policies so in effect it's everything we talked about today from on-page SEO to off page SEO doing the right thing with your content in terms of organizing the structure with headers creating very clear and concise meta descriptions submitting a sitemap all of those are white hat techniques addressing page load time using really relevant keywords naturally in your content and creating high quality content that's fresh and interesting for the end user that's white hat technique that's going to get you ranked higher and farther and with better benefits so gray hat is just simply a combination of black and white it's when practice of improving by following the policies but they considered you know ethically dubious and so what I mean by that is listen.you you don't want to purchase links you want links to come across naturally you don't want to do excessive internal linking you don't want to have a lot of Link's pointing to one page it's not natural so you want to be able to do things that are natural you don't want to just take content from another side and claim it as your own so you want to do things that are natural that's going to create a good experience for the user because if it's for the end user which it is then generally it's going to be good for the search engines and so let's talk about website architecture now so basically when I say website architecture what I mean is we want to give the search engines an idea of how our websites built so website architecture and the structure of Roman sites important and so every website has a hierarchy it starts with the home page the home page is the top page it's the the domain it's where most people go to find other pages of your website and so generally you're gonna have a scenario where you're gonna have a home page with you know if you sell products multiple categories and in those categories you can have multiple products so the generally that's how a web architecture flows it's closed from top down and the reason for having a good website architecture is internal links are spread equally so you want to make sure again not to apply a black hat method or a grey hat method of pointing all links to one page you want links naturally to spread throughout your website because not just from an SEO benefit but from an end-user perspective you want users to flow through your website naturally so if you're de planning on developing websites from an SEO perspective you know take these things in consideration so we want to take into account the site architecture and navigation we want to take into account the URL remember we talked about your a rel structure and on-page SEO the rule of thumb is if you can read it the search engines will read it so we want to keep it clear and concise and relevant to the content of the when we talk about responsive design we're talking about multiple devices so you don't build a website just for desktop especially when mobile is being used by a majority of the users around the world so you want to build a website that's both desktop friendly and mobile friendly we also want to take into account a robots.txt file and a robots.txt file simply just a text file that allows the search engines to index certain pages it tells them what not to index and so you can always find the robots.txt file normally if you go to a website and let's just say we go to Valley fig com and then we type in robot or robots.txt file here we could see if I type in robots.txt file here this basically is a file a text file that's in the root directory and it simply just gives the search engines an idea of what they're allowed to index and what they're not allowed to index so anything with a disallow means hey search engines please don't index these pages so that's what a robots.txt file does and every site should have it because there are some pages on your website then you inherently don't want the search engines to index and you want to optimize for the crawlers so that means that making sure that your pages are available and that means also submitting a sitemap remember we submit our sitemap via the Google search console so good site architecture not only makes content easy to find but also helps to gain traffic because hey if your site is easy its well-organized it's built multiple devices the URLs are easy then all that's going to be apparent to the search engines and when it's apparent to the search engines it's going to get indexed I'm going to get indexed then you're going to get found and you're gonna get the traffic so it's just a natural progression it's best practice so some important features of good architecture are again that you're all structure code your site navigation and CSS or HTML make it easy for the search engines to follow build a comprehensive structure for an internal linking meaning they should be matched internal links if a page is relevant to another page then create an internal link if you have a very big website with a lot of content or a lot of products then create a breadcrumb navigation okay so we're may be familiar with that on Amazon as an example amazon.com has a lot of products and if you're navigating from one product to another in one directory or one category to another category that Amazon creates what they call breadcrumbs to help you navigate back to where you were quickly so these are all good best practices for good site architecture good site architecture equals search engine results so responsive design house to make your website mobile-friendly it will increase the amount of time the user spends on your website which may improve site rankings so let's talk a second about mobile friendliness so if i go back to google search console there happens to be in search console a mobile usability report and so if I click on that report basically what it's going to show me is pages that are do not follow Google's best practices so some of Google's best practices are making sure that the text is easy to read that clickable elements aren't necessarily close to one another and the viewport is set to the appropriate device meaning the screen is set to the appropriate device okay and so basically if we are found in violation then the page is affected are going to get flagged by Google and if the page is affected or flagged by Google then those pages won't get indexed and so we want to keep an eye on the mobile usability report and Google search console so remember it's better to have a good site architecture that BOTS can easily index so BOTS will give preference to web pages with relevant content and in the end it will help your website rank better and as a side note always use a sitemap to easy for the pots to crawl your website so we covered that an on page as a reminder if I go back to search console and if I click on sitemaps I can go ahead and submit my site map so if I created an XML version of my site map called Simon XML and I submit that basically what I'm doing is I'm saying hey Google here's my sitemap file and in that sitemap file or all the pages on my website that want to get indexed and when you submit your sitemap to Google basically they're going to discover those URLs and index those URLs and their search index and that expedites the process of getting indexed it expedites the process of getting found on search and it expedites the process of getting clicks on your search results pages and and having that traffic go to your website where they can enjoy the user experience and convert and remember the robots.txt file is there to allow google and other search engines to know what pages to crawl so good website architecture like for example Amazon they use breadcrumbs they have a hierarchy in terms of categories okay so you can see how its evenly dispersed on the left side on the right side a poor website architecture is very slanted in one direction a lot of internal links no breadcrumbs the navigation isn't very clear so we want to make sure things are simple and easy so let's turn our attention to local SEO so local SEO is for those businesses who focus on a specific market it could be a whole state like the state of Florida and the United States it could be a specific city in a particular state like Orlando Florida or Miami it really depends on the business and who you are trying to attract and what geolocation you are trying to attract so if you're trying to attract a segment of audience in a specific location then local SEO should be in your sites for optimization and so we talked about local SEO we're really talking about optimizing your website to get traffic from a specific location so that's what local SEO it and the idea behind local SEO is to put your particular service or product or whatever it is you're offering to that particular geo market that particular locale or that city or that state so you want to put yourself in front of the right audience that's the whole idea behind local SEO and so if we focus in on Google you know local results are based on three factors and this is according to Google so it's based on a relevancy so if somebody's looking for a plumber and you happen to be a plumber in that particular locale or city or zip code then chances of you getting found are gonna be great because of relevancy and then distance so where that person is located based on your address or where you're located has a role in how you display on local SEO and then prominence so prominence is also very important because you know how prominent are you as a business are you getting a lot of reviews do you have a lot of different locations do you have all your photos and all your information posted to prominence does play a bit of factor along with distance along with the relevancy on Google local SEO so these factors combined to help find the best match for your search there's somebody typing in that plumber or say that Italian restaurant or any particular product or service is going to find local results and you want to be there to to meet that person when they're looking for your product or service so that's the whole idea behind local SEO and so one of the factors with local SEO is having consistent and AP or not and so what is an IP it's really name address and phone number so it sounds very simple and it is simple you just have to be consistent so if you have a local SEO presence on say Bing sir Jinjin you want to make sure that the name address and phone number are can also the same name and address and phone number on google so it's just about consistency so that's what we want to do we want to make sure that we're consistent across the board because it's important for companies that want to wait well have some consistency and it's important to when we talk about consistency to actually have that information you need obviously the name of your company you obviously need a phone number and you need to put your address in there but really of all three the phone numbers just as important because we talked about local SEO we mentioned mobile earlier we know that a lot of people initiate their search on mobile and so if they're looking for local restaurant or local cafe or that plumber and you appear in local SEO then your phone number is going to appear with the results and that gives an opportunity for some money to go ahead and just click on that number to call it just makes it that much easier for somebody to get in touch with you so consistency and having all your information are important factors for local SEO so having an inconsistent nap if you will is not going to bode well for you on the local SEO results okay it's important because it offers up legitimate legitimacy it offers up better rankings and at the end of the day it's going to help you get those calls it's going to help you get traffic to your website so for example if a particular company that sells Coomer running shoes has a yellowpages.com listing we want to be consistent if it's on yellowpages.com and this is their address on their website then you need to be consistent with that if it's inconsistent and we're talking about very minor details but these minor details are important simply just putting Rd as road and then spelling out row is gonna cause some inconsistency so consistency is very important why because local SEO is also tied to mapping you know Google Maps and so Google wants to see consistency so that they can offer up the address and the mapping services so that's one good reason why it needs to be consistent another is again you know so many may want to drive to your location or call your location or see if that location is close to them so that's why consistency is such a key component to local SEO so in order to get started on Google for local SEO what you want to do is you want to just do a search for Google my business so Google my business is the platform in which you're going to set up your local business and once you set up your Google my business account whatever that account is you want to make sure you have all the credible information in there I can't stress that enough you need to have that phone number you need to have that address and needs to be consistent but with Google my business there's a lot of things you can do here so you can manage reviews so if you do have a location you can go ahead and manage those reviews that somebody puts in for your business and so if it's a negative review you definitely want to respond to that negative review if it's a positive review you definitely want to respond to that positive review so you can manage reviews you can upload photos so photos is a big component as we talked about with alt tags and images you know having these images helped up here in the local SEO results you can manage a lot of other things your information you can manage post you can offer up promotions there's a lot of things you could do you could set your business hours so the more information you put in to Google my business the more informations gonna can be conveyed to the end-user looking for your products and services and Google my business even goes as far as offering up the opportunity to have a website so if you're a business that doesn't even have your own website you can create a website right in Google my business and so the end result is this if somebody is looking for let's just say lice removal and Orlando let's just say your child comes home from school with some lice you need services that offer up lice removal well you're gonna be able to see businesses listed in the Orlando region and then offer up the service you're looking for and if you're on a mobile phone you can go ahead and quickly you know call that person you can go to the website you look at the reviews so local seo is a very important to local businesses very important and so you want to make sure you have consistent presence not just on google but i'm being in some of these other local platforms like yellowpages.com for example so being prominent across multiple platforms is going to put yourself in front of the right audience who's looking for your products and services let's talk about how to measure your SEO performance so all that hard work you've done with on-page SEO and coupled with all the work you've done with off page SEO are eventually going to net results and positive results and we want to be able to measure that as you're actually doing the work as you're putting forth the effort on on-page and off-page and so we want to be able to measure that and so you want to be able to understand what to measure and where to measure it and so when we talk about SEO we really want to hone in on three high-level core metrics and that's ranking trafficking inversion so when we talk about ranking traffic and conversion we can break that down into this list here what kind of traffic are we getting from organic search what kind of traffic are we getting from mobile devices remember mobile is very important because as we talked about with on-page SEO as we talked about with local SEO a lot of searches start with mobile devices we want to look at keyword ranking remember keyword research is the first step in the SEO process even before we do any work with on-page and off-page you know we want to look at the local visibility if we have local SEO results we want to look at engagement metrics so all that traffic we're driving from organic search we want to be able to measure how they're performing and behaving on our website we also want to measure some form of progress on off page SEO and that's in the form of backlinks so all of these are different metrics we can measure using different tools so let's talk about how to go about looking at these metrics somewhere to go look at them and measure them and so really monitoring all this behavior will help us understand how we're performing how SEO is performing and so really what we want to do is start with organic traffic and so we can look at that on a month-to-month basis we can look at it from a geographic perspective we can look at it in terms of how many new visitors were driving versus returning and then again more importantly conversion rate and so to me the best place to start to look at that traffic from organic search is Google Analytics and Google Analytics is a free tool it's simply there to measure website performance so if you go into Google Analytics we can actually go in and we can look at all sorts of data based on website behavior and so if I'm in Google Analytics and I go under acquisition and then I go under all traffic channels over a given period of time let's just say the last seven days for particular website I can see what traffic is coming from organic search and then I could see the amount of new users that are coming from organic search I can also see engagement metrics bounce rate for example so I want to be able to see if somebody's typing in a query clicking on our link in the organic search results and then coming to our website are they actually engaging with their website or are they leaving the website after only visiting the page they landed on so that's all in these are all important metrics to measure and I can measure all that right here in Google Analytics if I wanted to I can even take it a step further and break that down by country so if I type in country as a secondary dimension now I could see what country is driving traffic from organic search so a lot of your organic traffic information it's gonna be centrally located in Google Analytics so we also talked about mobile traffic a majority of searches take place on mobile phones versus desktop so Google basically is reporting that nearly 60% of searches now appear from mobile and so if we go back to google analytics we can also look at a mobile report so if I go in Google Analytics under audience under mobile overview I can see a breakdown of the amount of traffic coming from desktop versus tablet versus mobile and so you'll find as time goes on that your mobile device is likely going to drive a majority of the traffic from organic search and so you can compare device information with channel so if I just type in channel in Google Analytics as a secondary dimension and look at the default channel groupings versus device category I can see that you know mobile from organic search just driven traffic over the last seven days this is something you want to keep an eye on because a lot of people tend to begin their searches on mobile devices so mobile ranking is different than desktop ranking because with mobile ranking it's based on a responsive website and with that responsive website basically responsive being that the website's going to adapt to the mobile device so it's gonna respond to the device that somebody's on and so therefore the metrics or the engagement metrics are going to be different but if I look back to Google Analytics I can see again bounce rate I can see pages per session average session duration so if I look at line three I could see all the different engagement metrics compared to those metrics from other devices and other channels okay so you want to be able to do a comparison because if behavior is not up to par engagement is not the power on mobile then you want to do something about that so you want to hone in on mobile traffic specifically from organic search because the behavior is gonna be different you know people start their searches on mobile the site's gonna be different and so therefore it's a different experience altogether so make sure you track the behavior and more importantly make sure you track that page speed so earlier we talked about on-page SEO when we honed pagespeed so just as a reminder if I'm back in analytics and I go back under behavior then if I go to site speed then if I go to overview I'll be able to see the average page load time on my website I can also look at specific page timings and I should be able to see that by device so if I type in device category I'm gonna be able to see how each paid loads per device and so this allow me to understand which pages are loading fast which pages are not loading as fast and address those pages accordingly to improve engagement metrics so we want to keep an eye on page speed as well as overall user behavior from a lot of Isis you can also use other tools that are out there like agency analytics there are plenty of tools out there I tend to use Google Analytics because primarily it's free and Google Analytics is a Google product so it works with other Google platforms like Google search console we want to keep an eye on ranking so remember when we do our keyword research we're choosing keywords that have high relevancy high volume and low competition so we want to be able to track keywords that we choose that have high relevancy high volume and low competition and so the tool we use or at least I recommend using is ma so I mentioned Moz earlier with on-page and off-page SEO so if we go into Moz and we know what keywords we're trying to rank for we can go ahead and add the namaz and what Moz does they actually track where these keywords rank and so if I go into Moz and I click on rankings I'll be able to see on a weekly basis or a monthly basis how our keywords are ranking and for what pages they're ranking so for whatever keyword I choose to to optimize for I want to make sure I put those keywords in Moz because when I put them in Moz Moz is going to on a weekly basis tell me where these keywords rank and for what URL they're ranked for so that way I can keep an eye on ranking over time because in theory the higher you rank but more traffic you're gonna get and so we want to be able to see the trend in which keywords rank okay so if I click on a particular keyword in Moz it's gonna give me over a period of time where that keywords ranks be able to see improvement in ranking for particular keyword the whole idea behind SEO is to choose keywords that are relevant optimized for those keywords so that you can be ranked for those keywords in order to get the traffic and conversions so Moz is a good platform that helps us monitor rankings for particular keywords now if you don't want to use Moz as an alternative you can turn your attention to Google search console and so remember we talked about Google search console earlier when we talked about sitemaps we also talked about mobile usability with search console we also talked about links to your site with Google search console so Google search console is a good tool to help you understand how you're performing with organic search and so there's one tool in particular which is performance that helps us understand what keyword queries people are actually typing into Google search and so here I could see the actual query and so with this particular website valley fig com I can see that dried fig recipes over the course of the last three months have 5414 impressions that means that one of my pages either one or multiple pages appeared in Google search engine results 5414 times and over the course of this 5414 impressions I received 1100 clicks so Google search console is gonna be able to tell me not only you know how many impressions I received for a particular keyword but they also going to tell me how many clicks and if I wanted to add more metrics to that I can add them like the average ranking position for a keyword the click-through rate so I can add multiple metrics to this report to give me an understanding of hey or any of my targeted keywords being used or queried and if they are where my ranking and I am i showing up and am i getting clicks so search console serves is a good alternative if not primary tool or platform for you to measure how your organic search results are showing so for local visibility this metric is important for you know maintaining local SEO so remember on the local SEO we talked about Google my business so if I go back to Google my business I can go into my account and so Google my business is going to be able to show me some metrics so if I go into Google my business and I click on insights I'm gonna be able to see a number of different metrics over the course of a month I can see exactly you know what queries were used by how many users and when I appeared so I'll be able to see how many views I receive not only on search results but on maps then I can also see what actions people took when they saw my results in maps or in search did they visit my website through their request directions did they call so I can actually see engagement metrics right in Google my business I could see a break out by zip code I can see phone calls by day of the week I could see how many people even viewed my photos so there's a lot of insights into local SEO on Google my business so that gives you an idea of how you're performing organically on local search and remember you want to be able to use Google my business to hone in on your specific audience so all these metrics help you aligned with whether you're getting in front of the right audience and what are that audience is actually behaving the way you want them to meaning you know are they actually contacting you are they going to your website are they calling you so local visibility and understanding the metrics involve the local SEO is very important so Google my business is where you want to turn your attention so overall engagement metrics are important they play an important role in determining rankings for example we talked about bounce rates a bounce rate is the rate at which people go from organic search to your website and then leave after a seen one page and not going any further so if they land on a page and then leave the website landing on that page it's considered a bounce and so bounce or bounce rate is a good indication of how people are receiving our website or the content that they're reading on our website there are other metrics involved like average session duration or pages per visit all of these are engagement metrics and let's not forget about page speed so page speed is also a good engagement metric all of these metrics affect or determine rankings so we want to be able to make sure that if we're in Google Analytics and we're looking at engagement metrics that our metrics are good because if somebody comes to our website from organic search and there's a high bounce rate then what does that tell us that there's a disconnect between what that person's Quarian and then the content that they're reading and so we want to be able to address those engagement metrics so that we can continue to not only drive quality traffic but keep the traffic engaged and then in turn drive up conversions last metric we want to look at is backlinks so content having more backlinks from good domains will effectively improve your SEO performance we talked about backlinks with off page SEO and remember quality over quantity and so we can measure backlinks going back into Moz we can use Mazdas link explorer tool so remember if I type in a domain valley fig I can get some metrics related off page SEO including my domain Authority but more importantly I can see what links are pointing to my site in this case valley fig com so I can see there 575 link domains I can see there are seven thousand nine hundred inbound links and so just by clicking on that I can get a idea of the types of websites that are linking to my site and their domain Authority in there spam score Google search console so if you go back into search console you can also just click on links and we should be able to get an idea of you know what websites are linking to our site and more importantly we want to be able to see not only what sites for what pages they're linked to remember we want our backlinks pointing to interior pages not necessarily the home page so here I can see the top linked page for valley fig comm is slash recipes so we want links pointing to our interior page is not necessary the home page that's what's going to help your performance your rankings for all your pages not just your home page so having quality back links pointing to interior pages help boost the domain Authority and the page authority for that particular page so again using Moz slink Explorer tool or using the links report in search console are good sources for you to identify backlinks so when we look at these these reports we want to look at the domain authority of these sites that are linking ours the number of outbound links to the site or specific pages on our site we want to be able to look at the ratio of link distribution you know we want to be able to look at how many follows and nofollow so most of this if not all of these metrics are in Moz so if I go back to Moz I can actually see you know which ones pointing which ones are followed the total quality of the link that's pointing to our site again BAM so Moz link Explorer report tends us give us all the information we need in order to measure and get a sense of our backlinks that help us with off page SEO so there are other tools out there there's a traffic answer console there's other SEO platforms out there that'll help you measure backlinks okay now that we covered everything with on-page SEO and off page SEO and really everything SEO in general let's take a little quiz and if you could go ahead and just put your answers in the comment section below so just a little quiz here and we'll start out with question 1 which of the following type of site map is specifically designed for search spiders so the answer is either a HTML sitemap or B XML sitemap so go ahead and put your answers in the comment section below I'll give you just another second to think about that okay another question for you from a search engine perspective which of the following link types could cause a negative effect on your rankings it's either a purchase link or B nofollow link so again if you could if you know the answer or just take an educated guess go ahead and put the answers in the comment section below next question a website's robots.txt file serves what function is it a tell the bots what pages should be crawled and not crawled or B tell us the bots what links should be follow and no follow so if you know the answer you feel good about your answer go ahead and put it in the comment section below ok let's do a recap on some of the key takeaways from today's a session about SEO so we started out with why SEO and why do we want to take part and put some time and effort into search engine optimization if you recall one of the biggest factors was it increases visibility on search engines so if you're not getting any traffic to your website if you don't have any other marketing channels that you're currently working on such as social or blogging or paid search then SEO will definitely help increase your visibility then we moved over to what is SEO so we talked a lot about you know not only the benefits of SEO but what's involved with practicing search engine optimization and we know it's the practice of getting traffic organic search from really any search engine we honed in today on Google but really when it comes to SEO it's every search engine so we want to be able to be relevant for certain keyword queries on the search engines we focused our attention on two keyword research so we talked about what's involved with keyword research we talked about short tail keywords remember short tail keywords or three key words or less longer tail keywords or three key words or more and really when it comes to short tail keywords they're generally broad in nature they have high search volume but they're very competitive because they're broad in nature and the conversion rates tend to be a little bit lower because of the relevancy factor however if you focus it on longer tail keywords if you recall generally they're longer in nature low volume however if somebody's types in a longer tail keyword and you rank for that long tail keyword chances are it's gonna be a little bit more relevant for the end users so when they actually click on your link and the search engine results and go to your website your conversion rate increases so it's a balance between short tail and long tail we then transition to how search engines work more search engines send out BOTS to your website they want to crawl your website and by crawling what they do is they follow links ok they follow internal links and external links so in fact when they're following links they're creating a sort of a web if you will so that's where we get the term spidering from there they're spinning a web on all these links that they're following and what they do is when they follow they're really collecting and they're collecting all that content and bringing it back to their servers because when they bring the content back to their servers when somebody actually does a search on the search engine then the search engine itself is able to you know spin results in milliseconds based on the relevancy of that quick keyword query so that's in general how search engines work now they have an idea of how search engines work and why you should do as the and the importance of measuring longtail versus short tail keywords we went into the actual practical application and if you remember it's a two-pronged approach on page SEO and off page SEO so for on-page SEO it's everything that involves your website so we talked about making changes or optimizing your website to be relevant for certain keywords we went through a number of different factors we talked about schema and title tags and header tags if you remember header tags had a hierarchy h1 h6 we talked about what a featured snippet is you know whether it was a list or a paragraph we talked about the importance of page speed remember you can look at page speed in Google Analytics you want to be able to make sure your page is load between three to four seconds max because the longer takes a page the load the higher that bounce rates gonna be and the lower that conversion rates going to be we talked about the importance of internal linking and how you can measure internal linking in search console and speaking of search console we also made mention that you can upload a sitemap so the HTML sitemap is for the end-user the XML sitemap is for the search engines we can go ahead and take that XML sitemap it's submit it to the search engines so that they can recognize all the pages on your website so these are some of the key factors of aam page and when you do on-page then you transition over to off page SEO and off page SEO is really synonymous with link building and why do we do link building well we talked about some of the benefits it definitely improves the credibility of your website because if you have a link pointing from another credible website to yours then naturally the credibility is going to be there not only for the end user but for the search engine and as a result of being linked from quality websites or credible websites it's going to increase a metric called domain Authority remember domain Authority is a score between 1 and 100 and the higher domain Authority the more relevant you're going to be in the eyes of the search engines in order to be relevant you need backlinks or external links from quality websites and because you have links from quality websites the likelihood of you getting more traffic is going to increase so one of the net benefits of getting backlinks is you're going to get traffic from those websites especially if they're credible and they're popular and they get a lot of traffic themselves and so all of this leads to off page SEO which is in turn what we want to do is improve our page rank so we want to prove our rankings in the search engine results pages and when we improve our rankings in the search engine results pages in effect we're going to get more traffic from search engines so off page SEO is very critical that with on-page SEO balances out the relevancy factor and you want to be relevant in the eyes of the search engines for your targeted keywords we then shifted gears and we talked about some other factors along the lines of search engine optimization including duplicate content so search engines don't like duplicate content see if we recall we talked about ways to combat duplicate content we talked about setting up redirects we also talked about canonical tags remember canonical tags or tags we put in as a meta tag and that's going to alert the search engines hey this particular domain this particular page is the initial source pay attention to this page we talked about Google's algorithms and Google makes tweaks to their search engines every day and because they make tweaks to their search engines every day they're trying to fine-tune it and usually you're gonna find that Google in particular is going to have one or two major algorithm changes once a year and so we talked about some of the key algorithm changes as Google's made over the last couple of years including panda which took into account quality of content or Google penguin which took into account links Keamy okay so we want to stay away from link farming and you want to be able to create good quality content so that's what these particular algorithms took into account and then of course Google ranked brain which basically is synonymous learning so Google's search engines are continuously learning what people type in as queries and because they're learning what people type in they're starting to form their search engine results based on what they've previously learned so that's what rankbrain is it's on artificial intelligence or machine learning and Google initiated rankbrain back in 2015 so Google is constantly making changes to their search engines for the better they want a more solid more relevant set of results to improve the entire ecosystem of search and some of the SEO techniques that we talked about in order to be relevant for certain keyword queries and we talked about the techniques that you should apply and those techniques are white hat techniques so you want to be able to follow certain best practices you want to stay away from black hat SEO or grey hat SEO black hat SEO you know are things that you would do to kind of circumvent best practices like link farming so you want to take into account everything we talked about in today's tutorial because it follows the best practices not only Google but all search engines we talked about website architecture and how important that is for SEO I think the key takeaways here is responsive design remember Mobile is very important in terms of organic search and the eyes of Google most users conduct or initiate their search on a mobile device and so therefore it's imperative that you as a website owner have a responsive design for your website meaning that design caters to the device that somebody's going to your website with so if it's a mobile device the website should respond to the mobile device meaning take into account best practices we talked about having consistent URL structure having robots.txt files or robots.txt file is a file that allows the search engines to understand what pages to index and what pages not to embed we shifted gears and talked about local SEO local SEO is for those businesses that are targeting a specific market that'd be a town a locale a municipality a city or state local SEO is a strategy and remember the benefit of local SEO is you appear above the organic search results so if your local business catering to say people looking for plumbers then you have the opportunity to be listed above organic search results and one thing you need to do that we talked about was just be consistent with now name address and phone number and so if you're consistent with nap and you take advantage of everything that Google my business has to offer then your chances of being found locally are going to be good and we capped everything off with measurement so how to measure your SEO performance this was last but certainly not least so we talked about specific metrics in terms of organic traffic mobile traffic backlinks local visibility keyword ranking so some of the tools I mentioned in today's tutorial was Google Analytics so Google Analytics is a free tool and it will help you measure the traffic you're getting from your website from mobile from organic search and you compare that traffic against specific engagement metrics like bounce rate like time on pay or conversion or conversion rate okay so Google Analytics helps you understand how your visitors are behaving on your website from mobile organic search we talked about Google my business again because with Google my business they provide insights into how people are searching what search keyword queries they're using and if you're being found for those search engine queries and if you are found what are people what actions are people taking are they actually calling you are they looking for directions are they going to your website so Google my business has insights that provide information into your local visibility for SEO we also mentioned Moz Moz was a tool we mentioned throughout the tutorial we used it in our keyword research we used it in terms of talking about keyword ranking we also used it in terms of off page SEO remember the link Explorer our tool will allow us to measure what our domain and page Authority is and the quality of backlinks that we have okay so Maas fills the role with keyword ranking and backlink so we can get really good information in terms of you know what backlinks are hitting our site and the quality of those backlinks but also keyword ranking remember when we target certain keywords we want to be able to allow Moz to track the rankings of these keywords because in theory the higher a keyword ranks the more traffic you're going to get from the search engine so Moz Google my business Google Analytics for three of the main tools we talked about there are plenty of other tools like SEM Rush H refs there's a lot of different tools out there that we mentioned that are available to you so go ahead and use the tools that you feel comfortable with these are the tools that I only mentioned that I'm comfortable with with SEO so the key here is though you need to measure performance that's the key takeaway so thank you for listening to today's tutorial if you have any more information or any questions about SEO visit simply learn com for more information thank you hi there if you like this video subscribe to the simply learn youtube channel and click here to watch similar videos to nerd up and get certified click here

Channel: Simplilearn

Views: 309,532

Rating: 4.8955784 out of 5

Keywords: seo tutorial for beginners, seo tutorial, seo course, seo 2019, seo training, seo tools, seo tips, what is seo and how does it work, what is seo marketing, what is seo in digital marketing, search engine optimization tutorial for beginners, search engine optimization course, seo off page optimization tutorial, seo on page optimization tutorial, seo keyword research basics, google algorithms explained, seo, digital marketing, simplilearn digital marketing, simplilearn

Id: Qs0_Qu22v4M

Length: 151min 21sec (9081 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 11 2019