The Complete Guide to SEO in 2020 (Full webinar)

hey everybody and welcome to our 2020 clean SEO strategy webinar this is where we're gonna lay out the very basic fundamentals of everything we're doing to get traffic to our websites our webinar last year got almost 700,000 views to it and this is really where like you've got to give us time this is you know give us 45 minutes there's going to be a an in-depth presentation but you can either give 45 minutes now and really learn these things or you can spend years floundering and making mistakes with Google that are gonna kill your website exactly this webinar is a lot of years in the making we've we've spent a lot of time figuring a lot of a lot of things on our own over the last year since the last webinar we have built up a portfolio of websites we just sold a portfolio of six of our websites for over half a million dollars just going to show exactly what can still be done today there's still a ton of opportunity for bloggers today and those were all new sites we have built lots of them in the past that was just a new batch just in the last year what we're doing to get traffic is working and that's what we want to share building up sites from zero to a hundred thousand plus pages within a year getting tens of millions of page views on our organic pages coming straight from search it's just phenomenal what can still be done in blogging today especially what is he starting you know I kind of this stage of my career what's getting me much more excited is what we're seeing our customers doing the people the members of project 24 I mean almost every week and sometimes more than one a week we're getting a new member hitting the thousand dollars a month mark or the full time income mark like they're they're succeeding not all of them but that's an important thing to know most of you who start a blog will fail it's hard to do everything right enough to get that traffic there are so many places where you can mess it up and so that's what we're trying to show you in this webinar this webinar is going to walk you through numerous ways that you can bypass all of that we've I've we worked with many customers who said I've spent over a decade trying to figure this out on my own and I've never had success but now that I have a system a framework a series of processes I'm able to do it so in this webinar we want to walk you through some of these systems relative to SEO and how we get organic traffic from search and so today we're going to talk a bit about how Google actually works we're going to talk about the most important aspects of SEO which are relevance and then we'll talk about on-page SEO and off page SEO I'm excited to get going alright so most of this is based off of what's I've been been termed the qrg now the quality rater guidelines so this was several years ago Google hired a lot I mean a thousands of individual actual human beings to go a web site by website and answer survey questions about those websites so it was getting a human view about how well a website was matching the search the reputation of that site etc and we don't know exactly how Google is using this data if that army of people I mean thousands of people that they're still employing to do this is it used to manually rank those websites is it more for data validation on an AI Google has really been cagey about exactly what they do here they've given us a couple little clues but we just don't really know the point though is it doesn't matter the point is that Google has released a document for their quality raters that basically is saying this is what we want the perfect website to be and they hire thousands of engineers and they're one of the most powerful companies on planet earth with one goal how do we figure out which websites match that document because they're going to be the best search result for the people like that's their product is Google search right and they want to bring the best result every time and so this document is absolute gold nail at Menominee I might say yeah yeah it is great so what we're teaching you is not theory it is not philosophy it is what Google is saying that we have actually seen and work ourselves so since we made this webinar a year ago talking from the qrg google has made an update to the urg a couple event yeah there are some specific things that have changed that we'll talk about here in this webinar but if you want to go read that qrg just go to income school comm slash qrg and go check it out for yourself quark quark it just point anywhere let's talk about Google's top ranking factors now this this is tricky right google has they've said many times and everybody cites this number that there are over 200 factors that Google uses to rank content and so some of these ranking factors are high level they're the most important things but they're being measured by many other ranking factors as well and so there's there's a little bit of both there so the number one ranking factor bar none is relevancy which is obvious right like it doesn't matter how good your article is on weight loss if somebody searched you know how do I cut down a tree you know so that that's obvious right except that it's not when a new blogger starts writing they tend to write articles that are just getting things off their chest I have a tip to share I want to win on this amazing trip it's a blog like it's a log of their life yeah right and that will not work you have to be relevant to a specific search so that is the number one ranking factor by far yeah the second one and this is a ranking factor that ties into other ranking factors but quality backlinks to your website Google has specifically said though that quality backlinks is one of their top few ranking guidelines and so what this means is other websites other relevant websites with some authority on the subject are linking back to your content basically giving you a score of reputation of level of authority and when somebody links to your website it's kind of like a vote for hey that was cool content so what Google is looking it's that more and more about backlinks later on in this as well but because our approach is very different very non-traditional very non-traditional from what I think hardly anyone else in the industry does and it's clearly working alright next is user experience so there may be a lot of different ways that Google is looking at this but they have the data from google chrome from Android devices from just google search and salary blogger that's using Google Analytics yeah it's just they have the data on how long somebody stays on the page which are which article they're clicking into on the search results which search result satisfied their search and they're like okay I they've actually found the answer so user happiness of like actually having a good experience on your site really tough to game and it's one of the top ranking factors they're using that to say what is a good result another one is e8e that google's coined this term eat right this is expertise authoritative 'no sand trustworthiness i mentioned that backlinks was essentially a measurement for for the more important ranking factor which is this one and so backlinks is one measure of that but there are numerous other ways that Google is using to try to determine the expertise authoritative nough sand trustworthiness of the of the author and of the website there's actually two different things and so we'll talk in this webinar about specifically how we go about establishing EA T on our sites there are myriad other factors as we mentioned but some of the other leading ones were just use of images on the page outbound links like where do you link to do you link to spammy crap site well maybe you're a one yourself right the content age you know older content has had more time in the algorithm but it's too old and suddenly it's not relevant anymore social signals you know does this site have a big community of people around it that kind of tells me maybe this has more reputation and the site structure some of the things you do on the on the page itself so there's a lot of factors but we need to talk about that age part yeah exactly so it's this is really cool there's this this patent that certainly did not get the airtime it deserved where Google has we can see we can read the patent that talks about how long it actually takes to rank on Google and it's talking about the way that it does that yeah that we call stepped rankings that initially when a piece of content is released it's kind of making its its initial look at it of just like where should this rank should we even give this a shot with users etc what is the reputation of this website its kind of getting an initial ranking and then it's continuing with further tests down the line probably user testing and maybe a manual quality checker there's a lot that goes into that the algorithm that may take time and so what we see when we write a new piece of content is a ghost town absolutely nothing and when we started this last batch of sites that we created and sold it it's so disheartening when you start a blog and like even though we've done it dozens of times now built sites to success like still when you're writing new content nears like oh my gosh three people came to my blog today it's really hard to see the future but once you understand that it's gonna be about eight months before you really see that hockey stick growth when that content really is taking off where it's had enough time for other people to find you and link to you and do the user testing we really see a big jump at the eight month mark in content in rankings and it continues to grow even to a year and a half so it's easy to quit way too soon on your blog if you're starting today you got a commit you've got to commit to a year of this process and you may be doing everything right and when you are following a good system that you have confidences you're doing it well you can continue to make that content because you know it's gonna work exactly and it's important to understand that the stepped ranking system this stepped measurement system is happening because with a brand new website yes it's going to take that long but with an established site or you've already gained some credibility in a particular industry Google is able to shortcut through that ranking process now a big mistake a lot of people make is in order to shortcut that process on a new site they try to do things to manipulate the way Google's measuring the authoritative nosov a website like a lot of link building strategies that people are using today and those can work in the short term to kind of trick Google into shortcutting some of those steps because they they see these signals but what happens is that down the line at some point Google is able to recognize that it was shortcutted that that authoritative nassif built up is fake and then you get a manual penalty on your website and so now you're outside the system you're no longer in that normal step drinking process you're kind of just hammered down for a long time let's talk about relevance it's the number one ranking factor and I think because it seems so obvious so easy to skip over but there's a lot to learn in relevance we're also going to talk about search analysis here's so you have to write content that matches a search if you start your blog on building a home and you write something like I built my home in just five months and four days the only search that ranks four is how long did it take Jim harbour to build his home search and that is Jim's mom and of the reason and my mom searches a lot either the only the reason that people do that is one they just have things they want to share but two that's the kind of content we see all the time on social media it's what we see on YouTube it's that viral kind of content that fails on Google search Google search wants you to answer his or her question and so you have to think what's a question that somebody's typing into Google and then decide what content you're going to create that is the perfect answer to that get that in your head if you fail to remember this lesson you can do everything else right and your blog will be dead a year from now what most people do in order to create content that they believe will rain is they rely on us here on several different tools there are are many different tools out there available for quote keyword research and what these tools do is they're intended to give you an indication of how much search volume there is for a term essentially doing what we just told you you need you need to create content geared toward a search the problem is while there are multiple but one is those tools are based on keywords and Google doesn't care about keywords it's all about semantics it's what is the intent behind the search the words used in the search don't really matter anymore the second problem is none of these tools have access to the same size of data set that Google has not even close probably not even a million of the data that Google has and because of that they're extrapolating from the data sets they're able to put together and so their numbers are typically very far off from reality except for on high volume searches which are usually the type of searches and we're going to have anybody create content on so this is a trap say s a.m. rush all of them right and it shocks people when we go speak around the industry and people say well you know you don't use the keyword research tools for your keyword research no we don't at all and actually that's one of the secrets to why we're winning it's why we're winning all of our competitors are using the same faulty data and we have done this so they're all writing the same dozen hundreds of times we have done this where we take an article found our way to do search analysis we look it up in a keyword research tool and we say what's the search volume how many people search that and it will say 0 or 10 searches a month I've searches a month we'll even look up numerous different wordings right now what are adjacent ways that you wanted yeah it would trying trying to give it the most benefit of the doubt and it just says like almost no one searches this and then we actually go write the piece of content because our way shows like I know there's search volume there we actually go write it and we've seen multiple times we're springing in 5,000 people a month from one article that the tool tells us has no search volume and so all your competitors are using that volume to determine what to write in your and niche what if there was a way to find out a completely different set of terms that are truly undervalued with little or no competition oh I'm some like a Salesman we gotta just show up there is a way okay so we have an entire process called search analysis it is the entire process is way too in-depth for this webinar we actually have an entire course on it in our membership project 24 and so project 24 members have access to just like two hours of exactly how we do followed by a very very long over-the-shoulder video of Jim showing an example of exactly how to do this there's a lot to it but we can give you the quick yeah a few minute version here and this may just blow your mind if you don't if you don't there's the risk a lot of people see this and they're and the risk is that they look at it and they say no it's too simple to see yeah it there's no way it's that simple and they write it off entirely it is that simple but it is the best method we've ever found for doing search analysis which is just like keyword research 10 points at home so when let's say I'm doing a website about like logging or forestry or you know property you know having wooded property stuff like that so if I want to know what are the big searches google has autosuggest like when you start typing something in the search bar you know how it's like trying to complete the words for you well obviously when when it's guessing what the next word you're gonna type is it's getting that from what other people have searched right relative it's not we're gonna want it it's not gonna want to throw something really random Anish up there because that's probably not what you're trying to search so they're giving away what the biggest searches hop searches based off of the few words you've already typed in so if I start searching something like cutting down a tree I see an autocomplete wit of with an axe and I'm like okay cutting down a tree with an axe now I look there and I see you know there's quite a bit of competition of just how to do this but I can go to the bottom and Google has this searches related to cutting down a tree with an axe and now you see one that's really interesting how long does it take to chop down a tree with an axe and so we say hah google tells me that people search that and so I go to actually look at this the number one result is a forum forums are the lowest form of content online the anytime I see forums and the search results I say low competition I can beat that and then you look at the articles and they're not a oh wait yeah it's about how to cut down with an axe s not about the time and so that's the pattern we're just doing partial searches with some of the words that people would use letting Google autocomplete and then we actually do the search and see you know are there a lot of really big websites that have written this exact thing then that's competitive when there's forums and not articles exactly on point we say cut that's I know I'm gonna get page views from that this is a beautiful process and really this is how we determine the topics that are going to be highly relevant to people searches and then that's how we measure the competition there's there are many ways people will try to shortcut this using quote data and analytics but those datasets we just have not found anything that even comes close to a good measurement of competition and a good measurement of actual search volume other than this process and it actually is very simple and very easy to do it's just a little bit more manual and to be clear we subscribe to some of those tools we use them not for search analysis we use them like I want to track the links to my website and stuff there are some aah refs and grassy Amrish there it's an awesome tool they have really cool things it'll search your website to look for broken links no there's all sorts of stuff that they do a very good job of because you give them access to your site and they can see the whole thing yeah they they have incredible tools but for search analysis in our personal experience of using and trying them over and over and comparing it to this and actually writing the articles this is what's giving us the actual results and I've heard from many people in project 24 who say if all I got in project 24 was search analysis it was way more than worth it this this was the biggest game-changer for me and the other thing they can do the tools can do is just kind of give you ideas other areas to start searching for in this anyway okay so that's how we're doing it next we got to talk on page so on page SEO just means like what are you actually putting out the content you're actually putting on the website there is a lot to how you format and write that content to make it rank exactly and so one of the big factors that we've that people talk about a lot when it comes to on-page SEO it's just the length of the content there is a bit of a correlation between the length of a blog post and how well it ranks but that correlation can lead you to make a big mistake and that would be to just write longer and longer and longer posts what we have found has worked really really well is to size the content length but also just the depth of the content to the search query there are a lot of search queries where the absolute best and highest ranking blog post is thousand words there are other blog posts where the best highest ranking blog post is four thousand words but what we find is that oftentimes the Articles that are ranking because they're long are actually probably ranking because they're very in-depth and that's what the searcher intended and we find that there's a better way to out wring that content and to create a better user experience that's going to out that's just going to do better so what we teach our members is to write three different types of posts response staple and pillar posts a response pulse is around 1250 words a staple post is around 2200 words and a pillar post is about 35 hundred words and so the reason that we do this is not because you know we think that the word count is you know directly a ranking signal it's probably not but instead that there are different buckets of types of queries and in depth nasai t' so that you're hitting a good broadness of different types of searches that people make and also you're creating some content that's easy to produce and quick and others that's really median in depth and can keep someone on the website when we switch to doing this having people write those three different types of blog posts we saw huge gains huge gains in the success of those websites and we find that the order that we write these blog posts on a brand new website is actually very important well this is like you hear this and it's just like okay somebody's years to learn these things to figure these things out ourselves a brand new website is going to really struggle to rank for a competitive meaty topic in an industry even if it has the best content just because it just takes more authority it just takes some credibility like Google - yeah links exactly and so what we want to do is find some good quick wins so we're going to answer very specific questions early on on a website and so we're mostly going to focus on those response posts that answer a specific question this is huge yeah so if you're writing about SUVs on your website you know before you write what is the best SUV that's a really big keyword there are going to be a lot of people that are going to go after that search query it's gonna be extremely competitive you're gonna have articles from cars calm and Edmunds and USA Today and all kinds of big sites are writing about that yeah so you on this tiny little website if you write that you're about to get squashed right you're gonna get crushed your don't stand a chance but if instead I start my site by writing something like how to replace the leaf spring in a 1992 expedition well there may not be any other result for that on the whole and so Google's got to give you a shot right and so it's that kind of thing that we're writing early on in the site's lifetime and that's probably a bad example because that's probably Tuesday little bit writable but yeah we're working on those small search terms and writing quick response post you can finish in one hour crank them out and then Google start saying hey this guy's got good information he keeps ranking number one on Google people that kids website and then then you start ranking for bigger and bigger terms another just huge key opportunity that we've identified that we've been working on that we hear there's just crickets in the industry nobody's talking about this it's maddening we call this snippet optimization the snippet is that rich piece of content that shows up at the top of a search result and we're finding that more and more the number changes it seems every month more and more and more searches are having some sort of rich piece of content as rich snippet at the top of the at the top of the search result the rich snippet pulls a piece of information from the blog post that specifically answers the query and then it has a link obviously to the blog post itself that created that snippet that piece of information we are creating a little piece of content in every single blog post that's intended to be the snippet and we're finding that when we do that more often than not our blog posts win the snippet yes so this is the cool thing about this is like so there's nothing you can do like in the tags of your website to say is is the answer to that question is it doesn't work like that oh it's they come the algorithm is just looking your blog post and saying oh that sounds like a good answer right there and so we brought the whole blog post but we found that if we format just one little paragraph in a specific way that meets the length that we're bolding it that we're doing we're writing it in a certain way that really just fits well as a standalone answer there not only are we usually winning those snippets in the Articles where we're writing I went like if we're gonna be on the page at all we're usually getting the snippet by doing this and following that snippet up with the optimization process but most of the time Google is grabbing as the snippet the parrot that we wrote intended to be the snippet exam like it's when you think about that that's incredible and so snippet optimization it's crickets in the industry and it's so so cool here's why because you have to rank for so many different factors in your site is small you've got to beat the big guys with links and everything else but if you write the best two sentence summary of this search and you get google to grab that as the snippet not jump everybody to the top position of the of the search because you had great two sentences it's awesome so when you're have a website that's early on and you're writing these response posts and every one of them has a snippet worthy piece of piece of content within that blog post and so now you get early blog posts that are ranking number one because you have this snippet well how much does that speed up that growth of credibility that that steps ranking that Google does how much does that speed up your link velocity but still in such an organic way of link of you know link building or of gaining backlinks that Google there's no way they can penalize you because it's a hundred percent organic it's natural and it's just safe and long-lasting it's amazing it's so beautiful okay now content is king online like just if you're just creating a better answer to the question it's hard for other people to overcome that that are even similarly sized to you on the web so we want to look at a blog post that does this well so think about this first if I were to ask you go write a blog post about how much of boat weighs some of you just thought oh to 2,000 words yeah like that's like any 200 words 5,000 pounds yeah that's it like you don't know how to do it it's hard to think this way but when somebody goes really in depth and really thinks about what someone who has searched this searching this what do they need you know it's like when you go into Home Depot and they're like you're asking for something it's like I don't know how to do the plumbing please help me and they're like aisle seven and they walk away it's like you didn't help me very much right that's what a lot of blog posts are throughout seven but watch this look at this post how well it's done you go here and it bang it's not just its ski boat speedboat small fishing boat sailboat all the different types of boats that maybe you meant average weight yes it's one beautiful and now we're going to specific models and what they weigh in each of the different categories this site is great go look at outdoor troupe it's one that we sold this is an really well done website it's a good example you should be going and checking out the kind of things that they do well what I love about this post is it takes it even another step further it's why is somebody looking for how much of boat weighs probably because they're thinking about having to tow it and so they want to know will can my truck tow a normal ski boat and so now in the blog post there's another table here that says you know if you have an f-150 on average here's about what f150 can tow obviously there's different packages here's about what an expedition kantos you know and it just goes through those and then it says so here's how much weight it can normally tow and then it goes through here are the types of boats from my list above that it could tow like that one little table has the amount of information that you would find in an entire blog post usually but it's put it into one hopeful and extremely convenient table that formatting is a game changer in making your blog post extremely user friendly I know it seems silly like oh yeah I just put it in a table but there are many times where that type of formatting maybe it's a table maybe it's a bulleted list maybe it's an infographic but that one thing is so much more helpful than an extra thousand words and so when that's the case absolutely do it so on the same site we had a guest writer who didn't do a good job with an article this is the best and coolest looking life jackets for riding jet skis when you look at this like you can tell it's just crap content you can tell they've never but on any of these lifejackets they've just got some stock photos and a couple sentences about each one it's just not that helpful it's not it's not the cut type of content that when you see it you're like oh my thank you that was awesome you've really helped me it'd be really nice to know like okay this lifejacket was extremely comfortable and kind of you know moves with you and run when your jet skiing that's a really nice feature to have you know that that's part of best right instead it looks like they just went through Amazon and found the cooler and and we see a lot of that type of content in blogs now if you're wondering like okay but how would I come up with that how would I come up with the idea to write a blog post that you know it gives you the weight of boats but it also adds all these other things and for that we've come up with a post recipe we actually have like a template for what a typical blog post looks like and what that allows us to do is really just organize the thoughts come up with the with the subtopics for a blog post and be able to put together a good blog post in just a couple of hours because the members of our course were overwhelmed at one point where we were talking about everything that should be in a post and we were hearing in the community in the forum for our members they were saying like I'm taking eight hours to write one blog post and when we saw that we're like oh my goodness like if you spend eight hours taking up writing a post you're just never gonna get the kind of volume of posts that you're gonna need to really succeed and so we spent a lot of time like okay how could we put this into a formula so that when you sit down your butt hits the seat and you're ready to write a blog post this morning you're on a mission you know exactly what to do step step step step step and that post is perfectly formatted it's snippet optimized and it's written in a way that will help the user and so that post recipe template has really been huge for us so go look at our sites and you'll see the kind of content that that produces so there are a lot of these kind of I don't want to say philosophical but like it's just like write good content essentially and we're talking about different very important aspects of it but a lot of people are want the technical SEO to be the thing that that gets them ahead they want to say like yeah but what do I use Yoast or all-in-one SEO right and like that's gonna man what settings do i sat on Yoast SEO to launch my website and you look at other successful blogs and like I know they have a checkbox that I don't have right and so technical SEO we think of more as kind of pass/fail for a lot of the tests you know does your site utilize SSL does it have an image at all on the page is the site speed specific or sufficient enough to be fast to have a good user experience that's why we created our own WordPress theme called Aquabot oh it's just slightly you just nail 100 on the page they didn't say it's also it's called Aquabot Oh a lack of malware on the site easy to navigate URL length is it mobile friendly are there a bunch of broken links on the website is it over optimized with a bunch of spammy affiliate links plagiarism issues schema markup there's so much of this technical SEO that we just we want you to use some common sense as you're doing these things SSL you gotta have you should have an image on your page just a bad user experience not to same as mobile-friendly but most of these things like if you just build the website right you never have to think about ever again and so in the course we built 60 steps I know there's like no 60 steps of anything these days it's like three steps and you're a millionaire right like it's but it's it like walks you through so that your first 60 days of working on your website when your button hits the seat take this specific task so that we know that this stuff is just taken care of for you but this is the list if you're wanting to make sure you're doing okay on these just at least consider each of these things on your site there are many technical SEO things that that people will tout say that you have to do we have watched the analytics and you'd make a change does nothing you make another change does nothing now today like Jim said if you don't have an SSL we're reaching a point where that's going to hurt you but adding an SSL isn't going to give you some bump in traffic it doesn't work that way and so Jim talked about building your website the right way from the store that is what we teach in project 24 that is I mean project 24 is full of courses it is it has an amazing community of people that are helping one another with every step along the way we have a podcast in project 24 where we're talking about the latest things and the latest techniques that we're using to build our websites right from the start and what project 24 does for many many people today hundreds of people is it teaches them how to build their site right from the start and it saves them months and even years of work of doing it wrong or doing it almost right and it allows them to get to success so much faster and what we found is if we can help somebody get to success just one month faster it's more than paid for itself the entire membership and more than the goal is that you earn a full time income from your site and most people aren't going to succeed at that goal but a lot of our members are because of the things that they're learning and the mistakes they're avoiding and the years of frustration that we had to go through to learn it on their own that they're getting to bypass and so if you're going to be investing a lot of time and effort into building a website it's not going to happen in an hour Oh - this is a lot of time you're building a business we want to help you to do it right so I want you to check out project 24 it's an income school comm slash project 24 it has this library of courses the 60 steps has tools like you'll we made your WordPress theme for you an affiliate plugins for you we have the community where you can go in and ask questions every time you need help and a weekly podcast where we'll show you what's working right now for us so it's an incredible membership of what we're providing for you for a really reasonable cost but you know what if that's not in the cards for you don't let it stop you that's why we have this channel because we want to help everybody to get going and so that's why in this webinar we're showing you so much just the base fundamentals because we want you to build your website right so we want to talk about off absolutely so off be a Jessie o is like okay you've done everything you can with your content your site structure all that stuff and now still that site can lag behind and we built a website called seven-year-olds comm we were specifically testing a couple things in Google and so we were not sure if this I would work at all with we can talk about later but we're testing some kind of fringe topics on Google and the site was toast yeah for a long time super slow I mean yes the growth is positive but barely and when you compare to the doctor there is life we started at the same time with these other sites and they just took off so we tested a few theories in it so we were starting to think like yeah okay so we've learned something we we thought it might not work because of these things we were testing with kind of medical content a very risky kind of content and then we shared we shared it on YouTube this case study one side one video just shared and we sent a flood of traffic because people went over to go look at it and all of a sudden even after the spike disappeared we started to drink organically yeah posts that were ranking five seven not at all we're shooting up in the rankings and we started to get organic Google traffic from it I'll point out that that is not something we did with the other sites yes we build these sites without sending them that flood of traffic in order to test what works organically yeah when we say we built their portfolio of sites we know we have a big audience that we can't send to those site oh we start them from scratch with not sending an audience so we don't have any unfair advantages in knowing what you guys are going to be going through when you're building a site okay but that was an example of off page promotion of a site your reputation online matters very much to Google it's like I so I ordered the the cyber track as soon as that thing people I mean say what you will about it when I watch that announcement I was like how fast can i order yeah to get in front everybody needs to open now and so I mean it was a train wreck the the I mean a lot of people would say even the design but the demo the demo was a train wreck they the ball and like look how strong our glass is they throw it into just shatter so like it was a disaster right but then hundreds of thousands of people immediately put up money to buy it pre-orders that if that would have happened to Ford with their new electric vehicle it would have destroyed it but but Tesla can get away with everything because of the reputation that they've developed people like Elon Musk people like the green energy that they're doing people have driven a Model 3 and they're like holy crap this thing is awesome and so when they make a misstep the reputation is so strong that they still are building up steam and I would point out that with Tesla just like with you and anything you build the reputation is very strong among a large a certain group of people there are many other people that saw the Tesla cyber truck and said you know this is stupid this is ridiculous and they're gonna hate they don't like Elon Musk if they don't like anything Tesla stands for and I don't like ya and lithium batteries are the devil and all sorts of that kind of stuff right you don't have to please everyone but the point is it's important to establish a reputation within an industry and at least within a certain group of people within an industry and if you can have that reputation on your website of your website then it allows you to stand out especially in some of these really important topics that are so important to Google I bought a smoker like for smoking meat you have been kind of getting into it and there are a whole bunch of websites on smokers I mean dozens and dozens and dozens right and so Google says AHA man all these websites have written about what's the best wireless thermometer for smokers they all kind of use the same words they all have about the same number of backlinks who's the guy like who is the guy or gal which site is the one that like really has the goods here and it's like oh maybe it's the one that keeps getting spikes of traffic from social because people really like it right and so if you're building a blog I I would almost just not recommend at all that you only build a blog in or I want to see you spending some of your time building a YouTube channel where you can send floods of traffic over go sharing your posts on Pinterest and read it and doing some of these things outside of just blogging to just market your website it's just good marketing and when Google sees those things that like wow a lot of people mention this site on social a lot of people link to this website and that's how you get links right is you participate in the industry and you're out there all the time and then all of a sudden your website just has this invisible hand behind it that when you write the post it is about the same as the other guys yours is the one taken off this is a very different approach than the link building approach the link building approach typically is I just got to get links from anywhere and everywhere and so it's so sad to watch people do this oh man and some of the spammy garbage tactics that actually don't work and hurt your website are still being used today which is crazy yeah but some of the more legitimate tactics are things like writing guests posts for other blogs let me tell you something you could spend hours a day emailing 300 other website owners every single day begging them soliciting them to write to just let you write a post for them and a lot of them are just going to ignore you the ones who don't ignore you most of them will say well how much money you got mm-hmm and that is not a legitimate approach to building links and if Google figures out that was the approach you took then again manual penalty on your website which happens all often trading links like well link to your article here and you link to my article there they see much of that again it hurts you you can spend a lot of time trying to get the links to game Google's tests to try to trick Google into thinking you have authority or you can go participate in your industry writing an occasional guest posts makes sense but only if it's something you can do legitimately organically and yeah you met somebody yet or ever automat somebody at an industry conference and you're like hey could I write a gospel yes sure it's so much easier when you need people here right but we we receive dozens of emails a day and we work hard to hide our email address but dozens that are like you have a broken link here wouldn't it be nice if you switched it to my site and this is like when I go around the industry when I listen to podcasts and YouTube channels this is what everybody's teaching teaching spend half your time writing content half your time spam mass junk crapping emailing the world hoping that they're going to link to you and so we decided to do something radical a few years ago that we just said what if we just do what Google is asking us to do what if we just do normal marketing tactics that even if Google didn't exist we would still do it make it any tube channel and then Julien you know a fairly minimal amount of those actually yes mostly focused on just writing grading hunting if you spend 50% of your time creating content and 50% of your time promoting it and I spend 95% of my time creating content I either have twice as much content twice as many opportunities to rank or I have content that's twice as good and that's really a key here so does it work though can you still get the links well we just looked at the backlink profile for one of our sites that was still fairly new and it had thousands of links that we did nothing to create one blog post huge one blog post with 2,500 links to it and we did no active link building at all if you're creating great content people will naturally link to it just like you as a blogger naturally link to people and so it works I promise it works just create the content put it on that blog spend most of your time focused on creating incredible content and then just do some marketing naturally for your website the way that you would normally forgetting about links and Google at all it works now there are some industries where that outreach becomes more important we're establishing this reputation becomes much more important a couple years ago google coined the term why myl your money your life and it was these are just like those highly important topics where if the information is wrong it has major impact on a person's way if I google my left arm is numb and my heart is beating really fast it doesn't want to send you to a post about like oh yeah you should take an ibuprofen and go to bed yeah like no you have you're having a heart attack go to a hospital right and so it really matters some of these searches or how do I do a 401k rollover right like oh yeah you messed that up and you could Oh hundreds of thousand dollars in taxes and so Google is being careful with some searches in some categories to make sure it's going to someone with a good reputation because if they have a good reputation they're probably getting it right now one thing I would point out is what was your money your life why my L used to be your money your life right now it's your money your politics your shopping your news your religion your education why am why your life why and it's all of these things and I am just shocked that they have it included your pets and numerous others that are probably just around the corner but we have a strong belief that it's not black and white that there's a spectrum it's not like this topic is why my L and this one is not it's all on the bucket it's how I am why is this topic it's a gradient yes I could write shopping based topics that are not anywhere near as important to just nail as the heart attack question right and so there is a spectrum there but the important thing is that more and more topics are our topics where Google is specifically looking at the reputation and the authoritative miss of the author and of the website in order to determine who ranks so because Google was focused on this we really want you to take time to create a good about me page talk about the credentials you have your experience on the ground doing it even if you don't have official credentials we want you to you know participate with others in the industry and create media like YouTube and stuff so they can see there's a community outside of what you do interviewed on a podcast yes that they're going to link to you know go email podcast and say I'd love to be a guest you know that makes sense when you're in an industry where you have to have some kind of reputation exactly we this is all what feeds into that EA tea that we talked about at the beginning we've we've talked a lot about ei T we actually have an entire webinar on our YouTube channel here about ei T that you can go learn from we also have a like step by step by step course of 25 steps all these different things that you can go do to establish ei T for your website as part of Project 24 it's very important for many industries now to establish that it's just going to give you a leg up over all of the other bloggers who can't establish ei T because realistically they don't have any there is so much we've covered in this in this webinar if you're not subscribed to the income school YouTube channel that's what this whole channel is all about it's about building content online that can earn you an income by monetizing it it's about building a great YouTube channel about building blogs we talked about SEO that's if you like this video you're gonna like our channel so be sure to give us a lesson if you'd like us like us but we want to cover a couple of questions that people often ask when we kind of present this information first one is how good does the site's pagespeed need to be what I would say is don't obsess about it because we already have for you like wewe did just for fun we created the fastest WordPress theme it's called a kobato and you install it and follow the steps and you will be 98 99 100 on Google's PageSpeed insight score it is stupid fast yeah but you know what if you're 70 on Google's page speed inside score you're fine don't obsess about this yeah you know even if you're 50 it's like you're probably okay do some common-sense things to speed it up but going from 50 to 51 isn't going to improve your rankings going from 20 to 50 to 70 okay yeah you could see benefits especially long term as Google just sees this is just a better experience I would point out that there are some massive websites that are ranking very very very well with extremely slow pages with very very low page speed scores and the reason they still rank well is because they just have massive ei T I'm talking about sites like cnn.com oh yeah these guys get scores like for mobile PageSpeed score it's just DLS yet they rank well because there are low set of sites you're not gonna get a you're not gonna get away with that no you've gotta take every advantage you can get are the Recio tools that are worth paying for as we mentioned aah refs is one that I really like it's actually how I use it for a lot of things just not search analysis yet is what most people use it for but if you're doing technical SEO you need to look through a backlink profile and stuff it's an amazing tool yeah but really for starting your first blog I'd probably say no you just don't need it right now right now you need to create great content and just move on does my site need schema markup for a lot of industries I'm just gonna say it's not pivotal it's not it's not super important if you have a website though that's like recipes right or news it's going to be much more important you just won't stand out at all in the search rankings if you don't have schema you're gonna look just very different from all of the top content if you are a public figure if you're an author or something like that then having some organizational schema is gonna allow you to stand out as well when somebody does a search related to you so depending on your industry it could be really important a lot of WordPress themes are not taking schema into account that's another thing that we've discussed that we've covered in a kobato schema is just completely built in and so it's really really easy to just set up put that information in there and then have it available for Google to use are you sure we don't need to actively build links yes what about all the people who are still seeing success doing it well because it can work I mean it's like you know can are there ways that you can kind of game the system yes it's a short term gain because Google is often finding out what you've done and it's penalizing your site and destroying the whole business so in that sense it's a short term gain but also I don't even know that you can call it a short term gain because if I spend an hour creating a piece of content that is going to organically rank on Google and could bring in five thousand people a month and if if you're ranking that well an article that's seeing that many eyeballs it's going to generate I mean it could generate hundreds of links to your website just mean organic links or I could spend that one-hour mass emailing the world and hoping that one crappy site will link to me like that's just not even a comparison and just like yes you can succeed that way a lot of very successful bloggers are doing that and most SEO gurus that's what they're teaching you like can it work yes it can I'm just saying it's a better use of your time it's less risky and I think you're actually gonna have a better link profile by just creating the better content yep that X spending your time on better Compton yes exactly the next question is how can I be certain that a post has been indexed by Google there's really two places you can go look for this very easily for free the first one is in Google search console search well just Google Google search console you'll find it you if you set up your site connected with Google search console they they'll let you know what you know what pages are have have issues what pages are not indexed which pages have crawl issues you can see in there which pages have been indexed another really easy way to do it it's just using Google search you just type in site colon and then your URL for your website and you can either just look through all of the articles or you can just type in the search the headline or keywords from that article and just if it shows up there Google has found it that what that site colon URL what site colon income school com does is it tells Google to limit the search results to content on this website and so you can see exactly what content from your website has been indexed by Google if it's not indexed it won't show up should I leave comments enabled on my posts generally no you're gonna get so much spam it's crazy and all the plugins trying to prevent it are usually effective for a while and then all the sudden you log in a psycho crap I got 200 spam comments yesterday because somebody found a way around it yeah but there are industries where comments can be really valuable especially like recipes where people can come and say this work this didn't work etc there were the comments are really providing significant value and it's a really good way for Google to see which which recipes like there are 47 thousand recipes for hummus which one do I ranked number one well the user engagement with the blog post is one of the ways that Google can see which which recipe people like yeah but outside kind of those specific situations we just turn them off it's maybe not as good of technical SEO but it's like I know how much time it's going to take to go through these and moderate random elements and ensure they're actually quality that it's just not worth it I would rather spend that time creating content that's our webinar tour the clean SEO strategy for 2020 and we will see you in the next video

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Views: 166,964

Rating: 4.8782949 out of 5

Keywords: website, seo, content marketing, wordpress, youtube creators, search engine optimization, blogging, web traffic

Id: yetwWZMFb8o

Length: 56min 0sec (3360 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2020