Seo tutorial for beginners to expert

SEO Tutorial For Beginners TO EXPERT
WRITTEN BY
JAYARAJ
INDEX
➢ WHY SEO
➢ WHAT IS SEO
➢ KEYWORD RESEARCH
➢ HOW DOES A SEARCH ENGINE WORK
➢ ON-PAGE
➢ OFF-PAGE SEO
➢ TECHNIQUES AND TACTICS
➢ HOW GOOGLE ALGORITHMS WORK
➢ TYPES OF SEO
➢ WEBSITE ARCHITECTURE

➢ LOCAL SEO
➢ HOW TO MEASURE YOUR SEO PERFORMANCE
➢ QUIZ
1. 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 benefitis it increasesvisibility on search engine
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 trafficit 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

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 trafficyou 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 enginequeryhasand it'sbased 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 long 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 long
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 sendsa bot to yourwebsitethey'regonna crawlyourwebsite
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 pageSEO is defined aswhat
we do on our websiteto be relevantfor search enginequeryon 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 ourwebsiteto berelevantfor search enginequeryandsooff 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
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 relevance 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 tagis generallybetween 60and
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
aboutthecontenton 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 includestheirkeyword
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
headershelp notonlyorganizethecontentbuttheyhelp emphasizethe
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 enginesto rankimages in thesearch 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
othersearch enginesreallyto follow thepagesas theyindexyourentire
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
differenttypesof sitemapsyou 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 pageload 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 pageloads 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 Links 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
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
ability 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 trafficcoming 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 websites 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 Links 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

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