Search Engine Optimization (SEO) beginner to advanced levels
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page SEO and why is that because anytime you are part of a blog you're generating content and not only you generating content you're generating fresh content that's likely to be interesting to the end-user and with that content yes you can optimize that content but the beauty about blogging is really anybody can do it but if we want to connect blogging with relationships if we're a food blogger then we can write on other food blogs as a guest writer and we can have that blog post link back to our own blog as an example or we can have other bloggers in the same industry write a guest blog for us on their own blog and point their link back to our site blogging creates a lot of opportunities for link building because again it's a fresh canvas with interesting content and when you have interesting content then the opportunity for backlinking is going to be there because if you're writing about something that's interesting the natural are you're going to want to link to something else related to that that's interesting and so that's the opportunity that blogging creates so again it's vital to get links from authoritative webpages then multiple links from low-quality webpages so going back to the link Explorer report we want to be able to pay attention to those domain authorities or those websites with low domain and really you should pay attention to really quality sites okay you want to pay attention to quality sites and so when we talked about links there's inbound links there's outbound links we're interested in those inbound links we're interested in getting links from high quality web sites pointing to our own website and again that could be in the form of a blog it could be social media it could be a partner site okay these are all inbound links they just need to be followed make sure they're not a
nofollow so it's simple just getting a external link that's a follow to your to your own website and so the one thing I want to mention here though on inbound links from external web sites and that's making sure that not necessarily every inbound link points to the home page we want to be able to have links point to internal pages so let's park and back to search console as an example so search console our links report shows us links pointing from external websites to our own website but what are those link pages so if we look at some of those link pages here we can see the top link pages we can see I'm Vali fig comm slash recipes is the topped link page then the home page then the about us then slash international so we want to make sure that if we're trying to generate backlinks from external websites to our own website we want to make sure that they're pointing to interior pages not necessarily the home page and why do I say that because one of the benefits to link building and off page SEO is ranking so the whole idea about ranking is to get some of our other pages rank not necessary the home page the home page is just a doorway into your website if we have interesting content out there on the web and it's a food blogger as an example and they're talking about a particular food item well they're gonna want a link to a page that's related to what they're blogging about the food item they don't want to link to the home page the home page is just a doorway and so that's the whole idea behind link building we want to link to multiple pages on the site why is that because if I take this particular page Valley fig calm slash recipes and I just put that into
Moz and I look at the link Explorer report for this particular page the domain Authority is still going to be the same 35 that's what Valley fig com is 35 however there's also another metric called page Authority so page Authority is likewise with the domain Authority to score between 1 and 100 and so the more external links pointing to an internal page with high domain Authority that's likely going to increase the page Authority of that page so in other words if we have good links from other websites pointing to that page then it's going to increase the page Authority for that page and ultimately the domain Authority for that page and so just like the domain authority in this case Valley fig every page under the domain has a page authority score so the higher the score the likelihood that that page is going to rank in the search engine results okay so that's the whole idea behind link building is we want to improve the authority of the pages not just the domain but also more importantly we also want to keep the end user in mind so if it's from a blog or social media the link pointing from that blog or social media platform should naturally point to something related to what you're talking about not just the home page because again the home page more or less is the gateway into the website so we want to get people to where they want to go we want to naturally create a link from good content to some other good content so that's the whole idea behind backlinking so outbound links will direct a user from our own website to another website so the idea here is it's okay to have outbound links on
your own website the natural ecosystem of the world wide web okay what I would recommend ear is to have so many in a century located place for example don't have one page when nothing but external links on it now sprinkle these external links these outbound links throughout your website but also if it's not a reciprocal link meaning if a guest blogger is not linking to your website but you're just linking to theirs and they didn't ask you to then maybe consider a nofollow tag maybe you know ideally you want to make sure that these links are just natural in nature so don't just have a habit of putting outbound links because the whole idea behind outbound links is you want to keep people on your website but if it's a natural link going from one content to another and you think the end user is going to benefit then no problem but just don't get in the habit of putting external links on your website because that means that hey that user that's on your website may click on that link and leave your website and not come back so keep that in mind as well because you don't necessarily benefit from an SEO perspective by having outbound links on your own website you want to do it as a courtesy if somebody else is linking to you want to do it for the end user if you feel the benefit from additional content under the website but from an SEO perspective it doesn't necessarily directly
enhance your own website in terms of ranking sort of our attention to duplicate content so a lot of us have websites with a lot of content sometimes we go ahead and take our website and revise it create a new one or register a new domain and put content on that new domain and so we may find ourselves in a situation at one point or the other where we have two websites with the same content or could be the same website with a lot of content but some of that may be duplicate as well so we want to try and stay away from duplicate content but for some of us we may stumble across it accidentally we may find ourselves having content that's duplicated and so we want to try and prevent that because that's a no-no in the world of SEO so if we have duplicate content appearing in more than one year there are ways to rectify not having the search engines recognize the content twice so some examples of duplicate content are for example a spammer takes an article and post the same content on his web site or like I mentioned before you create another website or register another domain and have that particular content on the old website stone or you're writing a blog post and you tag it or categorize it and the content shows up under the tags under the categories and just shows up in general so there are a lot of scenarios where you can find your cells with duplicate content and so we want to rectify that
we don't want duplicate content we want the search engines to recognize the original source of the content and so basically if you have two versions of a webpage you may result in duplicate content issues another example that would be for example if you have products you may find that that same product may be under two different categories so how do we rectify that well there are a number of different ways and so the simple way is what they call a 301 redirect to the original URL so if you find yourself in a situation where you have a new website with the same content you could simply set up a redirect and we call it a 301 redirect because 301 refers to permanent so it's signifying to the search engines that you're permanently moving from this page to this page the other way is through a canonical attribute and so the word canonical may not register with some of you so let's just take a minute to talk about what a canonical is a basically canonical tag it's a page level meta tag so remember that meta tag description we talked about an on-page SEO well think about this as another type of meta tag and it's placed in that HTML header of your web page so basically all it does is by placing this meta tag it tells the search engines which URL is the original version to be displayed in index so it's the per purpose of a canonical is to keep the duplicate content out of the search engine
index so we want to consolidate our page rank or page authority or domain Authority all to original content that's the whole idea of having a canonical and it's a quick solution so all you need to do is add a canonical tag to the header so let me show you an example if you have a site let's just use CNN as an example cnn.com has a lot of content sometimes giving the umbrella that they have they may run into duplicate content so they simply just put a canonical tag into their their header and so by doing that they're able to tell the search engines hey this page this domain is the original if you find yourself with multiple sites well you can also use Google search console so remember we use Google search console in earlier examples when we talked about links to your site or we talked about that sitemap on page SEO well if we go in a search console we could basically say look Google because search console is a Google tool we want to confirm that this is our domain so this is the domain you should be focusing on so you can leverage search console to communicate with Google regarding which site is important which is the one that should get indexed you can use the canonical you can put that on any page of your website or you can set up a 301 redirect so those are ways to fix duplicate content issues 301's are the easiest Canonical's tend to be temporary because they're just the page level and then search console is a good method because it communicates with Google directly and it allows Google to crawl various web pages differently than if you didn't tell them okay so if you didn't tell them they're just going to grab anything they can so by communicating via the Google
search console tool it allows you to tell Google this is the domain I want to focus in on so let's talk then now about how the Google algorithm work so we'll shift gears here and we'll talk about how these algorithms work on Google so Google uses advanced concepts retrieve data so what they do is they're spidering their spidering they're collecting webpages and they're taking all these webpages back to their server and anytime somebody does a query they're delivering those webpages within milliseconds they're delivering results based on your query so that's in general how it works so it uses a combination of different algorithms to deliver the best results they want the best results and so some of the most popular algorithms below are Google Panda Google penguin and Google ranked brain so these are all things that Google has done and to make sure that they're constantly tweaking their search engines to deliver the best results so let's talk about some of these these popular algorithms and before we talk about these popular algorithms so let's just make one thing clear that Google is always tweaking their algorithms on their search engine and so if you want to get an idea how often they do it well we do it every day we're constantly tweaking it but then what they do is they release major changes to their algorithm a few times a year so if you want to get a sense of what those changes look like well you could go to Moz comm and you can go to Google - algorithm - change and you can see here that hey Google changes his search algorithm around 500 to 600 times while most of these are minor Google again rolls out major changes like panda like penguin that affects search results in significant ways so you can go here and you can go all the way back to 2000 and see some of the algorithm changes that have occurred over the last few years and you can see here the
last major one was done in August of 2018 that was the medicore update so they're constantly making changes to their search engine to deliver a more concise more better ecosystem for the nu so if it's a better search engine for the end user and users are going to come back so the whole idea is continuing to tweak the system that the algorithms to better show more accurate results and so let's take a look at some of the major algorithm changes that they have done in the past so the first is we'll talk about Google Panda and panda was an algorithm that was released back in 2011 so here we are in 2019 s a few years ago but still significant in that really this algorithm emphasized high quality content because before panda there was oh there's just a lot of content out there on the internet and there was a lot of spam content there a lot of duplicate content and so really the idea behind panda is for Google to really deliver in their search engine results pages high quality content so what it did was it removed web pages that had low-quality or duplicate content so that was the whole idea behind you know the algorithm nicknamed panda it removed low-quality and duplicate content and that kind of cleaned things up a bit where if you did a search query now you'd actually see better better results and one thing about panda is because there's so much quality because Google's indexing so much there on the internet that it's constantly being updated it's updated regularly so the next one we're going to talk about is Google penguin so penguin was released after panda and what that focused in on was low-quality links so remember we talked about link building we talked about quality links over quantity so naturally you're going to have links naturally from all web sites whether it be high quality or low quality the whole idea behind this algorithm is to sever the links that are low quality and so the idea behind that was they focused on two areas so they focused in on link schemes and keyword stuffing so that's what penguin focused on was link schemes were basically linked almost linked farming where you produced mass amounts of backlinks and not all of them were good quality weren't natural links links should be natural from one high quality site or blog to another high quality site or blog and by creating links games you've created an ecosystem where links just went to irrelevant low-quality spam related pages and so Google's Penguin's algorithm update focused in on that effort to remove or combat pages that had poor links from being indexed in their search engine results and then they also combated keyword stuffing keyword stuffing is nothing more than taking your targeted keyword and stuffing it into the content of your page or title tag your Meta Description so any sites that were
caught up doing that basically suffer the consequences because what penguin did was take care of sites that basically were accused of keyword stuffing or had characteristics of keyword stuffing and they removed sites that had a lot of links pointing to it from poor quality sites and vice-versa sites that really had a lot of external links pointing to other poor quality sites so that's what penguin did they took a look at those two areas I mean so we talked about link schemes again Penguins aim was to decrease the ranking of web pages that created artificially by using black hat techniques and basically what I mean by black hat techniques that artificially creating length that just didn't make sense just for the sake of getting the backlink just for the sake of passing link juice and so that's what a link scheme is or was and so Google basically tweaked their algorithm to combat those poor link schemes and so keyword stuffing as I mentioned a minute ago it's just repetitive usage of the same keyword and that just basically suffers the content is the thing that suffers here and when the content suffers the end users suffer so Google is all about quality content and when you have quality content and that quality contents indexed and users find what they're looking for chances are they're gonna go back to the search engine to continue to find what they're looking for with the end result being with quality content so keyword stuffing really dilutes the quality of the content and then let's talk about the third algorithm which is ranked brain so rank brain is a processing algorithm that uses machine learning and what that does that machine learning interprets search queries that users search on google so for example if ranked brain sees a word or phrase it isn't familiar with basically the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly so basically take these search engine queries and present them in a way that's logical so that the end
result can be something that's relevant to what you're looking for and so for example if you're searching for online marketing you will get results related for digital marketing on search engine result pages why because rank brain will interpret that particular keyword and they're trying to basically match based on all the data they collected what words or phrases might have a similar meaning so online marketing digital marketing have similar meanings now that we've talked about some of the different algorithm changes that Google has made over the years and continues to make let's Segway into the types of SEO and so when we talk about the types of SEO we're really talking about doing what's right what's expected versus doing something that you know is trying to cheat the system and so you may hear the terminology black hat I see a white hat SEO or grey hat SEO and so the whole idea behind these terminologies is that hey what are we supposed to be doing here in terms of following best practices in order to get our pages ranked on the search engines for the keyword queries week of it and so let's talk about what not to do first and that's always black hat techniques so I just mentioned a minute ago with panda and penguin algorithm updates you know penguin took into account you know link schemes poor linking techniques keyword stuffing so those are considered black hat techniques so black hat is a technique used to improve page rank by violating search engine rules and policies so it's clearly Google's made a clear line in the sand they don't like links gains they don't like keyword stuffing so if you take into account those practices then your practicing black hat techniques to treat this cheat the system to try and rank faster and so some other ways of blackhat or you know redirecting fishing having duplicate content all these are are things that are frowned upon by search engines so the result of not only algorithm changes is you could get your website blacklisted from the search engines if you are caught in violation of their policies it's pretty clear-cut so that's why the algorithms are in place the algorithms try and create a system and environment where you know good quality content is shown so if your keyword stuffing or creating lots of duplicate content that's not in adherence with you know Google's policies for creating good quality content and as a result you could get blacklisted so with black hat techniques you run the risk of being penalized and you don't want to be penalized by the search engines so white hat contrarily used to improve search engine rankings by following those rules and policies so in effect it's everything we talked about today from on-page SEO to off page SEO doing the right thing with your content in terms of organizing the structure with headers creating very clear and concise meta descriptions
submitting a sitemap all of those are white hat techniques addressing page load time using really relevant keywords naturally in your content and creating high quality content that's fresh and interesting for the end user that's white hat technique that's going to get you ranked higher and farther and with better benefits so gray hat is just simply a combination of black and white it's when practice of improving by following the policies but they considered you know ethically dubious and so what I mean by that is listen.you you don't want to purchase links you want links to come across naturally you don't want to do excessive internal linking you don't want to have a lot of Link's pointing to one page it's not natural so you want to be able to do things that are natural you don't want to just take content from another side and claim it as your own so you want to do things that are natural that's going to create a good experience for the user because if it's for the end user which it is then generally it's going to be good for the search engines and so let's talk about website architecture now so basically when I say website architecture what I mean is we want to give the search engines an idea of how our websites built so website architecture and the structure of Roman sites important and so every website has a hierarchy it starts with the home page the home page is the top page it's the the domain it's where most people go to find other pages of your website and so generally you're gonna have a scenario where you're gonna have a home page with you know if you sell products multiple categories and in those categories you can have multiple products so the generally that's how a web architecture flows it's closed from top down and the reason for having a good website architecture is internal links are spread equally so you want to make sure again not to apply a black hat method or a grey hat method of pointing all links to one page you want links naturally to spread throughout your website because not just from an SEO benefit but from an end-user perspective you want users to
flow through your website naturally so if you're de planning on developing websites from an SEO perspective you know take these things in consideration so we want to take into account the site architecture and navigation we want to take into account the URL remember we talked about your a rel structure and on-page SEO the rule of thumb is if you can read it the search engines will read it so we want to keep it clear and concise and relevant to the content of the when we talk about responsive design we're talking about multiple devices so you don't build a website just for desktop especially when mobile is being used by a majority of the users around the world so you want to build a website that's both desktop friendly and mobile friendly we also want to take into account a robots.txt file and a robots.txt file simply just a text file that allows the search engines to index certain pages it tells them what not to index and so you can always find the robots.txt file normally if you go to a website and let's just say we go to Valley fig com and then we type in robot or robots.txt file here we could see if I type in robots.txt file here this basically is a file a text file that's in the root directory and it simply just gives the search engines an idea of what they're allowed to index and what they're not allowed to index so anything with a disallow means hey search engines please don't index these pages so that's what a robots.txt file does and every site should have it because there are some pages on your website then you inherently don't want the search engines to index and you want to optimize for the crawlers so that means that making sure that your pages are available and that means also submitting a sitemap remember we submit our sitemap via the Google search console so good site architecture not only makes content easy to find but also helps to gain traffic because hey if your site is easy its well-organized it's built multiple devices the URLs are easy then all that's going to be apparent to the search engines and when it's apparent to the search engines it's going to get indexed I'm going to get indexed then you're going to get found and you're gonna get the traffic so it's just a natural progression it's best practice so some important features of good architecture are again that you're all structure code your site navigation and CSS or HTML make it easy for the search engines to follow build a comprehensive structure for an internal linking meaning they should be matched internal links if a page is relevant to another page then create an internal link if you have a very big website with a lot of content or a lot of products then create a breadcrumb navigation okay so we're may be familiar with that on Amazon as an example amazon.com has a lot of products and if you're navigating from one product to another in one directory or one category to another category that
Amazon creates what they call breadcrumbs to help you navigate back to where you were quickly so these are all good best practices for good site architecture good site architecture equals search engine results so responsive design house to make your website mobile-friendly it will increase the amount of time the user spends on your website which may improve site rankings so let's talk a second about mobile friendliness so if i go back to google search console there happens to be in search console a mobile usability report and so if I click on that report basically what it's going to show me is pages that are do not follow Google's best practices so some of Google's best practices are making sure that the text is easy to read that clickable elements aren't necessarily close to one another and the viewport is set to the appropriate device meaning the screen is set to the appropriate device okay and so basically if we are found in violation then the page is affected are going to get flagged by Google and if the page is affected or flagged by Google then those pages won't get indexed and so we want to keep an eye on the mobile usability report and Google search console so remember it's better to have a good site architecture that BOTS can easily index so BOTS will give preference to web pages with relevant content and in the end it will help your website rank better and as a side note always use a sitemap to easy for the pots to crawl your website so we covered that an on page as a reminder if I go back to search console and if I click on sitemaps I can go ahead and submit my site map so if I created an XML version of my site map called Simon XML and I submit that basically what I'm
doing is I'm saying hey Google here's my sitemap file and in that sitemap file or all the pages on my website that want to get indexed and when you submit your sitemap to Google basically they're going to discover those URLs and index those URLs and their search index and that expedites the process of getting indexed it expedites the process of getting found on search and it expedites the process of getting clicks on your search results pages and and having that traffic go to your website where they can enjoy the user experience and convert and remember the robots.txt file is there to allow google and other search engines to know what pages to crawl so good website architecture like for example Amazon they use breadcrumbs they have a hierarchy in terms of categories okay so you can see how its evenly dispersed on the left side on the right side a poor website architecture is very slanted in one direction a lot of internal links no breadcrumbs the navigation isn't very clear so we want to make sure things are simple and easy so let's turn our attention to local SEO so local SEO is for those businesses who focus on a specific market it could be a whole state like the state of Florida and the United States it could be a specific city in a particular state like Orlando Florida or Miami it really depends on the business and who you are trying to attract and what geolocation you are trying to attract so if you're trying to attract a segment of audience in a specific location then local SEO should be in your sites for optimization and so we talked about local SEO we're really talking about optimizing your website to get traffic from a specific location so that's what local SEO it and the idea behind local SEO is to put your particular service or product or whatever it is you're offering to that particular geo market that particular locale or that city or that state so you want to put yourself in front of the right audience that's the whole idea behind local SEO and so if we focus in on Google you know local results are based on three factors and this is according to Google so it's based on a relevancy so if somebody's looking for a plumber and you happen to be a plumber in that particular
locale or city or zip code then chances of you getting found are gonna be great because of relevancy and then distance so where that person is located based on your address or where you're located has a role in how you display on local SEO and then prominence so prominence is also very important because you know how prominent are you as a business are you getting a lot of reviews do you have a lot of different locations do you have all your photos and all your information posted to prominence does play a bit of factor along with distance along with the relevancy on Google local SEO so these factors combined to help find the best match for your search there's somebody typing in that plumber or say that Italian restaurant or any particular product or service is going to find local results and you want to be there to to meet that person when they're looking for your product or service so that's the whole idea behind local SEO and so one of the factors with local SEO is having consistent and AP or not and so what is an IP it's really name address and phone number so it sounds very simple and it is simple you just have to be consistent so if you have a local SEO presence on say Bing sir Jinjin you want to make sure that the name address and phone number are can also the same name and address and phone number on google so it's just about consistency so that's what we want to do we want to make sure that we're consistent across the board because it's important for companies that want to wait well have some consistency and it's important to when we talk about consistency to actually have that information you need obviously the name of your company you obviously need a phone number and you need to put your address in there but really of all three the phone numbers just as important because we talked about local SEO we mentioned mobile earlier we know that a lot of
people initiate their search on mobile and so if they're looking for local restaurant or local cafe or that plumber and you appear in local SEO then your phone number is going to appear with the results and that gives an opportunity for some money to go ahead and just click on that number to call it just makes it that much easier for somebody to get in touch with you so consistency and having all your information are important factors for local SEO so having an inconsistent nap if you will is not going to bode well for you on the local SEO results okay it's important because it offers up legitimate legitimacy it offers up better rankings and at the end of the day it's going to help you get those calls it's going to help you get traffic to your website so for example if a particular company that sells Coomer running shoes has a yellowpages.com listing we want to be consistent if it's on yellowpages.com and this is their address on their website then you need to be consistent with that if it's inconsistent and we're talking about very minor details but these minor details are important simply just putting Rd as road and then spelling out row is gonna cause some inconsistency so consistency is very important why because local SEO is also tied to mapping you know Google Maps and so Google wants to see consistency so that they can offer up the address and the mapping services so that's one good reason why it needs to be consistent another is again you know so many may want to drive to your location or call your location or see if that location is close to them so that's why consistency is such a key component to local SEO so in order to get started on Google for local SEO what you want to do is you want to just do a search for Google my business so Google my
business is the platform in which you're going to set up your local business and once you set up your Google my business account whatever that account is you want to make sure you have all the credible information in there I can't stress that enough you need to have that phone number you need to have that address and needs to be consistent but with Google my business there's a lot of things you can do here so you can manage reviews so if you do have a location you can go ahead and manage those reviews that somebody puts in for your business and so if it's a negative review you definitely want to respond to that negative review if it's a positive review you definitely want to respond to that positive review so you can manage reviews you can upload photos so photos is a big component as we talked about with alt tags and images you know having these images helped up here in the local SEO results you can manage a lot of other things your information you can manage post you can offer up promotions there's a lot of things you could do you could set your business hours so the more information you put in to Google my business the more informations gonna can be conveyed to the end-user looking for your products and services and Google my business even goes as far as offering up the opportunity to have a website so if you're a business that doesn't even have your own website you can create a website right in Google my business and so the end result is this if somebody is looking for let's just say lice removal and Orlando let's just say your child comes home from school with some lice you need services that offer up lice removal well you're gonna be able to see businesses listed in the Orlando region and then offer up the service you're looking for and if you're on a mobile phone you can go ahead and quickly you know call that person you can go to the website you look at the reviews so local seo is a very important to local businesses very important and so you want to make sure you have consistent presence not just on google but i'm being in some of these
other local platforms like yellowpages.com for example so being prominent across multiple platforms is going to put yourself in front of the right audience who's looking for your products and services let's talk about how to measure your SEO performance so all that hard work you've done with on-page SEO and coupled with all the work you've done with off page SEO are eventually going to net results and positive results and we want to be able to measure that as you're actually doing the work as you're putting forth the effort on on-page and off-page and so we want to be able to measure that and so you want to be able to understand what to measure and where to measure it and so when we talk about SEO we really want to hone in on three high-level core metrics and that's ranking trafficking inversion so when we talk about ranking traffic and conversion we can break that down into this list here what kind of traffic are we getting from organic search what kind of traffic are we getting from mobile devices remember mobile is very important because as we talked about with on-page SEO as we talked about with local SEO a lot of searches start with mobile devices we want to look at keyword ranking remember keyword research is the first step in the SEO process even before we do any work with on-page and off-page you know we want to look at the local visibility if we have local SEO results we want to look at engagement metrics so all that traffic we're driving from organic search we want to be able to measure how they're performing and behaving on our website we also want to measure some form of progress on off page SEO and that's in the form of backlinks so all of these are different metrics we can measure using different tools so let's talk about how to go about looking at these metrics somewhere to go look at them and measure them and so really
monitoring all this behavior will help us understand how we're performing how SEO is performing and so really what we want to do is start with organic traffic and so we can look at that on a month-to-month basis we can look at it from a geographic perspective we can look at it in terms of how many new visitors were driving versus returning and then again more importantly conversion rate and so to me the best place to start to look at that traffic from organic search is Google Analytics and Google Analytics is a free tool it's simply there to measure website performance so if you go into Google Analytics we can actually go in and we can look at all sorts of data based on website behavior and so if I'm in Google Analytics and I go under acquisition and then I go under all traffic channels over a given period of time let's just say the last seven days for particular website I can see what traffic is coming from organic search and then I could see the amount of new users that are coming from organic search I can also see engagement metrics bounce rate for example so I want to be able to see if somebody's typing in a query clicking on our link in the organic search results and then coming to our website are they actually engaging with their website or are they leaving the website after only visiting the page they landed on so that's all in these are all important metrics to measure and I can measure all that right here in Google Analytics if I wanted to I can even take it a step further and break that down by country so if I type in country as a secondary dimension now I could see what country is driving traffic from organic search so a lot of your organic traffic information it's gonna be centrally located in Google Analytics so we also talked about mobile traffic a majority of searches take place on mobile phones versus desktop so Google basically is reporting that nearly 60% of searches now appear from mobile and so if we go back to google analytics we can also look at a mobile report so if I go in Google Analytics under audience under mobile overview I can see a
breakdown of the amount of traffic coming from desktop versus tablet versus mobile and so you'll find as time goes on that your mobile device is likely going to drive a majority of the traffic from organic search and so you can compare device information with channel so if I just type in channel in Google Analytics as a secondary dimension and look at the default channel groupings versus device category I can see that you know mobile from organic search just driven traffic over the last seven days this is something you want to keep an eye on because a lot of people tend to begin their searches on mobile devices so mobile ranking is different than desktop ranking because with mobile ranking it's based on a responsive website and with that responsive website basically responsive being that the website's going to adapt to the mobile device so it's gonna respond to the device that somebody's on and so therefore the metrics or the engagement metrics are going to be different but if I look back to Google Analytics I can see again bounce rate I can see pages per session average session duration so if I look at line three I could see all the different engagement metrics compared to those metrics from other devices and other channels okay so you want to be able to do a comparison because if behavior is not up to par engagement is not the power on mobile then you want to do something about that so you want to hone in on mobile traffic specifically from organic search because the behavior is gonna be different you know people start their searches on mobile the site's gonna be different and so therefore it's a different experience altogether so make sure you track the behavior and more
importantly make sure you track that page speed so earlier we talked about on-page SEO when we honed pagespeed so just as a reminder if I'm back in analytics and I go back under behavior then if I go to site speed then if I go to overview I'll be able to see the average page load time on my website I can also look at specific page timings and I should be able to see that by device so if I type in device category I'm gonna be able to see how each paid loads per device and so this allow me to understand which pages are loading fast which pages are not loading as fast and address those pages accordingly to improve engagement metrics so we want to keep an eye on page speed as well as overall user behavior from a lot of Isis you can also use other tools that are out there like agency analytics there are plenty of tools out there I tend to use Google Analytics because primarily it's free and Google Analytics is a Google product so it works with other Google platforms like Google search console we want to keep an eye on ranking so remember when we do our keyword research we're choosing keywords that have high relevancy high volume and low competition so we want to be able to track keywords that we choose that have high relevancy high volume and low competition and so the tool we use or at least I recommend using is ma so I mentioned Moz earlier with on-page and off-page SEO so if we go into Moz and we know what keywords we're trying to rank for we can go ahead and add the namaz and what Moz does they actually track where these keywords rank and so if I go into Moz and I click on rankings I'll be able to see on a weekly basis or a monthly basis how our
keywords are ranking and for what pages they're ranking so for whatever keyword I choose to to optimize for I want to make sure I put those keywords in Moz because when I put them in Moz Moz is going to on a weekly basis tell me where these keywords rank and for what URL they're ranked for so that way I can keep an eye on ranking over time because in theory the higher you rank but more traffic you're gonna get and so we want to be able to see the trend in which keywords rank okay so if I click on a particular keyword in Moz it's gonna give me over a period of time where that keywords ranks be able to see improvement in ranking for particular keyword the whole idea behind SEO is to choose keywords that are relevant optimized for those keywords so that you can be ranked for those keywords in order to get the traffic and conversions so Moz is a good platform that helps us monitor rankings for particular keywords now if you don't want to use Moz as an alternative you can turn your attention to Google search console and so remember we talked about Google search console earlier when we talked about sitemaps we also talked about mobile usability with search console we also talked about links to your site with Google search console so Google search console is a good tool to help you understand how you're performing with organic search and so there's one tool in
particular which is performance that helps us understand what keyword queries people are actually typing into Google search and so here I could see the actual query and so with this particular website valley fig com I can see that dried fig recipes over the course of the last three months have 5414 impressions that means that one of my pages either one or multiple pages appeared in Google search engine results 5414 times and over the course of this 5414 impressions I received 1100 clicks so Google search console is gonna be able to tell me not only you know how many impressions I received for a particular keyword but they also going to tell me how many clicks and if I wanted to add more metrics to that I can add them like the average ranking position for a keyword the click-through rate so I can add multiple metrics to this report to give me an understanding of hey or any of my targeted keywords being used or queried and if they are where my ranking and I am i showing up and am i getting clicks so search console serves is a good alternative if not primary tool or platform for you to measure how your organic search results are showing so for local visibility this metric is important for you know maintaining local SEO so remember on the local SEO we talked about
Google my business so if I go back to Google my business I can go into my account and so Google my business is going to be able to show me some metrics so if I go into Google my business and I click on insights I'm gonna be able to see a number of different metrics over the course of a month I can see exactly you know what queries were used by how many users and when I appeared so I'll be able to see how many views I receive not only on search results but on maps then I can also see what actions people took when they saw my results in maps or in search did they visit my website through their request directions did they call so I can actually see engagement metrics right in Google my business I could see a break out by zip code I can see phone calls by day of the week I could see how many people even viewed my photos so there's a lot of insights into local SEO on Google my business so that gives you an idea of how you're performing organically on local search and remember you want to be able to use Google my business to hone in on your specific audience so all these metrics help you aligned with whether you're getting in front of the right audience and what are that audience is actually behaving the way you want them to meaning you know are they actually contacting you are they going to your website are they calling you so local visibility and
understanding the metrics involve the local SEO is very important so Google my business is where you want to turn your attention so overall engagement metrics are important they play an important role in determining rankings for example we talked about bounce rates a bounce rate is the rate at which people go from organic search to your website and then leave after a seen one page and not going any further so if they land on a page and then leave the website landing on that page it's considered a bounce and so bounce or bounce rate is a good indication of how people are receiving our website or the content that they're reading on our website there are other metrics involved like average session duration or pages per visit all of these are engagement metrics and let's not forget about page speed so page speed is also a good engagement metric all of these metrics affect or determine rankings so we want to be able to make sure that if we're in Google Analytics and we're looking at engagement metrics that our metrics are good because if somebody comes to our website from organic search and there's a high bounce rate then what does that tell us that there's a disconnect between what that person's Quarian and then the content that they're reading and so we want to be able to address those engagement metrics so that we can continue to not only drive quality traffic but keep the traffic engaged and then in turn drive up conversions last metric we want to look at is backlinks so content having more backlinks from good domains will effectively improve your SEO performance we talked about backlinks with off page SEO and remember quality over quantity and so we can measure backlinks going back into Moz we can use Mazdas link explorer tool so remember if I type in a domain valley fig I can get some metrics related off page SEO including my domain Authority but more importantly I can see what links are pointing to my site in this case valley fig com so I can see there 575 link domains I can see there are seven thousand nine hundred inbound links and so just by clicking on that I can get a idea of the types of websites that are linking to my site and their domain Authority in there spam score Google search console so if you go back into search
console you can also just click on links and we should be able to get an idea of you know what websites are linking to our site and more importantly we want to be able to see not only what sites for what pages they're linked to remember we want our backlinks pointing to interior pages not necessarily the home page so here I can see the top linked page for valley fig comm is slash recipes so we want links pointing to our interior page is not necessary the home page that's what's going to help your performance your rankings for all your pages not just your home page so having quality back links pointing to interior pages help boost the domain Authority and the page authority for that particular page so again using Moz slink Explorer tool or using the links report in search console are good sources for you to identify backlinks so when we look at these these reports we want to look at the domain authority of these sites that are linking ours the number of outbound links to the site or specific pages on our site we want to be able to look at the ratio of link distribution you know we want to be able to look at how many follows and nofollow so most of this if not all of these metrics are in Moz so if I go back to Moz I can actually see you know which ones pointing which ones are followed the total quality of the link that's pointing to our site again BAM so Moz link Explorer report tends us give us all the information we need in order to measure and get a sense of our backlinks that help us with off page SEO so there are other tools out there there's a traffic answer console there's other SEO platforms out there that'll help you measure backlinks okay now that we covered everything with on-page SEO and off page SEO and really everything SEO in general let's take a little quiz and if you could go ahead and just put your answers in the comment section below so just a little quiz here and we'll start out with question 1 which of the following type of site map is specifically designed for search spiders so the answer is either a HTML sitemap or B XML sitemap so go ahead and put your answers in the comment section below I'll give you just another second to think about that okay another question for you from a search engine perspective which of the
following link types could cause a negative effect on your rankings it's either a purchase link or B nofollow link so again if you could if you know the answer or just take an educated guess go ahead and put the answers in the comment section below next question a website's robots.txt file serves what function is it a tell the bots what pages should be crawled and not crawled or B tell us the bots what links should be follow and no follow so if you know the answer you feel good about your answer go ahead and put it in the comment section below ok let's do a recap on some of the key takeaways from today's a session about SEO so we started out with why SEO and why do we want to take part and put some time and effort into search engine optimization if you recall one of the biggest factors was it increases visibility on search engines so if you're not getting any traffic to your website if you don't have any other marketing channels that you're currently working on such as social or blogging or paid search then SEO will definitely help increase your visibility then we moved over to what is SEO so we talked a lot about you know not only the benefits of SEO but what's involved with practicing search engine optimization and we know it's the practice of getting traffic organic search from really any search engine we honed in today on Google but really when it comes to SEO it's every search engine so we want to be able to be relevant for certain keyword queries on the search engines we focused our attention on two keyword research so we talked about what's involved with keyword research we talked about short tail keywords remember short tail keywords or three key words or less longer tail keywords or three key words or more and really when it comes to short tail keywords they're generally broad in nature they have high search volume but they're very competitive because they're broad in nature and the conversion rates tend to be a little bit lower because of the relevancy factor however if you focus it on longer tail keywords if you recall generally they're longer in nature low volume however if somebody's types in a longer tail keyword and you rank for that
long tail keyword chances are it's gonna be a little bit more relevant for the end users so when they actually click on your link and the search engine results and go to your website your conversion rate increases so it's a balance between short tail and long tail we then transition to how search engines work more search engines send out BOTS to your website they want to crawl your website and by crawling what they do is they follow links ok they follow internal links and external links so in fact when they're following links they're creating a sort of a web if you will so that's where we get the term spidering from there they're spinning a web on all these links that they're following and what they do is when they follow they're really collecting and they're collecting all that content and bringing it back to their servers because when they bring the content back to their servers when somebody actually does a search on the search engine then the search engine itself is able to you know spin results in milliseconds based on the relevancy of that quick keyword query so that's in general how search engines work now they have an idea of how search engines work and why you should do as the and the importance of measuring longtail versus short tail keywords we went into the actual practical application and if you remember it's a two-pronged approach on page SEO and off page SEO so for on-page SEO it's everything that involves your website so we talked about making changes or optimizing your website to be relevant for certain keywords we went through a number of different factors we talked about schema and title tags and header tags if you remember header tags had a hierarchy h1 h6 we talked about what a featured snippet is you know whether it was a list or a paragraph we talked about the importance of page speed remember you can look at page speed in
Google Analytics you want to be able to make sure your page is load between three to four seconds max because the longer takes a page the load the higher that bounce rates gonna be and the lower that conversion rates going to be we talked about the importance of internal linking and how you can measure internal linking in search console and speaking of search console we also made mention that you can upload a sitemap so the HTML sitemap is for the end-user the XML sitemap is for the search engines we can go ahead and take that XML sitemap it's submit it to the search engines so that they can recognize all the pages on your website so these are some of the key factors of aam page and when you do on-page then you transition over to off page SEO and off page SEO is really synonymous with link building and why do we do link building well we talked about some of the benefits it definitely improves the credibility of your website because if you have a link pointing from another credible website to yours then naturally the credibility is going to be there not only for the end user but for the search engine and as a result of being linked from quality websites or credible websites it's going to increase a metric called domain Authority remember domain Authority is a score between 1 and 100 and the higher domain Authority the more relevant you're going to be in the eyes of the search engines in order to be relevant you need backlinks or external links from quality websites and because you have links from quality websites the likelihood of you getting more traffic is going to increase so one of the net benefits of getting backlinks is you're going to get traffic from those websites especially if they're credible and they're popular and they get a lot of traffic
themselves and so all of this leads to off page SEO which is in turn what we want to do is improve our page rank so we want to prove our rankings in the search engine results pages and when we improve our rankings in the search engine results pages in effect we're going to get more traffic from search engines so off page SEO is very critical that with on-page SEO balances out the relevancy factor and you want to be relevant in the eyes of the search engines for your targeted keywords we then shifted gears and we talked about some other factors along the lines of search engine optimization including duplicate content so search engines don't like duplicate content see if we recall we talked about ways to combat duplicate content we talked about setting up redirects we also talked about canonical tags remember canonical tags or tags we put in as a meta tag and that's going to alert the search engines hey this particular domain this particular page is the initial source pay attention to this page we talked about Google's algorithms and Google makes tweaks to their search engines every day and because they make tweaks to their search engines every day they're trying to fine-tune it and usually you're gonna find that Google in particular is going to have one or two major algorithm changes once a year and so we talked about some of the key algorithm changes as Google's made over the last couple of years including panda which took into account quality of content or Google penguin which took into account links Keamy okay so we want to stay away from link farming and you want to be able to create good quality content so that's what these particular algorithms took into account and then of course Google ranked brain which basically is synonymous learning so Google's search engines are continuously learning what people type in as queries and because they're learning what people type in they're starting to form their search engine results based on what they've
previously learned so that's what rankbrain is it's on artificial intelligence or machine learning and Google initiated rankbrain back in 2015 so Google is constantly making changes to their search engines for the better they want a more solid more relevant set of results to improve the entire ecosystem of search and some of the SEO techniques that we talked about in order to be relevant for certain keyword queries and we talked about the techniques that you should apply and those techniques are white hat techniques so you want to be able to follow certain best practices you want to stay away from black hat SEO or grey hat SEO black hat SEO you know are things that you would do to kind of circumvent best practices like link farming so you want to take into account everything we talked about in today's tutorial because it follows the best practices not only Google but all search engines we talked about website architecture and how important that is for SEO I think the key takeaways here is responsive design remember Mobile is very important in terms of organic search and the eyes of Google most users conduct or initiate their search on a mobile device and so therefore it's imperative that you as a website owner have a responsive design for your website meaning that design caters to the device that somebody's going to your website with so if it's a mobile device the website should respond to the mobile device meaning take into account best practices we talked about having consistent URL structure having robots.txt files or robots.txt file is a file that allows the search engines to understand what pages to index and what pages not to embed we shifted gears and talked about local SEO local SEO is for those businesses that are targeting a specific market that'd be a town a locale a municipality a city or state local SEO is a strategy and remember the benefit of local SEO
is you appear above the organic search results so if your local business catering to say people looking for plumbers then you have the opportunity to be listed above organic search results and one thing you need to do that we talked about was just be consistent with now name address and phone number and so if you're consistent with nap and you take advantage of everything that Google my business has to offer then your chances of being found locally are going to be good and we capped everything off with measurement so how to measure your SEO performance this was last but certainly not least so we talked about specific metrics in terms of organic traffic mobile traffic backlinks local visibility keyword ranking so some of the tools I mentioned in today's tutorial was Google Analytics so Google Analytics is a free tool and it will help you measure the traffic you're getting from your website from mobile from organic search and you compare that traffic against specific engagement metrics like bounce rate like time on pay or conversion or conversion rate okay so Google Analytics helps you understand how your visitors are behaving on your website from mobile organic search we talked about Google my business again because with Google my business they provide insights into how people are searching what search keyword queries they're using and if you're being found for those search engine queries and if you are found what are people what actions are people taking are they actually calling you are they looking for directions are they going to your website so Google my
business has insights that provide information into your local visibility for SEO we also mentioned Moz Moz was a tool we mentioned throughout the tutorial we used it in our keyword research we used it in terms of talking about keyword ranking we also used it in terms of off page SEO remember the link Explorer our tool will allow us to measure what our domain and page Authority is and the quality of backlinks that we have okay so Maas fills the role with keyword ranking and backlink so we can get really good information in terms of you know what backlinks are hitting our site and the quality of those backlinks but also keyword ranking remember when we target certain keywords we want to be able to allow
Moz to track the rankings of these keywords because in theory the higher a keyword ranks the more traffic you're going to get from the search engine so Moz Google my business Google Analytics for three of the main tools we talked about there are plenty of other tools like SEM Rush H refs there's a lot of different tools out there that we mentioned that are available to you so go ahead and use the tools that you feel comfortable with these are the tools that I only mentioned that I'm comfortable with with SEO so the key here is though you need to measure performance that's the key takeaway so.
Thank you.
