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Everything You Need to Know AboutEverything You Need to Know AboutSearch Engine OptimizationSearch Engine Optimization

Greg Hughes

Table Of Contents

The Basic Essentials

1 Introduction to SEO

2 How SEO Works

3 How Google Works

4 Search Marketing's Ugly Past

5 The Tale of Two Hats

6 3 Types of SEO

7 Your SEO Toolbox

8 The Key to Great On-Site SO

9 Use of Keywords

10 How to Build Authority and Influence

11 Google Loves the True Meaning of Words

12 More On-Site Optimization

13 Off-Site SEO

Table Of Contents continued

14 Site Trust

15 Google News

16 Working with Influencers

Advanced SEO

17 Canonical URL

18 Internal Linking

19 Site Map

20 Orphaned Pages

21 Priority

22 Crawl Budget & Crawl Rate

23 Robots.txt

24 Pagination

25 Redirects

26 Page Load Speed

Table Of Contents continued

27 Secured Socket Layer (SSL)

28 JavaScript

29 Open Graph

30 Google and Mobile Sites

31 Google Analytics

The Future of SEO

32 Real Time SEO

33 Voice Search and AI

34 Your Action Plan and Conclusions



# 1


Introduction to SEO

If you want to maximize your message, increase your bottom line, grow your following, satisfyyour customer base, gain new members or accomplish anything else a website is designed to do,then you need to get as much traffic as you can...but not just any traffic. If you want to get themaximum amount of the right kind of targeted traffic to your website, then you need to learn toplay the game of SEO. And that game has some strict rules. There is one entity that makes upthose rules: Google. So if you want to get strong search rankings on Google, then you need tounderstand how SEO or ‘Search Engine Optimization’ works.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website so that Google will be morelikely to index - or crawl - it and ensure that it ranks highly for the most relevant keywords andphrases. For example, if you have a website the sells shoes, then you might try to get it to rankfor the phrase ‘buy shoes online’. To do this, you would go through an optimization process thatwould involve strategies that optimize your website for those search phrases.

Sadly, it would take more than just good luck to get your website listed toward the top of theSERP (Search Engine Results Page) for those terms. Although, doing so would surely attract ahuge amount of targeted traffic.

Targeted is the operative word here. Google search traffic is targeted traffic and the only kindyou ever want. Search traffic traffic does not come from random visitors. These are specificpeople who are looking for the specific content they have typed into the search bar. Better yet,these folks are typically looking for solutions and answers to they queries at the very point theyget to your website. Depending on the specific search phrase or keywords, this can meanattracting visitors who are ready to convert, buy, join, subscribe and take the action you arehoping for.

This is known in the industry as organic search traffic. It’s organic or natural because it is not theresult of paid advertising or direct response campaigns.

SEO can be a daunting process - especially if you aren’t sure what steps to take. But it is still verypossible to reliably climb the ranks and to get your website to a point where it will start gettingmore and more organic traffic from searches.

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How SEO Works

So how do we play the Google game of SEO?

Search Engine Operation is an on-going process that includes techniques that essentially try tounderstand the algorithms used by Google. These calculations are what Google uses to decidewhich sites to index and where to rank them in search results.

Google works by using bots, an index and an algorithm. The bots (robots) , sometimes calledspiders, are small pieces of code designed to head out onto the web and look for content. (Get it? spiders...web…?)

Bots read website files (pages) and they add that content to a massive index that Google can useas a reference.

From there, Google uses an algorithm to identify which content in that index is relevant to whichsearch terms are being used – and which is ones are offering value to the searcher. Ultimately,Google’s goal is to help people find the exact content they’re looking for.

As you can imagine, this algorithm is beyond complicated. It involves a lot of factors, but at thevery basic level the algorithm is looking at how many links the site has, the quality of those linksincluding internal, external and inbound links, how visitors behave on that website, how longthey stay, how that website loads and responds to different devices and the use of key searchphrases within it’s content.

If a word or phrase is used within a sensible context and often enough - yet not too often, then itis possible to deduce that the word or phrase is likely to be the subject matter – and thereforeshould come up in searches for matching terms.

The bottom line is that SEO basically works by predicting and guessing how the algorithm works(because no one can be completely sure) and then using that information to engineer yourwebsite to get the maximum number of hits.

Of course it’s not quite that simple. As we dig deeper, we’ll see that there are ways of looking atSEO techniques that are quite effective and efficient, but need to be done well and withinacceptable guidelines.

And just to make our job of figuring out this puzzle more interesting, Google is constantlyupdating its algorithms (usually with words beginning with ‘P’ like Penguin, Panda and Pigeon...for some reason), and that means second guessing Google can get you into trouble.

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Being effective at SEO means having an up-to-date understanding of how it works and it meansknowing the core principles that underlie various strategies.

That’s where this course comes in. This is an up-to-date and modern guide to SEO for modernmarketers and site owners. In this work, we talk about the concepts that Google seems to stickwith through the years. Techniques you can count on working to unlock search ranking successon the web.

How Google Works

While there are several Internet search engines, the godfather of them all is Google. Google, insome ways, controls much of the Internet – whether we like that or not. Google’s greatest levelof power revolves around how web sites appear in search results – both organically and by wayof a complicated pay-per-click platform.

By their very size, search engines are extremely robust and complex. After all, search enginesare run by complicated algorithms and software that require the interaction and maintenance ofthousands of people and millions of dollars of equipment and development to operate. Learninghow Google is going to rank your website in a search result is a task that has created an entireindustry – SEO

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Search Marketing's Ugly Past

When the Google algorithm was new (andsimpler), it made perfect sense in theory. Itwould help Google to find the content theirsearchers are looking for quickly and easily byproducing results based on keyword phrasesand find websites that contained those termsin it’s content, it’s links and favor websiteswith a lot of backlinks (inbound links fromother websites.).

But the problem was that people eventually found ways to work the system and take advantageof it. SEO “experts” realized that all they had to do to get to the top of Google was to create asmany links and as much content (with keywords) as possible.

Of course, clever webmasters began to spam the link directories and content farms – submittingtheir links everywhere they possibly could. They were paying other content creators to placetheir links on their pages. They would sell and trade links creating an miniature industry ofmaking links that were ultimately useless to Google. Most websites ended up with a massive listof backlinks somewhere on one of their pages, which would just be other random sites that hadcontacted them and asked to exchange links.

Even worse things happened to the quality of website content. In a bid to create as much contentas possible and to use the keywords as often as possible, creators began to churn out content inhuge quantities while giving no regard to it’s quality or relevance to an actual human being thatmight read it. Keyword stuffing became the norm, which essentially means repeating keywordsover and over again, even when it didn’t make any sense.

It wasn’t unusual to see websites from those early years that might read:

“Are you looking to buy shoes online? Then you have come to the right buy shoes online website!This is the best place to buy shoes online for anyone who wants to buy shoes online inCalifornia.”

You can see the problem. This content is completely nonsensical because it’s not intended forhuman consumption. The mistake these marketers made was trying to appease an algorithminstead of a person - when Google was trying to reach actual living, breathing humans searchingfor answers.

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The first rule of SEO is to createcontent that helps Google accomplishits goals.

The phrase you just read above perfectly sumsup SEO in a nutshell. Which is why this courseis going to spend significant time on whatthose goals are.

Obviously these tricks and work-aroundsstarted to make a mess of Google’s results andso Google had to adapt and get smarter…Google had to wage war against all the badguys. The ones wearing black hats!

The Tale of Two Hats

If you have spent more than fifteen minutes in the SEO space, you have no doubt bumped intothe concept of Black Hat and White Hat search engine ranking techniques.

Like the days of old TV westerns when the bad guys wore black hats and the good guys worewhite, the SEO industry is also rife with bad guys and good guys as well.

The difference between black hat SEO and white hat SEO has to do with the techniques usedwhen trying to improve a website’s search engine ranking, but before we get too far into theweeds here, let’s cut to the chase. Using black hat SEO techniques is a really bad idea. It’s aboutbreaking the rules Google requires and if/when you get caught, the cost is too great. Beingbanned from Google is the ultimate death of a website or online business and using black hattricks leads there. The bottom line is you really can’t trick Google - not for long anyway.

At the risk of making this issue more complicated than it needs to be, you should know thatthere’s even room for the Gray Hat category in the world of SEO - a practice that's riskier thanWhite Hat SEO, but may or may not result in your site being banned from Google; so, not quitefully “black hat”. These methods belong in neither the Black or White category because the rulesfor some methods are often unclear. Hence the “gray area” of SEO.

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Black hat SEO focuses on techniques involving: keyword stuffing, link farming, hidden texts andlinks, and blog content spamming at the very basic levels. But here are also very clever andcomplex illusions the black hat artists try to use to pull the wool over the eyes of Google. Most ofthese are aimed at technical analysis side of SEO and less on the human interaction with awebsite.

White hat SEO refers to the use of techniques and strategies that not only target technicalrequirements, but also take into consideration the human audience who will be engaging with awebsite’s content and navigation. Good white hat SEO includes proper use of keywords, marketresearch research, relevant content appropriate on-page and offpage optimization. Generally,white hat SEO involves far more sensible methods of developing website content. Unlike blackor gray hat techniques, white hat SEO not only is about playing fairly and by the book, butfocuses on more long term ranking success for a website and an organization’s online presence.

Creating quality content is the fundamental core of white hat SEO. This demonstrates to Googlethe uniqueness and appropriateness of a website. Proper use of keywords that are neitheroverused or underused and are relevant to the site is necessary for SEO success. Proper SEOinvolves new, relevant and updated content. The more content-rich a website is, the morevaluable it will offer users of search engines, human visitors to websites and webmasters whowould most likely want to engage with and link to the website.

White hat SEO also has a price tag: it’s time consuming and sometime very technical.

This course you are learning from is based only on highly acceptable; white hat techniques forsearch engine optimization.

The 3 Types of SEO There are three general categories of searchengine optimization types. In this course, all ofthe techniques and methods we look at willfall under one or more of these categorieswhether they be the basics or more advancedconcepts. A proper SEO plan includes utilizingmethods in all three groups.

The three categories are: On-Site SEO, Off-Site SEO and On-Site Technical SEO.

On-Site: Basically your website content. To rank for good keywords or search terms, you

need to create interesting and engaging content that includes the right keywords and the

right amount of them.

Off-Site: All about backlinks links. To rank for competitive terms, you need the right

authoritative and relative websites linking to yours.

On-Site Technical SEO: Making sure Google is able to crawl and index your website the

way they want to as quickly and efficient as possible.

# 7


Your SEO Toolbox

Before digging in too deep, let’s layout somedefinitions and preliminaries you should knowabout that will make your journey through theworld of SEO more productive.

These are the basic broad topics anddefinitions we will be spending more time onthroughout as appropriate. Consider thissection an overview of the rudimentaryconcepts of SEO.

Google Webmaster Account / Google Search Console: If you are going to be involved with

any kind of web development, SEO or online marketing, you need a Google Webmaster

account (Google Console). If you gave a Youtube account, Gmail or any of the other Google

resources in your arsenal, you are almost there. Log into your Google account and get set up.

Know How to Access your Files: This may seem obvious, but it’s amazing how many so-

called webmasters have no idea how to access or look at their website files on the server they

are hosted on. If you are using an online platform that “automatically” publishes for you or

even WordPress, you still need to know how to access your files for pasting in and looking at

simple code snippets. It seems that many are intimidated by this or think it is reserved for

coders and developers. But as a webmaster and SEO expert, you need to know how to get to

them. Learn to use FTP, or your cPanel’s File Manager to see the file structure of your

website.

Keywords: Throughout this course we will be referring to keywords and keyword phrases.

These refer to the words and phrases end-users are typing into Google’s search engine to

find results. They play an important part in SEO, but their use for achieving high search

rankings is probably the most misunderstood concept by would-be webmasters. Keyword

research is still useful, but we need to know that Google doesn’t want us to overly stuff our

website with those search terms. It’s also worth noting that Google looks for keywords in

specific places in your content and gives those extra-value. Google will respond positively to

keywords when they are used correctly...ignore some that are used poorly and punish a site

for using them inappropriately.

Backlinks: Google no longer cares how many links you can get – it cares far more about the

quality of those links. If your links are from a lot of highly trusted websites, then you’ll find it

does great things for your ranking.

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Bounce Rates: Google looks at things like how long someone spends on your website. The

speed at which someone leaves your website creates this metric. High bounce rates are not

good.

Responsive / Mobile Friendly - How your site renders on mobile devices and how quickly

it loads is a critical factor in SEO. You can now get penalized for non-responsive websites.

Social Media: Google looks at social sharing signals. If you have lots of LIKES from

Facebook or shares on Twitter for example, it can have a positive impact.

Meta Tags: We discuss the details of these in the advanced section of this course, but you

need to know what they are and where they live. Every web page has a section of code that

stores various kinds of meta tag code. Knowing how to edit yours will be important. How you

do that will depend on the web design software you are using.

Page Load: This is simple. Google loves fast loading websites and hates slow ones. You’ll

need to use tools that help you measure the speed of your web page loads (how fast they

appear in a browser when visited) so you can know what adjustments to make.

SSL (https): Make sure your web host provides you with something called a Secured

Socket Layer certificate. This used to be complicated and expensive. Fortunately, it is no

longer difficult and any good web host will provide this service for you for free. This is good

news now that Google take it so seriously. There are many levels of SSL encryption, but for

most of us, simple shared SSL (usually free) will suffice.

Domain Age: Google seems to give notice to domain names that have been around longer

than newly registered ones. While you have little control over this, it’s good to know.

Fresh Content: Much of this course is about creating good content - something that you

will need to consider an on-going part of managing your website. Google likes updated, fresh

content.

Existing Traffic: Google likes sending traffic to websites that already have traffic. That

doesn’t seem fair when you are hoping to get your traffic from them in the first place, but it’s

an important factor in search marketing. The traffic you are getting from other sources is an

important part of what Google sees when assessing your website.

# 9


The Key to Great On-Site SEO - Excellent Content

Good SEO means knowing when to stop thinking about SEO techniques and concentrating moreon your end-user and readers. That is what Google is hoping you will do and that is what willhelp Google reach their goals for searchers. Your efforts should first be on producing engaginginformation and to be sharing it with as many people as possible.

It’s best, when considering your SEO techniques, to actually be thinking more in terms ofcontent marketing. Regardless of your strategy, there is no doubt that content is absolutely themost important asset when it comes to attracting traffic and impressing Google.

Content marketing is all about creating content that will help Google to find your site, posts andarticles to ensure you rank highly in the search engine results pages. While this is a powerful anduseful effect, it's actually only one part of what content marketing is about.

At the same time, content marketing is about building a readership on your site and ensuringthat people begin to trust what you have to say. It means demonstrating your knowledge andpoint of view to the point where people seek you out as an authority. Once you get to that point,you'll be considered an expert in your field and you'll be able to greatly influence your audience– possibly influencing their buying behavior.

Use of Keywords

One of the first things you’re going to need to do is to fill your site with great content and to useyour keywords throughout. There’s a fine line to be walked here: you need to repeat keywordphrases a few times to ensure that you create that association but at the same time, you alsoneed to make sure that you don’t overdo it and thereby appear to be spamming.

How do you know how much is too much? the optimum keyword density for on-site content isabout 1-2%. That means you can use your phrase once per every 100-200 words. But you alsoneed to use some common sense here: some phrases are easier to use in the natural flow to yourcopy than others, and making sure your content is real should always be the number oneconcern. Some keywords will be hard not to repeat 100 times. Others will seem to be difficult touse naturally.

Your reader/end-user always comes first. So, if you can’t fit the keyword in naturally anywhere,just forget it and use it elsewhere (image file name, alt-text etc.)

The length of your posts is also an important consideration. Back in the dark days of SEO, almostevery post was 500 words long. Today, you’ll have the most success by writing posts that arelonger and more in-depth. Imagine that your reader is going to sit down with a cup of coffee andreally dive deep into the subject – that’s the kind of experience that you should be writing for..

Better, deeper articles provide you with another advantage because it means that you can utilizeyour keyphrases more while keeping your word density low. If you repeat your keyword 100times and your content is 1,000 words long then that’s a 10% density (too high). If your contentis 5,000 words long, that’s 2% density (just fine.)

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Although 5,000 words is too long for most website or blog posts. Instead, the general consensusis that an ideal blog post will be somewhere in the region of 800-1,500 words. But that is not ahard and fast rule. The quality of the content is by far more important. Remember that you serveyour visitors first and foremost. These are the people that you want to impress - and that meansthat you shouldn’t worry too much about length – do what comes naturally for your subjectmatter.

How to Build Authority and Influence

High ranking websites are sites that Google considers authoritative. Websites that influencetheir market space are the obvious winners in Google’s race to the top of search results. So howdo you get there? The key is to think about and study the websites and blogs that haveinfluenced you over the years and the ones you read regularly. How did they get to that point?

This isn’t so much about building trust with Google as much as it is building authority with thecrowd in your market. When readers want to keep coming back to your site, sending others to itand staying there awhile is how you gain that level of influence.

Each post that you create for your blog and every article of text content you produce shouldprovide useful and/or interesting, actionable information your reader is looking for. As much aspossible, it should offer something that isn't available everywhere and it should be as in-depthand comprehensive as you can make it.

This uniqueness in content is incredibly valuable for your reader and for you. Sadly, this conceptis too often overlooked. If you’re trying to stand out in a crowded niche, let’s say the fitnessmarket, then it is not enough to write posts on how to get flat abs, or how to lose weight. Theweb is drowning with countless articles with the exact same titles and subject matter.

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Meanwhile, you need to be consistent in posting your content in terms of your branding. In otherwords, your brand needs to evoke your mission statement. People should know from yourwebsite design and logo what kind of subject matter you are likely to deal in, and what they canexpect from your website’s content. This is also how you can build brand recognition and aconsistent image across different forms of marketing - including on different social mediaplatforms.

The goal with good content is to become a source that people start to trust and rely upon forguidance. Essentially, all searchers have problems that are looking for a solution to. When youprovide that solution, you have achieved the goal of good content. Eventually, you want tobecome a go-to source for answers in your niche.

Deliver value so that people come to your site for answers. You’re working with Google bywriting high quality content while Google is rewarding you for it with traffic. This is how youtruly grow for the long term . Content marketing like this makes a lot of sense from a businessperspective. People will be much more likely to buy from you if they recognize, know and trustyour brand.

Google Loves the True Meaning of Words

Let’s discuss LSI. This stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This is a fancy term that explains howGoogle understands the meaning of phrases rather than just looking to match wordsmathematically. Part of the way Google does this is by looking for synonyms and related termswhen responding to search queries instead of just exact keyphrases. This is why several relevantterms and related phrases are part of your good keyword library.

This is important because it can prevent a mismatch between searches. For example, if someonesearches for a homonym, like bark, how would Google know whether they mean the sound that adog makes or the skin of a tree? They know by also looking for related terms like Germanshepherd and puppy or perhaps tree and oak.

At the same time, the use of synonyms and related verbase shows Google that there is a lot ofcontent revolving around the same topic.

So if you’re writing about magic tricks, magic shows or magicians, then you need to make sure toinclude lots of related language, like:

- deck of cards- top hat- rabbits- rope tricks- magic wand- illusions- stage- escape- audience- mind reading

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Doing this will confirm the subject matter of your site and will look a lot more natural and usefulthan if you just use the single key phrase.

For this same reason, it is also be a good idea to use variations of your keyphrases and to takeadvantage of secondary search terms.

For example, if your keyphrase is do card tricks, then you should also try to include the termsperform tricks with cards, magic card tricks, doing card magic, etc. With this, Google can knowthat this means the same thing but won’t be as likely to penalize you for keyword stuffing. It alsomakes you a better writer.

Keep in mind that Google no longer accomplishes finding search results only by trying to matchsearch terms that are exact in your content. You can see this yourself when you perform aGoogle search. Search for card tricks and you’ll see many of the results that come up won’tnecessarily include those precise words.

Also, outbound (external) linking to relevant resources can help Google better understand thetopic of your content, while also demonstrating that you are trying to provide extra value foryour visitors.

More On-Site Optimization

Here are a few extra tips that can help to improve your on-site SEO. These are not critical norshould you rely on these tips alone. Consider these secondary techniques that are just a fewlighter touches that will likely help your ranking score.

- It’s generally accepted that using copyright notices and legal disclaimers can be seen as apositive sign by Google as these will make your website look more professional and more like areal business.

- Avoid the use of Adobe Flash. It’s been phased out by most web developers and makes your sitelook outdated. Also, Google can’t read anything from that kind of web element.

- Use some search terms in your site’s code by including it in file names such as the file name ofan image. For example, easy-card-trick.pngInclude search terms in the URLs of specific pages – which should match the content on thatpage. For example, https://yourdomain.com/my-best-card-tricks.html But make sure you neveruse a search term on a file name that has no connection with the content.

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- How long are your visitors stay on your website is actually pretty important. This is calledstickiness. How long do they stick to your pages? Do they click a lot of internal links? Do theyscroll down the page? Are they leaving comments? Google wants to see that your site is offeringvalue to your visitors and the best way they can do that is by looking to see if people are actuallyenjoying the content you’ve created. Your site design is all about getting your visitors to spendtime on your page then and to interact with it. You can do this by using related content and bymaking your comments section appear more interesting and easier to use. But you can also dothis by simply ensuring that your site looks great, performs well and is filled with interesting andrelevant content. Try to avoid ads or obnoxious design elements that are going to instantly putpeople off and cause them to leave your website. The opposite of stickiness is called the bouncerate and Google actually measures that. How fast people bounce from your website is a metricyou can see in your Google Webmaster account. High bounce rates are bad. Good stickiness =lower bounce rates.

As we have repeated many times, good SEO comes down to making sure that you’re providingthe very best experience for your visitors – but doing so in such a way that Google can see andunderstand that is what you are doing.

Off-Site SEO

Most of off-site SEO is about backlinks. Andit’s important to know how this concept haschanged in recent years.

With backlinking, that is, links that areinbound to your website coming from otherwebsites, the focus more on quality ratherthan quantity. More is not always better whenit comes to backlinks.

There was a time when having thousands ofdifferent links all coming from an unknownvariety of websites helped your Googlerankings. Then Google changed the rules andstarted punishing websites with backlinks thatcame from low quality and unrelated websites.

This created a new problem. As a webmaster you had no control over who was linking from theirsite to yours. So a malicious computer could put backlinks on Russian gambling sites linking toyour website about knitting!

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So Google had to step in an add a safeguard called the Link Disavow Tool. This also gave someamnesty to webmasters who had been using poor quality backlinks in the past to startdisassociating themselves with those links. Read Google’s caution and instructions for using thedisavow tool. Using it incorrectly can hurt your rankings:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

This tool allows you to tell Google that you didn’t ask for the low quality links and thus preventthem from affecting your ranking. The fact that tools like this exist show that Google does wantto support good websites using proper SEO techniques.

Site Trust

As you now know, the sites that Google will rank highest for a particular search term are theones that appear the most relevant and that have the best content and best design. At the sametime, they will also be the ones that have the most trust. This means that Google considers theman authoritative resource and expects the information on their site to be accurate and well-written.

This is something that sites like Moz have tried to quantify with terms like Trust Flow. However,there’s no defined method of determining a site’s true trust factor so we have to infer the beststrategies for building trust.

There are some sites that Google trusts absolutely implicitly and without doubt. These are siteslike Harvard.edu, BBC.com, Amazon.com, USA.gov, Facebook.com, wikipedia.org, etc. Googlewill trust sites that either have a very well-recognized brand name (like Twitter, orWeather.com) or sites that have ‘.edu’ or ‘.gov’ domains.

So how do the rest of us survive? One way is to try to get links that come from those highlytrusted resources, or least ones like them. If you were able to get a link from BBC News forexample, then this would absolutely transform your success. You would find that you gothundreds of thousands of visits to your site simply from people clicking on your link and thiswould result to overnight traffic success. Additionally, if the content that was linked to waspopular, then thousands of these people would post your link and share it

But more importantly, Google would sit up and take notice that the BBC had linked to yourwebsite. A highly trusted authority is linking to your site – suggesting that your site also has acertain level of trusted authority.

Providing good content and sharing it with the masses through social media platforms likeFacebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube and the like, is a more realistic approach for thoseof us that aren’t going to get picked up by the BBC. Creating social conversation with yourcontent and links to it can spread the word is a good start, and an on-going part of any goodonline marketing plan. And you never know who might find your content worthy enough toshare and link to.

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https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en


Google News andOther Important SitesIf you can’t get a link from the BBC, Fox Newsor CNN, then where can you get a link that willhave a similar result? Unfortunately for manyof us, it’s nearly impossible to get a responsefrom a massive site like these , unless we havea very news-worthy story and a usefulcontact. Therefore, we need to going to haveto look elsewhere.

A good place to start is with the Google News section of the SERPs. If you search for somethinglike election results during an election season, then you’ll find that a few results are highlightedat the top of the page with an image and a snippet of text. You can also click the News tab formore news stories.

These news stories aren’t manually curated but are selected from sites that Google trusts. If asite is in Google News, then that is a pretty sure sign that the site has made it– especially if it’s acompetitive niche.

And thus, this shows you exactly where you need to be getting your links from. If you can getlinks from any of these sites, then you’re going to get almost the same boost as you would getfrom the BBC, Fox or CNN (almost).

But how did these sites make it so big?

Perhaps because they got links from the big boys– in which case you are getting some of thebenefit via their link to you.

And the same thing would happen if they had a link from a site that had a link from a major site.

You can think of this as a game of degrees of separation. You might struggle to get in touch withthe very biggest authorities on the web but if you can indirectly trace a link back to a big site,then you’ll enjoy more love from Google the closer that relationship is.

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Working With Influencers

Chances are that you already know what the biggest sites in your niche are. These are the sitesthat are household names and that everyone goes to when they want information on yoursubject. Chances are that they’re also the same sites that end up in Google News. And becausethey’re so big, they’ve probably got links coming in from other big sites.

So how do you get these big sites to answer you so that you can get some benefit from theirlinks? And since you are no longer allowed to buy links or do link swaps, how do you get them tolink to you?

The answer that most SEO experts recommend is using a technique called guest posting. A guestpost is like a link swap except that instead of swapping a link for a link, you’re swapping freecontent for a link.

Your job is to scope out sites that might be responsive to a message from you, to look at the typeof content they publish and then to write a post or article that’s along the same lines. You thencontact the site owner by email and show them your content, asking if they would like to publishit. The deal is that they can publish your post but only if they include a link back to your site inexchange.

They sometimes do this by putting your link and bio in an author box, or they can do it byincluding your link naturally in the content of the article. By embedding the link this way, youmake it look a lot more natural and you can send even stronger signals about the topic of yourpost.

Remember that it’s also highly important for the topics of sites linking to you to match the topicof your site. And this way, you are not only posting on a site you chose in your niche, but you’realso filling it with a directly relevant post.

This is a fantastic way to build links, but there are a few caveats.

You still need to be careful when using guest posting. Matt Cutts (who is a spokesman for andworks with Google Search) has made it clear that over-use of guest posting can still lead topenalization. This is still a form of link manipulation.

Likewise, you need to be careful about constantly using the same anchor text and generallybeing predictable. Mix it up.

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Finally, consider that it will still be hard to get an answer from top influencers in your niche.Some solutions to this problems include these:

- Make sure that your content and the site you’re linking too are great quality so that the creatorwill be happy to be associated with them. Deliver real value in the guest post.

- Spend some time developing a relationship first – perhaps by sending some emails and maybeby leaving some comments on their blog. Use Facebook for connection socially.

- Start small and work your way up. Look for blogs that are just ahead of yours. Each time yousucceed, your site will get bigger and you’ll be able to approach a slightly bigger influencer nexttime.

- Use your existing contacts. Maybe you have a friend who owns a blog?

- Network in person. For making a big impact, nothing beats the power of actually meeting ablogger or site owner in person and making a connection that way. Attend SEO and InternetMarketing networking events.

- Look at your competition and see which sites have got the most traffic in your niche. Then, onceyou’ve found them, try to get links from the same site. Not only does this method ensure thatyou’re going after the right links that have a proven track record but it also helps you to findlinks that are likely to accept your guest posts.

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Advanced SEO

Advanced SEOWhen you are ready to take your SEO efforts to new heights, the strategies andtechniques in this section are for you .

These are the principles that separate SEO enthusiast from professionals. These arethe concepts that legitimate and professional SEO agencies know about and areperforming for their top paying clients.

While I’ve listed these in an advanced section, it doesn’t necessarily mean they aredifficult to implement. However, some of the jargon used here may be foreign to you.If you really want to maximize your SEO work, spend time studying this section andlearning about these crucial tips.

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Canonical URL

Always specify a canonical URL (this tells Google which URL to rank). This can help preventduplicate content. Although duplicate content isn’t as scary as some people think - it’s not a goodthing to have. Technically, Google doesn’t punish your ranking for it (in spite of common belief).

But the reason you don’t want it is because when you have multiple pages with the exact samecontent, then Google gets to decide which link to display in the search results instead of YOUdeciding that. You want to let Google make as few decisions for you as possible. If you don’t, usea canonical URL on a page Google could potentially do something like rank a page with variablesin it instead of the basic root address.

So, you need to be sure that your canonical tags exactly match the URLs that you want ranking insearch engines (including https, www, trailing slash, everything). Here’s what a canonical tagwould look like on a specific page’s code :

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://dotcomclassroom.com/some-page/” />

Internal Linking

Internal linking is one of the more complex things to get right when it comes to search engineoptimization. There are a couple of things that you need to consider when you’re using internallinking on your website. Internal linking is what connects the content within your web site sothat Google can discover that content. A good internal linking SEO strategy includes thecreation of a hierarchy to reflect which pages are more important than other pages - and internallinking is part of that structure.

Internal linking can fulfill several tasks. Of course, it ensures access to documents. But it alsoprioritizes our content and creates what Google calls link juice.

The most common link types are text links and image links, but there are also navigation links.

A link’s html code has two or three parts to it that need to be considered. A simple link looks likethis in HTML:

<a href="https://www.dotcomclassroom.com/">Visit our Website</a>

The first part is called the destination. That’s the part that holds the URL or address to the pagewe are linking to.

The other part of the link is the anchor text . This is the part that visibly displays on the page andshould be an explanation of the destination.

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There can also be a third part to a link called a nofollow. Adding this to our code would change itto look like this:

<a href="https://www.dotcomclassroom.com/" rel=”nofollow”>Visit our Website</a>

Notice we added the rel attribute.

Ideally all content on your website should be accessible within three to four clicks from yourhome page - which is why your internal linking hierarchy or site structure is so important forsearch engine optimization. Google doesn’t want have to dig deep into your website and go fromone page to another and then to another just to find all the content. The site structure needs tobe organized and simple.

That lead us to this vital concept: Important pages on your website should be closer in hierarchy to the home page than less important ones. In other words, pages that you really want Google tofind should be easy to get to within one click of your home page.

And that works both ways – pages that you don’t find to be very important on your site or youdon’t need to rank higher are ones that you can bury - that could be 10 clicks away so to speakfrom your home page.

This is why the use of bread crumbs can be very important to your website. If you organize yoursite structure well, using bread crumbs can help your visitor. And Google help find those pagesand their relative importance in the site structure.

Site Map

Now let’s talk about something called crawler management. In other words, how Google crawlsyour website. This is done with a file called the sitemap.xmlYour sitemap.xml file needs to be up-to-date and your links to your important pages need to beaccessible in it. That file tells Google what pages are essential to your website and where theyare.

An XML sitemap is an XML file that contains individual pages of the website. It helps Google get abetter understanding of the structure and volume of content of a website. It also enables themto crawl the website more intelligently, because they get the data (especially URLs) in astructured format.

A sitemap look something like this:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" ><url><loc>https://www.90secondwebsitebuilder.com/</loc><lastmod>2018-012-01</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.5</priority></url><url><loc>https://www.90secondwebsitebuilder.com/index.php</loc><lastmod>2018-012-01</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.5</priority></url><url><loc>https://www.90secondwebsitebuilder.com/features.html</loc><lastmod>2018-012-01</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.5</priority></url><url><loc>https://www.90secondwebsitebuilder.com/videos.php</loc><lastmod>2018-012-01</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.5</priority></url><url><loc>https://www.90secondwebsitebuilder.com/testimonials.php</loc><lastmod>2018-012-01</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.5</priority></url><url><loc>https://www.90secondwebsitebuilder.com/faqs.php</loc><lastmod>2018-012-01</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.5</priority></url><url><loc>https://www.90secondwebsitebuilder.com/order.html</loc><lastmod>2018-012-01</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.5</priority></url></urlset>

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Sitemaps should be used when a website is extensive. Smaller websites do not necessarily needone. But, it’s important to understand that sitemaps do not directly impact rankings, they simplyhelp Google see the structure of your website – so they need to be accurate, up-to-date andclean.

Search engines do support different types of sitemaps, so say you want to be listed in Googlenews, then there is a specific Google news sitemap format. The same is also true for images andother media content, for example video. XML sitemaps are generally not visible to your endusers.

Usually, they reside in locations like domain.com/sitemap.xml – however it’s also possible to hostsitemaps on third party domains, which can make sense for larger-scale websites.

While there are limitations to the sitemap, they will not likely affect your website unless it isgigantic. Very large websites have to divide their sitemaps into several smaller ones, because thelimitation is that the file cannot contain more than 50,000 URLs nor exceed 50 megabytes in filesize. Not likely a problem for most of us.

The only content that is really required is the URL itself which you want to submit using thesitemap. Optionally you can also submit a last modified date, a change frequency and you canalso use and help Google with priorities.

You also have to tell Google that your sitemap exists. There are multiple ways to do this, but theeasiest way is to log into your Google Webmaster account and submit your sitemap’s URL toGoogle. When you do, you may also find some helpful data information from Google. They cantell you how many URLs you have submitted and how many of them have been indexed.

Site quality is very important. A sitemap must only contain URLs that serve a HTTP 200response. There should be no redirects, there should be no URLs that are blocked for robotsusing either robots.txt or the robots meta tag. Keep it clean and Google will love your sitemapfile.

NOTE: If you are using web design software that automatically generates your site map for you,then this can be easily controlled from that interface. For example, this program: 90 SecondWebsite Builder will automatically generate and upload your sitemap.xml file.

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Advanced SEO

Orphaned Pages

Another important internal linking concept for search engine optimization is something calledorphaned pages. Sometimes as your website changes you’ll have a page you no longer linked tobut you still left on your web server.

This can happen if you rename the page and don’t overwrite the old one which is still on theserver. If you’re not linking to that page anywhere with in your site it is an orphaned page andcan only be found if someone goes to that exact URL .

The problem is it can may found in Google’s search sometimes or someone may havebookmarked it somewhere. That disconnected orphaned page needs to be cleaned up. Eitheryou need to delete it from your server if you’re not using in any more or it needs to be part ofyour link structure so that it makes sense in a hierarchy of your website.

Internal linking report tools can be helpful in discovering orphaned pages, broken links andexcessive links on your site.

Priority

After making sure your content is accessible with proper internal linking, we need to talk aboutpriority. Google sees priority of a page based on the quality of it’s content and the number ofincoming links it has.

For example, you may have a website that has categories like you would might have with anecommerce website. Then you have more specific pages that may contain detailed productinformation. Your category pages would have broader keywords (shoes), where as your productspecific pages might have more long-tail keywords associated with it (women’s blue runningshoes). Therefore your category pages need to be linked closely to your home page becausebroadly searched terms would have more traffic volume than long-tailed specific searches.

From an SEO perspective product pages are less important – have less priority because theywould only be found by very specific searches which would have a low volume of search activity. These pages would normally be found after a broad search took the user to a moreimportant/higher priority category page where they would then find the more specific one.

Therefore if you were to link a specific product page to your home page, you would be indicatingto Google (and your visitors) that this specified product is important enough to highlight furtherup in the hierarchy – perhaps your main flagship or featured product would appear this way.

This is why structuring your site in levels is so important instead of linking everything toeverything (cross-linking).

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So the number of links going to the page and the location of those links now becomes animportant part of an SEO strategy.

Your main header navigation is the most important site wide linking content your site shoulduse, perhaps linking to the broadest categories on your site.

If you do need to cross-link (go outside of the hierarchy), the use of in-context linking is the beststrategy. This would be a link that is part of an article that goes to a specific or deeper pagebecause it makes sense in the context of what is being written.

Image links must make use of the alt tag otherwise Google cannot consider the content of theimage itself when associating it with a link.

Side-bar links should be used for linking to content that is related to the content the side-bar ison.

Footer links are best for legal terms, FAQs privacy policy, contact information. Know that theselinks are usually less important from an SEO perspective because of their location. Your internallinking should not be relying on your footer links.

For ALL your links, one of the most important parts is it’s ANCHOR TEXT. This needs to clearlytell Google what the purpose of this link is. The anchor text should be the MAIN KEYWORD thedestination page should be ranking for. If you aren’t clear or accurate with this, Google will beconfused by it and this link will be less effective for SEO.

Also, don’t overuse the same anchor text that goes to different pages. If you do, Google won’tknow which anchor text to associate with which page. This is called internal link competition.

For example, this is bad:

Anchor Text A -> Page Destination A

Anchor Text A -> Page Destination B

Anchor Text A -> Page Destination C

If you do the opposite, meaning you use different Anchor Text on the same page that goes to thesame URL, Google will not look at or count anything past the first link.

So, this is also bad:

Anchor Text A -> Page Destination A

Anchor Text B -> Page Destination A

Anchor Text C -> Page Destination A

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With this, your remainder internal links have no SEO value. That’s why you want to have as fewredundant links as possible on a page.

By the way, you can’t trick Google by using a nofollow tag in your first link to make them go tothe next. They will still look at the first one.

In fact, according to Matt Cutts, it’s best to avoid the use of nofollow links on internal linking asmuch as possible. The way Google sees a nofollow tag is as if you are telling them that the link isnot trustworthy.

Crawl Budget and Crawl Rate

One of the least known secrets of SEO is how to properly control search crawlers, and how todeal with what we call crawl budget.

Google spends billions of dollars to crawl websites and millions per year in operating costs.

Since a lot of money goes into crawling, Google has to budget how they crawl websites. Theircrawling resources must be used efficiently and economically. Resources are measured in unitsof “data center computing time” per domain – so essentially you can help Google achieve theirgoal with by providing them with SEO practices that make their crawling time more efficient.

When Google crawls a website, they are looking to achieve a good Crawl Rate. This is thenumber of crawl requests by Google in a 24 hour period on a domain. The more you can provideGoogle with an optimized website, the better the crawl rate will be.

These factors impact Google’s crawl budget on your website:

Age of the Domain: The older, the better.

Link Profile: This reflects the authority and trustworthiness of a domain.The stronger the overallprofile is, the more budget they will spend on your website’s crawl.

Size of the Website: This is about the number of URLs within your site structure.

Content Freshness: How up-to-date your content is and how much of it you have.

Accessibility: Make sure that all your links are actually working, and that you are using proper

HTTP Status Codes.Prioritization: Important content should be prioritized over less importantso that it is crawled first.

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Duplicate or Thin Pages: Duplicate is self-explanatory. Thin pages are pages with very little oruseless content.

Page Load Speed: This helps people stick when they visit your website and saves Google time...and time is money.

Thoroughness: You want your website to be crawled as thoroughly as possible so you wantGoogle to find all of the necessary content.

Changes Detected Quickly: You want to be sure the content you produce will be found asquickly as possible. If you update it, you want Google to identify this as soon as possible. IfGoogle crawls too much irrelevant stuff on your site, this costs them money, increases the CrawlRate and decreases your Google score.

A good starting point for assessing these issues is to use Google’s Search Console in your GoogleWebmaster account. Go to the tab called CRAWL STATS. This gives you information about howmany pages are being crawled per day – you can use this information as a baseline and keep aneye on it’s trend.

The bottom line is that you want to make sure you know what kind of content exists on yourdomain and decide if you want it to be indexed and/or crawled. If not, there are various types ofdirectives and rules that you can apply to make sure that they do not crawl or index the content.

To understand how search engines work, how their crawlers behave and how they crawl yourdomain you would need a tool that does essentially the same thing. This is where variouscrawling tools such as ScreamingFrog or DeepCrawl, and others come into play. These solutionssimulate Googlebots and their behavior.

When you install a crawler on your local computer like Screamingfrog, you can use it to fetch allthe URLs that are linked and reachable within a domain. It puts them into a spreadsheet-likeoverview. Screamingfrog has predefined reports and can find directives and other informationyou might care about. For small sites, Screamingfrog is free, but, depending on the size of yourdomain, you can run into limitations. But for most of us, it should suffice and be a great help. Youcan get additional data from Google Search Console or Google Analytics.

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Advanced SEO

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is probably the oldest way to control the search engine crawler. The entire filename needs to be written in lowercase, and it resides in yourdomain.com/robots.txt

A robots.txt file may look something like this:-----------------

User-agent: *Disallow: /cgi-bin/Disallow: /downloads/

Disallow: /somepage.html/

Disallow: /someimage.png/

Disallow: /myfolder/mypage.html------------------

In the above example, the robots.txt file is telling the search crawler to EXCLUDE (do not crawl)everything in the cgi-bin folder, everything in the downloads folder, a specific page calledsomepage.html, a specific image file called someimage.jpg and a specific page called mypage.htmlwhich resides in the myfolder directory.

As you can see the most common case for robots.txt is actually to prevent specific crawlers fromaccessing certain files and / or directories. To do this, you should select the user-agent such asGooglebot. This will be followed by your statement saying disallow and then the URL that has tobe blocked. You can also define rules that are different for Googlebot versus Googlebot-newsfor example. The great and unique feature of Googlebot is that they can also understandwildcards in robots.txt

You can also prevent access to specific file types (say all json files) or other specific extensions ina single line of robots.txt statements.

You can also combine instructions. You might specify the user-agent that you‘d want to disallowfor a specific folder, and then the next line will be a positive allow-statement, for example,allowing access to a subfolder which resides in the previously disallowed main folder.

The robots.txt has some limitations. The instructions specified in the robots.txt file do not haveto be adhered to: while Google, Bing abide by them stick to them not all the other web crawlersdo. Google is able to handle wildcards whereas certain other crawlers are not. The policiesspecified in a robots.txt file cannot prevent other websites from linking to these URLs or yourdomain in general. Excluding certain URLs of a website using the REP does not guaranteeconfidentiality. To keep a document really secret, you should use other methods.

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Be aware that misusing the robots.txt can lead to significant harm. If you by accident block theentire domain for crawling, that can have severe consequences. That’s why you should use therobots.txt testing tool that’s available in the Google Search Console.

The debugging mode in the console gives you an idea of how Google understands all thestatements that you have. It shows if the syntax is correct and how they interpret each line of thefile. You can even use sample URLs to test and see if your rules result the desired effect.

Monitor your robots.txt regularly. You’d be amazed how often a robots.txt file gets changed byaccident and all of a sudden things stop working as they were.

Pagination

Pagination is one of the things that can have a huge positive impact on how your site ranks insearch results. There are two different types of scenarios for pagination.

Scenario 1 - You have an e-commerce site and you have category pages and subcategory pageswith a number of articles and/or products. This causes you to create a page 2 for the category oreven page 3 if needed.

Scenario 2 - You work with editorial content and you have very long articles. So, you have tobreak them up in the middle to prevent having long pages (multi page articles).

In the e-commerce scenario, there is no reason for you to have page 2 for the category beingindexed. You want people to end up on the first page of this category where the stronger sellingproducts would be.

Also, there is no difference in ranking for a URL of page 2 or 3 of that same category. There oncewas a time you could just have applied noindex to anything that is not page 1 and call it good.

The new solution to this confusion is found in the use of a link tag attributes that look like these:

rel=“next”

rel=“prev”

Here is an example:

------------

<link rel="prev" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/category/page/2/" /><link rel="next" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/category/page/4/" />

--------------------

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What Google sees here is that you have connected all existing pages in a chain using rel-attributes. This explains to Google which page in the chain comes next or appeared prior to it. Ifthis is done correctly, the whole family of links would be redirected to the first page of thatchain, for which the original ranking was intended.

When you use the rel=“next” and rel=“prev“ attributes in your links, keep in mind that ifsomeone was to search specifically for the URL of category page 2 or 3 it will show up in searchresults. There’s nothing you can do about that because the searcher is looking for that specificpage.

Also be sure your canonical tag does not point back from pages 2,3,4 to page 1. A canonical tag issupposed to point to itself, if you are on page 2 it should point to page 2. If you take the canonicaltag for all the page`s URLs and point it back to URL1 – that is totally wrong and it will kill yourefforts. Product pages linked from category page 2+ will not get link scores if you canonicalizeeverything to page 1.

Redirects

Whenever the URL structure of a website changes in a way that a URL would no longer beaccessible, you need to use a redirect. Otherwise you would lose your organic rankings andultimately your organic traffic.

A good example is if you had a page called mypage.html and now it is called mypage.php, theseare TWO seperate files - even though you may want all of the older visitors to land on the phpversion of the page.

Redirects also make sense when a visitor/crawler would receive a 404 error (page not found), orthe domain could no longer be reached. This also happens when old pages are deleted,subdirectories are deleted, or categories in a WordPress site are renamed and the name is usedin the link; subfolders get moved into a different directory or when changes are made with SSL(HTTP becomes HTTPS).

Whenever a URL changes and the old one is not working anymore, there is a need forredirection. The basic rule is that the redirect should be to a URL with the greatest possiblesimilarity to the original link (this ensures higher chances of equal rankings to the previous URL).

There are several different types of redirect status codes available on the server side. These arethe most common:

301 – moved permanently302 – temporarily moved (which is the server standard)

Other types of redirects are triggered HTML rather than the server, by using inline JavaScript ormeta refresh tags.

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For the end-user, it should all look the same. The user should always get transferred from a PointA to Point B. But from an SEO perspective, there is a huge difference. It is strongly advised to useHTTP 301 redirects because when doing so, rankings of an older link are fully transferred to thenew relevant URL.

If you don’t use 301s, it can lead to the loss of important ranking positions. This could cause asignificant loss in organic search visibility and traffic.

It takes a while before Google notices all the changes and they are fully transferred from oneURL to another. This is especially important if you change a lot of things at once. It can take acouple of weeks or even months before Google has everything sorted out. But you willeventually fully benefit from your 301 redirects.

Be careful to prevent too many redirect chains. They can occur if you make changes more often.On other words, one URL redirects to another and this one continues to the newest one. This isnot ideal from crawl budget standpoint. Multiple requests are always slower, and in some casesGoogle will stop following them altogether. Ultimately don’t just rely on redirects beingcorrectly implemented, but have a routine in place to take care of your code and suite structureso these changes don’t have to happen so often. Keep you site updated on the front end.

There is a lot of discussion about the use of redirects in the SEO community. But, from a practicalstandpoint it is still strongly recommended to do 301 redirects whenever you can.

Page Load Speed

Google loves fast loading sites because people that browse website love fast loading websites! Itmakes sense that this helps with SEO, because delivering better and faster crawling has to helpGoogle on many levels. But you should be building a fast loading site anyway because you careabout your users first and foremost, and you don’t want them to wait to access your content.

According to a Nielsen report, 47% of people expect a website to load within two seconds, and40% will leave a website if it does not load fully within three seconds.

That doesn’t leave a lot of room for error. That means 100 milliseconds can make a bigdifference. When Amazon found a way to increase their site performance, their revenue grew1% for every 100ms they gained in speed. Impressive numbers when you are selling to millions.

Let's look at some of the tools you should be aware of when it comes to page load speed.

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Page Insights

Google has one of their own the Pagespeed Insights Tool. You can type in a URL, and it willreturn a fairly rough overview of where your site stands. It gives you a numerical score from 0 to100 and makes some recommendations that you may or may not need to follow, depending onwhat they find. Often, these recommendations or suggestions are only partially doable or evenpractical. It’s important to not take these reports as 100% gospel. They are mostly just a goodoverall test that helps you find the bigger issues. Don't think you have to”fix” everything theyfind wrong. Also, it is often quite unclear what your return on investment will be if you canimprovement your score form from say 89 to 90. This kind of data is just a starting point, butthat’s all it is.

webpagetest.org

This tool has everything that you need for website performance optimization. It gives you a lot ofdifferent metrics. There will be information about compression, caching and specialrecommendations on how to optimize your images. They also have a very detailed diagramwhere you can see how the page is loading and what the dependencies towards each other are. Italso provides DNS lookup details and more. Amazingly, this tool it’s free...at least for now :)

Lighthouse

Another Google tool that is part of the Chrome browser. It specifically is used for monitoring formobile performance. This is a very important ranking factor. However, Google now looks at yourmobile site as the one that is basically responsible for performance measurement and scoring. Inthe past your score was based on or against your desktop site, this has changed now.

Page speed is an important ranking factor, so keep in mind that it is mostly about how fasteveryone is. Are you slower than most? If so, that’s a problem.

Remember that page speed performance measurement it is not a one-time effort. You need todo it often over time. It’s best to compare your performance against your competitors to bettersee what is happening in your niche, and to see how you perform against them.

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Performance Dashboard

Performance Dashboard from sitespeed.io, can help you see trends over a week or month and tosee how your competitors are doing at the same time.

Page Load Speed Killers

Let’s talk about the two most common areas of concern you will encounter when checking pagespeed load for your website website.

HTTP Requests - When you access a website in your browser, a lot of different components aredownloaded in the background – images, СSS files, JavaScript and more. The amount of thesehas significantly increased over the years as websites have become more complex. On theaverage we have 275kb to 350kb of JavaScript code used on every single web page and as muchas 6 different СSS files for each URL. The best way to economize this is to think about how toreduce the sheer number of these things by merging, deleting, etc.

For example, you probably don’t need more than 1 or 2 CSS files.

You can also use minification of your files which shrinks down CCSS files and JavaScript. Itshortens variables and removes unnecessary line breaks. Depending on your web designplatform, you may have minification tools built-in. For example, 90 Second Website Builderprovides this option.

Image Files - Images account for about 60% of all web traffic. But most webmasters do notoptimize their image files. If you ever have created and exported an image with Photoshop as a.png or .jpg, and just put it on your website, you know may already know about this problem.

These image files contain something called metadata that are usually not properly compressed.Sometimes they are even the wrong file type. These are considered to be fat image files. But youcan fix this by thinning them down. There are tools like tinyPNG & tinyJPG, where you canoptimize your images (free of charge) and carve away all unnecessary file size fat.

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Secured Socket Layer (SSL)

Of course, we also need to talk about the use of HTTPS when covering performance of websites.Implementation of an SSL certificate - the service that allows you to utilize the https protocol - does not directly affect your site performance. But because it is required on a browser level toserve pages that are running on the new HTTP/2 protocol there’s no reason not to takeadvantage of it.

Also, there are many platforms such as Facebook that require certain links to come from an httpsURL...and many more going in that direction. As the public becomes more aware of site securitythey have learned to look for that green lock in the browser bar that provides some reassurancethat the site is safe and secure. They also know to look for that “S” in the https.

Google has wanted all sites to use SSL for a long time - long before most people knew what itwas. Statistics show that 60% or more of all results for high volume keyword queries in the top 3results have already been moved over to run on HTTPS. That alone should tell you what Googleis looking for.

The level of SSL encryption you use depends largely on your website’s purpose and business.Banks and credit card transaction sites need to use stronger and more expensive levels of SSLand TLS, while most common websites are fine using shared SSL - now available for free frommost legitimate web hosts. For example, see KloudWire.

When Google officially state that something is a ranking factor, we should pay attention as thisonly rarely happens. Regarding the use of HTTPS, Google has made it clear that it is critical.

In fact, Google actually flags every HTTP URL as NOT secure by way of the browser barnotification. Who wants to spend time explaining that to your site visitors? That is clearly aconversion killer.

The good thing is that HTTPs is now very easy to implement. Also the migration work involved,because of the protocol change, is relatively straightforward from an SEO perspective. If you doit right and follow best practice you should not expect any significant loss.

Ironically, using SSL (HTTPS) adds a few milliseconds to your page load speed because it takesthat long to verify the SSL certificate. But apparently, Google thinks it’s worth it.

If you have not yet switched over to HTTPS make sure you do. Check with your host or get onewho will take of this for you. They should not charge you. If you need a good host, go toKloudWire.

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JavaScript

Statistics show that about 96% of all websites use some form of JavaScript. This meant in thepast that Google`s crawler could never see what is happening in those areas because Javascriptis executed on the client's side. In other words, f you go to the site in a browser, you can see theeffects of the JavaScript. But that can’t be done server-side, so Google would miss out on that.

The crawling software that Google uses updated quite a lot and quite often, but until recentlywas is still not capable of rendering a website like an end user. That means that if Google hadn’tdone something about that, this would still a problem for them.

So, one of the things they did recently was build a crawler that was capable of looking at andrendering user-side activity, especially for JavaScript. The goal was for Google to understandwhat you would be presented with in a modern web browser as a person viewing it. Googlewanted to see from a human perspective what is happening while also crawling a website server-side.

So, in the past when you looked at the HTML markup, you saw what the crawler saw. Now that isentirely different. Google essentially sees it all. In a nutshell, they still do the regular, text-basedcrawl. And then in addition to that, they have use the new JavaScript rendering-crawl to see thatdata as well.

Here’s a summary and checklist regarding SEO and the use of JavaScript:

- First, Google tries to detect if a resource is necessary (such as JavaScript) from a renderingpoint of view. If not, it probably won’t be crawled.

- Although the exact time is not fully known, it is accepted by the SEO community that Googlewon’t wait longer than about 5 seconds for a script to execute. So large JavaScripts can beproblematic.

- If your site is slow, Google will have issues related to rendering your JavaScript content as thatadds to the weight of your website content. Slowing down the crawling process is not a goodthing.

- Use Google Mobile friendly test – it can show you errors Google may encounter whenrendering your page.

- The Googlebot is not a real person...it only acts like one (sort of). That means there aresomethings it won’t do like click or fill in forms.

- When you want to use canonical tags in JavaScripts, make sure they are placed in plainHTML/X-robots tags. Canonical tags injected by JavaScript are considered less reliable, and thechances are that Google will ignore them.

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Advanced SEO

Open Graph

Sharing on social media sites has proven to be a big part of relationship marketing. But it also hasa serious impact on SEO. The huge audiences of Facebook and Twitter make them some of thebest platforms for reaching out to your fanbase. But how do you optimize that content for SEOpurposes?

In 2010, Facebook developed something called Open Graph. It was developed to createintegration between Facebook and any other websites by allowing that site to provide objectson their site that work well with content on Facebook.

How well data travels from an external website back to Facebook when a page is shared in a postis controlled largely by Open Graph. It works by providing special meta tags on the website thatFacebook knows to look for in the page’s code. These OG meta tags are stored in the <head>tags.

Now, more and more social media sites also are taking advantage of these social meta tags. Forexample, Twitter and LinkedIn both honor and recognize OG tags. Twitter even has its ownversion of unique meta tags called Twitter Cards. But when Twitter bots can’t find their ownstyle of tags on your website, they know to look for OG.

Social media is a major player for most of the web’s traffic, so it’s important to know how to bestexploit to the potency of social media meta tags. Have you ever shared a link on Facebook onlyto find that the thumbnail was not showing, or there was a totally different image than you werehoping for? Open Graph tags allow you to literally control what image shows (and a few otherthings) when a link is shared this way.

You should also know that OG tags won’t have a direct affect on your SEO ranking eithernegatively or positively. Their purpose is to improve the quality of your content when shared onsocial media. This alone has an overall positive effect on your website since this will influenceclick-through rates to your website.

Here are some of the different Open Graph tags you can specify in your websites code (betweenthe <head></head> tags):

og:title – This is the title of the page as it should appear.

og:type – This is the type of page, e.g.“video.movie.” (Some types may require additionalproperties.)

og:description – This is the description of what your page is about.

og:image – This is the full URL to the image that you want to display. It should be an accuraterepresentation of your page.

og:url – This is the canonical URL for the page.

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Advanced SEO

Here’s an example of a page utilizing 6 Open Graph tags:

-----------

<html><head><title>My Page Title</title><meta property="og:title" content="My Page Title" /><meta property="og:site_name" content="Greg’s Blog"/><meta property="og:type" content="website" /><meta property="og:url" content="https://www.mywebsite.com/this page.html/" /><meta property="og:description" content="All about Greg and the stuff he likes to talk about onhis blog."/><meta property="og:image" content="https://www.mywebsite.com/imgages/somelogo.png" />...</head>...</html>

----------

You need to make sure to specify OG tags for any page that gets social traffic. Your links will lookmore better and more sensible with the image of your choosing as a thumbnail and a well-written title and description you have full control of. This which will help improve your click-through rate—and therefore your reach—on social media and beyond.

Google and Mobile Sites

Google calls it Mobile First - which means they are looking at the mobile version of a websitenow as a starting point for indexing. Google is saying they are giving preference to websites thatdeliver content in a way that can be easily queried from and displayed on a lot of differentdevices. In other words, you need a responsive design / mobile friendly website to compete intoday’s SEO world.

It’s critical to make sure that desktop and mobile are in sync regarding your content, as well asother indexing concepts. If you have a separate mobile site, make sure it lives on the samedomain (in a sib-directory and has all the indexing rules, but also covers simple things likeensuring that images are available, that it has proper canonicals, etc.

All of this is way easier to do if you are on a responsive site - that is when your mobile version isthe same page just with different page variations or break-points. If your mobile site is separate(which is not ideal), and you have less content on the mobile site, that will mean that Googlewon't rank your site for the content that is missing. If there is content that covers an importanttopic on desktop and is not available on the mobile version, you will probably be losing out.

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Advanced SEO

Let's finish this off this section with some tips about mobile website indexing to make sure thatyou are not losing out:

- If you are using responsive design, you should generally be good to go. That is a website that isdesigned to respond or accomodate any browser width on multiple devices without having toredirect to a separate mobile sub-domain.

- If you must have an independent mobile website, implement rel alternate and canonical tagsbetween mobile and desktop URLs.

- Check and if necessary, revise your keywords and keyword targeting. Ask yourself if people aresearching for something different if they are on a mobile device.

- This seems obvious but you could miss it. Make sure that the site is mobile friendly! It’s an easytest if you are using the built-in Chrome DevTools (Ctrl+Shift+I). Then you can switch toresponsive, and you will see if your site generally looks OK.

- Don’t prevent access by using crazy overlay/pop-ups/animations with mouse hovers thatwould negatively affect user experience on a mobile device.

- Pay close attention to your website’s output. You can use Screamingfrog to simulateGooglebot for smartphones with JavaScript.

Google Analytics

Savvy companies will track the ROI of their SEO spend by using Google Analytics. This is themost well-known analytics tool for webmasters and marketers and one particularly usefulfeature it has is the ability to help you set a goal and then track the traffic that makes it to thatgoal.

So if you’re trying to sell a product, then your goal might be to get traffic through your salesfunnel to a thank you page that you show after a purchase. This allows you to see not only thatyou’re getting more traffic but also that you’re getting more targeted traffic that’s actuallyconverting.

Better yet, Google Analytics will be able to tell you where those converting visitors came from.And specifically, you’ll be able to see if someone who used your search term eventually ended upbuying your product. These are people who have bought products from you because of your SEOefforts.

Thankfully, setting up Google Analytics is pretty easy. First, you’ll need to go to Google Analytics(http://www.google.com/analytics/) and you’ll need to add a small tracking code to each page ofyour site. If you’re using WordPress, then you can simply use a plugin to do this.

You can then set up your view, which will let you choose which stats you want to look at.

Some useful things to look at are your audience overview (key data regarding who is looking atyour site, which can help you to better target specific demographics), acquisition (where yourtraffic is coming from), real time (which shows you how many people on your site right now) toname a few options.

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http://www.google.com/analytics/

Advanced SEO

Google Analytics is an important part of your SEO strategy as it provides you with metrics youcan use to make adjustments and repairs to your site. Of course, you will need to list your site inyour Google Webmaster account and place the GA code snippet on your web pages so Googlecan track these metrics for you and report on them. Of course, some of these metrics can bemore useful than others.

You can see the number of internal links that have been built into your site. You can see the PageRank of the pages where those links have been built (although page rank is now a less importantmeasure). You can see what backlinks are associated with your website to ensure that they arehighly quality links and not just link spam. And you can track changes in your positions in theSERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Many SEO companies use tracking software that allowsthem see your site climbing the rankings for different search terms over time. They can then usethese to deliver a report showing how your site has performed since their intervention.

If you are handling your own SEO, you might consider a tracking tool in order to keep an eye onyour success over time and ensure that your efforts are getting results.

Good SEO is about constant monitoring and being ready to adjust. You want to see which actionsare having the best impact on your search rankings. If you are struggling to rank for a certainterm, you might consider aiming for another one. With good analytics, you will sometimesdiscover that people using a search term to find your website that you never considered to be animportant keyword are actually converting more highly than those from your normal list. Whenthat happens, (and it does quite often) it might be time to change gears and start trying to rankfor that phrase instead.

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The Future of SEO

The Future of SEO

With everything we’ve covered in this course should provide you with a more than substantialtool box for working with SEO. Basically, you should now know just about everything you needto know in order to begin an effective SEO campaign.

The problem is that SEO is something that is constantly evolving and changing.

And we already know that Google has a lot planned for its search algorithm in the future becausethey always do. They not only change with the technology and trends of online business, butthey often create those trends and changes.

So we’ll finish off this course with our best efforts on what seems to be coming down the pike inthe world of SEO. these aren’t so much predictions as they are based on some pretty goodknowledge of what is happening in this industry - yet haven’t been implemented yet.

Consider this section a fair warning of things to come :)

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The Future of SEO

Real Time SEO

One of the biggest changes we can expect going forward is the introduction of a real-timealgorithm. This means that any changes made to your site’s SEO might be reflected immediatelyin the search results. This is expected to have the biggest influence on inbound links and whetheryour backlink profile is mainly made up of high quality links or spam. In this case, adding a spamlink to your site could result in an immediate downgrade to your ranking.

Likewise, the reverse could also be true. Using the disavow tool could help you see an immediaterecovery – while a very good link could result in an immediate boost to your site.

It’s also not too much of a stretch to expect that in future, we might see this start to apply toother aspects of SEO – including the ranking of sites and pages. We already see news storiesappear very quickly in Google’s search results.

Here’s what some SEO experts predict the effect real time SEO will have:

SEO tactics may shift more toward social media - If Twitter and Facebook updates are going tobe read by the real-time search spiders then you might as well optimize your tweets andFacebook status. Social media networks have better content and user control on their end.

Meta tags might be used more by Google - Google started relying ion meta tags less as yearswent on. Real time SEO may create a need for them to revisit this. When real-time search resultsappear on the first page, Google might now think of reading meta tags more. They couldprobably use the data on the real-time results as they show.

Social bookmarking may become more prominent - When you want your site shown on thereal-time search engine results, you’d want it to stay there. What better way to keep on re-placing your site on real-time results than posting your content it on multiple socialbookmarking sites?

So what should you do to make sure that you will benefit from these changes? How can youfutureproof your site?

Answer: Stay on top of your links, disavowing bad ones and make sure that you are constantlyadding good links. Bigger sites may in the future need to have whole dedicated teams working onkeeping their links profile healthy full-time. Also, make sure to keep updating your site regularlyand keep the date in all your content.

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The Future of SEO

Voice Search and AI Assistants

One good way to know what’s coming in the world of SEO is to keep your eyes on the industrynews sites - specifically Google’s own blog.

Right now, everything is pointing toward a heavy investment in voice search and ArtificiaIIntelligence. Google is not just a search tool. With the capability of reading and understandinghuman language, Google is an AI platform already. It has been shaping the way we develop ourcontent for quite some time.

Google Now is the name of Google’s assistant service that combines search, a digital assistantand all the data that Google collects about people into one amazing tool. This is the real reasonthat Google had to move toward latent semantic indexing. It needed to understand the content,rather than just look for exact word matches.

This is also why Google needed to start using rich snippets and structured data – so that it couldunderstand key facts from the web.

It allows Google to use its quick answers box. Ask Google: “What are the largest cities in Texas?"”….and it won’t just bring up search results – it will answer your question.

And Google also has ‘localization’ and ‘previous query’ functions that provide a way for it tosuggest better searches based on what you previously searched. For example, if you oftenresearch a particular product or brand, in future, Google might recommend searches relating tothat brand.

This is the direction that Google is moving in but what does it mean for the future of SEO? Willcreators miss out when Google starts providing visitors with answers without them needing tovisit our pages? Not likely. Google is still relying on you, me and the rest of the world to provideall that data and content.

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The Future of SEO

Your Action Plan and Conclusions

We’ve covered a tremendous amount of information in this course from the basics to advancedtactics - and even speculated at what the future of SEO might reveal. At this point then, you maybe wondering where to start and how to put everything you’ve learned into action.

Let’s simplify for a moment with some broad -stroke takeaways:

- Google is getting smarter...to the point of becoming an AI platform with a lot of personalinformation about its uses

- Google is increasingly understanding what content actually means, from a human perspectiverather than just what it literally says.

- You should NEVER try to ‘trick’ Google. They will always win that fight in the long run.Work with Google to help them achieve their goal. They want to provide users with the mostrelevant, well-informed and entertaining answers to their questions.

- Prove that you are trustworthy by connecting as closely as possible to high authority sites.

- Use structured and well-planned websites that are organized in sensible ways.

- Don’t keyword stuff – write naturally using synonyms, relevant terms and good readablecontent.

- Build a brand and focus on consistent quality.

- Post fresh content regularly and build the trust of your users with smart and thoughtfulcontent marketing.

- Use guest posts and aim for the sites that have Google’s trust already.

- Think of SEO as one part of a much more cohesive marketing strategy.

- Combine excellent content with interesting social sharing.

- Measure and monitor what is working and be willing to update your strategy.

- Make sure you do your research and examine which terms to target before you set out.

Finally, make sure that you are passionate about your online business and its content.. Becausewhen you really love what you’re writing about, your passion will show through naturally withhigh quality content, great connections and consistency. Don’t look for quick fixes, but focus onbuilding a trustworthy brand filled with incredible information for the long term. If you do allthat plus some good marketing, Google’s should help you do the rest and reward yourenthusiasm.

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Thanks for Reading!Greg Hughes

DotComClassroom.com

https://dotcomclassroom.com

the best kept secrets of seo - dotcomclassroom.com€¦ · attracting visitors who are ready to...

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