SEO Optimization: Class Notes

Last week I took a class on SEO Optimization; here are my class notes:

moz.com

keywords dictates everything
find worlds that people actually type in to buy skateboards, sign up for training classes, etc

what are my services?
what are my products?
what am i offering?
these are your “categories”
ex: web design, web programming
within these categories, there are your “phrases”

if you google for a “phrase”, that’s a good sign that you’re on the right track
typing phrases into google and seeing what comes up - 25% of keyword research is just doing that

have to play dumb and google things like a newbie

scroll to the bottom, see what Google suggests in the “searched related to…” section
google would not suggest these phrases unless there was some good volume behind them

“best” [whatever]
— modifier that works great for “category” level

moz.com
“opportunity” and “priority” — ignore these. Moz’s numbers are wrong

“difficulty”
0 - 30, you’ll be on page 1 pretty guaranteed
difference between 30 and 40 is pretty big
30 - 40 is still doable

the higher the number of difficulty, the harder it is to get this going
if you’re in the 60’s it could take 6 months of trial to get results

50% of search queries are 5 words or MORE
Google doesn’t know how to track all those related phrases that well when they’re large
“no data” doesn’t mean it’s a BAD phrase. just means thus far in SEO world there is not a good tool for measuring those

every keyword phrase is a “content idea”

adwords.google.com

a lot of people use this, the ONLY tool a lot of people have
the “competition” field is NOT your “organic competition”

AdWords Keyword Planner
free
best free tool out there
(Moz has 30 day free trial, 2 clicks to cancel if you don’t want to use it)

Moz stuff —
example: snackskatebaords.com

SEO could be a 6 month process, creating a LOT of new pages to get the ranking to work properly

<title> tag
max of 55 to 60 characters
include site title pLUS the top level things that describe that home page
ex: musicblogdotcom - music reviews, band photos, podcasts, etc.

* where do the keywords GO on the webpage itself
<title> tag
meta description
URL
*** but do NOT go and change the URLs on your website
- the downside to that is far worse
NEW pages, go ahead and add to uRL, but DON’T remove the existing URLs, and don’t CHANGE them either

You want the phrase in the first paragraph of content, ideally in first sentence
good to have H1 headers in your content for SEO

images have alt text
alt “chocolate donuts”
google crawler can only see the file name and alt text
can also change file name, and put the keyword in the filename

“Artificial Grass Cost:”
SEO people use colons and pipes in their titles

if your keyword difficultly is HIGH, you need to write more content (2000 words per page) to get better results

news jacking —
ex: every time an Edward Snowden gets arrested, what are the laws that got violated, etc
people during that time, people are searching a lot for privacy rights, etc.
lots of questions about that get searched
that’d be a great time to put new, related content out on the web

if there is some big scandal in the SEO world maybe write an article about black-hat SEO ranking, etc.

getacopyrighter.com -
can get a 1000 word article for 70 bucks

if you’re small, take chances
put a call to action in the article
promote your stuff in that article
so visually they see YOU

start w/ “buy skatebaords online”
THEN do articles like “should i teach my kid to skateboard?”

Moz “opportunity”
% of organic clicks for that search
not ALWAYS 100% because there are ads and things that affect this

tool to figure out content
google.com
type in “blog: music reviews”
can find a lot of competitors
gets all the blogs for that topic

buzzsumo
BEST content analysis tool out there
can do a free trial

long tail phrases (5 - 6 words) are harder to repeat several times in an article.

LINKS —

(searchengineland.com)

links from other sites IN YOUR INDUSTRY

content theft / originality

link attraction - people just link to your content because it’s great
PRHacker - company that’s great at this
PRHacker.com

without link building it’s hard to get to page 1 on google

without doing ANY link building, you CAN get to page 1
by doing GREAT SEO

moz.com
research tools
link opportunities
reclaim links
— find broken pages on your site that have inbound links
so if you did a site redesign and the urls broke you can use this to find those urls

99signals.com — good articles on SEO. link building, etc.

link building
quid pro quo
don’t ask for charity, you won’t GET charity
“I’m a digital marketer and a regular reader of your website”
“I”m the CEO at…”
“I also run the blog at…”
i thought my article might be a good fit for your “weekly round-up post and thought I’d reach out”
99signals.com/high-quality-backlinks/

don’t make it seem like a “business transaction”
content community
connecting
be chill in your emails to other webmasters

Infographics
lowest of the low hanging fruit
can get infographics built super cheap:
fiver.com

use “site: foo.com baseball” to find all the places on foo.com that talk about baseball

infographics, super valuable

articles are FIVE TIMES more likely to be shared (maybe more) if they have a powerful image, infographic, etc.

writers are more receptive of a good info graphic

pass on the “embed” code so people don’t have to upload an actual graphic, log into CMD, etc.

crituecue.com
kind of lowest thing to do that isn’t too sketchy in terms of acquiring backlinks

testimonials
write for a product and ask for a link back to your site
“hey i’ve used your app on 12 clients and it worked great. can i write a testimonial for you and get you to link back to my site?”

prweb.com
- sends a press release for like 99 bucks
gets you a press release, get a back-link, maybe picked up by other sites, etc.

google looks at the distance between terms to judges their relevance to each other
if you google “clark kent” you get “superman” because they’re always related

“free crawl report tool”
tools.seochat.com

crawl report —
always do a crawl report w/ your website
find easy to fix errors
missing <title> tags, 404 errors missing meta description, etc

Screaming Frog
Best SEO software, but you have to download it

Google PageSpeed Insights
can run your site thru here for free,

Google Data Highlighter
can increase search rankings/results quite a bit
highlight info about upcoming events (i.e. shows when your band is playing, etc)
can help combine “south” “of” “shasta” so google knows that is “1 thing, not 3 things”

DON’T USE SUBDOMAINS
blog.foo.com
should be foo.com/blog
move it over asap

GOOGLE ANALYTICS  —
how do we measure all this stuff and make sure it’s resulting in more traffic, visits, conversions, etc.

if user only visits 1 page, time might be 0:0:0 because google can’t string together a session w/ another page
need to get bounce rates down and keep users on the site, clicking to other pages also on that site.

Order of Operations
GA tracking code
set up goals
upwork.com - get a cheap GA developer if you need to
get “search console” on every website
get “tag manager” on every website

what are the things that i care about tracking the most?
email subscribes, video plays, track your “donate” button, page views on the blog, KPI on the “contact” page, etc.

if you have web pages right now w/ nothing in the title tag, fix that FIRST

keywords
content ideas
keyword mapping
- for every page on your site, try to pick the most relevant phrase and put that in the title tag
for home page, maybe put stop 2 phrases next to each other

go into sub pages that you think will rank well
look at headers, body, meta description
DONT CHANGE EXISTING URLS

cross-linking from page to page with the right keywords

on page SEO

still not ready to create blog posts yet

remove all duplicate content from the website

correct 404 errors
find these in Google Search Console
- that’s “reclaiming links”

Search Console will help you track down duplicate content
Can also run a crawl test w/ Moz

go into Search Console
add structured data, start marking it up

NOW you’re ready to start blogging

look at keyword list
prioritize in a logical way

3 metrics:
volume
keyword difficulty
conversion probability — no tool that can tell you what’s best for you

not going to have a “here are my top 10 keyword priority list”
should be able to say “THESE are more of a priority, let’s just focus on these 5 for now”

start writing content

blogging frequency: 4 amazing articles a month is awesome. 1500-ish words each
that’s a great goal to hit
if you can outsource this, try to hit 8 articles per month

writing is exhausting
going to be a 2 day period where you’re like “i’m not writing now, i’m fried”
that’s when you reach out for link building, outreach for links
need to have a big list of websites in a spreadhseet
listed by domain authority and page authority
find at least 50 websites that you could potentially get a link from
include infographic sites, blogs in your industry, places you’ve written/traded testimonials with, etc.

what’s my process for link building and outsourcing things?