Advanced Step-By-Step SEO Tutorial

Hey, thanks for watching this great video on “Advanced Step-By-Step SEO Tutorial” by Brian Dean. I’ve made a few notes relating to the above video which you’ll find below.

However, before we go any further, I feel that we need to lay the groundwork by taking a quick look at some of the terminology that you will come across within the notes.

Helpful SEO Terminology

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page within the website without “paying” for it. In general, higher ranked and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive. The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how the search engines work, what people are searching for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, it’s HTML code, including associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. SEO also includes promoting a website in order to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links to that site.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console previously known as Google Webmaster Tools is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. It is a good idea to register with Google Search Console in order analyse and troubleshoot any problems you may have with the way Google bot or crawlers index your site.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Although Bing Webmaster Tools does not appear within the above video tutorial or the tutorial notes below I believe that it is just as important as the Google Search Console and that you should also register with their service.

Bing Webmaster Tools previously known as the Bing Webmaster Center is a free service as part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It allows you to add your websites to the Bing index crawler. The service also offers tools for webmasters to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your website, Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools, website statistics, consolidation of content submission, and new content and community resources.

HTTP 404, 404 Not Found, 404 Error Message

The HTTP 404, 404 Not Found and 404 error message is a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) standard response code, in computer network communications, to indicate that the client was able to communicate with a given server, but that the server could not find what was requested.

The web site hosting server will typically generate a “404 Not Found” web page when a user attempts to follow a broken or dead link; hence the 404 error is one of the most recognizable errors encountered on the internet.

Now that we have some of the terminology let us move to the notes I took for the above video.

Advanced Step-By-Step SEO Tutorial

Boost Your Site Loading Speed

You need to know that Google penalizes slow loading websites. However, once you reach a certain upload speed you are on par with most websites so Google does not need to rank you any higher.

To boost your sites loading speed go to Google PageSpeed Insights and enter one of your pages in the box provided. This should be a page from your site that gets a fair amount of traffic that way you will get the results for a page that your users actually see and hit analyse.

Google will show you where your page code could use a tune up.

However, there is a problem because it does not actually measure the site loading speed; it only analyses your page code.

To actually see how fast your site loads for a real site user check out GTmetrix.com which will provide a more accurate measurement of how your site speed stakes up.

Set Up Your Technical SEO for Success

If your website has serious technical SEO issues you are not going to rank; fortunately identifying and fixing these sorts of issues can be supper easy.

Your first step is to log in to your Google Search Console account and pay close attention to the crawl area section. If you see any issues with DNS, Server connectivity or Robot.txt fetch it is something you will want to fix ASAP but if they all show a green check mark against them then you are all set.

Next click on the crawl area button; this will take you to the URL error section of the search console – its perfectly OK to have a few errors and 404 errors but if you see hundreds of errors then you have a major problem that you will want to fix ASAP.

Keyword Research

Here are three quick techniques for finding awesome keywords.

  • Google Suggest
    To use Google Suggest enter a keyword into the Google search bar but don’t press enter. Google will suggest long tailed keywords that you can target and if Google actually suggests keywords to you then you know that its a keyword that loads of people search for.

    You can also use the Uber Suggest Tool to see hundreds of these Google Suggest keywords in one place.

  • Keywords You Already Rank For

    Untapped keywords in the keyword search console – log into your Google Search Console and click on search analytics – sort the results by position and scroll down until you hit positions 11 to 15; these are the keywords you are already ranking fot on the second page.

  • SEMrush
    SEMrush is unique; instead of putting a keyword into the tool you put in a competitor’s website URL and SEMrush shows you all the keywords that they already rank for.

Content Development

Today Google’s number one goal is to show users the best result for a given keyword; that means that they don’t care about how many pages of content you have on your site or how often you publish

So What Works?

Publishing less often, but making each piece of content that you do publish Absolutely Crazy Amazing.

Here’s how

Make your content insanely actionable.

What makes online content go viral?

Highly practical content is more likely to go viral than content that did not contain practical information for instance

Next you want to make sure that your content is at least 1890 words long – it was dis covered that longer content significantly outperformed short blog posts.

Next you want to make info-graphics part of your content marketing; info-graphics gets up to 2.3 times more shares than other formats.

On-Page SEO

Now that you have published an awesome piece of long form content, it is time to analyse it around your target keyword(s).

Publish your page on a short URL making sure that the URL contains your keyword.

Next, include your keyword once in the first hundred words of your article.

Google puts more weight to keywords, that appear at the top of the page.

Add outbound links to your page leading to other useful pieces of content.

Content Promotion and Link Building

Broken Link Link Building – 3-Step process

  • Find a page you want to link to get a link from (in your niche);
  • Find a broken kink on that page;
    find a page with a lot of external links then check the page using the Check My Links extension for Chrome (Free). It will review all the links on the page that is not working;
  • Let the site owner know about their broken link.

User Experience Signals

Optimize your site around User Experience Signals. Google’s RankBrain uses how many users engage with your site in Google search as well as Click Through Rates (CTR) and uses it as a key factor along with low bounce rates to help rank your site.