Complete SEO Information For beginners | TheKaushalPathak

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. And it's the process of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine's organic search results. Now, let's talk a bit about how they work.

If you're completely new to SEO, then it's easiest to think of search engines as libraries. But instead of storing books, they store copies of websites and web pages. So when you search for a query, the search engine will then look through all pages in its index and try to return the most relevant results. And SEO helps demonstrate to search engines that your page is that result. Now, you might be thinking: why should I focus on SEO when there are so many other marketing mediums? Well, there are three major things that attract marketers to search engine optimization and in my opinion, these three things make SEO the best traffic source.

Whereas other mediums like social media and email marketing often result in traffic spikes that usually end up fading to nothing. And it makes sense because social media networks are designed to surface fresh content. Emails often get marked as read, forgotten, or land in the spam box. Whereas search traffic is a result of users actively searching for information. And the number of searches for a given topic is typically consistent month to month.

In fact, as of October 2019 there were nearly 4.39 billion internet users around the world. And almost 4 billion of those people are Google users. This is why search engine optimization is an 80 billion dollar industry and why marketers from all walks of life are adopting and pursuing it today. Everyone wants their business to get discovered and SEO is the perfect way to do that.

Now, let's briefly talk about how Google works. And there are two parts to this. The first is crawling and indexation. And these two things are what actually allows Google to discover web pages and create their search index. So to actually attain information, Google uses crawlers, also known as spiders, which gather publicly available information from all over the web. The spiders will start crawling from a list of known URLs called seeds. They then follow the hyperlinks on those pages and crawl those newly discovered pages. And this process goes on and on, allowing them to collect a ton of information. They then take all of this data back to Google's servers to be added to their "search index." And that's what people like you and I are searching through when we key in a query in Google.

Now, if you were to search for something and Google returned every result that mentioned your words on the page, then you'd end up with really bad results. This brings us to the second part, which is Google's ranking algorithm. Google has hundreds of ranking signals and they make tweaks to their algorithm 500 to 600 times per year. So to be frank, no one knows exactly how their algorithms work. But they've given us clues and some guidelines to better understand the factors that are most important. In addition, third party companies have done studies to test and better understand these factors.

Now, I won't bore you with over 200 ranking signals, many which are just speculation at best, but I do want to cover a few of the most important factors that you'll need to understand from a fundamental standpoint.

Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another. And Google has said on their How Search Works page that if other prominent websites link to a page, that's proof to be a good sign that information is well trusted. The easiest way to understand the value of a backlink is to think of them as votes. When a page receives a backlink, it's essentially another website vouching for the content on the page. And the more "votes," you get from credible sources, the higher the trust. And we also studied the effect of backlinks on search traffic and found a clear positive correlation between backlinks from unique websites and a page's organic traffic.

Second is search intent, which represents the reason behind a searcher's query. And if you think of Google's goal for search,

their job is to return the most relevant results for any given query. So with that said, you can discover search intent simply by looking at the top ranking pages for the query you want to rank for. For example, if you search for "slow cooker recipes," you'll see that the search results are mostly blog posts with a list of slow cooker recipes. So if you try and rank a product page where you're selling a slow cooker, you won't be matching search intent and therefore, you won't rank.

Now, if we change the query to just "slow cooker," you'll see that the dominant types of pages are ecommerce category pages. So if you try and rank your blog post of slow cooker recipes, then you probably won't rank because you're not matching search intent. This is a critical concept to understand and I'll share a simple 3-step checklist you can use to determine search intent for any query.

And third is content depth. Search engines are made up of computer programs. So they can't actually read and understand text like you and I would. Nevertheless, Google has poured billions of dollars into creating sophisticated technology that understands content to a certain degree. But it's your job as a content creator to provide context about the subject. For example, if you look at the top ranking pages for the query "how to drive a car," you'll find that they talk about things like, fastening your seatbelt, familiarizing yourself with the gas and brake pedals, adjusting your seat and mirrors, and other things that a first-time driver may not know. Basically, you want to be able to answer the searcher's query the best that you possibly can. And naturally, it should lead to content that has depth. 

Now, it's important to note that depth doesn't always translate to length. For example, a topic like "how to turn off iPhone 12" doesn't need to and shouldn't be long. In fact, the top ranking page is only 185 words. But the content itself solves the user's query from start to finish. Alright, so the basics are in the book and it's time to move on to the keyword

They're simply just words and phrases that people type into search engines to find what they're looking For example, if you were shopping for running shoes, you might search for keywords like "men's running shoes" or simple just "running shoes."

Now, keywords are actually super-important in SEO because it sets the entire foundation for search engine optimization. The basic goal of SEO is to rank your pages for keywords that your target audience or customers are searching for. And if you're not ranking for keywords that actually get searched, then your SEO efforts are kind of meaningless. For example, we rank #1 for the query "SEO checklist." And this keyword is responsible for driving around 1,500 monthly visitors from Google. And that's just in the US. So keyword research is the process off finding keywords that people are inputting into search engines.

So how do you actually choose keywords that are worth targeting? Let's run through a checklist that should help you choose keywords effectively. The first thing to check is if your

keyword has search demand. Search demand represents the volume of monthly searches made for a keyword. And this is measurable with a keyword metric that we call "search volume." You can find the search volume for a keyword by using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs

search volume alone can actually be a bit misleading. Which is why it's worth looking at the second checkpoint which is to check the traffic potential of the topic.

Traffic potential represents the total search traffic you could get if you were to rank at the top of Google for your keyword. 

So while you may be optimizing your pages for a main keyword, your page will likely rank for hundreds or even thousand of other relevant keywords. And because of that, the monthly search traffic potential of the topic "SEO checklist" is actually higher than its monthly search volume. This is what makes traffic potential a much more reliable metric than search volume. And the way you determine traffic potential is by looking at how much traffic the top- ranking pages are getting.

Now, choosing keywords based on metrics alone is not a good idea. Which is why the rest of the checkpoints are meant to ground you. The next point on our checklist is to assess the business potential of the keyword or topic.

Business potential simply represents the value a keyword has to your business. And "value" really comes down to your niche as well as your business model. So an easy way to do this is by assigning scores between 1-3 to keywords you're researching. The higher the number, the more important the topic is to your business. So let's say you have a site about golf. And the way you make money is by selling used golf clubs. Bringing this back to business potential, that means topics where you can organically recommend products to visitors would hold the highest business value.

For example, people searching for something like "buy used golf clubs" are likely ready to make a purchase here and now. So in my books, this would have a business value of 3. Now, a keyword like "best golf clubs" would also be relevant to your site. People are likely ready to make a purchase soon but just don't know which clubs to buy. But it's actually quite easy to plug your products. Because for the golf clubs you recommend, you can easily link back to your product pages leading visitors closer to making a purchase. So I'd give this a business value of 2.

Now, a keyword like "what is a handicap in golf" would be really tough to organically recommend your products. But nevertheless, it's a way to attract relevant traffic to your site. So I'd give this a business value of 1. So these would hold the lowest priority. And anything that has a score of 0 is probably worth ignoring because it's not going to impact your bottom line. So something like "happy gilmore review" would have a business value of 0 because it has nothing to do with your business other than the fact that it's a fantastic movie about golf.

I touched on this in the first lesson on SEO basics, but I really want to take some time to unpack what it is and how to use it in keyword research. Reason being, if you can't match searcher intent, then you probably aren't going to rank for your target keywords.

So again, search intent represents the reason behind a searcher's query. And matching search intent is one of those "must do" things to show search engines that your page will fulfill their goal - to deliver the most relevant results for any given query. And while it might sound like you're trying to satisfy Google, what you're actually doing is learning what you need to do to satisfy the searcher's intent. Identifying search intent is usually quite easy.

All you have to do is search for the keyword you want to rank for and then analyze the top-ranking results. And the top-ranking results are a great proxy to understand search intent because Google understands what searchers want, probably more than anyone else.

Now, "analyzing" is kind of a jargony word, but I have a simple 3-prong formula you can use. It's called the 3 C's of search intent.

Content type can usually be categorized into blog posts, videos, product, category, and landing pages. For example, the dominant type of pages for the query "best golf shoes" are blog posts.

And this applies more to blog posts and landing pages. A few common blog formats you'll see are "how-tos," step-by-step tutorials, list posts, and opinion editorials. For a landing page, that might be something like a tool or calculator. Again for the query "best golf shoes," you'll see that all of the top results are listicles, which makes sense because the word "best" implies that a comparison needs to be made.

#3. And the third C is content angle,

which often depicts the "benefit." It's basically your hook as to why someone should click and visit your page. For "best golf shoes," you'll see that every post has gone with the "freshness angle," which is evident based on the current year being in the titles. In my opinion, this is the least important and often least consistent among top- ranking pages. Now, this is just one example of search intent for a keyword.

Let's go through a few more example to really drill in this concept. The first example is for the query "how to swing a golf club." The dominant content type is clearly blog posts.

But you'll also notice that a YouTube video is ranking ahead of the blog posts. So this tells us that it may be worth creating both a blog post and video to potentially get two different spots in the search results. As for content format, they're clearly all how-tos. And seeing as the nature of the topic would require a step-by-step procedure, that's probably the route you'd want to go too. And you can confirm this by actually visiting some of the top-ranking pages.

Now, with content angle, it appears as though "for beginners" or "basic" seems to be the right way to approach the topic . The second example is for the query "golf clubs."

Looking at the SERP, you'll see that they're all ecommerce category pages. Which tells us that when people search for this query, they're likely in shopping mode. Now, seeing as content format applies mostly to blog posts and landing pages, it wouldn't be applicable here since we're looking at ecommerce category pages. As for content angle, it seems to be mostly about deals -- so saving money on golf clubs.

Alright, the final example is for something like "golf bags." Looking at the SERP, you'll see something a bit different. We have a mixed SERP. Content type for the top ranking page is an ecommerce category page. Then we have a couple of blog posts on "the best golf bags." And we also have an outlier on how to buy golf bags. And towards the bottom half of the results, we have more ecommerce category pages.

So what do you do?

Well, in order to make an educated decision, we still need to lay some foundation work. So we'll revisit this example in a later lesson.

This will help you understand how hard it'll be to rank high in Google for your target keywords.

Let's get started.

So when it comes to ranking in Google, you need to understand who you'll be up against before you target a keyword. Otherwise, you could be entering a battle you won't be able to win. From an SEO perspective, competitors are pages and websites that rank at the top of Google for your target keywords.

So that means your competitors can be different for every single keyword you target. So there are three main things you'll want to consider before you decide to pick a fight.

→ Search intent;

→ Metrics of the top-ranking pages and websites;

→ topical authority of the top-ranking websites.

Now, as we go through these points, we're going to create a list of self-check questions which should help you make informed decisions in your keyword targeting. Also, in order to see things like metrics of top ranking pages, you need an SEO tool since Google won't show you data on other pages.

The first thing you need to do is look at the SERP and ask yourself: "Do some of the top-ranking pages fail to closely match search intent?"

Also, pay close attention to the titles and URLs of the ranking pages. In general, if the top pages include the primary

keyword or a variation of it in the title and/or URL, they're likely targeting that keyword.

The first metric to look at is the number of websites that are linking to the page. At Ahrefs, we call this "referring domains." As I mentioned in module one, backlinks are one of Google's most prominent ranking signals. So if a page has a lot of quality links pointing at it, then it'll be more competitive to rank. So before choosing a keyword, you need to ask yourself: "Can I get more quality backlinks than the top-ranking pages?"

The second metric is website authority. At Ahrefs, we call this Domain Rating, which represents the overall strength of a website's backlink profile. Very generally speaking, you should be going after keywords where your website's DR is in a similar ballpark range as the top-ranking pages. Or at the very least, one of the top-ranking pages should be in the same range as your website.

For example, if all of the websites that rank in the top 10 have high DRs and you have a DR of let's say, 10, then you may want to consider competing when you're at a similar level. So let's add that question to our checklist:

"Is my website in a similar DR range or higher than the top-ranking websites?" Again, this is a very general recommendation but still a decent one to follow if you're a beginner to SEO.

To see the Domain Rating of your own site, you can enter your domain in Site Explorer and see it here on the Overview page. Or you can enter your domain in our free Website Authority Checker. 

Alright, let's move on to the third part which is topical authority of the top-ranking websites. Google wants to rank pages from authoritative sources. And this goes beyond backlinks. So the question you need to ask yourself is: "Is my website equally or more topically authoritative than the top-ranking websites" If the answer is yes, then that's a positive thing for you. The easiest and quickest way to find out is to just look at the domain names and use some common sense. 

For example, looking at the SERP for "best convertible car seat for small cars," you'll see sites like Experienced mommy, Baby center, Parenting pod, Babylist, and other relevant sites that talk about product for children. And for domains that aren't as easily distinguishable, like 800bucklup.org, you can just visit the site, hit the About page and get a general idea of what the site is about.

As a very general rule of thumb, the more yeses you can check off, the better your chances of ranking. Again, very general because SEO is quite nuanced. 

Alright, so what is on-page SEO?

It's simply the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines. It revolves heavily around optimizing pages for search intent. But on-page optimizations also involve creating and optimizing HTML tags like titles and meta descriptions. Now, if you've been exposed to the practice of on-page SEO, then it's quite likely that you've heard conflicting advice. And for that reason, we're going to discuss both what on-page SEO is and what it is not. 

Let's talk about common advice you might see on on-page SEO best practices which just aren't true today. And while there are many old school tactics that are still being recommended, I want to focus on just three points to help you navigate the noise.

It used to be common practice to include the exact keyword you wanted to rank for in your title, URL, and content. For example, if you wanted to rank for "car dealer San Diego" you would stuff that keyword throughout your page despite the fact it doesn't make sense - grammatically speaking. Google is smart enough to understand things like connecting words, synonyms, and closely related words and phrases. In fact, for all of these queries, the top 10 pages are nearly identical.

Unfortunately, stuffing exact match keywords is still being practiced today which can lead to poor user experience and poor readability; all things that on-page SEO should not do.

The second thing is that on-page SEO is not about using your keyword a specific number of times on the page. In our study of 3 million search queries, we found that on average, the top-ranking page ranks for around 1,000 other relevant keywords in the top 10. Now, can you imagine what it would be like if a top-ranking page had to mention all 1,000 of those keywords at least three times? It makes no sense. The content would be unnecessarily lengthy and create an awful user experience for visitors.

The third point is that on-page SEO isn't about meeting a minimum word count. Some studies have shown that the average content length of the top 10 results is over 2,000 words. As a result, many SEOs have recommended that you create pages that are at least that length. But that isn't exactly sound advice.

Now, let's talk about what on-page SEO is today and beyond. Looking at the definition again, on-page SEO is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines. And as I mentioned, this revolves heavily around optimizing pages for search intent. 

The keyword here is "search intent." Translation: the goal of your pages should be to satisfy the searcher's intent. How?

Well, we talked about the 3 C's of search intent which should help you get the basic stuff down like the content type, format, and angle. In addition to this, your content needs to address the things people expect to see. You'll also want to nail the more "tangible" items like titles, subheadings, internal linking, readability, and of course, the actual content itself.

Okay, so with on-page SEO, there are two main things we need to cover. The first is arguably the most important and that's to ensure your page satisfies searcher intent.

We've already covered the 3 C's of search intent which again will give you very basic guidance on the type of content to create, the format to use, and the angle to go with. But the actual content itself is what'll leave your visitors satisfied or dissatisfied. So you might be wondering: "What exactly do I write about in order to satisfy searchers?" The short answer is to learn from your competitors. The top-ranking pages are ranking at the top for a reason. Google and other search engines deem them as the best candidates to satisfy a searcher's query. So they're clearly doing something right, at least from the perspective of a search engine. Now, while the content will vary from topic to topic, the way you research your competitors' content will be more or less the same.

And while the content is the most important part, there are also a few more "technical" on-page optimizations you should do. Let's go through a few of the most important ones.

First is to include your target keyword in your title when it makes sense. Adding your target keyword to your title should come naturally. For example, our title for this post is "full SEO Course to rank on Google (Detailed tutorial)." And "free SEO Course" is our target keyword. Now, there will be times when it makes more sense to use a close variant of your target keywords.

The next thing you can do is to use a short and descriptive URL slug. Short and descriptive URLs help people immediately understand what the page is about before even visiting them.  Again, you should only do this when it makes sense, so you don't need to worry about forcing it. Now, if you're wondering if you should use subfolders to describe categories, that's entirely up to you. Alright, next is the meta description.

The meta description is HTML code that's meant to briefly summarize your page. And search engines often use this text right within the SERP. To my best knowledge, meta descriptions aren't used as a ranking signal, but they can influence click through rates. And for that reason, I think it's important to add to your pages. Now, it's important to note that according to our study of 192,000 pages, we found that Google rewrote meta descriptions nearly 63% of the time. So I wouldn't spend a ton of time on them, but you should still include them. Alright, next up is to add internal links to and from your pages. 

Internal links are links from one page on the same domain to another. And they're super-powerful because they can pass link authority to other relevant pages and they also help search engines better understand a page's contents. 

For example, if I had a site in the careers niche, and I was writing a post about how to write a cover letter, then I'd definitely want to add internal links from other relevant pages like one on how to write a resume. More importantly, visitors who want to learn how to write a resume would probably want to know how to write a cover letter and vice versa. 

To find opportunities, you can go to Google and search for site:yourdomain.com and then add the topic you're writing about. Then visit relevant pages and see if there's an opportunity to add an internal link to your new post. Alternatively, you can use Ahrefs' Site Audit tool completely free. Just sign up for an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account, verify your site and then run a crawl. Then you can head over to Link Explorer to find internal linking opportunities. Alright, next up is to optimize your images.

In the last 28 days, we've had over 4,000 visits to our blog from Google image search. While that pales in comparison to our 500,000 monthly organic blog visits, it's still 4,000 visits.

If you took the photo yourself, then chances are, your smartphone or camera named it something like IMG_ and then a million numbers. Instead, change the filename to something More realted to your keywords. Not exactly rocket science, but according to Google, filenames can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image.

Alt text, short for alternative text is an HTML attribute that goes in your image tag. So the syntax would look something like this, where the alt value should describe the image. Alt text helps improve accessibility for those who are using screen readers or if the image fails to load, visitors will be shown the alt text instead. Now, Google recommends "creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page." Yes, Google explicitly says to use keywords, but they also say to avoid stuffing keywords as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam. 

Meaning, don't do something like this : Now, looking back at the syntax, our alt text isn't exactly descriptive. So let's change that to something like, "puppy sitting on a couch." If you use WordPress, just add your alt text here when inserting your images and the CMS should do the rest.

Alright, the third thing you'll want to do is compress your images. Compressing images makes your image file sizes smaller, leading to faster load times. And PageSpeed is a Google ranking signal. There's a free tool for compressing images called "ShortPixel" which has both a web interface as well as a WordPress plugin. And the last thing I highly recommend is to optimize for readability.

#1. Write in short sentences and short paragraphs because no one wants to land on a page with a HUGE wall of text.

#2. Use descriptive subheadings so people who are skimming the article can easily find the things that are important to them.

#3. Use a large enough font that's easily readable on both desktop and mobile.

#4. Avoid using big words. It's more important that people understand your content.

#5. Write as you speak. Your content will be more conversational and entertaining to read.

A free tool I recommend using is called Hemingway app. It'll give you some writing tips as well as a readability grade. I'd recommend trying to keep things at or below a sixth grade level. Now, there are other on-page optimizations you can do like adding open graph meta tags or OG tags for short. These will allow you to customize the titles, descriptions, images, and other information when your pages are shared on social media networks. There's also schema markup, which is code that helps search engines understand your content and better represent it in the search results.

Now again, the most important part of your content is that you're striving to satisfy searcher intent. Yes, the technical things are important too, but they're more like the icing on the cake.

THE most important AND most challenging SEO strategy. It's called link building. And to kick things off, we're going to talk about what it is, why it's important, and the mindset you'll need to have to be successful at it. Let's get started.

By definition, link building is the process of getting other websites to link to a page on your website. And these hyperlinks are called backlinks. Now, while the end result might make sense conceptually and seem simple, the part that most people don't understand and can't seem to get right is this: THE PROCESS. And this ultimately boils down to emailing complete strangers and asking them to link to you. Now, let's take a quick second to talk about how strange and kind of awkward this might sound. So let's go through a few scenarios and then we'll revisit this definition of link building.

Let's say that you have a marketing blog and you write about SEO and digital marketing. Now, if some random person, let's call her Sally, sent you an email and said…

"Hey, can you link to my post on Facebook

ads? It's REALLY good."

Would you link to her?

Probably not. In fact, you probably wouldn't even reply or click the link in her email to actually check and see if her content is as good asbshe claims. Now let's flip the script a bit.

Let's say that You've implemented some of the strategies

we've shared and gotten some great results for your site. On top of that, you've been doing SEO for 3 years. Now, an email pops up in your inbox from someone you know, like me TheKaushalPathak. A name and face you might recognize. And in that email, I've asked you to link to our New posts from your page . Would you link to me? Maybe.

Let's say your mentor who helped you get started in digital marketing sends you an email. And she asks you to link to a page on her site from a relevant page on yours.

Would you link to her? Definitely!

She helped you get started in digital marketing, you obviously trust and respect her, and you'd be willing to bend over backwards for her. The point of these scenarios is to show you that the PROCESS of link building is actually very relational and can sometimes take more time than you might like. With Sally, you don't know her. You don't owe her anything. You don't trust her. She's blindly coming in, almost invading your inbox, and asking you for a favor without offering any kind of value in return. In the second scenario when I hypothetically emailed you, you knew who I was, I had indirectly helped you, and you were a user of our product for years.

So while we may not have a real-life relationship, we're still connected in some way. So the chances of linking to me are probably higher than linking to sally. Now, when your mentor asked you for a link, there's a real relationship there.

There's a sense of trust, respect and gratitude. So of course you would link to her. Now while you can't and shouldn't try to become "friends" with everyone just to get links, you'll find that your best links will usually come from relationships that are sparked from email outreach. So let's redefine link building and set the tone for the rest of this module.

Link building is the process of building relationships with other relevant site owners who want AND will link to your content because it enhances theirs. So this definition isn't just about you getting something. It includes relationships, relevance, and a value exchange. All things we'll touch on later in this module. 

Now, since EFFECTIVE link building is tough,you need to understand WHY it's worth the effort. In short, backlinks are used by search engines like Google to help rank web pages. And it's been this way since 1998 when Google created PageRank.

PageRank is a mathematical formula that judges the "value of a page" by looking at the quantity and quality of other pages that link to it. And Google confirms the importance of backlinks on their how search works page. Under their "ranking useful pages" heading, they state:

"If other prominent websites on the subject LINK to the page, that's a good sign that the information is of high quality."

We also found a clear correlation between organic traffic and backlinks from unique websites in our study of over one billion web pages. So while getting backlinks may be harder than let's say, creating a blog post, they're absolutely critical if you want to rank for competitive phrases. And competitive phrases are usually the ones that'll drive the most traffic and revenue for your business.

Now, we briefly touched on the main way of getting backlinks, but not all links can or will be obtained through outreach. So in the next lesson, we'll talk about 3 methods to get backlinks as well as the level of difficulty and effectiveness.

Now, before we get started, it's important to set the expectations right for this lesson and talk about the difference between a strategy and a tactic.

To me, strategies are higher level in the sense that it outlines the scope of the plans. Whereas tactics are more micro and often focused around smaller steps. So the strategy sets you in the right direction and the tactics kind of define how you get there. And we'll get into a few link building tactics later on in this module.

Alright, so when it comes to link building, there are 3 main strategies to get backlinks. You can create them, buy them, or earn them. Let's talk about what each method looks like, their level of difficulty and effectiveness. 

Creating backlinks means to manually add links on one domain back to yours. This can be done by adding your website to directories, leaving comments on blog posts, or adding your website's URL to your social media profile. Anyone can do this with minimal effort. So like almost all easy things in life, they're generally not that effective from an SEO and ranking perspective. 

Now, buying backlinks is exactly as it sounds. You pay webmasters or authors a fee, and it return, they'll link back to a page on your site. Now, this is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can potentially result in a penalty. That might be anything from losing ranking positions or even worse, getting your pages removed from Google's search index. Also, buying links isn't exactly cheap. We contacted 250 websites to ask if they sell links. And we found that the average cost of buying one was nearly $353. And of course, we didn't buy any. In terms of level of ease, if you have the money, it's super easy to do because it's just a transaction. Now, in terms of the effectiveness, I would think that they're highly effective unless OR until you get caught. And in my opinion, the risk isn't worth the reward, especially if you want to build a business that'll stand the test of time. 

The final way to get backlinks is to earn them. And there are 3 common ways you can do this. The first and most common are links that are earned through email outreach. This is when you email other website owners and editors and ask them to link to you. Another way to earn backlinks is by becoming a source for an online publication or media outlet.

For example, if a journalist references you in an article, they'll often link to you and/or your social media profiles. And the final way is to earn backlinks organically. For example, if someone visits your page from a link on social media, organic search, word of mouth or wherever and decides to link to you, then that's an earned link. Now, even though 100% organic links may sound like the best way to get them, I don't want you to bank on that.

These kinds of links are typically less consistent unless you're an extremely well known brand with extremely well crafted content AND you're already getting significant exposure. It takes time to build a reputation that's well-trusted and for those organic links to come in on a regular basis. And if you're just hoping and waiting, you'll likely fall behind because your competitors will actually be busy BUILDING links by reaching out to other website owners. Generally speaking, the harder it is to obtain a link, the more valuable it'll be. And for that reason, we'll be focusing on streamlined tactics so that you can build a steady stream of backlinks to your page and get more traffic from SEO. Now, not all links are created equal. Some will help propel your pages to the top of Google, while others can actually hurt your site.

Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the third lesson in the link building module. Today, we're going to talk about the attributes that make a backlink good or "high quality." As I said in the last lesson, not all backlinks are created equal. For example, if you spammed forums with links to your site, those wouldn't and shouldn't hold more weight than let's say a link from the New York Times. Otherwise, backlinks would just be a game of quantity and Google's search results would reward the biggest spammers. Fortunately, ranking on Google doesn't work that way and quality backlinks are still a prominent ranking signal. So with that said, let's talk about the 5 attributes that make a backlink "good." The first attribute is relevance. Imagine this for a second. You're going to visit Greece for the first time next month and you need recommendations for places worth going to. Now, you have a friend that has lived in Greece for their entire life and obviously knows every nook and cranny. You also have a friend in the US who hates travelling and has never been outside of the states. Who's opinion would you hold higher? Obviously your Greek friend. 

In the same way, links from a website about travel or Greece would hold more weight than links from sites about technology or marketing because they're more topically relevant and authoritative. 

Alright, the next attribute of good quality links is authoritativeness. If you're unfamiliar with "authority" in the context of backlinks, it basically represents the so-called "link power" a web page has. And this relates to how Google's PageRank works. As we discussed before, both the quantity and quality of links matter. So the MORE quality links a page gets, the more PageRank it earns.

And the more PageRank it has, the more authority it can pass to other pages through hyperlinks. For example, let's say that page C has two links: one from page A and one from page B. Page A is stronger than page B, and also has fewer outgoing links. Feed this information into the PageRank algorithm, and you get the PageRank of page C. Now, this is obviously a simplified version of how PageRank works, but the key point here is that getting links from high-authority pages will likely have the greatest impact on your rankings.

And the last part of the link we'll talk about is the rel attribute. Some links contain a rel attribute, which is intended to tell crawlers about the relationship between the linking page and the linked page. And the 3 rel values that you should know about when it comes to link building are nofollow, UGC, and sponsored.

Historically, nofollow links told Google that the linking page would rather not associate themselves with the linked page. And for that reason, Google didn't transfer "authority" through those links. But then Google added a couple other rel values: UGC, which stands for user generated content, and sponsored, which signifies an ethical paid link. They also announced that going forward, they would look at these link attributes as "hints," meaning, they may pass value through them at their discretion.

Now, if a link doesn't have any of these rel values, then it would be called a "followed" link. Meaning, the link can pass PageRank and help boost your rankings. Seeing as this is still relatively new, I'd recommend focusing on building followed links, although that's only partially within your control. 

Now, it's important to note that nofollow and UGC links aren't bad. It's just that followed links are proven to pass authority. One final thing I want to touch on is link placement. Prominent links are more likely to be clicked, and it's believed that Google takes this into account when determining how much authority a link transfers. For instance, an editorial link is more likely to be clicked than a link in the footer. So, all else being equal, the former would be better than the latter. So to summarize.

An ideal link would come from a relevant and authoritative page where the link is followed. It would have a descriptive anchor, and be placed contextually within editorial content. But the truth is… a lot of this is out of your control. What IS in your control is how you spend your time building links. By using these five attributes to help qualify prospects - or people that are worth contacting,

you'll spend your time building links that will actually move the needle. Now, the easiest way for a beginner to start building links is to use tried and tested tactics.

we're going to talk about the step-by-step process to build backlinks as well as 3 cookie-cutter link building tactics that are tried, tested, and completely beginner friendly. Let's get started with the general processto link building.

When prospecting, you're searching for relevant pages and websites that might link to you. These might be people who are linking to a similar page as the one you're going to create, those who have influence in your industry, or people who are passionate about the topic. The main goal isn't to find a perfect list of people, this stage is about finding as many people as possible that fit a specific set of criteria. And this criteria is usually dictated by link authority metrics as well as relevance. As a result, you'll usually be working with large and very unperfect sets of data. 

The vetting stage is where you start to refine your list of prospects. These are the people that you'll be contacting, so you'll need to visit their websites and validate that they are indeed people worth contacting. 

Finally is the email outreach stage.This is when you'll finalize your pitches and start emailing your vetted prospects. Now, depending on the link building tactic you use, the way you prospect, vet and craft your email pitches will differ.

And this is actually quite difficult when you're new to link building. Fortunately, there are a few dead simple but SUPER effective link building tactics that are completely newbie friendly. But before we can get tactical, let's revisit our definition of link building because there are 3 main parts in it that will help you with prospecting, vetting, and email outreach. Again, link building is the process of building relationships with other relevant site owners who want AND will link to your content because it enhances theirs.

Now, I want to highlight the 3 main parts from this definition: relationships, relevance, and a value exchange We already talked about the relevance part in the last lesson. Now we're talking about mainly the value exchange and what that looks like in some common link building tactics. Now a quick note on the relationships part. I've said it once and I'll say it again… you don't need to try and be best friends with every person you reach out to. Relationships are often the byproduct of good outreach paired with good content. And these relationships often lead to more than a one-off link. Now since this is a beginner's course, I won't be covering the relational aspects of link building so much.

let's dig into a few easy link building tactics and I'll show you what each stage of the link building process looks like in

detail. Plus, I'll outline the value exchange for each tactic to give you a better idea of what I mean. Alright, the first link building tactic is to get free PR using HARO.

HARO or "Help a Reporter Out" is a free service that connects journalists with sources and sources with journalists. Just sign up as a source and select the categories where you're qualified to answer questions. You'll then get emails from journalists from various media outlets, looking for sources on specific topics. And these aren't just your run of the mill publications. In just this SINGLE email, you'll see publications like Parents.com, Popsugar, and The Houston Chronicle to name a few.

Just skim through the topics and if you find something where you can add value, respond to the journalist with your expert opinion. And if they use you as a source, they'll usually link back to your site and social media profiles. Now, the value exchange here is simple. You're exchanging your expert knowledge for a mention and usually a link from an authoritative site. From my personal experience, some people i know have gotten links from places like Reader's Digest, Inc Magazine, Forbes, and the Huffington Post to name a few. 

Now, looking at the 3 stages of link building, the prospecting part is as easy as it gets. You sign up for a free service and journalists are actually looking for your help, not the other way around, which makes HARO super beginner-friendly. As for vetting, you can simply scan through the results on a daily basis, but that can be time consuming. A simple tip you can use is to create a gmail filter so only relevant emails will surface in your inbox. Just login to Gmail and click on the caret to bring down the search options. Next, set the "from" field to haro@helpareporter.com. Then, you'll want to set the subject to HARO within square brackets since all of their emails include that in the subject line. Finally, set the "has the words" field to any keywords you want to monitor.

And you can also use the OR search operator to include multiple keywords or phrases. Click search to see the results your search filters would include and check out some of the emails to ensure you're getting relevant results. If everything looks good, click on the caret again and then click create filter. You'll then have options to apply labels, mark it as important, or forward it to another team member to take care of. Now, as for the email outreach part, HARO gives you an email address which will then be forwarded to the journalist. So just respond to the given email address, and write your response. Now obviously, you're not going to be the only person emailing the journalist.

1. Keep your emails as short as needed. Journalists get tons of emails and if they see a huge wall of text, they probably won't even give your response a chance.

2. Go after topics where journalists are likely looking for multiple sources. For example, this query from Best Life is seeking medical experts - as in the plural form of expert. These kinds of requests will usually be your typical listicle styled posts. So the more responses they accept, the higher your chances of getting mentioned and linked to.

3. Respond as quickly as possible. Journalists on HARO will often give a tighter deadline to give themselves time to actually put together a good story. Plus, some journalists believe that people who respond faster are better sources. Don't believe me? Here's what a journalist from Reader's Digest said:

"The deadline was just to make sure I get people to respond in a timely manner. I actually have the rest of the month to put the story together, which is nice. I find the tighter the deadline I attach, the better the responses because the only people who go to the effort are ones who really have something relevant to offer."

Obviously, this doesn't apply to every journalist, but it kind of makes sense. Alright tip 4 is to prioritize questions where you are an expert and use it as the first line in your pitch. There'll be days where you can't respond to every relevant request. So prioritize the ones where you have the highest probability of getting sourced. For example, PopSugar is looking for experts who can talk about why cats scratch furniture and how to stop them from doing it. If you're a vet, then you might start your email with something like…

Clearly, I'm not a vet, but you get my point. When you immediately qualify yourself, as the right person to answer the question, you'll likely get their attention. Of course, you should be 100% honest so I wouldn't claim to be a vet when I'm not. And finally, follow all directions in their query.

Alright, the next link building tactic is guest posting or guest blogging - same thing. Guest blogging is when you create content for another website. And the reason why this strategy works is because there's a clear value exchange. They get great content for free, and almost always, they allow you to link back to your site; whether that be within the content or in the author bio.

Now, guest blogging also provides another great benefit aside from a potential backlink. You get the opportunity to get exposure to someone else's audience. They've already done the hard work in building that audience, you just have to write something that'll impress their readers. Now, when you're prospecting, you'll need to get a list of websites. And there are a few ways you can do that. The first way is to use Google search operators. Just go to Google and search for something like….intitle: "write for us" wrapped in quotes and then a keyword that's related to your niche. In this case, this search query will show us pages that include the phrase, "write for us" in the title and have the word golf balls somewhere on the page. And this is a common footprint that websites use to attract guest writers. Now, because you'll want to write for sites with some kind of link authority, you can use Ahrefs' SEO toolbar to see link authority

metrics right within Google's search results.

Now, with around 200,000 domains you might be wondering which ones allow guest posts. The truth is...you won't know until you ask. But there's a way to improve your hit rate. And that's to look at websites that have previously accepted guest authors.

To find those sites, just click on the websites tab and make sure that your results are sorted by the number of authors. Basically, the more authors you see, the more probable it is that they accept guest posts. Either that or they have a big staff of writers. From here, you can export the results and then move on to the vetting stage. At this point, you'll want to do a quick check to make sure that the websites don't look spammy and that they're actually relevant to your site. For example, golfballs.com is clearly going to be relevant and it's not spammy at all seeing as it's just a regular ecommerce site. As for "metricscat.com," the domain doesn't look like it's about golf. And if you visit the site, you'll see that it looks like a software company. So we'd exclude this domain from our outreach list. Now, another thing worth checking is the domain's sitewide organic traffic.

To do that, go to Site Explorer and search for the domain. Next, click on the organic search tab. If the site is getting consistent search traffic like this, then it's a good sign that the domain is in good standing with Google. Domains that have an organic traffic graph like this is probably something you'd want to exclude when vetting sites. Reason being, the HUGE decline in search traffic is telling us that Google may have penalized the website So you probably wouldn't want to associate your domain with theirs. 

Now, when you're vetting, you'll likely want to find around 10 times the number of posts you can write in a week. For example, if you can write 2 posts per week, then try and find 20 vetted sites. Reason being, most people won't accept your post let alone respond to you. 

Alright, let's move on to the next stage, which is email outreach. Now, when you're pitching websites for a guest post, ideally, you want to come up with a good reason as to why they should accept your post.

Free content is great and all, but it's not necessarily SO convincing that everyone will accept it. So take some time to do your research on the site. See how your expertise can be helpful for their audience or business. For example, if we look at the blog for golfballs.com, you'll see that they have content on "the best golf balls for kids." And after searching through their site, I found that they have another guide on the best golf balls for the longest distance. Now, they're missing out on a lot of these "best golf balls for [blank]." And seeing as they're in the business of selling golf balls, I could easily pitch them topics on something like… "best golf balls for high handicappers," which according to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer gets searched around 800 times per month globally. So I might send them an email and say something like

Now, with this outreach email, I'm showing them that I've done my research on their site, I'm a golfer myself, I have some unique data which I spent time and money to get, and I'm also showing them how my post could help them get more sales. We'll talk quite a bit about outreach in the next lesson, so let's move on to the final tactic, which is the Skyscraper technique.

The Skyscraper Technique is a link building tactic where you find content that has a lot of links, create your own version on the topic but improve on it, and then reach out to those linking to the popular post and ask them to link to yours. Now, as much as I'd love to say that the value exchange is introducing people to your amazing content, that's not exactly valuable in and of itself. 

With the Skyscraper Technique, you need to craft pitches that will actually impress someone so much that they'll want to link to you. It's easiest if you think about it like this. Perhaps you have a friend or family member who always tells the same story over and over and over again.  Maybe it's at a dinner party or when you're meeting with friends who haven't heard that story. That story is the popular content with lots of links. So how do you get them to stop telling that same story? They need to find a better story. One that's SO good that the old story is nothing but a vague memory. That's your content. And the result of them sharing the NEW story, is like getting a link. 

Now, prospecting and vetting are pretty straightforward. But the hardest part of link building, and the part that makes link building challenging is outreach.

We're going to cover how to do blogger outreach that leads to backlinks. And this may very well be the most important lesson in this entire module because nearly ALL link building tactics require some sort of email exchange. So today, we'll cover the primary objective of blogger outreach, two common approaches, and I'll break down the anatomy of a good quality outreach email.

So the primary objective of blogger outreach is to convince those with large targeted audiences to talk about you. And from the perspective of an SEO, you want them to link to your website. Now, outreach doesn't mean broadcasting, meaning, you shouldn't be sending every single person the exact same email like you would through email marketing.

For example, this outreach email that I got is what typical blogger outreach looks like today.

First of all, I can see that they didn't even take a second to check what my name is when literally two thirds of all pages on my personal site have my full name on them. Instead, they stuck with the generic "there," used it in a mass mailing software, and broadcasted it out to hundreds maybe even thousands of people. But the name thing isn't that big of a deal. Second, this is clearly a generic templated email with zero consideration for the recipients. The person says "I'm writing because I saw your post here." Then they didn't even take a second to proofread the email. And their justification for me to link to them is because "it fits well in my post." On top of that, the person followed up with me 3 - MORE - TIMES with nearly the exact same email all sent within the same 30 minute period.

And the results of these kinds of emails lead to nothing. The page the person wanted me to link to got a total of 2 backlinks and both of them are irrelevant and look like they've been paid for. And those backlinks aren't moving the needle since the page gets zero organic search visits. These kinds of emails along with hundreds of others in my inbox are prime examples of why you need to write good quality emails. Otherwise, you'll just blend in with the rest of the spam people get on a daily basis. Afterall, these are unsolicited emails.

Now to be clear, it doesn't mean that you can't use SOME sort of template to send a lot of emails efficiently. For example, I literally just got this email in my inbox and it says:

"Hey dash,

I just published a roundup post about the Best Personal Blogs to Read and I featured you in it - and that's a link to his post."

Then he explicitly says…

But I'm not looking for a share or anything like that. I just wanted to say thank you for all the inspiration you've brought to the blogosphere and digital marketing world. Best of luck in your endeavors and keep up the good work.

It came to the one on my personal site. So he clearly did a bit of digging before sending the email and I'm sure he sent a similar message to all 117 people he featured. So you might be thinking: what's the point of this email if he's not asking for anything?

We'll get to that later in this lesson. Now, the first email that I just showed you is one of the common approaches to blogger outreach. It's called "the shotgun approach" where you build a broad list of targets, load them up into an outreach tool, and then blast out emails to anyone and everyone. The opposite approach to this is the sniper method.

This is when you choose targets carefully based on a tight set of criteria and then send personalized emails. Of the two methods, we recommend going with the sniper approach because shotgunning emails to anyone and everyone is a surefire way to burn bridges. Plus, no one likes spam. And for that reason, the rest of this lesson will be centered around the sniper approach.

So before we get into actually crafting your outreach emails, let's quickly talk about who you should be contacting and how to find their email addresses. In general, you'll want to contact the author of the post IF they work for the website. 

To find who that person is, you can check places like the website's about or team page, their "write for us" page if they have one or their company's LinkedIn profile. Now to actually find the person's email address, the easiest way is to check contact and about pages. This works best for websites with one author. For websites that have MULTIPLE people involved like Sitepoint or Ahrefs, you usually won't find individuals' email addresses on their site. So to find these emails, you can use a tool like Hunter.io, go to their email finder tool, and just search for their first and last name as well as the domain. 

Hunter will then give you their best guess. In this case, they're wrong, but the success rate is generally quite high. Alright, so if you've done the work for the lessons in this module to this point, then you should have chosen one of the 3 tactics I outlined, created a list of prospects, vetted your list, and found some email addresses.

So it's time to actually write the pitch. Now, while there isn't exactly a streamlined formula for every outreach email you send, I want to talk about the anatomy of a simple outreach email that has been effective for me for many years now. And there are five main parts to a typical outreach email.

The goal of the subject line is simply to get them to open the email. Otherwise, there's no chance at getting a response. But you don't want to clickbait them because that'll only leave a bad impression. So when you're writing a subject line, you want to briefly and accurately describe why you're emailing them and ideally, evoke curiosity. If we look back at my guest blogging outreach email from the previous lesson, I showed you a hypothetical pitch where I asked if I could write a post for a golf site and share data I have on the best golf balls for high handicappers. So I might use a subject line like: New data: best balls for high-handicappers. In my opinion, the "new data" part evokes curiosity and the rest of the subject line[t] explains the topic of the email. 

And while there are numerous ways to write an intro, I think it's best to start by telling them WHY you're emailing them. And the goal of this part is to get them to read the next part of the email. For example, with our guest posting sample email, 

I said:

Now, I will admit that the first sentence could definitely be stronger, but I'm basically saying that you've done this and this...but looks like you're missing out an opportunity here.

Simply asking someone for a favor and expecting them to see a mutual benefit is naive. You need to show them WHY you're qualified and justify the pitch that we'll get to in a second. For example, if you're contacting someone to guest post, then explain why they should accept your post over potentially hundreds of other submissions? If you're asking them to add your link to a page on their site, give them an actual good reason why they should. So in our guest posting sample you'll see that I said… Being a high-handicapper myself, I spent hundreds of dollars on balls and countless hours on launch monitors to find the best ball for me. So the fact that a) I mention I'm a high handicapper, and b) I've tested numerous balls and gotten factual data from launch monitors qualifies AND justifies what I'm about to pitch -- which again, is a guest post about the best golf balls for high handicappers.

Alright, the last part of the email is a simple one-liner to keep the conversation rolling. Simply put, you don't want to end your email with a cold hard pitch. The purpose of your first email should be to start a conversation. So you might say something like… Is that something you'd be open to? Is there anything I missed? What do you think? Do you agree with our conclusion? Or whatever.

Now, this is just a basic template you can use as you start blogger outreach. But I don't want you to limit yourself within this box. All you're really doing is talking to people and starting to build SOME kind of relationship. Just think about it like an in person encounter. You wouldn't go to a party and ask a complete stranger to buy you a drink. You might strike up a conversation, connect with them on a common interest, and maybe buy the first round of drinks -- expecting nothing in return. And as a result, they might want to reciprocat by returning an act of kindness. 

Again, the goal of the VERY first email you send is simple: start a conversation.

And this brings us back to this outreach email that I got. The person who mentioned me on their site specifically told me that he's not looking for a share or anything like that. And he literally just wants to say thank you. So what did that accomplish?

#1. I actually read his email

#2. I responded to him and said thanks for the mention

#3. should he email me again, I'll probably open it because I'll recognize his name.

So while there will be times where it makes sense to ask for the link or guest posting opportunity right away, there are A LOT of times when it makes more sense to just start that conversation and see where it leads. The final tip I want to leave you with is to ONLY use your best work when sending email pitches.

You don't want to email anyone and everyone for EVERY single piece of content you create. For example, if you had a golf site and you created a post on a topic like… "what is a handicap," there's nothing interesting or unique about it yet it's still a topic you would probably want to cover. Coming up with a good reason for them to link to you on this topic would be tough. Plus, time is finite. So it's worth doing outreach for your BEST content because there's a higher probability that it'll result in backlinks. Alright, so with everything you've learned up to this point, you should be able to create content for your website that'll get traffic from search engines.

But there's still one piece to the fundamentals

of SEO that we haven't covered and that's

Throughout the next two lessons, we're going to be talking about technical SEO. And technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to help search engines find, understand, and index your pages..Now, for beginners, technical SEO doesn't need to be all that technical. And for that reason, this module will be focused on the basics so you can perform regular maintenance. on your site and ensure that your pages can be discovered and indexed by search engines.

Basically, if search engines can't properly access, read, understand, or index your pages, then you won't rank or even be found for that matter. So to avoid innocent mistakes like removing yourself from Google's index or diluting a page's backlinks, I want to discuss 4 things that should help you avoid that.

First is the noindex meta tag. By adding this piece of code to your page,.it's telling search engines not to add it to their index. And you probably don't want to do that. And this actually happens more often than you might think.

For example, let's say you hire Design Inc to create or redesign a website for you. During the development phase, they may create it on a subdomain on their own site. So it actually makes sense for them to noindex the site they're working on. But what often happens is after you've approved the design, they'll migrate it over to your domain.

But they often forget to remove the meta noindex tag. And as a result, your pages end up getting removed from Google's search index or never making it in. Now, there are times when it actually makes sense to noindex certain pages. For example, our authors pages are noindexed because from an SEO perspective, these pages provide very little value to search engines. But from a user experience standpoint, it can be argued that it makes sense to be there. Some people may have their favorite authors on a blog and want to read just their content. Generally speaking, for small sites, you won't need to worry about noindexing specific pages. Just keep your eye out for noindex tags on your pages, especially if after a redesign.

The second point of discussion is robots.txt. Robots.txt is a file that usually lives on your root domain. And you should be able to access it at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Now, the file itself includes a set of rules for search engine crawlers and tells them where they can and cannot go on your site. And it's important to note that a website can have multiple robots files if you're using subdomains. For example, if you have a blog on domain.com, then you'd have a robot.txt file for just the root domain. 

But you might also have an ecommerce store that lives on store.domain.com. So you could have a separate robots file for your online store. That means that crawlers could be given two different sets of rules depending on the domain they're trying to crawl. Now, the rules are created using something called "directives." And while you probably don't need to know what ALL of them are or what they do, there are two that you should know about from an ndexing standpoint.

The first is user-agent, which defines the crawler that the rule applies to. And the value for this directive would be the name of the crawler. For example, Google's user-agent is named Googlebot. And the second directive is disallow. This is a page or directory on your domain that you don't want the user-agent to crawl. For example, if you set the user agent to Googlebot and the disallow value to a slash, you're telling Google not to crawl any pages on your site. Not good.

Now, if you were to set the user-agent to an asterisk, that means your rule should apply to ALL crawlers. So if your robots file looks something like this, then it's telling all crawlers, please don't crawl any pages on my site. While this might sound like something you would never use, there are times when it makes sense to block certain parts of your site.or to block certain crawlers. For example, if you have a WordPress websit and you don't want your wp-admin folder to be crawled, then you can simply set the use agent to all crawlers and set the disallow value to /wp-admin/. Now, if you're a beginner, I wouldn't worry too much about your robots file. But if you run into any indexing issues that need to be troubleshooted, robots.txt is one of the first places I'd check. Alright, the next thing to discuss are sitemaps. Sitemaps are usually XML files and they list the important URLs on your website.

 So these can be pages, images, videos, and other files. And sitemaps help search engines like Googl to more intelligently crawl your site. Now, creating an XML file can be complicate if you don't know how to code and it's almost impossible to maintain manually. But if you're using a CMS like WordPress, there are plugins like Yoast and Rank Math which will automatically generate sitemaps for you. To help search engines find your sitemaps, you can use the sitemap directive in your robots file and also submit it in Google search console. Next up are redirects. A redirect takes visitors and bots from one URL to another. And their purpose is to consolidate signals.

For example, let's say you have two pages on your website on the best golf balls. An old one at domain.com/best-golf-balls-2018, and another at domain.com/best-golf-balls. Seeing as these are highly relevant to one another, it would make sense to redirect the 2018 version to the current version. And by consolidating these pages, you're telling search engines to pass the signals from the redirected URL to the destination URL. And the last point I want to talk about is the canonical tag.

A canonical tag is a snippet of HTML code that looks like this. Its purpose is to tell search engines what the preferred URL is for a page. And this helps to solve duplicate content issues. For example, let's say your website is accessible at both http://yourdomain.com and https://yourdomain.com. And for whatever reason, you weren't able to use a redirect. These would be exact duplicates. But by setting a canonical URL, you're telling search engines that there's a preferred version of the page.

As a result, they'll pass signals such as links to the canonical URL so they're not diluted across two different pages. Now, it's important to note that Google may choose to ignore your canonical tag. Looking back at the previous example, if we set the canonical tag to the unsecure HTTP page, Google would probably choose the secure HTTPS version instead. Now, if you're running a simple WordPres, site, you shouldn't have to worry about this too much.

CMS's are pretty good out of the box and willbhandle a lot of these basic technical issues for you. So these are some of the foundational things that are good to know when it comes to indexing, which is arguably the most important part in SEO. Because again, if your pages aren't getting indexed, nothing else really matters. Now, we won't really dig deeper into this because you'll probably only have to worry about indexing issues if and when you run into problems. Instead, we'll be focusing on technical SEO best practices to keep your website in good health.

So the first thing you should do is ensure that your site structure follows a logical hierarchy. Site structure is simply the way you organize content on your website. ou can think of it like a mindmap. At the top, you'd have your homepage. Then you'd probably have main topics that branch out from your homepage like your services page, your blog, and about page. Then from these main topics, you'd probably have even more branches to other pages.