What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization A Step by Step Guide

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Welcome everyone gonna talk about keyword research how does a search engine work then we're going to go into on-page and off-page SEO and techniques and tactics related to both of those we're gonna dive into how Google algorithms work the types of SEO website architecture local SEO how to measure your SEO performance ie analytics and then we gonna have a little quiz at the end so a lot of information in today's tutorial so let's get right to it and start with why SEO and some of you with a website maybe your bloggers maybe you just have a website with a lot of content probably have this conversation before where you said hey look I got all this content but I can't be found on Google search engines and the first reaction somebody might have is well why don't you optimize your

website for SEO and some of you may know what SEO is some of you may not know what SEO is and the natural question would be what is my website need SEO what is SEO well there are a lot of inherent benefits to SEO which stands for search engine optimization and the first benefit is it increases visibility on search engines so all the techniques we're going to cover today in today's SEO tutorial are going to be techniques to boost your visibility on the search engines so we're not talking about Google per se we're also talking about Bing and Yahoo and Baidu and some of the other search engines that are out there so that's inherently the first benefit to doing search engine optimization is we want to increase our visit ability on search engines and today's tutorial is going to cover that the

second benefit is it will rank help you rank higher for relevant keywords so the idea behind search engines is we want our websites to be found our pages on our websites to be found when somebody does a search and so ideally when somebody does a search you want to be found for the keyword queries that are most relevant to your business so we want those keyword queries to match the content that we have on our website and so that's a benefit we want to be found for what people are looking for and so that's the beauty of SEO is that your content could be found for those relevant keywords the third benefit is it helps to increase traffic to your website so the idea here is a lot of people go to search engines on a daily basis around the world depending on what search engine they use Google is one of the most popular but if you look at China Baidu is a popular search engine

nonetheless what's common around the world is people do use search engines to find information and so what we want to do is we want to be found in search engines because that's what people use to find content and so we're found on search engines people are going to find us for relevant keywords and if they see our content is relevant and the search engine results after they query a keyword then they're going to click on our link and go to our website so if you can imagine all that content you have on your website and all that content is able to be found on the search engines and a lot of people are using search engines with relevant keywords then naturally you're gonna get clicks that's going to drive traffic to your website and so that's in summary how it works and that's what we want we want to increase traffic to our website from search engines because that's what people use and then

 inherently because of that it will help people find our website so an optimized site helps your target audience find your website increase brand awareness so that's the idea if we could drive traffic to our website from search engines and multiple traffic sometime from the same users it's going to naturally also increase our brand awareness people are going to know more about us if we're found in the search engines and then another benefit here is it helps to convert a local business into a global business what we mean by that is if we're found in the search engine results if somebody types on a relevant keyword and our content shows up in the search engine results on google or

Baidu or Bing or any search engine ideally our business can be found all over the world our content can be found all over the world it's not necessarily local per se we may have a local business in a particular city or locale but that doesn't stop anybody from around the world from finding our content so the idea behind search engines is look the contents available to anyone around the world and to me this is one of the biggest benefits because it can boost traffic it can boost brand awareness it can boost traffic and the whole idea is taking your business and taking it and elevating it to more of a global brand versus just a local print and so that inherently is one of the key benefits to search engine optimization so let's move on to what is SEO and we're going to talk about SEO and how do you define it so SEO again stands for search engine optimization it's basically the practice of getting

traffic from the organic search results on not just Google but really any search engine so depending on the keyword that somebody types in regardless of what search engine they use that search engines going to rank websites based on the relevancy of the keyword so if you have a website and you have a blog and you have a lot of content in your food blogger and you write about let's just say restaurants and you're doing restaurant reviews and you happen to be doing a restaurant review about Italian restaurants well somebody typed in Italian restaurants you may want to come up for that keyword okay so it's all about relevancy does that search engines see that particular blog post as the most

relevant for that search query so that's what SEO is all about we want to be able to rank our websites for certain keywords on search engines so if our website is ranked on search engines then there's a lot of benefits to that we talked about those benefits in the why SEO but the biggest benefit is the visibility that comes with that so the higher your ranked on a search engine the more traffic you're going to get and it's a snowball effect because the more traffic you get the more conversions you're gonna get so here you can see the percentage of Google traffic the higher you rank so generally there are 10 results per page on a search engine so if you're ranked in the top three or even in the first or second position you're gonna get a majority of the clicks and search engine optimization starts with the keyword because we want to be found for relevant keywords and so the first step and search

engine optimization is always going to be keyword research so it is the most important step and so what does keyword research all about well it's process of identifying keywords we want to be found for on the search engines so millions of people use search engines on a daily basis we want to be found for those keywords that people type in that are relevant to the content we want to be found so going back to the Italian restaurant example if we're writing a blog post about Italian restaurants if somebody types in the best Italian restaurants or Italian restaurants in a specific city we want to be found for that content if it's relevant to what we wrote about so keyword research should be done based on two factors really it's based on the factor of how much traffic or volume a particular search engine query has and it's based on competition and really the underlying factor here is that all keywords in your keyword research should be relevant so you need to understand what those

keywords are so are they relevant to the content that you want to be found for if they are then really the two you want to look for is the volume how much volume or traffic each keyword has associated with it and then the competition how many other websites are trying to be found for the same keyword so those are the factors involved with keyword research you always want to choose relevant keywords and then once you find or choose those relevant keywords you want to be able to find out exactly how much volume and how much competition is associated with each of those keywords and so when you look at keywords you're always going to choose relevant keywords but there are two types of keywords there are short tail keywords and there are long tail keywords and we're going to talk about both of these here so let's start with short tail keywords so short tail keywords are generic

 keywords generally they're less than three words in a keyword phrase for example Italian restaurants so short tail keywords generally have very high search volume that means that if somebody types in Italian restaurants then there's going to be a large amount of volume with that meaning that generally a lot of people type in the keyword Italian restaurants however with high volume always comes high competition so if you want to be found for Italian restaurants know that you are ranked number one or number two or even on page one of Google you're going to get a lot of traffic however to get to page one of Google or even position one or two it's going to take you a while because they're probably a lot of websites who are in front of you who want to be ranked and found for the same

 keyword so the whole idea with short tail keywords is it's a lot of visibility it's a lot of traffic a lot of volume but also a lot of competition and generally the underlying factor here is that if you are ranked for a very broad or short tail keyword like Italian restaurants then chances are it's not going to be as relevant so if you get the traffic to your website then chances are the conversions not necess really gonna happen because we don't necessarily know the mindset of somebody typing in a very short tail generic keyword like a tie in restaurants they could be doing research on Italian restaurants they could be a chef who's trying to get recipes for Italian food it could be worse looking for Italian restaurants in a different City or it could be a person just looking for Italian restaurants near their location or where they're living and so there's a lot of different factors with short tail keywords so you just don't know because it's so generic and because it's so generic if you do get the traffic for that generic keyword then the chances of the conversion are going to be lower than say if it's a more

specific relevant keyword so let's take an example of a short tail keyword let's just stick with Italian restaurants so I'm gonna go to a tool called Moz and while Moz has a tool called the keyword explorer and within Moz so if you go to Moz comm and then use the keyword explorer you can get an idea of how much volume and competition are associated with a particular keyword so in this example we're using Italian restaurants it's a very broad keyword we could see that the monthly volume is between 70,000 and 118 thousand per month okay so that means for a particular keyword in the United States on a search engine you're going to get about seventy thousand to one hundred eighteen thousand people who type in that keyword and so if we were looking at the difficulty of that keyword you can see that it's fairly difficult because out of one to one hundred it's going to score

forty three so it's fairly difficult however if you notice to click the rates very high so Moz estimates that we'll have a forty percent organic click the rate for that keyword if we're rank for it so if it's relevant to us and we want to get some visibility to our site then yeah we want to use that generic short tail keyword however if we're interested in conversions then we really want to turn our attention to longer tail keywords however if you want the visibility then you want to use short tail keywords if you want the conversion then you want to switch over to longer tail keyword so longer tail keywords are more specific they usually consist of more than three keywords so tie-in restaurants very generic if we add a few more keywords that keyword phrase it then becomes longer tail so compared to short tail keywords longer tail keywords are generally less competitive and the search volume is not as high case in point so if we go back to Moz and then we look at the keyword explorer and we'd

actually type in a tie in restaurants and let's just say Orlando Florida Moz is going to generate some monthly volume for us and they're gonna allow us to understand how difficult that keyword is and so here you can see very very little search volume in fact so little volume there's eleven 250 ok so that means on average that this keyword generates 11 250 queries a month so very low compared to our short tail keyword Italian restaurants the difficulty here didn't necessarily lessen but it is less competitive so if you're interested in conversions and you have an Italian restaurant and say Orlando Florida then this is the keyword you may want to use so there's a trade-off between longer tail and shorter tail well when visitors land from longer tail keywords they're usually ready to make a

purchase they're usually more specific intent there's more intent involved with a longer tail keyword so best restaurants in a time in Florida branded shoes in Florida something very specific is going to generate probably a higher conversion rate than something more generic so that's the trade-off and so when to use long tail keywords well we want to use long tail keywords and for targeting pages with a product or specific article so if we're interested in that particular conversion then longer tail keywords are likely more the way we want to go versus something more generic which means if you're using a generic shorter tail keyword you're more interested in the visibility and the traffic not necessarily the conversion how does a search engine work so let's talk about that for a minute so we know that means people use search engine we know that we want to be found on search engines but how do we

actually get our content in the search engines so that's the important part that we need to understand if we have our own website and we have our content so these search engines want your content in their search engine index so how do they get your content well they send out BOTS or files and we'll just call them spiders so they send out these spiders to crawl your website and the whole idea behind using the insect spider is because we're talking about the world wide web and so if Google for example sends a bot to your website they're gonna crawl your website and spider your web so the creating a web of pages so all they're doing is following link and every page and link that they hit they're going to bring back to their server so these spiders scan your web sites they just follow links and they take all the pages and content that they're able to gather when they hit your website and they're going to pull all that information back into their own index so if you think about Google

they're crawling or spidering millions and billions of web sites all those millions and billions of web sites are sitting on Google servers so when somebody does do a search query Google because they have all these websites and their index are able to quickly determine which website is the most relevant for that search engine queries so that's generally how search engines work so let's talk about the types of SEO so if we want our website to be found on these search engines and Google or these search engines have crawled our website then what we want to do is we want to basically look at it from a two pronged perspective it's a two prong strategy so the first strategy we're gonna talk about today is on-page SEO so those are on page SEO is defined as what we do on our website to be relevant for search engine query on a search engine so again on page SEO is what we do to our own website off page SEO is the other the second part of that SEO strategy and off page SEO determines what we do our website to be relevant for search engine query and so off page SEO generally is

synonymous with link building and we'll talk about that a little bit more as we go forward but really when you want to do SEO when you want to be found for a keyword on a search engine you're going to have to apply but with on-page SEO and off page SEO so let's talk about on-page SEO and so this is the first part of our SEO effort we want to focus on on page SEO first and so on page SEO is the method of optimizing elements of web pages remember these are all the items we want to do on our website to be relevant for certain search queries so it's basically the idea behind this is to make our web pages more relevant for specific search queries on search engines and so there are a number of different elements on our website on a particular web page that we want to manipulate or optimize if you will to be relevant for search engine query and so let's start around the idea that you know you there's a number of things you can do so let's start with schema first and so schema is nothing more

 than it's a collaborative effort between Bing Yahoo Baidu Google and the idea is really they want to understand more about the content of your website and so the idea behind this is that you want to be able to provide snippets of information to these search engines so they understand a little bit more about what your web page is trying to portray or convey so that they can find out exactly what's relevant to that search engine query so it's nothing more than micro data or bits of information that you can add to your website or web page in order to provide a little bit more enhanced information to the search engines so if you think about it's collaborating with the search engine so the more basic information you share with the search engines that the better off they have to under and what your webpage or website is all about and so the more information they have the better of an opportunity you have to be ranked for that search engine query and so if you have a website with reviews if you

 have a website with images if you have let's say a website with products with prices in other words you have an e-commerce website and you're trying to sell product well to me you want to employ schema because in schema is snippets of information that are provided to the search engines so they can better understand so you can certainly provide snippets of information in the terms of images or prices or particular products and how much is left in stocks so all this information these bits of information you can provide to the search engines so that they can better understand what it is you're trying to sell how much it caused how much is in inventory what people think about the product etc so if you have a website that's sub products you probably want to employ schema and so when you do employ schema again snippets of information provided to the search engines the search engines are going to better understand and then they're going to present that information in the search engine

 results so if you have ratings and reviews you can provide snippets of information to the search engines the search engines in turn are going to present that information in the search engine results so if you have positive reviews then somebody typing in in this example shoes they're going to be able to see that you have positive reviews for your websites so that's the whole idea behind schema is to provide snippets of information so again it's not just related to reviews also for images so if you have images you can provide snippets of information to the search engine so they can see you know what the shoe actually looks like when they type in in this example Puma shoes or like I mentioned inventory snippets of information about your inventory the search engines are going to provide that information search engine results so if somebody's looking for women's training shoes or women's Puma shoes and they see your product and they see how this is in stock great let me go to this website and purchase these shoes so that's the whole idea behind schema is making sure you present

information critical to your website so that the search engines better understand what your website's all about it also house with relevancy because the more those search engines know about your website the more relevant your website becomes and the better chance you have to rank for a particular keyword there's also some other information here involved with schema and those are site links so site links additional pages on your website ok that's show up in the search engine result and so again the more information a search engine has about you the better chance you have to be found the better chance you have to get it clicked so site links are just additional links on your site that appear in search engine results and that's all a benefactor of having schema so here you can see in this example we have additional web pages that show under certain search engine results and so by

having more links in the search engine results you have a better chance of getting the click so if you want more information about schema I would recommend going to schema.org so when you go to schema.org you can actually click on a link that allows you to see all the information you need to get started with schema.org okay so it's got a lot of information available to you it describes what it is you have to do in order to get your information and set for these search engines to better understand Ghassan for on page SEO is title tag and so title tag is which shows up and the search engine results so if you've ever done a search engine query meaning you've gone to Google typed in a query using a keyword like Italian restaurants you're gonna see specific search engine results and the title tag is what appears in those search engine results so a title tag is important because it's the title of a web

page that appears in those results and so the title tag is something that's important because if we want to be found for specific keyword we want to make sure that keyword is in the title tag because that keywords gonna describe what the page is all about and so if we want to be found for that keyword let's just say Italian restaurants in Florida for example that's going to be part of our title tag so when somebody types in that particular keyword query Italian restaurants in Florida then we have a good chance of showing up because the title tag which is the title of the page is going to have that particular query in it and so you can edit the title tag and when you edit the title tag you want to be able to put that particular keyword in the title tag so if we do a search on Google for example so if I go to google.com and I type in Italian restaurants and Florida here I can see under the local search results and here I can see Italian restaurants in Florida Central Florida ten restaurants in Miami so you can see that these are highlighted so the title tag is not only stands out but allows you to you know

 showcase exactly what your page is all about and it helps with the relevancy of that keyword query so when you're trying to optimize your website using the title tag for specific keyword you want to keep it in mind a couple parameters because title tags show up in the search engine results but certain search engines particularly Google has character limits around the number of characters you can use in the title tag and so we want to keep that in mind so ideally we want to format our title tag appropriately and so to me the most optimal way to optimize a title tag using a particular keyword that you want to be found for is to use that keyword in the title tag and then separate that with your brand name so if you actually have two keywords then you can use the primary keyword first then the secondary keyword and then the brand name so to me this is the most optimal format but keep in mind there are character limits but if you look at this format to me it's the most easiest format to abide by because it makes your title tag more relevant you don't have to worry about necessarily fitting in excess keywords in the title tag because again the title tag is character limits so if we take a look at

our example in Google search results if you go over those limits and the title tag is generally between 60 and 65 characters long and so if you go over those limits let's just say your title tag is more than 65 characters Google in this case is going to cut off big characters and so here you can see the ellipses after the title tag now if you follow the format that you know we at simply learned recommend you can see if our keyword is Italian restaurants in Florida and then separated by the brand name this gives you an optimal format for title tag it also makes it relevant for the keyword query so you want to keep that title tag probably no more than 60 characters because you'd flirt with putting more than 60 characters then the search engines are going to cut off that title tag and then that's not going to look good and it's gonna also become less relevant so we want to keep the character counts in mind so if you abide by that format of the keyword and then maybe the secondary keyword if you have one separated by the brand name then you should be good to go with making sure your title tag is relevant for that keyword query so let's then turn our attention to the Meta Description so the Meta

Description is just a short description about the content on your web page so if the title tag is the title of the webpage the Meta Description describes the page okay so it's a description about what that page is so the meta description appears under the title tag and then the URL so if we go back to our Google search results we look here Italian restaurants in Florida Maggiano's Little Italy is the brand or the restaurant we could see the URL which is underneath the title tag and then here we could see the Meta Description and so with the Meta Description you have a little bit more room to work with in terms of character counts but the Meta Description just like the table tag is just as important because one it shows up in the search engine results two it describes what the page is all about and three it allows you to optimize the Meta Description so the Meta Description becomes more relevant for that search query that somebody types in to that particular search engine so the optimal length for a Meta Description you can go up to 300 characters but I would not even recommend even flirting with that limit because just like the title tag search engines in the case of Google will actually cut off the Meta Description so if we look here back at our search results if you go over those limits you'll

see that the search engines will cut off the copy of the Meta Description width and they'll just put ellipses so we don't necessarily want to go over those limits so my recommendation is to keep that Meta Description probably a hundred and sixty-five characters two to no more than 200 because we're trying to describe not only what the page is all about but we're also trying to optimize that Meta Description so it becomes relevant for the search engine query and so you want to keep it short and concise so if we look at our example here Italian restaurants in Florida Maggiano's is a good job it's a book an event space make a reservation at Maggiano's in florida to enjoy delicious few maps menus and more so very concise Meta Description it includes their keyword query that they want to be found for Italian restaurants in Florida and so to me it's short and concise describes what the page is all about and allows them to fit it all in within the character limits so here in this example we want to be found for Amazon Puma shoes so the brand here is Amazon so Amazon wants to include you

know Puma shoes not only in the title tag but they want to try and fit that into the Meta Description however the whole idea behind the Meta Description more than anything else is describe what the page is all about okay you want to be relevant for the search engine query but you also want to sound natural as well you want to be able to really the whole idea between the tail tagging amount of description is to get people to click on your link because remember there are nine other listings on the Google search engine results page for page one so we want our Meta Description and our title tag to stand out so we want it to be relevant who we want it to stand out so it's important you write that Meta Description according to what the page is all about but you want it to stand out uniquely and accordingly so once you've done the title tag and the Meta Description you want to focus your attention on a header tag and so header tags are used on a web page to really separate out content and so you have headers and sub headers and so ideally you want to be able to optimize the header tag

and sub-header and so if we think about a headers there's a hierarchy for headers so there's between a header one and a header six and so we'll just shorten the word header and we'll call it an h1 so h1 is really at the top of the hierarchy for headers and so if we use that h1 on our webpage then what we're trying to explain that the search engines is listen this particular keyword phrase in our header is is a header and we're emphasized what it is we're trying to say and that's how really the search engines interpret headers they see an h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 and h6 they know that if you're using an h1 you're trying to really emphasize something so if you put that keyword in the header tag what you're telling the search engines is hey I'm really emphasizing this particular keyword and so the search engine will interpret that as important and if you use your keyword in that header then really what you're saying

 is hey I really this keyword is really relevant to that query so naturally the other benefit of a header is it really breaks up the page as well so the header you can use sub headers and sub patters are nothing more than say a lower H tag so if you have a header that's an h1 you can use an h2 and h3 as a sub header and so forth and so on because what you're really trying to do is not only organize the content in your webpage but you're trying to emphasize that for google so if something's an h2 or an h6 you're basically telling Google or the other search engines this is not as important to say an h1 so if we take a look at our example that we've been using for tallien restaurants in Florida and if we click on Maggiano's we could see that they're using headers so if we click on Maggiano's we can see that this is a header here we want to bring everyone together Maggiano's Italian restaurant in Florida so they're using that header to break up the text here you can see they're using another header here

excellent Italian food and an excellent experience to match so that's a header to break up the content ok they're not using sub headers they're using headers but that's fine they're really trying to emphasize the content by putting in that header and so headers help not only organize the content but they help emphasize the actual keyword it is you want Google to recognize so if we're not sure if something is a header we could simply just mouse over what we think is a header and we can just right click and if you right click on something you're gonna see a menu and if we click inspect element then basically what that browser in this case Firefox is going to do is show us the HTML of that particular thing of that item that we right-click so here we could see in this particular case this is an h2 tag so it's an h2 so if we scroll down and we mouse over this we could see this is also an h2 as well so this particular page is using h2 tags not h1 but an h2 so what they're explaining or trying to convey to the search engines is listen this is an h2 it's still relevant we're still trying to put emphasis on it but not as much so we want to be able to use our H ones and our h2s accordingly so remember an h1 is you're

providing the search engines with information by telling them hey this is the most relevant this is we're putting emphasis on this keyword and h2 nuts as much as an h1 and h3 not as much as an h2 so use your headers accordingly not only just to break up the text not only for styling but for emphasis for the search engines so headers are very important elements for on-page SEO let's turn our attention to the URL structure okay so URL stands for Uniform Resource locator and so our URL is the specific location of a webpage on the Internet so basically if we're found in the search engine results one of our web pages are gonna go along with the title tag in the Meta Description in the search engine results page so if I go back to our search engine results for Italian restaurants in Florida we could see that the particular URL in question here is occations Maggiano's dot-com / florida so that's the URL that shows up along with the title tag in the Meta Description so if we click on that link that's exactly where we're gonna go so URL structure is important for on-page SEO so why is it

 important because not only does it show people where they're going but we have an opportunity to optimize that URL for the search engines to make our URL more relevant for that search query so just like the title tag just like the Meta Description just like the headers we can also manipulate the URL so if we look at a URL it consists of really the protocol and the protocol means it's either a secure site or non secure site so in this example we can see it's HTTPS and that means it's a secure site and so ideally search engines like web pages or web sites that are secure so after the protocol you're gonna see the domain and then after the domain you're gonna see subdirectories okay so that's generally the breakout with a URL structure so you have the protocol the domain and subdirectories and then you may have more subdirectories so if we go back to the example we've been working with if I go back to you Maggiano's you can see here this is a secure site HTTPS you can see the domain in this case it's actually a sub domain so Maggiano's com is the domain but they decided to put locations dot Maggiano's com and that's okay we call that a subdomain and then here you can see they have one particular subdirectory after the domain and that's Florida so a well-structured URL not only provides the users with information about where they're going when they click on your link in the search engine results but more importantly it also provides the search engines and some

information about what the page is all about so going back to our simple example with Maggiano's the search engines know that hey if somebody clicks on this link they're going to a page about Florida pretty simple the URL structure is pretty simple to understand we know it's a secure site we know its Maggiano's calm and we know the sub page is Florida with subdirectories Florida you want to be careful like everything else since in SEO there are parameters just like the title tag has parameters up to 65 characters the Meta Description tag has a limit of up to 165 characters a well structured URL also has character counts but the idea here is we don't want to get into numbers when we talk about character counts for URL structure really the rule of thumb or the best practice for you URL is to keep it short and understandable okay if we keep it clear and concise not only does the end user know where they're going but the search engines know what the page is all about so the rule of thumb is

always if you don't understand the URL or what it means then the search engines are likely not going to understand what the URL means we want to keep the number of directors and subdirectories to a limit so ideally here you can see in this example xyz.com if we want to optimize that URL we could put the targeted keyword in the URL if we'd like to but we want to keep it probably to a minimum of one to two subdirectories the shorter this the amount of subdirectories the better off we are because that means that not only the end user will understand the URL but the search engines will understand the URL as well so we always want to make sure that URL is readable again for the end user and the search engine and so in this example you can see amazon.com slash men's - shoes slash sneakers slash Puma very easy understand as an end user I know that I'm going to a puma page for men on amazon.com now when you get into your rels with dynamic parameters in them then ideally you as an end user is not going to really know where you're going to go so in the example here the middle example I can see that I'm going maybe to a shoes page but I have no idea with the rest that URL

 means and in the other example where you have a very low URL readability I have no idea as an end-user where I'm going to go so as an end user I need to be able to have confidence in knowing where I'm gonna go once I click on a link in the search engine results so if I don't have that confidence if I don't understand what the URL is then the you then the search engines aren't going to understand as well and it's not going to bode well in terms of relevancy and again the URL structure is important factor for being relevant and if we're not relevant then the chances of us are ranking higher is not going to be as good because our URL is not readable so ideally what we want to do is make sure we're using keywords that the end-user in the search engines understand and if we need to separate out those keywords in the first example we could see men's shoes we want to separate that out with a hyphen and so ideally if you have a URL that's readable and it's short and concise then again your chances of ranking higher on the search engine results page bodes better than if you have a very long antiquated unreadable URL so let's focus our attention on image alt text or alt tags if you will so alt tags or text tags as they're also known as allow the search engines to understand a little bit more about what's on the page in terms of images so images are a prominent part of every webpage on the Internet unfortunately images are you know usually files that are not readable by search

engines so we want to be able to provide some alternate text so that the search engines understand what those images are all about so again it gives us an opportunity to communicate with the search engines so that they better understand what the image is all about to make the page more relevant so generally if an image fails to load on a web page as an example well if you have an alt tag then the alt tag is going to show in place of the image not loading more importantly if we have an alt tag and the search engines have spidered our website and somebody's actually searching for images then the alt tag is used as a descriptor for the image so it Hustle helps us get found for the images on search engine results pages and so like everything else we've talked about with on-page SEO there are character limits to alt tags you know generally the rule of thumb is 125 characters for an alt tag and the alt tag is used in the HTML so we want to surround our image with an alt tag by putting in a descriptor and so ideally if you're trying to be found for a particular search engine query then you want to use the search engine query as part of the alt tag and so let me show you an example here

going back to Maggiano's we look at their web page and we actually inspect one of their images on this web page if we look at for example a Pinterest or Facebook we can actually see in this example that the image here has an alt tag as Pinterest and so you want to be able again to put in alt tags for all your images so it better communicates with the search engines what the image is all about it also allows the search engines to rank images in the search engine results based on that alt text and what the keyword query was so alt tags play an important role because again if the image doesn't load on the webpage for some reason then the alt tag is there as a replacement it's also there to help the search engines rank those images and understand the page a little bit better so you always want to be able to put in the keyword query that you're trying to be found for in the alt tag and so be as descriptive as possible you have a hundred and twenty-five characters to use so be as descriptive make it easy to read because again this is what's going to show up in the search engine results just for images okay let's turn our attention to internal links so when it comes to SEO internal links also play a vital role because basically an internal link which is a link from one page of your website to another page of your website allows Google to or other search engines really to follow the pages as they index your entire website so it serves that purpose of allowing search engines to index so it definitely improves the indexing but internal linking also has many benefits and one of the other benefits is it helps

spreads what we call link juice and so link juice is basically a way another way of saying you know this page is important because it has links from other pages on our website so if we link I have a link from one page to another and a couple of other pages on our site linked to that same page then search engines tend to take notice and they tend to note that you know if one particular page has a number of different links pointing to it then this page may be important and so that's what we mean by link juice it's a signal for the search engines to determine what pages on your website are important because of the links that point to it and so if we look at this example here we could see that you know there's usually a navigation on a website that point to pages and every page on a website tends to have a link but if more than one page has multiple links then again that signals to the search engines that hey you know this particular page seems to be important because it has a lot of Link's pointing to it our attention to site maps so sitemaps basically allow us to list all the web pages on our website so we could do that in a couple of different ways but when we do it it basically is going to and help the

 search engines find our page is easier just as I mentioned a minute ago about internal linking when you have one link point to another page on your website it helps the search engines find these pages quicker well sitemaps do same thing except sitemaps are an entire list of links on your website and it allows the site search engines to find all your pages and you would say fairly easily but it also helps the end user to so if you have a big website like Amazon has a huge website with a lot of different products well if you're looking for a particular product you can do a search for it or you can look at the site map and the site map will list all the particular pages on the site and so it's also good for the end user as well so when we talk about the end user and we talk about search engines there are really two different types of sitemaps you got the HTML version which is for the end user that's gonna be nothing more than a link on the website usually in the footer and so when you click on that sitemap link you'll get a list of all the links on the website ok so that's an HTML sitemap then we have the sitemap for the search engines you know the spiders that want to crawl our site so that's the XML

 sitemap and in XML is just a different format it's just a way to format all the links on our website so the HTML sitemap is HTML written in hypertext markup language designed for the end user if you click on it it helps the end user navigate the website quickly because they can find what they're looking for and so generally that is an HTML now if we turn our attention to the XML sitemap that's basically designed for search engines and thing about the search the XML sitemap is we work with Google to go ahead and and and submit the sitemap to Google so Google can quickly understand what pages on our website so for example if I went to a website let's just say valley fig com so if I went here and if I'm a search engine I'm gonna want to know all the URLs that are on this website well as an end user I can also just type in sitemap dot XML usually that's the XML file where all the URLs are located and here I can see all of the URLs on Valley fit com and so the idea behind an XML sitemap is we want to communicate that XML file to the search engines and so Google in

particular has they call a search console in search console if you go to google.com slash webmasters so search console is a way to communicate with Google and one of the ways to communicate with Google is to submit a sitemap so we want to submit our XML sitemap so if our XML sitemap is located in the root directory so after our domain valley fig comm slash sitemap XML we know that that file is sitting in the root directory I can go into search console and I can submit my site map and when I submit my site map then I'm basically communicating with Google telling Google hey Google instead of trying to find all our web pages on our website when you crawl the website we're going to go ahead and submit the sitemap to you so we're gonna tell you all the pages on our website and so by doing that by submitting our sitemap XML file to Google it speeds up the process because Google's able to now understand all the pages on our website that have been submitted and then once we submit those pages then Google is going to quickly index a majority of those pages if not all of those pages and so that's the benefit of having an XML sitemap for the search engines is that we can quickly submit that file to the search engine so our pages get submitted and indexed quicker so continuing on with on-page SEO we now turn our attention to PageSpeed and so PageSpeed also known as page low time of a particular page of a particular website is important for SEO why is it

important because Google has millions of users use their search engine and Google wants their users to have a good experience and so if Google ranks websites based on relevancy they also want to take into account PageSpeed because if a website does not load fast or a web page doesn't load fast then it would be detrimental for Google to rank that page high because what's going to happen is that page is going to get a number of clicks and then the user experiences not to be that great and so therefore it's gonna have a negative impact not only in the end-user but Google as well and so page load time then becomes important for on-page SEO so really when it comes to page load time we really want to pay attention to how long it takes our web pages to load in terms of seconds because if a page loads slow then chances are the user experience is not going to be good even from an analytics perspective meaning if I go to Google type in a query click on a link and then it's that link takes me to a website where the webpage loads very slow chances are I'm not gonna spend a lot of time waiting for that page to load I'm going to leave that page and if I leave the page then it's gonna cause up what they call a bounce so I'm going to bounce from the page and that's just not good for the entire search ecosystem and so we want to pay close attention to page load time because the faster a site or page loads Google's going to recognize that and that's going to help with ranking and so how do we understand how our pages load well we can look no further than web analytics tool like Google

Analytics for example so if we turn our attention to Google Analytics if I go to say valley fig comms analytics account I can look over the last 30 days and I can see ok on average our page average page load time for the entire site was 5 seconds around 5 seconds and ideally we want our pages load as quick as possible I would say the rule of thumb on page load time is probably no more than 3 to 4 seconds ok but there are factors involved with page load time so a couple of factors are the browser that people use so some browsers load pages differently than other browsers the other factor involved with browsers is the device so you could be on a mobile device and say Internet Explorer versus on a desktop using Chrome and you're going to have variation in terms of average page load time so definitely browser device plays a role but also country plays a role the infrastructure how much bandwidth is available so you could be in say San Francisco United States and be on a high-speed network versus another city or another country where you're not necessarily on the same high-speed network you're on a lower bandwidth or lower network and that's going to affect the page load time as well so in analytics you can actually see the breakdown of time per country and then of course the page itself so when we talk about an average page load time for a website we're talking about the average for the entire site but we can actually look at in Google Analytics the average load time for every page on the site so ideally if you have a particular page you want to rank organically in the search engines and the average page load time is not suitable or it's very high then you want to

address what the issues are and so the great thing about Google Analytics is you actually have speed suggestions so if I go to speed suggestions in Google Analytics I'm going to be able to see the average load time for certain pages on the site and then what Google's going to do is actually give me some feedback so for example I can see that the home page loads about five point five nine seconds and so if I click on PageSpeed suggestions then Google is going to give me suggestions on how to speed up the page load time not only on desktop but on mobile as well so when you click on its page speed suggestions you're actually going to go to a tool a Google tool called PageSpeed insights and then PageSpeed insights is going to allow you to see how quick your page loads and then it's going to be able to give you feedback on what to do in order to speed up the page load time not only for the page but for the site and the great thing again is you can see it for desktop and you can see it from mobile so PageSpeed is important we want to be able to keep our page load time low no more than probably again three to four seconds because if it's any more than Google's going to take notice the other search engines are going to take notice and they're not going to want to rank that particular page high on Google so some ways to increase your page speed you always want to optimize your images you never want to have images that take a long time to load you want to use the simple website design now I know flash as an example has long been disbanded but you don't want to use other

technology that's really going to slow the page load time of course where your website is hosted does matter so the server it's hosted on could be shared with other web sites and so that may eat into how quick the server responds to people trying to load your web page and so you want to keep that in mind so server response time does play a factor in loading and then of course optimizing your code you want to never have unnecessary code on your website and when I say unnecessary code some examples could be tracking code if you're doing any search advertising let's just say on Facebook or Bing you try to want to minimize the amount of extra code you put on a site because that code has to execute and that eats into the page load time so you want to be cognizant of how much code you put on your website because that will eat into the page load time so let's talk about featured snippets so featured snippets is the search result that generally shows up at the top of the search engine organic results so it's informational content and you'll see it above organic results but you'll also see it below search advertising and so some of the common features that you may see are in the form of a

paragraph a table or a list and so paragraph snippets tend to be the most popular and let me show you an example of a featured snippet so if I go to say google.com and type in machine learning here you can see some paid search ads okay and why do I another paid search ads because I can see ad next to them but if I look below the paid search ads but above the organic search I see a paragraph featured snippet and this is nothing more than again just some informational content about machine learning and really the whole idea behind featured snippets is really they're just informational and really it's informational and and what Google likes to do is pull content in there that really answers a question so if your content doesn't necessarily answer question then you can't expect your content to show up as a featured snippet so the whole idea is with the search engines is really Google searches through a number different sites to find content that will best answer a user's question like for example what is machine learning okay so if we ask the question what is machine learning we can expect to find a feature snippet and so really what users do a lot when they type in a query they use prefixes like how does or how do or how to or what is and so those types of questions are normally asked as part of the search query so if you can answer those questions then generally Google is going to recognize that and if it's relevant it's gonna show up as a featured snippet so the whole idea is to really create truly high quality content so about feature snippets is if you have true high quality content that answers a question then chances are your content may show up as a featured snippet so the whole idea is you

know work to create high quality content that provides a really good answer to really basic question it could be anything what is machine learning what is a fig you know how to ride a bicycle how do I surf all these are related questions that content can answer and Google wants to make sure as part of a feature snippet that they provide content that answers that question and not just content the best content that does the the best job with the most relevant information answer that person sir very so here we could see our three examples you have a table format so if we want to type in Aviation jobs we can see snippets of information about the latest job listings for aviation you can see in the middle screenshot what is machine learning so that's our paragraph featured snippet and then if you type in something like building a fence it's gonna give you a list of you know ways to go about building a fence so these are all answers to questions the query may not necessarily be in question form but the snippet is there just in case you want to know more information about that particular query so generally that's how featured snippets work and the great thing about featured snippets it's open to everybody the key is to have quality content if you have quality content that provides answers to questions then chances are your content can show up above organic search results which will give

you more visibility drive a lot more traffic to your site and quality traffic because likely it's answering somebody's question so let's do a a recap of everything we talked about with on-page SEO so before we move on off page remember on-page SEO is what we do to our website to enhance our website to be found in the search engines for relevant keywords so it's all about relevancy and remember before you do anything to your website you need to start with the basics of keyword research you need to find keywords that are highly relevant that have volume and low competition and so when you can focus on your keywords and you find out and finalize what keywords you want to be found for then you're going to conduct on-page SEO on page SEO consists of number of different factors some of which we talked about today starting with schema remember we want to have structured data to better communicate with the search engines what our web pages are about then we talked about title tags so title tags appear in search results remember 65 characters we want to make sure our keyword is in the title tag followed by our brand name and then we talked about meta descriptions meta descriptions allow us to you talk specifically about what that page is all about meta descriptions fall under the title tag in the search results we talked about headers h1 through h6 h1 being the biggest and the hierarchy of headers and having an h1 tag with your keyword provides the search engines with an identity of how strong or how important something is on a page it also organizes the page

with headers and sub headers and it breaks up the content so it's easily understandable by the end user we also talked about alt tags so remember images on its own are not recognized by search engines so we want to surround those images with alt tags with words that help the search engines identify what that image is they also serve a purpose in the browser if an image doesn't load then we can actually see what the image is all about with the alt tag we talked about feature snippets there are lists ok their paragraphs ok they're there different types of snippets and really the whole idea again behind snippets is answering a question with quality content we talked about Page Speed identifying how quick our pages load in Google Analytics so if your pages don't load very quickly then Google actually provides suggestions to speed up the page load time of a particular page and some of the culprits that you want to look at are making sure you have images that are good quality but also not a lot in size you want to make sure they're optimized you want to look at your server response time you want to make sure you optimize code so there's a lot of different factors of page load time you just want to keep an eye on what pages are not loading quick enough and remember we want to keep it as low as possible but no more than 3 to 4 seconds we talked about internal linking internal linking to a

particular page from one page to another provides link juice and link juice is nothing more than an indicator for the search engines to identify what pages tend to be more important than another based on the number of Link's pointing to that page and then we also talked about sitemaps so we talked about the two types of sitemaps HTML and XML HTML is for the end user XML is primarily for the search engines XML generally is going to be a file called sitemap XML and we could take that XML file and submit it to Google search console and so that expedites the process of indexing your site and helps your site not only get indexed faster but will help Google understand how many pages are on your site and then get those pages indexed so that they can be found so that you generate traffic so all these are factors with on-page SEO that you want to address before you move on to off page SEO ok let's turn our attention to off page SEO now that we covered all the essentials for on-page we still need to focus our attention on off page remember earlier I mentioned that SEO is a two-pronged approach we have to focus on on page SEO first and then to complement our efforts and to continue our efforts and to continue the effort of being relevant for certain keywords we need to do what we call off page SEO and those are actions we take that don't involve our website directly meaning we've already updated the title tag the Meta Description the alt tags the headers etc we want to do things off our website that's going to allow Google and other search engines to recognize that hey we are relevant these pages are relevant for certain keywords on our website and so really when we talk about off page SEO it's really the technique promoting your website using link building when we say technique of promoting our website using link building that means establishing links on other

websites that's what we mean by link building and so establishing links on other websites really as our SEO efforts because it improves first and foremost and improves the credibility of our website so if we're on a you know a very popular website that is known to be reputable than having a link pointing from that website to ours just improves the credibility of our own website not necessarily in the minds of the search engine but in the minds of the end user the other benefit here is it increases our domain Authority and let's take a minute to talk about domain authority so domain authority is simply just a score between 1 and 100 and so in digital marketing even including SEO is a marketing channel everything is measurable and we want to be able to measure everything we do digitally and so off page SEO is measurable one of the metrics involved with off page SEO is domain Authority in other words it's a score between 1 and 100 for our domain so how does Google how does bi do how do these other search engines see our domain how authoritative is our domain how reputable is our domain and so having links on other websites pointing to our domain increases our reputable bility increases our authority and so I'm going to show you an example so if you remember back on on-page SEO I when we're talking my keyword research we used a tool called Moz Moz calm and I

would recommend using Moz calm to measure domain Authority so if we go to Moz calm and Moz calm has a tool called link explorer so if you put in your domain using their tool link explorer you're gonna be able to see your domain Authority and domain Authority is a score between 1 and 100 and basically it's simply just scoring your website in terms of authority how does the search engine see your site out on the World Wide Web the higher the score the better and so recommend using Moz comm link explorer to measure the domain authority so the more links we have on external sites pointing to our own site in theory the higher the domain authority so we're going to come back to Moz calm quite frequently as we talked about off page SEO because we need a tool to help manage our efforts so we're going to come back to Moz combo woods let's talk about some of these other benefits too off page SEO so we know it helps with the credibility and increases our domain Authority but what are some of the other intangible efforts that are also measurable well it increases our referral traffic and by increasing our referral traffic meaning if we're on a reputable site that gets a lot of traffic and there's a link point in our site then naturally we're probably going to see traffic coming from that site and we can measure that in tools like Google Analytics we can measure referral traffic and so that's an inherent benefit to doing off page SEO because we're trying to create the

relevancy of our own website we're trying to be found for relevant keywords but yet at the same time we can increase traffic to our website and then certainly not lost in all this is improving our page rank so the idea here is you need on-page and off-page SEO to work together to improve our rankings and improving our rankings in the search engine results will inherently increase our rankings and drive traffic to the site from search engines and that's ideally what we're trying to do we're trying to accomplish traffic from search engines by improving our rankings but at the same time we improve our credibility and we accrue improve our standing in the search engine world and we also increase traffic to our site from all these other websites and so there are a lot of benefits to off page SEO it's just let's talk a little bit more about some of these other benefits because according to a backlink Oh a web page with more backlinks is going to rank higher than a page with fewer backlinks but let me just say this with back linking especially from sites it's all about credibility it's all about quality over quantity so we want to pay attention to quality over quantity so let's harken back to Moz and here we can see we have a domain Authority of 35 but we have a lot of links inbound links from other websites pointing to our website we have five hundred and seventy five domains out there on the internet pointing to our domain Valley fake com and so if we want to take a specific look at these domains we can just simply click on linking domains and here we can see all the different domains pointing to our website now again it's about quality not quantity so if we look at the domain

Authority and that's a score that measures the credibility of a website we could see the domain Authority on some of these domains like npr.org has a domain Authority of 93 and so to me that helps boost the domain Authority for our own website our own domain it also has the chance of driving that traffic it also increases the credibility but in the end having quality links from other quality domains is going to increase our own rank on search engines and that's the whole idea behind it so we could actually see that we have quality websites of quality domains linking to our domain now you can also use another tool I mentioned this earlier with on-page SEO when I was talking about sitemaps so if you go to search console so that's a Google tool we can also look at a link report and see what other websites are linking to us so this is Google's way of communicating to us what websites are out there linking to us and so here I can see the top linking sites to our website valley fig calm is the crumby kitchen has fourteen hundred and forty-three links pointing back to our site cookscountry.com Whole Foods magazine mind perfect kitchen these are all sites with links pointing back to our site so search console is a good tool it's a good alternative tool especially the links report is a good alternative tool to get an idea of the types of sites that are linking to your site now what

you're missing here in search console is the domain Authority but you can use the link Explorer tool in moz.com to measure the domain Authority for any domain it's just a matter of going to the tool itself going by going to moz.com by going to the link explorer report and just typing in the domain and from there you'll be able to see the domain Authority so it's all about quality over quantity I can't stress that enough so when it comes to off page really it's synonymous with link building so it's the most effective method for off page SEO and it's simply just getting links from other websites to your own so it's not as easy as it sounds especially when we're talking about quality over quantity but building these links to our website will help our rankings and that's the whole idea behind off page SEO we want to be able to link from other websites to ours so that we can help our rankings in addition to some of the other benefits I just mentioned so Google recognizes backlinks as one of their top ranking factors so in addition to some of the on-page SEO tactics that I mentioned earlier including title tag and Meta Description and URL structure and headers all those are important but at the same time it's a balance so Google wants to know hey yes we understand you've optimized your

title tag for keyword but how does the rest of the internet see your website or is your website worthy enough to add a link from a particular quality website to your website so if there are a number of quality links then your site must be a quality as well and so that's the whole idea behind link building being an important factor because again it's about from a Google's perspective it's about the user experience they want to make sure that sites ranked on page one of Google are quality sites quality sites that load well that have good content that have fresh content not just sites that have a gazillion links pointing to them with you know keywords stuffed into the title tag so it's an ecosystem Google's and other search engines want to protect that a good system with quality so that's why link building is an important factor and so there are different types of links so when you have a link pointing from one website to your own ok the link could be a follow a link or nofollow link and the whole idea behind follow or nofollow is simply hey we know that Google and other search engines they're spidering the entire web the whole idea is for them to collect as many pages as they these search

engines can to bring them back to their servers so they can serve them up in their search engines well as Google and these other search engines spider these sites they're following what they're doing is they're following links that's as simple as it gets they're following links from one link to another so remember we talked about internal links earlier on on-page SEO internal links are just links on your web pages pointing to other pages on your own website well when it comes to external links so links pointing from one website to your website that website that's linking to your website has an opportunity to say hey Google you can follow this link or don't follow the link and so if they choose to not follow the link meaning they put a nofollow tag into the anchor text then Google's going to follow the link but not recognize the link itself and what I mean by that is hey if you have let's just use Valley fig has a link from Wikipedia if Wikipedia has a link pointing to Valley fig calm but the link itself is nofollow then what Google's gonna do is not recognize the link itself they're not gonna

recognize the link so therefore you're not going to get credit or link juice as we say you're not going to get any juice from Wikipedia - Valley fig but if it is a follow link then what Google's going to do is recognize the link and give you credit for the backlink and by giving you credit for the backlink that's going to inherently increase your domain it's also going to likely increase your rankings so you want to pay attention to the types of link-building that's out there nofollow and so any time you try to establish a link on an external website just make sure it's a follow make sure it's not a no follow because if it's a nofollow link then you're not going to get the credit from the search engines and so the whole idea behind link building in terms of SEO is to get some credit from a quality website to your website and so if we look here a follow link in this example is one where the H ref or the link itself doesn't have a nofollow in it but if a hyperlink does have a nofollow in it then that means you're not gonna get the credit for the back link so remember no follows they don't allow search engine

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