Complete SEO Course for Beginners: Learn to Rank #1 in Google

Hello everyone, my name is sam oh and welcome to the ahrefs SEO fundamentals

course

. In this

course

I will teach you the fundamentals of SEO with a big focus on execution and although it is a beginner's SEO course, I don't want you to do that. We let ourselves be fooled by the word beginner, even for an eight figure business like ours, we don't do anything crazy or complicated technical from the beginning, we have stuck to the SEO fundamentals which led to compound growth and today our site surpasses the million. monthly visits from Google search alone, making SEO one of our most effective strategies for driving traffic to our site, so the course is divided into four modules plus this video, which is more of an introduction to the course and also in SEO 101 in this video.

We'll go over the basics of SEO and cover things like why it's important and how it works. You will then move on to module one which deals with keyword research throughout these lessons. I will show you how to find keywords to target that can benefit your business, it will also lay the foundation for the next module which is On Page SEO, in this module we will talk about how to optimize your pages to

rank

for those keywords, the next module will be on link building, this is one of the most prominent Google

rank

ing signals that have been shown to contribute to higher search rankings, finally we will end the course with the basics of technical SEO, which will mainly deal with best practices and website maintenance.

Well, let's start with the basics of SEO. We'll talk about what search engine optimization is, why it's important, and how Google works. SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the process of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine's organic search results. Now let's talk a little about how they work. If you're

complete

ly new to SEO, then it's easier 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 go through all of them. pages in your index and try to return the most relevant results and SEO helps prove 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 means of marketing. Well, there are three main things that attract marketers to search. engine optimization and in my opinion these three things make SEO the number one best source of traffic, unlike paying for ads, search traffic is free, number two, organic traffic is usually consistent once you you're ranking high while other mediums like social media and email marketing often result in traffic spikes that usually end up disappearing and it makes sense because social media is designed to showcase new content.

Emails are often marked as forgotten read or end up in the spam box, while search traffic is the result of users actively searching for information. The number of searches for a given topic is usually constant month to month and number three has the opportunity to reach massive audiences that you would not otherwise have access to. In fact, as of October 2019 there were almost 4.39 billion internet users worldwide and almost 4 billion of those people are Google users, this is why search engine optimization is a 80 billion dollar industry and why marketers from all walks of life are embracing and pursuing it today, everyone wants their business to be discovered and SEO is the perfect way to do it.

Now let's talk briefly about how Google works and there are two parts to this: the first is crawling and indexing and these two things are what actually allow Google to discover web pages and create its search index for information. Google uses crawlers also known as spiders that collect 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 the newly discovered pages and this process continues allowing them collect a ton of information, then they take all this data to Google's servers to add it to their search index and that's what people like you and I look for when we enter a query into Google now, if you were to search for something and search on Google. returned all the results that mentioned your words on the page, then you would 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 makes adjustments to their algorithm 500 to 600 times a year, so to be honest, no one knows exactly how their algorithm works, but they have given us clues and some guidelines to improve. This is just speculation at best, but I want to cover some of the most important factors you'll need to understand. From a fundamental point of view, first are backlinks Backlinks are links from one page of one website to another and Google has said on its internal search page that if other prominent websites link to a page you have proven to be a good sign that the information is trustworthy, The easiest way to understand the value of a backlink is to think of them as votes.

When a page receives a backlink, it is essentially another website vouching for the content of the page and the more votes it gets from credible sources, the higher the trust and we also study. the effect of backlinks on search traffic and found a clear positive correlation between unique website backlinks and a page's organic traffic. Second is search intent, which represents the reason behind a search query and if you think that Google's goal for search, its job is to return the most relevant results for any given query, that being said, you can discover search intent by simply looking at the top ranking pages for the query you want to rank for, for example, if you search for slow cooker recipes, you will see that the search results are mostly blog posts with a list of slow cooker recipes. slow cooker, so if you try to rank a product page where you sell a slow cooker, it won't match the search intent and therefore 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 to rank your slow cooker recipes blog post, it probably won't rank because it doesn't match the search intent.

This is a critical concept to understand and I will share a simple three point checklist that you can use to determine search intent for any query in the next module and the third is that content depth search engines are made up of programs However, you and I would say that Google has invested billions of dollars in creating sophisticated technology that understands content to some extent, but it is their job as Content creator provide context on the topic, for example if you look at the top ranking pages of the quarry, how? To drive a car you will find that they talk about things like fastening your seat belt, getting familiar with the accelerator and brake pedals, adjusting the seat and mirrors and other things that a first time driver may not know, basically you want to be able to answer the questions.

Search the quarry as best you can and it should naturally 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 and shouldn't. In fact, it won't be long, the top ranking page is only 185 words, but the content itself solves the user's query from start to finish, so the basics are in the book and it's time to move on to the keyword research. Hello, I am love and welcome. to the first module which is about keyword research in this first lesson we are going to talk about what keywords are and how to choose them using a simple four point checklist let's start, what are keywords in the context of SEO?

Just words and phrases that people type into search engines to find what they are looking for. For example, if you are shopping for running shoes, you can search for keywords like men's running shoes or just running shoes. Now keywords are actually very important in SEO because it lays the entire foundation for search engine optimization. The basic goal of SEO is to rank your pages based on the keywords that your target audience or customers are searching for and if you are not ranking based on the keywords that are actually searched, then your SEO efforts are kind of pointless, for example, we are ranked number one on the SEO query checklist and this keyword is responsible for generating around 1500 monthly visitors from Google and that is just in the US, so word research key is the process of finding keywords that people enter into search engines and we.

We'll get into this process in the next few lessons, so how do you actually choose keywords worth targeting? Let's go over a checklist that should help you choose keywords effectively. The first thing you should check is if your keyword has search demand. Search demand represents the volume of monthly searches performed for a keyword and this can be measured with a keyword metric we call search volume. You can find the search volume for a keyword using a keyword research tool like ahrefs keyword explorer, for example the query kilometers to miles is searched about 478,000 times a month in the US alone. .us, but as you can see here in the hfs keyword explorer, 80 of the searches are done without clicking on a page and that's because Google has a handy calculator right here that will solve the search engine problem, So search volume alone can really be a bit misleading, so it's worth looking at the second checkpoint, which is checking the traffic potential of the topic.

Traffic potential represents the total search traffic you could get if you ranked at the top of Google for your keyword. our SEO checklist page stats in HF Site Explorer, so we are again ranked number one in the query SEO checklist and sends us about 1500 US monthly search visits, but If we look at the total global organic traffic to the page, you will see. As we see, we receive approximately 3,000 monthly visits from Google each month and that is because this page ranks for over 200 keywords and this page is not an outlier. In our study of three million keywords we found that, on average, the highest ranking page ranks for almost a thousand other keywords in the top ten, so while you can optimize your pages for one main keyword , your page will likely rank for hundreds or even thousands of other relevant keywords and, because of that, the theme's SEO Checklist monthly search traffic potential is actually higher than your monthly search volume. , this is what makes traffic potential a much more reliable metric than search volume and the way to determine traffic potential is by looking at how much traffic the highest ranking pages receive, for example, if we go to the browser ahrefs keywords. and search submit website to search engines you will see that it has a search volume of 1100 monthly searches in the US.

Now if I scroll to the bottom of the page you will see a Serp overview showing you the Top 10 ranking pages. for that keyword and serp simply means search engine results page and as you can see our page receives approximately 5,300 monthly search visits from the United States alone and we rank for over 1,300 keywords making the potential for traffic for this keyword is greater than your current search volume. It doesn't always work this way, for example query keyword cannibalization has a search volume of 150 monthly searches, but the traffic potential is well below 100, so it becomes more of a business decision if Do you want to address the topic or not, nowchoose.

Keywords based solely on metrics are not a good idea, so the rest of the checkpoints are meant to serve as a basis for you. The next point on our checklist is to evaluate the commercial potential of the keyword or topic. Commercial potential simply represents the value that a keyword has. Your business and its value really comes down to your niche and your business model, so an easy way to do this is by assigning scores from one to three to the keywords you are researching, the higher the number, the more important the theme for your business. So, let's say you have a site about golf and the way you make money is by selling used golf clubs, which gives you back the business potential, meaning the topics where you can organically recommend products to visitors would have the most value. commercial, for example, people looking for something. like buying used golf clubs, chances are they are ready to make a purchase here and now, so this would be a trade value of three in my opinion.

Now, a keyword like best golf clubs would also be relevant to your site. People will likely be ready to make a purchase soon. but I just don't know what clubs to buy, but it's actually quite easy to promote your products because for the golf clubs that you recommend, you can easily link them to your product pages which brings visitors closer to making a purchase, so I would give this a business. value of two now, a keyword like what is a handicap in golf? It would be really difficult to organically recommend your products, but it's still a way to drive relevant traffic to your site, so I would give it a business value of one so they would keep the lowest priority and anything that has a score of zero would probably It's worth ignoring because it won't affect your bottom line, so something like Happy Gilmore Review would have zero commercial value because it has nothing to do with your business other than the fact that it's a fantastic movie about golf.

The next point on this checklist is to see if you can match the searcher's intent. This is a concept that we covered in the first lesson of this course, but it is something that I will continue to talk about because it is very important, so again search intent represents the reason behind a searcher's query and the way in which We determine this by looking at the top ranking pages for the keyword we want to rank for, for example, let's say you have recipes.blog and want to rank for toaster oven. When looking at the top ranking pages, you will see that almost all of the pages are eCommerce category pages, which tells us that the searcher's intent is likely to purchase or at least compare prices for different products. toaster ovens, so unless you can satisfy searcher intent, it's unlikely that you'll be able to rank highly for this query and we'll delve into search intent in the next lesson.

The last point on this checklist is to determine if you can rank for your keyword search volume, traffic potential and business potential mean absolutely nothing if you can't rank for your keyword in the not too distant future and understand The level of difficulty in ranking for a given keyword requires a bit of analysis and practice. That's why I've created an entire lesson on how to evaluate ranking difficulty because mastering this process will help you get predictable results in SEO, so I'll save it for a later lesson. Now, choosing keywords comes down to finding a balance on this checklist.

You have to ask yourself if the theme generates enough traffic and has commercial value to make it worth the effort. This is the question you should ask yourself before creating pages with the intention of ranking in searches. These five checklist items are exactly what you need. Let's dive deeper into the rest of this module Hi, I'm Sam, and welcome to the second lesson all about search intent. I already mentioned this in the first lesson on SEO basics, but I really want to take the time to break down what it is and how to use it in keyword research, because if you can't match searcher intent then you probably won't rank for it. your target keywords, so again search intent represents the reason behind a searcher's query and the matching search intent.

It's one of those things you need to do to show search engines that your page will meet its goal of providing the most relevant results for any given query, and while it may seem like you're trying to satisfy Google, you actually are. doing is

learn

ing what you must do to satisfy the seeker'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 indicator for understanding your search. intent because

google

understands what searchers want probably more than anyone now analyze is a slang word but I have a simple three prong formula you can use it's called the three c's of search intent the first c is type of content, the type of content can generally be categorized into blog posts, videos, product category and landing pages, for example, the dominant type of pages for the quarry, the best golf shoes, are blog posts, the second c is content format and this applies more to blog posts and landing pages, some common blog formats you will find.

See step-by-step tutorials, list posts and opinion editorials for a landing page that could be something like a tool or calculator again for finding the best golf shoes. You'll see that all the top results are lists, which makes sense. because the word best implies that a comparison needs to be made and the third c is the content angle that often describes the benefit, it is basically your hook for why someone should click and visit your page to see the best shoes from golf, you will see that each post has It has gone with an angle of freshness that is evident based on the current year in the titles, in my opinion this is the least important and often the least consistent among the highest ranking pages .

Now, this is just an example of search intent for a keyword, let's go over a few. More examples to really dig deeper into this concept. The first example is for the query on how to swing a golf club. The dominant type of content is clearly blog posts, but you'll also notice that a YouTube video is ranking ahead of the blog post, so this tells us that. It may be worth creating both a blog post and a video to potentially get two different spots in search results. As far as the content format is concerned, all the procedures are clearly stated and since the nature of the topic would require a step by step procedure. that is probably the route you would like to go and you can confirm this by visiting some of the top ranked pages now with a content angle that seems to be beginner or basic seems to be the right way to approach the topic.

The second example. It is for golf club consultation. If you look at the search engine, you'll see that they are all e-commerce category pages, which tells us that when people search for this query, they are probably in shopping mode, since the content format primarily applies to blog posts and landing pages, it wouldn't be applicable here since we are looking at ecommerce category pages as far as the content angle goes, it seems like it's mostly deals so saving money on golf clubs is fine, the final example is for something like golf bags looking at the search engine.

We'll look at something a little different, we have a mixed search content type for the top ranking page which is an ecommerce category page, then we have a couple of blog posts about 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 does it do well to make an informed decision? We still need to lay some groundwork, so we'll revisit this example in a later lesson. Hello, it's ammunition and welcome. to the third lesson of our keyword research module in this lesson, I'm going to show you how to find keywords for your website based on what you

learn

in lessons one and two of this module.

Let's get started, so keyword research is the process of finding the keywords that people search for in search engines and the overall process can be broken down into two macro steps: the first step is generating keyword ideas and the Second step is to validate if those keywords are worth following. Now this lesson is mainly about the first step. keyword ideas for your website and to do that you need a keyword research tool. Keyword research tools show you information about keywords, such as search volume, keyword difficulty scores, and other SEO metrics, plus they should help you discover potential topics worth pursuing.

There are many tools available and you can use whatever you want, but for this course I will use the ahrefs keyword explorer. Now I also understand that some people may not be in a position to purchase SEO software right now, if that's you. then we also have a free tool called ahrefs keyword generator, which is a good place to start. I'll leave links to both tools in the description, so we'll do keyword research for the rest of this lesson, so let's say the website we're doing keyword research for is a golf blog and the way The reason this blog generates income is through affiliate commissions, which means they promote other people's products and when someone clicks on one of the links and makes a purchase, they receive compensation. a commission so the first step is to generate a list of seed keywords and a seed keyword is just a broad keyword related to your niche so I'm going to go to hfs keyword explorer and add some seeds for our site of golf so it can be golf balls, golf clubs and golf hats to name a few, next I'll go to the phrase match report which will show us keywords that include any of these phrases and so, we have about 125,000 keyword ideas with search volumes and a ton.

Of other useful metrics, some of which we'll cover later, 125,000 keywords are too many to filter, so before we continue, let's take a second and review again the five-point checklist from the first lesson of this module, the five things. What we are looking for when it comes to choosing keywords: one, we want keywords that have search demand, two keywords with traffic potential, three keywords with business potential, four, we need to be able to match search intent and five , we want to know how difficult it will be. be to rank at the top of Google for that keyword, so when we generate keyword ideas we can check off the first four points, and for the fifth, we'll cover that in the next lesson.

Well, let's take a look at our list of keyword ideas and start checking some of these boxes, so first we need to find keywords that have search demand. To do this, you can set up a search volume filter to display keywords with a minimum volume of at least 300 monthly searches and now list that. It's just been narrowed down to 351 keyword ideas that will be easy to filter manually. The next point on this checklist is to see if they have traffic potential. Traffic potential is a more reliable metric than search volume because not all searches generate clicks and at the end of the day, we want traffic, not searches.

To check the traffic potential of a theme, you should look at the top ranking pages and see how much traffic they receive. You can click the navigation button next to any of these keywords. so if we do that for quarry golf clubs, you'll see that the top page gets about 16,000 search visits monthly from the U.S. Now, if you don't have an ahrefs account, you can get a free version of the serp using hf serp. The next verification tool is business potential. Business potential is simply the value a keyword has to your business, and while 16,000 monthly search visits sounds great, you need to consider theFourth point on the checklist, which is to ask yourself if you can match the search intent.

As you can see, almost all of the top ranking pages are eCommerce category pages, so searchers are probably in shopping mode, but we have an affiliate golf blog, so the site probably doesn't sell golf clubs. , meaning we can't create an ecommerce category page and therefore won't be able to match the search intent, so since this query doesn't meet the points on our checklist, we wouldn't search this keyword. Now, looking further down the list, you will see the best golf balls that the quarry has. a high search volume and if I click on the search button you will see that the traffic potential is around 5000 monthly visits from USA pretty good now in terms of business potential this keyword would be worth 3 because our site makes money reviewing and recommending products, so it would be very easy to organically recommend products in one of the top posts, which I assume would generate a good amount of affiliate commissions, since, for search intent, these are blog posts in list format with the content angle updated as you can be seen in the top ranking page titles, so this query checks all the boxes and passed our initial crawl test, so I'll do Click the checkbox and I will add it to my golf keyword list.

Now checking the serp for all these keywords would be quite time consuming, so there is a quick technique you can use to find relevant keywords and that is to use keyword modifiers. A modifier is a complement to a base keyword, for example, if our base keyword is golf hats, we can modify this keyword by adding best top. or the current year and modifiers tell us a lot about search intent, a word like best again tells us that a comparison needs to be made, so searchers are probably looking for blog posts with lists with several different product recommendations now if a word like how or what is in the keyword, it tells us that the top pages will probably be blog posts or videos with step by step tutorials or some other informative content, so with this knowledge we can filter this list of keywords to keywords that are likely to have commercial potential. and b keywords that we can match searcher intent with, for example, since we are doing keyword research for an affiliate site, modifiers like best top versus and review would probably generate topics where we can recommend products organically, so if we go back to the keyword list, we can click on the include filter and paste this list there.

Next, I'm going to hit the any word tab, since we want to find keywords that include any of these modifiers as well as one of our seed keywords, hit Apply and now we have a list around it. 30 keywords that are likely to have high business potential, plus we know that 99 of the time the results for any best type keyword will be list blog posts and we know that we can now match searcher intent to our affiliate blog if We change the modifiers in the inclusion filter for words like how, who, where, why, guide and tutorial, then we can apply the list to find informative topics that we could write about in our blog and almost all of these keywords will be a game clean for our hypothetical golf blog.

Now, if you plan to use a list of modifiers, it's worth noting that you should probably do so with much broader positions. For example, you'll see that we only have 10 keywords when we use the search volume filter combined with our informational modifiers list. if I change the c to just golf, set the volume filter to a minimum of 300 monthly searches and then paste my list of informative modifiers, press any tab and click apply, you will see that we have many more topics that we could potentially create content, like this So if this is a method you want to try, take a screenshot of this list of modifiers and feel free to use them in your keyword research Now, after doing keyword research for exactly 33 minutes and 14 seconds, I was able Compile a list of over 190 keyword ideas in my Golf Keywords List.

Now, one downside to using keyword research tools is that the list of keyword ideas will generally be limited to words and phrases that include your seeds, but there are other great keywords that won't necessarily include your seeds, so how do you do you find them okay? The best way to find these keywords is to look at the pages that are driving the most search traffic to your competitors' sites because if your competitors are ranking for the keywords that are sending them a lot of search traffic, then i I'm sure you'd like to get in on the action right now from the competition.

I'm not necessarily talking about your direct business competitors. I'm talking about your organic search competitors, which are websites that rank for the keywords you would want. To rank to find these competitors, I'll go back to the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, but this time I'll click on my golf keyword list. Then I'll go to the domain traffic share report which will show you the websites that are getting the most search traffic based on your keyword input, in this case our golf keyword list, as you can see, sites like golf digest golf.com and golf wrx get the most search traffic from the keywords I hypothetically want to rank for, but we already know these keywords since we created the list, so what you can do is click the cursor at side of a domain you want to investigate further and then click on the top pages which will show you the pages that send the most search traffic to a website and check out this golf overview page on game improvement irons . receives about 5,400 monthly search visits from the US This page that ranks what degree a sand wedge is receives about 4,700 monthly search visits and we wouldn't have seen them in the keyword ideas report because we didn't contain our seeds, so you can simply skim through this list, search for potential topics, then go through those four points on the checklist to find keywords that are interesting to you, add them to your keyword list, and once you've exhausted the main pages of a website, rinse and repeat for the other organic pages.

Search for competitors until you are satisfied with your list and if you are still not satisfied with your list, you can try to find other seeds in this report. The two that immediately stand out are Sand Wedge and Fairway Woods, so I'll go. Go back to the keyword explorer and type them into the search box and since they are both different types of golf clubs, you can add putting wedge putter, etc., and so on. In short, you shouldn't be short of keyword ideas and you should be. You can use these two methods to create a solid list of topics that will keep you busy for years, but here's the thing, even if you've checked these four boxes on the checklist. , there's still one left and it won't matter if you don't do it.

Don't rank for your keywords. Hey, it's ammunition and welcome to the fourth lesson of our keyword research module. Today I'll show you how to determine the ranking difficulty of a keyword. This will help you understand how difficult it will be to achieve high rankings on Google for your target keywords, let's get started. When it comes to ranking on Google, you need to understand who you're going up against before you target a keyword, otherwise you could get into a battle you can't win with SEO. Perspective Competitors are pages and websites that rank at the top of Google for your target keywords, meaning your competitors may be different for each keyword you target, so there are three main things What you should consider before deciding to fight. and those are search intent metrics of the top-ranked pages and websites and the topic authority of the top-ranked websites.

Now, as we go through these points, we'll create a list of self-assessment questions that will help you make informed decisions in your Keyboard targeting. Also to see things like metrics for top-ranked pages, you need an SEO tool, since that Google will not show you data on other pages so I will use the Ahrefs keyword explorer throughout this lesson now if you do not have an ahrefs account you can use our free search engine checker tool which will give you data on the three main pages. Ok, let's start with search intent. The first thing you should do is look at the search engine and ask yourself if some of the top ranking pages are failing. to closely match search intent to figure this out, you can go over the three C's of search intent as we discussed in lesson two of this module and from the looks of it, they are all listicle blog posts using the angle of freshness, so they match.

Also pay close attention to the titles and URLs of ranking pages in general, if the top pages include the main keyword or a variation of it in the title or URL, they are likely to target that keyword, for For example, all of the top ranking pages for the quarry on how to save money are about exactly that, while a quarry like the best convertible car seats for small cars is a bit of a mixed bag, as you can see some pages have been tailored specifically to the angle for small cars, so it probably matches the searcher's intent better than More extensive posts about the best convertible car seats for any car are a sign of search engine weakness because it means there's probably a lack of content worth ranking about the best convertible car seats for small cars, now I don't.

I want you to take this as advice that you should include the exact keyword phrase in your titles or URLs with this example. Finding convertible seats for small cars is actually a very specific need for a specific person. Well, let's talk about the metrics first. The metric to consider is the number of websites that link to the page in ahrefs. We call these referring domains, as I mentioned in module 1. Backlinks are one of Google's most prominent ranking signals, so if a page has many quality links pointing to it. then it will be more competitive to rank, so before choosing a keyword, you should ask yourself if I can get more quality backlinks than higher ranking pages.

The second metric is the website's authority on ahrefs. We call this domain score, which represents the overall strength of a website's backlink profile, generally speaking you should look for keywords where your website's dr is in a similar range to that of pages of top ranking or at least one of the top ranking pages must be in the same rank as your website, for example, if all the websites that are in the top 10 have high drs and you have a dr of, say , 10, then you might want to consider competing when you're at a similar level, so let's add that question to our checklist: Is my website at a similar or higher dr rank than the top-ranked websites again, this It is a very general recommendation, but it is still a good recommendation to follow if you are a beginner in SEO to see the domain rating of your own site, you can enter your domain in the site explorer and See it here on the overview page or you can Enter your domain into our free website authority checker.

I'll leave links to all of these tools in the description. Okay, let's move on to the third part, which is the topic authority of the top-ranked websites. Google wants to rank pages from authoritative sources and this goes beyond backlinks, for example if we look at serp 4 on how to unclog a toilet you will see that this dr42 site is outperforming much more powerful websites with many more domains. reference. Well, this page comes from a website that is only about plumbing, so it probably has more authority on the topic, so the question you need to ask yourself is whether my website has as much or more authority on the topic than the sites best classified website.

If thea similar structure where the make and model of the clubs are used as The subheadings also add a brief description of the clubs as well as some bullet points that can be read and the final page does more or less the same - they use subheadings as the brand and the model followed by a brief review. Now, unless you're a golfer, you may not have caught this minor but perhaps important detail. All the pages talk about sets that would appeal more to

beginners

, for example they all talk about the Callaway Strata set and they all include sets from the Wilson staff, in my opinion these would not appeal to an intermediate or advanced level. level golfer, okay, at this point we know we need to create a holistic blog post with freshness as an angle.

We also know that the content should probably be aimed at

beginners

. A couple of common sets that were mentioned in all the posts were also callaway strata. as a bunch of Wilson's staff, it's now important to note that they don't need to be included in his post, but it's just an observation I made. We also saw that the first two pages of three had the best picks for categories like best game. improvement clubs, as well as the best clubs for the money, we finally know that the subtitle should be the name of the club. Another thing I recommend before you start writing is to do a page-level content gap analysis.

The level will show you the common keywords that rank top pages where your page is not, but since we don't have a page we can still find common keyword rankings among some top ranking pages using the ahrefs Content Gaap tool to get started . to hr site explorer and paste any of the URLs, then head to the content gap tool. Now I'm going to take the three URLs that we analyzed and put them all in the top section of this tool, so what this says is show us the keywords that any of these targets rank for where at least one of them ranks among the top 10.

Now if I run the search, you will be able to see the keywords that these pages are ranking for in the position that they are ranking for. As a general rule, the more URLs that rank high for keywords, the more relevant your content will be, so to narrow our search a bit, I'll click on the intersections drop-down menu and select two and three intersections. i.e. only show me keywords where at least two of our targets are ranking in Google and at least one of those targets is ranking in the top 10. From here, simply browse through the list and look for interesting subtopics worth adding to your post.

Plus, you might be able to learn some interesting things about the audience, as well as the language they use. As you can see, people looking for this quarry are mainly looking for men's clubs and want to know the best clubs for the money they want. to see cheaper options and others are specifically looking for a set of irons, these are all things you should consider when creating your content, so armed with this information you should be able to create a great post with a search engine in mind and while the The content is the most important part, there are also some more technical optimizations on the page that you need to do.

Let's review some of the most important ones. First, include the target keyword in the title, where it makes sense to add it to your title it should be natural, for example, our title for this post is 45 Best Free SEO Tools Tried and Tested and Free SEO Tools is our target keyword. Now there will be times when it will make more sense to use a close variant of your target keyword, for example this one. The post is aimed at the query on how to get YouTube subscribers, but our title is 9 Ways to Get More YouTube Subscribers because we went for the list angle.

The next thing you can do is use a short and descriptive URL. Short, descriptive URLs help people right away. Understand what the page is about before you even visit it, just look at these two URLs, they are on exactly the same topic, but one is much more descriptive than the other. This part of the URL is called the slug and is the easiest way to choose your slug. is to use your target keyword where spaces will be replaced with dashes 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 whether you should use subfolders to describe categories.

It's up to you, next is the meta description. The meta description is an html code meant to briefly summarize your page and search engines often use this text directly within the search engine, as far as I know meta descriptions are not used as a ranking signal but they can influence in click-through rates and for that reason I think it's important to add to your pages now it's important to note that based on our study of 192,000 pages we found that Google rewrote meta descriptions almost 63 percent of the time, so I He doesn't spend much time on them, but you should still include them.

The next step is to add internal links to and from your pages. Internal links are links from one page on the same domain to another and are super powerful because they can pass links. authority for other relevant pages and also help search engines better understand the content of a page, for example, if I had a site in the careers niche and I was writing a post on how to write a cover letter, then I would definitely want add internal links from other pages. relevant pages such as one on how to write a resume; Most importantly, visitors who want to learn how to write a resume 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 and colon on your domain. com and then add the topic you are writing about, then visit the relevant pages and see if there is an opportunity to add an internal link to your new post. Alternatively, you can use the ahrefs site audit tool

complete

ly free, just sign up for an ahrefs webmaster tools account. your site and then run a crawl, then you can head to the link explorer to find internal linking opportunities. We have a short but helpful video on how to do this on the Ahrefs Product Updates YouTube channel, so I'll link to that video in the description.

The next step is to optimize your images. In the last 28 days, we've had over 4,000 visits to our blog from Google image search, although that pales in comparison to our 500,000 monthly organic blog visits. There are still four thousand visits. We are now optimizing your images. For SEO it's threefold, number one, name your image files appropriately, for example this is a photo of a puppy, if you took the photo yourself your smartphone or camera will probably name it like img underline and then a million numbers change the file. Naming something puppy isn't exactly rocket science, but according to Google file names can clue Google into the topic of image number two use descriptive alt text abbreviated alt text for alt text is an html attribute that goes in the tag your image, so the syntax would look like this, where the alt value should describe the image.

Alt text helps improve accessibility for those using screen readers, or if the image does not load, visitors will be shown alt text. Google now recommends creating content rich in useful information that uses keywords appropriately and is in the context of the page content. Yes, Google explicitly says to use keywords, but it also says to avoid keyword stuffing as it results in a negative user experience and can cause your site to be seen as spam, which means don't do it. Do something like this Now, looking back at the syntax, our alt text isn't exactly descriptive, so let's change it to something like a puppy sitting on a couch.

If you use WordPress, simply add your alt text here when you insert your images and the cms should do the Rest well, the third thing you'll want to do is compress your images. Image compression reduces image file sizes, resulting in faster loading times and page speed is a Google ranking signal. There is a free image compression tool called short pixel that has a web interface as well as a WordPress plugin and the last thing I recommend is optimizing readability. Here are five simple but effective tips you can use to improve readability. Number one: write short sentences and paragraphs because no one wants to end up on a page with a huge wall of text two use descriptive subheadings so that people skimming the article can easily find the things that are important to them 3. use a font sufficiently large that is easily readable on both desktop and mobile devices 4. avoid using big words, it is more important that people understand your content and 5. write as you speak, your content will be more conversational and entertaining.

Reading A free tool that I recommend using is called the Hemingway app and it will give you some writing tips as well as a readability rating. I recommend trying to keep things at or below 6th grade level now that there are other on-page optimizations you can do, such as adding open graphics meta tags or og tags for short, these will allow you to customize titles, descriptions, images and other information when pages are shared on social networks. There is also schema markup, which is code that helps search engines understand your content and represent it better. In search results, for example, these pages use the recipe schema type so Google can display things. like recipe rating, number of votes, total time to prepare the food as well as nutritional information, if you have a WordPress site then you can add og tags in the schema with plugins like ranking math or yoast now again, The most important part of your content is that it strives to satisfy the searcher's intent.

Yes, the technical stuff is important too, but it's more like the icing on the cake. here is a complete on-page SEO checklist, take a screenshot and let's move on to the next module which is about an SEO strategy called link building. Hello, it's ammunition and welcome to the third module of our SEO for beginners course over the next five lessons. We'll talk about possibly the most important and challenging SEO strategy: it's called link building, and to start, we'll talk about what it is, why it's important, and the mindset you'll need to have to be successful at it.

Get started, so what is link building by definition? Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to a page on your website and these hyperlinks are now called backlinks, while the end result may make sense conceptually and look simple, the part that most of the people does not do. I don't understand it and I can't seem to get it right. Here's the process and ultimately what this boils down to is emailing complete strangers and asking them to link to you. Now let's take a second to talk about how strange and a little awkward this may sound.

Let's go over some scenarios and then we'll review this definition of link building. Let's say you have a marketing blog and you write about SEO and digital marketing now, if a random person, let's call them Sally, emailed you and said, "Hey, you can." you link to my post on facebook ads, it's really good, could you link to it? Probably not, in fact, you probably wouldn't even respond or click on the link in her email to check and see if her content is as good as she claims. Flip the script a bit, let's say you've been following the Ahrefs blog and YouTube channel for some time, you've implemented some of the strategies we've shared and gotten great results for your site, in addition to what you've been using. our SEO tools for three years, now an email appears in your inbox from me, with a name and a face that you may recognize because you have been following our channel and in that email I asked you to link to our SEO checker free backlinks from your page listing the 15 best free SEO tools, would you link to me?

Maybe now is the final scenario, let's say your mentor who helped you get started in digital marketing sends you an email and asks you to link to a page on her site from a relevant site. page of yours, could you link to it? She definitelyhelped you get started in digital marketing. You obviously trust and respect her and would be willing to do whatever you can for her. The goal of these scenarios is to show you the link building process. It's actually very relational and sometimes it can take more time than you would like with sally you don't know her you don't owe her anything you don't trust her she comes in blindly almost invading your inbox and asking you for a favor without offering any kind of value in return in return. the second scenario, when I hypothetically emailed you, you knew who I was, I had helped you indirectly, and you were a user of a product for years, so while we may not be in a relationship in real life, we are still connected in some way, so the chances of bonding with me are probably higher than bonding with Sally now, when your mentor asked you to bond, there is a real relationship, there is a sense of trust, respect and gratitude, so of course , he would bond with her now.

While you can't and shouldn't try to befriend everyone just to get links, you'll find that your best links usually come from relationships that are built over email, so let's redefine link building and set the tone for the rest. From 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 improves theirs, so this definition is not just about you getting something, it includes relationships, relevance and a value exchange, all of which we will talk about later in this module, since effective link building is difficult, you need to understand why it is worth the effort.

Search engines like Google use short backlinks to help rank web pages and have been that way since 1998, when Google created the page. Page ranking 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 its internal search jobs page under the ranking heading. of useful pages that state whether other leading websites on the topic link to the page, which is 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 a billion web pages, so while getting backlinks can be more difficult than, say, creating a blog post, are absolutely essential if you want to rank for competitive phrases and competitive phrases are usually the ones that will generate the most traffic and revenue for your business.

Now we briefly touch on the main way to get backlinks. but not all links can or will be obtained through outreach, so in the next lesson we will talk about three methods of obtaining backlinks, as well as the level of difficulty and effectiveness. Hey, it's ammunition and welcome to the second lesson of our link building module at In this lesson we will talk about three link building strategies to get backlinks. Before we begin, it's important to set the right expectations for this lesson and talk about the difference between a strategy and a tactic. To me, strategies are higher level in the sense that they describe the scope of the plans, while tactics are more micro and often focus on smaller steps, so strategy puts you in the right direction and the Tactics define how to get there and we'll cover some link building tactics later.

In this module, all right, when it comes to link building, there are three main strategies for getting backlinks. You can create them, buy them or earn them. Let's talk about what each method looks like, its level of difficulty and effectiveness. The first method is to create backlinks. Backlinks means manually adding links on a domain to yours. This can be done by adding your website to directories, leaving comments on blog posts, or adding your website URL to your social media profile. Anyone can do this with minimal effort, like almost all easy things. in life they are usually not that effective from an SEO and ranking perspective, now buying backlinks is exactly what it sounds like, you pay a fee to webmasters or authors and in return they will link you to a page on their site .

This goes against Google's webmaster. guidelines and can potentially result in a penalty which could be anything from losing ranking positions or, worse yet, having your pages removed from Google's search index. Plus, buying links isn't exactly cheap. We contacted 250 websites to ask if they sell links and found that The average cost of buying one was almost $353 and of course we didn't buy any in terms of level of ease. If you have the money it's very easy to do because now it's just the transaction in terms of effectiveness I think They are very effective unless or until you get caught and in my opinion the risk is not worth the reward especially if you want to build a business that stands the test of time.

The final way to get backlinks is to earn them and there. There are three common ways to do this: The first and most common is links obtained through email. This is when you send an email to other website owners and editors and ask them to link to you. Another way to get backlinks is to become a source for an online publication or media outlet, for example, if a journalist references you in an article, they will often link to you or your social media profiles and the Final way is to get backlinks organically, for example if someone visits your page from a link on social media. organic search from word of mouth or wherever and decides to link to you, then that's an earned link now, although 100 organic links may seem like the best way to get them, I don't want you to rely on these types of links generally being less consistent a Unless you're a well-known brand with very well-crafted content and you're already getting significant exposure, it takes time to build a reputation that's trustworthy and for those organic links to come in on a regular basis and if we're just waiting and hoping it's probably going to happen. get left behind because your competitors will actually be busy building links by communicating with other website owners.

Generally speaking, the harder it is to get a link, the more valuable it will be and for that reason we will focus on optimized tactics so you can create a steady stream of backlinks to your page and get more SEO traffic. Now not all links are created equal, some will boost your pages to the top of Google, while others can harm your site. So what makes a really good link? That's what we'll talk about in the next lesson. Hey, it's samo and welcome to the third lesson of the link building module. Today we will talk about the attributes that make a good or high backlink. quality, as I said in the last lesson, not all backlinks are created equal, for example, if you spam forms with links to your site, those would not and should not carry more weight than, say, a link from the New York Times, otherwise backlinks would simply be a quantity game and Google 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 being said, let's first talk about the five attributes that make a good backlink. The attribute is relevance imagine this for a second: you are visiting Greece for the first time next month and need recommendations for places worth visiting. Now you have a friend who lived in Greece his entire life and obviously knows every corner. You also have a friend in the US who hates traveling and has never been outside of the states whose opinion you would have higher, obviously, your Greek friend, in the same way that the links on a website about travel or Greece would have higher weight than links from technology or marketing sites because they are more relevant and authoritative on the topic, for example, you will see that this page is ranked number one for the query how to devein shrimp.

If we look at your backlinks and also filter by link by domain we can see your backlinks from different websites now, if you don't have an ahrefs account you can still see backlinks pointing to pages using our free ahrefs tool. backlink check, which I'll leave a link to in the description going back to the backlink report you'll see this wikihow page called three ways to peel and devein shrimp, so the link is on a very relevant page . Scrolling down a little bit, you'll see this link for a page called Shrimp in Garlic Sauce, which again is relevant at the page level, but you can also see that it's relevant at the domain level by simply looking at the domain name slimpalette.com.

Both links are great from a relevant point of view, while a link like this is not very relevant at all. The page is about Firefox. 3.5, which is a web browser, comes from a site about video games and computer hardware, so an ideal link would be placed contextually within the body of the content, where someone is literally recommending or referencing you. The next quality of good quality links is authority. If you are not familiar with authority in the context of backlinks, it basically represents the so-called link power that a web page has and this relates to how Google page rank works, as we discussed before, both the amount as the quality of the links are important, so the higher the quality. links a page gets, the more page rank it gets and the more page rank it has, the more authority it can pass to other pages through hyperlinks, for example, let's say page c has two links, one from page a and one from page page b, page a is stronger than page b and also has fewer outbound links.

Feed this information into the pagerank algorithm and you get the page rank for page c. This is obviously a simplified version of how pagerank works, but the key point here is to get links from high authority pages. It will probably have the biggest impact on your ranking now, although Google doesn't provide website authority or page rank scores, we have two metrics on ahrefs that attempt to quantify it. Domain rank is our website authority metric and represents the overall backlink strength of a website. profile, a URL score is our page-level authority metric that represents the overall strength of a page's backlink profile, and you'll find both metrics in most of our tools, giving you insight into referring pages now that we've We've covered two very important parts of good quality backlinks, but what we haven't talked about yet is the link itself, so let's break down the anatomy of a hyperlink and talk about how the different parts relate to SEO.

This is what a link looks like to your website visitors and if we look at the html code then it would look like this now there are three basic parts of a link which matter in SEO the anchor text of the destination URL and the rel attribute or lack of one the destination URL is simply the URL that the person will visit when the link is established the second part of a link is clicked is the anchor text the anchor text is the word, phrase or image in the that is clickable attached to the link, so in our example, the site explorer is the anchor text, which is the name of our competitive analysis tool, Google. uses anchor text to better understand what What a page is about and what terms it should rank for, but creating many links with keyword-rich anchors is an example of a link scheme and can result in a Google penalty as it doesn't look natural, for example if you had a post about the best golf balls and had 100 links pointing to it where the anchor texts were the best golf balls, then it would look and be quite unnatural.

People often use anchors such as company branding, page title, URL, or phrases. like click here and here is some proof. If we look at the backlink anchors pointing to our data study in the featured snippets, you'll see different anchor texts like ahrefs, old studies, HR studies research, and even specific statistics like 12.3 percent of search queries and 99.58 percent. and soIn fact, there are only 16 websites that have linked to us using the anchor text featured snippet, with the majority of links earned, you have very little to no control over the anchor text, so over-optimization It's not something you really need to worry about.

The last part of the link we'll talk about is the rel attribute. Some links contain a rel attribute which is intended to inform crawlers about the relationship between the linking page and the linked page and the three rel values ​​you should know when it comes to link building, nofollow ugc and historically links. Sponsored nofollow told Google that the linking page would prefer not to be associated with the linked page and for that reason Google didn't transfer authority through those links, but then added a couple of other rel ugc values. which means user-generated and sponsored content, which means an ethical paid link, they also announced that in the future they would consider these link attributes as suggestions, which means they can now transfer value through them at their discretion if a link It doesn't have any of these. rel values, then it will be called a followed link, which means that the link can pass the page rank and help improve its ranking, since this is still relatively new.

I would recommend focusing on building followed links, although that's only partially in your control now, it's important to keep in mind. That nofollow on ugc links is not bad, it's just that followed links have been proven to convey authority. One last thing I want to mention is the placement of the links. Featured links are more likely to be clicked and Google is thought to take this into account when determining how much authority a link transfers, for example an editorial link is more likely to be clicked than a link in the footer of page, so, all things being equal, the first will be better than the second, so in summary, an ideal link would come from a relevant and authoritative page where the link is followed, would have a descriptive anchor and would be placed contextually within the editorial content, but the truth is that much of this is out of your control.

What is in your control is how you spend your time building links using these five attributes to help. Qualify prospects or people worth contacting, you will spend your time creating links that will really move the needle. Now, the easiest way for a beginner to start building links is to use tried and tested tactics and we will cover some of them. in the next lesson, hey, it's ammunition and welcome to the fourth lesson of the link building module, today we will talk about the step by step process for creating backlinks, as well as three simple link building tactics that have been tested and tried. completely beginner friendly, let's start with the general process for link building.

There are three general stages in link building. Email research and outreach prospecting. When prospecting, you look for relevant pages and websites that can link to you. These can be people who bond. a page similar to the one you are going to create those who have influence in your industry or people who are passionate about the topic the main goal is not to find a perfect list of people, this stage is about finding as many people as possible who fit a specific set of criteria and this criteria is usually dictated by link authority metrics as well as relevance, as a result you will generally be working with large and very imperfect data sets.

The research stage is where you start to refine your list of prospects, these are the people you will be contacting, so you will need to visit their websites and validate that they are indeed people worth contacting. Finally, it is the email outreach stage, this is when you finalize your proposals and start sending emails to your vetted prospects now, depending on the link building tactic you use, the way you prospect prospects and craft Your email submissions will be different and this is actually quite difficult when you are new to link building. Fortunately, there are some very simple but super effective link building tactics that are brand new. friendly, but before we can get tactical, let's review our definition of link building because there are three main parts that will help you with prospect research and email outreach again.

Link building is the process of building relationships with other relevant site owners who want to and will do it. link to your content because it improves theirs Now I want to highlight the three main parts of this definition: relationships, relevance, and a value exchange. We already talked about the relevance part in the last lesson. Now we're mainly talking about value exchange and what that means. as seen in some common link building tactics, so let's dive into some simple link building tactics and I'll show you in detail what each stage of the link building process looks like, plus I'll describe the value exchange that each tactic will give you. a better idea of ​​what i mean, the first link building tactic is to get free PR using hero hero or help a reporter 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 are qualified to answer questions, then you will receive emails from journalists from various media outlets looking for sources on specific topics and these are not just run-of-the-mill publications in one email you will see publications like Parents.com, Popsugar and Houston Chronicle, to name a few, just skim through the topics and if you find something you can add value, respond to the journalist with your expert opinion and if they use you as a source they will usually link to you. to your site and social media profiles Now the value exchange here is simple: you are exchanging your expert knowledge for a mention and usually a link from an authoritative site from my personal experience.

I've gotten links from places like Reader's Digest Inc, Forbes Magazine and the Huffington Post to name a few, now we look at the three stages of link building, the prospecting part is as easy as getting you to sign up for a free service and the Journalists actually look to you for help, not the other way around, which makes Harrow a super beginner. Research-friendly, he can simply scan the results daily, but that can be time-consuming. A simple tip you can use is to create a Gmail filter so that only relevant emails appear in your inbox. Simply log into Gmail and click cursor to go down the search options, then set the from field to harrow helperreporter.com, then you'll want to set the subject to harrow in square brackets, since all of your emails include that in the from line. subject, finally set the field has the words on any keyword you want to monitor and you can also use the search operator or to include multiple keywords or phrases, click search to see the results that your search filters would include and review some of emails to make sure you get relevant results if everything looks OK, click the cursor again and then click Create Filter.

You will then have the options to apply tags, mark it as important, or forward it to another team member to take care of it Now, as for the email disclosure part, Harold provides you with an email address which will then be forwarded to the journalist, so simply reply to the email address provided and type your response now, obviously you won't be the only person emailing the journalist, so here are some tips you can use to improve your hit rate number one. keep your emails as short as necessary, journalists receive tons of emails and if they see a huge wall of text, they probably won't even give your answer a second chance, look for topics where journalists are likely to search multiple sources, for example, this query from The Best Life is to Seek Medical Experts, since in the plural form of expert, these types of requests will generally be typical posts in list form, so the more answers you accept, the better your chances. to be mentioned and linked to the number three.

Respond as quickly as possible. Journalists. in hero they often give a tighter deadline to have time to put together a good story, plus some journalists believe that people who respond faster are better sources, don't believe me, this is what a reader summary journalist told me , the deadline was simply To make sure people respond in a timely manner, I actually have the rest of the month to put the story together, which is nice. I think the tighter the deadline I attach, the better the response will be because the only people who put in the effort are those who actually have something relevant to offer, obviously this doesn't apply to all journalists but it makes sense, tip 4 is prioritizing the questions you are an expert on and using them as the first line in your speech. days when you can't respond to all relevant requests, so prioritize those where you have the highest chance of being hired, for example popsugar is looking for experts who can talk about why cats scratch furniture and how to prevent them from doing so. do if you If you are a veterinarian, then you can start your email with something like Hi Jenna, my name is Sam oh and I am a veterinarian with 12 years of experience and a board member of the Cat Alliance.

I'm clearly not a veterinarian but you get my point when you immediately qualify yourself as the right person to answer the question you will probably get their attention of course you need to be 100% honest so I won't claim to be a veterinarian when I'm not and finally Follow all instructions in your query. For example, this one says: Be sure to include your full name, pronouns, title and credentials, and the website you want to link to under your name. The next link building tactic is guest posting or guest blogging, the same thing guest blogging is when you create content for another website and the reason this strategy works is because there is a clear value exchange, they get great content for free and they almost always allow you to link to their site, either within the content or in the author bio.

Now guest blogging also offers Another great benefit besides a potential backlink: you have the opportunity to gain exposure to someone else's audience. They've already done the hard work to build that audience. You just have to write something that will impress your readers now that you're prospecting. You will need to obtain a list of websites and there are a few ways to do this. The first is to use Google search operators. Just go to Google and search for something like in the title, colon, put us in quotes, and then a keyword. that is 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 They use now to attract guest writers because If you want to write for sites with some type of link authority, you can use the Ahrefs SEO toolbar to see link authority metrics directly in Google search results and, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, you can use our free website authority checker to see. domain ratings for these sites another way to find a list of sites quickly is to use the ahrefs content explorer the content explorer is a searchable database where you can find pages on any topic along with social and SEO to get started, simply enter a topic that is related to your niche and then run the search, you will want to set up some filters to make sure that a you are getting relevant results and b that you are reaching websites that have some type of link authority, so first I'll set the language filter to English, since that's the only language I'll be able to write in, then I'll set up a proficiency rating filter and set it to a range of 30 to 60.

Now, if this is your first time writing as a guest blog, then you may want to set a lower range, like 10 to 30, to practice before launching more authoritative sites, or, if you're an experienced guest blogger, you can try something like 40 to 70. Okay, so Next I will enable this filter one page per domain. which will limit our results to one page per website and this is almost a thing to do because it doesn't make senselaunch the same website multiple times now with around two hundred thousand domains; You may be wondering which ones allow guest posts, the truth is you won't know until you ask, but there is a way to improve your hit rate and that is to look for websites that have previously accepted guest authors.

To find those sites, simply click on the websites tab and make sure your results are sorted by number. of authors basically the more authors you see the more likely they are to accept guest posts or have a great team of writers from here you can export the results and then move on to the research stage at this point you'll want to do a quick check to making sure the websites don't look spammed and are actually relevant to your site, for example golfballs.com will clearly be relevant and won't be spam at all as it's just a normal email. -Commerce site as for metricscat.com, the domain does not look like it is about golf and if you visit the site you will see that it looks like a software company, so now we would exclude this domain from our disclosure list.

Another thing that is worth worth checking is the domain's site-wide organic traffic. To do this, go to the site explorer and search for the domain. Then click on the organic search tab. If the site receives consistent search traffic like this, then it is a good sign that the domain is working. Keeping up with Google domains that have organic traffic like this is probably something you'll want to exclude when looking at sites, as this large decrease in search traffic tells us that Google may have penalized the website, so You probably won't want to associate your domain with theirs now, when you're researching, you'll probably want to find about 10 times the number of posts you can write in a week, for example, if you can write two posts a week, try to find 20 sites. examined.

Since most people won't accept your post let alone respond to you, let's move on to the next stage, which is sending via email. Now, when you're pitching websites for a guest post, the ideal is to find a good reason why. They should accept your publication. Free content is great, nothing, but it's not necessarily so compelling that everyone will accept it, so take some time to research the site and see how its expertise can be useful to your audience or business, for example, if we look at. on the golfballs.com blog you will see that they have content on the best golf balls for kids and after searching their site I discovered that they have another guide on the best golf balls for the longest distance, now they are missing out on a lot of these best golf balls for blanks and since they are in the business of selling golf balls you could easily present them with topics like best golf balls for high handicaps which according to ahrefs keyword explorer is searched for around 800 Times a month. globally, so you could email them and say something like Hi, whatever the publisher's name is.

I was researching your site and saw that you have a couple of posts about the best golf balls for kids and distance, but I was quite surprised Look, you don't have one for other types of players, i.e. older ones, who have a handicap myself. high. I spent hundreds of dollars on balls and countless hours on launch monitors to find the best ball for me if you're open. I would love to write a post for you on how to find the best golf balls for hacky golfers like me. I'm happy to share all the facts and statistics that I think will help people make an informed decision while shopping at your store.

I'd be open to applause, Sam, now with this outreach email I'm showing you that I did some research on your site. I am a golfer. I have some unique data that I spent time and money getting and also showing you how my posts could help you get more sales, we'll talk a little bit about outreach in the next lesson so let's move on to the final tactic which is the skyscraper. 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 it and then contact those who link to the popular post and ask them to link to yours now.

If we were to go through the prospecting and outreach research stages, this lesson will run another seven or eight minutes, so instead I'll link to a video that will take you through the entire process step by step. In fact, we have an entire playlist dedicated to link building tactics strategies and processes, so I highly recommend checking it out now as well. Prospecting and research are pretty easy, but the hardest part of link building and the part that makes link building challenging is outreach, so the next lesson is dedicated to creating outreach emails. highly effective. Hello, it's ammunition and welcome to the final lesson of our link building module today.

We are going to cover how to achieve blogger reach that leads to backlinks and this may be the most important lesson of this entire module because almost all link building tactics require some type of email exchange, so today we will cover the main objectives. of blogger outreach, two common approaches, and I'll discuss the anatomy of a good quality outreach email. Let's get started, so the main goal of blogger outreach is to convince those with large targeted audiences to talk about you and from an SEO perspective. want them to link to your website now outreach doesn't mean transmission, which means you shouldn't send each person the exact same email as you would through email marketing, for example this outreach email which I received is what the typical outreach blogger 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 the pages on my personal site have my full name, instead they stuck with the generic one, which They used it in mass mailing software and I broadcast it to hundreds, maybe even thousands of people, but the name is no big deal. Second, this is clearly a generic template email with no 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 check the email and their justification for me linking them is because it fits well into my post, on top of that the person followed me three more times with almost the same email , all sent within the same 30 minute period, this, ladies and gentlemen, is called spam and the results of these types of emails lead to nothing.

The page the person wanted you to link to got a total of two backlinks and they are both irrelevant. They appear to have been paid for and those backlinks don't move the needle as the page receives no organic search visits. These types of emails along with hundreds of others in my inbox are great examples of why writing good quality emails is necessary. You'll just blend in with the rest of the spam people receive every day, after all, these are unsolicited emails. Now, to be clear, it doesn't mean you can't use some kind of template to send a lot of emails efficiently. for example, I literally just got this email in my inbox and it says Hi Sam, I just published a roundup post about the best personal blogs to read and I mentioned you in it and that's a link to your post, then it explicitly says but I'm not looking to share or anything like that, I just wanted to thank you for all the inspiration you've brought to the blogosphere and the world of digital marketing.

Best of luck in your endeavors and keep up the good work on the ahrefs YouTube channel. This email did not arrive. It didn't come to my ahrefs email account, but to my personal site, so clearly he did some research before sending the email and I'm sure he sent a similar message to the 117 people he featured, so maybe you are thinking. What's the point of this email if you're not asking for anything? We'll talk about that later in this lesson. The first email I just showed you is one of the common approaches to blogger outreach. It's called a shotgun approach, where you build a broad list of targets, upload them to an outreach tool, and then send emails to each and every one.

The opposite approach to this is the sniper method, that is, when you choose targets carefully based on a strict set of criteria and then send personalized emails from the two. methods, we recommend using a sniper approach because emailing anyone is a sure way to burn Bridgets and also no one likes spam and for that reason the rest of this lesson will focus on the sniper approach , before starting to prepare. Your Outreach Emails Let's quickly talk about who you should contact and how to find their email addresses In general, you'll want to contact the author of the post if you work for the website, for example, this is a post written by Joshua Hardwick on ahrefs blog since his profile says head of content at ahrefs, you know he works there and controls what is published on the ahrefs blog now for this post by josh, it wouldn't be helpful to contact him because he doesn't work for sitepoint In this case, You'll want to contact the blog editor to find out who that person is.

You can check places like the websites about our team page, your write for us page if you have one, or your company's LinkedIn profile now to find the person. email address of the person, the easiest way is to verify the contact on the pages. This works best for websites with one author, for websites that have multiple people involved, like sitepoint or ahrefs, you generally won't find individual email addresses on your site, so to find these emails you can use a tool like hunter. io, go to your email search tool and simply search for your first and last name, and domain hunter will give you its best guess.

In this case, they are wrong, but the success rate is usually pretty good, so if you have done the work of the lessons in this module up to this point, then you should have chosen one of the three tactics I described. I created a prospect list, reviewed your list, and found some email addresses, so it's time to write. speech now, while there isn't exactly a simplified 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 and consists of five main parts of a Typical outreach email.

The email first is the subject line. The goal of the subject line is simply to get them to open the email; Otherwise, there will be no chance of getting a response, but you don't want to click bait because that will only leave a bad impression. You're writing a subject line that you want to briefly and precisely 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 speech in the which I asked if I could I write a post for a golf site and share the data I have on the best golf balls for high handicap, so I could use a subject line like new data, best balls for high handicap, in my opinion, the new part of data evokes curiosity and the rest of the topic.

The line explains what the email is about, the next part is the introduction and while there are numerous ways to write an introduction, I think it's best to start by telling them why you are sending them the email and the goal of this part is to get them to read. In the next part of the email, for example, with our guest post sample email, I said that I was researching your site and saw that you had a couple of posts about the best golf balls for kids and for distance, but I I was quite surprised to see that I don't have one for other types of players, i.e. older ones.

I admit that the first sentence could definitely be stronger, but I'm basically saying that you've done this and this, but it seems like you're missing an opportunity here. The next part of the email is the qualification and justification, simply asking someone a favor and hoping theysee a mutual benefit is naive. You need to show them why you're qualified and justify the proposition which we'll get to in a second. For example, if you're contacting someone about guest posting, explain why they should accept your post over hundreds of other potential submissions. If it asks you to add your link to a page on your site, give it a real good reason why it should do so.

In our guest post example you'll see I said that being a high handicapper myself, I spent hundreds of dollars on balls and countless hours on pitching monitors to find the best ball for me, so the fact that I mentioned I'm a high handicapper and b I have tested numerous balls and gotten real data from launch monitors that rate and justify what I am about to throw, which again is a guest post on the best golf balls for high handicappers, now to really dig into the concept of qualification and justification. let's look at an example email for skyscraper technique a while ago we did some outreach to get links to our blog post on SEO stats, so we emailed people with an email that looks like this Hi name, I saw you mentioned how 93 of online experiences start with a search engine on your page on how to do keyword research, that's our reason for contacting you.

We then went on to say that the statistic is actually 14 years old. More recent research suggests that this number has dropped to 68. I believe it is lower because social media and other sources now account for about a third of traffic, that is our qualification and justification for what we are about to present and Obviously, the next part of the email is the presentation; The pitch essentially includes your question as well as your value proposition and generally speaking, the stronger your value proposition, the higher the chances of getting a link, so for a guest post example, I said that If you're open, I'd love to write a post for you on how to find the best golf balls for hacky golfers like me. and here is my value proposition.

I'm happy to share all the data and statistics that I think will help people make an informed decision while shopping at your store, so not only will you get data for free, but I'll show you how to do it. can add value to your results now it's not always easy to come up with a solid value proposition, for example in our SEO stats email, our pitch was that we published this and some other new SEO stats here, I'm not sure if is actively editing posts, but it might be worth an update if you're not pressed, so what exactly is the value proposition that we're helping bloggers keep their content up to date?

In fact, we didn't even directly ask for a link, but we were still able to get 27 backlinks. In fact, we have an entire three-part video series on this exact case study, so I'll link to it in the description and highly recommend you check it out. The last part of the email is a simple sentence to keep the conversation going. Simply put, you don't want to end your email with a cold, harsh tone. The purpose of your first email should be to start a conversation so you can say something like this is something you would be open to is there something I missed what do you think you agree with our conclusion or whatever now this is just a template basic thing you can use when starting 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.

Think of it as an in-person meeting where you wouldn't go to a party and ask a complete stranger to do it. buy them a drink, you might strike up a conversation, connect with them over a common interest and maybe buy the first round of drinks without expecting anything in return and as a result, they might want to reciprocate by returning an act of kindness back to the target of the same. The first email you send is simple, it starts a conversation and this brings us back to this outreach email I received. The person who mentioned me on her site specifically told me that she's not looking to share anything or anything like that and that she literally just wants to say. thanks, so what did that accomplish? number one.

I actually read your email number two. I responded and said thanks for the mention. And number three. If he emails me again, I'll probably open it because I'll recognize his name, so while it's there. There will be times when it makes sense to ask for the link or guest posting opportunity right away. There are many times when it makes more sense to just start that conversation and see where it goes. The last piece of advice I want to leave you with is: only use your best work when emailing pitches; You don't want to email anyone for every 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, but still a topic you probably want to cover.

Finding a good reason for them to link back to you on this topic will be difficult, plus time is finite, so it's worth spreading your best content because there is a higher chance that it will generate backlinks, so with all that What you've learned up to this point, you should be able to create content for your website that attracts traffic from search engines, but there's still a bit of SEO fundamentals. that we haven't covered and that's technical SEO. Hey, that's ammunition and welcome to the final module of the ahrefs SEO course for beginners. For the next two lessons, we'll talk 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 does not need to be so technical and for that reason this module will focus on the basics so that you can perform regular maintenance on your site and make sure that your pages can be discovered and indexed by search engines, let's start right, so let's talk about why technical SEO is important basically, if search engines cannot properly access, read, understand or index your pages, then will not classify or be found.

In fact, to avoid innocent mistakes like removing yourself from Google's index or diluting a page's backlinks, I want to discuss four things that should help you avoid the no-index meta tag in the first place by adding this snippet to your page indicates the search. engines won't add it to their index and you probably don't want to 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 design phase. development. create it on a subdomain on their own site, so it really makes sense that they know how to index the site they're working on, but what often happens is that after they've approved the design, they'll migrate it to their domain, but often They forget to remove them in a no-index tag and, as a result, their pages end up being removed from Google's search index or never appearing at all.

Now there are times when it really makes sense not to index certain pages, for example our authors' pages. They are not indexed because from an SEO perspective these pages provide very little value to search engines, but from a user experience point of view you can argue that it makes sense to be there, some people may have their favorite authors on a blog and want to read only its content. Generally speaking, for small sites, you won't have to worry about not indexing specific pages, just keep an eye on the index tags on your pages, especially if after a redesign the second point of discussion is robots.txt. robots.txt is a file that normally 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 is important to note that a website can have multiple robots files if you use subdomains, for For example, if you have a blog on domain.com, then you will have a robots.txt file for the root domain only, but you could also have an eCommerce store. which is located at store.domain.com, so you could have a separate robots file for your online store, meaning crawlers could be given two different sets of rules depending on the domain they are trying to crawl.

Now 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 you should know about from an indexing point of view: the first is the user agent, which defines the crawler by which rules are applied and the value of this directive will be the name of the crawler, for example the Google user agent is called

google

bot 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 configure the user. agent to googlebot on the disallow value in a bar, you are telling google not to crawl any pages on your site, wouldn't it be good now if you set the user agent to an asterisk, that means your rules should be applied to all crawlers, so if your bot file looks like this and tells all crawlers not to crawl any pages on my site, even though this may seem like something you would never use.

There are times when it makes sense to block certain parts of your site or block certain trackers to For example, if you have a WordPress website and you don't want your wp-admin folder to be tracked, you can simply configure the user agent for all trackers and set the value of disallow to trim wp admin now if you are a beginner I would do it. Don't worry too much about your robots file, but if you have any indexing issues that need fixing, robots.txt is one of the first places I check. The next topic to discuss is sitemaps.

Sitemaps are usually xml files and list the important URLs on your website, so these can be pages, images, videos and other files. Insight maps help search engines like Google crawl your site more intelligently. Now creating an xml file can be complicated if you don't know how to code and is almost impossible. Maintain it manually, but if you're using a CMS like WordPress, there are plugins like Yoast and Ranking Math that will automatically generate sitemaps to help search engines find your sitemaps. You can use the sitemap directive in your robots file and also submit it to Google.

The next step of Search Console is redirects, a redirect takes visitors and bots from one URL to another and its purpose is to consolidate signals, for example let's say you have two pages on your website about the best balls of golf, an old one on dominio.com, bestgolfballs2018 and another. on domain.com, since they are very relevant to each other, it would make sense to redirect the 2018 version to the current version and by consolidating these pages you are telling search engines to pass signals from the redirected URL to the URL of destiny and the last point I want to talk about is the canonical tag.

A canonical tag is a piece 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 resolve duplicate content. problems, for example, let's say your website is accessible at http colon double slash yourdomain.com and https colon double slash yourdomain.com and for some reason you couldn't use a redirect, these would be exact duplicates , but by setting a canonical URL you are telling search engines that there is a preferred version of the page and as a result they will send signals such as links to the canonical URL so that they are not diluted into two different pages.

Now it's important to note that Google can choose to ignore it. your canonical tag looking back at the example above, if we set the canonical tag on the non-secure http page, Google would probably choose the secure https version now, if you are running a simple WordPress site you shouldn't have to worry too much about this. cmss are pretty good out of the box and will handle a lot of these basic technical issues for you, so these are some of the fundamental 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 go into this further because you will probably only have to worry about indexing issues if you haveproblems, instead we will better focus on technical SEO. practices to keep your website in good health hey, it's ammunition and welcome to the final lesson of this module and in fact, it is the last lesson of the ahrefs SEO course for beginners. In this lesson, we'll go over some technical SEO best practices so you can keep your site looking good, let's get started, so the first thing you should do is make sure your site structure follows a logical hierarchy.

Site structure is simply the way you organize the content on your website. You can think of it as a mind map on top. If you would have your home page, then you would probably have main topics branching out from your home page, like your services page, your blog, and about page, then from these main topics you would probably have even more branches to others. pages that these branches represent. Internal links which are just links from one page of your site to another and help search engines understand the relationship between these pages. Site structure also helps search engines crawl your pages more efficiently, so having a logical hierarchy is now important.

We've talked about pretty basic things and you may already be doing this, but it can get more complex as you add more pages to your site, such as blog post category pages or product pages. We have a whole video on how to use internal links to rank higher. on Google, so I'll link to it in the description. The second thing is to make sure your pages are not loading slowly, as you may know, page speed has been a confirmed ranking factor for desktop search since 2010 and in 2018, Google announced that. They would be using page speed in mobile search rankings, now you don't need to obsess over every millisecond it takes for your page to load.

Google says the speed update, as we call it, will only affect pages that provide the slowest experience. users and it will only affect a small percentage of quarries, so you don't want your pages to load slowly and there are two very basic things that I think every website should do. The first is to cache your website content. Caching is basically one way. to temporarily store copies of files so they can be delivered to visitors in a more efficient way and most web hosting companies I have come across have caching features and the second thing you can do is compress your images.

Image compression reduces the size of your files. and smaller files load faster, you can use a tool like Short Pixel which has a web interface and a WordPress plugin. If you want to take page speed a step further, it can get quite technical and complex, so we created a full tutorial on how to speed up a WordPress website using Cloudflare and a WordPress plugin, so I'll leave a link to that in the description and the last thing I want to talk about is doing your best to stay on top of about 50 possible SEO mistakes. For me, it's not as bad as it seems.

There are potentially hundreds of technical SEO issues that can occur and some will definitely happen on your site. Some of these things include broken pages that still have internal links pointing to them. Orphan pages that are pages on your site. which have no inbound internal links and are great because it can make them harder for search engines to discover, duplicate content issues and redirect chains to name a few. Now there's no point in going through 50 different potential issues because you only care if you find them, so what I recommend you do is run scheduled website audits on your site and a website audit will give you a complete analysis of the issues.

Potential issues that could be harming your website's SEO performance if you are an ahrefs user. You can do this using our site audit tool and even if you don't have a paid ahrefs plan, you can sign up for a free ahrefs webmaster tools account which will allow you to track up to ten,000 pages on each website you own to get started. . go to ahrefs.com awt and sign up for your free webmaster tools account, then you will need to verify your website i.e. prove that you really are the owner. You can do this using Google Search Console, which is the easiest method, or else.

If you have a Search Console account, you can do it manually, just enter your domain and click Continue, then verify your website using one of these three methods and I'll actually go back and use the Google Search Console method. Next you will need to import your sites and I will choose to run the first audit, I will now schedule weekly audits and I will also enable the external link tracking option to ensure we detect any broken or redirected outbound links, hit import and the tracking should start running now after After the crawl is complete, go to the overview report in your site audit project and you'll immediately see things like your health score, which is a percentage of your site's URLs that have no errors.

You will also see the main problems we found on your site. as well as the number of URLs that had the problem so that when you encounter a problem you can click on the cursor to see a description of what it means and also a short snippet of how to fix it and once you have an idea of ​​what than what the problem is and how to fix it, simply click on the number below the crawled column to see the affected URLs, then it's just a matter of fixing them one by one or hiring someone to help you and since you set up scheduled audits weekly, you can revisit the overview report to see if there is any SEO maintenance you can do that concludes the ahrefs SEO course for beginners.

Everything you've learned in this course should be enough to get you indexed rankings and keep your site in good technical health. I linked a playlist in the description of the full course with the 14 videos that will be free forever. Thank you for joining me and I hope you were able to get a lot of value from the course and be sure to like, share and subscribe for more information. Practical SEO and marketing tutorials, feel free to browse our channel and if you have any questions, leave them in the comments and we will do our best to answer each one.

I'll see you in the next tutorial.