Chapter 3- Digging deeper into SEO

Little by little, the bird builds his nest

Step 1- Lecture list (to read!!!!)

Here it is all about SEO.  To get started, you should read these posts every two weeks for two months. You’ll see that there’s always something you’ve missed and that you can learn from.

Ranking factors

  • Ranking factors for 2014 Searchmetrics : Google ranking factors 2014
  • Ranking factors 2013 Moz: Shows the biggest ranking factors in 2013

How to get links and improve content

  • Smartpassiveincome.com with Pat Flynn: SEO and how to earn passive incomes
  • Quicksprount by Neil Patel : Learn to get more traffic
  • Backlinko by Brian Dean: The backlinking expert
  • Ali Mese: How to present content

Step 2- Improve SEO and link building

SEO requires consistency, hard work and setting goals. Your primary goal is to have good and relevant links to your website. If you’ve checked the ranking factors, you see that there are many things affecting SEO such as click-through rate and Social Media. We will primarily focus on link building.

To have a strategy, create yourself clear weekly and monthly goals (goals should be realistic). Some examples:

  • Increase my email subscriber list by 50 per week
  • Get 5 new links per week including 1 from a top ranked website
  • Contact 10 websites per day to get backlinks.
  • Have 5000 new unique visitors in 3 months

When you work on link building, remember that Twitter is an effective tool for getting in contact with people (people answer you less on emails). Twitter lists can also be used as a CRM system to keep track of people you’ve interacted with. If you haven’t read it yet, check this post on how to use Twitter . And with Boomerang , you can schedule emails and get reminders of who hasn’t answered you.

If you have started to make money with your site, you can start create partnerships with bloggers and offer some compensation for them featuring you on their website.

E-commerce has partnerships with bloggers where they offer gift cards, money or products in return for a mention. To be able to analyze the value it can add to you, you should use tools such as to analyze their traffic. Also, ask for their analytics and previous outcomes of deals.

  • Free website statistics websites: Alexa Ranking and SimilarWeb
  • Paid option, but much better Alexa and Similarweb : Searchmetrics and Sistrix

Partnerships are all about negotiation, so I recommend improving your negotiation skills. If you want to consolidate your SEO skills, you can also take this SEO course on Lynda.com.

I also recommend that you have SEO contracts stating what you’ve agreed upon.

Full SEO training course

SEO training course

Step 3- Optimize on-page SEO

Outsourcing for startups

Outsourcing

Outsourcing
How to outsource
One habit you should have to gain more experience and learn on-page SEO is to set off a couple of hours per month to improve your on-page SEO. Make sure to do this at least once a month. Analyze your site with SEO Site Checkup , Hubspot Marketing Grader , Quicksprout and Woorank. Here is also a post to do a full Site audit .

Maybe you’ll need to change some HTML, CSS code, maybe you want have to change your WordPress theme (if you’re using WordPress), or maybe you to add some features to your website. If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can always outsource these tasks on freelancing websites such as Elance. Before you outsource, you should know what you want, and you should also have some basics about the stuff you want to outsource.

Step 4- Explore other content

To get traffic, there are other alternatives that can give you lots of traffic. The most effective are Videos (Youtube, Fiverr…), Infographics, Podcasts and visual social medias such as Instagram and Pinterest.

To create Infographics, you can do it on your computer with Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, or by using online infographic tools such as easily .

It is probable that you don’t know how to or that you don’t have time to do it yourself. Therefore, remember that you can always outsource!

With time, as SEO becomes more and more competitive, knowing how to use different media channels combined with your creativity will become more and more important!

content channels

Step 5- Learn to A/B test

A/B testing is something to focus on, but only when you have a proven market and only when you start to have good amounts of traffic. If you don’t have a market, consider working on something else.

A/B testing is easy with tools such as O ptimizely . In order to A/B test, I recommend having foundations in Design such as understanding the psychology of colors, typography and layout design. Good design foundations will make A/B testing easier.

GO TO CHAPTER 4

SEO tools

Great resources to analyze your on-page SEO: ———————————————————————
  • SEO Site Checkup: Checks your website’s SEO problems for free.
  • Hubspot Marketing Grader: Grades your marketing.
  • Quicksprout: Does a complete analysis of your site.
  • Woorank: Page and SEO review
  • Nibbler: Analysis your page
  • Site audit list by Moz: Checklist for site audits

Checks your Keyword rankings

  • SERPs Rank Checker: Checks how your keywords are ranking

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Website Analytics

Checks all website analytics- Is used to check website’s analytics before establishing partnerships

  • Alexa Ranking : Analyzes any site’s rank
  • SimilarWeb: Analyzes website statistics for all domains
  • Searchmetrics: Paid option, but much better than Alexa and Similarweb
  • Sistrix: Paid option, but much better than Alexa and Similarweb

Website Page Speed

  • Pingdom Website Speed Test: Test website’s loading time and suggest improvements
  • Google page speed insights: Test loading time and suggest improvements

SEO reporting Tools

  • SEMRush
  • BrightEdge

Link checkers
  • Mozbar (a must): Checks links, Domain authority and Page authority
  • Open Site explorer : Tool for link analysis
  • Check my links extension: Finds Broken links
  • OpenLinkProfiler: Finds all your backlinks and shows the quality of backlinks

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Finding great content
  • Google Keyword Planner: Finds interesting keywords to target on Google
  • SubReddit: Allows you to check for popular topics, as well as ask for feedback
  • Quora: Allows you to check for popular topics and ask for feedback
  • Google Keyword Planner: Finds interesting keywords to target on Google

Creating great content

  • Grammarly: Corrects your English
  • Copyscape: Searches for copies of your page content on the web
  • Copyblogger: Inspiration for creating good post titles

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Posts and SEO Blogs to follow

You won’t find many people more qualified in SEO than these guys (they live for SEO):

  • Smartpassiveincome.com with Pat Flynn: About SEO and how to earn passive income
  • Quicksprount by Neil Patel : Learn to get more traffic
  • Backlinko by Brian Dean: The backlinking expert
  • Ali Mese: How to present content

Ranking factors:

  • Ranking factors for 2014 Searchmetrics : Google ranking factors of 2014
  • Ranking factors of 2013 Moz: Shows the biggest ranking factor influencers in 2013

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WordPress SEO Plugins:
  • WordPress SEO by Yoast: Have a fully optimized WordPress site
  • XML Sitemaps: Sitemap generator that creates XML & HTML variants (to be uploaded to Google Webmaster tools.
  • WP super Cache : Makes website navigation faster for users
  • Bwp minify: Minifies HTML, CSS and Javascript files
  • Smush.it: Image optimizer WordPress plugin

I recommend compressing images on Photoshop, Iphoto (on Mac) or Tinyjpg . Too many plugins slow your site down.

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Online course platforms
  • Lynda.com: Courses by professionals (covers all types of courses)
  • Udemy: Courses by professionals (covers all types of courses)
  • Generalassemb.ly: Business courses
  • Teamtreehouse: Coding classes
  • Coursera: Online University classes (covers all types of courses)

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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

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