Chapter 4- Get a “professional” experience

It always helps to get additional professional experience to consolidate your insights and to learn more. At this step, your are strongly recommend to get do SEO internships or Freework or a full-time SEO position. At the end of this Chapter, I’ll have an SEO section for SEO opportunities in Europe.

Step 1- Define how much time you have available

Before you decide to get an external experience, set up your priorities. If your website is popular and it requires a lot of work, then figure out how much time you have. Find out how many hours you have available to work for someone else.

Step 2- Do an internship, do freework, find a full-time SEO position or do some Freelance work

You should have in mind that SEO skills are highly demanded, especially by e-commerce companies.

If you want to Freelance and offer your services directly, I recommend that you check this course about outsourcing. It shows how you can learn to outsource your outsourcing. Also, research what clients normally expects so that you can understand what clients expect in terms of reporting and results.

For example, some clients expect weekly reports, other monthly. You should, therefore, take a look at reporting tools such as SEMRush or BrightEdge.

Task for Chapter 4:

Define available time
Get a external professional SEO position

Tasks for own website:

Daily: Contact blogs for link building
Daily or Weekly: Monitor and analyze traffic on Google Analytics
Weekly: Posts for newsletter or blog
Weekly or biweekly: Read and apply resources + learn SEO ranking factors
Biweekly or monthly: On-page and off-page SEO analysis

GO TO CHAPTER 5

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

Google 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

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