Master SEO Fundamentals: Keyword Research, On-Page, Link Building & Technical SEO

hey everyone my name is sam oh and welcome to the seo fundamentals course by ahrefs in this course i'll be

teaching you the fundamentals of seo with a heavy focus on execution and while it's a beginner's seo course i

don't want you to be fooled by the word beginner even for an eight-figure business like ours we don't do anything

crazy technical or complicated right from the start we've stuck with the fundamentals of seo that led to

compounded growth and today our site gets over a million monthly visits from google search alone making seo one of

our most effective strategies to get traffic to our site so the course is broken down into four modules plus this

video which is more of an introduction to the course as well as in seo 101 in this video we'll go over the basics of

seo and cover things like what it is why it's important and how it works you'll then move on to module one which is on

keyword research throughout these lessons i'll show you how to find keywords to target that can benefit your

business it'll also set the foundation for the next module which is on-page seo in this module we'll talk about

optimizing your pages to rank for those keywords the next module will be on link building this is one of google's most

prominent ranking signals which has proven to contribute to higher rankings in search

finally we'll finish off the course with the basics of technical seo which will mostly be about best practices and

website maintenance all right let's kick things off with the seo basics we'll talk about what search

engine optimization is why it's important and how google works seo stands for search engine

optimization and it's the process of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine's organic search

results now let's talk a bit about how they work if you're completely new to seo then it's easiest to think of search

engines as libraries but instead of storing books they store copies of websites and web pages

so when you search for a query the search engine will then look through all pages in its index and try to return the

most relevant results and seo helps demonstrate to search engines that your page is that result

now you might be thinking why should i focus on seo when there are so many other marketing mediums well

there are three major things that attract marketers to search engine optimization and in my opinion these

three things make seo the best traffic source number one unlike paying for ads search traffic is free number two

organic traffic is typically consistent once you're ranking high whereas other mediums like social media and email

marketing often result in traffic spikes that usually end up fading to nothing and it makes sense because social media

networks are designed to surface fresh content emails often get marked as read forgotten or land in the spam box

whereas search traffic is a result of users actively searching for information and the number of searches for a given

topic is typically consistent month to month and number three you have the opportunity to reach massive audiences

you wouldn't have access to otherwise in fact as of october 2019 there were nearly 4.39 billion internet users

around the world and almost 4 billion of those people are google users this is why search engine optimization

is an 80 billion dollar industry and why marketers from all walks of life are adopting and pursuing it today everyone

wants their business to get discovered and seo is the perfect way to do that now let's briefly talk about how google

works and there are two parts to this the first is crawling and indexation and these two things are what actually

allows google to discover web pages and create their search index so to actually attain information google uses crawlers

also known as spiders which gather publicly available information from all over the web the spiders will start

crawling from a list of known urls called seeds then they follow the hyperlinks on those

pages and crawl those newly discovered pages and this process goes on and on allowing them to collect a ton of

information they then take all of this data back to google servers to be added to their search index and that's what

people like you and i are searching through when we key in a query in google now if you were to search for something

and google returned every result that mentioned your words on the page then you'd end up with really bad results

this brings us to the second part which is google's ranking algorithm google has hundreds of ranking signals

and they make tweaks to their algorithm 500 to 600 times per year so to be frank no one knows exactly how their algorithm

works but they've given us clues and some guidelines to better

are just speculation at best but i do want to cover a few of the most important factors that you'll need to

understand from a fundamental standpoint first are backlinks backlinks are links from a page on one website to another

and google has said on their house search works page that if other prominent websites link to a page that's

proved to be a good sign that information is well trusted the easiest way to understand the value

of a backlink is to think of them as votes when a page receives a backlink it's essentially another website

vouching for the content on the page and the more votes you get from credible sources the higher the trust and we also

studied the effect of backlinks on search traffic and found a clear positive correlation between backlinks

from unique websites and a page's organic traffic second is search intent which represents

the reason behind a searches query and if you think of google's goal for search their job is to return the most relevant

results for any given query so with that said you can discover search intent simply by looking at the top ranking

pages for the query you want to rank for for example if you search for slow cooker recipes you'll see that the

search results are mostly blog posts with a list of slow cooker recipes so if you try and rank a product page where

you're selling a slow cooker you won't be matching search intent and therefore you won't rank

now if we change the query to just slow cooker you'll see that the dominant types of pages are ecommerce category

pages so if you try and rank your blog post of slow cooker recipes then you probably won't rank because you're not

matching search intent this is a critical concept to understand and i'll share a simple three-point checklist you

can use to determine search intent for any query in the next module and third is content depth search engines are made

up of computer programs so they can't actually read and understand text like you and i would nevertheless google has

poured billions of dollars into creating sophisticated technology that understands content to a certain degree

but it's your job as a content creator to provide context about the subject for example if you look at the top ranking

pages for the quarry how to drive a car you'll find that they talk about things like fastening your seatbelt

familiarizing yourself with the gas and brake pedals adjusting your seat and mirrors and other things that a first

time driver may not know basically you want to be able to answer the search's quarry the best that you

possibly can and naturally it should lead to content that has depth now it's important to note that depth

doesn't always translate to length for example a topic like how to turn off iphone 12 doesn't need to and shouldn't

be long in fact the top ranking page is only 185 words but the content itself solves the user's query from start to

finish alright so the basics are in the book and it's time to move on to the keyword research module

hey it's amo and welcome to the first module which is on keyword research in this first lesson we're going to talk

about what keywords are and how to choose them using a simple four point checklist let's get started so what are

keywords in the context of seo they're simply just words and phrases that people type into search engines to find

what they're looking for for example if you are shopping for running shoes you might search for

keywords like men's running shoes or simply just running shoes now keywords are actually super

important in seo because it sets the entire foundation for search engine optimization the basic goal of seo is to

rank your pages for keywords that your target audience or customers are searching for and if you're not ranking

for keywords that actually get searched then your seo efforts are kind of meaningless

for example we rank number one for the query seo checklist and this keyword is responsible for driving around 1500

monthly visitors from google and that's just in the us so keyword research is the process of

finding keywords that people are inputting into search engines and we'll get into this process in the upcoming

lessons so how do you actually choose keywords that are worth targeting let's run

through a checklist that should help you choose keywords effectively the first thing to check is if your

keyword has search demand search demand represents the volume of monthly searches made for a keyword and this is

measurable with a keyword metric that we call search volume you can find the search volume for a

keyword by using a keyword research tool like ahrefs keywords explorer for example the query kilometers to miles

gets searched around 478 000 times per month in the us alone but as you can see here in hfs keywords

explorer 80 of searches go without a click to a page and that's because google has a handy calculator right here

that'll solve the searcher's problem so search volume alone can actually be a bit misleading which is why it's worth

looking at the second checkpoint which is to check the traffic potential of the topic

traffic potential represents the total search traffic you could get if you were to rank at the top of google for your

keyword let's look at the stats for our seo checklist page in hf site explorer

so again we rank number one for the query seo checklist and it sends us approximately 1500 monthly search visits

from the us but if we look at the total global organic traffic to the page you'll see

that we get approximately 3 000 monthly visits from google every single month and that's because

this page ranks for over 200 keywords and this page isn't an outlier in our study of three million keywords we found

that on average the top ranking page ranks for nearly a thousand other keywords in the top ten

so while you may be optimizing your pages for a main keyword your page will likely rank for hundreds or even

thousands of other relevant keywords and because of that the monthly search traffic potential of the topic seo

checklist is actually higher than its monthly search volume this is what makes traffic potential a

much more reliable metric than search volume and the way you determine traffic potential is by looking at how much

traffic the top ranking pages are getting for example if we go to ahrefs keywords

explorer and search for submit website to search engines you'll 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'll see a serp overview which

shows you the top 10 ranking pages for that keyword and serp just stands for search engine

results page and as you can see our page gets an estimated 5 300 monthly search visits

from the us alone and we rank for over 1300 keywords making traffic potential of this keyword higher than its search

volume now it doesn't always work out this way for example the query keyword

cannibalization has a search volume of 150 monthly searches but the traffic potential is well under 100 so it

becomes more of a business decision whether you want to tackle the topic or not now choosing keywords based on

metrics alone is not a good idea which is why the rest of the checkpoints are meant to ground you

the next point on our checklist is to assess the business potential of the keyword or topic

business potential simply represents the value a keyword has to your business and value really comes down to your niche as

well as your business model so an easy way to do this is by assigning scores between one to three to keywords you're

researching the higher the number the more important the topic is to your business

so let's say you have a site about golf and the way you make money is by selling used golf clubs

bringing this back to business potential that means topics where you can organically recommend products to

visitors would hold the highest business value for example people searching for something like buy used golf clubs are

likely ready to make a purchase here and now so in my books this would have a

business value of three now a keyword like best golf clubs would also be relevant to your site people are

likely ready to make a purchase soon but just don't know which clubs to buy but it's actually quite easy to plug

your products because for the golf clubs you recommend you can easily link back to your product pages leading visitors

closer to making a purchase so i'd give this a business value of two now a keyword like what is a handicap in golf

would be really tough to organically recommend your products but nevertheless it's a way to attract relevant traffic

to your site so i'd give this a business value of one so these would hold the lowest priority and anything that has a

score of zero is probably worth ignoring because it's not going to impact your bottom line so something like happy

gilmore review would have a business value of zero because it has nothing to do with your business other than the

fact that it's a fantastic movie about golf alright the next point on this checklist is to see if you can match

searcher intent this is a concept that we covered in the first lesson of this course but it's something that i'm going

to keep talking about because it's super important so again search intent represents the reason behind a

searcher's query and the way we determine that is by looking at the top ranking pages for the keyword we want to

rank for for example let's say you have a recipes blog and you want to rank for toaster oven

looking at the top ranking pages you'll see that almost all of the pages are ecommerce category pages

this tells us that the intent of the searcher is likely to buy or at least to shop around for different toaster ovens

so unless you can actually satisfy the intent of the searcher it's unlikely that you'll be able to rank high for

this query and we'll dig deeper into search intent in the next lesson the final point on this checklist is to

determine whether 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 so distant future and understanding the level of difficulty to

rank for a given keyword takes a bit of analysis and practice this is why i've created an entire

lesson on assessing ranking difficulty because mastering this process will help you get predictable results in seo so

i'll save that for a later lesson now actually choosing keywords comes down to finding a balance in this

checklist you have to ask yourself does the topic drive enough traffic and have business value to make it worth the

effort and this is the question you should ask yourself before you create pages with the intent to rank in search

and these five points in the checklist are exactly what we're going to dive deeper into throughout the rest of this

module hey it's sam oh and welcome to the second lesson which is on search intent

and i touched on this in the first lesson on seo basics but i really want to take some time to unpack what it is

and how to use it in keyword research reason being if you can't match searcher intent then you probably aren't going to

rank for your target keywords so again search intent represents the reason behind a searcher's query and

matching search intent is one of those must do things to show search engines that your page will fulfill their goal

to deliver the most relevant results for any given query and while it might sound like you're trying to satisfy google

what you're actually doing is learning what you need to do to satisfy the searcher's intent

identifying search intent is usually quite easy all you have to do is search for the keyword you want to rank for and

then analyze the top ranking results and the top ranking results are a great proxy to understand search intent

because google understands what searchers want probably more than anyone else

now analyzing is kind of a jargony word but i have a simple three prong formula you can use it's called the three c's of

search intent the first c is content type content type can usually be categorized

into blog posts videos product category and landing pages for example the dominant type of pages

for the quarry best golf shoes are blog posts the second c is content format and this

applies more to blog posts and landing pages a few common blog formats you'll see are how to's step-by-step tutorials

list posts and opinion editorials for a landing page that might be something like a tool or calculator

again for the quarry best golf shoes you'll see that all of the top results are listicles which makes sense because

the word best implies that a comparison needs to be made and the third c is content angle which

often depicts the benefit it's basically your hook as to why someone should click and visit your page for best golf shoes

you'll see that every post has gone with a freshness angle which is evident based on the current year being in the titles

in my opinion this is the least important and often least consistent among top ranking pages

now this is just one example of search intent for a keyword let's go through a few more examples to really drill in

this concept the first example is for the query how to swing a golf club the dominant

content type is clearly blog posts but you'll also notice that a youtube video is ranking ahead of the blog post so

this tells us that it may be worth creating both a blog post and video to potentially get two different spots in

the search results as for content format they're clearly all how to's and seeing as the nature of

the topic would require a step-by-step procedure that's probably the route you'd want to go to and you can confirm

this by actually visiting some of the top ranking pages now with content angle it appears as

though for beginners or basic seems to be the right way to approach the topic the second example is for the query golf

clubs looking at the serp you'll see that they're all ecommerce category pages which tells us that when people

search for this query they're likely in shopping mode now seeing as content format applies

mostly to blog posts and landing pages it wouldn't be applicable here since we're looking at ecommerce category

pages as for content angle it seems to be mostly about deals so saving money on golf clubs

alright the final example is for something like golf bags looking at the serp you'll see something

a bit different we have a mixed serp content type for the top ranking page is an ecommerce category page then we have

a couple of blog posts on the best golf bags and we also have an outlier on how to buy golf bags

and towards the bottom half of the results we have more ecommerce category pages

so what do you do well in order to make an educated decision we still need to lay some

foundation work so we'll revisit this example in a later lesson hey it's ammo and welcome to the third

lesson in our keyword research module in this lesson i'm going to show you how to find keywords for your website based on

the things you learn in lesson one and two of this module let's get started so keyword research is the process of

finding keywords that people are searching for in search engines and the general process can be divided into two

macro steps step one is to generate keyword ideas and step two is to validate whether those keywords are

worth going after now this lesson is mostly about step one generating keyword ideas for your

website and in order to do that you need a keyword research tool keyword research tools show you

information on keywords like their search volume keyword difficulty scores and other seo metrics plus they should

help you discover potential topics worth going after there are a lot of tools out there and you're free to use whichever

ones you want but for this course i'll be using ahrefs keywords explorer now i also understand that some people

may not be in a place 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

all right so we're going to be doing some keyword research for the rest of this lesson so let's say that the

website we're doing keyword research for is a golf blog and the way this blog generates revenue is through affiliate

commissions meaning they promote other people's products and when someone clicks on one of the links and makes a

purchase you're compensated with a commission so the first step is to come up with a

list of seed keywords and a seed keyword is just a broad keyword related to your niche so i'll go to hfs keywords

explorer and add a few seeds for our golf site so that might 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 just like that we have around 125 000 keyword ideas with search volumes and a ton of other helpful metrics some

of which we'll touch on later now 125 000 keywords is just way too much to filter through so before we continue

let's take a second and revisit the five point checklist from the first lesson in this module

again the five things we're looking for when it comes to choosing keywords are 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 hard it will be to rank at the top of google for that keyword

so when we're generating keyword ideas we'll be able to check off the first four points as for the fifth we'll

tackle that in the next lesson alright let's look back at our list of keyword ideas and start checking off

some of these boxes so first we need to find keywords that have search demand to do that you can

set a search volume filter to show keywords with a minimum volume of at least 300 monthly searches

and now that list has just shrunk to 351 keyword ideas which will be easy to manually filter through

the next point on this checklist is to see if they have traffic potential again traffic potential is a more reliable

metric than search volume because not all searches result in clicks and at the end of the day we want traffic not

searches to check the traffic potential of a topic you need to look at the top

ranking pages and see how much traffic they're getting to do that you can click on the surf button beside any of these

keywords so if we do that for the quarry golf clubs you'll see that the top page gets

around 16 000 monthly search visits from the us now if you don't have an ahrefs account

you can get a free version of the serp using hf serp checker tool next up is business potential again

business potential is simply the value a keyword has to your business and while 16 000 monthly search visits seems great

you need to consider the fourth point on the checklist which is to ask yourself if you can match 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 a golf affiliate blog so the site probably isn't selling golf

clubs meaning we can't create an ecommerce category page and therefore we won't be able to match search intent so

seeing as this query doesn't fulfill the points on our checklist we wouldn't go after this keyword

now looking further down the list you'll see the quarry best golf balls it has a high search volume and if i click on the

search button you'll see that the traffic potential is around 5000 monthly visits from the us

pretty good now in terms of business potential this keyword would have a value of 3 because

our site makes money by reviewing and recommending products so it would be super easy to organically recommend

products in a best of post which i assume would lead to a fair amount of affiliate commissions

as for search intent these are blog posts in the listicle format with the freshness content angle as you can see

from the titles of the top ranking pages so this query checks all boxes and passed our initial sniff test so i'll

click on the check box and add it to my golf keyword list now checking the serp for all of these

keywords would be pretty time consuming so there's a quick technique you can use to find relevant keywords and that's to

use keyword modifiers a modifier is an add-on 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 listicle blog posts with various different product recommendations

now if a word like how or what is in the keyword then it tells us that the top pages will likely be blog posts or

videos with step-by-step tutorials or some other informational content so with this knowledge we can actually

filter this keyword list down to a keywords that likely have business potential

and b keywords where we can match searcher intent

for example since we're doing keyword research for an affiliate site modifiers like best top

versus and review would likely bring up topics where we can organically recommend products

so if we go back to the keyword list we can click on the include filter and paste this list there

next i'll 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 we now have a list of around 30 keywords that are most likely

going to have high business potential plus we know that 99 of the time the results for any best type keyword will

be listicle blog posts and we know that we can match searcher intent with our affiliate blog

now if we switch the modifiers in the include filter to words like how what

who where why

guide and tutorial then we can apply the list to find informational topics that we could write

about on our blog and pretty much all of these keywords will be fair game for our hypothetical

golf blog now if you plan to use a list of modifiers then it's worth noting that

you should probably do it with much broader seats for example you'll see that we only have

10 keywords when using the search volume filter paired with our list of informational modifiers

now if i change the c to just golf set the volume filter to a minimum of 300 monthly searches

and then paste in my list of informational modifiers hit the any tab and click apply

then you'll see we have a lot more topics that we could potentially create content around so if this is a method

you want to try then 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 to compile a list of over 190 keyword ideas

in my golf keyword list now one downside to using keyword research tools is that the list of

keyword ideas will usually be limited to words and phrases that include your seats but there are other great keywords

that won't necessarily include your seeds so how do you find them

well the best way to find these keywords is to look at pages that drive the most search traffic to your competitor sites

because if your competitors are ranking for keywords that are sending them a ton of search traffic then i'm sure you'd

want to get in on the action right now by competitor i'm not necessarily talking about your direct business

competitors i'm referring to your organic search competitors which are websites that rank for keywords that

you'd want to rank for so to find these competitors i'll go back to ahrefs keywords explorer but

this time i'll click on my golf keyword list next i'll go to the traffic share by

domains report which will show you the websites that get the most search traffic based on your keyword input in

this case our golf keyword list so as you can see sites like golf digest golf.com and golf wrx are getting the

most search traffic from the keywords that i want to hypothetically rank for but we already know these keywords since

we created the list so what you can do is click on the caret beside a domain you want to research further and then

click top pages which will show you the pages that send the most search traffic to a website

and check this out golf digest page on game improvement irons gets around 5 400 monthly search visits from the us

this page that ranks for what degree is a sand wedge gets around 4 700 monthly search visits and we wouldn't have seen

these in the keyword ideas report because they don't contain our seeds so you can just skim through this list

look for potential topics then go through those four points in the checklist for keywords that are

interesting to you add them to your keyword list and once you've exhausted a website's top pages

rinse and repeat for the other organic search competitors until you're satisfied with your list and if you're

still unhappy with your list you can try and find other seeds within this report the two that stand out to me right away

are sand wedge and fairway woods so i'll go back to keywords explorer and type those into the search box

and seeing as both of these are different types of golf clubs you can add pitching wedge putter putting and so

on and so forth bottom line there should be no shortage of keyword ideas and you should be able

to use these two methods to build a solid list of topics to keep you busy for years

but here's the thing even if you've checked off these four boxes on the checklist there's still one left and it

won't matter if you don't rank for your keywords hey it's ammo and welcome to the fourth

lesson in our keyword research module today i'm going to show you how to determine ranking difficulty for a

keyword this will help you understand how hard it'll be to rank high in google for your target keywords let's get

started so when it comes to ranking in google you need to understand who you'll be up

against before you target a keyword otherwise you could be entering a battle you won't be able to win

from an seo perspective competitors are pages and websites that rank at the top of google for your target keywords so

that means your competitors can be different for every single keyword you target

so there are three main things you'll want to consider before you decide to pick a fight and those are search intent

metrics of the top ranking pages and websites and topical authority of the top ranking websites

now as we go through these points we're going to create a list of self-check questions which should help you make

informed decisions in your keyboard targeting also in order to see things like metrics of top ranking pages you

need an seo tool since google won't show you data on other pages so i'll be using ahrefs keywords explorer throughout this

lesson now if you don't have an ahrefs account you can use our free serp checker tool

which will give you data on the top three pages all right let's start with search intent

the first thing you need to do is look at the serp and ask yourself do some of the top ranking pages fail to closely

match search intent to find this out you can go through the three c's of search intent as we

discussed in lesson two of this module and by the looks of it they're all listicle blog posts using the freshness

angle so they do match it also pay close attention to the titles and urls of the ranking pages

in general if the top pages include the primary keyword or a variation of it in the title and or url they're likely

targeting that keyword for example all of the top ranking pages for the quarry how to save money are exactly about that

whereas a quarry like best convertible car seats for small cars is a bit mixed as you can see some pages have gone

specifically with the angle for small cars as a result it's probably matching

searcher intent better than the more broad posts about the best convertible car seats for any car

this is a sign of weakness in the serp because it means there's probably a lack of rank-worthy content out there about

the best convertible car seats for small cars now i don't want you to take this as

advice that you must include the exact keyword phrase in your titles and or urls with this example finding

convertible car seats for small cars is actually a very specific need for a specific person

all right let's talk about the metrics the first metric to look at is the number of websites that are linking to

the page at ahrefs we call this referring domains as i mentioned in module 1 backlinks are

one of google's most prominent ranking signals so if a page has a lot of quality links pointing at it then it'll

be more competitive to rank so before choosing a keyword you need to ask yourself

can i get more quality backlinks than the top ranking pages the second metric is website authority

at ahrefs we call this domain rating which represents the overall strength of a website's backlink profile

very generally speaking you should be going after keywords where your website's dr is in a similar ballpark

range as the top ranking pages or at the very least one of the top ranking pages should be in the same range as your

website for example if all of the websites that rank in the top 10 have high dr's and

you have a dr of let's say 10 then you may want to consider competing when you're at a similar level so let's add

that question to our checklist is my website in a similar dr range or higher than the top ranking websites

again this is a very general recommendation but still a decent one to follow if you're a beginner to seo

to see the domain rating of your own site you can enter your domain in site explorer and see it here on the overview

page or you can enter your domain in our free website authority checker i'll be

leaving links to all of these tools in the description alright let's move on to the third part

which is topical authority of the top ranking websites google wants to rank pages from

authoritative sources and this goes beyond backlinks for example if we look at the serp 4 how

to unclog a toilet you'll see that this dr42 site is outranking much more powerful websites with significantly

more referring domains well this page comes from a website that's just about plumbing so it's

likely more authoritative on the topic so the question you need to ask yourself is

is my website equally or more topically authoritative than the top ranking websites

if the answer is yes then that's a positive thing for you the easiest and quickest way to find out

is to just look at the domain names and use some common sense for example looking at the serp 4 best convertible

car seat for small cars you'll see sites like experienced mommy baby center parenting pod baby list and other

relevant sites that talk about products for children and for domains that aren't as easily

distinguishable like 800 buckleup.org you can just visit the site hit the about page and get a general idea of

what the site is about in this case you'll see that they talk about car seat recalls and review car seat brands so

yes it is topically authoritative on car seats all right let's look at our full list of

yes or no questions as a very general rule of thumb the more yeses you can check off the better your

chances of ranking again very general because seo is quite nuanced with that said let's go through

a couple of hypothetical examples for our golf site to set the scene let's say you have a website that's about golf

instruction and you also review golf equipment and your website's domain rating is low at around 15.

all right so the first example is for the quarry best golf grips let's start with the first question

do some of the top ranking pages fail to closely match search intent from the looks of it they all look

decent so i'll check the no box next up can i get more quality backlinks than

the top ranking pages again we haven't covered anything about quality backlinks yet so for now let's

just look at quantity most of the sites have very few referring domains so i'd say this is a

yes next question is my website in a similar dr range or higher than the top ranking

websites based on the serp there are a few sites with similar website authority so let's

give this a yes as well and finally is my website equally or more topically authoritative than the

top ranking websites well all of the top pages are from golf sites and so is mine so let's give this

a yes as well so based on our analysis it looks like this would be a topic worth going after

all right the next analysis is for the keyword best putters looking at search intent overall it

looks like the majority of pages are good so i'll check the no box but i do want to touch on this page on the best

blade putters this is more of a focused post and they're likely ranking high for this

because of all of the other factors like high website authority lots of referring domains and topical authority so i would

actually exclude them from the rest of this analysis alright next up can i get more quality

backlinks than the top ranking pages again just looking at the quantity of links to these pages the answer would

likely be a yes seeing as we're still looking at about a dozen referring domains but it's important to realize

that getting more links than the number one page probably won't happen in the near future meaning getting the top

ranking spot will be tough next is my website in a similar dr range or higher than the top ranking websites

the answer is no and finally my website is topically authoritative so i'll give this a yes

now it looks like we're at a tie between yeses and notes and this is exactly why i said

as a very general rule of thumb the more yeses you can check off the better your chances of ranking

again seo is nuanced plus you need to weigh out some of the other principles we discussed like traffic potential and

business value and the best way to make sound judgment calls is through experience

so it will take time to hone your skills and gain a better grasp of keyword analysis

so as you can see understanding how hard it will be to rank in google will be a key skill to your success in search

why because it's the first step to getting predictable results

after all if you know what it'll take to rank ahead of your competition then it all comes down to execution

and that's what the next two modules are all about hey it's ammo and welcome to the second

module which is about on-page seo if you haven't seen the introduction to seo video and the module on keyword research

then i highly recommend watching those first they'll help you get the foundational knowledge you'll need to

get the most out of this module i'll leave links in the description all right so what is on-page seo it's

simply the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines and it revolves heavily around

optimizing pages for search intent but on-page optimizations also involve creating and optimizing html tags like

titles and meta descriptions now if you've been exposed to the practice of on-page seo then it's quite

likely that you've heard conflicting advice and for that reason we're going to discuss both what on-page seo is and

what it is not let's talk about common advice you might see on on-page seo best practices which

just aren't true today and while there are many old school tactics that are still being recommended i want to focus

on just three points to help you navigate the noise number one on-page seo is not about

stuffing exact match keywords it used to be common practice to include the exact keyword you wanted to rank for

in your title url and content for example if you wanted to rank for car dealer san diego you would stuff

that keyword throughout your page despite the fact it doesn't make sense grammatically speaking

google is smart enough to understand things like connecting words synonyms and closely related words and phrases

in fact for all of these queries the top 10 pages are nearly identical unfortunately stuffing exact match

keywords is still being practiced today which can lead to poor user experience and poor readability all things that

on-page seo should not do the second thing is that on-page seo is not about using your keyword a specific

number of times on the page in our study of three million search queries we found that on average the top

ranking page ranks for around a thousand other relevant keywords in the top ten now can you imagine what it would be

like if a top ranking page had to mention all 1000 of those keywords at least three times

it makes no sense the content would be unnecessarily lengthy and create an awful user experience for visitors

here's an example look at the syrup for the quarry diet plan you'll see that health lines article on how to lose

weight ranks number one and there's no mention of a diet plan in their title or url

in fact there's only one fleeting mention of it on the page not even a subheading here's another example gq

ranks in the top spot for classiest watch but if we look at the page you'll see

that the word classiest isn't there and neither is the word classy the third point is that on-page seo

isn't about meeting a minimum word count some studies have shown that the average content length of the top 10 results is

over 2 000 words as a result many seos have recommended that you create pages that are at least that length

but that isn't exactly sound advice for example our backlink checker is 628 words yet we rank number one for our

target keyword and the page generates around 130 000 monthly visits from google search alone

here's another example this page only has 76 words on it the majority of content are images according to hf site

explorer the page gets over 170 000 monthly search visits now let's talk about what on-page seo is

today in 2021 and beyond looking at the definition again on-page seo is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank

higher in search engines and as i mentioned this revolves heavily around optimizing pages for search intent the

key word here is search intent translation the goal of your pages should be to satisfy the searcher's

intent how well we talked about the three c's of

search intent which should help you get the basic stuff down like the content type format and angle in addition to

this your content needs to address the things people expect to see you'll also want to nail the more

tangible items like titles subheadings internal linking readability and of course the actual content itself

these are the things we'll be answering in part two of our on-page seo module where we'll get more tactical and talk

about how you can create content that's optimized for search hey it's ammo and welcome to the second

lesson in the on-page seo module today i'm going to show you how to create a page that's optimized for search let's

get started so as i showed you in the last lesson on average the top ranking page ranks for nearly a thousand

keywords for example healthline's page is clearly targeting the query how to lose weight fast and sure enough they're

ranking in the top spot now the traffic to this page doesn't come from just their target keyword it

comes from the combined effect of ranking for thousands of queries and when we sum up the traffic from all

keywords it makes up well over a hundred thousand monthly search visits just from the us

in fact if we look at the page's keyword rankings you'll see that the target query how to lose weight fast only sends

them a small percentage of the total monthly search traffic now in order to rank for a ton of

keywords and get a ton of search traffic you need two things the first is a page that's optimized to rank and the second

are backlinks in this lesson we'll cover how to create an optimized page and we'll tackle links in the next module

okay so with on-page seo there are two main things we need to cover the first is arguably the most important and

that's to ensure your page satisfies searcher intent we've already covered the three css search intent which again

will give you very basic guidance on the type of content to create the format to use and the angle to go with but the

actual content itself is what will leave your visitors satisfied or dissatisfied so you might be wondering what exactly

do i write about in order to satisfy searchers the short answer is to learn from your competitors

the top ranking pages are ranking at the top for a reason google and other search engines deem them as the best candidates

to satisfy a search's query so they're clearly doing something right at least from the perspective of a search engine

now while the content will vary from topic to topic the way you research a competitor's content will be more or

less the same let's go through an example so let's say that we want to create content that targets the quarry

best golf club sets to start i'll go to ahrefs keywords explorer and search for the quarry

then i'll scroll down to the serp overview to see the top ranking pages now if you don't have an ahrefs account

you can use our free serp checker tool to do everything i'm about to do all right so looking at the serp we want to

pick out the top three or so relevant ranking results and by relevant i'm talking about pages

that match the dominant search intent based on the three cs we've discussed so many times now so in this case the

majority of pages are blog posts in the listicle format with freshness as the content angle so that means we wouldn't

look at pages from amazon or golf galaxy because these pages are clearly ecommerce category pages and are

therefore outliers to the dominant search intent we'll also exclude the pages from golf digest and business

insider since it doesn't look like they're intentionally targeting our query so i'll open up these three pages

in new tabs and what we're going to look for are similarities in their content

specifically in the subtopics and we'll also look to deepen our understanding of content format and content angle

looking at the first page you'll see that they've created a list of categories for the best golf club sets

so there's best selling best game improving irons and so on looking further down they have a

subheading which is the make and model of the golf club set followed by a brief review of the clubs

the next page also has a summary based on more broad categories like best value premium pick and best choice

and based on the table of contents you'll see that they followed a similar structure where the make and model of

the clubs are used as subheadings they also add a brief description of the clubs as well as some skimmable bullet

points and the final page does pretty much the same thing they use subheadings as the

make and model followed by a short 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 callaway strata set and they all include sets from wilson's

staff in my opinion these wouldn't appeal to an intermediate or advanced level golfer

alright so at this point we know that we should create a holistical blog post with freshness as the angle we also know

that the content should likely be targeted at beginners a couple common sets that were mentioned in all posts

were the callaway stratas as well as a set from wilson's staff now it's important to note that you don't have to

include these in your post but it's simply an observation i had made we also saw that the top two out of three pages

had top picks for categories like best game improvement clubs as well as best clubs for the money

finally we know that the subheading should be the name of the club set another thing i recommend before you

start writing is to do a content gap analysis at the page level a content gap analysis at the page level will show you

common keywords that the top pages are ranking for where your page isn't but since we don't have a page we can still

find common keyword rankings amongst a few top ranking pages using ahrefs content gaap tool

to get started go to hr site explorer and paste in any one of the urls next head on over to the content gap

tool now i'm going to take the three urls we analyzed and put them all in the top

section of this tool so what this is saying is show us keywords that any of these targets rank

for where at least one of them ranks in the top 10. now if i run the search you'll be able

to see the keywords that these pages rank for in the position that they're ranking it

as a general rule of thumb the more urls that rank high for the keywords the more relevant it'll be to your content

so to narrow our search down a bit i'll click on the intersections drop down and select both two and three intersections

meaning 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 just skim through the list and look for interesting subtopics that

might be worth adding to your post in addition you may be able to learn some interesting things about the

audience as well as the language they use so as you can see people who search for this quarry are mostly looking for

men's clubs people want to know the best clubs for the money they want to see cheaper options and others are looking

specifically for a set of irons these are all things you should consider as you craft your content

all right so armed with this information you should be able to create a great post with a searcher in mind and while

the content is the most important part there are also a few more technical on-page optimizations you should do

let's go through a few of the most important ones first is to include your target keyword

in your title when it makes sense adding your target keyword to your title should come naturally for example our

title for this post is 45 best free seo tools tried and tested and free seo tools is our target keyword

now there will be times when it makes more sense to use a close variant of your target keyword for example this

post is targeting the query how to get youtube subscribers but our title is 9 ways to get more youtube subscribers

because we went for the listicle angle the next thing you can do is to use a short and descriptive url slug

short and descriptive urls help people immediately understand what the page is about before even visiting them just

look at these two urls they're on the exact same topic but one is much more descriptive than the other

this part of the url is called the slug and the easiest way to choose your slug is to use your target keyword where

spaces will be replaced with hyphens again you should only do this when it makes sense so you don't need to worry

about forcing it now if you're wondering if you should use subfolders to describe categories that's entirely up to you

alright next is the meta description the meta description is html code that's meant to briefly summarize your page and

search engines often use this text right within the serp to my best knowledge meta descriptions aren't used as a

ranking signal but they can influence click-through rates and for that reason i think it's important to add to your

pages now it's important to note that according to our study of 192 000 pages

we found that google rewrote meta descriptions nearly 63 percent of the time so i wouldn't spend a ton of time

on them but you should still include them alright next up is to add internal links

to and from your pages internal links are links from one page on the same domain to another

and they're super powerful because they can pass link authority to other relevant pages and they also help search

engines better understand a page's contents for example if i had a site in the

careers niche and i was writing a post about how to write a cover letter then i definitely want to add internal links

from other relevant pages like one on how to write a resume more importantly visitors who want to

learn how to write a resume would probably want to know how to write a cover letter and vice versa

to find opportunities you can go to google and search for sitecolon yourdomain.com

and then add the topic you're writing about then visit relevant pages and see if

there's an opportunity to add an internal link to your new post alternatively you can use ahrefs site

audit tool completely free just sign up for an ahrefs webmaster tools account verify your site and then run a crawl

then you can head over to link explorer to find internal linking opportunities we have a short but helpful video on how

to do this on ahrefs product updates youtube channel so i'll link that video up in the description

all right next up is to optimize your images in the last 28 days we've had over 4 000

visits to our blog from google image search while that pales in comparison to our

500 000 monthly organic blog visits it's still four thousand visits now optimizing your images for seo is

three-fold number one name your image files appropriately for example this is a picture of a puppy

if you took the photo yourself then chances are your smartphone or camera named it something like img underscore

and then a million numbers instead change the file name to something like puppy

not exactly rocket science but according to google file names can give google clues about the subject matter of the

image number two use descriptive alt text alt text short for alternative text is

an html attribute that goes in your image tag so the syntax would look something like

this where the alt value should describe the image alt text helps improve accessibility for

those who are using screen readers or if the image fails to load visitors will be shown the alt text instead

now google recommends creating useful information rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context

of the content of the page yes google explicitly says to use keywords but they also say to avoid

stuffing keywords as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam meaning

don't do something like this now looking back at the syntax our alt text isn't exactly descriptive so let's

change that to something like puppy sitting on a couch if you use wordpress just add your alt

text here when inserting your images and the cms should do the rest alright the third thing you'll want to do is

compress your images compressing images makes your image file sizes smaller leading to faster load times and page

speed is a google ranking signal there's a free tool for compressing images called short pixel which has both

a web interface as well as a wordpress plugin and the last thing i highly recommend is

to optimize for readability here are five simple but effective tips you can use to improve readability number one

write in short sentences and short paragraphs because no one wants to land on a page with a huge wall of text

two use descriptive subheadings so people who are skimming the article can easily

find the things that are important to them 3. use a large enough font that's easily

readable on both desktop and mobile 4. avoid using big words it's more important that people understand your

content and 5. write as you speak your content will be more conversational and entertaining to read

a free tool i recommend using is called hemingway app it'll give you some writing tips as well as a readability

grade i'd recommend trying to keep things at or below a sixth grade level now there are other on-page

optimizations you can do like adding open graph meta tags or og tags for short these will allow you to customize

the titles descriptions images and other information when your pages are shared on social media networks

there's also schema markup which is code that helps search engines understand your content and better represent it in

the search results for example these pages use the recipe schema type so google is able to show things like the

recipe's rating the number of votes the total time to make the food as well as nutritional information

if you have a wordpress site then you can add og tags in schema with plugins like rank math or yoast

now again the most important part of your content is that you're striving to satisfy searcher intent

yes the technical things are important too but they're more like the icing on the cake so here's a full on-page seo

checklist take a screenshot and let's move on to the next module which is on an seo strategy called link building

hey it's ammo and welcome to the third module in our seo course for beginners throughout the next five lessons we'll

be talking about arguably the most important and most challenging seo strategy it's called link building and

to kick things off we're going to talk about what it is why it's important and the mindset you'll need to have to be

successful at it let's get started so what is link building by definition link building is the process of getting other