The Beginner's Guide to SEO

THE BEGINNER’S
GUIDE TO
S
E O
www.positionly.com
1

Who is this Guide for
In this guide we provide you with the complete and up-to date knowledge
about Search Engine Optimization.
If you're a beginner, you'll learn everything you need to know about the
principles and benefits of SEO, which will help you understand how
search engines work and how to use that knowledge to get more highlytargeted
traffic to your website for free. We'll walk you through the basics
like planning your website’s structure, on-page optimization and keyword
research.
If you’re already familiar with SEO you’ll also find something for yourself
too. In the later parts of the guide we discuss how to fix the most common
issues with SEO that you might encounter during your journey. Finally
we’ll go through the off-page optimization basics with deep focus on link
building. Let’s get started!
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Table of contents:
1. What is SEO
4-10
2. How to Start Your First SEO Campaign
11-16
3. On-page SEO
17-34
4. Content Marketing
35-40
5. Off-page SEO
41-46
6. How to track SEO
47-53
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KEYWORDS
UPDATE
WHAT IS SEO
SEARCH
CONTENT
CHAPTER 1
5

Introduction
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting a website to
rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs). When a user types a
word or phrase into a search engine, a sophisticated algorithm returns all
relevant web pages, ranked so that the most relevant results appear at the
top of the first page of results.
There are many factors that search engines use to determine which pages
should be ranked highest for a particular search query, including the
content that appears on the page and the other sites that link to it. SEO
means optimizing all of these factors to help the site move up the rankings
of popular search engines such as Google.
For example, in order to make a webpage appear in the search engine
results page when a user searches for "florists in Boston" it would have to:
• include the words "florists in Boston" in the on-page text
• get links that points to it from other websites
These signals to the search engine that the page is relevant and
appropriate to display for the search query.
A Brief History of SEO
The world’s first search engine, known as Archie, was created in 1990 to
help people find information online. Google followed in 1996 and has since
grown to become by far the biggest player in online search: roughly 70
percent of searches are now conducted using Google.
Search engine optimization was born when website owners realized that
they could get more visitors by figuring out how to alter their sites to make
them rank more highly in search engines.
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Early SEO techniques were very primitive – websites could get traffic
simply by repeating a common search term over and over again in the onpage
text or in the HTML tags. As search engines evolved, they became
much more sophisticated at telling the difference between spammy
attempts to manipulate them and sites that offer real value to visitors.
Why Your Website Needs SEO
Search Engines changed the way we seek for information, products or
services. We type in the query and we receive the information in the matter
of seconds. That means that your website can be found by a highly specific
audience. The better the visibility of your website, the higher the chance
that your business will be discovered by users looking for services like
yours.
Studies suggest that the first organic result (the first result that occurs
below the ads) on Google gets about 20 percent of searchers’ clicks. That’s
a lot of visitors that you may be able to turn into customers!
Literally thousands of people around the world generate thousands of
searches for the most popular queries. For example, if you optimize a web
page around the keyword “flower delivery,” which is searched for around
165,000 times every month, then you could potentially have 33,000 visitors
a month if you get your page to rank as the top result on Google – and
that’s just from one search engine.
Google is the most popular search engine, but traffic from Yahoo and Bing
can also contribute to your business’s online success.
Implementing SEO in your marketing strategy is the right choice, as it
means that the people you attract to your site are those who are actually
looking for the products and services that you offer.
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LEARN MORE
Why SEO Will Grow Your Business
Can You Do SEO By Yourself
Many SEO agencies claim to be able to get your site to the top page of
Google, but there are actually many benefits of managing SEO by your
own.
DIY SEO can be an extremely cost-effective way of getting traffic,
compared to using an SEO agency or paying for ads to bring in traffic. You
could start by spending just a few hours a week on:
• keyword research
• optimizing your present web page for keywords
• building links
• creating keyword-rich content for your site
However, if you don't want to hire an in-house SEO specialist and you don't
have the time to do it yourself, an agency can be a good option - just make
sure that you know exactly what techniques the agency is using to improve
your site's ranking. You need to make sure that your site’s SEO is built
around a safe long-term strategy, not cheap tricks designed to get quick
gains by manipulating search engine algorithms.
LEARN MORE
What to Ask an SEO Agency Before Working With Them
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Main Elements of SEO
SEO involves both on-page and off-page elements. You will need to use
both to help your strategy reach it’s full potential!
On-Page Elements
Site Structure
Structural elements of your site, such as the way the pages link to each
other, can affect SEO. Search engines “crawl” through this link structure to
find and index pages. You need to structure your site so that all off the
pages would be easy to index by search engine crawlers. Creating a clear
website structure will not only make your website more accessible for
search engines, but most of all - more friendly to the end users.
Content
Search engines love original content, the same as people do. By saying
original content, we’re are thinking about what is really unique and that is
not found anywhere else on the web. Filling your site with regularly
updated content, including text, images and videos, is one of the best ways
to improve SEO.
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Keywords
Including keywords in your content lets search engines know that your
page is relevant to people who are searching for those keywords. You will
need to include keywords naturally throughout your on-page content,
including:
• headlines
• subheadlines
• bolded section of text
Remember not to over do it! Over-stuffing the content with unnecessary
stuff will make it look really spammy. This kind of content could turn your
visitors away instantly and what’s worse - could be a threat from the SEO
point of view.
Meta-tags
Similarly to keywords inside your content, meta-tags define certain
elements on your page, such as images and titles. Including keywords in
these tags is essential and has an enormously big impact on your website’s
performance in search engines.
LEARN MORE
On-page Optimization Checklist
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Off-Page Elements
Links
Links are hand-in-hand with on-page optimization are the foundation of
visible appearance in Google. Receiving links to your website from other
reputable sites in your niche, can help to getting a better exposure. There
are many strategies for link building, which we cover in the later stages of
this guide.
These signals indicate that the page is relevant and appropriate to display
for the search query.
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HOW TO START
YOUR FIRST SEO
CAMPAIGN
CHAPTER 2
12

Introduction
It's never too late to start using SEO as a part of your marketing strategy.
Things have changed so much in the world of technology, but the
principles of SEO pretty much stayed the same. You may have an
advantage by starting now, over other businesses that are still operating in
an old way. This guide will introduce you to your goals, tools and strategy in
launching a SEO campaign. Where you go from there is entirely up to you
and what you want to achieve.
How Does SEO Work
In our increasingly mobile world, people normally only click on the first few
results from any search. Ranking at the top of the search engine results
page (SERP) can make the difference between being found and being
forgotten. SEO techniques cover all the changes and improvements you
can make to your website to help you be found more easily and turn
visitors into customers.
While the Internet has brought people together who never would have met
otherwise, many searchers are still frustrated trying to find what they want
online. The engineers who build search engine algorithms are always
refining their programming to better understand what people really want
compared to what they search for.
That makes SEO an ongoing process as businesses try to give algorithms
what they need to boost the rankings for specific search terms. Global
competition is increasing, language is changing all the time and search on
mobile devices is becoming the new normal. All these add up to the fact
that getting found is getting harder than ever. Better SEO is the answer.
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Benefits of Improving Your SEO
Ranking at or near the top is the ultimate goal of SEO, but that's just the
beginning. Three of the most important benefits from improved SEO are:
• A better user experience – By simplifying navigation and streamlining
your content, site visitors will be able to find what they want much more
quickly. That improves conversion rates, which leads to the second
improvement.
• Measurable ROI for your site – Businesses have treated advertising like
a sunk cost because nobody was able to track how effective it was
compared to word of mouth and referral traffic. With website analytics,
you can see where your money is going and how much of a revenue
impact your changes make.
• Stronger market position – Brand reputation is measured by how well
known you are and how people feel about your company. Making
customers feel welcome on your site and making it easy for them to find
what they need improves your reputation and social mentions across the
web.
• More targeted traffic – Bounces don't help anyone. When someone
clicks on your site and clicks away, neither you nor the user get what you
want. SEO improves your conversion rates along with your reputation as
an authority in your field. When your keywords, titles, meta-tags and
images are all coordinated on a specific topic, searchers will find your
site useful and compelling.
• Better brand exposure – One of the greatest aspects of on online
presence for smaller business is that it levels the playing field in terms of
brand exposure. Companies that can't afford prime real estate on the
main shopping street or giant billboards on the side of buildings can get
just as much exposure through shared content and social proof that
comes from effective SEO.
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Leading SEO Metrics
The question all business owners really want to know is how to tell if their
SEO strategy is working. Although every business will have slightly
different metrics based on what goals they are trying to achieve, here are a
few of the most common metrics that are tracked for changes month over
month.
• Search engine rankings – Where your site falls for specific keywords.
• Conversion rate – The percentage of your total site visitors that perform
a specified action, like signing up for an account or subscribing to your
newsletter.
• Organic traffic – The number of visitors who come to your site based on
search results and other non-paid sources.
• Average order value – The average dollar amount of completed
purchases at your online store.
LEARN MORE
Search Engine Rankings as a Reporting Metric
How to Measure ROI of SEO
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Free SEO Tools
Now that you know what to look for, you need some tools that will collect
and present that information. These are the absolute basics in terms of
SEO tools and all are free.
• Google Analytics – Google's free SEO research tool is the place to start
finding out how site visitors are finding you and where you stand in the
market.
• Google Webmaster Tools – While Analytics focuses on site traffic,
keywords and visitors, Webmaster Tools help you make adjustments
according to how Google's algorithms rank your site.
• Bing Webmaster Tools – Microsoft's Bing captures 16 percent of the
search market compared to Google's 67 percent, but that can change
quickly and your target audience may prefer Bing. It's worth it to do
some research and cover all your bases.purchases at your online store.
LEARN MORE
Complete Guide to Google Analytics
Complete Guide to Google Webmaster Tools
Beginner’s Guide to Bing Marketing
Basics of SEO Strategy
Everyone is trying to rank at the top of searches in their industry, so there
are going to be a few winners and plenty of runners-up. The difference is
strategy. SEO is part of a bigger field known as content marketing and
these two need to be in alignment to make an impression on the market.
The main components of your strategy are:
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• Selecting keywords that are popular with searchers and relevant to your
business.
• Writing page titles and meta tags that are informative for customers and
tied to your business goals.
• Building clear site navigation that flows from one page to the next,
leading visitors to convert.
• Publishing content that is rich with original information, quality images
and video.
• Establishing inbound links from authoritative sites.
• Increasing your mentions on social media.
The End of the Beginning
Your journey into better search rankings, more site visitors, higher revenues
and broader brand awareness starts now. Things change quickly in the
world of SEO, so make sure all of your information is up-to-date.
To stay informed on the inevitable changes to search engine algorithms
you can subscribe to our newsletter, where we try to cover the latest news
in regard to SEO.
LEARN MORE
The Best SEO Strategy
16

ON PAGE SEO
CHAPTER 3
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Introduction
If you want visitors to find your site easily online, you need to pay attention
to on-page SEO factors, such as page design, content and keywords. The
Internet’s two most popular search engines, Google and Bing, both publish
webmaster guidelines to help site owners produce high-quality sites that
get noticed by search engines.
Content Guidelines
Google Webmaster Guidelines contain a number of tips for improving onpage
SEO. The world’s most popular search engine emphasizes the
importance of creating quality sites, rather than using SEO tricks and hacks.
According to Google, sites that are rich in useful information get ranked
highly. Bing webmaster guidelines also encourage filling sites with quality
content, rather than ads or affiliate links.
How to Create Quality Content
Quality content is original and easily readable by human visitors. From the
SEO point of view, it contains relevant keywords at the right density. Your
keywords should appear in titles and subtitles, as well as in the main body
of the text, but as said before - they shouldn’t be stuffed into every
sentence.
How to Maintain Quality
To keep the quality of your pages high, Google advises monitoring them so
that you can remove any user-generated spam as soon as it appears. You
can prevent users from leaving comments with links to their own sites by
disabling HTML in comments, or you can require users to register before
they are allowed to comment.
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Technical Guidelines
You also need to ensure that all the technical details of your site are
correct. Remove broken links, and make sure that all the HTML tags on
your site are correctly formatted. A simple formatting mistake, such as
forgetting to close an HTML tag with "/>" could prevent a search engine
crawler from reading all the text that is on your site.
Use Text to Display Information
While images, videos and interactive elements are fantastic for appealing
to human visitors, the Google crawler relies on text to find out what
information is contained on a web page.
Written information should be included as text, as words displayed in
images or videos are not recognized by the crawler. You should also use
ALT attributes in your tags to describe the images on your site to both
search engines and visually-impaired readers. For example, if you have a
page that is focused on the keyword "iPhone 5", then photos of the phone
should be tagged with the keyword "iPhone 5" so that Google knows they
are relevant to that particular search query.
According to Google Webmaster Guidelines, one good tip is to use a text
browser, such as Lynx, to see how your site looks to the Google crawler.
This type of browser strips out advanced features such as Flash or
JavaScript to leave behind just the text that the Google crawler sees.
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Bing Webmaster Guidelines
Bing webmaster guidelines give similar advice to Google in terms of
encouraging quality content. Bing also advises site owners to create pages
that are rich in relevant content, rather than filling them up with ads or
affiliate links.
Page Load Times
Both Bing and Google advise webmasters to keep page load times as low
as possible. Bing webmaster guidelines explain that slow-loading pages
decrease user satisfaction and can affect how the Bing algorithm ranks
your site. If fancy features are slowing down your site, try simplifying key
pages down to just the essentials to improve your customers’ experience.
Status Codes
Bing webmaster guidelines also give guidance regarding the status codes
that pages on your site deliver. For instance, they encourage webmasters
to use a 301 redirect when they need to move the content on a page to a
new URL. This sends visitors to the old page onto the new one. Bing
advises that 301s are better for SEO than other types of redirects, such as
meta refresh redirects. You should also make sure that your site’s "page not
found" page returns a 404 status code, not a 200 code, to prevent this
page from being indexed by Bing.
Cloaking
Both Google and Bing webmaster guidelines are very clear that cloaking is
a practice to be avoided. Cloaking means showing one version of your site
to the search engine crawler and a different version to human visitors.
While it might be tempting to show a different version of the page to the
crawler in order to meet all these guidelines, the practice can result in your
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site being delisted by search engines. Cloaking should never be necessary.
Both Google and Bing are getting better and better at identifying sites that
provide value to their users. If you focus on creating pages that appeal to
visitors and give them the information they need, then you should enjoy
success with both search engines.
Keyword Research
The "Why" and "How" of Keywords
As you begin your foray into the world of SEO, you'll hear a lot of buzz
around on the role of keywords in optimizing your site's content. So, why
are keywords such an integral part of SEO
Simply put - keywords, as they relate to search engines, are words and
phrases that match search queries that people type in when looking for a
specific information. What that really means for you as a marketer or a
simply webmaster, who plan to get more traffic to your website
Let’s get back to paid campaigns for the moment. If you know what people
are looking for and you are able to address this specific need, at this
particular moment - that’s a win-win situation. Moreover, you are able to tell
where they are looking for it or if they are ready for a purchase. Phrases
typed in the search engine query box articulate user’s intent very well, for
example:
• coffee shop Toronto - you are able to tell, that this person looks for a
coffee shop particularly in Toronto
• buy cheap coffee - here, you are able to see a clear purchase intent
• iphone 6 review - this phrase for instance shows, that a person is doing
a research about a product, but not necessarily is ready to buy it
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As you can see, it's essential to optimize your site's content with proper
keywords, so the people would be able to find it. How is this
accomplished Welcome to the wonderful world of keyword research.
The Google Keyword Tool
The Google keyword tool is typically the first tool webmasters use to
determine what searchers are actually looking for. In its simplest form, the
tool provides information on individual keyword searches, along with
monthly estimates on how often the searches are performed.
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The tool also gives researchers an indication of keywords related to the
main research query.
Researchers can also look at results for individual countries, regions and
specific languages.
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The Google keyword tool helps marketers answer the question "what are
people looking for". Although the Keyword Tool is available in AdWords
account, which is meant to be a paid solution, you can access it and use it
with no additional costs.
LEARN MORE
Keyword Research Masterclass - Using the Google Keyword
Google Trends
The Google trends tool looks at the same keyword searches in a different
context. The tool is designed to let marketers and researchers know what
kind of interests are rising and/or falling in popularity. In some cases, there
may be a relatively new search that may not have much data reported by
the keyword tool; however, it may show up in the trend report due to
Internet users' interests.
The Google trends tool also provides information on different genres of
searches. For example, researchers can find out what kinds of searches are
rising and/or falling in popularity within YouTube, Google News and Google
Images. While the information still falls within the context of the trend,
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instead of the exact numbers of keyword searches, it is still helpful in
determining what kind of subject matter is worth discussing in content
creation efforts.
Bing Webmaster Tools
When it comes to search engines, Google is not the only player in town.
Internet users can also opt for Bing or Yahoo. Bing webmaster tools provide
keyword search data and volume for queries in the Bing search engine.
While not as widely used as Google, Bing still has good information on how
consumers and businesses are using the search engine. Marketers can and
should use this information to confirm their content and SEO strategies, as
trends tend to be similar between both Google and Bing.
Suggested Searches
Both Google and Bing provide convenient search features for their users,
which also give marketers some clue as to what kinds of queries are
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outinely being conducted. When users type in the beginnings of words
and phrases, Google and Bing will attempt to provide suggestions so that
the entire phrase won’t need to be typed in.
These phrases are chosen from actual searches conducted by users in
previous visits to the search engines. Looking at these suggestions is an
excellent way to determine the real-time interests of Internet users within
keyword-determined niches and markets.
Pay Per Click Campaigns
Because Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns are paid for by advertisers, their
presence usually indicates that there is activity among searchers and users
for a particular keyword. With PPC campaigns you can test the
effectiveness of different keyword phrases; so much so, that when there
are no ads present for a particular search, it is an indication that buyers do
not use that search query. Presently Google doesn’t provide an information
about the keywords which make users come to your site, but this rule
doesn’t apply to paid campaigns, where the keywords you used and the
actual phrases are easily available.
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Marketers should carefully target the keywords that are most used by
advertisers. Creating SEO content for a keyword that doesn’t help you find
buyers is a waste of resources.
Competitor Activity
As is the case with PPC campaigns, competitor activity can be an indication
that a market interest has been found and is being exploited. While the
science of this method isn’t as objective, SEO marketers do need to keep
an eye on their and their clients’ competitors. When a competitor creates a
presence in an area previously untouched, the new activity should be
analyzed using the objective tools mentioned above.
The Necessity for Keyword Research
Companies must maximize their time and resources by focusing on the
web marketing angles that will lead to profit. Being uncertain about where
to invest marketing assets costs money, because companies lose the
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chance to target the most effective keywords. Marketers need to use the
data provided by keyword tools to guide their SEO strategy.
How to Do Keyword Research
Now, when you know the basics of keyword research and tools you can
use for free let’s go deeper into keyword analysis. There are a few
indicators that can tell you, what keywords are appropriate for you.
Research can be time-consuming, but executed properly will help you
achieve long-lasting results.
In general, there are four aspects your strategy should include:
• The use of long-tail keywords
• Measuring keyword difficulty
• Determining keyword intent
• Keyword targeting
LEARN MORE
Keyword Research - How to Select Top Keywords for SEO
Long-tail Keywords
The more knowledge a customer has about what they are looking for, the
more words they tend to use in their search query. This is typically an
indication that they are looking for the right place to find a particular
product model number, product feature or product enhancement.
It’s important to ensure that your site has webpages that new site users can
find easily at this stage in their buying process. While there will not be as
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many people using these terms (front-loading Maytag washing machine, for
example) as more general terms (washing machine), those searching at this
stage are more serious and closer to making a purchase, and are worth the
effort to capture.
Keyword Search Volume
The length of the phrase is closely related to the traffic volume it can bring
to your website. The rule is simple:
• the more general phrase, the more searches are being made and more
traffic you can get.
• the more narrow phrase, the less traffic, but very high relevancy
Which one is best It highly depends on your strategy. Longer phrases
doesn’t bring as much traffic as more general terms, but are extremely
targeted and probably will bring you the highest conversion rates. Shorter
phrases bring on the deck more visitors, but without a clear intent. The best
way is to mix up both in the proportions.
Keyword Difficulty
A companion issue for marketers regarding long-tail keywords is the level
of difficulty in getting a website ranked for a particular keyword term. In
general, longer-tailed keywords are easier to get ranked for among the top
10 websites than general terms. In most cases, a business or marketer will
choose a longer-tailed keyword to target which has fewer visitors and
searchers than a general term. The competition will not be as high as it
would be for those keywords with more visitors and searches.
There are great benefits to capturing visitors for more general searches as
well. Search-engine-savvy entrepreneurs make the effort to capture
general visitors' contact information so they can stay in touch by email until
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the visitors are ready to buy. It may, however, take longer to capture a firstpage
or top 10 ranking for a more competitive term.
Therefore, there should be an ongoing effort to distinguish between terms
that are highly competitive and those that are minimally competitive.
Keyword Intent
Because resources are limited and you will only be able to attack a finite
number of keywords, markets and/or niches with your search campaign, try
to focus as much as possible on those keywords that indicate someone
wants to make a purchase. Some long-tailed keywords will actually spell
out buyer intent and are quite popular among users.
Smart Keyword Targeting
As with any type of marketing strategy, you should always strive to be as
efficient as possible. Ensure that your site targets keywords that bring the
maximum ROI to your content marketing efforts. Translation Keyword
research never ends because your site and industry is always evolving,
plus search engines are always shifting how they gather keyword data on
your site's content. Some keywords, regardless of how easy they are to
rank for or how much traffic they might bring, may be lower in priority for
targeting than those that bring returns quickly.
How to Prepare Content for Your Website
You've spent a considerable amount of time understanding your market
and the questions your customers typically ask. You then took that
knowledge and condense it into a constructive blog post or article.
However, there are a few more steps that should go into your website
content to be certain that it's capable of influencing prospective buyers.
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Maximize your efforts by rewriting your content with these five basic
elements in mind.
Before you’ll hit the "Publish" button, make sure these five
factors have been addressed:
• SEO-friendly content
• duplicated content
• rich snippets
• social plugins internal linking
Together, they affect how easy it is for the right people to find you.
SEO-Friendly Content
Every content creator’s post or article should be SEO-friendly. Period. But
what does it mean really. Besides the information you would like to present
to your audience your content should be properly prepared from the
technical side.
Content length
Posts should be of sufficient length in order to thoroughly explain the topic.
it should contain around 650 words at least. As a content creator you
shouldn’t add content just for the sake of adding it. Content discovery is
one thing, but if it will attract your reader and build trust around your
project - that’s a totally different thing. Remember - at the end of the day
your content will be read by a real people.
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Title
Also, content should be titled so that those interested in the topic can find
it. The subject of the post should be something that people are actually
seeking answers for, either through forums, social media or a search bar.
Target keywords should occur in the title, as well as naturally throughout
the rest of the text. In order to make the content feel really natural and
easily readable for your readers try not to overdo the on-page optimization.
Feel free to use similar keywords, synonyms and other variations. They are
known as secondary keywords. When these other words are used, it's an
indication to search engine robots that the content is potentially topicrelevant.
LEARN MORE
How to prepare your content for search engines thoroughly
Duplicated Content
The content shouldn’t appear elsewhere on the Internet. It should be
original. It's okay to reference other ideas; but using other peoples content
can bring you some trouble.
Webmasters and content creators can be penalized if duplicate content is
found on their website. In order to avoid this kind of situations you can
easily learn how canonical tags can be used.
LEARN MORE
Learn everything you need to know about the canonical tag
32

Rich Snippets
Search engines give webmasters and content creators the opportunity to
add special elements to their websites' appearance in search results. For
example, restaurants can add coding to their sites to display a photo of
their business or a map alongside their search result listings.
This makes it easy for those that may not know exactly what they are
headed, along with generating greater interest in their result than in others
just displaying text. These coded elements are called "rich snippets," and
they're important in how search engines will determine which pages of
websites will display for queries.
LEARN MORE
Learn how to easily implement rich snippets on your website
Social Plug-Ins
Social signals, or the rate at which there is activity such as commenting,
liking and sharing, although there is a lot of discussion about it, doesn’t
count as a ranking signal. Nevertheless you should always bear in mind,
that if your content will be good enough, your readers will be more likely to
share it with other people. That is a very big opportunity to get more traffic,
so you shouldn’t make it difficult for your readers to share it.
While social activity is good on its own merits, content creators should not
pass up the opportunity to get additional exposure in social media
platforms.
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Internal Linking
Internal links indicate that your content’s importance in comparison with
other web pages on your website. Key concepts, products and services,
when discussed, should be highlighted with hyperlinks redirecting readers
to other related resources on your site. This element is one routinely found
in content that readers find helpful. It's the kind of resource search engines
consider worthy of their visitors’ time.
Preparing Content
Of course, there is no substitute for relevant, timely content. Making sure
that your site is truly addressing a visitor’s needs is top priority for any
content creator. The five elements discussed can make the content more
discoverable; however, for the efforts to truly matter, they should be
directed toward rich, relevant content.
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CONTENT
MARKETING
CHAPTER 4
36

Introduction
Content marketing is a phrase you probably heard a lot of times. SEO and
content marketing are the two sides of the same coin. Optimization with a
specific keywords can make your content being discovered, but the actual
content itself is responsible for engaging your visitor.
Content marketing involves using many forms besides the text, like audio
formats (mp3 files and podcasts), videos (on the website or on social
sharing sites, like YouTube), presentations (hosted on websites like
Slideshare.com) or graphics (like infographics). If you’re creating an article
addressing other people’s specific problems in a attractive way - you’re
using content marketing.
It requires three distinct phases to be executed effectively:
• content planning
• content creation
• content promotion
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Content Marketing for Grown-Ups & Serious Businesses
How to Measure Your Content Marketing Campaign
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Content Planning
Content planning is the process of answering some questions during the
design of a marketing campaign.
• What is the purpose of your content
• Who is your target audience
• What is your goal
• What kind of content could possibly engage your visitors
SEO is considered to be a long-term strategy, so should be your content. It
is a good practice to prepare a publishing schedule, so you can attract your
audience for a longer period of time.
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How to Create a Rock-solid Content Strategy
Content Creation
Once you have a basic road map for your content, it’s time to create one.
Regardless of what form the content takes, it is really important to
understand what the audience is concerned about and what problems they
really want to solve.
In some cases, it will make sense to hire out or collaborate with content
specialists, like ghostwriters, copywriters and video creators to produce it.
In other cases, it may make sense to keep the entire process in-house.
Regardless, if you are responsible for creating the actual article, script or
outline, you should be an expert in the subject matter being discussed.
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This will help you build your personal brand and pose you as an authority in
your niche.
While creating the actual content, you have to keep two additional factors
in mind - quality and attractiveness. People read the articles differently on
the Internet. The tend to scan the text, rather than read it from cover to
cover.
Try to provide a clear structure with headlines, subheadlines, bullets and
bolds in the most important sections of your content. This will help improve
your readers experience and let them find the information they are looking
for a lot quicker.
As for attractiveness - no one likes to read boring stuff, right Try make your
content a bit more vivid - use pictures, examples, videos to illustrate the
information better and make your content memorable.
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Content Creation Checklist
Must-have Tools for Effortless Content Creation
Optimizing Your Content for Search Engines
We've discussed the importance of creating content that addresses
problems that your readers want to solve. However, you also need to let
your audience know that this content exists. Otherwise, it's like building a
deluxe apartment complex without telling the public that the units are
available for lease.
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SEO aims to give your content visibility by making it easier to find via
search engines. As cover earlier, keyword research plays an important role
in this process, since you want your website to feature the most popular
keywords in your niche. Additionally it gives you an idea what kind of topics
are popular based on the number of monthly searches.
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How to Combine Content with Keywords
Content Promotion
Good content is enough to attract traffic from search engines. Well, not
quite. Although the content itself actually promotes the business, it requires
to be promoted. Unfortunately, when good content is created, it doesn't
magically show up in front of Internet users to solve their problem.
Higher rankings for a specific keyword aren’t built in a day. As we
mentioned before and we will cover in the next chapters of this guide, they
are affected by the number of backlinks your web page receives from other
reputable websites. You can image those backlinks as votes towards your
content. The more votes it gets, the more visible it will be.
Thus, content should be shared across all available social media channels,
as well as communities within a specific niche. It will help you gain
maximum visibility so the others will have a chance to read it and maybe
refer to it with their work.
While content creation allows for a great deal of freedom in how it’s
implemented, the ways you can promote your work is quite limited.
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It’s difficult to create an outstanding piece and receive backlinks manually.
Fortunately there are ways to achieve that.
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Effective Content Promotion Tactics
40

OFF PAGE SEO
CHAPTER 5
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Introduction
Google and other search engines rank pages according to how useful they
think each result will be for the searcher. Part of this assessment involves
the relevancy of each returned page - how closely the content matches the
search query that was entered. The other factor that plays into the ranking
of a particular page is its popularity. Search engines rank more popular
pages highly, as popular sites are more likely to match what the searcher is
looking for.
Link Signals: How Search Engines Assess
Popularity
SEO as a field of study is quite well documented for all of those years
search engines are available. Over the years, one element of high-ranking
sites has remained consistent: the number of high-quality, authoritative
inbound links.
Why Links Matter
Let's frame this in terms of social media. On your Facebook timeline, you'll
notice that the stories with a higher concentration of "likes" display higher
up on the feed. This is partly how the Facebook algorithm determines
which content is the most valuable. In other words, think of an inbound link
as a vote for your site. Of course, a search engine's algorithm looks beyond
just the sheer number of inbound links. These inbound links have to be
trusted and authoritative. For instance, if a bunch of authoritative sites link
to relevant content on your site, some of that "authority" is transferred to
your site. In a nutshell, these sites are legitimizing your site just by linking to
your content. What is the result Your content is viewed as authoritative on
a subject or keyword and has a good chance of appearing on the first page
of your desired search engine.
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The Problem with Links
Inbound links are valuable, but can also pose a problem — primarily that
relying on external inbound links alone leaves the ranking of your site in
the hands of another site. For instance, if no authoritative sites link into
yours, your chances of ranking on the front page of Google are slim to
none — regardless of the quality of your digital branding. No business can
or should leave this up to chance. To take control, companies either hire a
professional or an agency that can help them to build authority through a
process called link building. Of course you can also build links by yourself.
You have to keep in mind, that link building is treated as an unnatural way
to gain higher visibility in Google. Fortunately there are many methods to
promote your work and where links can be a good addition for your effort.
Link Building Basics
If you don’t go about link building in the right way, your efforts can backfire.
Before we talk about how to get it right, let’s quickly look at a warning list of
the link building strategies that will harm, rather than help, your site.
• Link exchange schemes used to be a popular way of building links.
Webmasters would publish links to other sites in exchange for links to
their own site. Recent Google algorithm updates penalize these kinds of
link schemes.
• Buying links - although buying links can give you immediate results, it
can be a very short way to make your website banned and wiped out
from SERPs.
• Hosting links on pressed pages - the newest update to Google
Webmaster guidelines treat links from spammy looking websites as a
ones that can make you receive a penalty.
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• Commenting on blogs and forums with a link to one’s own site (and not
much else in the way of content) is spammy and can harm SEO,
particularly if the place where the link is being dropped is totally
irrelevant to the topic of the linked site.
• Article directories allow site owners to publish articles which include a
link back to their site. However, most article directories have been hit
hard by Google algorithm updates, which means that they no longer
provide high-quality links.
Links provided by these kinds of schemes are generally low-quality and will
not improve SEO. They could even damage it! Rather than taking a get-richquick
approach to link building, you need to put in consistent effort over
the long term.
How to Get High Quality Links
According to Google Webmaster Guidelines, good links are ‘natural’ links.
That means that your primary focus should be on creating content that
people naturally want to link to. However, there are a couple of link building
strategies that can help you.
Social Media
Links from social media sites to your site are often ‘no-follow,’ which means
that they don’t have a direct impact on SEO. However, having a brand
presence on social media can increase traffic to your site and build your
reputation in general. The more visible your content is on social media, the
more chance that people will share it via blog posts, forums, social
bookmarking sites, and other avenues, naturally increasing your link profile.
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YouTube and Pinterest
One way to draw traffic to your site is to post rich video or image content
on YouTube or Pinterest. These sites have very good domain authority,
which means they rank well in search engines, and they also have large
communities of users who can discover your content. Create useful and/or
sharable content, such as tutorial videos, and promote them on social
media. Make sure you include a link to your site in either the video
description or the link attached to your Pinterest image.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a practice where one blogger offers to write a post on
another person’s blog. The post would usually include a link back to the
guest blogger’s site. The guest blogger benefits by gaining a link from a
site in the same niche, while the blog host gains high-quality content for
free.
The two keys to guest blogging are relevance and quality. As a guest
blogger, you need to be picky about who you write for. You should be
targeting high-quality blogs that are highly relevant to your site, rather than
participating in generic blog exchange networks.
Link Building: Quality is King
If you are interested in guest blogging, find out who the best bloggers in
your field are and get in touch with them directly. Be careful though again
to not overdo it. Large scale guest blogging for a link purpose is also
considered as a technique which violates Google’s rules. In SEO slow ones
are the winners.
When it comes to link building, quality matters. Don’t waste time building
links from low-quality or unrelated sites. Instead, focus on creating high-
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quality content, publicizing it in different websites and building
relationships with the best bloggers in your niche.
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The Best SEO Strategy for Sustainable Results
46

HOW TO TRACK SEO
CHAPTER 6
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If You Can Measure It, You Can Improve It
Since its inception, Google Analytics has empowered web marketers and
businesses with tools to track and measure search engine performance
with ease. When it comes to the SEO game, success is determined by
traffic, rankings, and conversions—all of which can be tracked via cloudbased
applications available on the Internet, as Google Analytics is a quite
good tool, in terms of SEO is quite limited.
When your search marketing efforts are effectively tracked, they can be
effectively improved (i.e. lower bounce rates, increased time on site, etc).
Let's take a look at the fundamentals of SEO tracking and measurement
strategies.
Top 3 Key Performance Indicators
First thing's first, what's a Key Performance Indicator In very basic terms, a
KPI is a measurement of performance. In regard to the the SEO, KPIs are
the performance metrics that matter the most. While there are several
performance indicators that are helpful in understanding how to improve an
SEO strategy, there are three main KPIs that help ensure SEO success.
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SEO Key Performance Indicators
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Organic Traffic
This is among the most talked about KPIs because it's a signal that people
are paying attention to your product or service. But there's a lot more to
traffic than just numbers; these numbers actually have to mean something.
In general, there are two aspects of inbound traffic that you should monitor:
Volume (number or percentage of daily/monthly visitors) and Quality (the
type of visitors).
• Traffic Volume: When it comes to the sheer number of inbound visitors,
organic traffic is the holy grail. For the uninitiated, organic traffic occurs
when users are referred to your site via a search engine. SEO success in
the traffic volume department is usually indicated by the percentage of
organic traffic you receive from major search engines like Google,
Yahoo, and Bing.
• Traffic Quality: Determining traffic quality is a little less straight forward,
as you need to know exactly what to look for. Some of the most common
metrics for determining traffic quality include: pages per visit, bounce
rate, time on site and click-through rates (CTRs). In a nutshell, traffic
quality generally means that your site visitors are staying and engaged
on your site and consuming content that moves them through your
conversion or sales funnel.
SEO Rankings
According to Search Engine Watch, organic search results on the first page
of Google get up to 92% of the traffic, as opposed to a measly 18% if your
site ends up on the next page. Translation Keyword rankings still matter.
Improving your rankings isn't necessarily rocket science, but it does take a
bit of finesse to get this right. Be patient in your quest for higher search
engine rankings. It will pay off in the long-run.
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Conversions
This is the "why" behind your SEO strategy. All search optimization has—or
at least it should have—clear, definable goals that can be measured. When
these goals are accomplished, this is called a "conversion." Also, a
conversion doesn't always have to mean a monetary transaction. In many
cases, a conversion is something as simple as a newsletter subscription, or
a document download. In any case, your site conversions can and should
be tracked with your analytics tool.
Conclusion: Track Everything
SEO tracking is all about data. The more data you have at your disposal,
the more knowledge you will have to make a big impact on your audience.
This means that you can track just about any activity via your analytics
dashboard. This includes everything from social media engagement to
display ad click-throughs to video streams on your website. The key is to
understand which performance indicators really matter.
Google Analytics for SEO
Google Analytics (GA) is an important component of tracking SEO. In a
nutshell, with little to no technical know-how, you can track, monitor and
measure just about any activity completed on your website. Do you need to
track daily site visitors Want to track how many times your new white
paper has been downloaded How about the length of time each visitor
spends on a landing page You can track all this and much, much more
right in the GA dashboard.
In other words, GA helps you make sense of your site's actionable data in a
way that helps you improve the efficacy of your site.
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Why Businesses Choose Google Analytics
For starters, the price is right around zero dollars. Plus, it's developed,
curated and managed by the folks behind the world's largest and most
innovative search engine you try to rank on.
Additionally, GA still reigns supreme as the most widely used analytics tool.
Now, let's take a look at four capabilities that will help you take your SEO
analytics to the next level.
Organic Traffic Monitoring
Monitoring organic traffic is a normal part of an SEO professional's daily
routine. With a few key, built-in features, GA helps you mine key nuggets
from organic search data.
How to Monitor Organic Search Data
With the latest GA update, monitoring organic traffic is a cinch. Simply log
in to GA, go to the left-hand navigation menu and select "Traffic Sources."
Then click on the "Search" drop-down menu, and click on "Organic." Here
you'll see a list of keywords referring organic traffic to your site. You can
see detailed information on each keyword referral (# of visits, time on site
and pages per visit).
"Not Provided" Keyword Tracking
What is a "not provided" keyword Well, let's provide a little context.
In late 2011, Google announced that it would start encrypting keyword
terms used in secure search queries. For instance, if you follow the organic
traffic monitoring process above, you may find "Not Provided" listed as a
keyword referrer. This means that these queries were performed in secure
search. That's the bad news. The good news is that you can still leverage
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this data in Google Webmaster tools. The downside is that you can only
view the first 1,000 organic search results.
LEARN MORE
How to Master SEO with Google Analytics – Beginners Guide
Are Google Tools Enough to Control SEO
Landing Page Analytics
With the landing page analytic tools built into GA, you can go real granular
when tracking page performance. Sure, you can view all the normal metrics
(bounce rates, clicks, inbound traffic, etc), but you can also set individual
conversion goals for each landing page to get specific conversion
percentages for each landing page you choose to monitor. This allows you
to get real specific about which site or page elements are performing well.
Additionally, you can track and analyze keywords affected by the "Not
Provided" issue spelled out above. From here, you can make appropriate
adjustments and fine tune your landing page's content to improve
performance.
Content Grouping
In GA, you can monitor the performance of specific aspects of your site
with a feature called Content Grouping. For instance, if you run a large
retail apparel site, you can group site elements together that focus on
men's-only apparel. This lets you view specific performance metrics based
on that specific aspect of your site. The only downside to this feature is that
Google only lets you create five content groupings per site.
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Conclusion
It's well established that GA is among an SEO professional's most valuable
assets. A huge part of GA's inherent value lies in deep customization
capabilities. Whether you are customizing your own analytics reports or
your dashboard settings, GA gives you a great deal of control over your
data gathering process.
Obviously, if you have spent any amount of time with the dashboard, this is
just the tip of the iceberg. GA comes built with deep customizations that
enable improved search engine monitoring capabilities and help you learn
how to track your SEO. Learn to harness the power of GA to boost your
current and future SEO efforts.
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TRY POSITIONLY
Check out the simplest and most user-friendly tools. Monitor daily
changes, your competitors, measure SEO performance, and
improve your search engine rankings.
GET STARTED NOW
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