Lesson-6: What is SEO in 2020? – On page SEO and how to write an article like a pro | Ankur Aggarwal

Hey guys, today I will be talking about myfavorite topic, search engine optimization.

I love free things, and what I love the mostis free traffic.

And through SEO it is possible.

So let’s start with the video.

Hey guys, welcome back to the digital marketingmastery course.

In the last videos we talked about how tostart your blog and how to configure your WordPress.

Today’s my favorite topic, search engineoptimization, so let’s get started.

So what is SEO? SEO stands for “search engine optimization”.

It is the process of getting traffic fromthe search results on the search engines.

So I won’t give you this bookish definition, rather, show it to you through an example.

So if you go to “google.

co.

in” and searchfor the keyword “list of free job posting sites in India”.

The first result is an article on my website:“ankuraggarwal.

in/free-job-posting-sites-in-india” So if you click on this result and come onmy website then you will become part of organic traffic to my website.

So now let’s talk about why SEO is evenimportant and why you should even consider doing it for your website.

Personally, I love SEO.

Why? Because it is a free evergreen traffic.

So let me show you the stats of various websitesthat I own.

So this is the traffic stats of one of mywebsites for one month combined.

As you can see that almost 89% of my trafficis coming from search engines.

This is another website of mine and as youcan see almost 50% of my traffic is coming from organic channel.

Now I allot around 2 hours per week on thiswebsite and it is generating me around $1, 000 to $2, 000 per month.

This is the reason why I love SEO.

Whenever we talk about SEO we primarily focuson Google, because Google owns the majority of the market shares in the search enginespace.

So as you can see in the data here that Googleowns around 75% of the search engine market and Yahoo comes at second place at 8% .

Sowhenever we’ll be talking about SEO, we’ll be focusing entirely on Google.

I should also mention that SEO is for organicsearch results, and SCM is for search engine marketing.

That is for paid search results.

So the goal in SEO is to get into the top3 ranking positions of Google search results.

So let’s say you are searching for the keyword“best places in India”.

Then your target is to rank your website onthe first result here.

Where “traveltriangle” is ranking currently.

Why? Because it’s human tendency to click onthe first couple of results and not go down on the search results page.

Also going through the stats here you cansee that the position one is getting almost 20% of clicks for the target keyword.

It goes down from there for position two around13%.

Position four around 8%.

And for position ten you are only getting8% of the clicks.

So the ultimate goal is to rank your websitefor the first position.

Now there are two ways to get ranked in thefirst position.

Either you can pay money and buy those keywords, or you can go the SEO route.

So how the hell even Google rank websites, right? So already there are 200+ factors that Googleconsiders while ranking a webpage on their search results.

But the primary ones are the backlinks, content, user experience and site structure.

One of the key metrics that Google considerswhile ranking a webpage is the number of backlinks.

So backlinks is all about how many differentother websites are linked into your webpage that you are trying to rank on Google searchresults.

So let’s say if you write an article on“best credit cards in India”.

And it’s get mentioned on 30 different websites, with the link back to your article, then that means you have 30 different backlinks to yourarticle.

We’ll be talking about backlinks in thenext video of this video course.

Now let’s talk about content.

Content is king when we talk about the SEO.

The content should be comprehensive, it shouldanswer all the questions that a person has while searching for the keyword.

Let’s say if I’m searching for “bestcredit card in India” and I click on the first result.

If that article can give me all the details, the best great car comparison, table, recommendation, pros and cons, then obviously that’s a highquality article.

I’ll be spending more time on the website.

Let me give another example.

So if you search for “best places in India”and you click on the first result, you’ll go to this article of Travel Triangle.

As you can see this article is highly comprehensive.

It is covering all the places, while addingimages, and it’s also giving bullet points, how to reach, best time to travel, attractions… So you get all the information in one articleitself.

So you’re more likely to share the article, you’re more likely to spend time on this article.

So that’s the kind of article that you haveto write in order to get yourself ranked in the first place of Google search results.

When we talk about site structure then thisaffects us like speed of your website, the responsiveness of your website, is it loadingproperly on mobile phone or not? So these are the various factors that affectthe ranking of your website.

So now let’s talk about types of SEO.

There are primarily 2 types of SEO: on-pageSEO and off-page SEO.

We’ll be covering the off-page SEO in thenext video, today we’ll be focusing entirely on on-page SEO.

Although all of them are equally important.

So what is on page SEO? So these are all the measures, all the tacticsthat you can use directly within your website in order to improve its position in the searchrankings.

So there are various factors that affect theon page SEO.

So we’ll go through them, one-by-one.

So the most important metric is, keyword.

Keyword in the context of search engine optimizationis a particular word or a phrase that describes the content of a webpage.

So this phrase here “list of free postingsites in India” is a keyword.

As you can see here, Google is also recommendingsome extra keywords here.

Like people who are searching for this keywordwould also be searching for these keywords.

My job will be to optimize my article forall these keywords, because the intent is same.

And then you have to find all the keywords, which has similar intent.

So here the person is looking for free jobposting sites.

So you’ll have to find all the keywordswhere the intent is to find free job posting sites.

Similarly for here like best places in India.

So Travel Triangle is here ranking for bestplaces in India.

We do comprehensive keyword research throughvarious paid tools, one that I personally use and prefer is “ahrefs”.

So I have already added the URL is of theTravel Triangle, and as you can see this article is ranking for almost 2, 652 keywords.

Look at the keywords here.

They all have similar intents.

Best places to visit in India, places to visitin India, tourist places in India.

So why are keywords even important? Keywords are actually the foundation of yourwebsite content.

Before starting an article, I spend 30 to50 minutes finding the right keywords.

Also you have to understand that Google isa machine.

They have crawlers to understand the contentof your website.

There’s no human eye looking at your content.

So the only way they can understand the contentof your website is through keywords.

So the better optimized your article is forthese various keywords, the better ranking you will get in the search results.

I’ve even see websites drive almost a millionplus visitors to their site, without doing anything else apart from keyword researchbecause the competition is very low in some of the niches.

Whenever we are talking about unpaid SEO itstarts with keyword research.

So now I hope that you might have understoodthat keywords are extremely important for your website.

So where the hell do you even find these keywords, right? Although there are many free tools also availableout there in the market, which can be used to do the keyword research.

But if you are really serious about SEO, ifyou are really serious about driving the free organic traffic through Google search resultsthen you should definitely invest in a paid tool.

The one that I personally use and prefer is“ahrefs”.

So I have a portfolio of almost 13+ websitesright now and all my SEO efforts are done through “ahrefs”.

Ahrefs is not only used for keyword research, but much more than that.

So let me show you the process that I usedto do the keyword research.

This might be different from what the expertssay, but this has been the most profitable one for me.

So let’s say if I have to write an articlefor best credit cards in India.

What I’ll do is first search for the mainkeywords, the natural looking keywords.

The best credit cards in India, then I’llcopy the URL of the first article that is ranking.

Open site explorer of ahrefs, enter the URLhere, select “prefix” and press search.

Apart from ahrefs you can also use other toolslike “semrush” it is also very popular in the market.

It also has very comprehensive database forthe keywords and the backlinks.

So this is my go-to software if I am not usingahrefs.

It also offers a 30-day trial.

I’ll make sure to add a link there belowthis video, for you to sign up in the 30-day trial.

For ahrefs you have to pay $7 for the 7-daytrial, so that is something you can also do if you want to try the software.

You can also use “moz”, it’s one ofthe biggest websites when we talk about internet marketing online.

They also have SEO software.

Apart from that you can also use this freetool “keyword finder”.

Their keyword difficulty metric is reallypreferable in all the internet.

So 26 out of 100 means that this keyword willbe fairly difficult to rank but not too difficult.

Also it gives you a list of related keywordslike “tourist places in India”, “best tourist places in India” along with thesearch value and the CPC.

But the keyword difficulty metric here isextremely important.

So what are the things you should rememberwhile doing the on page SEO? The most important metric is the niche.

Your niche should not be too competitive.

It should be easy to rank.

So whenever you are writing an article makesure you do comprehensive research.

Research is very important before writingany article.

So make sure you research your article, makea list of the important, relevant topics related to the niche of your article.

And then do the keyword research.

The more keywords you have, the more keywordsyou are targeting in your article, the better ranking you will get, the more traffic youwill get in the future.

So let’s say you are writing an articleon the best credit cards on India.

So other related search term is “how toapply credit card”, “credit card steps”… So these are all related search terms whichalso have comparable search volume.

So you should be incorporating all these keywordsin your article.

You also have long tail keywords like “whichcredit card is best in India”.

So this is a long tail keyword.

And then you should just follow my techniqueof putting in the URL of the top ranking articles into ahrefs and then downloading the excelsheet on the various keywords.

So let’s say if you entered 3 differentURLs and downloaded 3 different excel sheets.

So make a combined master file and removethe duplicates.

The various keyword metrics that you haveto look at is the search volume, how many people are actually searching for this keywordin a particular month.

Then you have to look at the number of clicks.

All these data are available in ahrefs.

So let’s say you’re searching for “bestcredit cards in India” then someone might be bidding for the keywords for the paid adson Google.

So if someone is bidding for the keywords, then the number of clicks on your article, even if you are ranking in first position, will be competitively less.

Traffic potential is the accumulated trafficyou can drive to your article for your target keyword.

So if someone is searching for “best creditcard in India” other person might be searching for “top credit cards in India”.

Both of them have the same intent, so you’llbe combining all these traffics to get your traffic potential for your article.

If you are ranking number one for all thesekeywords.

And the fourth and most important metric iskeyword difficulty.

So writing the article is not yet a job done, you also have to do a lot of things after you write the article.

But yes on page SEO will make a differencein your rankings, so you have to optimized your article on all the areas on on page SEOand on off page SEO as well in order to rank in the number one position.

I have already shown you ahrefs and how touse it in finding the right keywords, apart from that I’ve already shown you SEMrushand KWFinder.

These are the two different tools apart fromahrefs that you can use to do your keyword research.

Finally I will give you a list of all theother metrics that are equally important for your on page SEO.

First is the website speed.

A fast loading website is highly preferredby Google, so make sure that you do all the optimization, to increase the loading speedof your website.

So how do you even find the loading speed? So let me give you an example.

So open this page “pingdom website speedtest”.

And I have taken this dummy website “onlinemediamaster”.

Why? Because they have already optimized theirwebsite for speed.

So as you can see their website loads at 708milliseconds.

This is exceptionally good results.

Even my websites are taking almost 2.

5 secondsto load.

This is another tool that you can use to checkthe speed of your website.

Apart from PingDom, GTmetrix is also highlyconsidered by the online marketing experts.

Here you can see again that the website takesa 100% score in page speed score and 97% in yslow score.

And again here it is only loading in 0.

8 seconds.

Right now I am even feeling jealous becauseI want my websites to load as fast as this guy’s.

And here the best part is all of these toolswill give you recommendations on how and where you can improve to increase the speed of yourwebsite.

So all you have to do is click on this arrowand they’ll give you all the URLs that might be causing the issues and all the variousmetrics, various scoring and your score as well.

Now let’s talk about dwell time.

Dwell time is the time that a person on averagespends time on your article after coming from the Google search results.

Let’s say the same example of best placesin India, if you’ll go to travelarticle.

com article, the article is well formatted, ithas bold, italics, it has all the information for all these places, it has multimedia elements.

And it has bullet points, key attraction, so this is answering almost all of my questions.

And the best part is you can even book theplace here.

So I am more likely to spend more time here, because I am getting all the information that I am looking for.

So let’s say I am spending more than 7 minuteson this article.

And only 3 minutes on the nexts article.

Then Google will understand that the firstresult is the relevant one because the user metric is the best kind of metric.

Because if I am loving the article, then definitelyother people will be loving the article.

Let’s take another scenario here.

If the majority of people who are searchingfor the best credit cards in India, go to this third result, and spend more time onthis third result, compared to the first and second result then Google will think, “okay, the third result, might be more relevant.

” Why? Because people are clicking more on the thirdresult and also spending more time on the article.

Hence, Google might promote this article tothe first position.

That is not the only metric, but yes it willhelp in getting the first ranking in the Google search results.

I still remember one of my own examples, therewas this article which I ranked from number 5 to number 1 position just by increasingthe length of my article, by adding more multimedia content, by making use of simple language.

And just because of that, the on article timeon an average was increased and hence, Google promoted my website to the number one position.

Now let’s talk about internal links.

So let’s say you’re writing an articleabout best credit cards in India.

You already have an article about how to improveyour credit card score, putting a link to this new article in this already existingarticle will also help increase the ranking of your website.

So if you have purchased a theme online thenresponsive design is something that you don’t have to worry about.

Because majority of the new themes are responsivein nature.

So your website should be customized for atablet, for a mobile phone, for a laptop, etc.

So if you’re buying a theme online, thisproblem will already be covered.

Meta description, so this is another metricthat you have to take care of.

So what do we mean by meta title and metadescription? Here in this line “11 Best Credit Cardsin India 2018 Review” is the meta title.

And here this extra text, below along withthe date is the meta description.

So all of these are available in the backendwhile you’re writing the article from WordPress.

From there you can customize it, but the ultimategoal of meta title and description is it should have the target keyword.

As you can see, the first result which isranking, it has the target keyword “best credit cards in India”.

So Google is more likely to rank it, becauseGoogle understands that this article is relevant to the person who is searching for the query.

Also as you can see here, that the URL alsohas the main keyword.

“cashoverflow.

in/best-credit-cards-in-india…” So having the main keyword in your URL alsohelps in the search engine ranking.

So this was it about the meta title and description.

So here I will end this on page SEO descriptionand thanks for watching this.

Now you have the exact blueprint on how tooptimize your articles for search engines.

In the next video, we’ll talk about theother very important aspect of SEO that is backlinks.

Writing an article is not enough, you alsoneed to build backlinks to get grander search results.

So tomorrow, I’ll show you my strategiesthat I use to get my articles ranked.

Until then, write your first blog post andshare it on our Facebook group, and we’ll give you the feedback.

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