There are plenty of ways an industrious individual can make money online. Countless people have turned to the World-Wide-Web looking for a good money making opportunity they can accomplish from the comfort of their own home. It may seem daunting at first but you can make money online if you learn, duplicate and most importantly have the determination to just start.
One of the most ingenious ways to supplement or even replace your income is through online affiliate programs. Online affiliate programs first sprang up in 1996 when Amazon.com started paying websites for referring customers to their site. Now in 2006 online affiliate programs are a mainstay in the e-commerce world. Even Fortune 500 companies such as Dell, Walmart and Apple have adopted the online affiliate program marketing module.
Online affiliate programs provide home business professionals and online entrepreneurs a risk-free form of advertising to produce revenue from their websites. Affiliate marketing has become an increasingly popular home based business opportunity because:
It requires no production costsVery low start-up costsNo employeesNo inventoryNo order processingNo shippingNo customer serviceVery limited risk
So you don’t have a website? In many cases you do not even need to operate a website or know any HTML to make money with online affiliate programs. With the maturation of contextual advertising through Yahoo! Publisher and Google Adwords many pay-per-click (PPC) savvy online affiliate marketers have moved away from deploying websites and focus entirely on search engine marketing (SEM). This may be a good way for some to test the waters with marketing online affiliate programs but if you’re not familiar with setting up PPC campaigns tread lightly. The cost per click can quickly add up with little return on your investment if done improperly. As for myself I still believe content is king and always will be. Having real estate on the web is much like owning a piece of property, it only matures and appreciates in value with age.
An article published by Click Z News identified that according to eBay their largest affiliate earned over $1.3 million dollars in January 2005 commissions, the largest amount yet in their online affiliate program’s history. Their top 25 affiliates averaged over $100,000 per month each and the top 100 affiliates earn almost $25,000 each per month.
With these sort of numbers buzzing around the Internet it’s no wonder affiliate marketing is quickly becoming the numero uno money making opportunity online. There are literally thousands of people just like you making a very handsome living from selling other peoples products online.
Don’t be fooled though. As we all know there are NO get-rich-quick programs online or offline. Like any business making money with affiliate programs takes work, dedication and education.
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Monday, 31 May 2021
Affiliate Marketing Mixed With Google Adsense Equals Profits.
Are you a webmaster who needs funds to keep your website running? Or is your website the only way for you to earn income? Whichever you are, for as long as you are a webmaster or a web publisher and you need cash, affiliate marketing may work well for you. With affiliate marketing, you may get a lot of cash pouring into your bank account easily. And if your website is rich in great contents and you want to earn more profit, why not get into the Google Adsense program as well?
Why Affiliate Marketing?
Well, simply because affiliate marketing is the easiest and probably the best way to earn profits online, unless otherwise you are a businessman and would rather sell your own products online than advertise other businessman’s products on your site. But even online retailers can benefit from affiliate marketing programs, because affiliate marketing actually works for merchants as well as it works for the affiliates.
Affiliate marketing, simply said, is a relationship or agreement made between two websites, with one site being the merchant’s website and the other being the affiliate’s site. In the relationship, the affiliate agrees to let the merchant advertise his products on the affiliate’s site. The merchant, on the other hand, would agree to pay the affiliate in whatever method they have agreed into. This would generally mean easy income for the affiliate, as he would do nothing but place the retailer’s ad on his site. This would also be very beneficial for the merchant, as getting affiliates to advertise their products would be a lot more affordable than hiring an advertising firm to promote their products.
There are a variety of methods on how the merchant would compensate the affiliate for his services, and for the webmaster, these methods simply translates to the method by which he would earn easy cash. Among the more common methods of compensation are the pay-per-click method, the pay-per-lead method, and the pay-per-sale method. The pay-per-click method is the method most preferred by affiliates, for their site’s visitor would only have to visit the advertiser’s site for them to gain money. The other two methods, on the other hand, are better preferred by merchants, as they would only have to compensate you if your visitor becomes one of their registrants or if the visitor would actually buy their products.
Getting much profit on affiliate marketing programs, however, does not depend so much on the compensation method is it does on the traffic generated by your site. A website that can attract more visitors would generally have the greater chance of profiting in affiliate marketing programs.
What about Google Adsense?
Google Adsense is actually some sort of an affiliate marketing program. In Google Adsense, Google act as the intermediary between the affiliates and the merchants. The merchant, or the advertiser, would simply sign up with Google and provide the latter with text ads pertaining to their products. These ads, which is actually a link to the advertiser’s website, would then appear on Google searches as well as on the websites owned by the affiliates, or by those webmasters who have signed up with the Google Adsense program.
While one can find a lot of similarities between Google Adsense and other affiliate marketing programs, you can also see a lot of differences. In Google Adsense, all the webmaster has to do is place a code on his website and Google takes care of the rest. The ads that Google would place on your site would generally be relevant to the content of your site. This would be advantageous both for you and for the advertiser, as the visitors of your site would more or less be actually interested with the products being advertised.
The Google Adsense program compensates the affiliate in a pay-per-click basis. The advertisers would pay Google a certain amount each time their ad on your site is clicked and Google would then forward this amount to you through checks, although only after Google have deducted their share of the amount. Google Adsense checks are usually delivered monthly. Also, the Google Adsense program provides webmasters with a tracking tool that allows you to monitor the earnings you actually get from a certain ad.
So, where do all of these lead us to?
Where else but to profits, profits and even more profits! Affiliate marketing programs and the Google Adsense program simply work, whether you are the merchant or the affiliate. For the merchant’s side, a lot of money can be saved if advertising effort is concentrated on affiliate marketing rather than on dealing with advertising firms. For the webmaster, you can easily gain a lot of profits just by doing what you do best, and that is by creating websites. And if you combine all your profits from both the Google Adsense program and other affiliate marketing programs, it would surely convert to a large amount of cash.
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Wednesday, 13 January 2021
How To Become A Successful Real Estate Agent
Real estate training is essential for the people who want to become a successful real estate broker. It helps them to learn all about real estate business. Real estate business requires some time, some basic knowledge of the business and skill to perform all transactions. Real estate business will be one of the good carriers for a hard working person. Real estate training suggests them all the ways to achieve their goals.
License is the basic requirement to become a real estate agent. Even it is an essential thing to conduct real estate business. Real estate Internet is the best option to join real estate business. Some states provide online training courses that will help you to complete pre-license requirements. Before joining real estate business people should satisfy some pre-license requirements. They should; be of at least 19 years, be managed a proctored exam, have high school diploma or some equivalent to it, pass a state exam, have completed a least approved course.
Generally real estate training gives some guidelines to understand some real estate basics. They can easily learn about ownership transfer, real estate law and math with the help of real estate training. They are taught how to deal to with real estate transactions during their course. Real estate training enables them to understand the tips and tricks of the real estate contracts. People who want to join some state approved courses should have initial license.
People can learn about real estate business with some related books. They can also join some online courses that provide information via Internet. Nowadays several people are making money in real estate business. Real estate brokers should be kind, knowledgeable, efficient as well as trustworthy. They should know the skill how to attract more customers. They can also take some suggestion from the experienced real estate agents.
Real estate business may be wonderful business but only thing that it requires real estate training. Please share the article with your friends...
Tuesday, 30 June 2020
Which app/website is best to find a searchable keyword?
BEST KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS
Rank number one for one of the most competitive key terms out there on Google. Can you take a guess what it is? It's online marketing. You know what? Guess how much money that one keyword makes me? Little to nothing. Why? Because I picked the wrong keyword to rank number one for. Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel, and today I'm gonna share with you how to find the right keywords to rank number one on Google for. (lighthearted bouncy music) The first tip I have for you is go put in your competitor URL, in semrush. What semrush will show you is your most popular pages, that your competitors are getting getting traffic for. This will give you ideas of what your competitors are doing. If your competitors are bigger than you, they probably know what they're doing, and they're probably going after keywords and traffic, that's converting into leads and sales. You wanna make sure you look at your strategy before you come up with your own. Once you've figured out their most popular pages, go take those pages and go put them int ahrefs.
Ahrefs will show you how many links each of those pages have, and you know what the hardest thing is, is to build links? What you wanna do is go look for the most popular pages that has the least amount of links. That means those are the pages you should be focusing on first. It'll give you ideas on all the keywords that your competitors are ranking for when they don't have a ton of backlinks. That'll give you idea of the ones you should be targeting first, 'cause not only will they drive you a lot of traffic, but they're the lease competitive because you don't have to build backlinks. The second tip I have for you is use Google Search Console. Did you know that Google gives you a free tool that helps you rank number one? Yes, it's called Google Search Console. It breaks down all of your rankings, the key words that your pages are getting traffic for, and even the positioning as page 1, page 2, page 3, the six spot on page one, right? It breaks down exactly where you're ranking. Now the cool part about Google Search Console is when you dive deep into each of your pages using the search analytics, it shows you all of the impressions that you're getting for keywords that you're on the bottom of page one for. The reason you wanna go after the keywords that you're at the bottom of page one for, it's way easier to rank number one for a keyword, that you're already on the first page for, versus going after a brand new keyword that you're not even in the top hundred for. Going after a brand new keyword that you're not even in the top hundred for, is a lot more work than going after one that you're already on the bottom of page one for. While you realize that Google Search Console is that you rank for a lot of long tail keywords at the bottom of page one, that you're note even trying to go after, but yet they drive traffic, and they convert visitors into customers. So once you have those keywords, you wanna look at them, and Google Search Console shows you all these keywords. You wanna then go to your landing page, and make sure that those keywords are are in your title tag, your meta description, your heading tag, and within the content of your page. By doing that, you'll slowly start increasing your rankings for those pages that you're at the bottom of page one for.
The last tip I have for you to finding amazing keywords is to use Google Trends. It's another free tool by Google. It breaks down keyword traffic from web images, news. This breaks down what keywords are climbing in popularity, and you wanna go after the keywords that aren't popular yet, but are climbing. Foe example, Apple has a ton iPhones, right? I don't know what's the next one they're gonna release, but let's say it's the iPhone 100. If they're gonna release the iPhone 100, you wanna talk about it before everyone else is talking about it, because the moment you're one of the first adopters, one of the factors that Google has when it comes to rankings is time. It's hard to outrank older pages. It's not impossible, it's just harder, so why not be one of the first people to blog about new terms that aren't popular yet. So, let's say the iPhone 100 is coming out. You can be blogging about it. You can be blogging about iPhone 100 cases, iPhone 100 apps, new features that they have, and even if you don't know 'em all, just blog about the ones you do know about. You could even make your own predictions. Let's say you don't even know anything about the iPhone 100. You could be writing articles about huh, here's my 10 predictions for the iPhone 100.
Even if they're wrong, that's okay. You're not lying to people. As long as you're taking really good educated guesses, and providing amazing content, people won't have issues. So write about new upcoming keywords, because you're not gonna get traffic from them right away, but in two, three months, or even a year, you're gonna be dominating, because no one else went after those keywords before you did. Just think about green tea, and acai berries, and all of those hot crazy nutrition terms. Yes, they're really popular now, and they're buzz words, but back in the day, no one was really looking at them. If you're not sure what keywords are up and coming, just tell me the keyword, or link in the comments below using the Google Trends link, and I'll tell you if it's a good keyword, or a bad keyword, if it's up and coming, or it's declining. That way you're not wasting your time writing articles on stuff that won't be popular. Make sure you describe to this channel, share it, leave a comment below and I'm there to help you succeed.
Sunday, 28 June 2020
How to Build Backlinks Without Paying.
Look, if you want to rank on Google you need backlinks. We all know this, it's hard, and that's why a lot of people pay for them, but you shouldn't pay for them. Paying for them is against Google's policy, it's a great way to get your site banned, it's short term, it's one of the silliest things you can do. So, if you don't pay for them how can you get them? Hi everyone, I'm Neil Patel and today I'm going to share with you how you can build backlinks without paying for them. (upbeat music) Before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel, and if you're on YouTube click the alert notification that way when I go live you'll get notified. So question, how do you build backlinks? Well, I'm guessing most of you don't build them at all, and I'm curious altogether, because there is a really simple way to do this. It does require hard work, I'm not going to tell you that you're just going to get these links in, wave a magic wand and do nothing, but if you're willing to do the work it's not hard to get these backlinks. And here's how you do it.
Step one, I want you to head over to Backlinks, it's a free link building tool that I created for you. Go to neilpatel.com/backlinks, in the search bar put in your competitor URL, it'll show you all the people that link to your competitors. Within there I want you to search for the pages that they have that are the most popular. It'll show you that, you can see all the links, all the links that people are pointing to other than their home page. And through the Backlink's report you can also see that, you can see the backlink count for the whole domain, a specific URL, and when you find the right articles that a competition's going after, you want to look at the backlink count for that URL.
Now, if you're struggling to find really good pages, another easy thing you can do is when you're already in the Backlink's report, in the side bar click on top pages, it'll show you the top pages that your competitors are writing on, look at the ones that are most similar to you and you can also click the backlinks button there, it'll show you every single person that's linking to that article. Second step, whatever that article is that your competitors wrote that's similar or related to your industry, I want you to write a better version of that article. You know, if it's 1,000 words I want you to make it 5,000 words. Yes, I know that sounds crazy, requires a lot of work, but go in depth. And I'm not talking about just shoving in key words and making it long for the sake of it. I'm talking about great amazing content. If I told you to write a article on how to make pizzas, you would just write a article and you probably would discuss here's how you make dough, you put it in the oven, here's a temperature, you put toppings, bada boom bada bing you're done, you got pizza. Well, when I'm saying write amazing content, I want you to do things like talk about, if you're going to write on how to make pizza, break down everything to, how do you pick the vegetables. Organic versus ones with pesticides. Do you need to drain out the water from the vegetables when you're cutting them up? What's the right length to cut your cucumbers? All the way to, how the water quality changes the taste of your dough. Do you use bottled water? Do you use tap water? All those things matter from, hey you put the dough, you make it first, you put it in the oven that is preheated to a certain temperature, once it's cooked you break it out, you put marinara sauce that you handmade and this is how you do it step by step and even picked the tomatoes from the local market. And then how do you put your toppings? How do you cut it? What kind of fork and knife do you use to cut a pizza?
You use that circular roller thing? I don't know how to cook because I'm not a cook, but you get the point. If that's how you make a pizza I just want super in depth, and I would try to go even more in depth than that. And when go that in depth, you'll also find that hey, your article is so thorough that when someone reads it they're going to get better instructions on how to build that pizza. I would also include GIFs, animated with images showing like the process of making the dough and spreading it out and tossing it in the air and then catching it and then my wife getting mad at me for making a mess in the kitchen. Again, I don't cook but I would be a fun experiment, why not try it out? So, you would do all these things, and making it super detailed is how you create better content than other people. Whether it's images, videos that you also want to add to your articles. Whether it's having a custom designer go in there and create graphics for you, all that adds up. You want your content to be better. This is the most important part in this step. It's not using my Backlinks tool, you can use anyone else's tool if you want, mine's just free. It's nothing else. This step, the second one, is the most important. Now, the last step you need to take, you need to email out everyone linking to your competition and break down why your article's better. But the real key is to do custom emails. So for example, if someone links to my article on how to get content, or if someone links to a competitors article on how to get ranked on Google faster, or how to get new content index faster, you know, I may end up emailing them telling them hey look, that content's talking about how you go and you submit your article to search console, and I would break down and be like, hey I know you use to link to us but that doesn't guarantee that your article gets indexed, Google still picks what you want. Here's three other things that I break down that helps people get a index. And these three things are really easy, they can do that in two minutes.
This other thing takes seven minutes but combined they're going to get a much better success ratio. And when you create that detailed email and then you're like look, if you want them to, if you want to provide more value to your users feel free to check out the article. If you enjoy it, I would really appreciate it if you also linked to it. That kind of stuff is more effective, takes more time, but it works. That's how you build links without paying for it. Most of it is manual labor on your end, and that's why a lot of people don't have links. It's because they don't want to take the time to build all those links, it's just so time consuming. With you, if you're willing to do that, you'll outpace your competition, rank higher, and gobble up their traffic. It's a better approach, it's a long term approach, don't get caught in shady gray hat tactics. If you need help with your link building check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital. If you have any questions, comments, leave it below and I'll answer it. And if you enjoyed the video like it, share it, tell other people about it. Thank you for watching.
Thursday, 25 June 2020
Free SEO Course- How to get free traffic
HOW TO GET FLOOD ONLINE TRAFFIC
-Hi, everyone, it's Trinayan along with Neil Patel again, and today, we're going to be going over on-page and technical SEO. So I hope you guys are really excited because, if you don't make the right changes and adapt your site to Google from a code perspective, you're not going to rank well. And that's what I'm going to teach you today throughout this lesson. We're already in Week Two and, as I mentioned, we're going to be going over on-page and technical SEO. I'm really excited for Week Three because that's where we get into one of my favorite parts which is content marketing. But for now, let's go over the technical SEO. Everyone knows that linkable content wins. The more people that link to you the easier it is for Google to find your site and the higher that you're going to end up ranking. And there's many types of links that links other sites linking to you, as well as other pages within your site linking to other page within your site, as well. When you're going through your site and you're optimizing for Google, there's many factors that you need to look out for. But before I go into each of those factors, let me first show you how Google sees your website. I want you to go to Browseo and put in your URL. This will show you how Google views your website. What you'll see is all this code and text. That's how Google looks at your website. They don't look at your website in a pretty user interface, or a pretty design. They don't see any of that. What you're seeing on the screen is roughly how they view your own website. Now that you know how Google views your website, let's go into the 10 main elements when it comes to on-page SEO. The first one is titles. You know, whenever you do a Google search, you'll see this purple or bluish text at the top, then a green URL, and then, black text underneath. The text at the top is titles. That's your title tag. The middle one, the green, is your URL, of course, that's the URL of your website or your webpage. And below that is a description. That's called a meta-description. The title tags impacts clicks. If everyone does a search on Google and clicks on the second listing instead of the first listing, because the text and the title's more appealing, what do you think that tells Google. It tells Google, hey, everyone finds this second listing more relevant, so let's move it to number one, and let's move the original one that was ranking at the top back down to number two. So you want to make your title's super-appealing, and the easy way to do this is, you put your keyword close to the front because someone's, typically, searching for a keyword when they're on Google, and then, you add a modifier towards the end. A modifier is words like buy, guide, review, online, offers, cheap. Sometimes, you can even include the year. Updated it in, and then, you would add the year. And we've found that, when you add the year, especially, for detailed guides, it drastically increases the click-through rate. The second element that you need to look at is headlines. David Ogilvy always said that 80 cents of advertising campaign out of a dollar is spent in the headline. And it's true. Headlines are super-important. A quick stat for you: Eight of 10 people will read your headline, but only two out of 10 people will click through and read the rest of your copy. So if your headline's not good, you're going to lose them and you're going to miss the main opportunity to get people to your page and read the rest of your copy. With the headline, here's some formulas, right? Use a number or a trigger word at the beginning, then an adjective, then a keyword, and then, a promise. Remember, your headline is different than the title tag. This is, typically, the wording, or the phrase, or the sentence, title, whatever you want to end up calling it, that you use at the top of an article, or the top of a page. The title tag is what you show to someone who's searching Google, and that's what we discuss in the first point. But a headline is what's seen on your own website in the top of the page. People read it, they'll either bounce away or they'll scroll down and they'll read the rest of your copy. An example of someone not using my headline formula is, let's say, how to sell your house. Not that attractive, not that appealing. After using my formula, you can end up using things like, how you can effortlessly sell your home in less than 24 hours. People are like, oh, cool, that's great. I want to get rid of my home. I don't want to put in that much effort, and I want to get rid of it as quick as possible. You don't want to be deceptive with your headline. I'm giving you an extreme case here. Let's say, you're in the home-selling business and you know that you can't help people sell their home in 24 hours, don't put 24 hours in there. Maybe, you can do it within 30 days. That's still a good promise that'll cause a lot of people to click through. Some quick tips. Short and sweet. Headlines at around six words tend to do better. Use numbers in there. People love numbers. Just imagine yourself going through the grocery store, in the checkout aisle, you see all these magazines. A lot of them have numbers there on the cover. It's because they know numbers work. Use interesting adjectives. Try negative words like, no, without, or stop. Also, make sure your headline matches the content. If it doesn't, you're going to lose trust with your readers or your website visitors. When it comes to headlines, you also want to make sure that your getting a ton of shares on social sites like Facebook, or Twitter, or even LinkedIn, and here's some interesting stats for you, is when you're looking at two-word phrases, the word, how to, generates more shares than any other two-word phrase that we're seeing, according to BuzzSumo. And when you're starting your headline, what I mean, start, the word at the very beginning of the headline, X Ways To tends to do the best. The number, or the word, X, or technically, the letter, X, would be replaced with a number such as five, 10, 15, 20. And when you're thinking, hey, what number should I put in there for X ways, well, first off, however many ways you have. That would be a way to start. And another things to look at is the total number of shares. When it comes to numbers, the word, five, the number, 10, also do really well, and you can see that on the left graph when it comes to social sharing. And when it comes to the length of your headline, think about headlines that are roughly around six, seven, eight words, 10 words long. They do fine. If you go too long, you're going to get very little shares and, if you don't have enough words, you're not going to get that many shares, either. If you want to get the most amount of shares with your website and your blog posts or your resource pages, make sure you're using plugins like Social Pug, or Super Socializer. It's a great way to add the social-sharing icons to your site like I have on the Neil Patel website, and it does help generate a little bit more social shares. It doesn't give you a ton more, but every little bit adds up. The next thing I want you to look at is the first hundred words on your webpage. Your first hundred words is what Google's crawling and they're like, hey, if these are your first words, typically, what you talk about in your first paragraph or two which is where your first hundred words usually are is going to be what the article is about. You would end up having your first two paragraphs have nothing to do what your webpage, your article, is about. That's why they're looking at your first hundred words really heavily. And you want to make sure you're dropping in your keywords within there. And you shouldn't have to manually force them in or stuff them. It should appear naturally. And, of course, you want to put ones that are more popular, the ones that are least popular, and you can use Ubersuggest. It'll show you what keywords are more popular than others. Next, it's time to make sure that your pages are all interlinked together. So this is a cool graphic from Google, and they show you how they're crawling the web. When you're taking your pages and you're linking page to page, to page, it allows their crawler, their algorithm, to continually crawl your website and index every piece of content if they see fit. The reason I say, if they see fit, is, if they don't feel the page is that valuable, they may choose not to index it, or if the feel that the page is, doesn't have have unique content, they may choose not to index it. And we'll get into all those things later on, but I just wanted to give you a quick overview. And internal linking is super-important. I rank very highly on Google for a lot of my head terms because I'm interlinking throughout my site. Another site that does this is Wikipedia. They rank for almost everything on Google because they're interlinking everywhere. And you can see it. Whenever you read a piece of content, you'll see those blue links throughout their text, because that's the power of internal linking. It's what allows Wikipedia to continue to rank higher and higher. And here's a cool graphic from Brahma Media. It shows you that, as you link from your homepage to other internal pages, you can have your links just flow throughout your site. Typically, not always, but typically, your homepage has the most authority, because a lot of people are linking to your homepage. And then, as you link to other pages on your site and you cross-link those other pages and those articles to other important pages, what you'll find is, it can bring up the rankings of your whole site overall. When you're doing your internal linking, make sure you put in keywords within the link. So, for example, here, you're seeing keyword-stuffing anchor text. That would be the text of the link. Here, I'm showing you the code. And the reason I'm showing you keyword-stuffing anchor text is because, although I want you to put keywords within the link, and that ends up helping you rank higher for that term, whatever it may be, like keyword-stuffing anchor text, it'll help you rank higher. But you need to be careful in not just stuffing keywords. Because if it's unnatural, it's not a good user experience. It's not just about adding in links and keywords. It's about doing what's also best for the user. You're not just optimizing for Google. You're also optimizing for users, as well. Typically, what I see is, if you have a 1,500-word article, you want to aim for at least three to four internal links. A lot of these links may be backing up your claims or linking to other relevant articles and, if you don't have three or four, that's fine. Don't just shove them for the sake of shoving them. Do what's natural and best for the user. Next, external links. This is you linking to other websites, and also, other websites linking to you. A lot of times, you may be, "Hey, Neil, there's my competitor. "They have some great data. "But I don't want to link to my competitor." It's okay. There's nothing wrong with linking to your competitor. I don't it all the times because, if my competitor has some amazing stats and data, yes, I'm plugging them, but it provides credibility, as well, and it shows that I'm an authoritative figure because I'm not just making up stats and data or making up information. I'm telling you what to do backed by real data. So that's why external linking is real important. It also tells Google, hey, you are similar to these other websites. And, if some of them link back to you, or other websites in the same neighborhood link back to you, what I mean, neighborhood, I also have other marketing sites link back to me. It tells Google I'm a marketing site and I should be ranked for marketing-related keywords. If I had a pet website, and other dog sites link back to me, it would tell Google, hey, this site's related to pets, or dogs, and you should consider ranking them higher for dog or pet-related term. Make sure, when you link to the sites, you're linking to trustworthy sites that are reputable. Don't just link to Joe the Plumber because you like their design. Make sure their data, their facts, are relevant and accurate, because you don't want to deceive your own users because it'll reduce how much people believe in you and affect your trust. Now, with your website, you also have a lot of pages. Your page all have unique URLs. URL links is really important, and here's a cool graph by Brian Dean from Backlinko. When your URL link is around 50 characters, you'll tend to rank better than if it is 60 characters, or 70, or 80. So try to keep your URL short and to the point. Keep them clean. You don't want all these crazy words or characters in there, like the example I am showing you on the screen with question marks and equal signs. You want to keep it clean, to the point. Use letters, use numbers. This is really important in URLs because, the more messy it is, what you'll find is, the lower you'll rank. And a lot of people are like, no, I want my URL to be really long so I can put in all my keywords. Well, Google will think that your URL is only related to somebody who searches for all those keywords, plus you'll rank for the long-tail phrases, as well. Long-tail phrase, just as a quick recap if you're not familiar with that, is when people are doing a Google search for three, four, five-word phrases on Google. With your URL structure, make sure you don't include dates. I removed dates from my URL structure on neilpatel.com. By doing this, I've boosted my SEO traffic by 50% in roughly 30 days. I kid you not. And here's an example of it on a screen. Quicksprout.com/, you know, a date, 2019, a month, you know, 07, a day, /24, and then, the title of the article. By removing the date, Google will be like, oh, cool, this article is still relevant. Because 2019 happened a long time ago, right? We're way past 2019. But the article on how surveys can hook more customers, that's still relevant in future years. But when you have a date in your article, Google will be like, it's not 2019 anymore, so we shouldn't rank this article as highly. But when you remove the date, it tells Google, wait, this isn't a news-related article. It's not relevant to a specific time period. It's still relevant in the future. So make sure you don't have date in your URL. And if you have dates in your URL, you can't just remove them. You've got to remove them and 301 redirect your old URLs, the ones with the dates, to the new ones, and I'll go over that in the upcoming lessons. You'll also want to make sure that you're using a SSL certificate. Most of the webpages that rank on Google use that SSL certificate. This makes your URL, instead of HTTP, it adds that S at the end. So then, you'll be HTTPS. You know, when you go to a website and it says Not Secure? Usually, it's because they're not using an SSL certificate. So you want to make sure that you're using an SSL certificate, not only because it helps with rankings, but it also helps with conversions. Some general URL tips: Use hyphens, not underscores. Use lowercase text. Use characters that are safe. So no And signs, no Pound signs, no squiggly marks or anything that isn't letters, numbers, or dashes, to keep things simple. And try to keep you URLs at a max of two folders. Because whenever someone does a search, it may be your domain.com/aword/, and then, another word or two words. The slashes are folders. So you don't want, ideally, more than two slashes. Sometimes, you have more but try to keep in in that realm. The next tip I want to go over, the next factor, is readability. Look, if people are on your site, they're there to read, and then, figure out if they want to buy, or consume information. But if you're text isn't readable, people aren't going to stick around. I like doing things like keeping my words on my page really simple and easy to understand. I'm not trying to impress someone who went to Harvard. I don't have amazing grammar or spelling skills. Keep it simple. Don't talk above people's heads. Use short sentences, that way, it's easier to skim. I try to keep my sentences and paragraphs at a max of three to four lines. Sometimes, if I have more desktop readers, you can do five to six. But a lot of people are on mobile devices these days as I showed in previous lessons, you also want to use subheadings, you want to use images, quotes, lists, and call to actions. And now, I'm going to dive into each of them a little bit more. So when it comes to images, you want to create images or use images sites where you can get images like pexels.com, for free. You want to try to create your own images when possible. People like custom-made images. Make sure that they're compressed in size, they're small. You don't want them blurry. But there's a lot of tools out there. If you just Google, compress your image, they'll compress them and keep the quality similar. So that way, they load faster for people. And you also want to consider the dimensions for social channels, as well. If you don't consider the dimensions, then what'll happen is people won't be able to easily share them on Facebook or LinkedIn. And you want to avoid stock photography when possible. Yes, there are sits like Pexels for free that you can use as a last resort, but they tend not to do as well as custom images. With your images, you also have to keep in mind that Google can't see them, right? Remember how I showed you how Google looks at a page when you go to Browseo? So you want to use an Alt Tag to describe what your image is. And you can see here, that little code snippet, <img src="neilpatel.jpg", I'm saying this image. I'm defining the name as Neil Patel because that's me. And I'm also saying, my description would be, let's say, Neil Patel, assuming I'm trying to rank for my name. And my title, a tooltip when someone hovers over the image, I would also use the same, typically, as my Alt Tag, which would be, again, Neil Patel. And you're probably wondering, why do I need to do all of this? Well, one, it helps Google. On top of that, it helps people with disabilities. Because they use programs that help them describe a website. And, of course, if Google's going to rank a website, why not rank a website that's great for all people, even ones who are disabled because there's so many people out there who have disabilities. So please, do thank you to make your website compatible for them as well. When you're looking at image sourcing, some sites to also check out is Envato or Graphic River. Those are two awesome sites, as well. Now, subheadings. Think of your title, your heading on a page, as an H1, but then, you have subheadings, right? You have the title of your book. That's like the title of your article. But then, there's also chapters in a book. Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three. Those are what is considered subheadings. And, typically, your subheadings are using H2 heading tags, or H3 heading tags. And, if you're not sure if you're using them right, you can go to Ubersuggest, type in your URL, and then, on the left navigation, click on Site Audit, and it'll analyze your headings and all your code for you and tell you what's wrong there, as well. With your webpages, call to actions ar really important when it comes to readability. If your calls to actions don't stand out in color and they're not clear, you won't do well. Make sure, when you're picking the color, do not use red. Red is typically a color for Stop, like a stop sign, or a stoplight. So you want to avoid red, but you can use any other color. Just make sure it stands out and there's a good difference between the color on your page. So, for example, if my page has a ton of blue, I may use green instead, or I may use orange, or I may use, I don't know, purple, or pink, you know, pick any, or yellow. I don't know what goes with blue, but you get the point I'm trying to make. You wouldn't want to use the exact same color. Also, another thing I do throughout my blog posts is, I use a lot of quotes and bullet points. It makes things so much easier to read and skim. Keep in mind, not everyone's going to read your content. A lot of people are skimming it. So using quotes and using bullet points makes things so much easier to skim. That's also why I love creating infographics. They're like a visual piece of content that shows people information and images and it makes it easier to understand and skim. And these days, everyone is watching videos. YouTube is one of the most popular websites. It makes up a decent chunk of Google's market cap. So make sure you're including videos when it's relevant. And videos are also a great thing for your leverage and I'll probably create another course on this in the future, is YouTube SEO, right? You can get a ton of traffic from videos, as well, because YouTube is the second-most popular search engine. Another factor to look at is related keywords. Google knows that, when you do a search for Windows, you're not just looking at Windows operating systems, like Windows 10. You may be looking at older versions like XP, or 8 or or 7. And you can see at the bottom of Google, whenever you do a search, it'll show you other related searches. This is their own latent semantic indexing, and you can also use Ubersuggest, when you go to the keyword ideas report on the left side. When you put in any keyword that you're trying to rank for, it'll show you all the other related keywords that Google looks at, and you want to try to integrate some of these keywords within your page, as well. Because if you want to rank for the main keyword, might as well rank for all the relevant, related keywords, as well. It's an easy way to get more traffic. The interesting thing is, whenever you do a Google search and you type in a keyword, you'll notice that it bolds the keywords that you typed in when they're there on the page, such as How To, or Apple Pie, or Make, and this allows you, as a user, to clearly see, hey, these pages have what you're discussing. That's the importance of keywords, so make sure that you're including the right keywords within your page, in your title, in your headings, if you want to rank. If you don't, you won't do well. Last but not least, I wanted to go over social sharing. On Ubersuggest, whenever you type in a keyword, and then, you go into the content ideas report on the left side, it'll show you all the popular blogs around the web that have a ton of social shares. You want to created content around things that are going to be popular. And what's cool about this report is it shows you what's already done well. Because, if something has done well, the chances are, it'll continually do well in the future. If a lot of topics don't get a lot of social shares, because you can keep going to the next page, and the next page, and the next page, on the content ideas report within Ubersuggest, and I recommend that, you'll start seeing what's less popular. You'll want to avoid writing stuff that not that popular, and you'll want to write on more of the stuff that is really popular. What's also cool about this report, too, is it breaks down the estimated visits and backlinks. The holy grail is writing stuff that gets a ton of estimated visits, a lot of backlinks, and a lot of social shares. If you do that, you can do extremely well. That's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, I'm going to be going over off-page SEO. Thank you for watching.
