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hey everyone my name is sam oh and welcome to the seo fundamentals course by ahrefs in this course i’ll be teaching you the fundamentals of seo with a heavy focus on execution and while it’s a beginner’s seo course i don’t want you to be fooled by the word beginner even for an eight-figure business like ours we don’t do anything crazy technical or complicated right from the start we’ve stuck with the fundamentals of seo that led to compounded growth and today our site gets over a million monthly visits from google search alone making seo one of our most effective strategies to get traffic to our site so the course is broken down into four modules plus this video which is more of an introduction to the course as well as in seo 101 in this video we’ll go over the basics of seo and cover things like what it is why it’s important and how it works you’ll then move on to module one which is on keyword research throughout these lessons i’ll show you how to find keywords to target that can benefit your business it’ll also set the foundation for the next module which is on-page seo in this module we’ll talk about optimizing your pages to rank for those keywords the next module will be on link building this is one of google’s most prominent ranking signals which has proven to contribute to higher rankings in search finally we’ll finish off the course with the basics of technical seo which will mostly be about best practices and website maintenance all right let’s kick things off with the seo basics we’ll talk about what search engine optimization is why it’s important and how google works seo stands for search engine optimization and it’s the process of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine’s organic search results now let’s talk a bit about how they work if you’re completely new to seo then it’s easiest to think of search engines as libraries but instead of storing books they store copies of websites and web pages so when you search for a query the search engine will then look through all pages in its index and try to return the most relevant results and seo helps demonstrate to search engines that your page is that result now you might be thinking why should i focus on seo when there are so many other marketing mediums well there are three major things that attract marketers to search engine optimization and in my opinion these three things make seo the best traffic source number one unlike paying for ads search traffic is free number two organic traffic is typically consistent once you’re ranking high whereas other mediums like social media and email marketing often result in traffic spikes that usually end up fading to nothing and it makes sense because social media networks are designed to surface fresh content emails often get marked as read forgotten or land in the spam box whereas search traffic is a result of users actively searching for information and the number of searches for a given topic is typically consistent month to month and number three you have the opportunity to reach massive audiences you wouldn’t have access to otherwise in fact as of october 2019 there were nearly 4.39 billion internet users around the world and almost 4 billion of those people are google users this is why search engine optimization is an 80 billion dollar industry and why marketers from all walks of life are adopting and pursuing it today everyone wants their business to get discovered and seo is the perfect way to do that now let’s briefly talk about how google works and there are two parts to this the first is crawling and indexation and these two things are what actually allows google to discover web pages and create their search index so to actually attain information google uses crawlers also known as spiders which gather publicly available information from all over the web the spiders will start crawling from a list of known urls called seeds then they follow the hyperlinks on those pages and crawl those newly discovered pages and this process goes on and on allowing them to collect a ton of information they then take all of this data back to google servers to be added to their search index and that’s what people like you and i are searching through when we key in a query in google now if you were to search for something and google returned every result that mentioned your words on the page then you’d end up with really bad results this brings us to the second part which is google’s ranking algorithm google has hundreds of ranking signals and they make tweaks to their algorithm 500 to 600 times per year so to be frank no one knows exactly how their algorithm works but they’ve given us clues and some guidelines to better are just speculation at best but i do want to cover a few of the most important factors that you’ll need to understand from a fundamental standpoint first are backlinks backlinks are links from a page on one website to another and google has said on their house search works page that if other prominent websites link to a page that’s proved to be a good sign that information is well trusted the easiest way to understand the value of a backlink is to think of them as votes when a page receives a backlink it’s essentially another website vouching for the content on the page and the more votes you get from credible sources the higher the trust and we also studied the effect of backlinks on search traffic and found a clear positive correlation between backlinks from unique websites and a page’s organic traffic second is search intent which represents the reason behind a searches query and if you think of google’s goal for search their job is to return the most relevant results for any given query so with that said you can discover search intent simply by looking at the top ranking pages for the query you want to rank for for example if you search for slow cooker recipes you’ll see that the search results are mostly blog posts with a list of slow cooker recipes so if you try and rank a product page where you’re selling a slow cooker you won’t be matching search intent and therefore you won’t rank now if we change the query to just slow cooker you’ll see that the dominant types of pages are ecommerce category pages so if you try and rank your blog post of slow cooker recipes then you probably won’t rank because you’re not matching search intent this is a critical concept to understand and i’ll share a simple three-point checklist you can use to determine search intent for any query in the next module and third is content depth search engines are made up of computer programs so they can’t actually read and understand text like you and i would nevertheless google has poured billions of dollars into creating sophisticated technology that understands content to a certain degree but it’s your job as a content creator to provide context about the subject for example if you look at the top ranking pages for the quarry how to drive a car you’ll find that they talk about things like fastening your seatbelt familiarizing yourself with the gas and brake pedals adjusting your seat and mirrors and other things that a first time driver may not know basically you want to be able to answer the search’s quarry the best that you possibly can and naturally it should lead to content that has depth now it’s important to note that depth doesn’t always translate to length for example a topic like how to turn off iphone 12 doesn’t need to and shouldn’t be long in fact the top ranking page is only 185 words but the content itself solves the user’s query from start to finish alright so the basics are in the book and it’s time to move on to the keyword research module hey it’s amo and welcome to the first module which is on keyword research in this first lesson we’re going to talk about what keywords are and how to choose them using a simple four point checklist let’s get started so what are keywords in the context of seo they’re simply just words and phrases that people type into search engines to find what they’re looking for for example if you are shopping for running shoes you might search for keywords like men’s running shoes or simply just running shoes now keywords are actually super important in seo because it sets the entire foundation for search engine optimization the basic goal of seo is to rank your pages for keywords that your target audience or customers are searching for and if you’re not ranking for keywords that actually get searched then your seo efforts are kind of meaningless for example we rank number one for the query seo checklist and this keyword is responsible for driving around 1500 monthly visitors from google and that’s just in the us so keyword research is the process of finding keywords that people are inputting into search engines and we’ll get into this process in the upcoming lessons so how do you actually choose keywords that are worth targeting let’s run through a checklist that should help you choose keywords effectively the first thing to check is if your keyword has search demand search demand represents the volume of monthly searches made for a keyword and this is measurable with a keyword metric that we call search volume you can find the search volume for a keyword by using a keyword research tool like ahrefs keywords explorer for example the query kilometers to miles gets searched around 478 000 times per month in the us alone but as you can see here in hfs keywords explorer 80 of searches go without a click to a page and that’s because google has a handy calculator right here that’ll solve the searcher’s problem so search volume alone can actually be a bit misleading which is why it’s worth looking at the second checkpoint which is to check the traffic potential of the topic traffic potential represents the total search traffic you could get if you were to rank at the top of google for your keyword let’s look at the stats for our seo checklist page in hf site explorer so again we rank number one for the query seo checklist and it sends us approximately 1500 monthly search visits from the us but if we look at the total global organic traffic to the page you’ll see that we get approximately 3 000 monthly visits from google every single month and that’s because this page ranks for over 200 keywords and this page isn’t an outlier in our study of three million keywords we found that on average the top ranking page ranks for nearly a thousand other keywords in the top ten so while you may be optimizing your pages for a main keyword your page will likely rank for hundreds or even thousands of other relevant keywords and because of that the monthly search traffic potential of the topic seo checklist is actually higher than its monthly search volume this is what makes traffic potential a much more reliable metric than search volume and the way you determine traffic potential is by looking at how much traffic the top ranking pages are getting for example if we go to ahrefs keywords explorer and search for submit website to search engines you’ll see that it has a search volume of 1100 monthly searches in the us now if i scroll to the bottom of the page you’ll see a serp overview which shows you the top 10 ranking pages for that keyword and serp just stands for search engine results page and as you can see our page gets an estimated 5 300 monthly search visits from the us alone and we rank for over 1300 keywords making traffic potential of this keyword higher than its search volume now it doesn’t always work out this way for example the query keyword cannibalization has a search volume of 150 monthly searches but the traffic potential is well under 100 so it becomes more of a business decision whether you want to tackle the topic or not now choosing keywords based on metrics alone is not a good idea which is why the rest of the checkpoints are meant to ground you the next point on our checklist is to assess the business potential of the keyword or topic business potential simply represents the value a keyword has to your business and value really comes down to your niche as well as your business model so an easy way to do this is by assigning scores between one to three to keywords you’re researching the higher the number the more important the topic is to your business so let’s say you have a site about golf and the way you make money is by selling used golf clubs bringing this back to business potential that means topics where you can organically recommend products to visitors would hold the highest business value for example people searching for something like buy used golf clubs are likely ready to make a purchase here and now so in my books this would have a business value of three now a keyword like best golf clubs would also be relevant to your site people are likely ready to make a purchase soon but just don’t know which clubs to buy but it’s actually quite easy to plug your products because for the golf clubs you recommend you can easily link back to your product pages leading visitors closer to making a purchase so i’d give this a business value of two now a keyword like what is a handicap in golf would be really tough to organically recommend your products but nevertheless it’s a way to attract relevant traffic to your site so i’d give this a business value of one so these would hold the lowest priority and anything that has a score of zero is probably worth ignoring because it’s not going to impact your bottom line so something like happy gilmore review would have a business value of zero because it has nothing to do with your business other than the fact that it’s a fantastic movie about golf alright the next point on this checklist is to see if you can match searcher intent this is a concept that we covered in the first lesson of this course but it’s something that i’m going to keep talking about because it’s super important so again search intent represents the reason behind a searcher’s query and the way we determine that is by looking at the top ranking pages for the keyword we want to rank for for example let’s say you have a recipes blog and you want to rank for toaster oven looking at the top ranking pages you’ll see that almost all of the pages are ecommerce category pages this tells us that the intent of the searcher is likely to buy or at least to shop around for different toaster ovens so unless you can actually satisfy the intent of the searcher it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to rank high for this query and we’ll dig deeper into search intent in the next lesson the final point on this checklist is to determine whether you can rank for your keyword search volume traffic potential and business potential mean absolutely nothing if you can’t rank for your keyword in the not so distant future and understanding the level of difficulty to rank for a given keyword takes a bit of analysis and practice this is why i’ve created an entire lesson on assessing ranking difficulty because mastering this process will help you get predictable results in seo so i’ll save that for a later lesson now actually choosing keywords comes down to finding a balance in this checklist you have to ask yourself does the topic drive enough traffic and have business value to make it worth the effort and this is the question you should ask yourself before you create pages with the intent to rank in search and these five points in the checklist are exactly what we’re going to dive deeper into throughout the rest of this module hey it’s sam oh and welcome to the second lesson which is on search intent and i touched on this in the first lesson on seo basics but i really want to take some time to unpack what it is and how to use it in keyword research reason being if you can’t match searcher intent then you probably aren’t going to rank for your target keywords so again search intent represents the reason behind a searcher’s query and matching search intent is one of those must do things to show search engines that your page will fulfill their goal to deliver the most relevant results for any given query and while it might sound like you’re trying to satisfy google what you’re actually doing is learning what you need to do to satisfy the searcher’s intent identifying search intent is usually quite easy all you have to do is search for the keyword you want to rank for and then analyze the top ranking results and the top ranking results are a great proxy to understand search intent because google understands what searchers want probably more than anyone else now analyzing is kind of a jargony word but i have a simple three prong formula you can use it’s called the three c’s of search intent the first c is content type content type can usually be categorized into blog posts videos product category and landing pages for example the dominant type of pages for the quarry best golf shoes are blog posts the second c is content format and this applies more to blog posts and landing pages a few common blog formats you’ll see are how to’s step-by-step tutorials list posts and opinion editorials for a landing page that might be something like a tool or calculator again for the quarry best golf shoes you’ll see that all of the top results are listicles which makes sense because the word best implies that a comparison needs to be made and the third c is content angle which often depicts the benefit it’s basically your hook as to why someone should click and visit your page for best golf shoes you’ll see that every post has gone with a freshness angle which is evident based on the current year being in the titles in my opinion this is the least important and often least consistent among top ranking pages now this is just one example of search intent for a keyword let’s go through a few more examples to really drill in this concept the first example is for the query how to swing a golf club the dominant content type is clearly blog posts but you’ll also notice that a youtube video is ranking ahead of the blog post so this tells us that it may be worth creating both a blog post and video to potentially get two different spots in the search results as for content format they’re clearly all how to’s and seeing as the nature of the topic would require a step-by-step procedure that’s probably the route you’d want to go to and you can confirm this by actually visiting some of the top ranking pages now with content angle it appears as though for beginners or basic seems to be the right way to approach the topic the second example is for the query golf clubs looking at the serp you’ll see that they’re all ecommerce category pages which tells us that when people search for this query they’re likely in shopping mode now seeing as content format applies mostly to blog posts and landing pages it wouldn’t be applicable here since we’re looking at ecommerce category pages as for content angle it seems to be mostly about deals so saving money on golf clubs alright the final example is for something like golf bags looking at the serp you’ll see something a bit different we have a mixed serp content type for the top ranking page is an ecommerce category page then we have a couple of blog posts on the best golf bags and we also have an outlier on how to buy golf bags and towards the bottom half of the results we have more ecommerce category pages so what do you do well in order to make an educated decision we still need to lay some foundation work so we’ll revisit this example in a later lesson hey it’s ammo and welcome to the third lesson in our keyword research module in this lesson i’m going to show you how to find keywords for your website based on the things you learn in lesson one and two of this module let’s get started so keyword research is the process of finding keywords that people are searching for in search engines and the general process can be divided into two macro steps step one is to generate keyword ideas and step two is to validate whether those keywords are worth going after now this lesson is mostly about step one generating keyword ideas for your website and in order to do that you need a keyword research tool keyword research tools show you information on keywords like their search volume keyword difficulty scores and other seo metrics plus they should help you discover potential topics worth going after there are a lot of tools out there and you’re free to use whichever ones you want but for this course i’ll be using ahrefs keywords explorer now i also understand that some people may not be in a place to purchase seo software right now if that’s you then we also have a free tool called ahrefs keyword generator which is a good place to start i’ll leave links to both tools in the description all right so we’re going to be doing some keyword research for the rest of this lesson so let’s say that the website we’re doing keyword research for is a golf blog and the way this blog generates revenue is through affiliate commissions meaning they promote other people’s products and when someone clicks on one of the links and makes a purchase you’re compensated with a commission so the first step is to come up with a list of seed keywords and a seed keyword is just a broad keyword related to your niche so i’ll go to hfs keywords explorer and add a few seeds for our golf site so that might be golf balls golf clubs and golf hats to name a few next i’ll go to the phrase match report which will show us keywords that include any of these phrases and just like that we have around 125 000 keyword ideas with search volumes and a ton of other helpful metrics some of which we’ll touch on later now 125 000 keywords is just way too much to filter through so before we continue let’s take a second and revisit the five point checklist from the first lesson in this module again the five things we’re looking for when it comes to choosing keywords are one we want keywords that have search demand two keywords with traffic potential three keywords with business potential four we need to be able to match search intent and five we want to know how hard it will be to rank at the top of google for that keyword so when we’re generating keyword ideas we’ll be able to check off the first four points as for the fifth we’ll tackle that in the next lesson alright let’s look back at our list of keyword ideas and start checking off some of these boxes so first we need to find keywords that have search demand to do that you can set a search volume filter to show keywords with a minimum volume of at least 300 monthly searches and now that list has just shrunk to 351 keyword ideas which will be easy to manually filter through the next point on this checklist is to see if they have traffic potential again traffic potential is a more reliable metric than search volume because not all searches result in clicks and at the end of the day we want traffic not searches to check the traffic potential of a topic you need to look at the top ranking pages and see how much traffic they’re getting to do that you can click on the surf button beside any of these keywords so if we do that for the quarry golf clubs you’ll see that the top page gets around 16 000 monthly search visits from the us now if you don’t have an ahrefs account you can get a free version of the serp using hf serp checker tool next up is business potential again business potential is simply the value a keyword has to your business and while 16 000 monthly search visits seems great you need to consider the fourth point on the checklist which is to ask yourself if you can match search intent as you can see almost all of the top ranking pages are ecommerce category pages so searchers are probably in shopping mode but we have a golf affiliate blog so the site probably isn’t selling golf clubs meaning we can’t create an ecommerce category page and therefore we won’t be able to match search intent so seeing as this query doesn’t fulfill the points on our checklist we wouldn’t go after this keyword now looking further down the list you’ll see the quarry best golf balls it has a high search volume and if i click on the search button you’ll see that the traffic potential is around 5000 monthly visits from the us pretty good now in terms of business potential this keyword would have a value of 3 because our site makes money by reviewing and recommending products so it would be super easy to organically recommend products in a best of post which i assume would lead to a fair amount of affiliate commissions as for search intent these are blog posts in the listicle format with the freshness content angle as you can see from the titles of the top ranking pages so this query checks all boxes and passed our initial sniff test so i’ll click on the check box and add it to my golf keyword list now checking the serp for all of these keywords would be pretty time consuming so there’s a quick technique you can use to find relevant keywords and that’s to use keyword modifiers a modifier is an add-on to a base keyword for example if our base keyword is golf hats we can modify this keyword by adding best top or the current year and modifiers tell us a lot about search intent a word like best again tells us that a comparison needs to be made so searchers are probably looking for listicle blog posts with various different product recommendations now if a word like how or what is in the keyword then it tells us that the top pages will likely be blog posts or videos with step-by-step tutorials or some other informational content so with this knowledge we can actually filter this keyword list down to a keywords that likely have business potential and b keywords where we can match searcher intent for example since we’re doing keyword research for an affiliate site modifiers like best top versus and review would likely bring up topics where we can organically recommend products so if we go back to the keyword list we can click on the include filter and paste this list there next i’ll hit the any word tab since we want to find keywords that include any of these modifiers as well as one of our seed keywords hit apply and we now have a list of around 30 keywords that are most likely going to have high business potential plus we know that 99 of the time the results for any best type keyword will be listicle blog posts and we know that we can match searcher intent with our affiliate blog now if we switch the modifiers in the include filter to words like how what who where why guide and tutorial then we can apply the list to find informational topics that we could write about on our blog and pretty much all of these keywords will be fair game for our hypothetical golf blog now if you plan to use a list of modifiers then it’s worth noting that you should probably do it with much broader seats for example you’ll see that we only have 10 keywords when using the search volume filter paired with our list of informational modifiers now if i change the c to just golf set the volume filter to a minimum of 300 monthly searches and then paste in my list of informational modifiers hit the any tab and click apply then you’ll see we have a lot more topics that we could potentially create content around so if this is a method you want to try then take a screenshot of this list of modifiers and feel free to use them in your keyword research now after doing keyword research for exactly 33 minutes and 14 seconds i was able to compile a list of over 190 keyword ideas in my golf keyword list now one downside to using keyword research tools is that the list of keyword ideas will usually be limited to words and phrases that include your seats but there are other great keywords that won’t necessarily include your seeds so how do you find them well the best way to find these keywords is to look at pages that drive the most search traffic to your competitor sites because if your competitors are ranking for keywords that are sending them a ton of search traffic then i’m sure you’d want to get in on the action right now by competitor i’m not necessarily talking about your direct business competitors i’m referring to your organic search competitors which are websites that rank for keywords that you’d want to rank for so to find these competitors i’ll go back to ahrefs keywords explorer but this time i’ll click on my golf keyword list next i’ll go to the traffic share by domains report which will show you the websites that get the most search traffic based on your keyword input in this case our golf keyword list so as you can see sites like golf digest golf.com and golf wrx are getting the most search traffic from the keywords that i want to hypothetically rank for but we already know these keywords since we created the list so what you can do is click on the caret beside a domain you want to research further and then click top pages which will show you the pages that send the most search traffic to a website and check this out golf digest page on game improvement irons gets around 5 400 monthly search visits from the us this page that ranks for what degree is a sand wedge gets around 4 700 monthly search visits and we wouldn’t have seen these in the keyword ideas report because they don’t contain our seeds so you can just skim through this list look for potential topics then go through those four points in the checklist for keywords that are interesting to you add them to your keyword list and once you’ve exhausted a website’s top pages rinse and repeat for the other organic search competitors until you’re satisfied with your list and if you’re still unhappy with your list you can try and find other seeds within this report the two that stand out to me right away are sand wedge and fairway woods so i’ll go back to keywords explorer and type those into the search box and seeing as both of these are different types of golf clubs you can add pitching wedge putter putting and so on and so forth bottom line there should be no shortage of keyword ideas and you should be able to use these two methods to build a solid list of topics to keep you busy for years but here’s the thing even if you’ve checked off these four boxes on the checklist there’s still one left and it won’t matter if you don’t rank for your keywords hey it’s ammo and welcome to the fourth lesson in our keyword research module today i’m going to show you how to determine ranking difficulty for a keyword this will help you understand how hard it’ll be to rank high in google for your target keywords let’s get started so when it comes to ranking in google you need to understand who you’ll be up against before you target a keyword otherwise you could be entering a battle you won’t be able to win from an seo perspective competitors are pages and websites that rank at the top of google for your target keywords so that means your competitors can be different for every single keyword you target so there are three main things you’ll want to consider before you decide to pick a fight and those are search intent metrics of the top ranking pages and websites and topical authority of the top ranking websites now as we go through these points we’re going to create a list of self-check questions which should help you make informed decisions in your keyboard targeting also in order to see things like metrics of top ranking pages you need an seo tool since google won’t show you data on other pages so i’ll be using ahrefs keywords explorer throughout this lesson now if you don’t have an ahrefs account you can use our free serp checker tool which will give you data on the top three pages all right let’s start with search intent the first thing you need to do is look at the serp and ask yourself do some of the top ranking pages fail to closely match search intent to find this out you can go through the three c’s of search intent as we discussed in lesson two of this module and by the looks of it they’re all listicle blog posts using the freshness angle so they do match it also pay close attention to the titles and urls of the ranking pages in general if the top pages include the primary keyword or a variation of it in the title and or url they’re likely targeting that keyword for example all of the top ranking pages for the quarry how to save money are exactly about that whereas a quarry like best convertible car seats for small cars is a bit mixed as you can see some pages have gone specifically with the angle for small cars as a result it’s probably matching searcher intent better than the more broad posts about the best convertible car seats for any car this is a sign of weakness in the serp because it means there’s probably a lack of rank-worthy content out there about the best convertible car seats for small cars now i don’t want you to take this as advice that you must include the exact keyword phrase in your titles and or urls with this example finding convertible car seats for small cars is actually a very specific need for a specific person all right let’s talk about the metrics the first metric to look at is the number of websites that are linking to the page at ahrefs we call this referring domains as i mentioned in module 1 backlinks are one of google’s most prominent ranking signals so if a page has a lot of quality links pointing at it then it’ll be more competitive to rank so before choosing a keyword you need to ask yourself can i get more quality backlinks than the top ranking pages the second metric is website authority at ahrefs we call this domain rating which represents the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile very generally speaking you should be going after keywords where your website’s dr is in a similar ballpark range as the top ranking pages or at the very least one of the top ranking pages should be in the same range as your website for example if all of the websites that rank in the top 10 have high dr’s and you have a dr of let’s say 10 then you may want to consider competing when you’re at a similar level so let’s add that question to our checklist is my website in a similar dr range or higher than the top ranking websites again this is a very general recommendation but still a decent one to follow if you’re a beginner to seo to see the domain rating of your own site you can enter your domain in site explorer and see it here on the overview page or you can enter your domain in our free website authority checker i’ll be leaving links to all of these tools in the description alright let’s move on to the third part which is topical authority of the top ranking websites google wants to rank pages from authoritative sources and this goes beyond backlinks for example if we look at the serp 4 how to unclog a toilet you’ll see that this dr42 site is outranking much more powerful websites with significantly more referring domains well this page comes from a website that’s just about plumbing so it’s likely more authoritative on the topic so the question you need to ask yourself is is my website equally or more topically authoritative than the top ranking websites if the answer is yes then that’s a positive thing for you the easiest and quickest way to find out is to just look at the domain names and use some common sense for example looking at the serp 4 best convertible car seat for small cars you’ll see sites like experienced mommy baby center parenting pod baby list and other relevant sites that talk about products for children and for domains that aren’t as easily distinguishable like 800 buckleup.org you can just visit the site hit the about page and get a general idea of what the site is about in this case you’ll see that they talk about car seat recalls and review car seat brands so yes it is topically authoritative on car seats all right let’s look at our full list of yes or no questions as a very general rule of thumb the more yeses you can check off the better your chances of ranking again very general because seo is quite nuanced with that said let’s go through a couple of hypothetical examples for our golf site to set the scene let’s say you have a website that’s about golf instruction and you also review golf equipment and your website’s domain rating is low at around 15. all right so the first example is for the quarry best golf grips let’s start with the first question do some of the top ranking pages fail to closely match search intent from the looks of it they all look decent so i’ll check the no box next up can i get more quality backlinks than the top ranking pages again we haven’t covered anything about quality backlinks yet so for now let’s just look at quantity most of the sites have very few referring domains so i’d say this is a yes next question is my website in a similar dr range or higher than the top ranking websites based on the serp there are a few sites with similar website authority so let’s give this a yes as well and finally is my website equally or more topically authoritative than the top ranking websites well all of the top pages are from golf sites and so is mine so let’s give this a yes as well so based on our analysis it looks like this would be a topic worth going after all right the next analysis is for the keyword best putters looking at search intent overall it looks like the majority of pages are good so i’ll check the no box but i do want to touch on this page on the best blade putters this is more of a focused post and they’re likely ranking high for this because of all of the other factors like high website authority lots of referring domains and topical authority so i would actually exclude them from the rest of this analysis alright next up can i get more quality backlinks than the top ranking pages again just looking at the quantity of links to these pages the answer would likely be a yes seeing as we’re still looking at about a dozen referring domains but it’s important to realize that getting more links than the number one page probably won’t happen in the near future meaning getting the top ranking spot will be tough next is my website in a similar dr range or higher than the top ranking websites the answer is no and finally my website is topically authoritative so i’ll give this a yes now it looks like we’re at a tie between yeses and notes and this is exactly why i said as a very general rule of thumb the more yeses you can check off the better your chances of ranking again seo is nuanced plus you need to weigh out some of the other principles we discussed like traffic potential and business value and the best way to make sound judgment calls is through experience so it will take time to hone your skills and gain a better grasp of keyword analysis so as you can see understanding how hard it will be to rank in google will be a key skill to your success in search why because it’s the first step to getting predictable results after all if you know what it’ll take to rank ahead of your competition then it all comes down to execution and that’s what the next two modules are all about hey it’s ammo and welcome to the second module which is about on-page seo if you haven’t seen the introduction to seo video and the module on keyword research then i highly recommend watching those first they’ll help you get the foundational knowledge you’ll need to get the most out of this module i’ll leave links in the description all right so what is on-page seo it’s simply the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines and it revolves heavily around optimizing pages for search intent but on-page optimizations also involve creating and optimizing html tags like titles and meta descriptions now if you’ve been exposed to the practice of on-page seo then it’s quite likely that you’ve heard conflicting advice and for that reason we’re going to discuss both what on-page seo is and what it is not let’s talk about common advice you might see on on-page seo best practices which just aren’t true today and while there are many old school tactics that are still being recommended i want to focus on just three points to help you navigate the noise number one on-page seo is not about stuffing exact match keywords it used to be common practice to include the exact keyword you wanted to rank for in your title url and content for example if you wanted to rank for car dealer san diego you would stuff that keyword throughout your page despite the fact it doesn’t make sense grammatically speaking google is smart enough to understand things like connecting words synonyms and closely related words and phrases in fact for all of these queries the top 10 pages are nearly identical unfortunately stuffing exact match keywords is still being practiced today which can lead to poor user experience and poor readability all things that on-page seo should not do the second thing is that on-page seo is not about using your keyword a specific number of times on the page in our study of three million search queries we found that on average the top ranking page ranks for around a thousand other relevant keywords in the top ten now can you imagine what it would be like if a top ranking page had to mention all 1000 of those keywords at least three times it makes no sense the content would be unnecessarily lengthy and create an awful user experience for visitors here’s an example look at the syrup for the quarry diet plan you’ll see that health lines article on how to lose weight ranks number one and there’s no mention of a diet plan in their title or url in fact there’s only one fleeting mention of it on the page not even a subheading here’s another example gq ranks in the top spot for classiest watch but if we look at the page you’ll see that the word classiest isn’t there and neither is the word classy the third point is that on-page seo isn’t about meeting a minimum word count some studies have shown that the average content length of the top 10 results is over 2 000 words as a result many seos have recommended that you create pages that are at least that length but that isn’t exactly sound advice for example our backlink checker is 628 words yet we rank number one for our target keyword and the page generates around 130 000 monthly visits from google search alone here’s another example this page only has 76 words on it the majority of content are images according to hf site explorer the page gets over 170 000 monthly search visits now let’s talk about what on-page seo is today in 2021 and beyond looking at the definition again on-page seo is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines and as i mentioned this revolves heavily around optimizing pages for search intent the key word here is search intent translation the goal of your pages should be to satisfy the searcher’s intent how well we talked about the three c’s of search intent which should help you get the basic stuff down like the content type format and angle in addition to this your content needs to address the things people expect to see you’ll also want to nail the more tangible items like titles subheadings internal linking readability and of course the actual content itself these are the things we’ll be answering in part two of our on-page seo module where we’ll get more tactical and talk about how you can create content that’s optimized for search hey it’s ammo and welcome to the second lesson in the on-page seo module today i’m going to show you how to create a page that’s optimized for search let’s get started so as i showed you in the last lesson on average the top ranking page ranks for nearly a thousand keywords for example healthline’s page is clearly targeting the query how to lose weight fast and sure enough they’re ranking in the top spot now the traffic to this page doesn’t come from just their target keyword it comes from the combined effect of ranking for thousands of queries and when we sum up the traffic from all keywords it makes up well over a hundred thousand monthly search visits just from the us in fact if we look at the page’s keyword rankings you’ll see that the target query how to lose weight fast only sends them a small percentage of the total monthly search traffic now in order to rank for a ton of keywords and get a ton of search traffic you need two things the first is a page that’s optimized to rank and the second are backlinks in this lesson we’ll cover how to create an optimized page and we’ll tackle links in the next module okay so with on-page seo there are two main things we need to cover the first is arguably the most important and that’s to ensure your page satisfies searcher intent we’ve already covered the three css search intent which again will give you very basic guidance on the type of content to create the format to use and the angle to go with but the actual content itself is what will leave your visitors satisfied or dissatisfied so you might be wondering what exactly do i write about in order to satisfy searchers the short answer is to learn from your competitors the top ranking pages are ranking at the top for a reason google and other search engines deem them as the best candidates to satisfy a search’s query so they’re clearly doing something right at least from the perspective of a search engine now while the content will vary from topic to topic the way you research a competitor’s content will be more or less the same let’s go through an example so let’s say that we want to create content that targets the quarry best golf club sets to start i’ll go to ahrefs keywords explorer and search for the quarry then i’ll scroll down to the serp overview to see the top ranking pages now if you don’t have an ahrefs account you can use our free serp checker tool to do everything i’m about to do all right so looking at the serp we want to pick out the top three or so relevant ranking results and by relevant i’m talking about pages that match the dominant search intent based on the three cs we’ve discussed so many times now so in this case the majority of pages are blog posts in the listicle format with freshness as the content angle so that means we wouldn’t look at pages from amazon or golf galaxy because these pages are clearly ecommerce category pages and are therefore outliers to the dominant search intent we’ll also exclude the pages from golf digest and business insider since it doesn’t look like they’re intentionally targeting our query so i’ll open up these three pages in new tabs and what we’re going to look for are similarities in their content specifically in the subtopics and we’ll also look to deepen our understanding of content format and content angle looking at the first page you’ll see that they’ve created a list of categories for the best golf club sets so there’s best selling best game improving irons and so on looking further down they have a subheading which is the make and model of the golf club set followed by a brief review of the clubs the next page also has a summary based on more broad categories like best value premium pick and best choice and based on the table of contents you’ll see that they followed a similar structure where the make and model of the clubs are used as subheadings they also add a brief description of the clubs as well as some skimmable bullet points and the final page does pretty much the same thing they use subheadings as the make and model followed by a short review now unless you’re a golfer you may not have caught this minor but perhaps important detail all the pages talk about sets that would appeal more to beginners for example they all talk about callaway strata set and they all include sets from wilson’s staff in my opinion these wouldn’t appeal to an intermediate or advanced level golfer alright so at this point we know that we should create a holistical blog post with freshness as the angle we also know that the content should likely be targeted at beginners a couple common sets that were mentioned in all posts were the callaway stratas as well as a set from wilson’s staff now it’s important to note that you don’t have to include these in your post but it’s simply an observation i had made we also saw that the top two out of three pages had top picks for categories like best game improvement clubs as well as best clubs for the money finally we know that the subheading should be the name of the club set another thing i recommend before you start writing is to do a content gap analysis at the page level a content gap analysis at the page level will show you common keywords that the top pages are ranking for where your page isn’t but since we don’t have a page we can still find common keyword rankings amongst a few top ranking pages using ahrefs content gaap tool to get started go to hr site explorer and paste in any one of the urls next head on over to the content gap tool now i’m going to take the three urls we analyzed and put them all in the top section of this tool so what this is saying is show us keywords that any of these targets rank for where at least one of them ranks in the top 10. now if i run the search you’ll be able to see the keywords that these pages rank for in the position that they’re ranking it as a general rule of thumb the more urls that rank high for the keywords the more relevant it’ll be to your content so to narrow our search down a bit i’ll click on the intersections drop down and select both two and three intersections meaning only show me keywords where at least two of our targets are ranking in google and at least one of those targets is ranking in the top 10. from here just skim through the list and look for interesting subtopics that might be worth adding to your post in addition you may be able to learn some interesting things about the audience as well as the language they use so as you can see people who search for this quarry are mostly looking for men’s clubs people want to know the best clubs for the money they want to see cheaper options and others are looking specifically for a set of irons these are all things you should consider as you craft your content all right so armed with this information you should be able to create a great post with a searcher in mind and while the content is the most important part there are also a few more technical on-page optimizations you should do let’s go through a few of the most important ones first is to include your target keyword in your title when it makes sense adding your target keyword to your title should come naturally for example our title for this post is 45 best free seo tools tried and tested and free seo tools is our target keyword now there will be times when it makes more sense to use a close variant of your target keyword for example this post is targeting the query how to get youtube subscribers but our title is 9 ways to get more youtube subscribers because we went for the listicle angle the next thing you can do is to use a short and descriptive url slug short and descriptive urls help people immediately understand what the page is about before even visiting them just look at these two urls they’re on the exact same topic but one is much more descriptive than the other this part of the url is called the slug and the easiest way to choose your slug is to use your target keyword where spaces will be replaced with hyphens again you should only do this when it makes sense so you don’t need to worry about forcing it now if you’re wondering if you should use subfolders to describe categories that’s entirely up to you alright next is the meta description the meta description is html code that’s meant to briefly summarize your page and search engines often use this text right within the serp to my best knowledge meta descriptions aren’t used as a ranking signal but they can influence click-through rates and for that reason i think it’s important to add to your pages now it’s important to note that according to our study of 192 000 pages we found that google rewrote meta descriptions nearly 63 percent of the time so i wouldn’t spend a ton of time on them but you should still include them alright next up is to add internal links to and from your pages internal links are links from one page on the same domain to another and they’re super powerful because they can pass link authority to other relevant pages and they also help search engines better understand a page’s contents for example if i had a site in the careers niche and i was writing a post about how to write a cover letter then i definitely want to add internal links from other relevant pages like one on how to write a resume more importantly visitors who want to learn how to write a resume would probably want to know how to write a cover letter and vice versa to find opportunities you can go to google and search for sitecolon yourdomain.com and then add the topic you’re writing about then visit relevant pages and see if there’s an opportunity to add an internal link to your new post alternatively you can use ahrefs site audit tool completely free just sign up for an ahrefs webmaster tools account verify your site and then run a crawl then you can head over to link explorer to find internal linking opportunities we have a short but helpful video on how to do this on ahrefs product updates youtube channel so i’ll link that video up in the description all right next up is to optimize your images in the last 28 days we’ve had over 4 000 visits to our blog from google image search while that pales in comparison to our 500 000 monthly organic blog visits it’s still four thousand visits now optimizing your images for seo is three-fold number one name your image files appropriately for example this is a picture of a puppy if you took the photo yourself then chances are your smartphone or camera named it something like img underscore and then a million numbers instead change the file name to something like puppy not exactly rocket science but according to google file names can give google clues about the subject matter of the image number two use descriptive alt text alt text short for alternative text is an html attribute that goes in your image tag so the syntax would look something like this where the alt value should describe the image alt text helps improve accessibility for those who are using screen readers or if the image fails to load visitors will be shown the alt text instead now google recommends creating useful information rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page yes google explicitly says to use keywords but they also say to avoid stuffing keywords as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam meaning don’t do something like this now looking back at the syntax our alt text isn’t exactly descriptive so let’s change that to something like puppy sitting on a couch if you use wordpress just add your alt text here when inserting your images and the cms should do the rest alright the third thing you’ll want to do is compress your images compressing images makes your image file sizes smaller leading to faster load times and page speed is a google ranking signal there’s a free tool for compressing images called short pixel which has both a web interface as well as a wordpress plugin and the last thing i highly recommend is to optimize for readability here are five simple but effective tips you can use to improve readability number one write in short sentences and short paragraphs because no one wants to land on a page with a huge wall of text two use descriptive subheadings so people who are skimming the article can easily find the things that are important to them 3. use a large enough font that’s easily readable on both desktop and mobile 4. avoid using big words it’s more important that people understand your content and 5. write as you speak your content will be more conversational and entertaining to read a free tool i recommend using is called hemingway app it’ll give you some writing tips as well as a readability grade i’d recommend trying to keep things at or below a sixth grade level now there are other on-page optimizations you can do like adding open graph meta tags or og tags for short these will allow you to customize the titles descriptions images and other information when your pages are shared on social media networks there’s also schema markup which is code that helps search engines understand your content and better represent it in the search results for example these pages use the recipe schema type so google is able to show things like the recipe’s rating the number of votes the total time to make the food as well as nutritional information if you have a wordpress site then you can add og tags in schema with plugins like rank math or yoast now again the most important part of your content is that you’re striving to satisfy searcher intent yes the technical things are important too but they’re more like the icing on the cake so here’s a full on-page seo checklist take a screenshot and let’s move on to the next module which is on an seo strategy called link building hey it’s ammo and welcome to the third module in our seo course for beginners throughout the next five lessons we’ll be talking about arguably the most important and most challenging seo strategy it’s called link building and to kick things off we’re going to talk about what it is why it’s important and the mindset you’ll need to have to be successful at it let’s get started so what is link building by definition link building is the process of getting other websites to link to a page on your website and these hyperlinks are called backlinks now while the end result might make sense conceptually and seem simple the part that most people don’t understand and can’t seem to get right is this the process and this ultimately boils down to emailing complete strangers and asking them to link to you now let’s take a quick second to talk about how strange and kind of awkward this might sound so let’s go through a few scenarios and then we’ll revisit this definition of link building let’s say that you have a marketing blog and you write about seo and digital marketing now if some random person let’s call her sally sent you an email and said hey can you link to my post on facebook ads it’s really good would you link to her probably not in fact you probably wouldn’t even reply or click the link in her email to actually check and see if her content is as good as she claims now let’s flip the script a bit let’s say that you’ve been following ahrefs youtube channel and blog for some time you’ve implemented some of the strategies we’ve shared and gotten some great results for your site on top of that you’ve been using our seo tools for three years now an email pops up in your inbox from me samo a name and face you might recognize because you’ve been following our channel and in that email i’ve asked you to link to our free backlink checker from your page that lists the 15 best free seo tools would you link to me maybe now the final scenario let’s say your mentor who helped you get started in digital marketing sends you an email and she asked you to link to a page on her site from a relevant page on yours would you link to her definitely she helped you get started in digital marketing you obviously trust and respect her and you’d be willing to bend over backwards for her the point of these scenarios is to show you that the process of link building is actually very relational and can sometimes take more time than you might like with sally you don’t know her you don’t owe her anything you don’t trust her she’s blindly coming in almost invading your inbox and asking you for a favor without offering any kind of value in return in the second scenario when i hypothetically emailed you you knew who i was i had indirectly helped you and you were a user of a product for years so while we may not have a real-life relationship we’re still connected in some way so the chances of linking to me are probably higher than linking to sally now when your mentor asked you for a link there’s a real relationship there there’s a sense of trust respect and gratitude so of course you would link to her now while you can’t and shouldn’t try to become friends with everyone just to get links you’ll find that your best links will usually come from relationships that are sparked from email outreach so let’s redefine link building and set the tone for the rest of this module link building is the process of building relationships with other relevant site owners who want and will link to your content because it enhances theirs so this definition isn’t just about you getting something it includes relationships relevance and a value exchange all things we’ll touch on later in this module now since effective link building is tough you need to understand why it’s worth the effort in short backlinks are used by search engines like google to help rank web pages and it’s been this way since 1998 when google created page rank page rank is a mathematical formula that judges the value of a page by looking at the quantity and quality of other pages that link to it and google confirms the importance of backlinks on their house search works page under their ranking useful pages heading they state if other prominent websites on the subject link to the page that’s a good sign that the information is of high quality we also found a clear correlation between organic traffic and backlinks from unique websites in our study of over 1 billion web pages so while getting backlinks may be harder than let’s say creating a blog post they’re absolutely critical if you want to rank for competitive phrases and competitive phrases are usually the ones that will drive the most traffic and revenue for your business now we briefly touched on the main way of getting backlinks but not all links can or will be obtained through outreach so in the next lesson we’ll talk about three methods to get backlinks as well as the level of difficulty and effectiveness hey it’s ammo and welcome to the second lesson in our link building module in this lesson we’ll talk about three link building strategies to get backlinks now before we get started it’s important to set the expectations right for this lesson and talk about the difference between a strategy and a tactic to me strategies are higher level in the sense that it outlines the scope of the plans whereas tactics are more micro and often focused around smaller steps so the strategy sets you in the right direction and the tactics kind of define how you get there and we’ll get into a few link building tactics later on in this module alright so when it comes to link building there are three main strategies to get backlinks you can create them buy them or earn them let’s talk about what each method looks like their level of difficulty and effectiveness the first method is to create backlinks creating backlinks means to manually add links on one domain back to yours this can be done by adding your website to directories leaving comments on blog posts or adding your website’s url to your social media profile anyone can do this with minimal effort so like almost all easy things in life they’re generally not that effective from an seo and ranking perspective now buying backlinks is exactly as it sounds you pay webmasters or authors a fee and in return they’ll link back to a page on your site now this is against google’s webmaster guidelines and can potentially result in a penalty that might be anything from losing ranking positions or even worse getting your pages removed from google search index also buying links isn’t exactly cheap we contacted 250 websites to ask if they sell links and we found that the average cost of buying one was nearly 353 dollars and of course we didn’t buy any in terms of level of ease if you have the money it’s super easy to do because it’s just the transaction now in terms of the effectiveness i would think that they’re highly effective unless or until you get caught and in my opinion the risk isn’t worth the reward especially if you want to build a business that’ll stand the test of time the final way to get backlinks is to earn them and there are three common ways you can do this the first and most common are links that are earned through email outreach this is when you email other website owners and editors and ask them to link to you another way to earn backlinks is by becoming a source for an online publication or media outlet for example if a journalist references you in an article they’ll often link to you and or your social media profiles and the final way is to earn backlinks organically for example if someone visits your page from a link on social media organic search word of mouth or wherever and decides to link to you then that’s an earned link now even though 100 organic links may sound like the best way to get them i don’t want you to bank on that these kinds of links are typically less consistent unless you’re an extremely well-known brand with extremely well-crafted content and you’re already getting significant exposure it takes time to build a reputation that’s well trusted and for those organic links to come in on a regular basis and if you’re just hoping and waiting you’ll likely fall behind because your competitors will actually be busy building links by reaching out to other website owners generally speaking the harder it is to obtain a link the more valuable it’ll be and for that reason we’ll be focusing on streamlined tactics so that you can build a steady stream of backlinks to your page and get more traffic from seo now not all links are created equal some will propel your pages to the top of google while others can actually hurt your site so what makes the link actually good that’s what we’ll be talking about in the next lesson hey it’s samo and welcome to the third lesson in the link building module today we’re going to talk about the attributes that make a backlink good or high quality as i said in the last lesson not all backlinks are created equal for example if you spammed forms with links to your site those wouldn’t and shouldn’t hold more weight than let’s say a link from the new york times otherwise backlinks would just be a game of quantity and google search results would reward the biggest spammers fortunately ranking on google doesn’t work that way and quality backlinks are still a prominent ranking signal so with that said let’s talk about the five attributes that make a backlink good the first attribute is relevance imagine this for a second you’re going to visit greece for the first time next month and you need recommendations for places worth going to now you have a friend that lived in greece for their entire life and obviously knows every nook and cranny you also have a friend in the u.s who hates traveling and has never been outside of the states whose opinion would you hold higher obviously your greek friend in the same way links from a website about travel or greece would hold more weight than links from sites about technology or marketing because they’re more topically relevant and authoritative for example you’ll see that this page is ranking number one for the query how to devein shrimp if we look at their backlinks and also filter by one link per domain we can see their backlinks from different websites now if you don’t have an ahrefs account then you can still see backlinks pointing at pages using our free backlink checker tool which i’ll leave a link to in the description going back to the backlinks report you’ll see this page from wikihow which is called three ways to peel and devein shrimp so the link is on a very relevant page scrolling down a bit you’ll see this link from a page called shrimp with garlic sauce which again is relevant at the page level but you can also see that it’s relevant at the domain level too just by looking at the domain name slimpalette.com both of these links are great from a relevant standpoint whereas a link like this one isn’t very relevant at all the page is about firefox 3.5 which is a web browser it comes from a site about video games and computer hardware so an ideal link would be contextually placed within the body of the content where someone is quite literally recommending or referencing you alright the next quality of good quality links is authoritativeness if you’re unfamiliar with authority in the context of backlinks it basically represents the so-called link power a web page has and this relates to how google page rank works as we discussed before both the quantity and quality of links matter so the more quality links a page gets the more page rank it earns and the more page rank it has the more authority it can pass to other pages through hyperlinks for example let’s say that page c has two links one from page a and one from page b page a is stronger than page b and also has fewer outgoing links feed this information into the pagerank algorithm and you get the page rank of page c now this is obviously a simplified version of how pagerank works but the key point here is that getting links from high authority pages will likely have the greatest impact on your rankings now while google doesn’t provide page rank or website authority scores we have two metrics at ahrefs that try to quantify it domain rating is our website authority metric and it represents the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile an url rating is our page level authority metric which represents the overall strength of a page’s backlink profile and you’ll find both of these metrics throughout most of our tools giving you insights on referring pages now we’ve covered two very important parts of good quality backlinks but what we haven’t talked about yet is the actual link itself so let’s break down the anatomy of a hyperlink and talk about how the different parts relate to seo here’s what a link looks like to your website visitors and if we look at the html code then it would look like this now there are three basic parts to a link that matter in seo the destination url anchor text and the rel attribute or lack of one the destination url is simply the url the person will visit when the link is clicked the second part of a link is the anchor text the anchor text is the clickable word phrase or image attached to the link so in our example site explorer is the anchor text which is the name of our competitor analysis tool google uses anchor text to better understand what a page is about and what terms it should rank for but building lots of links with keyword rich anchors is an example of a link scheme and may result in a google penalty as it looks unnatural for example if you had a post on the best golf balls and had 100 links pointing to it where the anchor texts were all best golf balls then it would look and be quite unnatural people often use anchors such as the company’s brand name the title of the page the url or phrases like click here and here’s some proof if we look at the anchors of backlinks pointing to our data study on featured snippets you’ll see varying anchor texts like ahrefs old studies hr study research and even specific stats like 12.3 percent of search queries and 99.58 percent and so on in fact there are only 16 websites that have linked to us using the anchor text featured snippet with most earned links you have very little or no control over the anchor text so over optimization isn’t something you really need to worry about and the last part of the link we’ll talk about is the rel attribute some links contain a rel attribute which is intended to tell crawlers about the relationship between the linking page and the linked page and the three rel values that you should know about when it comes to link building are nofollow ugc and sponsored historically nofollow links told google that the linking page would rather not associate themselves with the linked page and for that reason google didn’t transfer authority through those links but then google added a couple other rel values ugc which stands for user generated content and sponsored which signifies an ethical paid link they also announced that going forward they would look at these link attributes as hints meaning they may pass value through them at their discretion now if a link doesn’t have any of these rel values then it will be called a followed link meaning the link can pass page rank and help boost your rankings seeing as this is still relatively new i’d recommend focusing on building followed links although that’s only partially within your control now it’s important to note that nofollow in ugc links aren’t bad it’s just that followed links are proven to pass authority one final thing i want to touch on is link placement prominent links are more likely to be clicked and it’s believed that google takes this into account when determining how much authority a link transfers for instance an editorial link is more likely to be clicked than a link in the footer so all else being equal the former will be better than the latter so to summarize an ideal link would come from a relevant and authoritative page where the link is followed it would have a descriptive anchor and be placed contextually within editorial content but the truth is a lot of this is out of your control what is in your control is how you spend your time building links by using these five attributes to help qualify prospects or people that are worth contacting you’ll spend your time building links that will actually move the needle now the easiest way for a beginner to start building links is to use tried and tested tactics and we’ll be covering a few of them in the next lesson hey it’s ammo and welcome to the fourth lesson in the link building module today we’re going to talk about the step-by-step process to build backlinks as well as three cookie cutter link building tactics that are tried tested and completely beginner friendly let’s get started with the general process to link building there are three general stages in link building prospecting vetting and email outreach when prospecting you’re searching for relevant pages and websites that might link to you these might be people who are linking to a similar page as the one you’re going to create those who have influence in your industry or people who are passionate about the topic the main goal isn’t to find a perfect list of people this stage is about finding as many people as possible that fit a specific set of criteria and this criteria is usually dictated by link authority metrics as well as relevance as a result you’ll usually be working with large and very unperfect sets of data the vetting stage is where you start to refine your list of prospects these are the people that you’ll be contacting so you’ll need to visit their websites and validate that they are indeed people worth contacting finally is the email outreach stage this is when you finalize your pitches and start emailing your vetted prospects now depending on the link building tactic you use the way you prospect vet and craft your email pitches will differ and this is actually quite difficult when you’re new to link building fortunately there are a few dead simple but super effective link building tactics that are completely newbie friendly but before we can get tactical let’s revisit our definition of link building because there are three main parts in it that will help you with prospecting vetting and email outreach again link building is the process of building relationships with other relevant site owners who want and will link to your content because it enhances theirs now i want to highlight the three main parts from this definition relationships relevance and a value exchange we already talked about the relevance part in the last lesson now we’re talking about mainly the value exchange and what that looks like in some common link building tactics so let’s dig into a few easy link building tactics and i’ll show you what each stage of the link building process looks like in detail plus i’ll outline the value exchange for each tactic to give you a better idea of what i mean alright the first link building tactic is to get free pr using hero hero or help a reporter out is a free service that connects journalists with sources and sources with journalists just sign up as a source and select the categories where you’re qualified to answer questions you’ll then get emails from journalists from various media outlets looking for sources on specific topics and these aren’t just your run-of-the-mill publications in just a single email you’ll see publications like parents.com popsugar and the houston chronicle to name a few just skim through the topics and if you find something where you can add value respond to the journalist with your expert opinion and if they use you as a source they’ll usually link back to your site and social media profiles now the value exchange here is simple you’re exchanging your expert knowledge for a mention and usually a link from an authoritative site from my personal experience i’ve gotten links from places like reader’s digest inc magazine forbes and the huffington post to name a few now looking at the three stages of link building the prospecting part is as easy as it gets you sign up for a free service and journalists are actually looking for your help not the other way around which makes harrow super beginner friendly as for vetting you can simply scan through the results on a daily basis but that can be time consuming a simple tip you can use is to create a gmail filter so only relevant emails will surface in your inbox just log into gmail and click on the caret to bring down the search options next set the from field to harrow helperreporter.com then you’ll want to set the subject to harrow within square brackets since all of their emails include that in the subject line finally set the has the words field to any keywords you want to monitor and you can also use the or search operator to include multiple keywords or phrases click search to see the results your search filters would include and check out some of the emails to ensure you’re getting relevant results if everything looks good click on the caret again and then click create filter you’ll then have the options to apply labels mark it as important or forward it to another team member to take care of now as for the email outreach part harold gives you an email address which will then be forwarded to the journalist so just respond to the given email address and write your response now obviously you’re not going to be the only person emailing the journalist so here are a few tips you can use to improve your hit rate number one keep your emails as short as needed journalists get tons of emails and if they see a huge wall of text they probably won’t even give your response a chance number two go after topics where journalists are likely looking for multiple sources for example this query from best life is seeking medical experts as in the plural form of expert these kinds of requests will usually be your typical listicle-styled posts so the more responses they accept the higher your chances of getting mentioned and linked to number three respond as quickly as possible journalists on hero will often give a tighter deadline to give themselves time to actually put together a good story plus some journalists believe that people who respond faster are better sources don’t believe me here’s what a journalist from reader’s digest said to me the deadline was just to make sure i get people to respond in a timely manner i actually have the rest of the month to put the story together which is nice i find the tighter the deadline i attach the better the response is because the only people who go to the effort are ones who really have something relevant to offer obviously this doesn’t apply to every journalist but it kind of makes sense all right tip 4 is to prioritize questions where you are an expert and use it as the first line in your pitch there will be days where you can’t respond to every relevant request so prioritize the ones where you have the highest probability of getting sourced for example popsugar is looking for experts who can talk about why cats scratch furniture and how to stop them from doing it if you’re a vet then you might start your email with something like hi jenna my name is sam oh and i’m a veterinarian with 12 years experience and a board member of the cat alliance clearly i’m not a vet but you get my point when you immediately qualify yourself as the right person to answer the question you’ll likely get their attention of course you should be 100 honest so i wouldn’t claim to be a vet when i’m not and finally follow all directions in their query for example this one says please be sure to include your full name pronouns title and credentials and the website you’d like linked with your name all right the next link building tactic is guest posting or guest blogging same thing guest blogging is when you create content for another website and the reason why this strategy works is because there’s a clear value exchange they get great content for free and almost always they allow you to link back to your site whether that be within the content or in the author bio now guest blogging also provides another great benefit aside from a potential backlink you get the opportunity to get exposure to someone else’s audience they’ve already done the hard work in building that audience you just have to write something that’ll impress their readers now when you’re prospecting you’ll need to get a list of websites and there are a few ways you can do that the first way is to use google search operators just go to google and search for something like in title colon write for us wrapped in quotes and then a keyword that’s related to your niche in this case this search query will show us pages that include the phrase write for us in the title and have the word golf balls somewhere on the page and this is a common footprint that websites use to attract guest writers now because you’ll want to write for sites with some kind of link authority you can use ahrefs seo toolbar to see link authority metrics right within google search results and if you don’t have an ahrefs account you can use our free website authority checker to see the domain ratings for these sites another way to find a list of sites fast is to use ahrefs content explorer content explorer is a searchable database where you can find pages on any topic along with both social and seo metrics to get started just enter a topic that’s related to your niche and run the search next you’ll want to set some filters to ensure that a you’re getting relevant results and b that you’re reaching out to websites that have some kind of link authority so first i’ll set the language filter to english since that’s the only language i’ll be able to write in then i’ll set a domain rating filter and set it to a range like 30 to 60. now if this is your first time guest blogging then you may want to set a lower range like 10 to 30 to get practice before pitching more authoritative sites or if you’re a seasoned guest blogger then you can try something like 40 to 70. alright so next i’ll enable this filter one page per domain which will narrow our results to one page per website and this is almost a must do kind of thing because there’s no point in pitching the same website numerous times now with around two hundred thousand domains you might be wondering which ones allow guest posts the truth is you won’t know until you ask but there’s a way to improve your hit rate and that’s to look at websites that have previously accepted guest authors to find those sites just click on the websites tab and make sure that your results are sorted by the number of authors basically the more authors you see the more probable it is that they accept guest posts either that or they have a big staff of writers from here you can export the results and then move on to the vetting stage at this point you’ll want to do a quick check to make sure that the websites don’t look spammy and that they’re actually relevant to your site for example golfballs.com is clearly going to be relevant and it’s not spammy at all seeing as it’s just a regular e-commerce site as for metricscat.com the domain doesn’t look like it’s about golf and if you visit the site you’ll see that it looks like a software company so we’d exclude this domain from our outreach list now another thing worth checking is the domain’s site-wide organic traffic to do that go to site explorer and search for the domain next click on the organic search tab if the site is getting consistent search traffic like this then it’s a good sign that the domain is in good standing with google domains that have an organic traffic like this is probably something you’d want to exclude when vetting sites reason being this huge decline in search traffic is telling us that google may have penalized the website so you probably wouldn’t want to associate your domain with theirs now when you’re vetting you’ll likely want to find around 10 times the number of posts you can write in a week for example if you can write two posts per week then try and find 20 vetted sites reason being most people won’t accept your post let alone respond to you alright let’s move on to the next stage which is email outreach now when you’re pitching websites for a guest post ideally you want to come up with a good reason as to why they should accept your post free content is great null but it’s not necessarily so convincing that everyone will accept it so take some time to do your research on the site see how your expertise can be helpful for their audience or business for example if we look at the blog for golfballs.com you’ll see that they have content on the best golf balls for kids and after searching through their site i found that they have another guide on the best golf balls for the longest distance now they’re missing out on a lot of these best golf balls for blank and seeing as they’re in the business of selling golf balls i could easily pitch them topics on something like best golf balls for high handicappers which according to ahrefs keywords explorer gets searched around 800 times per month globally so i might send them an email and say something like hey whatever the editor’s name is i was digging through your site and saw that you have a couple of posts on the best golf balls for kids and for a distance but i was pretty surprised to see that you don’t have one for other types of players i.e seniors being a high handicapper myself i spent hundreds of dollars on balls and countless hours on launch monitors to find the best ball for me if you’re open i’d love to write a post for you about how to find the best golf balls for hacky golfers like myself i’m happy to share all the data and stats which i think will help people make an informed decision as they shop through your store is that something you’d be open to cheers sam now with this outreach email i’m showing them that i’ve done my research on their site i’m a golfer myself i have some unique data which i spent time and money to get and i’m also showing them how my posts could help them get more sales we’ll talk quite a bit about outreach in the next lesson so let’s move on to the final tactic which is the skyscraper technique the skyscraper technique is a link building tactic where you find content that has a lot of links create your own version on the topic but improve on it and then reach out to those linking to the popular post and ask them to link to yours now if we were to go through the prospecting vetting and outreach stages this lesson would be extended another seven to eight minutes so instead i’ll link up a video which will take you through the entire process step by step in fact we have an entire playlist dedicated to link building tactics strategies and processes so i highly recommend watching that too now prospecting and vetting are pretty straightforward but the hardest part of link building and the part that makes link building challenging is outreach so the next lesson is dedicated to crafting highly effective outreach emails hey it’s ammo and welcome to the final lesson in our link building module today we’re going to cover how to do blogger outreach that leads to backlinks and this may very well be the most important lesson in this entire module because nearly all link building tactics require some sort of email exchange so today we’ll cover the primary objectives of blogger outreach two common approaches and i’ll break down the anatomy of a good quality outreach email let’s get started so the primary objective of blogger outreach is to convince those with large targeted audiences to talk about you and from the perspective of an seo you want them to link to your website now outreach doesn’t mean broadcasting meaning you shouldn’t be sending every single person the exact same email like you would through email marketing for example this outreach email that i got is what typical blogger outreach looks like today first of all i can see that they didn’t even take a second to check what my name is when literally two-thirds of all pages on my personal site have my full name on them instead they stuck with the generic there used it in the mass mailing software and broadcasted it out to hundreds maybe even thousands of people but the name thing isn’t that big of a deal second this is clearly a generic templated email with zero consideration for the recipients the person says i’m writing because i saw your post here then they didn’t even take a second to proofread the email and their justification for me to link to them is because it fits well in my post on top of that the person followed up with me three more times with nearly the exact same email all sent within the same 30 minute period this ladies and gentlemen is called spam and the results of these kinds of emails lead to nothing the page the person wanted me to link to got a total of two backlinks and both of them are irrelevant and look like they’ve been paid for and those backlinks aren’t moving the needle since the page gets zero organic search visits these kinds of emails along with hundreds of others in my inbox are prime examples of why you need to write good quality emails otherwise you’ll just blend in with the rest of the spam people get on a daily basis after all these are unsolicited emails now to be clear it doesn’t mean that you can’t use some sort of template to send a lot of emails efficiently for example i literally just got this email in my inbox and it says hey sam i just published a roundup post about the best personal blogs to read and i featured you in it and that’s a link to his post then he explicitly says but i’m not looking for a share or anything like that i just wanted to say thank you for all the inspiration you’ve brought to the blogosphere and digital marketing world best of luck in your endeavors and keep up the good work on ahrefs youtube channel this email didn’t come to my ahrefs email account it came to the one on my personal site so he clearly did a bit of digging before sending the email and i’m sure he sent a similar message to all 117 people he featured so you might be thinking what’s the point of this email if he’s not asking for anything we’ll get to that later in this lesson now the first email that i just showed you is one of the common approaches to blogger outreach it’s called the shotgun approach where you build a broad list of targets load them up into an outreach tool and then blast out emails to anyone and everyone the opposite approach to this is the sniper method this is when you choose targets carefully based on a tight set of criteria and then send personalized emails of the two methods we recommend going with a sniper approach because shotgunning emails to anyone and everyone is a surefire way to burn bridgets plus no one likes spam and for that reason the rest of this lesson will be centered around the sniper approach so before we get into actually crafting your outreach emails let’s quickly talk about who you should be contacting and how to find their email addresses in general you’ll want to contact the author of the post if they work for the website for example this is a post written by joshua hardwick on the ahrefs blog seeing as his profile states head of content at ahrefs you know he works there and controls what gets published on the ahrefs blog now for this post by josh there wouldn’t be any use in contacting him because he doesn’t work for sitepoint in this case you’d want to contact the editor of the blog to find who that person is you can check places like the websites about our team page their write for us page if they have one or their company’s linkedin profile now to actually find the person’s email address the easiest way is to check contact in about pages this works best for websites with one author for websites that have multiple people involved like sitepoint or ahrefs you usually won’t find individuals email addresses on their site so to find these emails you can use a tool like hunter.io go to their email finder tool and just search for their first and last name as well as the domain hunter will then give you their best guess in this case they’re wrong but the success rate is generally quite high alright so if you’ve done the work for the lessons in this module to this point then you should have chosen one of the three tactics i outlined created a list of prospects vetted your list and found some email addresses so it’s time to actually write the pitch now while there isn’t exactly a streamlined formula for every outreach email you send i want to talk about the anatomy of a simple outreach email that has been effective for me for many years now and there are five main parts to a typical outreach email first is the subject line the goal of the subject line is simply to get them to open the email otherwise there’s no chance at getting a response but you don’t want to click bait them because that’ll only leave a bad impression so when you’re writing a subject line you want to briefly and accurately describe why you’re emailing them and ideally evoke curiosity if we look back at my guest blogging outreach email from the previous lesson i showed you a hypothetical pitch where i asked if i could write a post for a golf site and share data i have on the best golf balls for high handicappers so i might use a subject line like new data best balls for high handicappers in my opinion the new data part evokes curiosity and the rest of the subject line explains the topic of the email the next part is the introduction and while there are numerous ways to write an intro i think it’s best to start by telling them why you’re emailing them and the goal of this part is to get them to read the next part of the email for example with our guest posting sample email i said i was digging through your site and saw that you have a couple of posts on the best golf balls for kids and for distance but i was pretty surprised to see that you don’t have one for other types of players i.e seniors now i will admit that the first sentence could definitely be stronger but i’m basically saying that you’ve done this and this but looks like you’re missing out on an opportunity here the next part of the email is qualification and justification simply asking someone for a favor and expecting them to see a mutual benefit is naive you need to show them why you’re qualified and justify the pitch that we’ll get to in a second for example if you’re contacting someone to guest post then explain why they should accept your post over potentially hundreds of other submissions if you’re asking them to add your link to a page on their site give them an actual good reason why they should so in our guest posting sample you’ll see that i said being a high handicapper myself i spent hundreds of dollars on balls and countless hours on launch monitors to find the best ball for me so the fact that a i mentioned i’m a high handicapper and b i’ve tested numerous balls and gotten factual data from launch monitors qualifies and justifies what i’m about to pitch which again is a guest post about the best golf balls for high handicappers now to really drill in on the concept of qualification and justification let’s look at an example email for the skyscraper technique a little while back we did some outreach to get links to our blog post on seo statistics so we email people with an email that looks something like this hi name i saw you mentioned how 93 of online experiences begin with a search engine on your page about how to do keyword research that’s our reason for contact we then went on to say that stat is actually 14 years old more recent research suggests that this number has gone down to 68 i think it’s lower because social and other sources now account for around one third of traffic that’s our qualification and justification for what we’re about to pitch and obviously the next part of the email is the pitch the pitch essentially includes your ask as well as your value proposition and generally speaking the stronger your value proposition the higher the chance of getting a link so for a guest posting example i said if you’re open i’d love to write a post for you about how to find the best golf balls for hacky golfers like myself and here’s my value proposition i’m happy to share all of the data and stats which i think will help people make an informed decision as they shop through your store so not only are they getting data for free but i’m showing them how that can bring value to their bottom line now it’s not always easy to think of a solid value proposition for example in our seo stats email our pitch was we publish this and a few other fresh seo stats here not sure if you’re actively editing posts but might be worth an update if you are no pressure so what exactly is the value proposition we’re helping bloggers keep their content up to date in fact we didn’t even directly ask for a link yet we were still able to pick up 27 backlinks we actually have a full three-part video series on this exact case study so i’ll link that up in the description and i highly recommend checking it out alright the last part of the email is a simple one-liner to keep the conversation rolling simply put you don’t want to end your email with a cold hard pitch the purpose of your first email should be to start a conversation so you might say something like is that something you’d be open to is there anything i missed what do you think do you agree with our conclusion or whatever now this is just a basic template you can use as you start blogger outreach but i don’t want you to limit yourself within this box all you’re really doing is talking to people and starting to build some kind of relationship just think about it like an in-person encounter you wouldn’t go to a party and ask a complete stranger to buy you a drink you might strike up a conversation connect with them on a common interest and maybe buy the first round of drinks expecting nothing in return and as a result they might want to reciprocate by returning an act of kindness again the goal of the very first email you send is simple start a conversation and this brings us back to this outreach email that i got the person who mentioned me on their site specifically told me that he’s not looking for a share or anything like that and he literally just wants to say thank you so what did that accomplish number one i actually read his email number two i responded to him and said thanks for the mention and number three should he email me again i’ll probably open it because i’ll recognize his name so while there will be times where it makes sense to ask for the link or guest posting opportunity right away there are a lot of times when it makes more sense to just start that conversation and see where it leads the final tip i want to leave you with is to only use your best work when sending email pitches you don’t want to email anyone and everyone for every single piece of content you create for example if you had a golf site and you created a post on a topic like what is a handicap there’s nothing interesting or unique about it yet it’s still a topic you would probably want to cover coming up with a good reason for them to link to you on this topic will be tough plus time is finite so it’s worth doing outreach for your best content because there’s a higher probability that it’ll result in backlinks all right so with everything you’ve learned up to this point you should be able to create content for your website that’ll get traffic from search engines but there’s still one piece to the fundamentals of seo that we haven’t covered and that’s technical seo hey it’s ammo and welcome to the final module in ahrefs seo course for beginners throughout the next two lessons we’re going to be talking about technical seo and technical seo is the process of optimizing your website to help search engines find understand and index your pages now for beginners technical seo doesn’t need to be all that technical and for that reason this module will be focused on the basics so you can perform regular maintenance on your site and ensure that your pages can be discovered and indexed by search engines let’s get started all right so let’s talk about why technical seo is important at the core basically if search engines can’t properly access read understand or index your pages then you won’t rank or even be found for that matter so to avoid innocent mistakes like removing yourself from google’s index or diluting a page’s backlinks i want to discuss four things that should help you avoid that first is the no index meta tag by adding this piece of code to your page it’s telling search engines not to add it to their index and you probably don’t want to do that and this actually happens more often than you might think for example let’s say you hire design inc to create or redesign a website for you during the development phase they may create it on a sub-domain on their own site so it actually makes sense for them to know index the site they’re working on but what often happens is after you’ve approved the design they’ll migrate it over to your domain but they often forget to remove them at a no index tag and as a result your pages end up getting removed from google search index or never making it in now there are times when it actually makes sense to no index certain pages for example our authors pages are no indexed because from an seo perspective these pages provide very little value to search engines but from a user experience standpoint it can be argued that it makes sense to be there some people may have their favorite authors on a blog and want to read just their content generally speaking for small sites you won’t need to worry about no indexing specific pages just keep your eye out for no index tags on your pages especially if after a redesign the second point of discussion is robots.txt robots.txt is a file that usually lives on your root domain and you should be able to access it at yourdomain.com robots.txt now the file itself includes a set of rules for search engine crawlers and tells them where they can and cannot go on your site and it’s important to note that a website can have multiple robots files if you’re using sub domains for example if you have a blog on domain.com then you’d have a robots.txt file for just the root domain but you might also have an ecommerce store that lives on store.domain.com so you could have a separate robots file for your online store that means that crawlers could be given two different sets of rules depending on the domain they’re trying to crawl now the rules are created using something called directives and while you probably don’t need to know what all of them are or what they do there are two that you should know about from an indexing standpoint the first is user agent which defines the crawler that the rules apply to and the value for this directive will be the name of the crawler for example google’s user agent is named googlebot and the second directive is disallow this is a page or directory on your domain that you don’t want the user agent to crawl for example if you set the user agent to googlebot in the disallow value to a slash you’re telling google not to crawl any pages on your site not good now if you were to set the user agent to an asterisk that means your rules should apply to all crawlers so if your robot’s file looks something like this then it’s telling all crawlers please don’t crawl any pages on my site while this might sound like something you would never use there are times when it makes sense to block certain parts of your site or to block certain crawlers for example if you have a wordpress website and you don’t want your wp-admin folder to be crawled then you can simply set the user agent to all crawlers and set the disallow value to slash wp admin now if you’re a beginner i wouldn’t worry too much about your robots file but if you run into any indexing issues that need to be troubleshooted robots.txt is one of the first places i check alright the next thing to discuss are sitemaps sitemaps are usually xml files and they list the important urls on your website so these can be pages images videos and other files insight maps help search engines like google to more intelligently crawl your site now creating an xml file can be complicated if you don’t know how to code and it’s almost impossible to maintain manually but if you’re using a cms like wordpress there are plugins like yoast and rank math which will automatically generate sitemaps for you to help search engines find your sitemaps you can use the sitemap directive in your robots file and also submit it in google search console next up are redirects a redirect takes visitors and bots from one url to another and their purpose is to consolidate signals for example let’s say you have two pages on your website on the best golf balls an old one at domain.com bestgolfballs2018 and another at domain.com best golf balls seeing as these are highly relevant to one another it would make sense to redirect the 2018 version to the current version and by consolidating these pages you’re telling search engines to pass the signals from the redirected url to the destination url and the last point i want to talk about is the canonical tag a canonical tag is a snippet of html code that looks like this its purpose is to tell search engines what the preferred url is for a page and this helps to solve duplicate content issues for example let’s say your website is accessible at both http colon double slash yourdomain.com and https colon double slash yourdomain.com and for whatever reason you weren’t able to use a redirect these would be exact duplicates but by setting a canonical url you’re telling search engines that there’s a preferred version of the page as a result they’ll pass signals such as links to the canonical url so they’re not diluted across two different pages now it’s important to note that google may choose to ignore your canonical tag looking back at the previous example if we set the canonical tag to the unsecure http page google would probably choose the secure https version instead now if you’re running a simple wordpress site you shouldn’t have to worry about this too much cmss are pretty good out of the box and will handle a lot of these basic technical issues for you so these are some of the foundational things that are good to know when it comes to indexing which is arguably the most important part in seo because again if your pages aren’t getting indexed nothing else really matters now we won’t really dig deeper into this because you’ll probably only have to worry about indexing issues if and when you run into problems instead we’ll be focusing on technical seo best practices to keep your website in good health hey it’s ammo and welcome to the final lesson in this module and actually it’s the last lesson in ahrefs seo course for beginners in this lesson we’re going to go through some technical seo best practices so you can keep your site in good health let’s get started so the first thing you should do is ensure that your site structure follows a logical hierarchy site structure is simply the way you organize content on your website you can think of it like a mind map at the top you’d have your home page then you’d probably have main topics that branch out from your home page like your services page your blog and about page then from these main topics you’d probably have even more branches to other pages these branches represent internal links which are just links from one page on your site to another and they help search engines understand the relationship between these pages site structure also helps search engines to crawl your pages more efficiently which is why having a logical hierarchy is important now what we’ve talked about is pretty basic stuff and you may already be doing this but it can get more complex as you add more pages to your site like blog posts category pages or product pages we have a full video on how to use internal links to rank higher on google so i’ll link that up for you in the description alright the second thing is to ensure your pages don’t load slow as you may know pagespeed has been a confirmed ranking factor for desktop search since 2010 and in 2018 google announced that they’d be using page speed in mobile search rankings now you don’t need to obsess over every millisecond it takes for your page to load google says the speed update as we’re calling it will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of quarries so bottom line you don’t want your pages to load slow and there are two very basic things that i think every website should do the first is to cache your website’s content caching is basically a way to temporarily store copies of files so it can be delivered to visitors in a more efficient way and most web hosting companies that i’ve come across have caching features and the second thing you can do is compress your images compressing images makes your file sizes smaller and smaller files load faster you can use a tool like short pixel which has both a web interface and a wordpress plugin now if you want to take page speed a step further then it can get quite technical and complex so we actually created a full tutorial on how to speed up a wordpress website using cloudflare and a wordpress plugin so i’ll leave a link to that in the description and the final thing i want to talk about is to do your best to stay on top of around 50 potential seo errors trust me it’s not as bad as it sounds there are potentially hundreds of technical seo issues that can and some will definitely happen to your site some of these things include pages becoming broken that still have internal links pointing at them orphan pages which are pages on your site that have no incoming internal links and these are great because it can make it tough for search engines to actually discover them duplicate content issues and redirect chains to name a few now there’s no point in me going through 50 different potential issues because it’ll only matter to you if you run into them so what i recommend you do is run scheduled website audits on your site and a website audit will give you a full analysis of potential issues that could be harming your website’s seo performance if you’re an ahrefs user you can do that using our site audit tool and even if you don’t have an ahrefs paid plan you can sign up for a free ahrefs webmaster tools account which will let you crawl up to ten 000 pages on each website you own to get started go to ahrefs.com awt and sign up for your free webmaster tools account then you’ll need to verify your website meaning prove that you actually own it you can do that using google search console which is the easiest method or if you don’t have a search console account you can do it manually just enter your domain and click continue then verify your website using one of these three methods and i’ll actually just go back and use the google search console method next you’ll need to import your sites and i’ll choose to run the first audit now schedule weekly audits and i’ll also enable the crawl external links option to ensure that we catch any broken or redirected outgoing links hit import and the crawl should start running now after the crawl has completed go to the overview report in your site audit project and you’ll immediately see things like your health score which is a percentage of urls on your site that don’t have errors you’ll also see the top issues we found on your site as well as the number of urls that had the issue so when you run into an issue you can click on the caret to see a description of what it means and also a short snippet of how to fix it and once you have an idea of what the issue is and how to fix it just click on the number under the crawled column to see the affected urls then it’s just a matter of fixing them one by one or hiring someone to help and since you set up weekly scheduled audits you can revisit the overview report to see if there’s any seo maintenance you can do and that wraps up ahrefs seo course for beginners everything you’ve learned in this course should be enough to get you indexed ranking and to keep your site in good technical health and i’ve linked up a playlist in the description to the entire course with all 14 videos which will be free forever thank you for joining me and i hope you were able to get a ton of value from the course and make sure to like share and subscribe for more actionable seo and marketing tutorials feel free to browse around our channel and if you have any questions leave them in the comments and we’ll do our best to get to each one i’ll see you in the next tutorial

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