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- Herausgeber: Youcanprint
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
This innovative guide will take you on a journey through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) from A to Z. The text is based on updated examples faithfully reported from the experiences with the 100 sites built by the Italian author Federico Magni, Senior SEO Specialist for about 10 years, and now founder of the SEOProf.it platform. Failures and successes on Google are told by analyzing not only the keyword and link building concepts, but also by focusing on the latest SEO strategies to place your site on search engines for a given keyword. In addition to practical suggestions and a bit of theory, you will find the experiences, the case studies verified in the European market, and the situations experienced by the author during his daily work in SEO, with concrete numbers and data. Written in a very clear and simple way, this SEO course is ideal for those who already know the subject, but also for those who have recently approached it. Recommended for the beginner who wants to start in the best way, but also for those who have a more advanced level and want to improve their skills for a professional growth. It's not a cold reading of false myths, tricks, or outdated content about SEO, but it's a book that gets straight to the point.
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INDEX
1. Introduction
1.1 Why, and What is the Definitive Guide?
1.2 Who am I?
2. SEO Nowadays
2.1 Today's SEO Definition
2.2 Why Is SEO Still Convenient?
2.3 How Much Does It Cost and How Long Does It Take?
2.4 History of Search Engines
2.5 The 3 Google Principles
2.6 What Has Changed with RankBrain
3. Keywords: the Basis for Every Project
3.1 Types of Keywords
3.2 How to Generate Keywords
3.3 Keywords' Evaluation
3.4 Spying on Your Competitors
3.5 SEO for Voice Search
3.6 Advanced Keyword Optimization
4. Choose the Domain Name Without Changing Your Mind
4.1 How to Choose The Domain Extension
4.2 EMD Update: Was It Really Effective?
4.3 Expired Domains: Why And When To Use Them
4.4 Changing a Domain Name
5. Choosing the Server: Where to Host the Website?
5.1 Server Types and Performance
5.2 IP address: Do Not Underestimate It
5.3 HTTPs: Yes and No
5.4 Reverse Proxy: Is It Worth It?
6. Site Structure: How Should It Be Organized?
6.1 Page Layout
6.2 The User Experience: How To and Why Should We Exploit It for SEO Purposes
6.3 Breadcrumbs: How To Use It Correctly
6.4 Content Organization
6.5 Internal Links: When and How To Use It
6.6 Sitemap: Is It Really Fundamental?
6.7 Errors 404 and 503: Optimal Handling
6.8 URL: How To Choose The Most Suitable Structure
6.9 Mobile SEO: Interventions to Consider
6.10 SEO Pills For The Most Popular Platforms
7. How to Write SEO-Friendly Content
7.1 Editorial Plan: Plan, Do Not Improvise
7.2 Persuasive Content: The 5 Benchmarks
7.3 Title: The Basic Fundamentals
7.4 How to Structure Content
7.5 Contents' Length
8. SEO OnPage: Optimize Webpages For Google
8.1 Title Tag: Length and Practical Tips
8.2 Meta Description
8.3 Header Tags
8.4 Emphasis And Other HTML Elements
8.5 Optimized Images
8.6 Optimized PDFs
8.7 CTR: Indirect Influence
8.8 Text To HTML Ratio
8.9 Rich Snippets: How To Get It Done With Microdata or JSON-LD
8.10 Robots: How To Influence Scanning And Indexing
8.11 Indexing A WebPage In 60 Minutes
8.12 SEO Elements For Multilingual Sites
9. Link Building: Backlinks Acquisition Strategies
9.1 Backlink Evaluation
9.2 Nofollow vs dofollow: When and Why?
9.3 Directories: Do They Still Make Sense?
9.4 Forum: Promote With Caution
9.5 Error Proof Guest Blogging
9.6 Natural Backlinks, Without Too Much Reliance!
10. KPI Monitoring and Measuring Results
10.1 Number of Visits
10.2 Keyword Ranking
10.3 Number of Leads/Conversions
10.4 Bounce Rate
11. Site Analysis And Optimization
11.1 Page Analysis Tools
11.2 Study Competitors: Learn From Others
11.3 Optimize Speed For Your Website: Examples and Best Case Practices
11.4 Crawl Budget: What Is It and When Is It Important?
11.5 Log Analysis
11.6 Position 0: The "Anonymous Stranger"
11.7 SiteLink: Why And How To Get It
11.8 Google Search Operators
12. SEO Is Everywhere (With Small Differences)
12.1 SEO For Blog
12.2 SEO For E-commerce
12.3 SEO For Landing Page
12.4 SEO For Local Businesses
12.5 SEO For video YouTube
13. SEO Penalties: Identification And Solutions
13.1 Penalties' Types
13.2 Real Example of Manual Penalty And Its Resolution
13.3 Duplicate Content: When Is It a Problem?
13.4 Google Sandbox and The Beginners' Mistrust
13.5 Negative SEO and Unscrupulous Competitors
13.6 Penalization: Hints On Trying To Solve It
13.7 Black Hat SEO: The Most Common Practices
14. Summing up...
14.1 What Do I Think of SEO? (10 Years Later)
14.2 How To Reach Me (Contact Info)
1. Introduction
Nowadays, phrases like "doing SEO is too expensive", or "SEO is not convenient anymore because today you have to work on social media", or "SEO is dead” are becoming more and more popular.
Such phrases typically come from people who have never done SEO, or maybe have done it, but with negative results to such an extent that their perspective got so badly imprinted, just like the effect of a permanent tattoo.
My decision to write this book is fueled by the aim of debunking some myths and by the desire to give a little courage back to those who have worked in an SEO campaign, but without success.
So, first of all, I'd like to thank you for choosing this book, despite the fact that there are quite a wide variety of books, at least 50 of them, which approach this topic and have rather positive reviews.
This SEO guide, will help you discover the basics of doing Search Engine Optimization from the very beginning, understanding keywords, and choosing the right domain and the hosting.
We will continue with the structural elements of an effective website, we will go through the writing of SEO-friendly content and we will study various webpage optimization techniques (OnPage factors).
Further on, we'll talk about the real stuff like link building and the results' metrics by means of key performance indicators.
After that, we will devote ourselves to an effective website analysis from the SEO perspective and we will study the different SEO approaches: for e-commerce, for blogs, local businesses and for YouTube videos.
Finally, we will address the full topic of SEO penalties with their respective solutions in detail, particularly focusing on negative SEO, Google Sandbox and Black Hat tactics.
This is definitely not just another book on SEO, neither is it a trivial and aseptic reading of false myths or miraculous recipes, nor a reading of obsolete SEO content. On the contrary, this is a book that gets straight to the point without too much beating around the bush.
1.1 Why, and what is the definitive guide?
This book is a complete journey through the concept of SEO, an A to Z presentation, enriched with up-to-date, practical examples (which cannot be found elsewhere), faithfully drawn from my experience gained from the 100 websites I've built over the last 10 years.
If you decided to read this text, you are probably bored of the classic 'manuals', but also tired of those guides which promise magical solutions to all the problems of the world, or to all the SEO problems at least.
In order to avoid writing anything that falls into one of these categories, I've decided to aim for some content that cannot be classified either as a cold, academic "manual", nor as a "miraculous guide" with a variety of tricks and stratagems.
Please, rest assured that I did my best in order to deliver a clear text, written in a simple manner, dedicated to everyone who is taking their first steps in SEO, but also to the ones who are familiar with the subject and have known it for several years but now they want to perfect some useful techniques, for their own professional growth and development.
Let's start with two of my actual experiences that I've had in the field of SEO.
Figure 1.1 - Traffic Timeline.
This is a project developed in 2018. It is a 'book price comparison' with 250,000 indexed pages and prices updated in real time, thanks to a few partnerships with some major Italian publishers.
I've always considered that this website is a failure, until now. The figures are really ridiculous in terms of revenue, but it will probably improve in the coming months.
This example depicts a negative experience, but the field of SEO also brings great satisfaction. In fact, you can see below, a report of a website which I consider a huge success.
It is a report on a shopping niche, with a thousand indexed pages. The sales volume provided by this website went from € 10,027.24 in June 2018 to € 32,908.90 in January 2019, literally tripling sales after just one semester.
Figure 1.2 - Traffic results after optimization.
The tricks and the optimizations suggested in order to obtain a successful website will be explained within the next chapters of this book. Unfortunately, we can never know all the infinite variables of a project and that is why failure is sometimes a part of our work (in my opinion it should not be hidden, because it is precisely the failures that make us human and not artificial intelligence).
1.2 Who am I?
Don't worry, I will not tell you the whole story of my life, but only some salient aspects that will help us get a little bit familiar with each other, as we prepare for this journey we will take together, side by side.
I am Federico Magni, and I have been doing SEO every single day for the last 10 years. I specifically created and ranked around 100 sites, providing sales to Amazon, Google, eBay and other big companies.
I recently launched my new start-up company, in order to offer guides and tools for Search Engine Optimization. It's called GetSEOfix.com and it is an All-in-One platform characterized by SEO tools and training guides which help improve the ranking of websites on Google.
I don't like stereotyping, but if I had to label myself, I would call myself a digital entrepreneur, affiliate marketer and SEO Specialist, even if the professional path that I followed up to now has been very particular.
In 1995, I bought my first Personal Computer with Windows 95 and, being able to change the desktop background without reading a tutorial on a blog or watching a video tutorial on Youtube, it was a significant challenge at that time, because there were not many who had the privilege of having an "innovative" 56 Kb connection back then.
After having created my first websites as a hobby and after Google search engine was created, in the early 2000s I started an SEO collaboration with a Dutch casino. After that, I worked on the ranking of an e-commerce website for a company in Milan, in 2007.
Being a student at the University of Milan, I continued the SEO activity with various projects, trying to experiment with new techniques, until the creation of a real network in 2012, related to the "pregnancy" topic.
It was the time when the sinking of Costa Concordia was all over the news. Soon after, a similar disaster happened for some of my projects, and I'll tell you exactly what happened.
At that time, not having advanced marketing skills yet, I dedicated myself exclusively to traffic.
The results achieved after 9 months, having around 8000 unique visitors daily, from search engines, and practically monopolizing the main SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) of that particular sector ("Pregnancy") were maintained for several months.
Figure 1.3 - Traffic on one of the network's websites.
At first glance, this may seem like a success, but it wasn't really like that.
Sometimes, my colleagues call me stubborn, but I prefer the word 'determined'. If I see some potential, I throw my self in. That's exactly what I did on this occasion, too.
Today, I often say to my clients a phrase like 'You can't eat traffic' because I had to learn the hard way that before jumping into an SEO project, one must study the keywords in order to verify the profitability in advance (maybe with a Google Ads campaign).
The alternative is to work on the ranking for over 9 months to achieve traffic goals, as in my case study of the "pregnancy network", but without obtaining the right conversions and revenue for your business which is, after all, the primary objective.
In the following years, besides developing other websites with SEO in mind, I launched some SaaS (Software as a Service) on the US market in order to improve my Web Marketing skills.
Recently I also help students and companies to grow their business by acquiring customers through search engines.
2. SEO Nowadays
At this point, let's clarify straight away what we mean by SEO and, by all means, let's find out if it still makes sense to practice this "art" nowadays, given the fact that it has been talked about again and again, for more than 10 years now.
As you may have guessed, this chapter begins by explaining what doing SEO actually means nowadays, compared to a few years ago.
After that, we will talk about the costs and most of all, we will talk about the time needed in order to create a good SEO campaign, without omitting the illustration of how Google works and, of course, a brief overview of the history of search engines, concluding with the advent of RankBrain and all the innovations it has brought along with it.
2.1 What is SEO, exactly?
Just flat out, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consists of a set of practices aimed to optimize one's website in order to improve its position within search results, and thus getting a greater number of visitors.
These techniques make it easier to appear on Google search pages (SERP) in increasingly higher positions and to become more visible to navigators.
I don't want to seem trivial, but I know from experience that certain concepts need to be reiterated more than once, especially to beginners.
Search engines offer spaces reserved for paid advertisements where, with pay per click (PPC) campaigns, advertisers spend money to bring every single visitor on their company webpages.
On the contrary, the organic search space presents a list of relevant results, based on a specific keyword entered by the user, and sorted according to an algorithm, which is constantly updated, in order to offer the best solutions for those who are doing online research, responding to their needs.
Therefore, in this summary preview, you should have already understood that there are two ways of finding a website on Google: the first way is the "paid" option, through PPC campaigns and the second option is "free", achievable through a series of practices which, together, stand for the so-called SEO.
At this point, you're probably wondering: which one is the most convenient?
As I was working on my first e-commerce back in 2007, I found myself saying "I want to do SEO because advertising costs too much". And it kind of made sense.
In some cases, this may be true and then, it is really worth studying the opportunity of doing SEO on a website, but not always!
When you find yourself in the situation of having to choose between PPC and SEO, you will surely bump into with the fairly intuitive concept of return on investment (ROI) and then you will ask yourself "which way will I earn the most money considering the investment required?”For example, if I spend € 1000 on advertising in a PPC campaign in order to get 1000 users and I earn € 1200, it means I have a margin of € 200. On the other hand, if I could position myself on the same searches with an SEO campaign, and get 1000 users with a revenue of € 1200, I would have a margin of € 1200.
Right? Well, no…
Although at first glance the SEO looks like the simplest and most profitable way to go, we must consider that "doing the optimization" is not quite enough to get everything perfect forever, because the algorithms change over the years, the competitors are born every day and besides, there are many other variables that come into play. Therefore, we need continuous monitoring and also some actions.
At this point, there are two options: "I learn about SEO and take care of it myself, on my own time" or "I pay someone who already knows how to do it".
Nothing new so far. So what changed nowadays?
2.2 Why is SEO still convenient?
You should know that the average CPC (cost per click, also known as pay per click or PPC) on Google Ads and Facebook Ads has increased exponentially in the last 5 years, as there are more and more advertisers who compete in the auctions for gaining visibility.
In my humble opinion, in the coming years, the competition in auctions will be increasingly fierce, thus not all businesses will be able to support PPC campaigns. Instead, they will have to look for other options and, in this case, SEO will be one of the main alternatives.
Depending on your activity, here are some reasons for which you might consider using SEO:
I could go on and on, with other cases and examples in which SEO plays a key role, but I'm sure that the most illustrative way to explain the convenience of doing SEO is precisely the following slice of real life.
In 2017, I had a colleague who was dedicated to software development, in the Northern Italy. We are talking about a freelancer with a sole proprietorship.
He basically promoted his work with a landing webpage containing a contact form to request a quote, which was normally followed by a phone call to make the sale. Furthermore, it received traffic from a Google Ads pay per click campaign and spent around € 350 a month.
Figure 2.1 - Semiannual expenditure from PPC campaign.
It always brings a smile to my face when I remember how he used to say: "...and again, I have to take out $350 from my pockets, to pay Google".
Let's talk a little bit about numbers: my colleague has spent over $4,000 annually from the beginning of the campaign so, most likely a total of $12,000 in these three years of activity. For a structured company this amount is probably peanuts, but for an individual company it certainly does not fall into the category of neglectable costs.
What we can learn from this experience is that paid Google Ads have been a great advantage for my colleague in allowing him to find out which keywords are the best converters and therefore procure sales.
On the other hand, one year after starting this campaign, it would have probably been appropriate to evaluate the possibility to complement or even replace the paid campaign with a good SEO ranking of its landing webpage, precisely for the best keywords identified with the paid campaign.
This practice is considered an intervention that can provide considerable cost savings for an individual company an increase of the number of conversions and, consequently, sales.
In this particular case, doing SEO on the landing webpage would provide excellent search results based on those keywords thus offering better conversion rates, generating visits, conversions and sales in automatic, without having to actually pay the bill to Google for advertising campaigns.
I would like to point out to you that "without having to pay Google the bill for advertising campaigns" is not synonymous with "free of charge". The optimization of a website is a constant work, which will probably be less expensive than a pay per click campaign (although this is not true for all markets), but it still requires resources, like your time, or the money to pay someone else to do it for you.
2.3 How much does it cost and how much time does it take?
Anyone who wants to do SEO can choose between these two different paths: They can either learn on their own by investing their time or they can choose to pay someone else to do it for them.
In terms of time the factors vary, depending on the market niche, the number of pages and few other variables, but ultimately we can say that, generally, or at least from my experience, on the European market some minimum results can be seen after three months from the first intervention, and reaching the final goal occurs after 6-12 months.
Listed below is an example of my new project on "religion", which, with a few hours of initial optimization and zero backlinks, has started showing improvement in terms of traffic, after the fourth month.
Figure 2.2 - Traffic performance for one of my young websites.
