#1 Guide On SEO | All You Must Know To Rank First On Google SERP
Traffic in the modern world equals to a lot of money, and if you want a lot of traffic you need to learn SEO.
Here in this blog post I am gonna show you how I have ranked many sites to have over 100.000 visitors a day.
All you need to do is:
- Read this article.
- Start right now to put in practice these concepts.
- Comment below or contact me for any question.
I am going to tell you what SEO is, and why you should focus on SEO vs PPC! And the best SEO techniques that work to boost your traffic.
99 % of all of this is Free, all you will need is a lot of patience and maybe a few domains and a good hosting plan.
What SEO Means
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and probably there is no better way to describe what it is. There are over 200 articles posted every second in this world!
If search engines did not develop a very efficient system to show related results in the search engine results page ( SERP ) it will be just a big mess of posts with no sense.
We need to think as a human would think In order to appear on this first page of google! When I think about how can I be first on Google I think about this:
- I cannot be first from day to night, I would need to have some reputation first before being shown first. (domain age) .
- I need to give more value compared to someone else. (content marketing).
- People need to interact with me. (comments and social media).
- My page has to be shown to people that are specifically interested in what they need. (targeted results).
- I need to have experience and proofs of what I am doing. (DA and Backlinks).
How SEO Works
If you are just starting you might have heard about ‘title tags‘ and ‘meta tags‘. These are the basis of search engine optimization.
You give your website page a nice title and description! If this is shown in search results the nicest this title and description are the highest it can potentially be your CTR click-through rate.
The click-through rate is one of the most important factors when trying to rank on google! You can check yours via the free google webmasters console.
MAKE A GOOGLE WEBMASTERS TOOLS ACCOUNT
The CTR is the number of clicks on that result divided by the impressions that that results had.
Let’s assume you are on the first page of Google and showing up in the top 10 results! If no one will click on your title you will be thrown on the second page pretty soon, and you can just get worst.
My advice is to always monitor your SEO with the google console and optimize your titles to enhance your CTR.
If you are using WordPress you can easily do all of this with a plugin called Yoast SEO.
If you code your websites you will need to add the SEO meta tags ‘title‘ and ‘meta description‘. I advise you to learn to code a bit with freecodecamp. This is an example here on my site.
<head>
<title>Make Money Online | Marco Diversi</title>
<meta name="description" content="Learn How To Make Money Online And Create A Passive Income Stream With Affiliate Marketing And No Bullshit Methods. My Name Is Marco Diversi, I Was Born In The Beautiful Town Of Rimini, Italy. I Want You To Experience Total Freedom. Hang Out On This Blog If Interested!" />
</head>
Why SEO Is Important
So you might say: ‘alright so let’s just create good titles and descriptions and money will pour into my bank account!’
Well this is not the case, search engine optimization got very complicated and the best way to learn it is by doing it.
So that’s why I highly recommend starting a website now! You can read my blog post here on how to start a successful blog.
With $2.95 a month, you will be able to learn so much stuff that is totally worth it.
There are millions of parameters to consider to rank on search engines like google and bing. If you go up in this article you can see that I have put in parenthesis some technical terms.
Domain Age
You can not pretend to go in the top results if you created a website yesterday! Old domains with already content on it will be shown before of yours for a while.
In my experience, usually, this timeframe is 1-2 years. So you will have no traffic for at least this period of time due to this limitation.
I have just started this blog and I have zero traffic on it, but come back next year and you will see some spikes.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing and niche sites are my favorite way to rank on Google. I love to see data popping up in the google search console and then traffic coming to my sites!
Looking at the SEO progress with google analytics and statcounter is exciting.
You can see everything that happens on your site from all over the world. All you need to do is writing better stuff than your competitors. That’s it.
Comments And Social Media
The more comments and shares you get, the coolest your stuff is. And search engines love cool stuff. Google think that they want to show their customer the best results!
If they see that a lot of people comment on your stuff positively (google is able to figure out negative sentiments). Click To Tweet
And a lot of people share your content all over their social media, this will make Google think that this piece of content, video or article needs to be shown more than another piece of contents.
Targeted Results
Google can not show me results like ‘how to buy a kitty‘ if I am looking for a ‘ how to buy a pet snake‘.
Try to keep your website and articles focused on answering some peoples questions or need. I love to use answer the public tool to figure out what the people are asking for Google.
But yeah, do not include pictures of cats on an article where your main purpose is to sell snakes.
DA And Backlinks
This is one of the hardest parts of SEO, and you have no control over this. Your domain will accrue domain authority if it is mentioned on other related websites to yours.
Let’s assume that Neil Patel or Brian Dean (SEO GURUS) will write an article on ‘the best SEO strategies‘ and drop a link on their article pointing on one of my articles! Like this one https://marcodiversi.com/blog/seo on their website.
My domain will suddenly get more authority and attention from Google! It got mentioned from some of the most important websites talking about SEO.
You have no control over this since you can not place links on other people’s websites! But you can use some techniques to get some links.
I will talk about this later.
The Keyword Importance Explained For Kids
As I said before there are over 200 articles posted on the internet each second. And there are billions of searches on Google each day from any country in the world.
A search engine like Google will show the article talking about ‘how to buy a pet snake‘ if people will type in stuff like.
Where to buy a snake in Florence?
In order for you to be shown you will need to include in your article sentences including the sentence above.
Google crawlers will take a note, and they will put your blog on a waiting list of websites that have the same question on an article.
If you are the only one that sells snakes in Florence and you wrote it on your site, you will be shown! If there are other people instead you will need to take in consideration also the points written above.
If you have no competition at all, you will rank first on google within a few months even if you don’t respect SEO.
But usually wherever there is money to make there is competition.
If you want to rank for really stupid stuff like ‘ why people live in Uelen ‘, you probably will rank but no one will pay to put ads on your site or buy anything from you.
You need to have a KW density at least of the 5% in order to rank. You can calculate it with the formula below.
Read my article on niche sites where I am giving you a better picture of what’s a keyword.
How To Rank For Any Keyword
For you to able to rank for any keyword you need to be on the internet for a while. Take the example of Wikipedia!
They are ranking for any given search mostly because they have good articles answering people questions and they are there for a lot of years.
This is something you can not change! You can not travel in time. But then there are many tricks you can use to speed up the time. Click To Tweet
SEOSiteCheckup
This is a pretty bad SEO tool, but it will give you some good insights on your on page SEO and tags and meta tags.
I would run a check with seositecheckup and follow each point from the report you will get and try to fix all the errors from there.
It is a very good starting point. Run a check on your homepage and most important pages.
Optimize H1 H2 H3 Tags And Titles Based On Google Ads
A webpage is composed of several elements. The easiest element to understand is the<h>tag. I suggest you do some freecodecamp to get more familiar with this.
But the <h> tags are working like this. There are usually tags graded from 1-6 like so <h1>…<h3>…<h6>.
The most important tag is the H1 tag and this should be your title containing the main keyword you want to rank for. You should not repeat the H1 more than 1 or 2 times in an article to not confuse google.
The H2 tags are less important tags than the H1 tags, you should put them in your main subheading, and include your keyword sometimes in there too. You should not have more than 3-4 H2 tags.
The H3 tags are less important and you can use them for the other subheadings of your post together with H4 tags.
I don’t use a lot the h5 and h6 tags. There are no limits with those as far as I know and you should include these tags every 300 words to separate the parts of your articles.
Optimize your tags looking at the paid Google ads in search results. These guys are paying a ton of money to get ads there and they have probably studied how to make them appealing and nice. So take advantage of that.
Website Speed
There is no way that you will rank on google if your website is super slow. If you are using WordPress I have created the best guide in the whole world with the optimal settings and plugins you need to follow and install to have the best WordPress speed.
READ MY STEP BY STEP GUIDE TO SPEED UP WORDPRESS
Then you will need to host your website in on an awesome hosting service! Here you can read my review on the best hosting according to me. They are cheap and awesome.
READ MY GUIDE ON THE BEST HOSTING
There is not a lot you can do to have a faster site if you don’t optimize your code, or WordPress site and you host all of this somewhere reliable like tmdhosting.
These are the most used and famous tools to measure a website speed. Google page insights, Pingdom, and gtMetrix. I am using gtmetrix all the time and you should make an account now as well.
Link Building Techniques
Building links, unfortunately, is extremely important for SEO, you need to have good quality links pointing to your site to rank on google.
It is better to have 100 high-quality links pointing to your site than 500.000 low-quality links.
A high-quality link is a link that comes from a famous and high authoritative website. You can measure the Domain authority (DA)of a website with the MOZ bar. You should have it!
A high authority site, for instance, is the new york times writing about your site on their site. If you get a link from them your DA will go to the moon.
But how to get those links?
Here there are a couple of my most efficient, working and good techniques I use.
Mention A Guru
If you write an article you can always mention a guru with his name if he has one and links it to one of his articles on your site.
Like ‘Neil Patel’, You see that I have linked to him and there is his website under his name. You can do that for a specified article with his name.
If you link a lot some of them will comment or reply or ask for a collaboration with you because you are in the same field and if you do a great job they want a fresh link on their site coming from a high-quality related article.
DOING THIS YOU WILL SAVE THEM SOME WORK BUILDING LINKS! Click To TweetThey will see that you linked to them because all of them use stuff like ahrefs on a daily base to monitor their activities.
So you will be discovered and if you link a lot, let’s say 1 out of 20 will link to you.
Broken Link Technique
Super powerful and simple technique that will allow you to get, eventually awesome backlinks. You probably read news and visit websites all day long right?
It will be very common to stumble upon a website related to your content, you will do this nonetheless. All you have to do is to install this extension called check my links.
When you are reading your favorite articles or looking at whatever you are looking at run the broken link checker.
Very often there will be broken links on that webpage since the web changes very fast and some sites could no longer exist or have that particular page.
This checker will highlight all the broken links on the page! And since you are a smart person you are going to send a message to the website owner with something like this:
hello,
I have noticed broken links here: https://brokenlink.com, this is not good for seo, I have created awesome content regarding this topic here https://yourwebsite.com, I would be happy if you replace that link with my link. Also it will add value to your page.
let me know,
thanks
This will work pretty often! The ratio is about every 40 message you will send you will get an awesome link. So keep sending.
Reach Out The Whale
If you are writing good stuff you should not be shy of contacting some whales in your industry. Just go in there to the website of your favorite company or guru or whatever it is and shoot them an email.
Mention how much you love them and that you have started a radical blog talking about stuff related to them and you would like to have a link back to your site somewhere on their site or even do a guest post for them.
Guest posts are hard to get, but if you get accepted from a big whale to guest post for them your authority will go to the moon and traffic also!
If it’s a big website your traffic can skyrocket from their referral traffic. So this is the big jackpot and you should bother them.
Update Content
Instead of writing new articles about one single specific topic, try to update your existing content with updated and fresh one.
You should use the google webmaster console technique. You will need a google webmasters account and verify your domains and start gathering data. Once you have some data, you can sort those numbers and keywords by impressions.
If you are getting a lot of impressions or you are ranking for something on the 55th position on search results and you have in mind stuff to talk about related to that keyword.
Just go back to your article and write an entire subheading or paragraph all about that keyword. I am using this website called dropmylinks to find websites that are accepting guest posts and you should do it as well. There are many other features as well.
You can also use this script in your google to find guest posts related to your KW (replace KW):
KW "accepting guest posts"
Use Ninja Outreach For Backlinks
If you are lazy about doing all of this, I get it. It is not a fun job and on top of that, it might be only a waste of time if people are not actually linking to you.
Thank god the technology is advancing and they have created an awesome tool that will simplify this job for you.
This tool is called Ninja Outreach and as you might guess from the name it will outreach dozens of people in an automated way.
All you will need to do is to run a simple keyword search and you can find online influencers in your niche, see valuable data about them, connect with them through email and social media, and partner with them to promote your brand to their audience.
You can create your templates according to the keyword you are trying to reach someone out and this software will do the manual job for you.
If you don’t have an account, I strongly advise you to create a free account with ninja outreach and try it. It is my favorite backlink building tool.
MAKE AN ACCOUNT WITH NINJA OUTREACH
Monitor The CTR
Be the best friend of the google console! Try to login into it at least once a day. What I usually do is something very simple. I usually download each day the CSV format of my google console results.
There is an option in there. Then I am copying and pasting the whole thing into a website like this one, it is meant for coders but you can paste whatever you want.
Copy and paste on one side the CSV of the day before or the week before and on the other side the brand new CSV file.
Try to look at the numbers that changed, if something went up or down try to analyze it! And as I said before if your impressions are going up, it means that there is the need for people writing about that keyword.
But if you CTR goes down it means that is not appealing for the users to click. So you will need to change the titles and meta tags so that you can improve the CTR.
Improving the CTR means that Google will put you in a better Position on the SERP. From the Google console, you can see what position you are specifically.
You should check all the boxes as shown in the picture and under the position tab! You can see what position your website in on the SERP separated by country and query.
The position 0 of Google is the holy grail of all the positions. If you get to position 0 your traffic will go to the next level. Position 0 is when you see a snippet on top of the results like in the pic below.
MOZ Site Explorer
The MOZ site explorer is another of your best friends with SEO. This website knows everything about your website and how it ranks on the SERP.
As hard as it sounds MOZ site explorer is able to figure out all the links that are pointing to your site! From where are they coming from if they are good links and what authority they will give.
You can also use another of my favorite tools to basically see everything about a domain. This tool is called SEMRush and is the best and more complete SEO tools you can get.
You can create an account and have full feature access to 5 searches a day! So go ahead and try it for free now. You can use the box below to run your first detailed SEO Report.
Use Youtube, Amazon, Reddit, Pinterest, Quora, Wikipedia As Search Engines
The websites above are all in their ways search engines. If you use them correctly you can gather the best keywords to rank ever.
Let’s take the examples of Reddit and Quora. These two websites and especially Quora are made to answer people questions.
What’s better than answering people questions on your blog posts? The answer is nothing is better.
So go into Reddit and Quora and also YouTube and Pinterest and try to study the results of your searches on these websites.
If you are getting people asking questions on how to build backlinks while you type best SEO practices you might want to create a radical post about that.
Of course, you should niche down the topic to something less competitive but the idea is this one.
Also be active in there and comment and give nice insights.
Once you get an important Quora or Reddit figure you can even drop some links to your website once in a while and these links will get a lot of traffic and some authority.
Buzzsumo To Find Related Articles And People
Buzzsumo is very similar to ahrefs but here is all about the content. If you copy and paste an article URL you will have a broad overview of what the people shared and most related to that topic on social media.
If you get a lot of shares, Google likes it and also you will get a ton of free traffic, people subscribing to your email list and potentially money.
So definitely you want to check out buzzsumo, type in your keyword and look at what people shares on social media related to that specific keyword or article.
Then create a better content than the one that this already there and outreach the website owner letting them know that you have created that masterpiece.
Make Articles With At Least 2000 Words
It is proven from a research, you can read more here on backlinko that articles with more than 1800 words have a lot more chances to rank on the first page of google.
So you will need to focus on writing stuff with at least 2000 words on the topics and things you really want to rank for.
I have a niche website where the only purpose is to teach people how to create a successful blog. I have many articles in there, but the main article called how to start a successful blog is made of 16.000 words.
Do not write sloppy content on stuff you care to become an authority.
Link Juice Articles You Get Hits But No Clicks With Articles That Get Clicks
As I said multiple times the google search console is one of your best friends. You can see what pages are ranking on your site on google and for what keywords.
Let’s assume that you are ranking on the first page of google for the KW ‘buy a pet snake‘, and you have an article on another page talking about ‘how to feed a python‘.
If you see that the ‘python‘ article ranks in position 45 so on the 5th page, you can link your first-page article about how to buy a pet snake to the python article.
This will create what’s called link juice and you should see some progressions on the SERP pretty soon. That is why also it is recommended to link to some of your old articles in a new article.
NOTE THAT IN THIS ARTICLE I AM ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT GOOGLE, BUT THE SAME APPLIES FOR BING, YANDEX, NAVER, BAIDU ETC... THEY ALL HAVE A CONSOLE. Click To Tweet
Get An SSL HTTPS And HSTS Certificate
Google has implemented an algorithm that will throw an error when trying to visit a website that does not have an SSL (secure socket layer).
In other words, this is the cool lock you see in your browser and the little ‘secure‘ word next to it. This means that your website has a valid certificate to run on and that your server talks to this certificate which is in a safe place and will transmit only safe information all over the web via an encrypted protocol called HTTPS.
It might sound very hard but if you follow my advice it will be very easy. To have a free SSL HTTPS you only need to have a Cloudflare account, so make one now.
And then manage your NS servers from there. I don’t want to be boring here but I will drop a video and you should do it this way.
This way you will save money on an SSL certificate and also with Cloudflare you will be able to enable for free an HSTS protocol.
Within the HTTPS protocol which is even safer and Google likes it even more. So create a Cloudflare account and you will have free SSL HTTPS and HSTS. Cloudflare is a CDN and will make your website faster as well.
Use AMP
If you don’t use it yet, just use it! AMP accelerated mobile pages, is an ambitious project that aims to create super fast loading pages for mobile users.
The idea is this one, if you are living in an advanced country you probably don’t care if a website loads fast or not because your internet speed is blazing fast and you might have a computer as well.
But we are not all that lucky! In 3rd world country people don’t have a computer and if they do have an internet connection is via a mobile phone that connects to a shitty network that probably has the speed as we were used to having 20 years ago here in Europe or North America.!
AMP transform the HTML code of a webpage into something lighter and easy to open on mobile.
You might have seen on google search results from mobile the little flash next to the results, or a button with ‘instant view‘ written on it.
This is AMP. To implement AMP on a website is pretty hard honestly but if you are a WordPress user all you have to do is to install the AMP for WordPress plugin and play with the settings. So if you are on WordPress go forward and install this plugin so that you can have AMP! You can test if all work properly from the button below.
Learn How To Use Yoast SEO
At last but not least, you really want to suck off all the powers of Yoast SEO. You need to navigate all its options, figure out everything that can offer you and mostly try to make all the dots yellow when writing stuff.
You need to try to have your keyword density at least 5%, you need to have short URLs and on page SEO!
But yeah just install this plugin and try to figure it out yourself. It is pretty easy and straightforward that if you can not figure out this is not good.
Go over all the options from the plugin settings and customize your meta titles and sitemap. It is here where you can get your sitemap URL to submit to the Google search console.
The most important thing is that you have it and you try to make everything yellow when writing an article.
SEO Best Practices
There are many best practices you should follow to have your website SEO optimized for good. What I fell like to do is to give you a few links to other good articles that you can read on top of this!
I have tried to put the best stuff from all the best articles I have found on the internet plus some of my own techniques like the ‘reach the guru‘ technique and the ‘dropmylink‘ technique etc…
Here are the best articles I have found:
- Article from Neil Patel
- Article from Matthew Woodward
- Article from Ahrefs
- Article from search engine land
- Article from BackLinko
- 10 free Google tools you should use (highly recommended to read).
Conclusions
This is a rather long post about SEO, I will update it on regular bases as long as I don’t get frustrated from WordPress too much since long posts like this one tend to crash on my backend.
But yeah I have tried to condense all the most important info you need to know to rank on Google using SEO techniques.
You have learned the basic things like meta tags and titles! Then you have learned more complex concepts like AMP or SSL certificates.
But really, the most important things in SEO in 5 steps are these:
- keyword optimization.
- write compelling content.
- improving the CTR.
- getting good quality backlinks.
- Page Speed.
So folks, if you liked this tutorial and you found it useful as it should be please comment below and share it on your social networks!
So that you will boost my motivation in keep writing this for free for you. Click To Tweet
It takes a lot of time to do this and sharing this blog would be seriously appreciated and will take no time to you.
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What You Will Learn On This Blog!
Stay tuned and subscribe to my blog so you will get notifications on new posts. I will slowly break down these topics:
- SEO(Search Engine Optimization).
- Affiliate Marketing.
- Free and Paid traffic hacks.
- Coding and WordPress
- Make money with a computer and an internet connection even while you sleep.
Follow me on social media, you’ve got all the links on the right bottom side of this blog, also comment and contact me if you need help.
Here are my top resources I always use to become a great affiliate, take a look here!
Do you want to be a free man or woman? Jump in the crew then!
Much Love and Peace Out,
Marco Diversi.
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Marco Diversi
Marco Diversi is a super affiliate for many companies like CrakRevenue, Awempire, MaxBounty, Peerfly and many others. He started his career as a civil engineer graduated from the University of Miami, Florida, and then after trying many paths in life, he started to make serious money as an affiliate on the internet. He now started a blog on marcodiversi.com where he's teaching how to have success online with SEO and Affiliate Marketing. Twitter Facebook Google+ Feedly
Thank for your post! Totally agree with every sentence written!
But to figure out what the people search in Google also try K-meta SE Suggestions. This tool collect Google autocomplete keywords like AnswerThePublic, but give results with metrics.
very cool, I have bookmarked your tool since it looks good and I will give it a try soon! thanks