SEO for Beginners: Rank #1 In Google

today's video i'm going to show you
exactly how to rank on the first page of
google
step by step in fact i use this exact
formula to rank on the first page of
google
for competitive keywords like link
building tools
backlinks and seo checklist
i'm brian dean the founder of backlinko
the place where marketers turn for
higher rankings
and more traffic and if you want to rank
number one in google
you'll love the actionable steps in this
video keep watching
i have a confession to make i used to
hate seo that's mostly because my first
website wouldn't rank
no matter what i did it was super
frustrating i hate usco
and to make matters worse i was
following all the advice that i read
from so-called seo experts
create great content add keywords to
your page make sure that your site loads
fast
yeah that stuff can help a little but
it's not going to rocket your site to
the top
of google's first page and when i
realized that i decided to run lots of
seo experiments i tested title tags
backlinks anchor text internal links
and more and over the years i started to
put the pieces together
flash forward to today and i rank number
one in google for tons of competitive
keywords
like nofollow links and success magazine
recently called me
the world's foremost expert on search
engine optimization
okay enough bragging now it's time for
me to reveal the process that you can
use to rank on the first page of google
step by step so let's kick things off
with step number one
find three keywords so your first step
is to find
three keywords these are keywords that
you'll create
content around in the next step and
here's exactly how to find
great low competition keywords first
head over to answer the public this free
tool finds
questions that people ask on forums
blogs and on social media
and it turns those questions into
awesome keywords
the best part the keywords that you get
from answer the public are usually
long tail keywords in case you haven't
heard of them before long tail keywords
are just keywords
that are long and very specific for
example a keyword like
keto diet is a short tail keyword but
keto diet breakfast recipes is a long
tail keyword
even though not a lot of people tend to
search for long tail keywords
they're also not super competitive which
makes them perfect keywords to go after
if you're just starting out another
great way to find keywords is believe it
or not
reddit just head over to a subreddit
where your target audience hangs out
and take a look at the topics that
people are talking about
you can even pop these topics and to
answer the public to find long tail
versions of these topics
finally head over to explodingtopics.com
this is another free tool that bubbles
up trending topics and industries
like tech health fashion marketing and
more and because these topics are
relatively new
the keywords that people use to find
information on them
aren't usually that competitive so once
you have at least three keywords ready
to go
it's time for step number two create
epic content
so i recently teamed up with buzzsumo to
analyze 912 million articles
and one of our most surprising findings
was that most content on the web
doesn't get shared or linked to in fact
we found that 94
of all articles online have zero
links zero and there's a simple reason
for that
most of the content that people publish
isn't that great and if it's not great
it's gonna get
lost among the millions of blog posts
tweets youtube videos
and twitch streams that come out every
day so for your content to stand out it
can't just be good
or even great for your content to be
something that someone else would want
to actually link
to it needs to be epic now there's no
formula for
creating epic content or else everyone
would do it but there are a few things
you can do to increase the odds that
people will share
and more importantly link to your
content first you want to publish
content that's long and in-depth the
buzzsumo study that i mentioned earlier
uncovered a little interesting nugget
and that nugget was that longer content
gets
more links than short content
specifically long-form content gets an
average of
77 more backlinks than short content
does this mean that publishing longer
content will automatically bring in
thousands of links
of course not but publishing in-depth
content that does cover an entire topic
in depth can increase the odds that
people link to you
for example this post for my blog is 4
700 words long
and because this post has everything
there is to know about link building in
one place
over a thousand different sites have
linked to it next
you want to add a hook to your content a
hook is something that would make a
blogger or journalist
want to link to your content your hook
can be a stat
a case study example a unique strategy a
rare interview
a tool or widget or even a visualization
basically
anything that makes someone else say wow
i need to link to this
can work for example a few years ago i
published this case study
of how i increased my blog's conversion
rate the hook in this case
was a specific case study that people
could reference
i also wrote about a unique strategy in
that case study
called the content upgrade which was
another hook and because my page wasn't
just
high quality content but included
several hooks
lots of people have linked to that post
now that your epic content is ready to
go
it's time for step number three keyword
optimize
your content on-page seo has changed a
lot
over the last few years back in the day
keyword optimization was all about
stuffing your page with keywords but
that doesn't really work anymore
instead the goal of on-page seo today
is to give google context about what
your page
is all about yes you still want to use
keywords on your page but you also need
to help google understand your page's
overall topic here's how to do it your
first step is to include your target
keyword and a few
important places on your page that way
google can understand that your page is
about
that specific term specifically you want
to add your keyword
to these areas of your page
next it's time to give google more
context about your page
and the best way to do that lsi keywords
lsi keywords are words and phrases that
are closely related
to your target keyword put another way
they're terms that tend to show up
next your keyword around the web for
example if your target keyword was
fresh prints lsi keywords would be terms
like this and when google sees these lsi
keywords on your page
it makes them say we're confident that
this page
is actually about that topic you can
find these lsi keywords
by searching for your keyword and then
scrolling to the bottom of the search
results
the bold suggested keywords here usually
make
great lsi keywords then sprinkle in a
few of these lsi keywords on your page
and you're good to go with that let's
dive right into step number four
optimize your content for users back in
the day google would rank pages based
almost a hundred percent
on who had the most backlinks yes
backlinks
are still important and i'll show you
exactly how to build backlinks in the
next step but to rank in google today
backlinks aren't enough your content
also needs to be optimized for users
that's because google pays very close
attention to how people
interact with your site in the search
results and if they notice that people
are clicking on your site and then
quickly heading back to google
they'll down rank you boring next
but if they see users sticking on your
page that's a sign that you're giving
google searchers
what they want this is awesome and
you'll usually
get a rankings boost with that here's
exactly how to optimize your content for
users
so they stay on your page first
structure your content so people start
getting actionable info
asap in other words you don't want to
start your post off with a long
explanation about why the topic is
important
that's only going to make people bounce
instead use a short intro then get right
into the steps tips
recipes workout plans or whatever you're
going to cover
in your post for example in this post
from my blog
i don't get into a long back story about
why seo
is important instead i have a brief five
line intro
then it's time for the first strategy
next make sure that your content's
design
is on point studies show that people
largely judge your site
based on design first and content
second so if your site looks like this
you can expect a really high bounce rate
now that doesn't mean that your site
needs to win
any design awards or look fancy in fact
in my experience a simple design
tends to work best for example if you
look at this post
there's nothing remotely fancy about it
but it does have a clean design
that makes it easy to read and skim
which leads us to our last step
step number five build backlinks are
backlinks still
important for seo yeah in fact
proficient digital
has been tracking the importance of
backlinks over the last
three years and they found that links
are basically just as important today
as they were since they first started
tracking them and if you follow the
steps so far by
creating epic content optimizing it for
users and adding hooks
you already have a strong foundation for
building backlinks
it's just a matter of getting your
content out there to actually
build those links and the best way to do
that broke in
link building in fact i used broken link
building to get this link
from a super authoritative website
here's how it works
first find a broken link on a page that
you want to get a link from
i personally use the helpful check my
links extension
for google chrome which is free it
automatically crawls
all the links on a page and ids broken
links
next you want to find a post on your
site that will make a good replacement
for the dead link for example i recently
found a broken link on this page and
after looking through my site i found
this post that would be a pretty good
replacement now it's not a one-to-one
match
to what the person linked to but it's
close enough finally reach out to the
person
that runs that site and ask them to swap
out the dead link
for a link to your content now for this
process you can definitely work with an
email script as you send these out but i
definitely don't recommend sending out
the same generic email
to a hundred different people in fact an
outreach study that i recently did with
pitchbox
found that personalized emails got 32
percent more replies
than emails that use the same exact
pitch for everybody
for example you can see that this broken
link building email that i recently sent
out is super personalized now before we
close out this seo tutorial
i want to show you a quick bonus step
use
unique images can using stock photos on
your site
hurt your google rankings as it turns
out they might the folks at reboot
online
recently ran an interesting experiment
they created
10 brand new websites all optimized
around a keyword
that they made up for the experiments on
five of the sites
they used five stock photos that were
already used on a bunch of other
websites
and for the other five they actually
took their own images
that way they were a hundred percent
unique
so what did they find they discovered
that the five websites that had unique
images
which are the green lines in this chart
you see here
outrank the sites that didn't use unique
images which are the red lines from the
chart
so what's the bottom line whenever you
can try to use unique images
in your content these can be pictures
that you take with your phone or
illustrations that you make in photoshop
or screenshots that you take
yourself as this study showed unique
images seem to have
a direct impact on rankings did you
learn something new from today's video
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it's free now i want to turn it over to
you which technique from today's video
are you gonna try first
are you gonna try broken link building
or are you gonna try adding
unique images to your page let me know
by leaving a comment below
right now now from okay we don't need a
pro
the hook here did i hurt you
but you also need to i think it's the
yeah that was like an action movie line