SEO for Beginners 2020 (SEO Basics for Blogging)

Sharon Tseung 0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design the best lives.

Unknown Speaker 0:14
Hey guys, it’s Sharon from digital nomad

Sharon Tseung 0:16
quest. And today we’re going to talk about the basics of SEO. Now, if you guys are new to this channel, welcome. I’m all about teaching how to build passive income, become financially free, and design your best lives. So if you guys are interested in that, make sure to subscribe. Now let’s just get right into it. So first, we’re going to talk about what SEO is. So SEO stands for search engine optimization. So what that basically means is, you know, when you’re on Google and you’re seeing search results, and you see past the paid ads portion, there’s going to be organic search results. And what happens is usually people look on the first page and kind of click on stuff that is relevant to your search results. So actually around 94% of people peruse the first page and then they’re going to change their search result if they can To find exactly what they need, so they don’t even sift through page 234. This is why it’s really crucial to rank really high on the first page of search results. And that’s where SEO comes in. So when you actually pay attention to the things that Google uses to rank your website and things like that, you’re going to do better when you’re trying to optimize those factors. Now, it’s not only limited to Google, for example, Amazon has its own SEO algorithm, right? So in order to rank well, on Amazon, you’re going to have to figure out their rules around how to rank higher on their search results. etsy has on too, so anything with their own search engine has their own algorithm on how they rank your items, or articles or listings or whatever, you have to think of websites kind of like spider webs. So normally, you know, websites have a bunch of pages like the about page, the Contact Us page, they’re all kind of connected in the spider web, Google needs to crawl the spider web to see how it’s all connected. And then they’re going to crawl the site to see if there are any new sites, and to see if there are any changes in those web pages that it’s crawling, then Google indexes them so that they’re all organized, which is basically reflected when you see the search engine results and how they’re ranking everything. Now, when you think of this spider web analogy, it means that you’re going to do better when a lot of websites are actually linking to you. So that’s one of the first factors I’m going to talk about when it comes to figuring out the different factors that might affect SEO. So this is a very important one, it’s called backlinks. So you want to make sure you have a bunch of backlinks to your website to your pages. And you can kind of see how well you’re ranking by checking your domain authority and your page authority. And I believe these are factors determined by Moz. But it’s very good at kind of determining how strong your website is, and how much of link juice your website has, which basically means that you know, you are a powerful website that has influence that people trust that has credibility, and a lot of it’s determined by how much people are linking back to you. Now, when I’m talking about these factors. This is part of the Google algorithm and they never reveal exactly how they rank everything. thing. So these are kind of factors that people have figured out sort of by kind of playing with websites and, you know, SEO and stuff like that. So because we don’t know exactly what the algorithm is, these are just factors that are things to look out for. But they’re not the complete rules on what they use to rank because Google does a lot of different updates so that they make sure that people aren’t ranking websites. I just spamming things are like kind of figuring out what like loopholes to do it. So Google updates their algorithm to basically prevent people from trying to game the system. So again, these are kind of things that people have figured out that usually affect Google rankings. But you know, Google algorithms kind of update all the time, and they don’t reveal the exact levers that really affect their algorithm, besides backlinks, bouncer and page time are very crucial to SEO as well. So for example, if you have a website where people will go on to your page and then they just bounce right off because they’re not interested in what they’re seeing is going to do worse on ranking, but If they go on to your website, and they’re staying there for long periods of time, and they’re going through the information, and they’re seeing that you’re absorbing the information, they’re going to actually rank you better. So that’s kind of why for example, if you put in videos and audio, it might actually help with your time because they might be kind of watching your video or something like that within your blog post that will basically create more page time and lower bounce rate. Another factor is click through rate. So for example, if you are on Google, and Google sees that you are never clicked on that page, then they’re actually going to lower your ranking. But for example, if you are always clicked, when they see your title and your meta description, they’re like, Oh, that’s exactly what I’m looking for. And then usually that will help when it comes to SEO, keyword density and placement are very important as well. So for example, if you want to rank for what to do in Cabo, Mexico, that might be a keyword that you’re going to try to rank for. And you know, want to place that in your title, as well as kind of in your meta description as well as in the body of your blog posts. So you also want to put it in headers. But you also don’t want to put it in too much where Google thinks that you’re doing some keyword stuffing, which is kind of like gaming the system. So you want to make sure that you’re ranking for the right keyword as well as kind of placing that within your post naturally, not just stuffing it in your blog post. Another thing I wanted to add about backlinks, so you want to make sure that your backlinks are not just from any source because a lot of people buy backlinks. And you want to make sure that your backlinks are legit and from sources that are related to your website. So when Google sees that you’re getting backlinks from sites that have higher domain authority, higher page authority, as well as it’s relevant to your website, it’s gonna do really well for your own website. In terms of rankings. site speed is another one. So you want to make sure that your site loads fast because when it’s loading slow, people tend to bounce off because they’re sick of waiting. So if your site is basically loading, like five seconds later, people are gonna be like, Oh my god, this is taking way too long and they’re gonna bounce off. So you want to make sure your site loads fast and then also social media. So I don’t think this is totally proven that social media helps. But it’s probably a good idea to create your Instagram profile your Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and everything for your websites, because it’s usually good for SEO. But links from social media are usually called nofollow links, which means that Google doesn’t count those in terms of backlinks. So usually, it’s not going to help in terms of that. But usually it helps when it comes to kind of driving traffic to your website, which will help in terms of your rankings as well. And then I kind of touched upon page authority and domain authority, those are very important things to consider. So when you’re trying to see how well your site’s doing, you want to look up your domain authority and page authority scores. So usually from 10 to 20, is kind of weaker, but if you’re like, you know, 40 and above your website’s ranking really, really well. So check for those different levers.

So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.

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