🔥 Advanced SEO Full Course For 2023 | SEO Advanced Tutorial | SEO Training For 2023 | Simplilearn

foreign for your website SEO or search in your optimization is the key to skyrocketing your online presence by strategically integrating relevant keywords throughout your website and securing high quality backlinks you will capture the attention of search engine and soar up the ranking however SEO is not solely about algorithm it revolves around delivering an exceptional user experience from lightning fast loading speed to captivating mobile friendly designs SEO enhances every aspect of your website with the rapid advancement of technology and the exponential growth of website on the internet the demand of SEO professional is sovereign speaking of

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don't miss out on this opportunity Find the course Link in the description for more information here success story from our satisfied Learner in their own words change is inevitable but growth is optional for me both came hand in hand I successfully changed my career from software development to digital marketing and simply learn present at the perfect route hi I'm rimajraf from Dubai and I have completed the pgp in digital marketing from Simply learn with Purdue University when I shifted to Dubai from Sri Lanka in 2015 I joined a group of company as a software engineer

but my interest in content creation attracted me towards the marketing industry intrigued by the marketing functions I decided to take up a challenge that would change my life forever I aim for a career change as risky as it was the rewards were truly overwhelming even though the journey wasn't easy the pgp in digital marketing with Purdue University acted as not only a catalyst but a game changer for my career change with no profiling certification in marketing domain it was difficult for me to transition and change my career towards completely so I decided to upskill with

the professional certification program I just simply learn because of its tremendously High waiting to be rated as one of the best Education portal online worldwide is surely promising not only were the ratings I but also the courses were economically charged the modules were very informative and amazing I still refer to those while in the final stage of my course I told my Superior about the certification program I was doing and then it offered me a digital marketing role in the marketing department as a digital marketing executive this that's how smooth it was after working for

a few years in the same company as a digital marketing executive I switched to a new role as a digital marketing manager with this my skill upgraded my salary increase and my self-confident Boost alongside numerous other positive outcomes I had a chance to take a challenge and change my career domain all together and I took it So currently I'm pursuing masters of Masters program from Simply learn where I would complete eight Masters program including artificial intelligent cloud computing and devops and many more growing requires moving out of our comfort zones keep learning unleash the magic

of SEO and witness the floodgates open as your website attracts a tidal wave of organic traffic and enjoy unrivaled success in the digital Ram so let's get started with Rachel is a baker who runs her own Bakery to expand her business she decided to create an online presence by first setting up a Blog she began posting on her blog regularly however even after regularly posting on the blog there were barely any visitors showing up deciding not to give up Rachel began searching for a solution on the internet that's when she came across SEO or search

engine optimization a term she's never heard before so let's take a journey together and help her learn about SEO search engine optimization is a method that could improve the quality and quantity of the audience coming to Rachel's website from search engines it could increase brand awareness attract local customers and build credibility and trust and all of this is possible without having to spend a single penny to bring visitors to our website Rachel would have to take advantage of the two types of SEO on-page and off-page SEO Rachel first decides to tackle on-page SEO and get

that sorted on-page SEO involved Rachel optimizing her website both in terms of content and the technical aspects including the HTML source code schema meta Tags and More she started off by using tools like Google AdWords allref and semrush to identify popular Search terms associated with the recipes she planned to publish on her blog she began to look for Search terms related to the broader area of baking cooking and related topics once she found these Search terms she began to incorporate them into her recipes she started off by providing an introduction to the recipe with this

she could provide an engaging beginning to her story like how the dish reminded her of her childhood and enabled her to naturally include the Search terms into the blog she also included these keywords in the actual recipe as well additionally she added pictures videos time lapses and more to increase credibility and engagement for her content and subsequently persuading search engines to show her content more people after this she moved to the website metacontent that search engines display when her blog appears in search results she optimized The Meta tax alt tags header Tags and More this

completed the on-page aspect of SEO thanks to this she saw a significant increase in the number of visitors coming to her page having done all she could on her web page she now decides to explore what could be done off page to improve her Page's visibility on search engines off-page SEO involved Rachel doing things outside her site page to help increase its search engine rankings making optimizations outside the site would improve the site's popularity relevance trustworthiness and Authority this is possible with the help of reputable websites vouching for your content with backlinks social media marketing

guest blogging linked unlinked brand mentions influencer marketing and much more Rachel also understood that for her content to reach people she would have to promote it on social media platforms like Facebook Twitter and Instagram as well as Niche platforms like quora Reddit and medium these could help her achieve greater reach for her website by sending stronger social signals to search engines leading to the page being shown as highly relevant for related searches and audiences and Eve Eve after understanding and implementing all of this Rachel had just scratched the surface of what was possible with SEO

Rachel decided to take up simplylearn's digital marketing certification with classes covering just about everything she needed to know about SEO it was only a matter of time before Rachel began to implement her learnings on her website and see a massive uptick in the number of viewers coming to her website in time she could even earn money off the site by setting up an online shop and with that we've covered an introduction to the concepts of SEO and the possibilities it can open for you so let's start with the why we would do keyword research so

Jesse is planning to publish a Blog of pizza recipes so she was doing pizza recipe step by step piece of recipes with sausage homemade pizza toppings pizza dough recipes thin crust pizzas she's doing a lot of different topics on pizza recipes well what Jesse needs to do is understand what's going to drive traffic to these blog posts if she's writing about you know different topics around pizza recipes so she's Unsure how these blogs are going to drive traffic so she really needs to understand that hey you need to choose the right keywords to drive traffic

so the question is if you're writing a blog post about recipes with sausages is pizza recipes with sausages or recipes for free the best keywords he is maybe maybe not so you need to take uh care and shoes in the queue words to align with your content so that's really the idea of why we would do keyword research because some of the issues with keywords that are poorly chosen are they can have low search volume for example you may choose a keyword that just a lot of people aren't using to search for or they can

be highly competitive so if you choose a keyword that's very broad or popular it can be very competitive and take you a long time to be found for that keyword or you could just make the mistake of choosing a keyword that isn't aligned with your content or you can choose keywords but use them incorrectly with your content so these are some of the issues that you can encounter if you just go about choosing keywords randomly without due diligence without the proper research so low search volume will lead to less traffic High competition you may not

even rank at all okay if somebody finds you for a keyword that's not relevant to the topic they're just going to leave the page and if you're not using the right keywords and or if you are using the right keywords and not using them correctly in the content then your pages may not even be found in organic search so you really have to take care and choosing the keywords to me that's the most important step with SEO is keyword research so we're going to talk about the types of keyword research then so we have short

tail keyword and we have long tail keywords so if you write a blog post about pizza recipes well what are you going to choose a short tail or long tail so let's talk about short tail keywords first so short tail keywords are keywords that are usually three keywords and a phrase or shorter in some cases it may be two key words in a phrase or shorter so shortcut keywords usually have high search volume which means likely means higher competition but what it also means it could be lower conversions because short tell key words like for

example pizza recipes could be considered a short tail keyword but maybe somebody's looking for homemade pizza recipes or pizza recipes from their favorite Italian restaurant so short taking words may not be as relevant so if we compare it with long tail keywords chances are you're going to have lower competition that's one of the benefits but you're also gonna have lower search volume but with longer tail keywords the key word is probably going to be more relevant with the content you're right writing about so therefore the conversion rates likely going to be higher so that's really

the difference between short-term keywords and long tail keywords if you want to look at simplistically short tail keywords are Broad in nature it's going to capture a lot of eyeballs but those eyeballs may look at your content as not relevant versus long tail K words that may be very relevant but not as many eyeballs on them so short tail keywords the characteristics they're not as specific usually they're less than three words they have high search volume and high competition so if you just choose pizza recipes could take you a while to rank for that keyword

but when you rank you're going to get the traffic but again it may not convert because the keyword is Broad in nature so pizza recipes is a short tail keyword that may not be exactly what you're writing about in your blog post so it may draw a lot of traffic but the traffic may not do anything so the longer tail keywords are very specific they consist of more than three words in in the search query they have relatively low search volume competition so the chance of you ranking higher faster for that long take word is

probably going to be greater because not many other websites are trying to rank for that same keyword and so the benefit of that is if you have let's just say homemade pizza recipes with mushrooms that's a long tip key word but if somebody's looking for that type of pizza recipe then you know you're going to track the right traffic and chances are that traffic is going to engage or convert based on the type of conversion you have in place so example would be homemade pizza dough recipes that'd be another example more than three key words

in the phrase very specific we're talking about homemade pizza dough recipe so we're not talking about just pizza recipes so it's a little bit more specific in nature longer tail so these keywords are used for targeted Pages including blog posts if you're writing a blog post specifically about pizza recipes with homemade dough then this is the key word you likely would want to use versus just pizza recipes so let's look at an example between a short tail keyword and a long tail keyword and to accentuate the differences we're going to use Google's Keyword Planner tool

so Google's keyboard Planner tool is located in Google ads the Google ads platform and when you're in the Google ads platform you can simply click on tools and then Keyword Planner and so what Keyword Planner allows us to do is get a sense of the type of volume that a particular keyword has so what Google's Keyword Planner does is they show you the average monthly searches this is the average monthly search volume of a key word over the past 12 months and so in this example we're going to choose pizza recipes and homemade pizza dough

recipes so one short tail and one long tail so we enter those keywords in we're gonna click get results and what Google's going to do is going to show us the volume of those keywords so for pizza recipe we could see the average monthly search volume is 33 100 for pizza recipe so note that pizza recipe and pizza recipes are closely related keywords and so what Google does is they consider that a close variance so meaning if somebody ties a piece of recipe then they're also in Google's eyes looking for pizza recipes so it's a

close variance and so for the keyword pizza recipe which is short tail we could see on average over the past 12 months this keyword received 33 100 queries and so if we hover over the graph we could see basically the volume of the average volume per month so here I could see for this particular keyword here the volume per month is 33 1000 and then I can see the actual volume over the past 12 months and then for the long long tail keyword I can see homemade pizza dough recipe again close variants homemade pizza dough

recipes I can see over the past 12 months with the search volume is for this on average it's 2400 but I could see here in December the volume went up to 3600 but for example in May it was 1900. so it's gonna fluctuate a bit over the past 12 months but on average is about 2400. so shorter tail a lot of more volume longer tail not as much volume but nonetheless there is volume here and so these are the difference between a short tail and a longer tail and so well Google's Keyword Planner also does

is allow us to get a sense of what the competition is and so here I can see the competition is low for both of these keywords fair enough so we now know that if we want to optimize or choose the keyword homemade pizza dough recipe for our blog post we know for rank points on page one of Google even in the top spot we can expect about 2400 search queries for that keyword now whether you get all 2400 clicks for that keyword remains to be seen chances are you're not going to get all 2400 you're

going to get a Lion's Share of those clicks but you're going to at least get some volume on it so even the longer tick keywords have a lot of Promise because there is some search volume here for this keyword how to do a proper keyword research so we looked at Google's Keyword Planner tool in Google ads and we typed in two keywords and we were able to get a sense of what the average volume is so we definitely want to choose keywords based on the following factors we want to choose it based on search volume

search volume is a good indicator of the potential traffic we can obtain so again for the keyword homemade pizza dough recipe we know that it averages 2400 a month in search volume again we may not not get all 2400 but we're gonna get a line share of that we also need to look at competition and so Google's Keyword Planner gives us a high medium or low in terms of the competition but if you're somebody who wants to get a better sense of what the competition is and you should because competition is a key component in

choosing keywords and so what I want to do is get a sense of how many people are actually optimizing for that keyword so Google's Keyword Planner tool is going to give me a low medium high really what I want to do is get a better sense of that numerically so what I can do is go into Google search and I could type in pizza recipes and I could see there's about one billion results that's a lot of results however that means that every potential web page out there on the internet that mentions pizza recipes is

going to be included in this number here and so I want to get a better sense of who's optimizing for pizza recipes so I'm going to put in the all in title syntax and so what that is going to ask Google to do is tell me all the websites that have pizza recipes the keyword pizza recipes in the title tag so if I do all entitle colon space then pizza recipes my result drops down to 336 000. so what that tells me is that there are 336 000 results with the keyword pizza recipes in the

title tag now if I want to focus in on my other keyword if I choose uh my other keyword was a longer tail keyword homemade pizza dough recipe so if I type that keyword in the homemade pizza dough recipe or recipes remember close variance and I just click enter or type the keyword in hit my Enter key I'm gonna get 35 Million results but again is that really an indicator of the type of competition I have no because every listing that matches homemade pizza dough recipes is going to be including the search results so I'm

going to type in my all in title colon space and then I'm going to get a better sense of how many websites have the keyword homemade pizza dough recipes in the title tag and I get 2160 different results so here I can see the first result in the title tag homemade pizza dough recipe second one homemade pizza dough recipe so these are sites web pages that have that keyword in the title tag so now I have a numerical number to work with and so the thing you have to understand about SEO specifically about keyword research

is you need to do research on a few different keywords not just one or two so what we want to do is have a spreadsheet the spreadsheet is going to contain keywords that we can potentially want to optimize for choose as keywords to optimize for SEO and so my recommendation is you come up with a theme first so that theme for us in this exercise is pizza recipes and so that's our theme so we chose the keyword pizza recipes so the close variance here is pizza recipe what was the volume well we know the volume

was 33 100 for pizza recipe so what are we going to do we're going to put that number in in our volume column what was the competition well if we go back and type in pizza recipes it was 683 000 so I'm going to type in 683 000. what was our next keyword well it was pizza or homemade pizza dough recipes so if I go back for this particular keyword is 2400 so I'm going to put 2400 in under my volume column and then what was my competition well my competition was I typed that keyword

back in 2160. so I'm going to put 2 160. so now I have an idea of what kind of volume and what kind of competition I have now now you want to do this for a number of different keywords and when you do it for a number of keywords what you do want to do is obviously choose a relevant keyword that has high volume and low competition so another way of saying it is the volume or ratio of volume to competition and so basically what we could do is take volume divided by competition if I

make that a percentage I can see it's 0.35 percent is the ratio between volume and competition if I do the same for my longer tail keyword 2400 divided by 2160 I can see that 111 so this just kind of proves the point that yeah I'm still going to get some volume but I have a better chance of ranking for this longer tail keyword homemade pizza dough recipes so you want to be able to do that for number keywords and examine the volume the competition and the ratio between volume and competition for your themed keywords in

this case pizza recipes so relevancy you want want to choose keywords that are very relevant to the content that you're writing and then again commercial intent what keywords are going to drive more conversions and revenue for the business so when we talk about commercial intent we're talking about you know are you choosing keywords that are going to get somebody to do what you want them to do so we could say You Know download pizza dough recipes so somebody's typing in the keyword download pizza dough recipes then chances are they're going to find you come to

your site and take action by downloading that pizza dough recipe so you want to be able to also think about the intent of the keyword is it going to help you drive conversions and revenue if you're an e-commerce site so search volume is the average monthly search volume made for a particular keyword and phrase so we can get that number using Google's Keyword Planner tool in the Google ads platform we want to Target keywords with high search volume that will help bring traffic to the website we want volume but we want to take into account

seasonality as well so that's where the Google's Keyword Planner tool comes in place because if we go back again we can just hover over we can get a sense of any particular Trend going on or season out so for example if I saw large growth in the winter months and not much volume growth in the summer months then that might indicate to me that this keyword is more popular during the winter time so pay attention to the grass that you know the Keyword Planner tool gives you use them to your advantage to take into account

seasonality so a good example would be funny Halloween costumes well we know that for Halloween you're going to have a spike probably towards the end of September all the way through October and then it's going to drop after October 31st which is Halloween so that's an example but in the case of pizza recipes you know you may find that more people are are choosing to search for pizza recipes during learn maybe the summer months versus the winter months so pay attention to seasonality it will affect search volume so competition based on our example it's one

of the most important key metrics you don't want to choose a key word that's highly competitive because if it's competitive then it's going to be harder to rank number one or even on page one of Google depending on competitive it is so high search volume low competition in other words the ratio between the two is the ideal combination so going back to the spreadsheet recommend you have that spreadsheet handy put your theme in place okay theme pizza recipes we use Google's Keyword Planner tool to find the volume we use the all entitled syntax to find

the competition so we entered both of those numbers in and we get our ratio and so when you have these numbers for a number of different keywords you want to be able to choose that ratio of high volume low competition but always relevant see always trumps ratio so always go with a key word that is going to be relevant to your content don't choose a keyword that's not relevant if you choose a keyword that's not relevant it's not going to bode well for user engagement so the difficulty of a keyword ranges from 0 to 100

and Google's keyword tool so it's going to be easy it's going to be medium it's going to be hard but my recommendation is also to get the numerical factor and that's the all in title syntax and again relevancy is what drives the traffic to your website and keep the traffic there on your website and also not only will keep the traffic on your website but hopefully get that traffic to engage and convert so that's the key about relevancy you always want to choose keywords that are relevant to your content even if it's sacrificing volume relevancy

again trumps volume and competition so always choose relevant keywords first so when you do do that you're always almost guaranteeing that at some point somebody's going to find your content because somebody out there might be looking for it and if they do you're going to get found and then the engagement is going to be better so understand your business find keywords that are relevant to your business and then focus on those keywords that'll help you with getting the right traffic to your site always keep in mind the commercial intent so these keywords are more specific

and result in conversion rate for example buying is a good commercial intent keyword so if you really want somebody to come to your website and buy then focus on those types of keywords in the case of the pizza recipes maybe it's download could be our commercial intent keyword again there may be low search volume but those are the type of keywords you want to focus on because that's the type of traffic you want to drive to your site so some other examples a commercial intent keywords or discount deal your coupon shipping you don't don't be

afraid to use some of these keywords and part of your longer tail keyword phrase again the volume may not be high but the traffic quality is probably going to be better so keyword research is the foundation for SEO so if you have chosen your keywords properly then if you do get ranked for those keywords then it's going to lead to better engagement with some conversions and so when we talk about keywords we also want to talk about our primary and secondary keyword so every page should have at least a primary keyword and then a second

carry keyword to work with so primary keywords are really defining the nature of your content the secondary keywords are relevant to the primary keyword so why do we choose a primer and secondary keyword because you may choose a keyword as a primary keyword that is relevant to the content but may not necessarily rank very high or have a lot of volume that's secondary keyword is also relevant to the primary keyword but also relevant to content and you may May rank for that secondary keyword so you always want to go with two keywords versus just one

keyword you want to give your yourself a chance to rank for at least two different types of keywords of relevant nature so for web page there can be several secondary keywords but only one primary keyword so your primary keyword is always going to be relevant to your content secondary keywords can be relevant to the keyword but and you may have multiple secondary keywords but it's also going to be related to the content and it gives you a better opportunity to be found between both the primary and secondary and search Okay so let's take a look

at another example of how to use primary keywords and secondary keywords when choosing keywords so if a primary keyword is healthy diet plan remember healthy diet plan is directly related to the content so that's what we're talking about but the secondary keywords are also related to content and play off the primary keyword and so what we want to do is go to cool Google's Keyword Planner tool and get an idea of the volume for healthy diet plan and then also the volume and competition for some of these secondary keywords like healthy diet for weight loss

healthy diet food low carb diet healthy meal plans and diet plan weight loss so if I go in to Google's Keyword Planner and type those keywords in I'm going to choose get results and now here I could see healthy diet plan keyword I'm focusing on is my primary keyword has an average monthly search volume of 9900 and then some of my secondary keywords healthy diet foods diet plan weight loss low carb diet you know Google will give me a number of different keywords to work with so I'm going to look at the search volume of

those as well and so ideally what I want to do is be able to then look at the volume and then look at the competition so healthy diet plan to go into my keyword analysis here that's my theme so that's my keyword what what's my volume for healthy diet plan nine thousand nine hundred what's my competition so my competition is seventy four thousand seven hundred and that's going to give me a ratio of volume the competition of 13 so that's what my content's about that's a considered a short tail keyword because it has a lot

of competition and so my ratio is 13 and what I want to do is I want to be able to put these other secondary keywords in here as well maybe even go to a little longer tail because I want to be able to find two key or at least two keywords I want to be able to find my primary keyword that's relevant to my content and then I want to be able to find my secondary keyword which is again related to the primary keyword which is also related to the content and so I want to

be able to choose two keywords basically and I want to choose two keywords that are relevant that have good ratio between volume and competition so that's the whole idea again I'm how to do keyword research you want to be able to find your keywords use the tools available to you and get a sense of what the volume is what the competition is look at the ratio between the volume and competition and then based on the content choose that primary keyword and then again based on the keyword you chose choose some secondary keywords as well because

you want to be found for not just one keyword but multiple keywords okay let's look at some alternative suggestions to keyword research so for doing keyword research we want to take into account LSI keywords we could take into account other platforms that host a lot of content like quora or Reddit we can use Google suggestions in the keyword search bar we can use popular platforms like Wikipedia and we can use social media bookmarking like Reddit so there are lots of suggestions that we can obtain from various sources so let's start with LSI keywords and LSi

stands for latent semantic Insight indexing and so basically what it is it's just keywords that are linked to your primary keyword and so when you're choosing keywords you always want to choose that primary keyword and then secondary keywords that are similar to the primary keyword and usually those are LSI or latent semantic indexing type keywords so they're used to drive relevant traffic to your page so if you focus in on one keyword we want to have other keywords that are similar to increase our visibility on the search engine result pages so we could find latent

semantic indexing right in search so if we use the term healthy diet if we go to Google search for example if I type in healthy diet in Google search all I need to do is scroll to the bottom of the page and I can see searches related to healthy diet so healthy diet menu healthy diet essay what does a healthy diet look like notice at the top Google's also given me some other suggestions here so they're saying low-fat diet veganism gluten-free diet so there's lots of different suggestions right in Google search bar so all of

these are LSI related keywords so if you're optimizing a page for a healthy diet then you could choose low-fat diet as a secondary keyword you can use gluten-free diet as a secondary keyword it really depends on what the content is but you always want to support your content with as much LSI keywords as possible so you can be found for as many different keywords as possible in Google search so it's important because if you have a Blog that you know talks about python so how do the search engines know if the website python is about

the programming language or the snake so Google for example uses LSI keywords to understand what the page is specifically focusing on so if you're just focusing on Python and your content you want to support that with LSI keywords and so that will allow your web page to better communicate with Google also to have the visibility to show up on search so they can certainly improve your search positioning and featured Snippets as well so if you have a keyword that answers a question you can certainly find for feature snippet for example maybe you know healthy diet

recipes if I type that in you can see here there's a featured snippet so if I'm talking about recipes that's a key word I may want to use and if I use that then Google has an opportunity to see what my content's about and place my information at the top in this featured snippet you can also again see what some of the questions are being asked what males are good for weight loss what is a good healthy diet plan all of these can be keyword phrases that you can use so the answers are right here

in Google so core is a great platform because core is a platform that people go and ask questions in a community response with answers or responses to that particular question or topic and so the great thing about core is it's a good eye is a good place for you to go to get some ideas about a specific topic so if we're talking about healthy dieting so we can find keywords with high search volume writing quora so the whole idea is you can look at you know the top five questions for specific topic like healthy dieting

and find relevant keywords to healthy dieting so if you just type in that particular keyword in quora you're going to probably get some responses to questions or responses to somebody else's question and so if we take a look at core for example so if I just type in healthy dieting what I'm going to do is I'm going to get some responses to the the topic healthy dieting so what's the best diet for Healthy Living what are the top five tips for a healthy diet habit so all of these could be keyword phrases that you could

take away with for your own content and so the benefit here is you're getting kind have an idea of what's trending what people are talking about and if you use tips for a healthy diet habit for example and you optimize for that well again that could turn around and bode well for you because you could be featured in Google as a featured snippet at the top here you can also turn around and use LSI related keywords for healthy diet habits and you can simply just look for those LSI keywords right in Google remember at the

bottom or at the Top If I scroll down I could see some related LSI keywords at the bottom so writing Google as well you could see in the Google search bar that Google provides some LSI related keywords to your query so if I go back here and type in healthy diet recipes I can see here Google's suggesting some other related keywords healthy diet menu healthy diet for man healthy diet foods healthy diet for women so these are all LSI related keywords that you can use to support your primary keyword in the the content you're writing

about so we've talked about LSI keywords where to find them so they're found right here they can be found at the top of Google and they can be found at the bottom you can also then go to core as well and get some ideas for the types of questions they're being asked so if you ask a question and use that as your keyword phrase then again you have an opportunity of showing up for a featured snippet in Google just by doing some additional research within Google itself or on quora so according to Google the autocomplete

predictions are automatically generated by Google's algorithm without any human intervention it's based on a number of factors but the primary factor is how often past users have searched for terms so Google collects all the keyword queries that somebody types in and they're suggesting some of the most popular terms that people have typed in so if I go back to Google again if I start to type in recipes I could see some of the other queries that somebody else has typed in or some of the most popular queries relate it to that topic so if you

enter the keyword healthy diet Google's going to suggest multiple keyword suggestions that users have asked in the past and you could certainly get the search volume of those keywords just by looking in Google itself I can see for healthy diet recipes billions of pages related to healthy diet recipes I can also get the search volume by going into Google's Keyword Planner so if I type in healthy diet I'm going to be able to see what my search volume is for that keyword and in addition I can see the seasonality of that particular keyword and in

addition to that Google is going to provide some other related keywords to my search query so if I'm looking for healthy diet Google's going to suggest hey maybe you should choose healthy food or healthy eating or how to lose weight so those are LSI related keywords that Google provides in the keyword plan which is built into the Google ads platform another option for you is Wikipedia so Wikipedia is a vast platform of content so we could turn Wikipedia into our own assets and use it to our own Advantage by finding relevant keywords in an easy

fashion so with Wikipedia we can identify a list of keywords in The Meta description itself we could choose keywords from the first paragraph of Wikipedia that has many relevant keywords or we could take a look at keywords from the Wikipedia content section so we can also see additional Pages like the see also section that gives relevant keywords that you're looking for we can also look at the references section as they contain relevant keywords so go to Wikipedia as an example and I type in healthy diet into Wikipedia here I can get just in the first

paragraph alone I can see some additional keywords that I might choose to use like micronutrients I never knew that micronutrients was related to healthy diet but Wikipedia is providing some information about what micronutrients is and maybe I can use that as a keyword an LSI related keyword to my content so if I scroll down I get to see also section so it might give me some information food information consumers for example dietary guidelines I can look at categories like dietetics and diets I can also look at the references section so I can also see what

information was provided like health effects of overweight and obesity I can look at diet and physical activity so all of these are related to my main keyword healthy diet so the answers are right in here on the platform they're just all over the page so Wikipedia has an abundance of information you just need to know where to look so again with Wikipedia you can look no further than the first paragraph you look no further than the see also section the references section category section there's lots of information right on the page itself to help you

get ideas for keywords so if you Google your keyword with Wikipedia term in the search query and get relevant keywords from the title tags in the search so you can also do that as well so if I type in healthy diet Wikipedia and search I can also get some information here as well so people also search for healthy food advantages or healthy food habits essay or information about healthy food all of these are related to my keyword healthy diet so again another bit of information for you to choose or look to choose some additional keywords

for so Reddit it's a popular Community where people post content and discuss a variety of topics so that's what Reddit is so with the help of subreddits an individual can find relevant keywords with with high search volume so in Reddit there's an easy way to find out keywords they have a keyword tool called keyword it so the keyword it gives the average monthly searches for a particular keyword so if we type a Word in key Reddit and choose keywords from the auto generator list this tool will extract the keywords and give us those relevant terms

with search volumes so if we go to the keyword it and Show an example of that for example healthy food if I get keywords I can see what keywords are relevant in the search volume of that keyword so if I just type in healthy food keyword tool is going to tell me some relevant keywords and what the volume is so if you don't have the Keyword Planner tool in Google ads available to you this is a good alternative solution to finding keywords so it's free you just need to go to keyword.com type in your keyword

click get keywords and what it's going to do is give you some relevant keywords related to your primary keyword with the search volume let's talk about keyword clustering now so the whole idea about keyword clustering is to really take advantage of the keywords that we're up optimizing for to gain higher ranking so if we can cluster keywords together in a theme and that theme of keywords is relevant to a specific page of a website then we have a better opportunity to rank so in other words why do we have to Target just one keyword when

we can Target many so keep in mind you know LSI keywords we want to group a bunch of keywords together that are similar for Content so for example after some keyword research you can thematically group keywords into a core topic so for example we can cluster these group of keywords together like for example what is SEO how does SEO work intro to SEO what are the basics of SEO all of those are related to the chord theme what is SEO another cluster of keywords for example could be SEO techniques SEO best practices tips and tricks

website optimization on-page SEO techniques Etc so those are clusters of keywords okay that we can group together in theme games and if we group keywords together in themes we can apply that to a particular content on our website so the whole idea behind clustering keywords it's going to provide more diversity more of an opportunity for us to be found so that's the whole idea behind clustering so some additional steps remember stay up to date on industry news to brainstorm your ideas first and identify a list of keywords like a thema keywords that you can cluster

together and then you could determine the keywords that your competitors are already ranking for so for example if we want to rank for the keyword SEO best practices for example we can use a tool called keyword Moz if I go to keyword the keyword Explorer tool and Moz and just type in SEO best practices what it's going to do is it's going to give me some volume related to that particular keyword but more importantly what it's also going to do is it's going to show me me what pages are already ranked for that particular keyword

so therefore I can get a sense of who is already ranking for that keyword so here I can see Moz Moz medium.com alexa.com so I can get a sense of what web pages are ranked for a particular keyword or group of keywords I want to rank for myself so if we look at tools for keyword research look no further than Moz that's the mods of the tool I would just choose but you could also use Google's Keyword Planner which we used in the example so for example if I go back to the Google ads Keyword

Planner if you're in Google ads you click on tools you click on Cleveland planner and what Keyword Planner does is it provides you for a particular keyword the average monthly search volume of the past 12 months it provides you information on seasonality so if I hover my mouse over a graph I'm going to be able to see the volume per month over the last 12 months what the Keyword Planner also does does is it provides me some additional ideas for my particular keyword and in addition to that it's going to provide me some sense of

how competitive that keyword is by telling me whether it's low medium or high in terms of competition so there's sem Raj there's also other additional keywords tools out there like word stream or href or the Reddit tool keyword it and then Moz is a is another tool I particularly use so if I go to Moz again here I can just type in a keyword that I'm interested in it's going to give me the search volume of that keyword it's going to give me the level of difficulty so 50 out of 100 so it's halfway between

difficulty and easy and then it's going to give me some additional metrics like for example what my expected organic click-through rate would be if I were to rank for this keyword but more importantly what I like about this is we could see exactly what other sites are linked to this particular key word we're interested in so here I can look at the top 10 list so this is mozz's keyword Explorer tool so that's what this tool is and it's part of moz.com so there's a lot of tools at your disposal I particularly use Moz I

particularly use Google's Keyword Planner and those are the tools I use but there are lots of tools out there if you are looking to become an SEO professional then look no further than simply runs postgraduate program in digital marketing so don't miss out on this opportunity Find the course Link in the description for more information on-page optimization as the name suggests is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher and get relevant traffic from the search engine on-page optimization includes both content and HTML source code optimization search engine optimization can be very complex so

when you're trying to understand it for the first time I find it very easy just to break it up into general concepts that you might already have an understanding of when you look at the hundreds of signals that go into SEO they can be broken up into either relevancy or because sometimes it's both popularity so relevancy and popularity out of all these signals they fit into one of these two things we're going to break all the signals we have into these two areas in this section we're going to talk about the on-page factors that's because

these are the factors that you have direct impact upon and you can make a small tweak and have a big impact with Organic traffic with your on-page relevancy factors the primary on-page relevancy factors that I'll cover in this lesson are title tags and meta description header tags which are used for headlines and subheadings website URLs and URL structure image alt text internal links keyword usage and sitemaps let's start with one of my favorites and that is the title tag this is also called a page title the page title is not shown on the page now

rather it is displayed on the browser Tab and this is what makes it highly important is that in addition to being displayed on the browser tab it is also the title tag or the page title that is shown on the text in the Google search results as the link to the page the page title influences both the click-through rates and people's first impressions of our website next up we have the meta description Now The Meta description can be a bit confusing The Meta description is in the code and it does not influence rankings but it

does influence clicks people will see your snippet or your page information in the search engine results that gray text is the meta description if you don't have a meta description then it may pull information from the page you can affect this and improve the chances of your meta description appearing if you write a short descriptive phrase of the content or the purpose of the page and just because we edit these elements does not guarantee that they will show up I often say that we affect the change but we cannot control it this is because the

search engine May override your changes and show different content in these areas sometimes it may help and it might be a better description but many times it's not now let's go to the next element the header tags these are also referred to as the heading and subheading and this is how HTML was built when the web was first created it enables a logical hierarchy of content so starting with the headline then displaying a subheading and then subheadings after that the idea here is that you're establishing a hierarchy of information so you start with the H1

like a newspaper there's only one main headline per page it describes the main purpose of the page then a subheading the H2 this is how you break the sub content into sub categories obviously you'll want to use a keyword in there as well you see by describing the purpose of the page in the headline and then again in a subheading you're naturally going to use your primary and secondary keywords because you're going to associate them with the product or the purpose and the benefit the key is to keep it short you see after the headline

are the subcategories the H2S and then your H3 is typically used as a paragraph heading now putting the keyword in these headings alone does not make your page optimized remember the purpose is to provide a quick reference for people to find the content they need within seconds so short explanatory heading and subheadings paragraph headings are very effective and naturally you'll be using keywords to help people locate the information that is most important to them now if we go back to the search engine results page the serp there is another element in that listing the page

title is the large Blue text The Meta description is the gray text now the green text is the URL of the page that is listed this is the address of the page just like the address for your home the internet knows that the URL is the address for that page this is extremely important for SEO for a variety of reasons the most important though is your keyword usage I like to make sure that I have at least one Relevant Word in the URL now also here keep it short one of the worst things you can

do is have a URL full of keywords or even worse hyphenate them all remember people use these urls they provide context for the page people also copy and paste URLs into Mobile messages emails and Social Links so it is extremely important to keep these short succinct and I like to say readable now I've just briefly touched about the importance of the URL and now let's look at the URL structure first let's start with the primary core of the URL the domain name in the example with the URL I have here example.com that's the domain name

so this is the first thing that people see with your online business now be on the internet this is going to be what's in all of your ads emails brochures business cards and online your social profiles all of your marketing efforts are going to drive people to this domain there's a lot of advice about buying or using domains that have your keywords in them and unfortunately domains have been being sold for decades so there's less chance of finding a domain with the keywords you want now the search engines don't make the keyword used in the

domain a primary ranking signal so that's good however the domain is your business it needs to be memorable if you have a very I call it a spammy looking domain name with multiple words and hyphens or one that's hard to spell or confusing people are going to make an initial impression off of that so make sure you have something that's going to make a great first impression here's the rule for a domain name something that's easy to spell and easy to pronounce ideally sure it's something you can type and share something thing you're going to

be able to put on a business card and be proud of not something that you bought primarily because you want it for SEO reasons and you think with that you're going to succeed as an example just think about Amazon their domain name says nothing about books and yet it grew to be one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world the same with Alibaba or Google their domain names were not the keyword but their marketing and branding built their company now everything after the domain is a subdirectory this is based on your website organization as

an example if you have a website selling shoes then the subdirectory can be called shoes it's easy right the sub directory is the folder that contains the relevant files or Pages for that group think of a file folder with documents inside the file folder is usually based on a major category of content or products now inside the folder are individual documents or Pages these files or Pages usually come after the subdirectory in this example you see the file.html the next step in optimizing the URL is to name the page in a way that explains the

content of the page to use our e-commerce shoe website a page name would usually be a specific product name this way you would end up with domain name forward slash shoes as the category forward slash brand name running shoe insert that here if you've ever looked at the HTML that make up the instructions of the page you'll understand a bit more of how search engines get the information from the page the text on the page and the markup such as the headings provide instructions as to where the text is located the importance and prominence of

the text in addition to the arrangement of the overall page HTML is a set of instructions for a browser to assemble the page and the search engines use that as well now the search engines spiders cannot see images as the internet developed many attributes were added to provide for accessibility and additional features users that are site impaired cannot see images and the alternative text tag describes the image further there are many times when our bandwidth isn't strong and not all of the images will load in that case we need the alt text description to provide

the context of the image and its purpose search engines use this alt text description to gain additional context about the page the content of the image and its purpose now we have an entire section on links but at this point I just want to cover internal links an internal link is a link from one page on your website to another page of your own website now this is important from a relevancy perspective you'll see internal links in your main navigation you'll likely have a link that says home one that says contact us or about our

company what you're showing to search engines and to humans is that this section if you click on this link is about our company or this is where you find our contact information you see these links are not votes like external links however they provide relevance and context to the information on your own website let's dive in a little more on keywords when a search engine crawls and processes your website it doesn't simply look for the instances of specific keywords it's a lot more complex than that it's using a technology called natural language processing natural language

processing uses algorithms to try to understand the meaning of text you see search engine processing is attempting to be human this is the same way that people see and hear the words and we're using the words to find the meaning expressed in the words similarly when a search engine goes to your website it may see keywords but it's looking for the context of those words you may say football but just having the word football repeated throughout your website isn't going to help you rank specifically for football what you need to do and what is more

common in actual human conversation happens very naturally when we talk about football we use naturally additional words such as goal and referee and World Cup you see Google and the other search engines are going to take these into account by usage of other synonyms and other common words you present the context of a bigger broader idea for your website the next site signal that we have is sitemaps now there are two kinds of site Maps there's the site map that is for humans and there is the site map that are for search engine robots crawlers

or spiders the one that is for human is called an HTML sitemap you've probably seen these before the link is generally in the footer of a website if you click on it it shows you the major sections of the website provide some search functionality but looking at it as a human it shows you the hierarchy of the website and where to find important information it shows how everything fits together now there's something else that exists called an XML sitemap it's not linked from any page of your website but exists as an independent file on your

server now this is something you can see but it is formatted for search engine spiders using a programming language called XML it shows the hierarchy and the priority of each of the URLs of the website every page every document every image and it also shows the date that each page was last updated or changed so at this point we've covered a lot of things that are important and things that you should be doing when optimizing your on-page content now let's go a different direction and cover things that you should not be doing keyword stuffing hidden

text repetitive anchor text and cloaking the first one is keyword stuffing now back in the early days of search engine optimization people used to increase the instances of words on the page now this is well before natural language processing at that time search engines were looking for occurrences of specific words well search engines they're very smart about this what may have worked 20 years ago or 10 years ago keyword stuffing does not work you're not going to rank better for any given phrase by including it a dozen or more times on the page in fact

you might get an over optimization penalty by constantly repeating the same word over and over focus on writing content that engages with your visitors and uses language naturally now the next one is hidden text unfortunately I still see this this is when you write content that is solely for search engines and not for people now typically it is attempted by writing a lot of repetitive keywords as text coloring it white and placing it against a white background see this was developed as another way to add more keyword stuff text without the user seeing the overuse

of keywords now it didn't work too well in the past and it definitely does not work today this tactic backfires in two ways first search engines can tell when it's white text on a white background it's easy to tell from a computer science point of view search engines read the HTML and in the HTML are the instructions for colors when you hide text modern search engines are smart enough to figure it out probably better than a human now secondly it's done to hide repetitive keyword stuff text which is the second thing against you these outdated

unprofessional tactics will most likely get a website penalized by the search engines the next one is repetitive anchor text you may have followed a link to a page when looking for a business or information and instead of the information you want you get a page that doesn't feel like it was written for people every sentence is redundant repetitive and almost every keyword is linked even when there doesn't need to be a link it confuses the flow of the information on the page now again this used to be a tactic that sometimes would work but it's

no longer helpful search engines and their natural language processing algorithms have advanced significantly they can tell when something's not readable when something is probably intended for machines and rankings but not for people search engines will figure it out please don't waste time on redundant links trying to inflate the relevance of your links and Pages the last thing to cover here is cloaking cloaking is the idea of showing one thing to the search engines and something entirely different to humans now this is related to the rest of the tactics I just covered it's something that used

to work but it was expressly against the search engine guidelines while it may have worked if the search engine is discovered it on your website you could have been penalized or dropped from the search engine results entirely now we've covered all of the most important on-page optimization factors let's take a look at what the theoretically perfectly optimized page would look like in this example we can see many of these elements being used together you can also see that the base key phrase digital camera is being repeated but always included with a specific contact next first

at the top of the page is the URL which has digital cameras in the address the page title follows using the context of the information and adding the word reviews you can also see at the top of the page that the main navigation and secondary navigation also called the breadcrumb navigation provides context of the Page's location within the entire website and natural keyword usage the H1 headline is the key phrase but also happens to simply be the best title for the content of the page the subsequent subheadings provide additional information such as ratings recommendations and

features the links provide relevant ways to access additional content the image utilizes alt text there are also clear calls to action which provide relevant offers to visitors as you can see the context of all of the content is very strong and sends a clear relevancy signal to both search engines and readers to conclude this section I'd like to cover the top influencing factors now sometimes you may find these as lists but I found it a bit more practical to separate them into categories typically every year you'll find these collections of lists from surveys experts or

speculation some are from testing but honestly you can't ever truly test a search engine as they change a little bit with every algorithm so the best thing is to take from these lists these factors that are the tried and true factors over the years that have worked consistently also those tactics that not only make your website more effective with users they tend to do well with search engines so if a tactic serves that Dual Purpose it's a good tactic so these are not exclusive and have to lists for every situation but guides and indicators for

you to use the top on-page factors from surveys opinions and data are these a relevant page title page headings anchor text links a keyword-based URL a keyword or contextual file name such as page name image name or PDF file name alt text and images and finally what you do with the content on a page to make it more readable lists bullet points and bolded text the top factors for off-page linking tend to contain these items the total number of domains linking to you the number of Highly influential domains linking to you the number of unique

domain IP addresses the total backlinks without no follow limits the total relevant anchor text in links to you and finally the types and context of keywords in Anchor text links the domain also contributes factors to your overall rankings such as the age of the domain which would include ownership information such as the length of time owned and operated by a company the real business information tied to that domain such as the business address being the same as the business registration address for the domain in addition the signals from social accounts driving visits to the domain

functionally the search engines also utilize some attribution based on the quality of programming of the website for instance taking care of the basic search engine Protocols of the robots.txt file XML sitemap and https protocol websites that Implement these features have shown that they are familiar with search engine guidelines and protocol now one of the changes over the past few years has been the implementation of page speed as an increasing ranking Factor slow loading pages with a lot of extraneous code that slowed the delivery of the page will be penalized as they take away from the

user experience optimizing the page code speeding up the load time of the page can directly impact your rankings and this is closely related to the mobile friendliness of your website if your website is not mobile friendly it will be limited in visibility as Google's primary index is focused on mobile devices and mobile delivery behavioral factors are the newest factors and with the Advent of artificial intelligence it is making determining the intent and the is making determining easier for a search engine to derive a judgment of relevancy based on interaction while the extent of these signals

is not fully known it is suspected that they are minor but growing in importance these include the amount of users that search for a brand name business's name and go to that result showing brand awareness also the amount of direct visits bypassing search time on page pages per session which is also called the depth of visit and lastly the behavior of a Searcher from the results page how many results are clicked how many times do they return to the results this evaluation is looking to judge if the results presented were satisfactory or deficient for that

query in the section on on-page optimization we talked about factors that centered on relevancy in this section we're going to go in a different direction we're going to talk about the signals that focus on popularity so what does popularity mean in this context well it's actually quite simple popularity always relates to links to hyperlinks on the web so you have seen these when you see the typically blue text that is underlined what this is is a tool it's a ahref technically in HTML that is pointing from one web document to a different one this is

a pretty simple concept I imagine you already know this so what does this mean from an SEO perspective well it turns out that this gigantic group of signals the ones related to hyperlinks are and are and historically have been the Lion's Share of signals that the search engines process when trying to rank pages now there's one big problem with these from an SEO perspective is that they are historically and today very difficult to influence this is because they do not take place on your website they take place elsewhere it's other people who are linking to

you generally speaking and this makes them very very difficult to have an influence on so this is a good thing and a bad thing it's a good thing because it it turns out to be a great metric for ranking web documents it's a bad thing because it's hard for us to make an impact on day-to-day level hands down the most time consuming and difficult part of SEO is link building now there's a lot of reasons for this primarily because it's constantly changing and because of all the elements that are involved with this but the big

the bigger takeaway here is that there's no one-size-fits-all solution for link building you have to take the context of your business of your website and you have to apply general principles to that so in this video we're going to cover these general principles so you can figure out how to apply those to your business these principles are and I think these are the most clever and the most important ones are creating link worthy content proactively participate in an off-site engagement and utilizing offline relationships the tried and true method for building links is creating content that's

optimized for humans so let me explain what this means the currency of the internet if you will is the content itself that's why people go on they want to read the newest article or they want to see the newest video whatever it may be that is what has been true since the beginning and I have no doubt will be true going forward so as an SEO or as an online marketer in general you can use this to your advantage creating the content that people are going to want to share with their friends or that they're

going to want to cite in any kind of paper or whatever they're working on that is a tried and true way of gaining links this is what we call the power of content you can do all kinds of bells and whistles you can go do these newest tactics you can try all these different things out but at the end of the day what's really important is the content itself so this is what I focus on this is where 80 of my time goes on when I'm working on link building it's on the content itself can

I create something that is just truly that is so truly great that someone essentially has to link to it this is what I focus on trying to answer and while there is no simple answer to that go in asking that question always sets you in the right direction the next strategy that I want to talk about is actually very counter-intuitive so if you're trying to build links to your own website I found one of the most effective ways and this is consistently true is to engage off your own site now this doesn't make any sense

right why would you work on other people's websites if you're trying to promote your yourself well think about human beings human beings are much more likely to link and give back to people to human beings that they know well so a lot of the time I spend when I'm doing link building is spent off-site engaging with others so sometimes this is through social media so I'll use whatever the latest social network is and I'll chat with people there who have similar interests or have similar interests to what I'm trying to promote be it a different

topic or be it a new industry all together I'll spend a lot of time promoting others and a lot of times chatting with other people building up genuine real relationships with human beings so that when it comes time for them to write an article or when it's when they're ready to link out to other people I'm the first person they think too and they link back to my website one of the reasons that link building is so hard is because the internet moves so fast what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow so one of the

most clever and easy ways to avoid this problem is to just simply go offline utilize some of the relationships that you have off of the internet in order to benefit on the internet this is something I try to do all the time because it consistently works by far the easiest favors to cash in on are the ones that you already owed so these might be from your friends who you work with who might be from friends who from childhood these are people who you actually know in the real world who are much more likely to

help you when you're trying to promote new content online so what I'm trying to do link building one of the things I focus on is people that I know in the real world so this can be lots of things this can be personal friends who happen to have websites and blogs this can be friendly competition you have or friendly allies you have in your space just saying hey we're looking for these kind of things can you help us out maybe I'll help you out somewhere else it's utilizing these relationships that Exist Elsewhere so that you

can start gaining these links yourself if that doesn't work if maybe you don't have any friends in these Arenas you can always go to local businesses and local agencies so sometimes this is a government-owned thing sometimes this is just third parties all together there's lots of things that they need help with that you as a business owner or you as uh trying to promote some client may be able to help them with and if you can help them offline they're more much more likely to help you online well link building it's very important to understand

that not all links are are created equally a link coming from the home page of CNN is going to provide a lot of what we call link Equity it's going to have a lot of popularity metrics tied to it and so it's going to be more valuable to you and help you rank higher whereas a link also coming from the home page but let's say Joe schmo's spam blog that is not going to be particularly helpful for you and it actually in some cases could hurt you so when you're going out and doing link building

make sure that you can stand behind the source of the link that is coming at you this could be in a good example from like a government website where it's trusted and a bad example this could be from a website that you would not normally go to even on your own in addition to that there's different kinds of links depending on the direction that they're going so if a link is coming towards you towards your website that's called an inbound link these are the ones that are very helpful for popularity metrics that we've talked about

there's also outbound links these are links that you linking to other people now generally there's a big misconception about this that you'd think you would not want to link out to other people but if you just follow the natural chain of events and you look at people who are writing blogs without SEO in mind you'll see that they are linking out naturally and it's these natural patterns that search engines are looking for so there's absolutely no problem in linking out just as long as it's two sources that you actually do trust so there's inbound links

there's outbound links there's links that have a lot of popularity value so like from an established Government website or from something popular like CNN there's also links that are inbound that are not going to have as much value for you that you probably don't want to spend your time building now regardless of where your links are coming from it's important to look out for one particular attribute it's called Rel nofollow Rel no follow was a tool that was originally developed to combat comment spam like on blogs you'd have lots of people who are leaving completely

irrelevant comments so they could link back to their own website and get credit for that that does not work at all today one of the primary reasons for that is the search engine introduced something called Rel nofollow where they said here's a link that's going out for my website but do not stand behind it and it does not pass any credit a lot of times when you're doing leak building you'll get a link which you're very proud of coming from somewhere very popular but then realize that it has this attribute attached to it no follow

and which means you will not get any credit for it so make sure that when you're doing your leak building the link coming at you that you've earned does not have this attribute associated with it otherwise you will get no credit for it now that you understand what nofollow is let's let's talk about the biggest use case for this social media most of the links that we see in social media are valueless this is because they're either hidden from search engines entirely this mostly happens on Facebook or they're visible to search engines but they use

this row this Rel nofollow attribute which means that they're useless so while social media does have many many benefits SEO and particularly link value from SEO is not one of the direct benefits of participating in social media now that we've covered some of the link building dues let's talk about some of the link building don'ts so these are things that you should not do because you'll be wasting your time and possibly more importantly your money the first one is Spam so we have all seen this online when you go somewhere and you see just a

bunch of spammy links links that are clearly written only for machines only for search engines a lot of times these will have the name of pharmaceutical drugs on them a lot of times they'll have just can be completely irrelevant to the content while these have worked in some instances they are certainly not a best practice and they are certainly not a long-term strategy so I never recommend trying to invest in spammy links this way because it's not going to ultimately help you in fact in many ways it'll probably hurt you so do not go out

of your way to try to get spammy links the next one is buying links this is these are toes closely tied together now buying links is when you go out and try to buy sometimes relevant sometimes irrelevant links and again this is something that had it worked sometimes historically not always my biggest problem with this is not so much the ethical problem although there is one there the search engines have Clues said not to ever do this my biggest problem with it is that you could not calculate an accurate Roi on this so if you

spend a dollar on this you don't know if you're gonna make a dollar or two dollars back you have no idea there's no way to accurately measure this so you have no idea if this if this is valuable to you or not where as opposed to if you're creating valuable content you can measure that and you can directly tie it to Sales so your your money dollar for dollar is spent much much more effectively on content than it is on buying links so I highly recommend do not spend your time or your money buying links

the last one is acquiring reciprocal links so reciprocal links as you can imagine are links that go in a circle you link to somebody and they link directly back to you now in the natural web when no marketing is taken to place into this there's no kind of manipulation trying to go on that happens that happens all the time so don't go out of your way and be afraid of this happening so one new site will very regularly link to another news article and that article might link back to them somewhere else that happens so

don't stress about this too much but don't go out of your way to try to build all of your links in a reciprocal way we're overthinking this by trying to link to somebody else who links to a third party that third party links to you don't waste your time this is just not a factor that you should worry about reciprocal links are not generally as good as one-way links but it happens so often that is not is not worthy of your time or any kind of investment trying to avoid this concept of linking is foundational

to good rankings and understanding the internet at Large it starts with the premise that good content will be cited by others recommending it to other people how we cite and recommend information online is by linking to it we link to information that we find valuable based on that the search engines assess content by how websites link to one another so we are going to cover the definition and purpose of links and the different functions that links serve we'll also look at how links mirror human judgment we'll look at how search engines evaluate links by mirroring

human judgment and how that affects what's called Block Level analysis and how where the location of different links and how they are used will greatly affect their relevance we're going to look at how visitors from different link sources will behave differently based on where they came from and also how you can measure the effectiveness of links and finally we're going to look at both good and bad linking practices now links serve a number of purposes from a functional standpoint they usually are our primary means of navigation online we click on links we go to different

pages and from those pages we find links to other pages links are also a method of citing other content when we quote somebody when we use information that we have found somewhere else we cite that information to give credit to the original author typically online we do that with a link so that if someone wants to see the original Source document it's available to them that also helps to provide credibility to you credibility to the author of the original source as well as assigning importance to the knowledge that came from that original source and the

authority of the original source links also provide us with a clear structure of how our websites are built how the pages relate to one another and how organized the information can be so let's break down the functional part of a link this is important if you're going to be developing anchor text and linking to understand the structure the ahref equals is the start of the link tag what you are doing is developing the reference of where the document is contained that's the href reference is what it is short for what comes next within the quotes

is the location of the document now this can be a full URL or you may just be linking to a document that's on the main root level of your server this is the full location where you can access the document and so you're putting the name of the document the extension so that it will be linked the next part is what I have in caps you'll notice off to the left I have something in all blue text and underlined which most people will recognize as a link you see when it is in between the document

location and the closing of the link tag the text you have in there is what's called anchor text you see instead of publishing the document location in the full URL of the document we can put the link within text and create anchor text so all someone has to do is click on the link and the document loads for them this anchor text is vitally important to understanding how we can add additional relevance to linking content then we see the closure of the link tag this is what makes the internet the internet is millions of pages

connected together by Links so when we look at the functional side of links and we look at this example here as you can see the title of this article is not the URL address of the article it's a title and the title is the link that is the anchor text of the link and so from a search engine standpoint search engines look to see what words are being used in the link and how relevant those words are to the document that is being linked it also looks to see where is the link is it in

the editorial information in the article is it part of the navigation is it in a sidebar or is it an ad and then also search engines are looking to see if this is a text link or an image link how long has that link been there what type of link is it does it go somewhere within your website does it go to another website or is it a reciprocal link which I will explain more later they also look to see the text in the link and the context to the page with the link directs you

to we utilize links a little differently you see from a human standpoint whenever we refer information to another person when we provide reference material to another person or even if someone asks us for a recommendation we provide this information you see offline we mirror the same behavior as we do online when we link people ask us for information and we provide it we just mirror that online by making a link offline we recommend we refer we provide information to each other in much the same way the way I want you to think about it from

a human standpoint is that if you asked another person for advice or directions or a referral are there certain people that you would trust more than others I'm sure the answer to that is yes and maybe you have some people in mind that you are thinking about you see we run across the same issue with search the search engines know that there are some websites that are much more trustworthy than others just like if you were to ask someone for information I'm sure you would ask the right person for the information you would ask the

most knowledgeable trustworthy person you knew who had Authority in that subject area the search engines are trying to do the same thing with the links that we publish on our websites they're trying to determine who is the most trustworthy and relevant based on the recommendations referrals and citations of other websites to other websites who are the websites that are trusted that are authorities the search engines are trying to do from a technical algorithmic standpoint what we do naturally from a human standpoint now from The Human Side as I had said before we need to think

of links as information that we receive from other people Word of Mouth advice information directions recommendations this is where we need to think about links not from the standpoint of building false relevance for a search engine but being a helpful resource for our readers how can we help them how can we provide information and how can we be a credible source of information how can we develop our Authority within the industry and so that people who have questions about this content will see our websites as authoritative and credible resources the best way to develop links

as you'll see is good content when people like what they read when they like what they see when they are willing to recommend it to others it's because you have created something of value and they'll link to you when they feel that you are credible and that you are authoritative with this information only then will they share it with other people because you have earned that right for them to share it with others by providing content that is informative educational entertaining and you've provided that service only then will people then want to recommend it to

others by linking to it now links serve a number of benefits When I look at some of the incoming links to my site one of the things I notice is that if I get a link in certain places that can drive a lot of brand exposure I can have thousands of people coming to the site looking to see an article and that provides a lot of exposure to a lot of people however also getting a link from a certain website especially if it's a high relevant authoritative website I can see my rankings increase because of

that but then also a good link is going to drive people that will convert and drive sales or leads those who become customers so those are the three aspects of a good link a good link will drive traffic to your site a good link will assist your rankings and a good link will bring in business if you can get a link to do all three of those at the same time that's what I call the golden link because it has all three benefits usually however you're going to find that different links will provide different types

of benefits one of these three or maybe two out of these three one of the things I'm usually very focused on is the link that drives sales or generates leads that's getting links in the right place that will benefit me tangibly rather than just getting thousands of people to see it why it benefits me financially if I can get a link in the right place so from here let's break down the different types of links we have navigational links we see these in our navigation our primary navigation maybe the footer of our web pages where

we have links to typical information such as about us or contact us we also have sidebar links this might be related information or offers or calls to action and then also I would break it down into outbound or inbound type of navigation outbound are links going to other websites inbound links are links that come from other websites and that also I might send to other pages on my own site now I've used the term editorial an editorial link is a link that is found within the content of the website and by that I mean through

an article so if I am writing an article and I link to someone else and cite them or reference them that is what's called an editorial link it means that it's part of the content a great example of this is that the navigation on your web pages is not part of the content it serves a function as navigation but it doesn't have anything to do with supporting information with citing an authority so information and links that you put within the content and presented content of your site are considered editorial now there's also call to action

links where you're bringing someone to a landing page or a registration page or a sale page then also we have Social Links now these can provide a variety of means but typically a social link will go to a profile maybe it's a username that takes you somewhere else or comment or maybe just an image or something that goes to a social site or that you have placed on your own site as well either way it's all contained within that social network even though the links are going on and off your site they tend to be

controlled in that social environment now I've used the term reciprocal link now this is something very specific a reciprocal link is one where you would go to somebody else and you would make a trade such as if you link to me I'll link to you and maybe you put those links on the home page or maybe you create a page just for that link you see sometimes it just doesn't make sense and so the search engines will see that you've linked to each other but if there's no contextual relevance if there's no contextual relevance most

likely you won't get any benefit because you've agreed to link to each other for the primary purpose of boosting rankings now this is not to say that two websites can't link to each other because there is some relevance we'll look at some examples of that later on in this module also then we have advertising links these can be ads banners anything on the page that is an advertising link that if you were to click on it you would go to that advertisers page those links are typically through an ad server and they take place in

entirely different ecosystem but they are links and we need to know what kind of links are advertising and which kind of links are functional to our websites now when I broke down the different types of links so we have our navigation links we have links in our sidebar and in our footer with Block Level analysis does is that the search engines look at the code of the page they break down the page because it's very easy to figure out which part of the code has to do with your navigation which part of the code has

to do with your sidebar and your footer and which part of the code is calling ads from an ad server what this leaves is the editorial content your article and the ability of search engines then to break down your page into these different elements the reason why they do it is that the links contained in the editorial space are considered to be more relevant in terms of linking to other websites than any of the other types of links on your web page search engines don't consider all parts of the page to be equally relevant which

is okay because neither do humans we look at the navigation as utilization pure utility because it's just helping me navigate among the different pages of your website I'm not expecting to learn anything I'm using it as a functional means of navigating your site now your sidebar might have some calls to action it might have links to other pages but it's not an article it's what you've developed and so it might be a little more important than your navigation but it's not as important as what you may have written within content your footer navigation is basically

the same you control that it's the same on every page and so what the search engines are looking for are the unique content the unique article or information that you've published and if there is a link within the editorial content that is highly relevant because it has to do with content it has to do with information that you are sharing and so the links there are going to be more highly relevant and are going to be more important for the search engines to see you see it's the same way with humans we're not going to

look at navigation to learn something it's functional the same thing with the footer and as humans we're reading the content that you have in your article and if you link to another source well you've provided us with utility but it's contextual utility because you're citing where you found information or you're citing an additional Source or you are linking to an example and it enables me as a human to see that understand it and if I need that additional information I can click on it and go to it so I'm going to look at the information

on the page in that article very differently that I'm going to look at the headings the navigation the sidebars or the footer because the article is what is informing me and so the links in the article I'm going to look at very differently and hold them in a higher level of relevance now over time search engines have had to refine the algorithm about links you see in the early days of search engine algorithms they used to Simply count the amount of links than if one site had more links than another that made it more credible

however once people started to figure that out people started accumulating links by really any means necessary and they were just looking for the sheer volume of links because they knew if they got the most amount of links it would affect their rankings and so over the years the search engines have had to change and adjust and add more relevance to their algorithm refine it in order to look at different aspects of links in order to properly determine relevance so over time it wasn't just having a link it was then also looking at how many people

cite this site as an authority so looking at the source of the link and the types of pages then also looking at the text of the link and matching it with the text of the page does it match is it contextual and then looking at the type of Link doing the Block Level analysis and then also the context the relevancy of your site compared to the linking site compared to the link and the information that's being shared there also some of the ways that they can look at it at the age of the link how

long has that link been there humans do the same thing when we look to see how long someone has been in business we're looking at credibility and then of course there are many many other ongoing refinements that are going into the search engines evaluations of links sometimes the age of the link isn't as relevant especially when you're looking for something that has happened very recently an Old Link could mean that it's old news or that something has changed since then so search engines are in a constant battle to ensure that people are not gaming the

system by falsely creating relevance through linking the link relevancy and the algorithm is all about trying to determine who is the most relevant and credible within this area and that is the focus of most search engine algorithm refinements over the past few years and it will be into the future now this is where I'm going to start bringing in some screenshots from a link Management program as a search engine Optimizer a link Management program is probably going to be one of your best friends as you move along in this industry in this example this program

link Decks that I'm using will track the incoming links to my website and it'll also provide a breakdown as to what type of website those links are coming from so I can see how many links I have from blogs how many links I have from news sites how many links from wikis how many links from directories forms social media public relations sites articles or additional resources then I can also add my competitors and I can compare where I stand in terms of the amount of links from each source and where my competitors stand in this

way I can be sure that we all have a similar link profile you see if my linking profile looks vastly different than all my competitors the search engines are going to see that as well and know that something might be different with me good or bad and that's going to raise a red flag so I want to look at the linking profile because every industry and almost every business is linking profile is going to be a little different but especially among Industries we see that linking profiles that is the amount of links from different sources

it's going to be slightly different for every different type of industry or business so this helps me understand where my links are coming from which is vitally important because from a business standpoint one thing that I've tracked consistently in analytics is that people will act differently and also I can predict which source is going to send me the best customers you see just because someone comes from a link doesn't mean they're going to buy or become a customer or really become a lead many times they're going to come look at your information and leave and

based on how they come to your site whether it's through a Blog a directory a forum or a new site has a lot to do with how they view your website and it's all about the context you see this is what I've learned over the years is that people will behave differently based on how they find the website what I found is that people from blogs news sites and articles they tend to stay longer do more and have a higher chance of conversion of becoming a customer or a lead the main reason is because blogs

and articles they have a lot of context it's an article someone has taken the time to write some information out and then link to my site which means there is a highly contextual reason for someone to click that link also what it means is that there's a lot less competition for that link when my link is in that article compare that with social news or any type of social site you see when you're on a social site and you're looking at your social stream of information there's a lot of different people competing for your attention

a lot of different things and it's not just in one subject area it's usually from multiple subject areas and so the context is very low because there's a lot of different types of information and the competition for your attention is very high because of that people from social sites or applications tend to visit more often but they only tend to view one page and leave immediately because they're looking to see what was interesting and then they move on to the next subject that's the difference between how people react based on where they come from and

so when I'm measuring links I'm looking to see which links do I have what's the source and then how do those sources behave differently from one another and why you see if I find that I'm getting links from sources that people are staying longer doing more and converting at a higher rate then I'm going to continue to focus on building links in those areas because it directly affects how I monetize my website so here's a strategy in building links one of the things I'm looking at is the source of links like I said if I

can find a link Source that's providing visitors that will stay look at my content engage with the content and eventually convert and convert at a higher rate than other sources of content or visitors then I'm going to focus on that source and so I'm going to look at some high Authority websites whether they're industry Publications news sites education sites those are what are considered high Authority blogs articles news sites that's what I'm looking to do I want to find the most authoritative website and sometimes it happens naturally if people that work at those websites or

manage those sites if they find you and they like your content they'll link to it and that way you can get more credibility more relevancy certain people certain organizations certain websites have more Authority influence than others it goes back to the question that I asked you early in this module that how do you know if someone is more authoritative than somebody else we also have mid Authority websites which you can get some links on and low Authority websites which are very easy to get links but here's what I've learned when it comes to link building

one link from one high quality website can be worth hundreds or thousands of mid to low quality links ultimately it's about quality not quantity one of the things that I will do utilizing my link software is look at the context of the link I want to see how relevant this is so as I said if I want to find a high relevant website what I'm looking for in terms of this is I want to see the influence of the domain as well as the relevance of the domain those are two factors that we're going to

look at when we're evaluating the quality of a domain now as I'm looking at this report here what influence means is that it is a high quality website that within the linking algorithm these sites have a lot of authority however they may not be relevant so for example they may have a lot of sites attributing authority to them but they may not be relevant to my industry which is why we have the next column of keyword relevance you see when I'm evaluating my links I'm looking for the sources that are both influential and relevant that

means that I've got a link from a site that fits the two standards of high Authority it's authoritative and relevant now it's good to have links from authoritative sites that might not be relevant it's still authoritative however to get the full benefit I want it to be influential and relevant but not to say that I'm not looking for links from these other sources this is just a means of measuring what you have as well as comparing it to your competitors and other websites now here's some best practices when I'm optimizing anchor text I want to

maintain contextual relevance so I want to use text in the text link and I want to explain to people what's they're linking to what they're going to find when they click on that link if I use an image as a link I'm going to use an ALT attribute because if that image doesn't show up that ultrabute is necessary to let people know where to go but also I do get a little tiny bit of benefit by using that alt attribute within the image link I also want to look at the relevance of the source page

that I'm linking to and make sure contextually the link the link text and the content of the page is contextually relevant to the destination page I also want to be sure that I don't overuse the keywords that I don't make multiple links to the same destination that I don't use the same anchor text over and over I can be downgraded or even penalized by the search engine algorithm if that is found on my pages so as an example instead of using click here for a how-to article I might use the exact phrase of how to

fix whatever it is and use that as the link to the page that has the content that's a simple way of looking at anchor text am I directing someone to additional information if I am then how can I present it to them so they know exactly what they're going to find and Link it appropriately I look at it as developing the next step for your readers where do you want them to go what do you want them to do what resources do you have available to them how can you structure them so that they are

easily understood and you're explaining the Final Destination like I said if you overuse anchor text you can be downgraded or penalized by the search engines so what I will tell you to do is number one avoid overstuffing anchor content that means needlessly repeating keywords in the anchor text don't do that avoid being redundant meaning don't have four or five or six links with the same anchor text going to the same page that's a clear way of letting search engines know that you're going overboard don't just randomly Place links throughout your text just to get the

link ask yourself are you really helping the reader find the information they need and do it once and then also avoid extremely overly promotional words within the linked text such as best expert cheap number one those types of things so a couple examples we can say for travel advice click here but I would say here is my travel advice and Link travel advice rewrite it be creative if it were easy everyone would be doing it but this is where you can write things in a better way to get the attention of the reader and position

it as a resource also utilizing your url as the link or as the anchor text as well for the link in order to get that click as I've got it here I would not recommend that you use that I would recommend that you avoid that also the third line the check out the best website for iPhones and iPhone accessories utilizing overly promotional words is one of those ways that you can easily get caught by the search engines now for future considerations when it comes to Links realize that the majority of algorithm changes are link based

evaluation refinements because people are constantly attempting to fool the search engines and develop a false link profile you should work to create high quality links with high quality content I wouldn't chase after Poor or low quality links now as I've mentioned before there are a number of tools available for you to manage and measure your backlinks tools such as link decks Moz Raven Advanced Link manager Majestic SEO and then also you can use your Google analytics as well however Google analytics only shows you the visitors that have come from links and what they've done the

basic functions of Link management software and there are many other types other than what are listed here but the first thing that it does is just provide a catalog of incoming links from other domains to your site and your competitor sites they offer tools for comparison to see which domains are linking to you what type of link it is and on which Pages those links are listed they'll also report newly acquired links in the past 30 60 90 days or something similar to that the purpose of Link management software is to help you assess high

quality domains versus low quality domains in terms of importance and relevance like I said the first job of a link management tool is to collect all of your backlinks you add your domain and the tools will usually spider the domain they'll go out into search engines and go out into many other formats in order to find and retrace who is linking to you what page that link is contained sometimes what text is on that page and what text is being used in the link they will catalog all of your incoming links organize them format them

and report back to you most of these link programs provide additional filters and management tools so that you can get more insights about who is linking to you how they are linking to you and the type of site personally I use linkedex in order to Monitor and report on my backlinking so the first report here that I'm showing out of Link text is that I see the total amount of incoming links to my domain this says I have over 2 000 links and those 2000 links are on about 1 000 domains on average it looks

like I have about two links from every domain that is linking to me so this is one way that you start to look at your links number one the total amount of domains that are linking to you and then the total amount of links available this way you can isolate domains that are linking to you consistently and also find those that may not be the best domains or that are sending a lot of links that are just not relevant the next thing I do in analyzing My Links is to look at the type of Link

meaning the type of site that it's coming from this report breaks down the amount of links coming from blogs news sites directories forums social sites articles or resources now it doesn't usually get all of those links but it does get enough to give you an idea of how well you're doing in each channel one of the things that I do like about this report is it also has a timeline so I can look and see when new links have been acquired and maybe when some links have been just disappeared that's called churn and it's normal

it's normal because many times a link is published on social media and it kind of just goes away or it's not tracked anymore by your link management software it can't find it anymore and so linking is always Dynamic you are always gaining new links and losing old links there's going to be a normal amount of churn the next report shows me all of the domains that are linking to me it also shows me in the next column how many of those domains are also linking to at least one competitor and it will list as many

competitors as I have listed in here if they list to multiple competitors it will let me know the influence of that site or the authority that site is seen because of the amount of websites and credibility that Authority has for that domain it'll also let me know the keyword relevance how relevant that website is overall contextually to my domain and the content that I have it will also let me know how many pages on that domain have links to my website so I can also go through and I can filter this list by the type

of site I can filter by those domains that are using anchor text to see how much anchor text is being used and what type of anchor text there are many different ways that you can filter through all of the domains that are linking to you in order to get an idea of what's happening on your domain what are competitors doing and also the relevance of those links to your site now when I say that I can add competitors this is another type of report very similar to the one I showed earlier where I look at

my own standing in the different types of sources of links such as blogs directories forums and so on I can also when I add my competitors look to see how they are performing in those different areas as well and so I can compare my link profile to my competitors different Industries are going to have different backlink profiles they might be more heavily weighted towards blogs or they might be more heavily weighted towards forums or social sites in this way I can look to see if my competitors are actively link building and how they're going about

it I can see where maybe they are excelling in one area that the rest of the competitors are not so I can compare different strategies I can also compare different timelines to see if I am acquiring Links at a faster rate than my competitors this is very important if you are a newer business or a newer website trying to compete now specifically what I can do is look at an individual domain in this case this domain has three pages linking to me and that domain also links to two of my competitors I can look at

the specific pages and what I'm looking at here are Snippets this should be familiar to you because what it's showing is the URL of the page that's linking to my page it shows me the page title of that page and then in this report it lets me know if there are any keywords being used in the link in the anchor text as well as the number of links from that page now what this tells me is that this is most likely a directory something that is listing all the different places that where you can buy

products because it's most likely the linking to the domain name seeing that there are no keywords being used in Anchor text and also that there are 16 out about links from that page that means that it must be a list of some sort and they are linking not only to me but most likely to competitors as well so I can track my Links at the Domain level and at the page level I can look to see which Pages might have more influence or relevance to my content I can also see the link URL the page

title if any keywords are being used in the anchor text and also within the context of how many additional links are leaving from that page if there are a high amount of outgoing links on that page then a link from that page might not be as valuable since there are so many links the less links there are coming out from that page the more it will benefit my site because I'm getting more benefit from less links now also what I'm going to do is compare the link reports to my analytics I'm going to go to

my analytics because linking software does not show traffic it doesn't show how many people are clicking on the link it only shows who's linking to you but it does not show visitor activity analytics will show you visitor activity to see which domains are most effective in sending visitors to your site if you go back to the primary benefits of linking visitors branding and business analytics show me visitors and business it shows me which domains are sending me visitors and which of those visitors are becoming customers so what I can do is go to Google analytics

look at all the domains that are referring traffic to my site I can also click on the domain and see the destination page that they are linking to I can see how many visitors are coming either monthly or annually how often they're coming back whether they're new users or repeat users how long they stay how many pages they View and how many conversions as a result of those visits this is a great way to get a 360 degree view of your linking because not only do you want links that will help you rank better you

also want links that will send business and customers to you as well building links can take many forms ideally it is through networks relationships and marketing that other websites and users learn about you like you and recommend you to others unfortunately there is a lot of bad outdated and untrustworthy advice to be found about building links to your website in this section I'll present the best practices as accepted by the omcp standard the objectives for this module that you'll be able to develop a link building strategy that you'll understand the value of different link types

finally you'll be able to find inbound link opportunities the first step in building links is to evaluate what you have now there are many tools available that you can utilize to do this for you there are automated tools that you can get that will catalog all of the incoming links to your website some of them are link decks Moz Raven or Advanced Link manager there are many that can do that you may also want to utilize your analytics as well in order to find websites that link to you the first step is evaluating where you

are right now your incoming links have a significant impact on your rankings and you can do a lot of on-page optimization and see some results however a lot of Google's algorithm takes into account links from other high quality websites now when you evaluate what you have in this example I'm showing you a screenshot from link decks link decks catalogs the incoming links to my website and it groups them into different areas the first way it groups them is by high value or high influence domains those are websites that link to me that have a lot

of influence not necessarily in my industry but High influence based on the amount of people that link to them as an authority on many different subjects the next way that it groups that is based on relevance now this is when it looks at the match of my content versus the content of the other website in the first example we can see the National Library of Medicine it is a high influence website because it is a government website with a lot of information that is cited frequently because of the amount of other websites linking to that

site it has a high amount of influence now based on the website that I am measuring there is a lot of keyword relevance meaning that that National Library of Medicine site with the government has a lot of content that's very similar to my site a lot of the same keywords are being used so not only is this website of high influence it also has a lot of relevance and that's key when evaluating my backlinks I want to look at which websites are also referring traffic so while I may have a link from the National Library

of Medicine I want to look at my analytics and look to see is it also providing visitors our visitors following that link to my site and I also want to look at the quality of traffic that it produces do these visitors stay longer than average do they convert more than average I want to look at the quality of traffic based on the source next I want to look at the incoming links from those other websites number one I want to make sure that the incoming link from the other site is both accurate and relevant meaning

the text that is used in the link is it accurate to the content that will appear on the page when the visitor clicks that link is the content relevant this is especially relevant if I have updated my website changed the content or moved things around I want to be sure that that incoming link sends visitors to the appropriate page and the appropriate information I also want to ensure that that link is worded correctly that it uses the right words that is sending visitors and setting expectations of the content that they will see I may need

to contact the website manager or owner and maybe ask for a better linked text or a more accurate page destination now this requires some interaction with the owner or manager of another website and you always want to be respectful of their time and not demanding that they make any changes in some cases the organization may be so big you may never find the right person in order to optimize the text or the destination of that link you always want to look for accuracy in cases where your company or website name is utilized in the link

but also if there is any contact information such as address phone number a description of your business and any content make sure it's accurate and it all points to the right place another way to look for links is to Simply go to a search engine and start doing searches search for your company your business your company name and look for websites that may mention you but do not have a live link to your website many times your company will be mentioned or cited but there will not be a live link you can only find these

through doing searches and seeing which websites mention you without linking to you now this could be an opportunity to get an Easy Link especially if you can find some contact information and finding the right person that could add a link to your company information again you'll need to be polite ask for their help and it will help it if you can develop the link along with the link text and send that over giving them just a quick and easy edit to be able to add the information so make it as easy as possible as an

example I've provided a sample request format again you want to be polite you want to be inviting and respectful of their time and their management sometimes like I said you may find the right person that can help you however the larger the company the more difficult it will be to make this happen this just requires your patience and again being polite and not expecting the company to do what you are asking many times this is just a formality and sometimes companies will act on it so be sure to approach this with the right expectations the

next thing I want to look at are business listings these are the easy ways to establish links and ensure that links are where they should be and also opportunities look for business directories especially if your company has a local presence you can utilize Chamber of Commerce lists Association lists or local listings if they are on websites see if they offer links that can go to your website rather than just the list of businesses that are in the area even on a larger level you can look for associations directories or listings where you can add your

business or double check if your business is there and always ensure that your business name address phone number and URL are correct complete and consistent with other listings the next level will require some active marketing and that's where you search for opportunities you can go out and look for other resource lists within your industry or directories of businesses within your industry and you can get a link many times through membership or submitting your business as a resource however you may want to step up your marketing you can do that by interviewing your clients seeing if

they might be willing to provide a testimonial and a link to your website you may also want to go out and find other communities online maybe some social communities that are relevant to your industry get involved with those communities fill out a profile and get involved by contributing information by sharing information you'll find that people like getting information and they'll respond by linking to your site another option is to utilize the tool that you had for indexing your links from the first step you can also add your competitors and you can look at their backlinks

you can look and see which websites and which domains are linking to your competitors but you always need to go and see why what are those other sites linking to and what is the nature of that link sometimes it may exclude you from being able to approach competitors backlinks and ask them for links however if they're being linked to by companies that are simply stating here are vendors in this space and they are linking your competitors and you're not there then it might make a lot of sense for you to approach and ask if you

can be listed as well however be sure that the links to your competitors are not from a consumer or customer relationship in that case it might be out of line for you to ask for a link make sure if you approach anyone who's linking to a competitor and asking for a link to your site make sure the context is right and then it makes sense for them and that's the ultimate judge of value does it benefit somebody else to link to your site we all know that it will benefit you but when you present your

link request you need to offer value and a benefit for others to link to you so be sure that you present it in a way that is beneficial and good for those people that will be adding the link they're the ones that have to take the work to do it and they're also the ones that are adding a recommendation for you and your business so as always you need to be considerate and patient now the best way to build links is by creating something that people like and sharing it you see the best way to

build links is by creating value through content or information or entertainment you see when people like things they link to it if they find a study or a white paper or research that you performed they link to it if you post a infographic that explains something and it's attractive people link to it you see that's what's most amazing about linking I find that when we put most of our effort into creating content that people like that's what builds the most valuable and the most relevant links and so what type of content well you can create

infographics videos top 10 lists or articles articles with advice or analysis of Market data or even research that type of content people love it and so when you publish it out you utilize social media to extend the reach and the visibility of that type of content and when someone likes it they'll link to it and recommend it to others now people also like depending upon your industry or your business they also like some personality maybe some humor people always like expert information they like the cute this is why pictures of cats tend to be liked

and linked to more than almost anything else and also the unexpected if you can inject any of that into your content that just makes it more valuable more personable and again more shareable by other people and every time someone shares it it builds a link to your site you see the best linking is when people like something when you create something that people like and share you might be surprised at the many opportunities there are to get links based on your content I've seen many many blogs based on cooking fashion Arts Sports music and when

people specialize within a specific topic they always find an audience and so anything they publish builds links even on certain social media sites such as Pinterest people upload pictures on articles and infographics especially about landscaping flowers food cars you name it there is a special interest for anything and you can develop links from those social sites to your site and it can generate traffic even with a Blog developing articles that talk about upcoming events new music Sports whatever it is when you create content that people like it takes the longest amount of time to build

content for building links when you develop your own content that's the biggest investment you'll make in time and research and writing and presentation however the result is that when you develop that content you will receive the best and highest quality links and the most valuable links are going to be to that content as I mentioned before one high quality link can be worth more than hundreds or thousands of low quality links so my best advice is to create content that people like that they link to and that will be high value links that you'll generate

to your site if you are looking to become an SEO professional then look no further than simply runs postgraduate program in digital marketing so don't miss out on this opportunity Find the course Link in the description for more information Google search console formerly known as Google webmaster tool is a web service provided by Google Developers Google search console is mainly responsible for optimizing a website for its visibility indexing website detecting crawl errors Etc after understanding what is Google search console now we need to focus on why search console is an important part of search engine

optimization a website's technicalities are directly or indirectly related to search control consider you have created a website for your business but from past few weeks your website is not visible in search result Pages here search console comes into action there is a possibility that searched engine crawlers are not able to crawl your website thus it is not visible in the search result pages to make crawlers crawl your website you will need to optimize your website using search console some other technical aspects of search console includes fixing indexing problems sending the updated content or Pages for

indexing generating search traffic reports generating alerts if there are any issues related to indexing or any other issue gets the list of sites linking to your website keep the track of mobile usability amp pages and more so now it is the right time to understand how search console works but before we begin this topic have a look at the range of courses of digital marketing and search engine optimization from skill up by simply learn you can get the link in the description box below so now I have a question for you what will you do

at first if your web page fails to appear in search result pages well let me know your thoughts in the comment section below stay tuned with this video Even though if you don't have the answer right now by the end of this video you will surely able to answer this question so let's get started by knowing how search console works to understand the working of search console it is necessary to have a detailed knowledge about how search engine works search engines mainly Works in three steps crawling indexing and ranking let's have a look at each

step one by one so first let's start with crawling search engines are hungry for content and so they send Web spiders or web crawlers also known as robots or search engine Bots to discover new content or any updated content content can be an image a web page a video or anything else present on the web this process is known as crawling now let's know about indexing as soon as the crawler discover the updated content or new content these web crawlers start storing the URLs of the content into the search index or web index this process

is known as indexing once the content is indexed it starts appearing in the search result pages when a user enters a search query the most relevant results are taken from the index and displayed in the form of most relevant to least relevant in the search result Pages this process is known as ranking now that we have gained knowledge about how search engine works here I have a question for you choose the correct option with respect to working of search engines you need to choose the option for all the steps of how search engines work option

A indexing crawling ranking option b ranking indexing crawling option C crawling indexing ranking and option D crawling ranking and indexing let us know your answer in the comment section below now let's get started by learning how search console actually works search console is a primary source of information that helps search engine Bots to crawl index and rank the pages of your website thereby allowing the website owners to monitor the health of your website all you need to do is integrate search console with your website and get the ownership allow the search engine Bots to crawl

your website and index the pages also don't forget to submit your website sitemap to search engines submitting sitemaps helps the crawler to discover more pages of your website thereby understanding your site's architecture we will know how it is done in the upcoming part of the video also you need to keep an eye on the errors suggested by search console and solve them else it may harm the ranking of your website now let me remind you that all the reports that are generated in search console are based on the activity of the web Crawlers on your

website now let's understand various parameters and terminologies from search console to get a complete understanding of this webmaster tool so without any further delay let's start understanding the basic terminologies of Google search console and how they work and improve your website's Health the first one we have is performance reports Google search console provides two types of performance report search reports and discover reports let's first understand about search reports search reports help to analyze the search performance of your website search performance reports include metrics and dimensions so let's first focus on metrics here there are four

types of metrics as you can see in this image the metrics include the total clicks or I must say clicks Impressions average CTR and average position Impressions provides the data on how many times your websites appears in the search results as you can see here the graph shows the number of times this website has appeared in the search results the next metric we have is clicks clicks provide the data on the total number of times users clicked from the search results and reached your website the graph below shows the number of times the users have

clicked from search results and they have arrived on any page of my website so suppose if here is a number 200 so we can definitely get an idea for very number of dates number of dates provided on the x-axis which shows that how many times the user has clicked and arrived on the website and the number various varies from between like 200 200 250 300 and in between 250 to 300. and the next metric we have is average CTR average CTR or click-through rate is the percentage of Impressions that results in clicks in the same

manner the graph below shows or the average CTR for various different dates the next metric we have is average position the average position represents the data about the average position of the sites in the search results it is possible that your website is ranking today at number one position so it may rank tomorrow at 3 some other day at 4 some other day at 9 or 10 and again it may rank to the one so this data actually provides the detail about the average position which your website frequently ranks at so that is if it

is ranking at one two and three in between one two and three positions so the average position may be two now understanding about the dimensions dimensions are the data attribute that defines who did something on your site or from where is the list of dimensions on which the dimension performance reports are generated that is countries Pages queries devices search appearance and dates the dimension country suggests the country from which the search came as you can see here from the left column you can get the list of number of countries from the right side you can

get the idea about the clicks impression ctrn position that is all the metrics related to that query uh from which the search came from or from that location or whatever the activity has happened from that location next we have is the dimensions pages Pages show the pages clicked by user or a page that is viewed on a search so this this actually you get the reports from the search console in the form of the links where you get the link which is the exact page that is viewed on the search if there exists duplicate pages

on the site then only one canonical page or canonical link will be displayed by the search engines out of the number of duplicate pages so basically canonical links are those links uh like if there are suppose there is a one original page and there are two three duplicate page of the same page so what happens uh the original page gains the canonical link and uh this page has more value than the duplicate pages so whenever the search engine will crawl your website all the duplicate pages may be ignored and all its uh link juice or

link Equity or anything will be uh completely taken for the original page uh moving ahead to queries queries provide the query string that users search on the Google search console so Suppose there is a website which is suppose uh let's talk about the simply learn website so suppose a user may add as Java course and simply learn websites appears at second or third position so this query say suppose user clicks on the website and reaches the website this query Java course on simply learn or Java course will add in the search console showing that the

user has reached to your website using this query Java course and again all the list of the queries appears towards the left and all the matrixes for that query like clicks impression CTR and its average position is appeared towards the right in the search console now talking about the search appearance search appearance helps in grouping the data as per the search result type or by the feature so you can get here the number of search appearance and again the same metrics as with respect back to the search appearance criteria next let's move towards the dates

dates groups of data as per the dates according to the public time zones now let's have a look over the Discover performance report now here you must be thinking about how the search is different from discover yes search and discover follow different approaches users enter a query to find a required information with search whereas discover shows the content based on what result will be best match for your query as per the Google's automated system now coming to the Discover performance report as per Google's guidelines discover performance reports are visible only if your website has a

minimum threshold of impressions in discover now moving to another important parameter of search console which is URL inspection URL inspection is an interesting tool in the search console this tool allows you to inspect whether the URL is indexable or not some main functions of this tool includes checking the current status of the URL inspecting live URLs requesting indexing for a URL viewing Pages rendered version viewing crawl Pages viewing tested Pages Etc in order to check the index status of URL open the URL inspection tool and add the complete URL for which we need to know

its indexing status now to understand the results check the present status if it shows that URL is on Google as you can see in the screen this means that URL qualifies Google's criteria and is eligible to appear in search results if it shows URL is not on Google then the URL does not qualify the Google's criteria and is not eligible to appear in search results you can check more details like URL Discovery crawl and indexing information from the page availability tab click on the crawl page to see the information about the HTTP request and response

if you find that the link is disabled just hover over the page to check the reason now coming to the live URL test it is helpful to test the live URL and check if it is capable of being indexed it proves helpful when you update your page and want to compare it with its latest indexed version just to bring it to your notice a live test will only confirm whether the Google crawler can access your page for indexing but it doesn't assure that your page will be included in the Google index all together with the

help of index coverage report one can find the list of URLs which includes the URLs Google has found on your website the URLs that have been indexed and identify if any indexing problem have occurred next we move ahead to understand about the site Maps a site map is the file that contains all the information of pages on your website this helps search engine crawlers to crawl your website and understand your website structure and helps them to index the pages more efficiently more the crawler indexes your pages higher the chances for the pages of your website

to appear in the search results with the help of site maps you can provide information about various contents like Pages videos images Etc as you can understand a site map plays an important role in indexing process you must be curious to know how we can create and submit a sitemap to search engines before we understand this process make sure that all pages of your website are linked in an appropriate manner with each other thereby maintaining a healthy site structure a site map can be created in XML format RSS format or in text format it can

be auto-generated or created manually as well most commonly used sitemap is XML following is an example of an XML site map this is the simplest version of the site map that we are representing here you can submit a site map to the sitemap reports in the search console however sitemaps can also be submitted through robots.txt file let's understand about robots.txt file so let's understand the robots.txt file in short robots.txt file notifies the web Crawlers about the URLs that they can access on the website as there are lots of search engines there exists different web crawlers

thus there is a possibility that some web crawlers may not obey the instructions from the robots.txt file it is necessary to know how to use the proper syntax as different crawlers understand syntax differently thus there are chances that some web crawlers might fail to understand the instructions from the robots.txt file a page can be indexed even if it is disallowed from the robots.txt file if it is linked to other site next let's know what enhancement reports are all the rich results status reports are displayed under the enhancement tab so let's know more about rich results

these type of results are known as Rich results in serps so basically Rich results can be any search results other than the traditional Blue Links for example image results carousels Etc you can check whether the pages from your website support Rich results or not using the rich result test tool provided by Google Developers now understanding the rich results status report the enhancement tab contains separate reports for Rich result type some rich results report types are listed below that are breadcrumbs education q a event FAQ fact check guided recipe how to image license job posting learning

video review Snippets Etc Rich results status reports consist of summary page and Details page the summary page mainly consists of Errors useful items found on your website warnings Etc The Details page consists of the information about the issues when it was detected item type when was the page last crawled Etc before we understand how to fix error in search console it is important to understand the status of each page as reported by search console each page has any of the following status error warning excluded and valid if the status of the page is valid it

means the page has successfully indexed the status of the page appears to be excluded if one purposefully wants the page not to be indexed or a page is blocked by robots.txt file for example setting the meta tag to no index warnings majorly appears when the page of your website is indexed but there are some issues with the page which needs your attention and have to be resolved as soon as possible if the page status is error then there is a need to pay a detailed attention over the issues in the page as these issues prevent

the page from getting indexed let's discuss about the errors in detail and how we can fix them some popular errors from the search console are listed below that is the redirect error server error submitted URLs blocked by robots.txt URL marked as no index submitted URL is a soft poor not for 4 Note 4 or page not found error so let's first know about the redirect error some redirect error that search console shows up are the redirect chain that was too long redirect true redirect URL that exits maximum URL length and bad or empty URL in

the redirect chain so all these error means that the redirections are not working properly and so there is a need to fix them so suppose for example you have added too many redirects from one page to another so in this scenario search engine Bots find it a waste of time to crawl again and again to the same redirections and at that time the search engine crawlers or search engine boards ignore those URLs or redirections so in such cases you need to fix those redirection to a single URL the next we have is server error the

server returns 5xx error when it fails to fulfill a valid request this error mainly conveys that something is wrong with your website server all you need to do is reach out to your hosting services and inform them about the issue and make sure it gets resolved as soon as possible the next one we have is submitted URL blocked by robots.txt to resolve this issue you need to remove the line of code from the robot.txt file that restricts Google from crawling the respective page the next we have is URL marked as no index when a URL

is marked as no index it sends the signal to crawlers that this page is not meant to be crawled or this page is not meant to be indexed if you want this page to be indexed check the metadata and remove the no index attribute to allow the Crawlers to crawl the URL now let's understand about the error submitted URL is a soft 404 and 404 or page not found error whenever a web page load server returns a 200 signal showing the success status code soft4 Note 4 is a condition in which server returns 200 success

status code and the page not exist error simultaneously this is considered to be a bad user experience this error can be solved simply by redirecting this page to any relevant URL or the home page of the website talking about 404 or page not found error this error mainly occurs when you delete the page from your website but the URL of the page still exists in the site map this error can be solved by simply removing the URL or removing the four not four URL from the site map or redirecting the URL to a new page

this will help to avoid the further errors in near future we will have a detailed look at other 4xx errors in the upcoming videos now that we are aware of the basics of search console let's dive deeper to know some stats regarding the search console in the SEO industry when you're thinking of adding a business online your website should fulfill all the technical SEO needs which can be achieved by Google search console thus there is a huge demand in SEO industry for the candidates having strong knowledge of Google search console the average salary of an

SEO expert with the Google search console skills in US is 53 000 dollars to seventy eight thousand dollars per annum and that in India is 2 lakh 76 000 per annum some biggies in the SEO industry looking for this skill sets include Accenture Amazon people group Eton Etc so let me know your dream company to work as an SEO expert in the comment section below what we're going to cover today I'm going to start out with how to set up a Google analytics account and so we're going to talk about everything that entails including creating

your Google analytics account we're going to talk about setting up a property in your account and what a property is we're going to talk about setting up a reporting view in your property and we're going to talk about installing the tracking code so those are the series of steps we're going to go through today in terms of setting up a Google analytics account so let's get right to it and so really the Bruin prerequisite here when it comes to setting up a Google analytics account is to have a Google login and ID so when you

actually go to Google analytics you need to be able to sign up or sign in and so once you actually sign in then you're going to go walk through a series of steps but really that's really all you need to get the account going is a Google ID and login so if you have a Gmail account or an other email account that you use for other Google products then you're good to go that's all you need to do so when you actually go to sign up for Google analytics you're going to be asked to set

up a new account and these are the series of steps you're going to walk through or go through to set up a new Google Analytics account so you're going to choose an account name and then you're going to choose a property name okay so the account name can be anything you want it to be to name your company your name whatever you want to name it the property name is really the website name so what website are we talking about so here I'm going to set up a fictitious website name for now it's called demo

simply learn so the URL for this website demo simply learn is going to be demo.simplylearn.com so that's the property when we talk about properties in analytics we're really talking about what website sites we want to measure and then you're going to be asked to choose an industry category and so for simply learn we're in jobs and education but you have a number of different industries that you could choose from this is important go ahead and choose the most relevant industry that your particular business is associated with okay and I'm going to talk about why that's

important here in a minute and then you're going to choose your time zone and the time zone is also important because that's when the day starts in analytics then the day ends based on that time zone so the data that Google analytics collects starts and ends with that time zone so very important to choose the time zone your business is located in okay and then you have some additional options here okay so you have some settings and so the first setting is to allow Google products and services so if you opt into this then basically

what Google's going to do is share some product services with you via email I would go ahead and opt into that that's of course recommended by Google it doesn't hurt to hear from Google on related products and services that may enhance your business the second is benchmarking so benchmarking to me is something you should opt into so going back to that industry and category we chose jobs and education so by opting into benchmarking basically what Google's going to do is share your data that it collects on your website in this case demo.simplylearn.com it's going to

share that data anonymously with others in the industry in this case jobs and education and because you've opted in it's going to do the same exact thing for you it's going to share Anonymous data on other websites in the same industry and the benefit of that is we get to see what other websites or how other website are performing compared to ours what's the Benchmark in our industry and so the benchmarking to me is important and I'm gonna go over that in a few minutes when we go over the different reports but to me I

would always opt into benchmarking because this is the only report Google provides in analytics about how others in your industry is performing versus your website okay so it's a way to compare your website performance against others in the same industry the other options here technical support and account specialist I would also recommend you opt into those because then it allows you to basically Google allow Google access to your account and they'll be able to help you if you occur or run into any issues so these are the options in setting up a Google analytics account

it's very simple very easy to do you're just entering in a few Fields note that we talking about a website right now so I'm talking about demo.com definitely learn.com but just know that if you want to track a mobile app Google analytics will allow you to do that as well you just choose the option mobile app so we're tracking a website we want to know how users behave when they get to my website and that's what Google analytics is going to allow us to measure and look at we just need to do a couple more

steps in the process so once we fill out these fields here we're going to click get tracking ID now I'm going to accept the terms of service I'm going to accept another terms and service in relation to data protection I'm going to click accept once I accept I'm going to be able to get some tracking code the tracking ID is the ID associated with your account and so this number is going to be associated with your account so your account ID starts with UA and it's going to be this number here now the dash one

is the property you set up so in this case I set up demo.simplylearn.com if I wanted to track multiple websites under that same account then I can certainly set up multiple properties just know that every property I set up in that account is going to have a dash 1-2-3-4 Etc depending on how many properties I set up so by default I set up one property so my first property ID is dash one if I set up a second property the same account number it's just gonna have a dash too and that's important because that ID

that account and property ID is going to be associated with that particular property or website so again once you finish setting up the account settings then you're going to be asked to add some tracking code to your site and that tracking code is going to be related to the account and the property so notice my tracking ID up here notice is the tracking ID and the snippet code now this snip and a code needs to go on every page of your website that you want to track and you don't have to put it on every

page but if you want to track website behavior on every page or website then it needs to go on every page of your website so if you're using a you know platform like Drupal or Joomla or even more popular platform like WordPress adding the tracking code site-wide is as easy as maybe adding a Google analytics plugin to Wordpress for example and then just simply plug in in the ID now there's an alternative to adding the Google analytics tracking code to your site and that's Google tag manager so Google tag manager is the way I would

recommend going so if you're not familiar with Google tag manager I would recommend watching the YouTube video we have on Google tag manager you can just go to YouTube Type in simply learn Google tag manager and this will give you a nice overview of you know what Google tag manager is and how it works but basically this is the way I would go and I would recommend that in addition having Google analytics you set up a Google tag manager account and then that way you can put the tracking code in Google tag manager so if

I go to Google tag manager and I just go into an account on tag manager I can just simply put in the Google analytics ID right into tag manager and so if I have it in tag manager then tag manager is going to be the place that holds the code and fires page view when somebody comes to my website so that way I don't have to add the tracking code to my website if I do it in tag manager so that's the recommended method for me is to add the Google analytics ID associated with tag

manager if you can assign associated with tag manager then that's the easier route to go versus putting code on your website okay so again take a look at the video we have on YouTube for Google tag manager that's the route I would go now once you do get the tracking code on your website whether that be through Google tag manager or through a plug-in or you know just simply adding the script to your site to pages on your site then what's going to happen is you're going to start collecting data so that's ideally the way

it works you need to add this code to your website now if you're not ready to do that and you simply want to basically understand how Google analytics works then I would recommend getting access to Google analytics demo account and so if you just type in and search Google analytics demo account basically what you're going to do you're going to choose the first listing there and you're going to go to demo account so if you have a Google and analytics or Google login then all you need to do is click on access demo account and

so what Google is going to do is put this demo account into your account and so it's going to look something like this so if I click on demo account here it's going to add to my Google analytics account so I'm going to have then access to the demo account from Google and Google analytics so I would recommend going this route here if you're not familiar or you're not sure what you're getting yourself into so think of the demo account as kind of a test drive you're test driving Google analytics before you even add any

code to your website so again all you need is a Google account and if you have a Google account and you add the demo account to your Google analytics account you're going to be able to see how analytics works okay and so that's what I would also recommend so if you're not ready to start adding code to your website then what you can do is just just simply add the demo account and then once you add the demo account you're free to peruse around Google analytics to see the different types of reports it has to

offer now when you do actually set up a Google analytics account you're going to have some settings that you're going to want to pay attention to so when you set up the account you have the account name and then you have a property so under each property you have by default you're going to have one View and so here you can see this view here so if we look at the account we set up we set up a demo simply learn account property is demos simply learned so that's associated with the website we're going to

track and then again by default under each property you're going to have a view and so by default the name of the view is going to be called all website data and so in that view is where all your analytics data is going to be stored so you can see my screen here there's a lot of different settings you have you have settings means under the account you have settings under the property and you have settings under the view so we're going to talk more about these settings and future webinars for advanced Google analytics users

but for now know that there's a bunch of settings that you have that you can play around with when it comes to Google analytics anything from adding users to your Google analytics account your Google analytics property or view you can actually set up goals you can set up filters you can set up segments you can link up Google ads you can you know set up remarketing list there's a lot you can do in terms of the settings as it relates to Google analytics but so know those settings are there they're located right down here in

this little sprocket icon that's the admin icon so if you need to get to these settings at any time you could simply just click on the sprocket or the admin icon and then you'll be prompted to choose any one of these settings here that you want to edit or alter so now let's take a look at some Google analytics reports so once you've actually set up your account you have a number of different reports that you have available to you in Google analytics so we're going to take a look at you know customized reports we're

going to look at real time audience reports acquisition behavior and conversion so these are all the different reporting buckets if you will that you have available to you in Google analytics so if I'm an admin and I'm looking at the Google demo account let's start out by looking at real time so if I click on the real time report and I just click on overview so basically what this is going to do is show me at this point in time how many users I actually have active on the website okay so that's why they call

it real time reporting because it allows you to see the behavior of users who are currently on your website and so this is the overview report under real time and you can see here I can see that 79 percent of my users are coming from desktop 18 20 are coming from mobile and then approximately three percent are coming from tablet here I can see how they actually came to the website so this is the referring Source if they came from say search or social I can see the source there and I can see what pages

they're active on and then here I could see what locations where they're located and so if I want to see a breakdown of everything in the overview I can certainly do that if I go to locations under real time I could see a majority of my users are coming from the United States okay where are they coming from I'll just click on traffic sources and here I could see the different sources and mediums medium is the means in which the traffic was driven so if it's Google it's either paid search or organic search so I

can see here it's organic then I can actually see what contents they're looking at on my website so I could see currently I have three active users on the home page two active users on the Google's women's white t page so forth and so on now most importantly if you have a vent tracking setup so if you're taking a look at our Google tag manager webinar you know that you could set up event tracking in Google analytics to measure engagement on your website whether that be a form submission or somebody clicking on the play button

of a video so if I click on events I'll be able to see what events are firing so here I can see we have event tracking set up and I can see how many different events are firing on my website in real time so here I can see e-commerce somebody clicking on the quick view click some a couple of users clicking on add to cart a couple of users clicking on the promotion click and as these events are fired you're going to be able to see them highlighted so if something gets fired it's going to

get highlighted and I could see that these are the current events that I have currently firing on the website and that's what's currently fire now if I want to look at the events that have happened in the last 30 minutes I could just click on this link here last 30 minutes and it's going to give me an overview of the events that have happened over the past 30 minutes okay so that's event tracking and then more importantly we can also look at what conversions are happening in real time just by clicking on conversions and so

now I can see I had one active user who entered the checkout so that's goal number four so in analytics you can have up to 20 goals and so here I can see we have goal number four has already had one active user and so if I look at the last 30 minutes I can see I still have only one goal over the last 30 minutes and that was somebody who entered the checkout so that's real time reporting in summary it just gives you an idea of what's currently happening on your website and so for

me ideally if I'm launching a campaign or let's just say you do a new website redesign and you want to see how users performing and behaving then real time is a good option for you so you could see how things are happening in real time now let's jump down to audience reporting so if I click on audience this is just right underneath real time I'm gonna see a number of different reports available to me under audience and so let's click on the audience overview report so audience reporting basically allows us to get a sense of

who is coming to our website when I say who is coming to our website it doesn't necessarily have to be a specific person in fact Google doesn't allow personally identifiable information in Google analytics personal identifiable information such as a specific name uh social security number credit card information Etc however we could still paint a nice picture on who is coming to our website meaning what country city or state did they come from what language what device did they get to our website from how old were they okay were they male or female or other what

interests do they have what browser did they use so we can paint a nice picture based on all this information that Google analytics is providing us under audience so if I go to audience overview here I can see I have all these different options available to me to get a basic understanding of who is coming to our website so for example I could see a majority of the people coming to our website speak English and are from the United States okay in fact that's rep represents 61 percent of the users and so Google analytics does

a great job of giving me an overall percentage so if I have a hundred percent of the users I could see 61 percent of those users represented English speaking users from the United States seven percent represented English-speaking users from Great Britain and so when it comes to analytics we have users and users are broken down into two categories they're either returning or they're new so when you add the Google analytics tracking script to your website what's gonna happen is if a user or when a user goes to your website they're going to get cookied if

it's the first time they've been to your website what Google analytics is going to do is store a cookie in the browser so when that same user comes back another day in the same browser analytics is going to recognize that that cookie is in the browser and so then analytics is going to categorize that user as a returning user okay so that's how analytics is able to differentiate new versus returning so if that user doesn't have a cookie in the browser then analytics is going to recognize that store the cookie and then count that user

as a new user and so when you're looking at analytics you're going to be able to see a breakdown of new versus returning so here I can see over three quarters of my traffic over the past week here I can see April 6 through April 12th three over three quarters are new users to the website here I could see about 23 24 are returning users okay so I can get a good breakdown of what type of users are coming am I driving new traffic am I driving traffic that's been to my website before what language

are they speaking okay I can also paint a bigger picture how old are they are they what gender are they do they come from mobile so let's take a look at some of these different reports under audience and so if I skip down now to demographics I can click on overview and when that report loads I can see now under demographics overview I can see the breakout of age ranges and so here I can see the majority of the traffic coming to my site again over the past week now if I want to change this

date range I could simply do that I can change the date range just by clicking on the date range and then maybe going say the last 30 days and I can even compare it to the previous period or the previous year I'm going to choose the last 30 days I'm going to click apply now I'm looking at data over the last 30 days and again you can change the date range to any range you want you can only go back as far as when you actually created the Google analytics account you can't go prior to

that so here I'm looking at the last 30 days and I can see almost 47 of my you users were in their age range of 25 to 34. now when it comes to gender I can say 66 percent represent males so I can get a breakout of gender and age as well as interest and click on interest and look at the overview there and see what the interest is of the users who are coming to my site based on in-market segments or Affinity I can also choose language and location so if I want to know

exactly where my users are located when they're coming to my website I can click on location and here I can get a breakout 43 of the users of the last 30 days were from the United States more importantly I can align my audience with goals and we'll talk about goals here in a minute but here I can see if I have an e-commerce website I can see of those 43 0.29 percent of those converted or purchase something and that equates to 94 transactions so I can get a good sense of not only how many users

are coming from a specific country but are those users converting if I click on mobile and mobile to me is one of those reports I tend to spend a bit of time on because I want to know what devices users are coming to my website and so for my website here or this is the Google demo website I can see mobile represents approximately 27 of the traffic so desktop still represents a majority of the traffic so for you you want to keep an eye on mobile because mobile is definitely a majority of what people use

nowadays that's how people start their day that's how they transact Via Mobile whether that's purchasing something communicating or searching it all starts with mobile so you want to keep an eye on mobile and more importantly you want to keep an eye on Behavior so Google analytics is telling me that yes I have approximately 27 percent of my traffic of the last 30 days came from mobile how are they interacting with my website so if I look across this report I'm going to be able to see different metrics so if I'm measuring specific metrics against my

dimension in this case the dimension is what we're measuring and in this example we're measuring mobile I can see that the bounce rate is approximately 48 and bounce rate means that if a user in this case for mobile landed on a page they left the site without going any further so they consider it a bounce if they don't go to another page if they leave the site from the page they landed on and they don't go any further that's considered a bounce so bounce rate is the percentage of people who come to the site and

leave the site without going any further so in this case we have 48 bounce rate that's almost half of our users who come from mobile leave the website from the page they landed on so is that good is that bad well it's open to interpretation is definitely subjective but you want to keep the bounce rate as low as possible you want to keep people on your site especially if you have an e-commerce website you want people who come to your website to purchase and so here we could see 48 mobile and desktop it's a little

bit lower at 41 percent now if I look a little bit further at engagement I can see how many pages on average do mobile users look at so versus desktop it's a little bit lower you can see 3.86 on desktop it's 4.5 now if I look a little bit further in engagement I want to be able to measure how long among somebody from mobile stays on the website if they're bouncing at 48 but they're also looking at 3.8 Pages 3.9 almost four pages per session then that means in this report analytics is telling me they're

spending about two minutes on the site and interestingly enough I can see that mobile of the last 30 days had more transactions so 51 transactions versus 34 transactions from desktop and interestingly enough the e-commerce conversion rate is at 0.29 percent that's higher than desktop at .07 it's lower than tablet but it's higher than desktop and mobile has the most transactions and since they have the most transactions they have the most Revenue at 2 380. so yes the engagement isn't exactly as great as it is this desktop but we can see that people are still purchasing

with their mobile devices so something to keep an eye on and mobile is something I definitely look at in fact since it's such an important report one thing you can do in analytics is if you actually like a report and you think you're going to look at that report multiple times then you can simply just go ahead and click save at the top here so if I click save I'm going to enter a name for this report I'm just going to call it mobile report and click OK and then what's going to happen is it's

going to be located under save reports and save reports is located under customization customization is located above real time okay so if I close that up you can see audience real time customization if I click on customization if I click on Save reports I should be able to see my save report here and I do so here I can see mobile report if I click on it I can simply go to the report I was looking at before I saved it so save reports to me is a good feature in analytics because it allows you

to quickly access a report that you've saved in the past so let's take a look at one more report under audience and let's go to benchmarking so remember when we're setting up our analytics account we had the option to opt into benchmarking and I recommended you do so and so if you did I actually opt into benchmarking then you're going to be able to see how your site compares to others in the same industry so if I click on benchmarking and then click on channels what I'm actually able to do now is compare my website

with others in the same industry so if I go back to say jobs and education and I choose education all education as my industry vertical I should be able to see websites that are in the same particular industry and how I compare with those websites so I'm choosing all country trees I can narrow that down if I wanted to I can just search for the United States I can choose a specific State and then I can choose a particular site size so here I'm choosing sites by daily session so these are sites that have an

average of 5 000 to almost 10 000 sessions a day and so in this vertical education in the United States sites that have five thousand to 9999 sessions per day that means that they're approximately 310 web properties contributing to this report okay based on this criteria I chose now if my site is similar meaning if I'm in the United States if I'm in education and I'm receiving 5 000 to 9 999 sessions per day then I'm able to compare my site against 310 other websites now Google's sharing this data anonymously from the other websites and

they're doing the same with your website to those particular websites benchmarking reports okay so it's a shared data anonymously in particular Industries and verticals and so now I'm looking at a channel report so if I want to see how I compare to others in my industry then I can go ahead and see by channel for example in my driving as much traffic as others in my industry and you can see I'm not in fact I'm 76 77 percent worse in terms of the amount of traffic being driven from organic search so anything in red is

going to show as a negative result a negative comparison whereas something in green is a positive comparison so if I look at engagement I can see that I might not be driving as much traffic but I can see that the pages per session are better than the side average or the industry average I can see if I go over again again looking just at organic search I can see the bounce rate is better than the industry average so the channel report under benchmarking allows you to measure how you compare to others in your industry and

you could do so by looking at location and devices so if you opted into benchmarking when you set up your account then you'll be able to compare your website against others in your industry in your country region and based on the size of your website in terms of how many visitors or sessions you're getting per day so let's go from audience to acquisition so if audience is who is coming to your website acquisition allows us to see how the traffic was driven to your website so how do these users get to our website and so

under acquisition if we click on overview we'll be able to see an overview of how users whether they're returning are new came to our website and so what what analytics does by default is they have a number of default channels and when we say channels we mean analytics is grouping different channels based on how users got to your website meaning how did users get to our websites they come via organic search meaning do they type something into Google and find you in the organic listing analytics also groups users based on whether they came to your

site directly meaning did they type in the URL directly into the browser or did they bookmark your website and come back via the bookmark so they're grouping users under direct they also group users under referral meaning do they come from another website they group users by social do they come from a social media platform like Twitter or Facebook if you're running paid search meaning if you're running paid search on say Google then do they come from Paid search ads now if you're running display ads on say Google's Network Google's Display Network that's a default channel

so analytics for group users there so if they don't recognize a channel then they're going to group it as others so by default Google analytics groups users and how they came to your website via these default channels and so I can see how many users came to the site from each Channel now if I want to drill down on this report I can click on all traffic and then if I click on all traffic I can go to channels I can look specifically at the channels report and so now I can see organic search again

over the last 30 days is the number one channel driving traffic and they represent approximately again you can see this number here in parentheses next to the raw number of users I can see that number's about 56 percent so 56 percent of my traffic over the last 30 days came from organic search and so those those are the number of users again as a metric you're also going to have sessions and you'll see sessions a lot as a metric so users are broken down between new and returning so every time a new or returning user

comes to the website basically what they're doing is initiating a session so you can have a user who can come back multiple times every time they come back to the website it's a session so session is simply the start of somebody coming to your website and the session ends when they leave the website and so just like we looked at with the audience reports when it came to mobile we can also look at engagement by channel so just like mobile we looked at bounce rate pages per session average session duration we can do the same

thing here with our Channel report more importantly in addition to behavior we can see conversions and since we're running it Commerce platform we could see what the conversion rate is by channel so organic search did drive the most traffic and they did have the most transactions over the last 30 days and the conversion rate in this case is 0.17 okay so how Google determines the conversion rate they basically take the number of transactions and divide that by sessions so that means that over the last 30 days organic search drove 38 123 sessions and of those

38 000 123 64 actually turned into a transaction which equates to 0.17 which also equates to 3 000 in Revenue so I'm able to determine not only how users are getting to my website by looking at the channel report I can actually see if they're engaging and if they are converting and notice when you look at a report in analytics you can look at by Channel you'll also get a summary so here I can see a summary or a total based on my date range so I could see over the last 30 days I've had

54 000 users 49 000 of them were new okay that meant that out of those 54 000 users I had 70 000 sessions I could see my average bounce rate was 43 percent the pages per session were just over four and the average session duration how long did somebody stay on my website on average about two minutes and 55 seconds the average conversion rate was 0.14 and I had a total of 97 transactions totaling fifty five hundred dollars okay and that's all over the last 30 days so any report you look at in analytics is

going to have a summary and note that any report you look at in analytics is going to allow you to save it so if it's a report you think you're gonna go back and look at at a future day then you simply just have to click on the save button conversely if you don't want to save it you can simply just export it so you can export it as a PDF if I click on PDF it's going to allow me to export that as a PDF now you have other options available to you as well

you can do a Google sheet you can export it as an Excel or you can export it as a common delimited file so here you can see I can save it as a PDF if I want to and if I click OK it's going to save to my desktop or location of my choosing and then I can go back and look at it in that format at a later time so that's the export feature available to you in analytics again if you you could save it as well or you can export it okay some other

reports under acquisition if you're running Google ads note that you can connect Google ads to analytics and this is key because now I can see how many people are coming from from Google ads to my website and are they converting now this is important because with Google ads I'm actually paying for the click so you can see here I'm running a report based on campaign data so I could see what campaigns are driving traffic how much a pain per click and you can see on average I'm paying 34 cents per click and then more importantly

I want to be able to see if they're converting so you can see I've spent 810 dollars over the last 30 days and received 858 dollars in Revenue so you want to make sure that you link up your Google ads account to your Google analytics account for this very reason you want to be able to see how your Google ads campaigns perform once the users get to your website and so I want to see if they're engaging and I want to see if they're converting so they're all sorts of reports under Google ads so you

can look at it by key words by search queries by hour of the day if you're running display campaigns you can look at display targeting says all sorts of reports under Google ads you just have to link it up and you link it up under the admin now there are other reports that you can look at so if I go to campaigns I can look at all campaigns so if you're running all sorts of different types of campaigns whether that be on Facebook whether it be email whether that be you know other types of advertising

let's just say Twitter or Instagram you're going to be able to see those campaigns here and that's under all campaigns and again you'll be able to see the campaign name and you'll be able to see metrics associated with those campaigns and more importantly you'll be able to see your e-commerce if you're running e-commerce platform or if you have goals set up so you'll be able to look at how your campaigns are not one not only driving traffic but two are they converting screen let's go from acquisition reporting to behavior so Behavior reports are going to

actually show you how users behaved once they got to your website once they landed on a page on your website how did they behave so when we looked at audience we got a sense of who is coming with acquisition we get a sense of how the traffic got to our website did they come from organic direct social Etc the behavior reports allow us to actually measure how that traffic behaved once they landed on a page on our website and so if I go to overview under Behavior now I'm looking at this graph here it's showing

me how many pages I've had and a page view is simply once a page is viewed it's counted as a page view so if a user comes to my site they're initiating a session and if they look at a page then that page is going to have a page view okay so a user can look at a page multiple times in a session and every time they look at that page it's going to count as a page view so here I can see in this graph how many pages I've had again over the last 30

days and if I look further at my overview report I can see the specific pages and how many pages they've had and I can also look at some other metrics okay the average bounce rate the average time on page I can look at the exit rate which means how many people actually exited or the percentage of people who exited from that page so I can dig deeper into my behavior reporting so if I click on site content and I click on all pages then I'm going to look at a report by Page this is my

Dimension this is what I'm measuring my page and now I can see how many page views each page had over the last 30 days now note you also have something called unique page views so unique page use is equivalent to one per session in other words if a user came to my site and looked at the home page then the home page is going to have one unique page view and one page view now if the user in that same session looks at other Pages then every page that user looks at it's going to have

one unique page view however if the user goes back to another to the same page in the same session then it's still going to be one unique page view but in this case the home page if they look at the home page a second time then the home page is going to have two page views if they look at the home page five times in one session then the home page is gonna have five total page views and one unique page view okay so that's why unique pages is equivalent to one per session where pages

is an accumulation of how many times the page was viewed in the same session so in other words you're always going to have more page views than unique pages okay so this gives me a sense of how my pages performed so again I can look at total page views and then engagement so ideally what you want to do with a report like this is if a user is not engaging on the page then that should tell you something about the page itself if they're not engaging if the bounce rate's high if the time on page

is low if the exit percentage of exit rate is high then you probably want to do something with that page now these are all pages but if I jump down to landing pages my landing page report is showing me how many people actually landed on that page and so here I can see under my landing page report I can see the home page had 36 000 17 sessions in the last 30 days that's how many people landed on the home page so here I can see 71 percent were news sessions meaning that I had a

lot of new users who landed on the home page in fact 25 000 or 52 percent of the people who landed on the home page were new I could see the bounce rates about 42 percent but of those who didn't bounce they went on to look at about 4.5 pages per session and spent about three minutes on the site and the one thing I like about the landing page report is I can also see whether that particular page in this case the home page did it help contribute to a goal or conversion and in this

case I can see of those 36 000 sessions I had 22 transactions totaling 1200 in revenue and that's an e-commerce conversion rate of 0.06 percent so the home page over the last 30 days contributed to 0.06 percent of the revenue so this gives you an idea of when somebody lands on your website and they land on a page is that page helping to move that person along meaning are they not bouncing and is that page helping to move people towards converting and so that's what the landing page in effect allows us to measure is the

engagement and in this case we're measuring transactions okay so analytics also gives us some other reports under Behavior including site speed so site speed to me is an important report to look at just like the mobile report to me site speed is important because what Google analytics does is they take a sampling of pages and in this case you can see over the last 30 days they sampled 2835 page views and of that sample they came back and said the average page load time is about four seconds now ideally you want to keep it as

quick as possible I would say even under three seconds okay now there are other factors involved with page load time the browser you're using the country that you're actually browsing that page from mine know how to have the best infrastructure you may not even be on the best internet Network meaning you're on a cell network or the Wi-Fi is not that great or you can be on a page that just has a lot of images or a lot of code that may slow it down so there are other factors involved and so what Google analytics

does is show you what those factors are so here I can see by browser with the average load time is if I want to look at Country I could see what country is contributing to the load time now the great thing about the site speed report is if I go to speed suggestions okay what speed suggestions is going to do is it's going to show me the page load Time by Page and then it's actually going to provide a link where I can actually click on to get suggestions on increasing the page load time so

for example I can look at this particular page here this Google redesign shop by brand slash YouTube page line number five if I look at line number five I can see the average load time of this page is eight seconds almost nine seconds okay that's an eternity to some people now notice this link next to it so Google's recommending seven total suggestions so if I click on seven total what it's actually gonna do it's gonna open up a new window and it's going to open up another Google report called page speed insights and Page speed

insights is going to give me some information about what I can do to create correct correct the page load of that particular page so look at the site speed report it's important because there is a correlation between site speed or page load time and user behavior of that page and there's also correlation between page load time and a page ranking organically on search so page load time is very important it's so important that I'm even going to save it so I'm going to click save and click on speed site speed suggestions as my name and

click OK and now that report is going to be saved under customization under save reports let's jump from Behavior to conversions now conversion reporting is arguably the most important section in in Google analytics because what the conversions reporting allows us to do is see how people are converting or if they're not converting on our website and so in Google analytics we have the opportunity to set up goals now you have the opportunity to set up 20 goals in your Google analytics View and so to set up a goal okay so you're going to click on

admin and Under The View you're going to see goals and so if you don't even have goals the first step is to create goals and so you have four different goal types in analytics so you have pages session so how many pages per session is so if your goal is set to say three or two if somebody actually looked at two or three pages per session it's going to count as a goal okay so if I look here I could see I have pages per session set at 10. so that means that if a user

came to the site looked at more than 10 pages per session then it's going to count as a goal another goal type is destination so destination means that if somebody actually went to a specific page then it's going to count as a goal and in this case I can see here that the goal is set to this particular page here and so when somebody actually lands on that page it's going to count as a goal now there are two other goal ties we can look at one is duration so just like pages per session in

our previous example is somebody looked at 10 pages per session it's going to count as a goal with duration it's based on time time so in this particular case if you set up a duration goal and the duration is set to say one minute and 30 seconds then that means if a user comes to my website and they spend at least one minute and 30 seconds then it's going to count as a goal okay and then the fourth type of goal in Google analytics is an event based goal so when you set up event tracking

you could turn that event into a goal so if somebody clicks on say the submit button of a form you can turn that event into a goal so here you can see the category equals contact form so you can always verify if a goal works just by clicking on verify this goal and in this case this event is turned into a goal so anytime somebody fires this event it's going to count as a goal so you have four different goal types in Google analytics you have pages per session destination event and duration and so so

once you've set up a goal then you can measure goals under conversions so now if I look at goals overview I can be able to see how many total goal completions I've had so if I want to look at it by goal I can just choose the goal option here so if I want to look at for example goal 2 engaged users this was the pages per session I can see that I had a conversion rate of 10 meaning that I had 7 000 of all the users that came to the website 7 000 gold

completions meaning 7106 users looked at 10 pages or more on my website and so that's how you want to be able to measure whether users wherever they're coming from whoever they are whatever Pages they look at you want to be able to look at the conversion reports to see if they're actually converting based on the goals you've set up whether that's pages per session duration and destination or event gold conversion tracking reports can help you measure who is actually converting and the great thing about Google analytics here is that I can actually see by segments

so the default segment in a segment is just looking at a specific user set so the default segment is always all users however I can choose a different segment so if I want to choose instead of all users if I want to choose Mobile Traffic I can select Mobile Traffic hit apply so I'm actually now looking at a subset of data I'm looking at mobile traffic so if all the mobile users have come to my site I can see 1400 engaged or looked at 10 pages or more okay and that's a seven percent conversion rate

so the great thing about Google analytics is you have the opportunity to set up four different goal types okay based on those goal types you can go to goals over View and look at the conversion rates of each goal but you can also change the segments of that particular goal to see who exactly converted okay another report I like under conversions is the multi-channel funnel report so if I click on multi-channel funnel basically what this allows me to do is see how different channels work together to convert so remember the channel reporting we looked at

under acquisition here I can see now how different channels work together to drive the conversion so if I look at three channels direct organic and referral I can see all three together drive two percent of the conversions if I look at direct and referral twelve and a half percent if I look at direct and organic 12.24 so I can see how different channels work together and so if I look at top conversion paths as an example I can actually see what channels how how channels work together to drive the conversion so in this example I

can see over the last 30 days that my top channel grouping was direct times two meaning that somebody came to the website directly meaning they typed in the URL in the browser or they bookmarked it and came to the site okay they came the first time but didn't convert but then they came back a second time via direct and then converted so that combination is my top conversion combination of the last 30 days my second best conversion grouping is organic search and direct meaning that a user came to the website via organic search first did

not convert and then came back via direct the second time and converted so basically what analytics does is give credit to the last referral meaning if you came to the website via referral or referring website and converted then the ref referring websites gonna get the credit for the conversion but analytics does a good job of showing you how different channels work together so a channel may drive a lot of traffic like organic search but that traffic may not convert the first time around for a number of different reasons whether it could be brand recognition Price

shopping reading content whatever the case analytics is able to measure if that channel actually did contribute at a later point and in this case we could see organic search drove traffic that didn't convert but that traffic came back a second time via direct and did convert so that's our second best Channel grouping and so the multi-channel funneling Report top conversion pass to me is a good report to look at so you can actually see not only at channels work together but you can see sources and mediums and campaigns and how all that all those different

campaigns and different sources work together to convert so that's just a good report to look at there are so many different reports available in analytics there's so many that we haven't even gotten to yet so my advice if you look at the demo report you can get a feel for each of these reports under each section whether that be audience acquisition Behavior or conversions take a look at these reports see what makes sense to you see what you can use to improve your website performance if you are looking to become an SEO professional then look

no further than simply runs postgraduate program in digital marketing so don't miss out on this opportunity Find the course Link in the description for more information so if I go to Google analytics and I log in okay what I want to do is go down to admin click on admin here and admin will take you to basically a screen that looks like this where you have an account column you have your property column and then you have review column now the The View column is where you're going to go to set up goals okay so

every view in every property has up to 20 goals okay so by default in analytics you're going to have at least one view for your property so if I have a property I'm gonna have at least one view but if I happen to set up multiple views like you see here then I know for every view I set up I have 20 goals to work with so where are those goals so Under The View I'm going to click on goals and now I could see I have 20 at my disposal now you can see here

by clicking on the recording column I can see I have in this particular property this particular view I have five goals that are active so you can use up to 20 but you don't have to have 20 active Okay you can have one active two active my recommendation is at least have one a goal again when you set up a goal you're going to measure everything in analytics against that goal okay so in this case we have five particular goals we're measuring so we have five active out of 20 total so if I don't know

no longer want to use a goal I could simply just turn it off if I want to continue using it just turn it on okay it's that simple you could turn on and off goals so here I already have five set up so if you want to set up a new goal the one thing you need to know in Google analytics is in order to set up a new goal okay you need to have edit access at least the view level I would say at the property level so you want to make sure whoever's in

charge of Google analytics for your organization or if you're in charge okay you simply just want to go to user management and user management you want to make sure the email address you're using to log into to Google analytics has at least edit permissions so you're going to need edit permissions to add new goals so I have edit permissions I'm going to go to goals and I want to set up a new goal but before we jump in and set up a new goal what is it that we want to achieve that's really the question

we want to ask ourselves what is the goal of the website well if it's somebody downloading something okay are you measuring that download via an event okay are they filling out a form submission before they download so if they submit that form submission is that the goal or do you have any Commerce site is somebody purchasing something so these are things you want to ask yourself before you actually set up the goal what is it that I'm trying to measure now when you actually do go to set up a goal you're going to click on

the red CTA button that says new goal so analytics actually has some templates set up for for you okay you can see them here okay if you're somebody's registering online or creating an account or reading review downloading something sharing something you could choose all of these options here what I normally do is choose custom 99 of the time I'm just going to choose custom it doesn't really matter if you use the template or not it's just a template is basically some free pre-filled configurations but my recommendation is always just go with custom you want total

control over how to set up your goal so we already have in mind what type of goal we want to set up so for example if somebody goes to fill out a form submission and they go to a thank you page after that well what's the URL of that thank you page we want to be able to track how many people go to that page because we know if somebody does type in or fill in a form submission and go to that page we know that they filled out the form and so for example if

I go to continue I'm going to name my goal first so I'm going to say thank you page as an example notice analytics is assigning an ID so notice this is goal ID 15. that means that that's the next available goal there are 20 goals available in analytics and so what analytics does is they group goals together so one through five six through ten eleven through fifteen sixteen through twenty into goal sets so for example goal 16 through 20 is part of goal set for and why does Google analytics combine these goals into different goal

sets well because it's easier to measure and look at data by goal sets so for example if I jump into any report here if I go to all traffic channels and I want to measure or how many goals by Channel I can look at it by goal set so if I have goal set one selected then I know any goal I have active in there between goal ID one through goal id5 I'm gonna be able to see those goals and goal set one and now I'm going to be able to measure every goal I have

active and goal set one against the channel so if I choose goal set two whatever goals are active there goal set three Etc notice I don't have any goals 16 through 20 active that earn goal set four therefore I don't have that option available to me so back to admin the bottom left navigation again goals okay we want to measure somebody going to the thank you page we have edit access we're going to choose custom as our goal setup we're going to type in a goal name I'm just going to say thank you okay this

is goal 15. now this is the important part Google analytics has four different goal types destination operation pages per session or screens per session to screens per session is related to mobile because Google analytics measures mobile app activity and then you have an event so we're going to cover all four of these but for the sake of this simple example I'm going to choose destination why because if somebody goes to that thank you page we're going to go ahead and put in the thank you page as the goal the goal URL so for example destination

is my choice I'm going to click continue now this is where I'm gonna put the URL so if my URL is just simply thank you.html I can just go ahead and put thank you.html or if it's just thank you then I can just do thank you depends on the website depends on the URI structure so whatever that URL is that's what you're going to put in and when you're done you can verify it so what Google analytics does is actually will verify over the last seven days if anybody's actually gone to that particular page so

if we click verify we can see zero percent conversion rate so that tells us that if this is the correct URL then we've had zero percent people go to that page this is just an example however if you didn't see a conversion then you might want to make sure you check the URL here that you put in and if you do see a conversion rate then you know it's working so Google analytics actually has options so we're saying thank you is equal to so the destination URL is equal to thank you or thank you.html or

thank you dot ESP or whatever that thank you page is okay you do have options so if you have a long URL you could say it begins with and you could say it begins with say thank you so this is the logic we're going to say hey if anybody goes to a rear URL that begins with thank you thank Canada's a goal or you could say equals two so if anybody goes to a URL that equals two thank you then count it as a goal you have one more option Here regular expression so Google analytics

understands the language of regular Expressions so regular expression expressions are just special characters used to communicate with Google analytics in order to hone in on exactly what you're trying to track so we can always say you know starts with or ends with so we can you know use characters like the dollar sign ends with or begins with so we can always do that so you can use regular Expressions as well if you're familiar with regular Expressions if you're not then you don't have to use them but there are special characters where that you can insert

in that are used as regular expression so if you're not familiar with regular expression don't choose that option you could choose the the other option of equals to or begins with now note that on all three of these options I didn't put the domain so if my domain is Amma Dash foundation.org slash and then thank you I don't need to put the domain because analytics is already knows what domain we're tracking so you don't have to put in the domain here when you're entering in in this case the Google URL so you can omit the

domain so when you put in that URL you know that you have three options to work with and then you always always want to verify that goal URL you always want to verify it because if you see zero percent conversion and in this case of the last seven days then that should tell you something either your goal is not set up correctly or you just don't have any conversions either way you want to double check that now when it comes to the destination URL goal you do have have an option here for funnel so if

I turn on funnel then that means I have the ability to track how people went through my funnel so if I have a cart and I want to be able to check how many people go in and out of the cart then I have the option of adding specific Pages as part of the cart so we could say you know step one which is basically cart we could say step two is billing information that could be slash billing we could see step three is shipping information slash shipping and then step four could be you know

confirm and that could be slash confirmation so whatever your url structure is for your cart and it doesn't necessarily have to be a cart basically all I'm doing is putting a series of steps with URLs as each step and why do I want to do that because I can then track how many people go through my funnel that I've created okay so here I could see this is my funnel that I've created for this particular goal okay and the funnel is only available for the destination URL so the funnels available if you want to see

traffic through the goal okay and how people go through the funnel and where they drop off now you have an option here to make the first step required so if you make that first step required then that means you're measuring the funnel through the first step only now if I turn that off then I'm measuring the funnel through each step meaning that I can measure people as they drop in and out of the funnel where if it's required the first step then I'm only measuring traffic as it enters in the top of the funnel so

you have that option available to you the funnel and then for all goals you do have a value so if somebody did actually convert okay go Google analytics is going to count it as a conversion and you can assign a value so if you're not an e-commerce website then you may want to think about assigning value if you are an e-commerce website then analytics has the ability to track e-commerce revenue for your website so you don't need to add a value but in this case let's just say your non-profit organization and you're collecting donations and

on average over the past year every donation that somebody contributed was equal to five dollars well you can just go ahead and put five dollars in there as the value for that goal so that means that if somebody did go to in this example slash thank you and convert analytics is going to count it as a goal and then assign five dollar value alongside that goal so if you're non-ecommerce if you're say a non-profit like this organization or your B to be and you want to track some value then you have that option there so

with the destination URL goal you have the option of adding a funnel with all goal types you have the option of adding a value all goal types and we're going to go through the rest of them you have the option of verifying that goal so that's the structure of setting up a goal destination URL is just one goal type we're going to talk about the other three goal types because in Google analytics there are four goal types again destination is one of them with destination as you do have the option with all goal types is

you have to be able to choose your logic here so we're going to cover that with the other three but just know when you set up a destination URL goal you have the option of adding a funnel now when you actually do set up a funnel what's going to happen is analytics is going to measure traffic as it goes to the funnel so where do you look for that funnel information Nation well you want to get out of admin you want to go to the left side navigation you want to click on conversions then goals

then funnel visualization So based on the funnel you set up you're going to be able to see traffic as it goes through the funnel so notice on this particular funnel we don't have the first step required why because I could see traffic as it goes in and out of each step of the funnel so let's go through this funnel and see how people react so here I could see the first step is the store front page so over this particular period of time I had 84 sessions enter the storefront page so out of those 84

I can see 21 left the storefront page 63 went on to the next step in the funnel which is the cart page I can then see 24 people went on to the cart page directly and file I've exited the site all together okay so that gave me 87 total and from 87 I saw that 82 went on to the next page for the next step what analytics does is they give you a percentage so in the first step we had 63 move on to the cart page out of 84 that's 75 percent so from the

cart page to the create your account page we had 94 move on so we didn't have anybody enter in the create your account page we didn't have anybody leave to create your account page so if 82 82 create your account and then we have 82 move on to the payment page so that's a hundred percent okay we have one exit so we have 81 that proceeded to beyond the payment page which was purchase so 81 of 82 is 98 and we started with 84. so that gave us plus the 24 that we accumulated along the

way so that gave us a 75 percent funnel conversion rate so 75 percent of the people who entered in the funnel went on to purchase okay so don't be confused with the overall e-commerce conversion rate so 75 is the funnel conversion rate the overall conversion rate for this particular goal is 18.45 over this particular period of time why because that takes into account all sessions that have won to the website so 18 of all traffic went on to convert but those that did go into the final 75 percent converted so that's a look at the

funnel so if you set up a funnel that's what it's going to look like you have the option to measure everything from step one and Beyond or measure as traffic goes in and out of the funnel so the purpose of this is we're going to be able to see where traffic drops off how effective our funnel is what pages we need to address in that funnel okay so that's the whole point of the funnel and the funnel is available with the destination URL goal so if I go back to admin if I go back to

goals Under The View I can actually see what that funnel looks like so here we chose regular expression so this is what the URL is okay you can see our funnel in each of the steps we have set up notice we're using regular Expressions here and then if we verify this goal we could see over the past seven days 19 conversion rate so that tells me something's working in this particular with this particular goal because we do have a conversion rate okay so that's the destination URL goals let's now talk about the other three types

of goals so the next goal type we're going to talk about is pages per session so if you're not sure what type of goal to set up for your website at the very least you should try and set up either duration related goal or pages per session related goal so let's talk about the pages per session so basically what this goal is going to allow us to measure is for example if we set the goal to three pages per session then we're going to be able to measure if how many people went to the site

and looked at three pages per session so let's take a look at that goal so if I open up the goal here I can see three pages per session is what we're naming it so basically what we're asking analytics to do is anything greater than two pages which would be three and Beyond count as a goal so if anybody comes to the site looks at more than two pages three pages or more then it's going to count as a goal and so here we can verify it so if we verified over the last seven days

we could see a 4.12 conversion rate and that tells me that four percent of my traffic over the last seven days looked at at least three pages or more so you're probably asking yourself well what number should I put in for the actual variable so in this case we see two well what you want to do is you want to look at on average let's just say year to day you want to make sure you have statistical significance so you want to look at a period of time so if you go to analytics go to

audience okay and then if you go to overview and if I change my date range to year to date I could see on average right now I have 1.21 pages per session so that's on average so we don't want to make our goal one page we don't want to make our goal two pages we want to make it three so we want to be able to basically measure at a higher rate okay why do we want to measure at a higher rate because if 1.21 is the average then two pages per session really isn't moving

the needle so what we really want to do is get people to stay on the site longer look at Pages more during their session so look at more pages and so we want to be able to see what segment of the audience is looking at more pages what channels driving traffic that's looking at more pages what pages are contributing to more pages per session so the whole idea is you want to hone in on what your goal is and see what's working and then see what's not working so you can make adjustments the whole idea

be on Google analytics is to improves website performance and so if our average is 1.2 then if we change it to just 2 it may not be good enough so in this case you know we want to up the bar a little bit so we're going to choose three now you can choose four or five that's perfectly fine just know if your average is 1.2 I wouldn't choose one page per session as my goal and I probably wouldn't choose two so I'd set the bar a little bit higher now the third goal type available in

Google analytics is also engagement related and that's duration so just like pages per session we can measure how long somebody stays on the website and we could set up a goal for that so in this case I have a goal set for one minute 30 seconds so my goal type is duration so if I click continue then basically I'm asking analytics in this case anybody who stays more than one minute and 30 seconds on the website count it as a goal and so so before you actually put in the number of hours minutes and seconds

you want to look at that average so if you go back to audience overview here I can see a minute and seven so do we want a minute and 30 maybe we could do that maybe we can go with two minutes so again the whole point is you want to set the bar a little bit higher than what the average is and so here I could see over the last seven days if I verify this particular goal I can see eight percent of my traffic over the last seven days stayed on the site at least

one minute and 31 seconds okay they stay greater than one minute and thirty and so the whole point is you can hone in because this is a goal I can go in this is goal okay this is a goal here and so I could see that this is gold 13. so now I can go to acquisition as an example I can go to channels as an example since this is I go this is goal 13 so that would be in goal set three so I can actually see what channel is basically driving that goal okay

in other words what channel is driving traffic that is staying on the side at least one minute 30 seconds and so that's the whole idea behind goals so likewise for pages per session we can go into channels and here I can see we have a over this period of time year to date pages per session we have three percent conversion rate and here I could see for example organic search has a 13 conversion rate here I could see social media has a 10 so I could see that or people coming from organic search are staying

on the site longer or they're looking at more pages than any other channel so just like duration or destination or any goal you set up you can measure that goal against any Dimension just because his engagement doesn't mean you can't you absolutely can and so the whole point of Engagement related goals is to figure out what's driving traffic the site but what traffic is engaging so you want to be able to pinpoint that so you can improve website performance now the fourth goal type available in Google analytics is an event so if you click on

new goal include custom click continue you have the option to choose an event so an event is something that you can measure on your website that analytics can't measure by default so if you want to measure PDF downloads or clicks on buttons or clicks on play buttons on a video or click on a submit button or click on an external link I mean you can measure pretty much anything with an event then you want to be able to turn that event into a goal so let's quickly summarize what an event is so again we want

to be able to measure a particular event that happens on the website so in order to do so we need to identify that event so if I go to for example this particular website here and I want to measure how many times somebody clicks on the Donate Now button well if I met I can measure that as an event so when you set up an event in analytics you have to actually assign a category and an action for that event so that's the first thing you need to do when you identify an event or let

it go first you need to set up the event in order to set up the event you need to assign a category in action okay so once you identify what you want to track as an event on your website you're actually going to go on a tag manager or have your web Master go on a tag manager and set up a tag and in that tag they're going to assign that particular category in action and so here you can see we have this set up our category is named donate now and our action is click

and that's what we want to do we want to measure how many people click on that donate Now button so anytime somebody does that then the category donate now is going to appear in analytics with the action click so when you actually do set up an event you can go into analytics and you could test that event so if I go to the website and I click donate now Okay the reason why I have this as an event is because I'm taking to a third-party website to handle the donations so here I can go into

analytics and now I can see a category is being fired for header donate with the action click so that's my category and that's my action so that category in action is what is firing after somebody clicks on the Donate Now button so if I want to turn this event into a goal I can easily do that now that I've set up the event now that I've identified the category in action I want to go back to admin and set up the event with these parameters in place so just turns out we already have the goal

set up so let's go through how this goal is set up so first we chose custom we chose event we gave it a name it has the best practice when you actually set up a goal as an event or turn an event into a goal I would add the prefix event colon to it and then that way when you're identifying goals in your reporting you know it's an event so I'm going to click continue and now that I've actually have set up the event already in Google tag manager I giving it a category give it

an action okay see here you can see we have a regular expression set up so anything with the header donate or donate is going to fire this goal so over the last seven days I have a 0.81 conversion rate okay I could have easily put in equals two and put in whatever the action what or the category which is donate now or I could have put action equals click I could have done that as well so let me show you another example here so if I do this custom continue events donate now here's my goal

ID it's going to be an event so all I need to do is put in the category in action so donate now and then click so that's all I have to do and that's my goal so I can verify it okay to see if anybody's fired it and basically that's what I need to do to turn that event into to a goal okay so you need to set up for an event first you need to identify the event set it up and Google tag manager which is another platform and once you've done that then you

have your category in action once you have your category in action you're again going to go into analytics and then simply put in that category and action into the appropriate fields to set up your event related goal now all events don't have to be turned into a goal if you actually do set up an event and you're not worthy of a goal meaning it's not a kpi or a dozen align with your business goals well don't fret you can always just go to behavior okay you can always go to events you can always go to

overview and measure your events that way so here you can see all of our events that are fired now we do have this one turn into a goal so if it's important for a business then we want to make sure we we convert that particular event into a goal okay if it's not important for example somebody's just clicking on a social button then you don't necessarily have to turn that event into a goal if you don't want to know that it's sitting here under events under Behavior so the point I'm trying to make here if

it's important to your business and you're already tracking it as an event via Google tag manager then feel free to turn it into a goal all you need is a category all you need is that action and so so one final note on that event related goal just like any other goal you can add a value okay so if I have an event set up I can choose to add a value here or in Google tag manager if I've assigned a value to that event so if I go back to the actual event and Google

tag manager you can see I have a value set up for one dollar then I could just go into analytics and say you know what I already have the value added so go ahead and use the value added in Google tag manager okay so I'm going to choose yes now if I choose no I have the option to add the value here just like I would with any other goal so just keep that in mind you can add a value to any goal type with an event related go you can add the value right into

the tag in Google tag manager just as I've done here so remember when you actually set up your goals whether it's a destination pages per session duration or an event you can just go ahead and choose that goal set that it's in and measure any Dimension against that particular goal so here I can see e newsletter sign ups by Channel I can go into another goal set here I can see contact form submissions okay I can see what particular channels driving contact form submissions okay so just know that you can align a goal against any

Dimension so if you have e-commerce you don't have to set up for goal for that that's separate but if you want to take a look at your goals and analytics and on its own you can just go to conversions goals overview here I can actually get a good sense of how my goals are performing over a period of time so again if I choose for example year to date now I could see based on the goals I've set up how many total goal completions value which takes into account the value we've added into these goals

okay the total conversion rate and here I could see it broken down by the goal I actually have set up and I can see it by Page or I could see it by Source a medium so I could see Google organic is driving the most gold completions then Google CPC direct and then I could see some others in here as well out contributing to goals now I do want to point your attention to another report in Google analytics that does take into account goals and that's multi-channel funneling so again under conversion goals multi-channel funnels if

I go to assistant conversions I can actually see what channel in this example is assisting with the conversions I've set up and so what do we mean by assistive conversions well that means that if a channel let's just say organic search drove traffic to the website and that traffic didn't convert when it arrived at the website and left but it came back a week later via another Channel let's just say email and when they came back via email they did convert during that session well what analytics does is they give an assist to organic search

because they help Drive the traffic to the website so it's similar to the game of basketball if I have the ball and I pass it to my colleague and my colleagues the one who scores because they had the ball last well they get the credit for the point I.E the conversion but I get an assist and so analytics works the same way they're always going to give credit to the last click or direct conversion but they will give credits to the channel in this case that assisted with the conversion so that's under a cystic inversion

and that's based on the goals you have set up you can highlight any particular goal here if I want to hone in on say the Donate clicks only then I'm going to be able to see what contributed to that particular goal so there's another report in here top conversion pass that I think is important so after you set up your goals you can actually see what channels in this particular example help to Drive conversions again this is year to day so I can see all the different combinations of channels that work together to contribute to

a conversion so again I can choose a specific goal or I can choose all my goals so those two reports are under multi-channel funneling there's also another report that I think is good that's time lag meaning how long did it actually take somebody to convert so here you can see most of our conversions 265 year-to-date happen on the day somebody arrived on the website but I could see I did get some conversions a day later two days later Etc so you have time lag top conversion pass assistant conversions they're all under multi-channel funneling and they're

all available after you set up at least one goal and so if you're not sure what goal to set up okay don't fret you can always at least set up an engagement related goal so that's available to you duration pages per session you also have destination and event tracking and they're all available to you you have 20 available per view now if you're not quite sure exactly what type of goal to set up there is an option available in analytics and that's the gallery so you can always import a goal from the gallery so in

other words we could take a look at what other people have set up in terms of goals so you just have to click on the button import from gallery and it'll take you to the gallery and you'll be able to see what are the goals others have set up so many of you out there have a website similar to the one I'm looking at now this is a non-profit that I work with I'm a foundation and like this website and probably like your website you probably have some interactivity on there that needs to be tracked

for example buttons uh if you have buttons like this one that says donate or newsletter sign up or there's a PDF download or a video that needs to be you know tracked based on the amount of people who click on the play button so I mean all sorts of inter activity on a website have you ever wondered how to track that well there is a way to track that because by default Google analytics can't track interactivity and engagement on your website like you probably want to have your website tracked so if you have buttons and

videos and things of that nature that you want to have tracked well you're going to need event tracking and if you're in analytics and you're always wandering around the data and you happen to find yourself under events well if you want events on your website and you want data to populate under Behavior top events you're going to need to set up event tracking so event tracking is a two-part process and we're going to talk about about that two-part process the first part of that is to identify what you want to track okay so if we

go back to our example website here I'm a foundation again we noted there's a lot to track here we gotta donate now Bob we got a newsletter sign up we have some social icons okay we got a donate Now button here we got a play button here got all sorts of interactivity you know we got a button here that says you know purchase tickets for an upcoming event I can go throughout the website and find different buttons and things to to track let me just say this there's no shortage of what you can track on

your website with event tracking so event tracking is just basically in layman's terms tracking engagement on your site because Google analytics by default is only going to track page view data meaning how somebody got to your website what page they looked at how long they stayed on that page what page they left from more or less their timing how long long somebody stays on the website and what pages they look at so there's more to a website than just how long somebody stayed on a page and so in this example we want to be able

to track everything here not just the donating album but everything because once you get the hang of event tracking then it's very easy to set up okay so step one identify what you want to track okay so there's a lot we want to track we're just going to use one example to start off with and that's going to be this donate Now button okay so this donate Now button we want to track now we have a newsletter sign up we have Facebook and and that's fine you could track all that but for the sake of

going through a step-by-step process today let's just focus on the Donate Now button what's focus on the Donate now button then we'll come back and start tracking these other things but this is what we want to track to start out with okay so step one identify what you want to track now when it comes to tracking events on a website you want to identify to find those events so we did that by choosing this donate Now button now once we identify what we want to track we need to assign two parameters for that event so

with event tracking you have three parameters but one is actually optional so you have two mandatory parameters that you have to assign to everything you want to track on your website and that's the category and then the action so event label or label is the third parameter but again that's optional okay so basically when we identify an event on our website we want to assign it a category and an action okay so why do we want to assign it a category in an action because when we're in analytics under Behavior under events top events we

could see we have different categories here and we have different actions we have different labels so if I click on any one of these Dimensions I'm going to be able to see the sum of the parameters I've entered in for previous events I'm tracking okay so the whole idea is you want to be able to group different events together into a category and assign an action and assign a label to it that's really what you're doing you're just grouping and identifying the events you're trying to track and so in this case I have this donate

Now button sitting in the header okay in fact I have a lot of things sitting in the header so if I wanted to and I want to track all these buttons I can create a category called header and then if I track all these buttons all these buttons can sit in that same category if I wanted to or I can create a separate category for each of these buttons it's up to you how you organize your categories because basically all you're doing is giving a name to what you're trying to track and the name is

equivalent to a category so in this case the Donate Now button is very important I'm just going to call it category header donate now I need to give an action to each category and so in this case I'm just going to say click because that's what the action is doing it's it's somebody's taking the action of clicking now if it's a video and it's a play button I can assign an action of play it's up to you whatever you name these parameters you just need to be organized and methodical about what you name it that's

all and so in this case header donate and then click okay and so that's our category in action and so that's clearly step two so step one identify what you want to track step two assign a category action and or label but remember label is optional so if I go back into analytics here I could see some categories and if I click on action I can see some actions that I've named now step three so we've identified in Step One what we want to track we've assigned a category in action so step three is going

into Google Google tag manager to set up the event okay so if you're not familiar with Google tag manager then you can easily just you know do a Google search for Google tag manager and basically you'll have all sorts of information on it there's a good video overview of tag manager here that you can watch so tag manager basically is what we want to use to set up event tracking now tag managers use for a lot of different things but the main thing we're doing here is setting up an event for our website and so

I'm logged in to the same email address I'm using for analytics okay so now I'm in tag manager and I want to set up my event for this donate Now button so what do I need to do well for every event I want to set up I need to set up a tag okay so if I go to tags I can see I already have some tags set up and some of these are events and so when you actually set up a tag I recommend having a naming convention so here you can see any event

we set up we start out by calling it GA Dash event Dash whatever it is we're trying to set up and so in this case we want to set up a new tag for the Donate Now button on our website so we're in Google tag manager because tag manager is what's going to fire that event so if I click on new okay and I click on tag configuration I'm going to choose Google analytics and then I'm going to choose events as my track type so we want the data to show up in Google analytics and

we're tracking an event we're not tracking a page we're tracking an event and so now remember in step two you identified what you want to call that category you identify what you want to call that action and you have some optional parameters like label so first things first header donates the name of our category and our action is click and if you want to add in a label and a value so if you want to sign a value you can if you want to add in a label you can okay those are optional so you

just need to focus on category action and then the last setting here that's probably worth mentioning is a non-interaction hit okay so this is automatically set to false and why is it set to false because it's a non-interaction no that's false we want this event if somebody clicks on the header donate to be an interaction so for example if I land on this page here and I click on that donate Now button that I'm tracking as an event and I actually leave the site because I have my settings set to false I want that click

to be an interaction then analytics is not going to count a bounce if I change it to true so from false to true then that means it is going to to be a non-interaction if somebody lands on the page and if somebody clicks on the button so I don't want it to be a bounce I want it to be an interaction so my advice is leave it set to false we're going to choose Google analytics as our setting here this is our variable for Google analytics so in other words that variable is set to our

analytics property ID and more or less that's what you need to do to set up the tag okay you need to in step two identify the category in action and or label and or value now value can be anything you want you're assigning a numerical value so if you just assign one anytime that event fires in analytics it's going to have a value of one okay and so we have our non-interaction set to false so anytime the event fires it's going to count as an interaction and therefore not count as a bounce if somebody landed

on that page so that that's more or less all you need to do to set up the tag and Google tag manager now if somebody else is setting up the tag for you then again you want to revert to step two you want to be able to give that person the appropriate category action and or label and or value why because you're the one that's going to be going into Google analytics and you're the one that's going to have to go to behavior events top events and look for the particular at category in action and

or label so you need to be able to communicate that information to whomever is setting up the tag now if it's you great you already know what it is because you're entering that information into tag manager so in this case I'm going to go ahead and choose a variable for my label parameter and why do I want to do that because in tag manager I have something at my disposal called very variables and variables allow you to see specifically things that are being tracked so in this case I chose page path okay so pagepath is

a URL and why did I choose page path as my variable for the parameter label because if somebody does click on the header donate button and the header donate button on our website is on every page so if I go to the children's page I'm still going to see that header donate button and so for me I want to be able to see what page somebody clicked on that header donate button and so this allows me to actually see in Google analytics what page somebody clicked on the header donate Now button and so now if

I go back to GTM Google tag manager I have a category I have an action and I have a label which is a variable okay so note that in Google tag manager you have a lot of different variables at your disposal and variables are there to help you identify specifically what is being tracked so take a look at all the variables at your disposal and tag manager in this example I'm using page path so now once you set up your tag pretty straightforward again tag types Google analytics track type is event you are assigning the

category action end or label and or value you're changing or leaving the default in place for non-interaction hit and then you're choosing the variable for Google analytics which is your property ID so once you've done that you have a tag the second part of setting up a tag is to assign a trigger to that tag so tag manager needs to be able to know when to fire that event and so here I'm going to look at a trigger I've already set up for this particular event and so if I click on it I'll be able

to see that what it is is a click on some links not all links but some links I'm actually saying Hey Google tag manager fire this event when the click ID equals header donate button now it just so happens that if somebody did click on this donate Now button they're gonna go to another website in this case networkforgood.com so in tag manager I could have set the trigger to equal URL equal instead of Click ID I could have said URL equal networkforgood.com so that could have been my Logic for my trigger in this case I

decided to go with the click ID and so in this case that button has an ID associated with it called header donate button so if you wanted to use click ID for your event for your button you could simply just us go to the website you can right click on that button and click inspect element and so when I actually inspect the element I can see now the button here you can see it's highlighted in the upper Pane and in the lower pane I can see where it's linking to it's linking to networkforgood.com but here

you can see if I hone in a little it I could see ID equals header Dash donate dash button so that's the click ID notice there's also a class I could have set the trigger to equal this class or again I could have set the trigger to equal the URL or the page that this button is pointing to I could have chosen any one of those but I decided to go with the ID so this is the ID I chose and that's the ID I have in my trigger okay so that is what's going to

fire that event so if somebody clicks on a button that equals header Dash donate dash button it's going to fire that event which is going to equal category header donate action click and then the label is going to be page path so now that we've set up our events we want to test to see if it actually works so there's two ways to go about testing an event and the first way is through Google analytics so if we go to Google analytics and then we go to real time okay we can go to events and

here you can see one is already fired so let's go ahead and go to and test this and go to the website so if I go here for example and I click on omagar alumni okay so if I click on that you can see I'm under our family and if I click on that button then go back to analytics and look at real time I should be able to see this event fire so if I click on it I'm going to go to network for good now if I go back to analytics here in real

time under real time under events per second I can see that event firing category equals header donate the action equals click now if I click on the category here I can see the label the label remember was page path and here you can see this event fired on the our family page which was the page I was just on so that's one way to test to see if your event works and in this case analytics recognize the event so it works it fired and so therefore it's going to show up under Behavior under events you

can go under overview or top events okay and what am I going to look for in this case I'm going to look for header donate okay if I click on header donate as my category I'm going to be able to see my action and if I click on action I'll be able to see my label in this case home page and then later on when the data propagates in Analytics I'll be able to see under label the page that I clicked on that header donate button which is slash our family okay the second way in

which you can test to see if an event fires is if you preview so if I click on preview in tag manager okay I'm going to go into preview mode okay in preview mode allows you to see in analytics and tag manager and on the website what tags are firing so here I could see I'm in preview mode now so I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to refresh and in my browser same browser I'm using for tag manager I can see the tags that are being fired on this page already okay

because I'm in preview mode so here I could see remarketing I could see page views I could see Google optimize I could see some tags that are already firing on this page now if I click on this button here by holding down my shift command and then click on that button I'll be able to see that the tag fired in preview mode there's my event header donate and I can see it fired so now I can see it fired in the preview mode so in addition to Google analytics in preview mode I could see that

that tag is fired and I know that it's working so there you have it you have two ways to test to see if the event fires again you have real time in analytics okay so in real time if you just go up to real time all you need to do is go down to events go to your website click on the button if you see it firing in real time then you know it works the second version or second way to test your event is through the preview mode okay if you see it firing in

preview mode then you know it's also working okay so let's rehash our steps first step is we want to be able to identify what we want to track okay so it could be this newsletter sign up it could be click on a Facebook it could be anything we want to be able to track an image a click on a CTA button whatever we want to track identify it second step identify the category action and label because that's what's going to show up in Google analytics remember label is optional variable or excuse me value is optional

third step go into tag manager actually set up your tag and your trigger so if you set up a tag and it's an event name it GA Dash events that way you can see in your list of tags in tag manager what event tracking you have already set up so when you set up your tag you set up your trigger your trigger is based on logic that can be a URL it can be a click ID it can be a class ID whatever you want to use to fire that event and then once you do

that you want to test it you could test it in GTM or you could test it in Google analytics if it doesn't fire you want to tweak your trigger if it does fire then great and then one thing I would recommend is if you're setting up various events for your website as a best practice what I would recommend is set up a spreadsheet and in that spreadsheet you know you want to put a note what's firing what are you doing to fire it could be in this case someone somebody clicks on the Donate Now button

in the header you want to put the tag name in here the type okay then you want to record your category action and label and then the great thing about events is you could turn those events into goals and that's as simple as going back into analytics okay so if I go in analytics and I go to admin and I go to goals if you set up a new goal okay all you need to do is choose custom click continue you're going to to choose event as your goal name and then from a naming perspective

in Google analytics for your goal I would definitely put event first and then click on header donate okay so if I click now continue what is my category it's equal to header donate my action is click and so I can verify to see if this is working and here I can see in analytics that the goal would have a 0.22 percent conversion rate so that tells me that the goal is working and I can turn this event into a goal and when you turn something into a goal in analytics then you can measure it across

all dimensions that's what I would recommend if the event is equal to a kpi or business goal or it's of importance it's something you really want to measure okay if it's just a click say on a Facebook button I wouldn't recommend setting that up as a goal okay so once you've set up your event you recorded it in your spreadsheet it's firing you want to be able to then go back into Behavior back into events okay you can go to top events okay so top events tell you by category as a default what events are

firing or what category is firing the most okay so if I choose my date range here I can just go to here to date so here I can see my enter donate button fortunately for me has the most total events now notice in analytics you also see unique events and so the difference between unique events and total events is that unique events are equivalent to one per session where total events means that somebody can come to your website initiate a session and click on that button multiple times in the same session so if I go

to the alma Foundation website okay I can click on that donate Now button three or four or five different times in the same session so what analytics is going to do is actually in that session count it once but accumulate the number of clicks as a total event for that session so you're always going to have more total events than unique events because in some cases users May click on the button more than once in the same session and so here I can see total events unique events and if I added a value to that

event I should be able to see it here so if I added a dollar as an example to this particular event because it had 164 unique events I should be able to see 164 as my value but since I see Zero that means that I did not assign value and so average value basically is just giving me how much average I have per event so it's taking into account the number of or the value the total value 5 divided by the total number of unique Pages or sessions and so because I don't have value I'm

not going to have average value but here you can see because value is optional here I can at least see how many events or how many clicks I receive for a particular button again it could be a video if I clicked on this video as an example I can see how many people actually started it I could see the unique and the total events and if I click on label if I have a label assigned then I'll be able to see what page triggered that event so if we go back again to our header donate

button back to category if we click on label as our primary Dimension here we can see the home page had the most unique events been followed by the children's page the contact form Etc so what you can do in analytics you can also look at the pages that have driven events so here I could see the home page has a q simulated the most total events followed by the contact us so that's how you would look at the data in Google analytics under Behavior under events and then under top events or overview is where you

can start analyzing your event tracking so first you need to do identify it assign a category action enter label set up that tag and Trigger once you do that once you test that it's working this is where you're going to go to analyze the data let's start out with why GTM so let's just say you're Sam and you have your own e-commerce website you want to understand how people are interacting with your website well Sam today's world of websites contain a lot of interactivity everything from videos to PDF downloads to commenting to form submissions uh

to all sorts of chat functionality interactivity going on throughout the website so there's just a lot that you need to track outside of just page views and so really what GTM does is they help you track all these things I just mentioned everything from somebody clicking on the play button of a PDF to somebody clicking on the submit button of a form to somebody entering in something on a chat function so that's what GTM is so why GTM because it helps us track all that interactivity so all GTM is is really allows you to really

place a piece of java code which is just script and the script that's added to a web page to collect information so that's really what a tag is it's just some script that gets put on a web page in order for you to collect information like page views clicks Etc and they send it to third-party tools okay so that's what GTM does it basically allows you to take all these tags that collect information and you can use them in GTM so if you want to for example collect how many people you know enter a chat

functionality and start chatting well you're going to take that script and you're going to put it in GTM and GTM will then allow you to start tracking that information so that's really what GTM is it just allows you to put tags into a container or think of it as a toy box you have all these toys and you want to track well you can put all those those toys or tags in a toy box or container and we're going to talk a little bit more about that but before we get into GTM let's just say

you know you're communicating with your developer and there's a new user request on your web page and you want to update the tag well your developer considering it's probably a small update your website is probably gonna not um has hesitate and is going to go ahead and turn around and do it normally and so normally what happens is the developer is going to go to the website and update the tag well what if you have a few things that you want to track all those things I mentioned before from downloads to clicks to you know

somebody checking out to watching a video well your Web Master your web developer is going to go well hold on a second now all these requests are going to take time I need to put them into the work queue so to speak well what happens is when they go into work queue usually it's going to take some time and in some cases you as a marketer need to launch a campaign and you want to get that tracking added to the website in time for the campaign launch so you want to go ahead and quickly turn

around the tracking for that particular campaign let's just say you're launching a campaign and you're sending people to a landing page that has a form submission and you want to be able to track how many people click on the submit button of that form submission well if you need to turn that around your developer's like well I need to put that in a work queue the timing isn't going to always work out between you and your developer is my point and so that's where GTM comes in because there is a solution to update your tags

faster and that's Google tag manager so when we say GTM that's what GTM stands for Google tag manager it's a place for you to add tags quickly and easily so tags remember are just Snippets of code that allow you to track things on your website interactively interactive actively and basically when you have GTM you can bypass the webmaster and do it quickly and easily so that's what GTM is all about so why GTM because we just identified two benefits one you could track all the interactivity on your website and two you can bypass your web

developer or webmaster and so that's the benefit of GTM so the benefit you get those tags tags updated very quickly via Google tag manager okay so that's what tag manager is so what we're going to talk about today is specifically what tag manager is and what it does we're going to list some of the benefits of tag manager we're going to show you how it works and then we're going to show you how to get started with tag manager tag manager if you're not familiar with working with webmasters and dealing with JavaScript and tags and

all this jargon is just new to you today okay well don't fret sit back we're gonna take it slow this is an introduction into Google tag manager again let's start out with what is tag manager so we've already introduced it to some degree because we already introduces a tool where you can put all your tags into a toolbox toy box or container so to speak right and we already already mentioned that hey you can bypass your webmaster so you're probably thinking well if I'm if you're not familiar with tag manager how can I bypass my

webmaster well first of all it's a free tool and it's a Google tool hence the name Google tag manager and it helps you really that's the main point it's deploy and track tags on your website bypassing your webmaster so that's tag manager and so examples of tags that can be deployed via Google tag manager are numerous these are just some examples like Google analytics Facebook's pixel tracking or Google ads There's No Limit into the number of texts you can track and tag manager there is no limit you can add any number of tracking tags and

tag manager okay so some of the benefits well again I we just listed two you can put any tag into tag manager and track that onto your website and we know you can bypass your web developer or webmaster and what it also does is it also allows you to test and deploy your JavaScript codes quicker so remember these JavaScript codes or Snippets of codes are just there to track certain things on your website whether that be a page view or somebody clicking on a play button or tracking somebody who converts or even just goes to

your website so the biggest benefit is you can take that snippety code let's just say Facebook let's just say you're growing Facebook marketing and you want to put that Facebook pixel on your website so that you could track people who come from Facebook and convert well you don't need to put that Facebook pixel on your website you can go right to tag manager and you can put that snippet of code right in tag manager really quickly and the other benefit here is all tags are managed in one place and that's that to me is really

a good benefit because when you start adding tags on your website and you have some tags and tag manager it just gets very confusing so ideally all the tracking codes you have on your website needs to be in tag manager think about that all the tracking so if you're doing Bing or you're doing Facebook or you're doing Twitter or you're doing in LinkedIn and you're doing Google you're doing all this type of marketing on all these different platforms you're going to have tracking code for all these different platforms and instead of putting all that code

on your website return gonna slow down the slow time of your web page and website you want to put them all in tag manager so they can be organized and you know exactly what you're trying to track and the other great benefit of tag manager is there's a versioning control so let's just say you have added tags to your website via GTM for the last six months well and let's just say you add another tag yesterday if you added that tag yesterday and something doesn't work well you can just roll back to a previous version

It's that simple so you have versioning and that's that's a good thing when you have versioning you can control what gets published and if something doesn't work after it gets published then you can roll back to a previous version so it's a a peace of mind so to speak just because you've added code to your site there's no guarantee it's going to work and so you can always control what version you're dealing with in tag manager and we'll talk a little bit more about that so the biggest benefit here to me with tag manager is

you have event tracking and so we talked about some of the things you could track on your website from videos from play buttons to somebody clicking on the stop on the video or pausing it all the way to somebody again chatting or let's just say somebody clicking on that purchase button on your website okay and you want to track all these different things these different interactivities and buttons well event tracking is what you're going to use to track all those buttons and to me this is the biggest benefit of tag manager and I'll show you

some examples as we go along and if we didn't mention it already I'll mention it again it is free tag managers free there's no limit so once you have tag manager going you can add as many tracking codes as you want there's no limit on the number of tracking codes you can add to tag manager Okay so so it's free and you can use it to its fullest Advantage okay so it's also high security meaning that it has different levels of permissions okay so you can have uh somebody just go in and look at the

different tags and tracking codes you have in GTM or you can ask somebody who is very familiar with tag manager it can go in and add the tracking code to tag manager and then publish that tracking code when it gets added so those are all the benefits let's talk about how it works now specifically how does tag Manager work because you're like Rob okay again a lot of jargon you know you you got tags and JavaScript and and versioning and Publishing and all this other stuff well I know I'm throwing a lot at you at

once but just bear with me here okay so let's start talking about how it actually works so you have a website okay whatever that domain is you have a website and there's chances are on your website you have some form of interactivity whether that be a video whether that be a Blog whether it be a form submission you have a website with some interactivity and let's just say you're even thinking about getting ready to launch some type of campaign on maybe Google or Facebook and you want to drive traffic to your website fair enough you're

joining the millions of other websites that are out there that have interactivity that also Drive traffic to the website so incomes Google tag manager and so tag manager is important because again we know we want to track people coming from that Facebook campaign or that Google campaign and interacting with our site so if you are running Facebook and you are running Google analytics well guess what you want to put that tracking code in tag manager so Google analytics being a Google product works very nicely with tag manager Facebook has its own tracking code and but

you still want to be able to track people who come from the Facebook campaign to your website so you're gonna get that tracking code from Facebook and put it in tag manager that's generally how it works so so here information from your website is shared with another data source through tag manager so think about that if I add Facebook tracking code to tag manager or let's just say a Google analytics tracking code to tag manager tag manager is the one that's pushing out and doing all the heavy lifting they're the ones that are controlling what

code gets fired and what code doesn't so if you're putting the code in tag manager tag managers controlling the code think about it that way and let's show you an example of what that looks like so here I am I'm in tag manager I just went to tag manager.google.com and here I could see a list of tags so in our conversation we're talking about tracking Facebook and we're talking about tracking Google analytics well Google analytics is easy because it's a Google product so here if I look at all the different tracking code I have on

my website through tag manager let's just take a look at Google analytics so if you're going to use Tag manager you might as well put the Google analytics code in here so here I can see I have Google analytics as a tag in tag manager now for Facebook if I'm running a Facebook campaign well I can take that pixel tracking and put it in GTM as well and here I can see Facebook pixel that is that code is added to GTM I just basically took what Facebook gave me and put it in the Google tag

manager so you can see I can add Facebook and Google analytics and again I can't stress it enough any tracking code from any platform I can add to Google tag manager in order to track the behavior from those sources so let's take a little bit deeper dive into how tag manager works so I just showed you an example of how you could take Facebook and Google analytics code and put it into tag manager but if you're not familiar with tag manager then how do I do that well let's talk about the structure and how tag

manager works so when you have a tag manager account you have a container remember I mentioned Toy Box earlier you have a bunch of toys if they're they're code and you're tracking different bits of code from different platforms like Facebook think of those as toys and you have a toy box okay well that's what this code is and that's what a container is the code is the code and that's going to go into the toy box or container and so the way tag manager works is you have tags triggers and variables so if I take

my Facebook tracking code and put it into a container I need to set up a tag and a trigger okay so let's take a look at what that is so first if I go back to tag manager I'm going to have an account and if I have an account I'm going to have a container so here I'm just going to click on an account with a container and a container is nothing more than what website you're adding the tracking code to okay that's all the container is we're just letting tag manager know this is the

website we're adding all the this code too so you have tags triggers and variables that's the structure of tag manager so tags are just what it says tags what are we trying to quote unquote tag well if it's Google analytics that's easy here I could see I have Google analytics added so if I click on Google analytics here's my tag and if I take a little bit of a deeper dive there since Google analytics is a Google product it integrates already with tag managers it's pretty easy I can just choose Google analytics then I'm going

to check page view and that's my tag now every tag needs a trigger okay so I need to tell tag manager how or when to fire the Google analytics tracking code so in this case I'm going to tell tag manager to fire on all pages so if I get somebody a visitor to my website analytics is firing on all pages so whatever page that visitor lands on Google analytics is gonna fire so that's really what it comes down to is I have a tag and I need to tell tag manager when to trigger that tag

that's really what the structure of tag manager is it's tags triggers and variables and variables we're going to talk about here in a couple minutes but do you have a piece of code you're going to go ahead and put that into tag manager you're going to tag it and then you're going to fire that trigger so let's take a look at another example here if I go back here you can see Facebook well here's my Facebook pixel okay that's my tag so when is it gonna fire well it's gonna fire on a specific domain or

subdomain that's basically what we're doing we're trying to tell GTM when to fire that particular tag so those are the three main components a tag okay which is going to contain the JavaScript code that you get from say Facebook work the trigger so you're going to go into tag manager and tell tag manager want to fire that code that's the trigger and then you have variables and so variables are basically just additional information that tag manager may need for your tag and Trigger to work so that's what a variable is it's there to get the

tag and Trigger to fire so variables are divided into built-in and user-defined variables so common used variables include say page path or page URL or hostname or click class again they're there and these examples I just gave you are there to get your tag and Trigger to work think about it that way they're just that's a component and if I go into tag manager here and here on the left side I can see variables so remember I have built-in and user defined so built-in means that tag manager already built these for me so in case

I need to get my trigger to work with my tag I can use a variable so those are built in and then I have user defined so these are what I Define these are what I created and again the variables are there to get the tag and Trigger to work okay so that's the job of the variable the job of the tag is to host that JavaScript code okay in the case of Facebook or analytics that's where we're putting our code so here if I click on AdWords remarketing again it's a Google product so I

don't really need to even deal with code I'm just going to select Google AdWords for marketing okay so you can see GTM integrates nicely with some of the other Google products but let's just say you have a Facebook pixel tracking code you're going to choose custom and you're going to put the code here so that's part of the tag and then the trigger again is there to get the tag to fire so you're telling GTM when to fire the tag and the variable is there to help you make sure that that trigger and that tag

work together so that's how all three kind of work together you need the tag to put the code you need the trigger to tell GTM when to fire the tag in code and the variables there to help you define when that tag and Trigger should work or how it should work so again review tags are they're just small codes of JavaScript or tracking pixels on your website and so tags are allowed to manage events like scroll track and remarketing clicks downloads files play buttons you name it even clicks on external links for example let's just

say you have a click uh or a Facebook uh icon on your site and when somebody clicks on it they go to Facebook you want to maybe track that you're going to create a tag okay the trigger is there because you need to tell GTM when to fire that tag so it's a certain condition whether it's you know fire the tag if the URL equals facebook.com or some other condition so the tag can not be created until the creation of the corresponding trigger so tags and triggers go together you can't just create a tag and

not have a trigger otherwise your tag will never fire and the variable is there again it stores the information when defining a trigger or transferring data to tag so a variable has a variety of data okay so you pick and choose the variable you want to use with that trigger okay so you're making sure that by defining a variable you're making sure that you're telling GTM how that trigger should be fired so let's take a look at another example here of how all three play together if I'm in this account I'm in this container if

I look down here I can see Google optimize that's another Google product so what I'm doing here is I just chose Google optimize as my tag it's already integrated so what does that mean I don't even need to deal with any code I'm just going to select optimize well we we have the tag Google optimize but we need to tell GTM how to fire that and so here we're going to tell GTM to fire it on all pages so that's basically a very simple example because we're firing it on all pages so if I want

to look at something specific again Facebook here's my tag here's my code what's my trigger well my trigger is it's going to fire on specific Pages how do I know that well if I look at the trigger here I could see the trigger is a page view but I'm telling it to fire on this particular hostname so the tag and Trigger go hand in hand [Music] so how to get started with tag manager so first things first you have to create that account so you're going to go to tag manager.google.com or you can do a

search for Google tag manager and you're going to create your account and then when you create your account what's going to happen is you're going to set up a container and when you set up a container you have choices so you could set it up for your website for an app on iOS or maybe Android or you can even set it up for amp except an accelerated mobile page so most people by default are probably going to set up tag manager for their website and so when you do that when you actually select website what's

going to happen is you're going to get some Google tag manager code in return and so the whole idea here is you're going to do a swap what you're doing is basically you're saying Okay Google I'm going to take this Google tag manager code and I'm going to put it on my website I'm going to put it on every page in my website so notice tag manager has two scripts one goes in the head as high as possible the other goes into the body tag as high as possible and so what you're doing is you're

making a deal you're putting this tag manager code on your website and in return every code you deal with whether that be Facebook or analytics or optimize or remarketing or whatever it is is gonna go in GTM okay it's going to go into the Container you created so you need the tag manager code on your website in order for tag manager to work okay so when you add this code to your website then you're free to start adding all sorts of tags to your container but if you don't have this tracking code on your website

then none of the tags you add to your container are gonna work so that's the idea behind the container and then one thing I wanted to mention on the account is it's a Google account so when you create your account then make sure it's the same account you use with say Google analytics or some other Google product that's a good best practice is always use the same email address when you set up your account so that it integrates nicely across all the different platforms meaning you can go from say Google analytics right to Google tag

manager in one browser without having to log out or log in okay so when you create the account you're going to create your container if you choose web then you're going to be asked to place code on your website and when you place that code on your website then you are free to start using tag manager and that means you're free to start adding tags so if you want to know more information about installing Google tag manager then what I would recommend is visit the quick start guide website of GTM so again if you're curious

as to where that code is located in Google tag manager well when you create an account account and you create a container that container is going to have a specific ID so if I click on that specific ID here's where I can get my code okay so again when I'm logged in to tag manager I'm going to click on workspace but in the top navigation I'm going to see my unique GTM ID if I click on that that's where my code is going to be located and so again your code needs to go in the

header and there's another script that needs to go in the body and if you're not sure how to add the code to your website well you can always click on the quick start guide here okay and that'll take you to a quick start guide page a reference page related to Google tag manager so let's talk about creating a tag so once you get tag manager installed I'm sure you're excited to get going and create that first tag so let's talk about how to create a tag in tag manager so when you're in tag manager all

all you need to do is basically you're looking at all your tags if you click on tag in the left side navigation you'll see all your tags and there's a new button there so you just click new and so basically what you're going to do is you're going to create your first tag and so what I would recommend once you get tag manager installed on your website I would recommend setting the first tag up as Google analytics so that will get you going with tracking page views on your website when some when somebody visits your

website okay so ideally that's what you want to do you want to get Google analytics as your first tag and tag manager so what I'm going to do is because analytics is a Google product it's already integrated nicely with tag manager so I'm just going to click on Google analytics it's going to be a page view that's what I'm tracking and now I have to set up a variable and so what it's going to do it's going to ask me to set a select a variable and so what you're going to do is you're going

to select new variable and what you're going to do is you're actually going to go and add your tracking ID here that's going to be your variable so where do I get my tracking ID and analytics well if I'm in analytics I'm going to go to admin and then under property settings I'm going to see my tracking ID and all you need to do then is go to tag manager and paste copy first you got a copy over that tracking ID then you're going to get a tag manager I'm going to paste it and then

that's going to create a variable for you and then when you create that variable you're going to see it in the drop down here so I've already created it and basically that's your tag with a variable then what are you going to do you're going to set up a trigger so see I have some triggers already set up you're going to see a default trigger already set up for you and that's going to be all pages so ideally what you want to do is you want to select all pages in order for analytics to fire

on all pages so that's what we're doing we're setting up a trigger we're basically telling tag manager hey if I get a visitor to any page on my website then I want you to fire Google analytics so that's basically in summary how to set up your first tag and my recommendation is your first tag should be Google analytics and when you set up analytics you're going to have to set up a variable for the tracking ID and so you get the tracking ID again from admin property settings copy and paste that tracking ID over save

it you have your variable that variable is going to be included in with the tag then your trigger is going to be all pages and there you go you have your first tag you have your first variable you have your first trigger so that's basically what you want to do and once you've added that tag once you've added that trigger then the only thing you need to do now is basically publish the tag and so anytime you save a tag you're going to go ahead and submit it so that way it gets published so again

what you're going to do is let's take a step back here you're going to choose new tag you're going to choose analytics from the drop down menu you're going to choose page view then basically you're going to add your tracking ID so you can set up the variable and then basically that's what you need to do okay you're going to add that tracking ID and then voila that's your tag with a variable and then once you've done that then you're going to click submit so when you click submit you're basically saying Hey I want this

tag to go live now this tag and Trigger and once you've done that then analytics is ready to go and anytime somebody goes to your website on any page tag manager is going to fire Google analytics so the great thing here is you have something called Google tag assistant and that's an extension that works with chrome and so when you've actually add a tag manager to your site or or you have analytics running in tag manager you can confirm if those tags are firing properly so let's take a look at how Google tag assistant works

okay so if you just do a search for Google tag assistant you're going to see here that it's basically just an extension that works in Chrome and unfortunately it only works in Chrome browser it doesn't work in any other browser so go ahead and install that extension into Chrome and when you do that you're going to see this nice icon here in your browser and now if you go to any website and I click on Google tag assistant and I click on enable Okay so basically I'm loading Google tag assistant and now once I refresh

the page I can see that this particular site has Google tag manager installed and not only does it have tag manager installed I can see that it's also has Google analytics running I have also Google optimized running and I have Google ads remarking tag running and tag manager so that's what tag assistant does it allows you to see if one tag manager is on the site and if it is great what other tags are firing on this particular site so tag assistance telling me I have these particular tags firing on that site and they're firing

within tag manager so tag assistant is a great way to confirm if one tag manager is on the site and two what other tags are firing on the site now another way you could confirm if tag manager is firing on the site is you can go into preview mode so even before you submit and publish your tag and Trigger you can click on the preview mode so if I click preview in tag manager so basically that's going to put me in preview mode and so what does that mean well that means that now I'm free

to go to my website and see if those tags are firing and so let's take a a look at what that looks like so if I go to the website and just click refresh then what's going to happen is tag manager is going to load in preview mode just as you see here okay so that's going to take a second couple seconds to load up and now what can I see in preview mode I could see that I have GTM firing but I also have some other text fine on this page remarketing I have Google

analytics I have Google optimize I have some other tags firing as well and so the preview mode shows me what tags are firing on any given page and I can also see what tags did not fire okay so here I have a number of tags already in GTM but they didn't fire on this particular page so let's just say I clicked on the Donate Now button I'm still in preview mode so I'm going to be able to see what tags fired now I could see I have a couple of tags that I've fired on this

particular page and then I can see what tags to not fire on this page okay so that's the preview mode you can use the preview mode before you even submit a tag and Trigger to see if it fires and that's the great benefit of tag manager so if you're not sure if something's going to fire or not then you can always go into preview mode um and if you are sure it's gonna fire then you can go ahead and submit it so you can leave preview mode and just go ahead and submit that particular tag

and Trigger so here I'm going to leave preview mode and now once I'm done and I'm sure the tag is going to fire and go ahead and submit all my changes that I've worked on in terms of setting up tags and triggers so that's really GTM in a nutshell so I have my tags okay my tags are just Snippets of code that I'm going to put in whether that be Facebook or vet tracking or any other Google product like optimize or page view then I have my triggers my triggers are there to tell G GTM

when to fire that tag and the variables are there to help those tags and triggers work together so remember that particular variable we set up for Google analytics okay so here it is right here because we want to tell GTM what property to specifically fire in Google analytics so that's why we set up that variable but there are all sorts of variables Google tag manager has built in or variables already created for you or you can specifically Define a variable so variables are there to help the tags and triggers work together so when you set

up a tag you set up a trigger you use a variable you can always go into preview mode preview it by going to the website seeing if it fires if it fires then voila you can go ahead and click submit and that will publish the tag and Trigger and you're good to go that's pretty much how tag manager works and again I can't stress that there is an unlimited number of tags you can add to tag manager there's no limit so you got everything from anything from Google to non-google to event tracking okay to Facebook

to anything that you want to track you want to be able to put into tag manager and again there's versioning that's one of the great benefits of tag manager so if I want to go back to an older version I can simply do that so here you can see I'm on version 32. that's how tag manager works and I can't stress that you know tag manager is there to help you track interactivity on the site because if you have a site that's interactive that has a video that has a download button let's just say you

know you have all sorts of newsletter sign-ons Facebook YouTube buttons on your website just like this website does and you won't be able to track how many people click on that particular button well you're gonna need tag manager and when you have tag manager you're going to be able able to track all of these button clicks and interactivity on your website with that tag manager it's going to be hard to do that if you are looking to become an SEO professional then look no further than simply runs postgraduate program in digital marketing so don't miss

out on this opportunity Find the course Link in the description for more information let's get started before I tell you how to bring traffic to your website let me tell you why this is so important okay why do we want to bring users to our website I mean it has to be on equal ground as web development and design is somebody who goes to your site and then does something when they get to your site so you have users and when those users get to your site they're generating page views and traffic and you want

to turn that traffic into engagement okay so each Page's traffic is configured independently of all their pages so when you go when somebody goes to your website they look at a page that's a page view and certain pages on your website you want to turn that page view into a a conversion okay whether that be you know looking at a video or purchasing something so think of these pages on your website as salespeople they're trying to convert visitors who come to your website but first we need to get the visitors to your website so when

you get visitors to your website again you can generate sales which means revenue or you can increase brand awareness or you can earn Revenue through sponsored posts and advertisements so if you have for example a lot of content on your website you can turn that in to revenue by hosting ads on your website so when somebody clicks on that ad you're going to earn a percentage of that click okay what that click is worth so having a website means a lot of good things for you but first you got to get the traffic there and

so what we're going to do is we're going to tell you how to drive traffic to your website so there's lots of different ways in which you can bring traffic to your website well the first is paid advertising so paying to advertise your products services with ads is one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your website so some of the options available are search ads social media ads or display ads so search ads or ads that are displayed in the search engine results so when a user types in a keyword a query you

want your ad to show up based on that keyword query okay so an example is digital marketing course somebody types in digital marketing course and simply learn is the first ad that shows up how do we know it's an ad because you can see the word ad next to the domain so when somebody clicks on that link simply learn is going to pay Google so that's how search advertising works okay the next is social so social media marketing involves increasing traffic or engagement or brand awareness lots of different strategies but you're instead of doing this

on search you're doing it on a social media media platform okay so for example you can advertise on any particular platform and the way you advertise could be with an image it could be with a video so in this case you could see cobrio is doing a sponsored ad here how to succeed with Google ads and then another form of advertising is display so display means creating ads that are placed on specific websites so with display unlike search you have a choice in the ad format with search you only have text ads but with display

you have text Edge image ads rich media ads video ads so you have lots of different options in which you can advertise on other websites so the idea here is to get your ad in front of the Right audience when they could see your display Banner your banner ad then it's going to be more visual more appealing generate some brand interest and hopefully you can get somebody to to click on that ad and over to your website so that's paid advertising again through search through social through display but you can also promote your site on

social media so once your content has gone live you could take advantage of different social media platforms I mean it really depends on what you're trying to promote because what you're trying to promote needs to align with the appropriate social media platform so Facebook is best suited for Industries like food and Beverages and news and media and if you're selling a product so you fall into one of those categories and Facebook could be the right platform for you if you're involved in again beauty or food and beverage or e-commerce then you can also leverage Instagram

which is part of Facebook's ecosystem so if you advertise on Facebook you can also advertise on Instagram and or Instagram so it doesn't have to be and Facebook and Instagram it could be Facebook or Instagram you also have LinkedIn as a platform LinkedIn is great for B2B so if you're trying to promote industry news or or tips and best practices or job postings then LinkedIn is the place for you it's a B2B platform it's great for targeting specific Industries targeting specific job levels or job descriptions okay so LinkedIn is great if you're into B2B focusing

on the business side of it so you also have YouTube now YouTube is part of Google's ecosystem YouTube is a video platform okay so it's great if you're trying to promote gaming or entertainment if you're a vlogger okay so YouTube's a great way to promote your site by getting your product out there in the form of a video and then you have Twitter Twitter to me encompasses a lot of different Industries Beauty and fitness news and media entertainment okay you have limited number of characters but a lot of people are active on Twitter and it's

a great way to generate some awareness and get some clicks over to your website so these are just some of the most popular social media platforms of course there are plenty more out there the third way in which you can drive traffic to your site is guest plus blogging so most of you already know what blogging is all about well if you're blogging for your own site you can jump on somebody else's site and blog on their behalf so having the opportunity to guess post on another website can be very helpful because one that other

blog could have lots of traffic and have a a well-known brand so if you're blogging on another blog it's going to build your brand awareness and potentially increase traffic to your blog or website so it exposes to you to targeted traffic so if you're going to guest blog guest blog on a site that's very relevant to your business or industry that way you're targeting the Right audience okay you can expand your personal Network so getting yourself out there getting your brand out there in front of a different audience and then obviously for serves because it

generates a backlink so serps search engine ranking Pages means that hey if you want to rank organically you're going to have to generate some backlinks so guest blogging isn't a way to generate some backlinks to your site and in effect that's going to help you get your pages ranked higher because Google is going to recognize the relationship from one blog to your blog and build up your relevancy so some other benefits here to guest blogging is you can grow your social media following because you can then promote that on social media that you're guest blogging

okay again you can improve your online Authority okay because when you're guest blogging and you have recognition on that guest blog if it's a popular blog then it's going to help your domain and Page Authority for SEO and then the end result is going to improve your backlink score so a lot of benefits to guest blogging to me at the end of the day it's just about reaching out to your audience using another platform to do that in the form of a Blog and the results of that is going to mean more brand awareness for

you and turning that traffic from that other blog into qualified leads so you can also interview industry thought leaders so that's another way an interesting way to generate traffic to your site so reaching out to thought leaders for interviews okay could generate some credibility for you and the other person so it's reciprocal so it means that you're active in the industry that you're in and it allows you to engage with other leaders in the industry and the indirect net result of that could be increased traffic because if you do the interview and you record it

or if it's via video then you can obviously post it on other platforms and that could in turn Drive traffic to your website obviously just like guest blogging it's going to increase your reach so so getting yourself out there nobody knows who your brand is and they know who the thought leaders are and they say you're interviewing the thought leaders then that's going to put you in front of these people and so it's going to increase your reach another way to drive traffic to your website is just to make sure your website's responsive and what

do we mean by responsive well we mean does it work on multiple devices specifically mobile so depending on the device your website hides shows shrinks enlarges or moves content so that it conforms to the browser that that person's looking at on your web for your website so if somebody's looking on mobile at your website you want to make sure that your website adjusts accordingly so you want to be able to you know test to make sure it's responsive and so as content arranged based on importance okay does it work across different browsers on different devices

into the images text and everything else align just like it does on desktop so there are plenty of tools out there on the web all you need to do is just do a search for you know check my website for responsiveness you know so you you can use plenty of tools to check to see if your website is responsive towards multiple devices why is that important because if somebody goes to your website Via Mobile and your site doesn't align properly or the content's all stretched out and somebody has to maneuver their browser just to see

your website then chances are they're not going to come back chances are they're not going to convert okay so you want to be able to revise your device browser combinations you want to make sure that everything works accordingly you want to be able to test those fonts make sure they look good and then you also want to make sure that people can navigate so if they're on mobile are they going to navigate just as easy as they can on desktop and if you have any pop-ups you want to probably make sure they're removed so that

way when somebody's looking at your website they're not getting interfered with on mobile and then of course you want to make sure that these Pages load okay so they load just as quick on desktop as they should on mobile and vice versa so this should not take a long time to load so moving on from responsiveness a mobile to building a brand community so brand community refers to a group of people who identify your brand and use your brand as a platform to exchange ideas and contribute content some advantages of having a brand Community are

promoting brand evangelism and loyalty it can be a source of feedback loyalty and ideas so build a community build a brand Community who you know identify with you okay so continue to you know treat these people as loyal customers okay maybe give them a promotion uh to use specifically just for them that they can use on your website or talk directly to them because you know that their followers they're repeat customers they purchase for you multiple times so talk to them differently as well you know who these people are and that's what building a brand

is all about it's about identifying your brand with other people okay and identify people who identify with your brand and messaging and talking to them as if they're part of your own Community your own family so you can use user generated content that provides future marketing strategies so the feedback you get from your own Community could it be in turn used to promote or used in future marketing strategies I.E advertising I.E post on social okay it can also provide PR opportunities so it's a chance for you to you know put out press releases based on

the community that you built so any brand regardless of who it is should be able to identify with your audience chance their target audience and that target audience eventually going to become part of a community these are group of people who identify with you what you're trying to sell what your cause is what your mission statement is what your services they identify with you so leverage them and reciprocate identify them talk to them separately give them the what they deserve the respect and loyalty that they deserve as well because they're communicating and they're following you

as a brand so the next thing you could do to drive traffic is Be Active in the comments section so engage in relevant and thought-provoking conversations on other blogs and sites it doesn't necessarily have to be another blog per se it could be other sites like Reddit or Cora or Mania sites that have a lot of content that are broken out by industry that allow you to engage in conversation and allow you to either upvote or share or respond Bond okay so be active because when you're active people are going to see that hey you're

a leader in the industry you know what you're talking about you have some some brand Equity you have some thought and some knowledge on the specific topic and subject so it just puts you in a better light when you can respond and be active on these different platforms okay let's turn our attention to search engine optimization also known as SEO or organic search so in order to drive traffic to your site you're going to have to implement an SEO strategy why do you want to implement an SEO strategy because it can help you improve your

overall searchability and visibility on search engines and obviously that comes with advantages one of those advantages is obviously more traffic to the site search is still King in terms of volumes of people using search on a daily basis so you have a great opportunity found it also builds trust and credibility because still a majority of the people who do a search click on an organic search listing and so if you're found organically and you're ranked number one then chances are somebody's going to click on your listing and it provides increased engagement and traffic and so

what that means is more traffic more engagement and engagement is something you define it could be again a download of a document or the clicking on the play button of a video or or submitting a form or signing up for a newsletter or calling these are all forms of Engagement so the the amount of traffic you drive from organic search to your website is only going to improve engagement okay so you can also provide and improve user experience and what do we mean by that well if you're getting lots of traffic from organic search you

have a really good opportunity to do a b testing and when you do a b testing you can improve user experience meaning you're showing one variation against the other from people coming from organic search and so this is helpful in that you know if you're running an A B test the variation has a chance to improve or outperform the original and if it outperforms the original you're improving user experience and then it helps Target quality traffic so SEO to me or all search is the only medium in which you're meeting somebody halfway you're you're addressing

what they're looking for so somebody's looking for a pair of red women's Nike shoes the 2019 model and you have that particular product to offer well you have a chance of showing up via organic search somebody types in you know women's red Nike shoes size whatever at the year 2019 model then of course they're gonna probably likely click on your list testing because you have what they're looking for and and that goes with any keyword any industry any business any segment any type of product you're selling so again you have a chance to really be

visible for what people are looking for and so that's the beauty of search engine optimization you have a really good opportunity here to meet people halfway to drive quality traffic to get them to enjoy a good user experience all the while generate an engagement and along with SEO we want to be able to build backlinks so SEO is a two-pronged approach meaning you have two strategies in one on page and off page and so off page involves backlinking so backlinks are just links that direct users from other websites to your own website so with that

inherently it's going to drive traffic qualify traffic to your website because if somebody's on a relevant website that's linking to yours and they click on that link and go to your website it's likely going to be qualified meaning they're going to be relevant and so backlinking because it's an off-page strategy why isn't an off-page SEO strategy because if Google crawls that other site that has a link to you then that's going to give you credit because Google will say hey this site's getting some links from some relevant sites we must think they're relevant and therefore

we're going to trust the site so by Google trusting your site it's going to improve your organic ranking and with the organic rankings being approved meaning it's going to mean faster indexing so what does that mean so you want to be indexed by the search engines and so the quicker Google can find your pages even if it's on somebody else's site then that means they're going to follow that link go to that page on your site and take that page back to their servers to be indexed okay so the quicker you can get index the

quicker you can get found and then it helps with referral traffic so again we notice that our efforts are on SEO organic search but if you're getting traffic from another website hey that still counts that's referral traffic okay so that's a side advantage to having backlinks is good traffic from other sites okay so those those are inherently the some of the reasons to do backlinking okay never hurts I mean there's brand awareness reasons to being on other sites as well there's industry leadership meaning if you you post content on Reddit okay you're coming across as

an industry leader but yet generating a backlink which helps with SEO and referral traffic so there's a lot of benefits to building backlinks and the opposite of backlinks are internal links so you want to do internal linking and that just means connecting one page on your site to another and why is that beneficial because it can help direct visitors to other Pages they wouldn't normally otherwise find via your navigation so if you're active on a Blog do don't be afraid to include multiple internal links you want to move people through your site you want the

flow of traffic to go from one page to another to another and so when you do internal linking just like with backlinks it's going to improve the indexing of your website Google's going to follow those links and index those pages and Google does give credit from an SEO perspective from an internal linking perspective so if one page is linked to another and that page has really good relevance in the eyes of Google then the other page is probably going to benefit from that the other reason we want to do internal linking again you want to

move people from your one page of your site to the other and when you do that it's going to reduce bounce rates so bounce rate is simply the rate at which people land on a page and then leave so if I have a hundred people in on my home page and only one person went to another page and the other 99 left the site then that's a 99 bounce rate so by putting internal links in in place you're helping people move from one page to the other and thus reducing the bounce rate and that's what

you want you want to keep people on your site you want to be greedy it also drives traffic to older posts so again when we say older posts we're really referring to blog posts so if you have a relevant blog post and you're writing a new blog post then link the two together if it's relevant link it I don't you know regardless of how old it is you know you want to show Google that these older blog posts just because they were written a year ago doesn't mean they're outdated and old-fashioned okay or useless you

want to keep them alive by linking to them so to me that's a good strategy for internal linking link to older blog posts you know show people you're an industry expert you've been doing this for a while and then you have lots of content to share okay so the longer you can keep somebody on your website the more likely it is they're going to engage and convert and some other inherent benefits improves page rank so what we mean by page rank is simply just a rank that Google gives pages so the more internal linking you

have the better off you are and then it helps spread link juice across websites and what we mean by link juice again just like backlinking it builds relevancy so just keep all these inherent benefits in mind to internal linking the end result is keeping the flow of traffic on your site and all these other benefits will fall into place okay so another way in which you can really hone in on traffic to your website is long tail keywords and long child keywords to me are more than just one or two keyword phrases okay so there

are usually three or longer keywords in a phrase okay so long tail keywords really nowadays account for most web searches people really take the time to even post questions as a search query it's a likely somebody it's unlikely somebody's going to go into search and just type in the word shoes they might type in red shoes but that's unlikely what they're probably going to type in is you know red Nike running shoes 2019 or some variation of that okay that's a long tail keyword and some of the advantages of using long tail keywords to be

found for are less competition so if you're using broad keywords like red shoes then who doesn't want to be found for Red Shoes well you don't necessarily you don't want to be found for red shoes because it's too broad you don't know what type of shoes somebody's looking for you just know they're looking for Red Shoes it could be running shoes it could be work shoes it could be you know boots it could be slippers okay it's too broad so long tail keywords help narrow it in and the more narrow and focused a keyword is

the less competition is going to have and when something's not competitive in the form of a keyword then that means your chances of ranking for that keyword are going to be greater and the chance of you ranking faster are going to be greater and then of course if somebody's looking for exact exactly what you have to offer then you have a higher chance to convert that person so if you have exactly those 2019 red Nike women's running shoes and somebody does a search for that and that's a long tail keyword and they click on your

organic listing if you have the right price then they're probably going to convert so you have a really good chance of converting somebody using long tail keywords so my point here is if you're looking for keywords to use focus on longer tail don't focus on one or two keyword phrases what it also does is it brings targeted traffic so even if somebody doesn't convert hey they could be back because it's exactly what they're looking for and if you're focusing on longer tail keywords like I just mentioned stay away from the shorter ones it's just easier

to optimize your page for SEO so remember SEO is a two-pronged approach on page and off page we talked about off page with internal linking and backlinks on page is all about making sure there's keywords you choose are are integrated in with the page you want to be found for and so if you're using a long tail keyword it's just easy to work that keyword in so it enables easier on-page optimization okay let's switch away from SEO to email marketing so let's focus on email marketing as a form or method of driving traffic to your

website so email marketing has been around a long time in terms of digital marketing why because it provides an effective way to convert leads into sales why because you can send personalized emails to a target audience so when you send an email to somebody on a regular basis you know who that person is so what are you doing in the email you're writing a specific message to that person well email marketing is the same thing except you're just sending an email to a larger group of people and when you send an email to a larger

group of people you're still going to personalize the message right you're not going to send a generic email to 1 000 people okay nobody's gonna do that so make sure your email is targeted if it's targeted it could be cost effective why because sending large amounts of emails or let's just say an email to a large amount of people or a large group of people is going to be cost effective it's not cost per click you know it's not cost per open okay so email usually depending on the the email provider you're using really is

a flat fee so just really depends on how many emails you're sending or how how many people you're sending the email to as well so but your email generally tends to be more cost effective than other forms of marketing so look at the email content provider you're using and just get a sense of what they charge but if you look at it and do a comparison email generally is cheaper than say doing pay-per-click because with pay-per-click you're paying for each click okay so that could be expensive depending on the keywords so email marketing is also

time saving okay a meaning it's a one-time thing and done so once you send the email it's just a matter of you know watching and looking at the metrics and learning what's going on so you don't make the same mistakes again but it is time conducive meaning you send out one email and that's it with pay-per-click you're constantly measuring and managing the campaigns and it provides real-time marketing so when you do send the email more than likely a majority of the people on day one or the day you send the email are gonna be able

to view it open it click on some of the links and convert so that's normally what happens in email majority of the people open it on day one and it kind of tails off from there so think about it as real time so when you send that email and if you have a thousand people on your email recipient list break it up send the first 500 first with a different subject line and then you can see the data come in and if you don't see the good results from the subject line or the body of

the email or you know the page they're going to then make adjustments before you send the other email to the next 500. so that's a great thing about emails you can break up the email into two groups the first group and then the second group with different subject lines and you can probably send them a little bit of time apart that way you can learn from the first email because with email you are generally going to get results right away okay within the first 24 hours so that's a great thing about email okay so the

other thing about email it's less intrusive so normally people who are going to get the email are the ones who sign up for the email so they're almost expecting your email so when they get your email again as long as you're not sending an email on a daily basis normally most companies send it monthly or bi-weekly it's not going to be as intrusive okay and then it also helps build credibility increase visibility and brand awareness meaning you're going to build your brand in that email you're going to put content in that email that's going to

show off your credibility meaning you could put some testimonials in the email you can put some good affiliations you can put a good article to an industry article you just wrote so email is going to inherently continue to build brand awareness for you okay and it's an easy way to track Roi so if your e-commerce it's pretty clear you send the email somebody opens it clicks on it checks out and purchases something it's easily trackable because you could track it right from that email so one thing I want to say there is just if you

do send an email make sure you're tracking that campaign and you want to be able to use an analytics program like Google analytics okay if you use Google analytics you're going to be able to track when you send the email who clicks on it and who converts so you want to be able to measure an Roi for these emails and you can and that's the beauty of email marketing okay let's move away from email marketing to webinars so webinars great method for for Effective social media promotion it's a great way to bring traffic to your

website so why do we recommend webinars well because it provides direct content contact within your target group what do we mean by contact with your target group well you're going to host a webinar and you're going to invite this targeted group of people who are interested in your product or service so if you have a Facebook Community you can do a Facebook live event or you could do a YouTube or you know you can even set up a webinar and another platform but promote it on social media and if you're pronouning something on social media

you're probably promoting it to people who are already following you or like you and so that's what we mean by direct contact with your target groups you're you're going to be able to create a webinar and talk directly to that group and that's going to help build brand awareness and credibility and the great thing about webinars is you don't need some fancy software I mean I'm talking to you on a webinar right now now and so webinars are free all you need is a video camera and a recorder that's all and that's all built in

with software so there's plenty of software out there that allows you just to do a webinar really quick and easy there's lots of opportunities in software so and a lot of them are very cost effective so if you want to build create a webinar you can do that by spending very little money in webinars again allow you to talk to your your targeted group your community maybe prospective clients it helps build credibility and in effect Drive traffic to your website and when somebody does attend a webinar they're likely going to be highly engaged because you're

inviting them they're going to opt into the webinar and the great thing about webinars is even if they don't attend the webinar the day you have it it's going to be recorded so they can always go back and watch it so whoever watches the webinar is going to be engaged because it's going to be a topic they're interested in and then users are likely to be com prospective customers so having a webinar talking about something inherently interesting to maybe a larger group of people you can promote that on social media and potentially get prospective customers

to sign up and watch the webinar and if you do they're going to be engaged and then take the next step oh I like what this guy this person has to say they seem to be credible I like their personality I like their brand I like their product I'm gonna go check their web out their website okay so webinars allow you to kind of pull in more people as well as just your community because you can promote the webinar and you can promote it in advance and you can leverage social media for that okay so

something related to webinars incorporating video content so videos have been proven to be a really good way to attract new visitors and it just it makes your website very engaging when you have videos on your website as well so if you create video you have an opportunity to post it on various video platforms like YouTube or Vimeo okay there's plenty of video platforms out there or just embedded in a blog post or embed it in a Facebook post or a tweet okay so you can do a lot with video and having video on your site

is going to increase engagement okay when you increase engagement good things happen that's going to lead to increased conversions and sales or or Roi or just like we mentioned the webinar can help build trust with your audience even that webinar you could post on your website so you want people to engage by watching this video they watch the video they're going to gain trust in you because you're talking directly to that person that user that audience that visitor to your website and when you get Bell trust it's going to increase engagement and that's the beauty

of video unlike text or imagery videos really do engage with the audience and so the more video you could do the better off you are because again you can leverage social to draw attention to your brand and product and service and then you can have that video on your website to increase engagement which in turn increases conversions and sales and improves Roi so always think video there's plenty of video software out there that you can leverage and the great thing about video two is hey most people are using mobile phones these days smartphones and so

video works just as well on mobile as it does on desktop so keep that in mind you know video is going to be engaging regardless of what device somebody uses and then of course if they're watching the video on Facebook or YouTube then chances are they're going to share that particular video which is going to bode well for your brand and traffic okay so video if somebody likes a video it's very easy to share video especially from a mobile phone so YouTube just makes it so easy easy to share or like or subscribe to a

channel it just it becomes that much easier things can go viral and chances of them going viral with video are going to be greater okay so other ways to drive traffic to your website is submit your content to content aggregators so what's a Content aggregator well content aggregators like Reddit that provides a great platform for you to post your content so that's what a Content aggregate is really a site like Reddit or medium or quora where you could post content to a large number of people okay so with Reddit people are either going to upvote

it or download it so the more upvotes you get are thumbs up or likes or people who encourage that content the more of a chance it has to be found and so first thing out of the gate if you do provide content to a Content aggregator like Reddit make sure it's good quality content that's interesting and that should be a case the case around across the board whether it's a social post or blog post make sure the content's unique professional and interesting and then if you do say put something on medium or you do put

something on Cora and it is professional and interesting and thought provoking then people are going to react to it and then that again could lead to traffic but even if it doesn't lead to traffic it helps build brand awareness so if you have content just like videos leverage it put the content out there okay and when you put content out there it's only gonna especially if it's good content put it's going to put you in a good light so don't be afraid to share your content on the likes of Reddit or medium or core or

some of these other content aggregator websites because good things are only going to happen and again referral traffic SEO brand awareness conversions so all these are inherent benefits of just sharing your content okay and then finally we want to learn from analytics okay so what do I mean learning from analytics so there are plenty of analytics platforms out there one of the most popular is Google analytics so you want to make sure you're tracking traffic on your site with Google analytics so all you have to do is just go to Google analytics via search sign

up add the analytics code to your website and voila they're doing all the heavy lifting they're going to track traffic coming your website and not only are they going to track traffic but they're going to tell you how that traffic engaged and so the benefits of it Google analytics is hey you could figure out where users are coming from are they coming from that email campaign that I sent out to a thousand people are they coming from YouTube based on that video I posted or are they coming from Reddit based on the content I just

posted there or they come in from organic search it is so Google analytics can help us understand how much traffic we're getting from organic search so it'll help us measure our SEO efforts and then with Google analytics you could segment so we could segment by mobile we can segment by desktop returning user new user by campaign by Page by Language by city by region I mean there's so many ways in which to segment your audience and segmenting simply is breaking up the entire group of people who come to your website into different segments based on

what you want to say so if you want to look at you know females between the ages of 18 to 24 who come from mobile via organic search that's a segment and you can look at that information and analytics if that's your target audience then you can see how they're performing okay so Anna there are a lot of benefits to Google analytics definitely want to take advantage of segmenting in Google analytics you could look at your competition so there's a benchmarking report the great thing about Google analytics you can also look at content and how

your content is performing once somebody lands on your website are they what page are they spending time on what page are they engaging on the most okay what pages have the highest bounce rate or the lowest time on page so you can really determine what pages work best and then of course the end result in analyzing all this data is you want to be able to fine-tune your website so take advantage of the data that Google analytics or any other analytics platform has given you by learning once you learn what's going on with your website

you can make adjustments to your website to improve user experience okay so we went over a lot of different ways to drive traffic okay you can incorporate all this to your website immediately let's talk about how to measure your SEO performance so all that hard work you've done with on-page SEO coupled with all the work you've done with off-page SEO are eventually going to net results and positive results and we want to be able to measure that as you're actually doing the work as you're putting forth the effort on on page and off page and

so we want to be able to measure that and so you want to be able to understand what to measure and where to measure it and so when we talk about SEO we really want to hone in on three high level core metrics and that's ranking traffic and conversion so when we talk about ranking traffic and conversion we can break that down into this list here what kind of traffic are we getting from organic search what kind of traffic are we getting from mobile devices remember mobile is very important because as we talked about with

on-page SEO as we talk about with local SEO a lot of searches start with mobile devices we want to look at keyword ranking remember keyword research is the first step in the SEO process even before we do any work with on-page and off page you know we want to look at the local visibility if we have local SEO results we want to look at engagement metrics so all that traffic we're driving from organic search we want to be able to measure how they're performing and behaving on our website we also want to measure some form

of progress on off-page SEO and that's in the form of backlinks so all of these are different metrics we can measure using different tools so let's talk about how to go about looking at these metrics and where to go look at them and measure them and so really monitoring all this Behavior will help us understand how we're performing how SEO is performing and so really what we we want to do is start with Organic traffic and so we can look at that on a month-to-month basis we can look at it from a geographic perspective we

can look at it in terms of how many new visitors we're driving versus returning and then again more importantly conversion rate and so to me the best place to start to look at that traffic from organic search is Google analytics and Google analytics is a free tool it's simply there to measure website performance so if you go into Google analytics we can actually go in and we can look at all sorts of data based on website behavior and so if I'm in Google analytics and I go under acquisition and then I go under all traffic

channels over a given period of time let's just say the last seven days for a particular website I can see what traffic is coming from organic search and then I could see the amount of new users that are coming from we're going to search I can also see engagement metrics bounce rate for example so I want to be able to see if somebody's typing in a query clicking on our Link in the organic search results and then coming to our website are they actually engaging with our website or are they leaving the website after only

visiting the page they landed on so that's all and these are all important metrics to measure and I can measure all that right here in Google analytics if I wanted to I can even take it a step further and break that down by country so if I type in country as a secondary Dimension now I can see what country is driving traffic from organic search so a lot of your organic traffic information is going to be centrally located in Google analytics so we also talked about Mobile Traffic a majority of searches take place on mobile

phones versus desktop so Google basically is reporting the nearly 60 percent of searches now appear from mobile devices and so if we go back to Google analytics and we can also look at a mobile report so if I go in Google analytics under audience under mobile overview I can see a breakdown of the amount of traffic coming from desktop versus tablet versus mobile and so you'll find as time goes on that your mobile device is likely going to drive a majority of the traffic from organic search and so you can compare device information with channel

so if I just type in Channel and Google analytics as a secondary Dimension and look at the default Channel groupings versus device category I could see that you know mobile from organic search just driven traffic over the last seven days this is something you want to keep an eye on because a lot of people tend to begin their searches on mobile devices so mobile ranking is different than desktop ranking the because with mobile ranking it's based on a responsive website and with that responsive website basically response of being that the website's going to adapt to

the mobile device so it's going to respond to the device that somebody's on and so therefore the metrics or the engagement metrics are going to be different but if I look back to Google analytics I can see again bounce rate I can see pages per session average session duration so if I look at line three I could see all the different engagement metrics compared to those metrics from other devices and other channels okay so you want to be able to do a comparison because if behavior is not up to par engagement is not the par

on mobile then you want to do something about that so you want to hone in on Mobile Traffic specifically from organic search because the behavior is going to be different you know people start their searches on mobile well the site's going to be different and so therefore it's a different experience altogether so make sure you track the behavior and more importantly make sure you track that page speed so earlier we talked about on-page SEO when we honed in on page speed so just as a reminder if I'm back in analytics and I go back under

Behavior then if I go to site speed then if I go to overview I'll be able to see the average page load time on my website I can also look at specific page timings and I should be able to see that by device so if I type in device category I'll just be able to see how each paid loads per device and so this allows me to understand which pages are loading fast which pages are not loading as fast and address those pages accordingly to improve engagement metrics so we want to keep an eye on

page speed as well as overall user behavior from mobile devices you can also use other tools that are out there like agency analytics there are plenty of tools out there I tend to use Google analytics because primarily it's free and Google analytics is a Google product so it works with other Google platforms like Google search console we want to keep an eye on ranking so remember when we do our keyword research we're choosing keywords that have high relevancy high volume and low competition so we want to be able to track keywords that we choose that

have high relevancy high volume and low competition and so the tool we use or at least I recommend using is Moz so I mentioned Moz earlier with on page and off-page SEO so if we go into Moz and we know what keywords we're trying to rank for we can go ahead and add the Namaz and what Moz does they actually track where these keywords Rank and so if I go into Mods and I click on rankings I'll be able to see on a weekly basis or monthly basis how are keywords are ranking and for what

page is the ranking so for whatever keyword I choose to to optimize for I want to make sure I put those keywords in Moz because when I put them in Moz Moz is going to on a weekly basis tell me where these keywords Rank and for what URL they're ranked for so that way I can keep an eye on ranking over time because in theory the higher you rank the more traffic you're going to get and so we want to be able to see the trend in which keywords rank okay so if I click on

a particular keyword in Moz it's going to give me over a period of time where that keywords ranked be able to see Improvement in ranking for a particular keyword the whole idea behind SEO is to choose keywords that are relevant optimize for those keywords so that you can be ranked for those keywords in order to get the traffic and conversions so Moz is a good platform that helps us monitor rankings for particular keywords now if you don't want to use Moz as an alternative you can turn your attention to Google search console and so remember

we talked about Google search console earlier when we talked about sitemaps we also talked about mobile usability with search console we also talked about links to your site with Google search console so Google search console is a good tool to help you understand how you're performing with Organic search and so there's one tool in particular which is performance that helps us understand what keyword queries people are actually typing into Google search and so here I could see the actual query and so with this particular website valleyfig.com I can see that dried fig recipes over the

course of the last three months had 5414 Impressions that means that one of my pages either one or multiple Pages appeared in Google search engine results 5414 times and over the course of those 5414 impressions I received 1100 clicks so Google search console is going to be able to tell me not only you know how many Impressions I received for a particular keyword but they also going to tell me how many clicks and if I wanted to add more metrics to that I can add them like the average ranking position for keyword the click-through rate

so I can add multiple metrics to this report to give me an understanding of hey or any of my target keywords being used or queried and if they are where am I ranking and I am I showing up and am I getting clicks so search console serves as a good alternative if not primary tool or platform for you to measure how your organic search results are showing so for local visibility this metric is important for you know maintaining local SEO so remember on the local SEO we talked about uh Google my business so if I

go back to Google my business I can go into my account and so Google my business is going to be able to show me some metrics so if I go into Google my business and I click on insights I'm going to be able to see a number of different metrics over the course of a month I can see exactly you know what queries were used by how many users and when I appeared so I'll be able to see how many views I receive not only on search results but on maps then I can also see

what actions people took when they saw my results in maps or in search did they visit my website did they request directions that they call so I can actually see engagement metrics right in Google my business I could see a Breakout by ZIP code I could see phone calls by day of the week I could see how many people even viewed my photos so there's a lot of insights into local SEO on Google my business so that gives you an idea of how you're performing organically on local search and remember you want to be able

to use Google my business to hone in on your specific audience so all these metrics help you align with whether you're getting in front of the Right audience and whether that audience is actually behaving the way you want them to meaning you know are they actually contacting you are they going to your website are they calling you so local visibility and understanding the metrics involved with local SEO is very important so Google my business is where you want to turn your attention so overall engagement metrics are important they play an important role in determining rankings

for example we talked about bounce rate to bounce rate is the rate at which people go from organic search to your website and then leave after a scene one page and not going any further so if they land on a page and then leave the website after landing on that page it's considered a bounce and so bounce or bounce rate is a good indication of how people are receiving our website or the content that they're reading on our website there are other metrics involved like average session duration or pages per visit all of these are

engagement metrics and let's not forget about page speed so page speed is also a good engagement metric all of these metrics affect or determine rankings so we want to be able to make sure that if we're in Google analytics and we're looking at engagement metrics that our metrics are good because if somebody comes to our website for organic search and there's a high bounce rate then what does that tell us that there's a disconnect between what that person's querying and then the content that they're reading and so we want to be able to address those

engagement metrics so that we can continue to not only drive quality traffic but keep the traffic engaged and then in turn drive up conversions last metric we want to look at is backlinks so content having more backlinks from good good domains will effectively improve your SEO performance we talk about backlinks with off-page SEO and remember quality over quantity and so we can measure backlinks going back into Moz we can use moz's Link Explorer tool so remember if I type in a domain Valley fig I can get some metrics related off-page SEO including my domain Authority

but more importantly I can see what links are pointing to my site in this case valleyfig.com so I can see they're 575 link domains I can see there's 7900 inbound links and so just by clicking on that I can get an idea of the types of websites that are linking to my site and their domain Authority and their spam score Google search console so if you go back into search console you can also just click on links and we should be able to get an idea of you know what websites are linking to our site

and more importantly we want to be able to see not only what sites but what pages they're linked to remember we want our backlinks pointing to Interior Pages not necessarily the home page so here I could see the top link page for valleyfair.com it's slash recipes so we want links pointing to our interior page is not necessarily the home page that's what's going to help your performance your rankings for all your pages not just your home page so having quality back links pointing to Interior Pages help boost the domain Authority and the page Authority for

that particular page so again using Moz link Explorer tool or using the links report and search console are good sources for you to identify backlinks so when we look at these these reports we want to look at the Domain authority of these sites that are Link in ours the number of outbound links to the site or specific pages on our site we want to be able to look at the ratio of Link distribution you know we want to be able to look at how many follows and no follows so most of this if not all

of these metrics are in Moz so if I go back to Moz I can actually see you know which ones pointing which ones are followed the total quality of the link that's pointing to our site again bam so Moz link Explorer report tends to give us all the information we need in order to measure and get a sense of our backlinks that help us with off-page SEO so there are other tools out there there's hrefs again search console there's other SEO platforms out there that'll help you measure backlinks if you are looking to become an

SEO professional then look no further than simply runs postgraduate program in digital marketing so don't miss out on this opportunity Find the course Link in the description for more info mission let's get started with keyword research so basically what we want to do is Center our keywords just like our website we want to Center our keywords around or our content around good keywords so the videos on YouTube are no different than the web pages on our website so if we have somebody who states YouTube is the world's second most well well-known engine well it is

because it's right behind Google it's not a search engine per se it's a video platform but if it was a search engine it'd probably be second right behind Google so YouTube is pretty popular majority people use YouTube search every day to watch videos on a number of different topics so they can find these videos in Google but because YouTube's so powerful and so popular people go directly right into YouTube for their searches and so the whole idea behind YouTube being the second most well-known search engine is centered around keywords so if you have the the

right keywords for your video then the chances of you ranking higher increases on YouTube so we're gonna share with you a few easy ways to do keyword research this is the most important step in getting your videos to rank on YouTube just like for those of you who watched any of the SEO videos we produced it at simply learn you know that keyword research is so essential to getting your web pages to rank on Google well it's no different keyword research and choosing the right keywords is just as important for your videos as is for

your web pages so we're going to go into a few things to do here to find the right keywords so we have the search suggestion you can look at your competitors we have different tools we can use some other factors involved in Google itself so let's start talking about some of these ways to really hone in and do some good research on your keywords to align them with your videos so first thing is search suggest so YouTube has a feature called autocomplete so if you've done any searches on Google it's very similar if you're typing

something in to YouTube search then YouTube is going to suggest other related popular keywords so let's take a look at that if we go back to YouTube for a second and I just type in machine learning YouTube is going to populate on the autocomplete in the search bar some other popular keywords that we can potentially use or in this case if I Choose You Know machine learning tutorial I'm going to see a video about machine learning tutorial so here you can see simply learns rank number one for machine learning tutorial but there are other videos

that show up in my search result so we want to be able to use the search suggestion box in the search box field so when we're typing in something you know YouTube just like on Google is going to give us those suggestions so if we're focusing a video on machine learning then you know we have have some ideas of some other keywords that we could center around because these are our popular keywords these are key words that people are using to search on YouTube so that's one suggestion looking at competitors is another suggestion so we

could search for keywords used by our competitors in their video and title and description so let me talk a little bit about that what you want to do is you want to go to that particular channel of your competitor so when you go to your particular competitors YouTube channel you want to be able to click on the videos tab when you click on the videos tab then you're going to sort by most popular and then what you could do is see a list of videos and then when you look at a list of videos you're

going to choose a video and then what you're going to do then is take a look at the keywords used in the title and description and then once you do that you're going to have a list of keywords that you can use yourself for that video so for example let's go back to YouTube so if I go to type and simply learn here's our Channel page just by clicking on simply learn if I click on videos ever wonder if there's so now I can see all the videos ever wonder if there's an easier way go

back so here I can see all the videos sort by most popular once they do that then I can choose a video this is the most popular video right now for simply learn if I click on that video it's automatically going to start playing but what I could do is simply just look at you know the content description so just by clicking show more I can see all the content that align with this video that's one way to do it is simply by looking at your competitors now what you could also do is look at

the tags associated with the particular video and so what you want to do is you want to look at the HTML and so that means looking at the page source so just like web pages what YouTube does is they look at meta tags so if you call from SEO in order to get your pages to rank you need to have a title tag and a meta tag description so videos are no different what we're doing for YouTube is aligning certain keywords with the video so if you take a look and do a search for keywords

by viewing the page Source you're going to see all the keywords associated with a particular video so for example if I go back to YouTube and I look at the page source of a video Let's just say this video here Facebook's ad tutorial I'm going to pull up the page source and all I need to do is control F and type in keywords and now for that Facebook video I can see all the keywords associated with the video so you can see there's a lot of different keywords we're aligning with this video and so why

do we want to do that because we want you know our video to show up for keywords that people may type in and so if you use that YouTube autocomplete it's going to give you those ideas this most popular keywords so if they're related align those keywords words with the video so here you can see Facebook marketing Facebook ad strategy Facebook ads for beginners so forth and so on so there's a lot of keywords we've aligned here with that particular video and again all you need to do is look at the page source so right

clicking view page Source do a control F for keywords and you'll be able to see the keywords aligned so you could do that for your competitors videos as well so you can see what keywords your competitors using for a video that's most popular for their Channel and is also ranking on YouTube and on Google so using the autocomplete gives you those keyword ideas looking at your competitors videos also gives you some other ideas for keywords that you can align with a video that's relevant that you want to rank for so let's look at some other

ideas here so you can install plugins and there are plenty of plugins available on the Chrome browser that will help you see the video tags associated with a particular video so a couple of examples are vid IQ and tubebuddy those are extensions that work in Chrome and what they do is they give you the exact tags that a particular video is using so for example if I go back here and I look at a video on YouTube let's just say the machine learning Basics video I have vid IQ installed on my Chrome browser so just

by clicking on that vid IQ is going to give me a lot of information about that video you're just going to give me an overview of their particular metrics they're going to give me some other information associated with Facebook some engagement metrics really what I'm interested in is those keywords so if I scroll down a bit here I can see the video tags associated with the machine learning Basics video so vid IQ is telling me is these keywords are associated with this video and not only does it show me what keywords are associated I can

also see where they rank so for machine learning Basics this particular video ranks number one if I go down I could see what is machine learning and how does it work I can see it's rank number two here I could see machine learning algorithms it's ranked number nine so I can get some ideas of the types of keywords that are being used as tags for that video further down I can also see some Channel tags but really this is the video tags or the idea place I want to be able to look to get an

idea of the types of keywords that are associated with the video that are also ranking or not ranking so that's another way for you to really get an understanding of what keywords to use at the particular video so autocomplete you can look at the page source of a competitors video or you can use a Chrome extension in this case I'm using vid IQ to give me some information about the video tags for a particular video so according to an industry study you using keywords and video tags will help you rank well on YouTube so you

have to use keywords and video tags if you want your video to rank there's been a lot of studies YouTube is so popular and videos are so prominent in today's world where if you have videos and you're going to upload them to YouTube then associate the right keywords with those videos so some important factors when we look at keywords what we want to do is look at search volume we want to look at competition we want to look at relevancy we want to look at the primary and secondary keywords that we want to use so

well chosen keywords will help you rank so we just gave you some ideas on how to do some keyword research again those ideas were really to use the autocomplete on YouTube or Google they're going to give you some popular keywords you can look what your competitors are doing by looking at the page source and just looking at the keywords that are aligned with that video or you can use it third party extension in Chrome in my example I use vid IQ that gave me the keywords associated with that video so you have ways to get

the keywords so what we want to do is we want to make sure we choose keywords with high search volume they're going to drive more traffic to your video however we want to balance it out with keywords that have low difficulty and are easier to rank for so you don't want to choose something very broad that's just going to be very difficult to rank for and of course we always want to go with relevancy so for talking about machine learning Basics then we want to choose keywords associated with that and that's where that autocomplete comes

in handy because what Google's going to do and YouTube's going to do is give us keywords that are very closely related to the video that we're trying to optimize for and so we have a number of different keywords at our disposal that are relevant that we can look to see if they have good volume and low competition and so the whole idea is we want to choose a keyword that defines the nature of the content and then what we want to do is support that with secondary keywords so we want keywords that are highly relevant

to the primary keyword so that's the way to go about aligning your keywords you want keywords that are high volume low competition or relevant and you want to choose that one keyword that is really what the content's about and then those secondary keywords that support the primary so if you have a machine learning video you could choose your primary keyword as in this case the machine learning Basics video so well chosen keywords help you rank well on YouTube just like the machine learning Basics so if I go back to our video our machine learning Basics

video if I just type in machine learning Basics I'll be able to pull it up and so here it is if I click on it I'm going to go to YouTube and so here I can see this keyword we know humans learn from is well aligned because it's in the title it's in the copy and it's a line is a keyword tagged with the video so we know that that keyword has good volume low competition is relevant because that's what the video is about the basics of machine learning it's an introduction to machine learning so

instead of honing in on just introduction and machine learning primary keyword is machine learning Basics and then we supported that video with those secondary keywords what is machine learning because somebody who doesn't know machine learning is probably going to type in that keyword and then introduction to machine learning is a good secondary keyword because it's explaining the basics of what machine learning is all about so primary keyword machine learning basic secondary keywords what is machine learning and introduction to machine learning so that's the whole idea behind choosing keywords you want that keyword that really is

going to define the content and then support that with those secondary keywords so remember when you're performing your keyword research choose keywords for your videos that Google show those on the video results page so what I mean by that is your video can get more views if you rank on Google as well so the whole idea is not necessarily to be found on YouTube it's also to be found on Google so if I go back to Google and I just type in data science for beginners and I type in videos then you could see we're

ranked number one so even if you're not looking at the videos clicking on the videos link on Google search you can always just when you do a search what Google's going to do is also put in the videos here on par as part of the search results so what they're going to show you is the top videos that are ranking for that particular keyword and so we may not rank overall for data science for beginners but we're ranked number one in the videos category and so if somebody's looking for a video that's important and you

can see here that these first two are ads so what Google is doing is they're saying hey this is so relevant this particular video for the keyword query data science for begin scanners that we're going to show it above the organic listings even though it's a video so the whole idea is to be found on YouTube and Google because you're increasing your visibility you're increasing your chances of getting found on both search platforms so according to backlinko google Ranks videos with keywords like how to tutorials so you know a lot of the videos that you

find on YouTube are going to be instructional based and so what Google's doing is they're saying hey if somebody types in how to or tutorial or an introduction to anything that's going to signal to Google that it's instructional it's going to help you rank so when you search for machine learning tutorial or how to become a machine learning engineer you're going to get results related to that because if you look at these examples we have machine learning tutorial in our title or how to become a machine learning engineer so keep that in mind if you're

creating a video video and it's educational in nature you know use those key terms like how to and tutorials in the video title because that will help you rank so let's move over now to video title so we want to use our Target keyword in the title of the video and again we want to make sure if it's educational to include that keyword tutorial or how to so for every video title YouTube has a limit of a hundred characters so we really have to pick and choose really wisely so if we look at the video

that we were focusing on a couple of minutes ago so machine learning Basics here we could see under 100 characters we have machine learning Basics what is machine learning introduction to machine learning and then the brand name so that is the title of this particular video so it takes into account the primary keyword the secondary keywords and the title and it also includes that really the key term that really Google and YouTube like and that's what is machine learning so it's helping us Rank by having our keywords in the title with that key phrase what

is okay so that's a good tidbit on creating a good video title is to align it with the right keywords your primary and your secondary and so we want to use those catchy words and numbers to gain High click-through rates just like you would on the title tag of your web page we want to do the same with our video title because the video titles what's going to show up in search so if I go back to you know search here we could see you know data science tutorial data science for beginners so we want

to make sure in this case you can see data science in five minutes so that was purposely done so that hey I don't have time to watch a video I only have a couple minutes data science in five minutes okay great I'm going to click on the video and now I have an opportunity to watch something and learn something under five minutes so choose using the right words in your video title is going to help you get that click-through rate up remember click the array is clicks divided by Impressions and an impression is how many

times your video shows up and the search results on YouTube or Google so we want to keep our click-through rate high and in order to do that we want to be able to write some really good title tags for our video so use catchy words like a number or how to or what is because that's going to resonate with people when they're searching now for the description what we want to do is we want to use the target word at the beginning of the description the title and the tags itself so if I go back

to my video here machine learning Basics we know it's in the video title and right off the bat if I look at the description of the video here I can see this machine learning Basics video will help you understand what is machine learning so our primary keyword is in the first sentence right in the introductory of this description and so that's going to bode well for optimizing our video the description length is 5 000 characters so we have a lot of characters to work with so if I go back to my video I click show

more we have a lot of characters to really describe what the video is about okay there's no shortage no shortage of including keywords into the content so you have 5 000 characters go ahead and see if you can work in naturally your keywords but one of the key tips here is just make sure that first sentence starts out with that keyword that's a good tip of course you always want to make it sound natural as possible you don't want to stuff it with keywords at the same time work them in naturally work in your keywords

naturally and then include hashtags in your description to help the audience find your video is easily so if I go back here you know we want to be able to include hashtags so hashtags it's like anything else she would use on social media it just signals to the end user hey this is what the video is all about and if I go ahead and type in that keyword then it's our video has a better chance because it's a line with that hashtag and then there's Target keywords and LSI keywords latent semantic indexing keywords we want

to be able to use those keywords as Target keywords with our video so if you recall the example I gave a few minutes ago we used the Facebook ads tutorial as our example here I could see all the target keywords associated with that particular video so don't be afraid to use those LSI related keywords meaning keywords that are related to the content use them as Target keywords with the video so between your LSI keywords Target keywords and then using our primary and secondary keyword in the title tag using our primary and secondary keyword in the

description and then using in hashtags in the description the combination of all of that if we chose the right keyword then we should find that our video will eventually rank on YouTube so just doing these small tidbits with our keywords really help get our video to rank so at the end of the day we want to be able to use the tools available to Us YouTube Itself by looking at our competitors those extensions like vid IQ the autocomplete to really find our good keywords and then incorporating those keywords into you know the title tag the

description as Target keywords hashtags we should really be off and running with our video on YouTube so at simply learn if I go to YouTube and I just type in machine learning you could see we're right here is the first organic video on YouTube for machine learning if I jump over to Google and I type in machine learning Basics you can see where number or number one for machine learning Basics under videos if I click on all we're also ranked here as well under the video section on organic search results another example data science for

beginners we ranked number one for that if I look at another keyword data science interview questions okay we'll rank number two for that so we're ranking for a lot of videos and why are we ranking for a lot of different content and videos on Google Search and on YouTube well we put a lot of work in behind the scenes of creating the video and that's what we want to show you so part of that has a lot to do with you know how our audience engages and sees our video so for example we're looking at

the machine learning Basics video here and we can see that it has over 221 000 subscribers for this video 234 000 views we've had over 2 000 people like the video and we have had over 270 plus comment on the video so when we get our our videos to rank then we can see there's a lot of Engagement and so that's the whole idea is when you do a video and you want to show up on YouTube you want people to enjoy you want people to share it you want people to like it you want

people to comment on it and that's part of the whole ecosystem of YouTube It's you know we're going to show you behind the scenes of what it takes to get your videos to rank and then we're going to show you some of the metrics involved with some of these videos to help you stay ranking so without further Ado let's go into how to get your videos to rank on YouTube so we're going to talk about keyword research for YouTube we're going to talk about some ways to create high quality videos so the importance of user

engagement just as I showed you with the machine learning Basics video all the shares all the commenting all the views and subscriptions then we're going to get into how to promote your content and then we're going to just review a little checklist for you and sum it all up so let's get started with keyword research so basic quickly what we want to do is Center our keywords just like our website we want to Center our keywords around or our content around good keywords so the videos on YouTube are no different than the web pages on

our website so if we have somebody who states YouTube is the world's second most well well-known engine well it is because it's right behind Google it's not a search engine per se it's a video platform but if it was a search engine it'd probably be second right behind Google so YouTube is pretty popular majority people use YouTube search every day to watch videos on a number of different topics so they can find these videos in Google but because YouTube's so powerful and so popular people go directly right into YouTube for their searches and so the

whole idea behind YouTube being the second most well-known search engine is centered around keywords so if you have the right keywords for your video then the chances of you ranking High higher increases on YouTube so we're gonna share with you a few easy ways to do keyword research this is the most important step in getting your videos to rank on YouTube just like for those of you who watched any of the SEO videos we produced it at simply learn you know that keyword research is so essential to getting your web pages to rank on Google

well it's no different keyword research and choosing the right keywords is just as important for your videos as is for your web pages so we're going to go into a few things to do here to find the right keywords so we have the search suggestion you can look at your competitors we have different tools we can use some other factors involved in Google itself so let's start talking about some of these ways to really hone in and do some good research on your keywords to align them with your videos first thing is search suggest so

YouTube has a feature called autocomplete so if you've done any searches on on Google it's very similar if you're typing something in to YouTube search then YouTube is going to suggest other related popular keywords so let's take a look at that if we go back to YouTube for a second and I just type in machine learning YouTube is going to populate on the autocomplete in the search bar some other popular keywords that we can potentially use or in this case if I Choose You Know machine learning tutorial I'm going to see a video about machine

learning tutorial so here you can see simply learns rank number one for machine learning tutorial but there are other videos that show up in my search result so we want to be able to use the search suggestion box in the search box field so when we're typing in something you know YouTube just like on Google is going to give us those suggestions so if we're focusing a video on machine learning then you know we have some ideas of some other keywords that we could center around because these are are popular keywords these are key words

that people are using to search on YouTube so that's one suggestion looking at competitors is another suggestion so we could search for keywords used by our competitors in their video and title and description so let me talk a little bit about that what you want to do is you want to go to that particular channel of your competitor so when you go to your particular competitors YouTube channel you want to be able to click on the videos tab when you click on the videos tab then you're going to sort by most popular and then what

you could do is see a list of videos and then when you look at a list of videos you're going to choose a video and then what you're going to do then is take a look at the keywords used in the title and description and then once you do that you're going to have a list of keywords that you can use yourself for that video so for example let's go back to YouTube so if I go to type in simply learn here's their Channel page just by clicking on Sim learn I click on videos ever

wonder if there's so now I can see all the videos ever wonder if there's an easier way go back so here I can see all the videos sort by most popular once they do that then I can choose a video this is the most popular video right now for simply learn if I click on that video it's automatically going to start playing but what I could do is simply just look at you know the content description so just by clicking show more I can see all the content that align with this video that's one way

to do it is simply by looking at your competitors now what you could also do is look at the tags associated with the particular video and so what you want to do is you want to look at the HTML and so that means looking at the page source so just like web pages what YouTube does is they look at meta tags so if you call from SEO in order to get your pages to rank you need to have a title tag and a meta tag description so videos are no different what we're doing uh for

YouTube is aligning certain keywords with the video so if you take a look and do a search for keywords by viewing the page Source you're going to see all the keywords associated with a particular video so for example if I go back to YouTube and I look at the page source of a video Let's just say this video here Facebook's ad tutorial I'm going to pull up the page source and all I need to do is control F and type in keywords and now for that Facebook video I can see all the keywords associated with

the video so you can see there's a lot of different keywords we're aligning with this video and so why do we want to do that because we want you know our video to show up for keywords that people may type in and so if you use that YouTube autocomplete it's going to give you those ideas this most popular keywords so if they're related align those keywords with the video so here you can see Facebook marketing Facebook ads track strategy Facebook ads for beginners so forth and so on so there's a lot of keywords we've aligned

here with that particular video and again all you need to do is look at the page source so right clicking view page source to a control F for keywords and you'll be able to see the keywords aligned so you could do that for your competitors videos as well so you can see what keywords your competitors using for a video that's most popular for their Channel and is also ranking on YouTube and on Google so using the autocomplete gives you those keyword ideas looking at your competitors videos also gives you some other ideas for keywords that

you can align with a video that's relevant that you want to rank for so let's look at some other ideas here so you can install plugins and there are plenty of plugins available on the Chrome browser that will help you see the video tags associated with a particular video so a couple of exams samples or vid IQ and tubebuddy those are extensions that work in Chrome and what they do is they give you the exact tags that a particular video is using so for example if I go back here and I look at a video

on YouTube let's just say the machine learning Basics video I have vid IQ installed on my Chrome browser so just by clicking on that vid IQ is going to give me a lot of information about that video I'm just going to give me an overview of their particular metrics they're going to give me some other information associated with Facebook some engagement metrics really what I'm interested in is those keywords so if I scroll down a bit here I can see the video tags associated with the machine learning Basics video so vid IQ is telling me

is these keywords are associated with this video and not only does it show me what keywords are associated I can also see where they rank so for machine learning basic this particular video ranks number one if I go down I could see what is machine learning and how does it work I can see it's rank number two here I could see machine learning algorithms it's ranked number nine so I can get some ideas of the types of keywords that are being used as tags for that video further down I can also see some Channel tags

but really this is the video tags or the idea place I want to be able to look to get an idea of the types of keywords that are associated with the video that are also ranking or not ranking so that's another way for you to really get an understanding of what keywords to use at the particular video so autocomplete you can look at the page source of a competitors video or you can use a Chrome extension in this case I'm using vid IQ to give me some information about the video tags for a particular video

so according to an industry study using keywords and video tags will help you rank like well on YouTube so you have to use keywords and video tags if you want your video to rank there's been a lot of studies YouTube is so popular and videos are so prominent in today's world where if you have videos and you're going to upload them to YouTube then associate the right keywords with those videos so some important factors when we look at keywords what we want to do is look at search volume we want to look at competition we

want to look at relevancy we want to look at the primary and secondary keywords that we want to use so well chosen keywords will help you rank so we just gave you some ideas on how to do some keyword research again those ideas were really to use the autocomplete on YouTube or Google they're going to give you some popular keywords you can look what your competitors are doing by looking at the page source and just looking at the keywords that are aligned with that video or you can use a third-party extension in Chrome in my

example I use is vid IQ that gave me the keywords associated with that video so you have ways to get the keywords so what we want to do is we want to make sure we choose keywords with high search volume they're going to drive more traffic to your video however we want to balance it out with keywords that have load difficulty and are easier to rank for so you don't want to choose something very broad that's just going to be very difficult to rank for and of course we always want to go with relevancy so

for talking about machine learning Basics then we want to choose keywords associated with that and that's where that autocomplete comes in handy because what Google's going to do and YouTube's going to do is give us keywords that are very closely related to the video that we're trying to optimize for and so we have a number of different keywords that are disposal that are relevant that we can look to see if they have good volume and low competition and so the whole idea is we want to choose a keyword that defines the nature of the content

and then what we want to to do is support that with secondary keywords so we want keywords that are highly relevant to the primary keyword so that's the way to go about aligning your keywords you want keywords that are high volume low competition or relevant and you want to choose that one keyword that is really what the content's about and then those secondary keywords that support the primary so if you have a machine learning video you could choose your primary keyword as in this case the machine learning Basics video so well chosen keywords help you

rank well on YouTube just like the machine learning Basics so if I go back to our video our machine learning Basics video if I just type in machine learning Basics I'll be able to pull it up and so here it is if I click on it I'm going to go to YouTube and so here I can see this keyword we know humans learn from is well aligned because it's in the title it's in the copy and it's a line is a keyword tagged with the video so we know that that keyword has good volume low

competition is relevant because that's what the video is about the basics of machine learning it's an introduction to machine learning so instead of honing in on just introduction and machine learning primary keyword is machine learning Basics and then we supported that video with those secondary keywords what is machine learning because somebody who doesn't know machine learning is probably going to type in that keyword and then introduction to machine learning is a good secondary keyword because it's explaining the basics of what machine learning is all about so primary keyword machine learning basic secondary keywords what is

machine learning an introduction to machine learning so that's the whole idea behind choosing keywords you want that keyword that really is going to define the content and then support that with those secondary keywords so remember when you're performing your keyword research choose keywords for your videos that Google shows on the video results page so what I mean by that is your video can get more views if you rank on Google as well so the whole idea is not necessarily to be found on YouTube it's also to be found on Google so if I go back

to Google and I just type in data science for beginners and I type in videos then you can see we're ranked number one so even if you're not looking at the videos clicking on the videos link on Google search you can always just when you do a search what Google's going to do is also put in the videos here on par as part of the search results so what they're going to show you is the top videos that are ranking for that particular keyword and so we may not rank overall for data science for beginners

but we're ranked number one in the videos category and so somebody's looking for a video that's important and you can see here that these first two are ads so what Google is doing is they're saying hey this is so relevant this particular video for the keyword query data science for beginners that we're going to show it above the organic listings even though it's a video so the whole idea is to be found on YouTube and Google because you're increasing your visibility you're increasing your chances of getting found on both search platforms so according to backlinko

google Ranks videos with keywords like how to tutorials so you know a lot of the videos that you find on YouTube are going to be instructional based and so what Google's doing is they're saying hey if somebody types in how to or tutorial or an introduction to anything that's going to signal to Google that it's instructional it's going to help you rank so when you search for machine learning tutorial or how to become a machine learning engineer you're going to get results related to that because if you look at these examples we have machine learning

tutorial in our title or how to become a machine learning engineer so keep that in mind if you're creating a video and it's educational in nature you know use those key terms like how to and tutorials in the video title because that will help you rank so let's move over now to video title so we want to use our Target keyword in the title of the video and again we want to make sure if it's educational to include that keyword tutorial or how to so for every video title YouTube has a limit of 100 characters

so we really have to pick and choose a really wisely so if we look at the video that we were focusing on a couple minutes ago so machine learning Basics here we could see under 100 characters we have machine learning Basics what is machine learning introduction to machine learning and then the brand name so that is the title of this particular video so takes into account the primary keyword the secondary keywords and the title and it also includes that really that key term that really Google and YouTube like and that's what is machine learning so

it's helping us Rank by having our keywords in the title with that key phrase what is okay so that's a good tidbit on creating a good video title is to align it with the right keywords your primary and your secondary and so we want to use those catchy words and numbers to gain High click-through rates just like you would on the title tag of your web page we want to do the same with our video title because the video titles what's going to show up in search so if I go back to you know search

here we could see you know data science tutorial data science for beginners so we want to make sure in this case you can see data science in five minutes so that was purposely done so that hey I don't have time to watch a video I only have a couple minutes data science in five minutes okay great I'm going to click on the video and now I have an opportunity to watch something and learn something under five minutes so choosing the right words in your video title is going to help you get that click clicked your

way out remember click the array is clicks divided by Impressions and an impression is how many times your video shows up and the search results on YouTube or Google so we want to keep our click-through rate high and in order to do that we want to be able to write some really good title tags for our video so use catchy words like a number or how to or what is because that's going to resonate with people when they're searching now for the description what we want to do is we want to use the target word

at the beginning of the description the title and the tags itself so if I go back to my video here machine learning Basics we know it's in the video title and right off the bat if I look at the description of the video here I can see this machine learning Basics video will help you understand what is machine learning so our primary keyword is in the first sentence right in the introductory of the description and so that's going to bode well for optimizing our video the description length is 5 000 characters so we have a

lot of characters to work with so if I go back to my video I click show more we have a lot of characters to really describe what the video is about okay there's no shortage no shortage of including keywords into the content so you have 5 000 characters go ahead and see if you can work in naturally your keywords but one of the key tips here is just make sure that first sentence starts out with that keyword that's a good tip of course you always want to make it sound natural as possible you don't want

to stuff it with keywords at the same time work them in naturally work in your keywords naturally and then include hashtags in your description to help the audience find your video is easily so if I go back here you know we want to be able to include hashtags so hashtags it's like anything else you would use on social media it just signals to the end user hey this is what the video is all about and if I go ahead and type in that keyword then it's our video has a better chance because it's a line

with that hashtag and then there's Target keywords and LSI keywords latent semantic indexing keywords we want to be able to use those keywords as Target keywords with our video so if you recall the example I gave a few minutes ago we used the Facebook ads tutorial as our example here I could see all the target keywords associated with that particular video so don't be afraid to use those LSI related keywords meaning keywords that are related to the content use them as Target keywords with the video so between your LSI keywords Target keywords and then using

our primary and secondary keyword in the title tag using our primary and secondary keyword in the description and then using hashtags in the description the combination of all of that if we chose the right keyword then we should find that our video will eventually rank on YouTube so just doing these small tidbits with our keywords really help get our video to rank so at the end of the day we want to be able to use the tools available to Us YouTube Itself by looking at our competitors those extensions like vid IQ the autocomplete to really

find our good keywords and then incorporating those keywords into you know the title tag the description as Target keywords hashtags we should really be off and running with our video on YouTube that's our turn our attention to creating high quality videos and some of the best practices around that so along with everything we mentioned about choosing the right keywords we always need to keep in mind that the videos we create need to be of high quality so the content itself in addition to the keywords is a primary factor in ranking so so in order to

have keywords we need to have content and in order to rank we need to have you know good content so let's talk a little bit about creating content and what's involved with that and what we really mean by high quality videos so if you have a video content that is not informative or irrelevant to the topic it won't rank so that's just common sense so you need to create content that's aligned with the topic obviously and then that way you have keywords that are aligned with the content so but if you have content it really

isn't aligned with the topic then you're not going to rank no matter how much you've optimized that video so just keep that in mind so there's a couple of things we want to look at here so high quality content is determined by really two metrics so we're not sure about how good our content is and how good of high quality video we created we want to look at audience retention and user engagement so on audience retention when simply the percentage length of your video that the audience has watched It's the percentage your audience has watched

so focusing on audience retention is important for people who want their videos to rank high so if you want to rank you need to optimize for the keywords but got to keep in mind content so content is related to audience retention and user engagement so audience retention percentage length your video of your video that the audience has watched and for example it can be both absolute in minutes or percentages so audience retention can be the average view duration or percentage of the audience that watched then we have user engagement so yours engagement viewers who are

engaged with your content and so that means they're either sharing it subscribing commenting or liking so those are all forms of Engagement so the percentage of users who watched or how long they watched versus engage management or in combination with engagement are two factors for ranking so let's talk about some tips for creating high quality videos so we want to publish longer videos and so what do we mean behind longer videos so what's the reason for longer videos let's just suppose we have two videos one shorter in length and one longer in length first video

is 15 minutes long the second video is seven minutes long so on average if viewers watch about 40 of both videos then video x which is 15 minutes long will have more than twice the watch time of the video that's seven minutes long so remember duration we want you know people to watch our videos longer so if the video is longer in length if it's 40 then it's gonna have a longer audience engagement audience retention so that's one of the reasons you know from a metric standpoint so even when viewers watch you know both videos

the time is going to differ so we want to take into account longer videos for primarily that region is because you know it gives an end user an opportunity to watch the video longer and then it's going to help us rank our videos longer so when we talk about watch time so if one video has higher watch time than the other watch time is just the number of views times the average view duration so another tip is we want to plan our video script so we want to keep the content organized my recognition is you

know create an outline first and once you create an outline of how the video is going to flow then start populating with content and so to me that's how you can keep the flow organized okay is really with an outline starting out with an on-pound there's no videos are no different than say a presentation if you've done a PowerPoint presentation you always want to start out doing an outline and then we want to upload a high resolution videos hi resolution we don't want to create videos that you know a small resolution like say you know

400 by 400 resolution or something you know something really small we want to create something a very high res so according to back or link Oaks more than 50 of videos on the first page of YouTube are high definition so high definition videos of higher quality are going to be shown on the first page of YouTube more often than not so high resolution videos organizing the content publishing longer videos are examples of creating high quality video we also want to make sure that content is relevant to the title so if we're talking about machine learning

Basics you know obviously the content is going to be about you know intro to machine learning or what is machine learning and then the title should reflect that content so aligning the title sets the expectation for the end user so when they see a title what is machine learning then when they watch the the video if they're expecting to learn about machine learning and what it is so if it meets expectations then the chances are that person who's watching the video is going to watch it longer and that means it's going to fulfill the viewers

requirements and when you align everything accordingly keywords titles content then at the end of the day the user is going to watch it and the more they watch it the higher the engagement the higher the engagement the better chance you have to rank some other tips that you could use to create high quality videos so we want to be able to you know use examples to clarify our content so you don't be afraid to go into another screen like I am if I want to I'm talking about videos jump into the machine learning Basics video

which I've done throughout this session I can simply do that by keeping the user engaged here this video is about machine learning Basics well the titles align with the video we made sure that we have have a nice description about what the video is about and we're aligning the expectations so not only that I'm showing you example within the video itself so we want to use examples throughout your video to keep the user engaged it will also help clarify what you're trying to express in the video itself so we want to make it visually appealing

so visually appealing means imagery or examples in the video and then when we talk about imagery you know you want to use good images in your video so use public domain sites that are available to you like Shutterstock or flat icon I mean there are plenty of those sites out there so feel free to use any one of those sites to use high quality images in your video give more information to your audience okay giving maximum relevant information can help gain more reviews and so when we talk about more information again it goes back to

you know the examples you use there's no should be no shortage of examples Hey their description use all 5 000 characters at your disposal imagery we want to build up as much information as you can in the video itself to keep the end user the viewer engaged we also want to create original content so always create original content you could certainly get ideas from YouTube if you want to create a video about machine learning see what else has already been done do searches on YouTube itself but you know when you're going to create a video

yeah you can create another video about what is machine learning but just make sure it has your own take on it you're the subject matter expert when creating the video create it with your own original content have high audio quality and video effects so just like you see here on this video we have effects in it and the audio is of high quality meaning no background noise no Distortion and we want to be able to speak clearly in the video so you want to speak clearly loudly concise just as I'm trying to do now so

that you can understand what I'm trying to say or what the viewer is trying to to understand when they're watching the video so watching and listening are two of the components and you want to make sure both of our high quality avoid distractions we don't want to pause you don't want to ramble on a particular Point too long we want to keep users engaged so you always want to move from one point to the other intermix it with examples those are ways to keep the users engaged we want to include transcripts or subtitles for your

video so transcripts is just more content that's aligned with the video and the search engines will be able to pick up that content and help your video rank so to me that's a key component to creating a good video is having the necessary content that go along with the video that outline I referenced earlier in terms of organization you always want to have a Content outline so what topics are you going to cover in the video that's why you need the outline to point that out confirm that before you actually start creating the video okay

focus on the initial 15 seconds so that's key you know somebody's going to click the play button of your video and if you don't catch them in the first 15 seconds then they're likely going to pause the video or just go ahead and close it out all together so you want to be able to capture somebody's attention right off the bat and even before they click on that play button you want to make sure again you're exceeding expectations that title is aligned with the content so in your first 15 seconds it basically needs to be

catchy but also setting the expectation of what the user is expecting so in this example here we want to pay close attention to the first 15 seconds that's when viewers are most likely to drop off so we can look at audience retention and YouTube so use the options above the graph to view absolute audience retention or relative audience retention so audience retention is basically how many views a video received and the percentage of the total number of video views and that includes every moment of the video as a percentage so we'll show you an example

of what that looks like so here if we go to the machine learning Basics video we can look at the audience retention report and this is since it's been uploaded the lifetime audience retention so here we can see a nice graph the percentage of people who viewed it and how long they viewed it so in percentage so here for example I can see you know 43 44 percent watch the video for at least two minutes here I can see 28.6 percent wash it for six minutes plus so that that's the audience retention it gives us

an idea in terms of percentage how many people or percentage of people watch the video at what length so that's audience retention so we want to keep that number high at the very initial stage of the video and we want to keep it high throughout and that's why you always want to create high quality content using those examples using imagery making it organized content not pausing you know going from one point to the other those are all best practices to keep the viewer engaged and then we want to add resources from well-known sites so throughout

this video we've used backlinko there are other sources we've used so if you have a source go ahead and put it in your video to add credibility and then we want to use cards to your videos so this cards is basically a feature that recommends relevant videos to your audience so in addition to machine learning Basics there could be other videos about machine learning that we can recommend or you two can recommend to the audience so set up end screens you want to make sure that with end screens you can use relevant videos to your

audience towards the end of your video so you can recommend relevant videos towards the end of your video you can also create playlists so this is a feature that keeps your audience engaged with relevant content by Auto playing the next video so if you enable this feature it's going to go from one video to another pattern interrupts keep the audience engaged so basically it allows for your audience to stay within one video without having any interruptions involved and so going back to the did you know audience retention report helps you analyze how well your videos

are engaging to the audience so what do we mean by that well if I go back again to my audience retention report how engaging was it well I could see 42 percent 43 percent watched it on average of 3 minutes and 21 seconds so to me that's pretty good of course we always want a hundred percent of the video the video is seven minutes long if almost half of our audience saw over half of the video then I would say that's pretty good people were engaged so audience retention just is a good report to start

looking at to help you understand how engaging is my video and if your video is not engaging you know you can always go back and edit it or fix it or tweak it so remember the average view duration for all videos and top performing videos listed by all time we can look at that information as well in addition we can look at demographics so we can get an overview of the age gender and location and we can look at playback locations report and what the playback locations report does is it helps us determine the platforms

where our videos are being streamed from within YouTube look at the traffic sources where did the viewers come from devices did they look on mobile or tablet and so if there's any doubts you know if you have any questions please drop a comment below but especially if you have any doubts on the metrics so if we go back into YouTube we can look at analytics and if we're looking at analytics we can see more and then this is going to show us everything we need to see from device type so if I click on more

I can see my playback location so this will show me where the video is watched it was on a watch page or a channel page I could see the traffic sources I could see the gender and age so if I click on the viewer age report I can see the percentage of views by age so I can get a lot of information about my video and how it's performed who's watched it what they've done with it where they come from all the information they need to know and so it's all within YouTube analytics so again

if you have any questions about that you know just drop a comment below especially if you're new to YouTube you may have some questions but just know that every video you publish to YouTube high quality align with your keywords you're going to be able to view the metrics by looking at YouTube analytics so let's talk about the importance of user engagement so engagement is as we mentioned important because basically we can't rank without engagement our videos won't rank unless we have engagement so that's why it's important so engagement is somebody liking the video commenting sharing

it or subscribing each one of these is important to ranking so yes you need to line keywords yes you need to have high quality content so when you do both of those and you upload your video then it's up to the viewer and so the hard work that you put out for the video is hopefully going to pay dividends with engagement so you want people to do one of these four okay so let's talk about what that means so how do I get engagement so we already talked about creating engaging content so there are a

lot of tips to creating engaging content and so according to wordstream if your content is entertaining then over three quarters of the users are going to share it so that's part of keeping uh users engaged is keeping it entertaining is part of getting a high quality video so remember on that high quality video when we say entertaining the audio portion has a lot to do with it examples has a lot to do with it quality of the video itself has a lot to do with it so a lot of components so all those components on

a high quality video are going to lead to engagement so parts of what you could do in your videos is conduct a quiz so meaning the quiz itself is a way to keep people engaged in your video so that also help you get some more comments so according to backlinku video comments help and rank in your video higher so just as I mentioned the last segment about YouTube analytics and all the different reports available on YouTube hey if you have questions on those just go ahead and add a comment so that's a way to entice

your users or your viewers to add comments is if they have questions because you know with videos you're not going to be able to cover every detail or every minute detail about a particular topic you can only cover in some cases the topic at a high level so users are going to have comments or questions naturally and so the comments section is a good way to remind viewers hey if you have a question or comment go ahead and put in the comment section because that will lend to engagement as well so we want to add

sources from high quality websites that'll help with engagement okay use humor in your video we want to be able to basically you know make it human based we don't want to be robots so we want to be able to sound like you know we know what we're talking about but at the same time talk to the viewer not necessarily at the viewer or looking the other way and just going through the motions so adding humor adding personality never hurts at the end of the day we are all human adding that clear call to action at

the end of the video will also lead to engagement so if we win the video with hey leave your comments on this video or hey feel free to share this video with colleagues who are interested then that's a call to action that's likely going to lead to more engagement reply to your comments as well so if you have comments we always want to reply to them likely those comments are going to be questions because again as I mentioned even in this video about how to rank your videos on YouTube okay there's a lot of information

and a lot of information sometimes doesn't get covered in its entirety and so we want to make sure that if we miss something because we're only human that we're able to respond in the form of an answer to a question that somebody leaves in the comments section so more comments also lead to higher rankings because it's engaged engagement so when you're getting high engagement and your video starts to rank well you know you're going to start feeling really good and what is that going to do look at that feel good is going to lead to

confidence which in turn is going to probably lead to more videos and that's exactly what we do at simply learn I mean we're in the education business but we're in it to not only educate but making sure that our videos are shown to as many people as possible so that we can educate as many people as possible so it's all it's contagious so getting ranked feels good and then once you get ranked then you know you probably have good engagement okay let's talk about how to promote your content so once you've done all the hard

work getting your video done high quality content optimized with keywords and then publish to YouTube we want to let everybody in the world know about it right so we want to promote it we've done all the work we want to promote it now so is it necessary to promote it I would say yes because once your video is published you want to reach out you want to reach reach out to your audience not necessarily on YouTube but on different platforms so if you're active on Facebook or Twitter that's an opportunity for you to post or

tweet something about the new video so when we say different platforms I am talking about you know social media platforms so it depends on what you're active on so if you're active on Facebook yeah go ahead and post some of you're active on Twitter go ahead and tweet something it could be you know on LinkedIn group if you're part of a LinkedIn group about you know machine learning then go ahead and post something to that group to promote the video so that's going to help Drive traffic to the video and then help with engagement so

we want to engage with our audience on those social media sites so it really depends on what you're active on so if you have a large following on Twitter then go ahead and you know share that YouTube video link on Twitter with the Tweet that's going to drive traffic from Twitter to YouTube Remember You know you're going to be able to see audience engagement or retention by getting people to watch the video so you're going to be able to see right away by promoting the video and driving traffic to the video how engaging it is

remember the more people you have watched the video the more engaging it becomes the better it's going to rain so it's an ecosystem and promoting your content is part of that ecosystem so it all starts with social media if you're active on whatever platform that is go ahead and promote it so you can also look at you know content based social media sites or social media content based platforms like Reddit or Flickr for example so you can participate in a forum discussion on Reddit so in this example here it's about machine learning so we want

to be able to post something about machine learning with the link to our video so we can also go to content-based sites that are q a uh related like quora for example Cora is a really good site where you know if you go there post information about machine learning or the basics of machine learning with the link back to the video it's going to help because not only is it going to drive traffic but it's going to signal to Google hey you get a lot of traffic coming from quora this is going to bode well

for this video in terms of ranking so here's an example you know if you find a question that you can post on core then you're going to get people to click on your video and respond accordingly on quora or you can act as the person responding to a question that's already there so somebody already asked a question about what is machine learning you can respond with your video as the answer so you can just simply embed your video URL as part of your answer that'll help Drive traffic so you can also create your own blog

and embed your video so in the case of machine learning here we have an example machine learning what is it and why it matters so this goes nicely with the video so here you can see the person the author of this blog went ahead and embedded did the relevant video in the blog post so they play off one another nicely you can also opt in for influencer marketing meaning hey you can reach out to somebody in this example here you know Katie nuggets posted information about machine learning so in this case why choose machine learning

as a career well they get information and then what do they do they went ahead and embedded the video about machine learning Basics and so working with you know influencers in a particular category or topic will help Drive traffic to the video you can also create a YouTube playlist so playlists tend to rank high in YouTube searches so if you find yourself doing a lot of videos we'll go ahead and you know go to your channel and simply on your channel you can go ahead and create playlists so when you create playlists basically what you're

doing is you're organizing the content into different playlists no different than say the music you have set up on your you know or your iPhone or iPad or or iPod whatever it is you're using so you're just creating different videos in a particular category and it YouTube likes it it's organized it's going to help you get your videos found quicker and easier on YouTube Itself by putting your videos in a playlist so here you could see we have entire playlist on machine learning trending Technologies cloud computing Big Data digital marketing project management so a lot

of different playlists very organized if somebody goes to the channel they're going to be able to go to the playlist that's interesting to them and see all the videos there so it allows not only the end user to find what they're looking for but it's good for YouTube because YouTube likes those playlists so we want to engage our Audience by posting your video link on a community page so you could do that within YouTube and you can prefer to link your YouTube channel in your email so you can also do that so for example if

I go back to YouTube and I'm looking at out a YouTube video you know I can always Click Share so here I'm gonna get a particular URL that's associated with the video and I can just embed that so I can embed the whole thing in my email I can embed it on a web page or a blog post so just by clicking share I can also immediately share it onto the social media platforms that we mentioned Facebook LinkedIn Reddit okay Tumblr so there's a lot of ways to embed the video not just on a blog

post or influencer blog post but in our email and on social media as well so here's an example of what we can do with the YouTube discussion so we can also bookmark the video on a popular bookmarking site you know like stumbled upon or Reddit or you know there's lots of other ones out there so there's plenty of sites that you'll be able to go to and bookmark that content so that people can find it and you can always opt for backlinks so that means that hey if there's a blogger out there that blogs about

machine learning you can always you know ask that blogger to create a link back to the video and you could reciprocate do the same thing so that helps increase the authority of the video so a lot of things you could do to promote your video so let's do a quick review on everything we talked about in terms of ranking your video on YouTube it all starts with the keywords so we want to identify a list of keywords that are relevant to the video so we can use tools to choose our keywords but remember we want

to choose keywords that have high volume and low competition and so where can we go to choose those keywords well we can use the autocomplete on YouTube we could check out our own competitors videos or you know we could use vid IQ or tubebuddy or any of these extensions in Chrome to help us look at the keywords that are tagged with a particular video video so remember we want to have a primary keyword that's aligned with the content then we want to choose LSI keywords as our secondary keyword or keywords that are related to the

primary keyword so we want to create high retention videos meaning that first 15 seconds of the most important but throughout the video we want to use examples we want to keep it interacting by adding quizzes imagery good audio good video quality so we want to focus on the user experience and we also want to optimize our video content what does that mean well those keywords that we chose we want to use them in the title we want to use them in the description we want to use them as hashtags we want to use them and

tag them with the video themselves so we can add keywords to our meta tag okay we don't want to overdo it but we want to add a handful of keywords that are associated with the video so we want to be able to write eye catchy video titled and descriptions so remember use some of those key phrases like like a number or a question like what is machine learning so we want to use relevant meta tags for the videos and we want to use popular YouTube tags so we want to be able to tag our videos

appropriately to watch the length of your meta tags so there are links involved remember keywords at the beginning of the title Target keywords in the title description and tags we want to use interesting thumbnails to increase our click-through rate ensure that thumbnails are relevant meaning when I say thumbnails I mean the actual title tag itself or The Meta description we want to use hi-res videos we want to create you know videos with good high audio quality don't be afraid to put in video effects like some animation don't be afraid to use examples and then you

know obviously look at the draft of the video before you publish it so does your video follow an outline is it organized so these are all the things to take into account and there's there's plenty more you can do you know you remember once you create and optimize that video you want to promote it you want to make sure that you're sharing it on social media you create a complimentary blog you know generate backlinks from say other blog posts so there are lots of things you can do to promote your video so before you promote

it you want to organize the content create good quality content align it with keywords once you publish it you know keep organizing it by creating this playlist and then reach out on social reach out on different communities related to the topic and all those things combined will help you to get your YouTube video ranked so again some key takeaways here use the keyword research Available to You on YouTube you want to basically you know watch your descriptions you want to be able to align your keywords with your title and meta tag description you want to

be able to promote your content on social media on social bookmarking though and I can't stress enough great high quality video first 15 seconds are important but you're gonna know if you have good quality video because every video has analytics associated with it so we want to keep in mind the engagement so just by looking at the video itself so here I can see this blockchain in seven minutes it was just posted just yesterday the 27th so basically already 42 likes 33 comments 378 views so these are all engagement related metrics so you'll be able

to just look at the front of any video and see how well it's performing from an engagement standpoint so the better the engagement the better you of a chance you have to rank if you are looking to become an SEO professional then look no further than simply runs postgraduate program in digital marketing so don't miss out on this opportunity Find the course Link in the description for more information now when we're talking about the trends there are significant shifts happening in organic search the first of which is machine learning uh that is more artificial intelligence

analyzing search queries and developing new algorithms within the machine learning to serve up results determine intent which is the primary goal of machine learning and to return not only the results but the information you need as well as predicting information you might need in the near future uh the second is voice search more and more voice assistants are becoming popular through your smartphone through your laptop through home assistance and people are asking for information and so it is completely happening at an auditory level not in visual level and so how that is happening and how

that affects SEO reporting is really going to be a factor moving forward and then also as I'm sure if you've been doing any search engine optimization for any length of time you are familiar with the struggle uh that has happened ever since Google decided to strip keyword data out of any analytics reporting that took away really the number one way that you were able to measure the effectiveness of gaining keywords in the search engines now to hit each one of these just to explain them a little bit more so that you know exactly what's happening

and what it looks like as it affects your current level of SEO work as well as reporting uh as an example of machine learning uh if you go into Google AdWords right now and you were to set up a campaign looking at maybe like auto body or Auto work or something like that if you typed in a few keywords into Google what's happening is Google is only reporting one phrase that might cover two or three or four phrases based on for example Auto Body being is it one word or is it two words Google here

is providing it as two words so even if I type in auto body as a single word this is where the machine learning is coming in realizing that these are the same queries and so rather than treat them as individual queries what is happening is through machine learning is they are trying to figure out what is the intent of the search and then grouping the intent into single categories or single searches and then all the variations would be included in that now if I do keyword research at a third party such as word tracker or

something like that now what I'm going to find are multiple different ways that people search uh they're going to put in locations they're going to put in details they're going to you know use one word two words and so in a third party keyword research format we're going to see a lot more variations because those are tracking what people are actually typing in what Google is doing from the machine learning standpoint is condensing everything and trying to group it into as I said similar forms of intent now What's Happening Here It means that phrases or

words that are plurals acronyms typical variants uh such as words that may mean the same thing uh but then they're different words so they're going to group them together and then also as you saw there words with spaces or without spaces uh conjunction words as well as hyphens and apostrophes a lot of these are going to fall out of what you're able to bid on also in the paid search side and it will all go into a particular group of words under a primary heading so that's where voice search is taking us is really a

condensing of the language into intent what are people searching for and how do we give that their in how do we give their information back to them now obviously this isn't perfect I've worked with a number of clients where they may offer a service and because of that service Google is trying to then associate them with another service uh and it's not relevant and so because of that machine learning sometimes uh what we're seeing is a difficulty in trying to get unique businesses new ideas or something that just isn't a part of that overall big

picture uh they're trying to force it into neat little boxes but as we know business is not full of neat little boxes uh it's messy it's fuzzy it's it's all kinds of different types of businesses suppliers industries that are going to have some level of uniqueness about them so hopefully this can continue to improve uh but it does at this point still need some human intervention the second aspect is voice search and maybe some of you have uh maybe the Google home or the Alexa Appliance in your home and you've been playing around with it

and seeing what it can do uh but also everyone's phone uh and then also Cortana is on uh any Microsoft operating system desktop and so being able to search from your phone simply by a voice command uh now this is affecting our ability to report because this does not show up uh as a search now if you're using Google now and you are searching on Google or a Google app it will show up as a search referral however if you're using Cortana if you're using uh Siri it's going to use the search engine of the

operating system and so in that case and I'm going to address this a little bit later it shows up as a direct visit rather than uh a search initiated visit and so this is affecting the reporting of SEO metrics uh but at the same time it is also changing the search landscape entirely right now uh Amazon is probably Google's biggest competitor for most searches especially for electronics uh especially for uh what you would consider things for home uh and garden Amazon and right now it has taken about 40 percent of the market share away from

Google in terms of electronics and Home Products because people are going to Amazon first and they're using Alexa to do this so how voice search it really is going to be uh a volatile industry to follow over the next five years and then as I mentioned before probably the biggest frustration of anyone doing search engine optimization or wanting to measure the effectiveness of optimization or where they stand in the marketplace is the keyword not provided uh now there's a number of reasons why Google has gone about this the first reason that they gave was for

privacy reasons uh that they wanted people's searches to be private but at the same time if you are doing paid search you have full access to keywords uh and also if you are advertising through Google you can Target People based on their Search terms so we know the Privacy thing uh was really kind of a smoke screen I think what's going on here is that this was really the first step to getting people away from thinking of individual keywords or key phrases and focusing on one or two phrases that there that would describe their business

by taking away the vast majority of keywords that you're going to see in your analytics it will force you to look at other words it will force you to think bigger picture rather than those one or two words that most people believe that's what my business needs this is where I'm going to focus my attention and in in so in some ways this has been good by making people forcing people to think Beyond a single word or a single phrase about their business and looking into the bigger picture this also plays into the machine learning

because as I showed you before machine learning is condensing all of these keyword phrases trying to determine intent and what better way to really assist that than to start taking away keyword data in the search engines however when you take that away you have then taken away the number one reporting fact of SEO and that is what keywords am I ranking for what keywords are bringing in not only visitors but business and so by taking away the number one factor we're forced to look at a number of different methods that we can use then to

develop better campaign metrics now one of the first things about uh metrics is the expectations whenever I work with a company I want to know specifically what are your expectations for the campaign what are you trying to get out of it what do you expect uh I'll never forget I was uh Consulting with an agency about how they are developing their SEO campaigns and how they were reporting them to their clients uh and I went with them oops to one of their client meetings and after some of the agency people left um I asked if

I could talk with a client for a bit after the meeting and because the main reason was on this white board in the corner of their office they had visits this month and visits last month and the client asked me about the agency um you know what I was doing for them and what they what the agency was trying to do and then they said that they had concerns and the reason why they had concerns is that the visits last month uh were higher than the visits this month and that over the past few months

the number of visits had been going down and because of that they were having a lack of confidence in their agency now this was really kind of surprising because this goes right to the heart of client expectations uh no when I had asked that client then after that you know towards the end of the conversation is how how is your business how are leads how are your key performance indicators how are the conversions on the site basically asking them how's business uh and the response to that was well business is great business has been improving

over the past few months however the primary metrics they were looking at was visits rather than the business oriented metrics and so this is where establishing expectations of what campaign metrics we're going to follow and what those campaign metrics mean to a business this is a conversation that must take place rather than just reporting basic information the same charts and graphs every month or every quarter that really might not communicate the information that everyone needs and so a conversation between agencies and clients about what are the expectations of this SEO campaign what do we want

out of that and what constitutes success that conversation needs to take place and then that will determine how the campaign metrics are then developed and presented and the discussion that will happen around them now one thing that I think has been uh you know I would say both a struggle as well as what needs to happen the the first thing about SEO metrics is the myth of the number one ranking once in a while I'll still run into this where someone will hinge the entire success of a campaign by seeing the number one ranking they

want a single word or a tooth word phrase to rank number one in Google and that is their only standard of success uh unfortunately I you know anymore I will not even work with that kind of a client because it's an unrealistic expectation and it also shows a complete ignorance of how search works and what it the power of what it can bring to your business that this is much bigger than a number one ranking and if that's all you want then give me a budget and we'll pay for it uh but I would say

for the most part we've moved Beyond a number one ranking uh and now what we have to educate people on is that rankings are really a personal metric that you the rankings you see are probably going to be slightly different than everybody else and I'm going to walk through why that happens and so you can help educate people within your own organization of why ranking is a personal metric now rather than a universal metric and then of course as I had mentioned before it's on the expectations campaign metrics need to focus on the business objectives

not just on the external factors of rankings and and somewhat invisibility uh we want to look at the visibility of a company but ultimately what we need to look at is how is your search campaign delivering on your business objectives because that's the point of it all is what are we what are we trying to accomplish and how is it being accomplished see it's when I see charts like this that still make me a little queasy and still make me roll my eyes this was done uh about two years ago asking people what are you

measuring and unfortunately there hasn't been much change since this initial survey that the vast majority of people are measuring the number of visits to the website uh and then they're measuring social sharing time on site and less than half are still measuring SEO rankings um now that still boggles my mind because that's what I'm going to walk through here is why we can't measure SEO rankings it is a completely undependable metric and so what what really surprises me shocks me is that 35 percent of people are measuring subscriber growth and 27 a little more than

a fourth of businesses surveyed here are measuring sales leads this is what it shows so shocking and surprising especially when we come to campaign metrics and expectations of a client and that is what are the business objectives what is it that you want to grow because the last column here sales leads is what makes business grow that is a direct contributor to revenue and subscriber growth well that builds my list and marketing to my list is a direct contributor to revenue and so as I said this is just so mind-boggling because the two things that

directly contribute that have a direct impact on Revenue are the least measured in this survey the four things that have an indirect impact uh meaning that you can have is as I mentioned before an incredible number of website visits but absolutely no Revenue coming in as a result of that these are all key performance indicators visits sharing time on site those are key performance indicators they're not business objectives and so part of the expectations of developing campaign metrics is understanding the difference between a key performance indicator and a business objective because it's easy to get

sidetracked especially with search metrics especially with these types of things of you know visits time on site page views rankings but they're all indirect which is why they are under the key performance indicator uh grouping whereas we want to look at the business objectives of subscribers sales leads downloads getting information into people's hands engaging with them and moving along the customer Journey when we can develop metrics that focus on the experience of a prospect or a customer then and tie that to our SEO performance now we're developing how our Campaign Will directly impact the business

and the customer now I want to just go off to the side for a little bit here and talk about rankings and this is the whole concept of rankings are personal not Universal now you'll notice on this this is the this is a uh a rankings report from 2008 and compared to 2006. I had to go back really far to find this screenshot and this is a uh if you were doing a search for the keyword latest news this would show you who ranked number one uh and the change in the rankings over the past

two years and it also we're looking at it in Google and MSN for some of you this may look really familiar because what this did is you put in the domains that you were tracking the keywords and you would get a report about who ranks where for what keyword now this is back in the day and even around 2008 uh we were still seeing some or we were starting to see fluctuations in rankings based on where you are searching from as well as some history coming in but we weren't seeing it to the extent that

we see it today you see now today your rankings that you see are largely based on your search history it's based on past searches it's based on content preferences uh what types of content you tend to search on click on or visit uh what business or industry you tend to uh search on as well as any behaviors such as your predilection to click on ads paid ads display ads or anything like that and so what's happening here is this has been actually going on for the past 10 years is that more and more of your

rankings are going to be personalized to your unique history and the words the sites that you visit the words you use the types of queries that you make all of this is being developed in order to provide you the most relevant personal results ultimately it's also being done in order to focus the paid search ads specifically to you and your behavior and the industry that you're in because that's how the search engines monetize so the better they understand you and what you're looking for and again it all comes down to intent if they can figure

out your intent and provide you results that are relevant both paid and organic then that's the goal that's what they're trying to do and so simply based on your history we're seeing that rankings are going to vary from person to person and maybe even from computer to computer to smartphone depending upon how you use them the second thing is Regional results uh if you search for specific things in one region it's going to show up differently in other regions if I search for right now if I go to Google and type in Ford dealership I'm

going to see the one that's near me and I'm not going to see one that's out in another state or another region because based on the localization that search engines are providing it's going to look at that query as a localized result and serve it to me specifically So based on location now sometimes we will see things brands are more Global however if I'm looking for something that is specific to my region that can be based on my IP address my country my city my state even into a zip code uh local results targeted results

can be limited to a small area to only show to people who are within that area or searching in that area and so more and more based on localization we're seeing that affect the results and that has been highly impactful especially over the past two to three years as local search has just gotten miles better uh in all of the search engines and it's only going to increase as well uh but then also based on the different types of media based on language based on the type of search uh the intent of search or what

words you might use uh as well as here we have the machine learning come in uh what you'll notice here is simply if I do a search for something in Spanish as compared to English I get different results I get a completely different results page uh there's more videos on the Spanish results uh from the Spanish search then the English uh also the makeup of the page is completely different so the words you use how you structure the query the language those are all going to affect the type of results that you see and then

also you can see here is that the organic results you know we're seeing videos uh taking over results how to's uh actual uh you know multiple things happening in the search engine and results page and so it's no longer just a list of 10 links and running a ranking report to see where you rank because What's Happening Here is we're seeing multiple videos being served prior to even seeing any what you would call a traditional link or traditional website snippet here showing up in the search engine results page so as you can see all of

these things are just completely transforming a individual's rankings and so if you were to measure rankings what you're measuring is unreality uh you're you're measuring something that doesn't exist uh and as I like to say it's a it's extinct before it's even run because no person will ever see a ranking report they will see that reflected in their results it's going to be personalized and unique something also to throw into the mix that even based on your device you are going to see different results primary reason is because if you're using a smartphone it knows

your location and so you're going to have location results mixed in also based on contracts with different search providers uh with different uh you know licensing from Google licensing from YouTube uh the results will be different based on the phone you use based on the provider that you have uh and based on uh simply just being mobile as opposed to desktop so results are different based on the device uh so hopefully if anyone uh was hoping to run a simple ranking report as an SEO campaign metric uh just this little side light here has shown

it's really a non-starter anymore the traditional ranking report is extinct and we have to move beyond that so how do we move beyond that because there's also now that I just shared the the difficulties of a traditional ranking report we also have a couple other obstacles thrown at us that are specifically uh both from a search engine standpoint and from a user standpoint the first obstacle that we're running into is from a search engine standpoint this is what Google is doing if I do a search for top car reviews in 2017 at the very top

of the results I get a snippet of information uh pulled from Consumer Reports now what's happening here and you may have seen this as well if you type a question or something like that that Google is not only displaying websites but they're displaying the answers and they're pulling the content from these websites now when they do that that does not show up as a visit and it doesn't show up as a ranking to Consumer Reports Consumer Reports has no method of tracking this visibility and it's incredible visibility so at one point Google is providing information

to the searcher but the owner of this result is having its content displayed by Google without any knowledge that it's happening unless someone has gotten in in order to see that so this is a significant amount of visibility that right now goes unreported because there's no way to integrate this into any metric calculation uh other than a visual inspection to see what's happening with this we're going to see more and more of this Google is presenting more and more answers through the search engine results page rather than just the website the main reason is Google

has seen the more they do this the more they deliver the answer in the search engine results page rather than having people click through to go to a website they find that people are more likely to come back and use Google again and what's happening here is that Google essentially is eliminating The Click through they're trying to keep people on the search engine results page as long as possible think about some of the searches you've done recently if you search for weather information you search for flight information if you search for sports scores on Google

uh those types of things you're going to get your answer in the search results page you don't even have to click anywhere else to get the information it's right there this is going to not only grow under Google but this is really the big question mark as to what is the whole purpose of Google and what are they doing and how does it benefit me as a website being in these results when I can't track this and when Google is trying to keep people on their site on their property as long as possible this is

the big question mark moving forward for SEO metrics the other side of this is from a consumer standpoint and this is what we call dark search dark search are searches that originate from a non-traditional search engine for example if you do a search from your computer for example Cortana or if you do a search from your operating system in uh in apple you can do a search uh almost on the uh the desktop through the spotlight search and it will bring up search results if you go through that it's using basically the search engine capability

built into the operating system but it doesn't get reported as a search engine referral instead what's happening is it's sending you to that site as a direct traffic so anything that's from an operating system a search that comes through an app now if you're using the Google app this is kind of a kind of a gray area um but it does happen uh so you basically have to install the Google Search app or use something in the browser but if you're in an app with a search function and the app is not a search engine

app it will show up as direct traffic uh your voice based searches that's using the operating system uh now you can use a voice based search in the Google Search app and that will show up as a search referral I know this might get a little confusing uh but this also is you know this is sort of the dark search of what's going on uh and then also Amazon like I said is stealing a lot of business away from Google but there's no way to really know what your Amazon ranking is for a specific product

or query uh so in that way you're kind of losing some of whatever Amazon is taking we're also losing some of that data so those are some of the obstacles that we're running into in terms of getting a big picture of campaign metrics so like I said we need to start with a business goal when we start developing campaign metrics this is where the expectations need to be very very clear uh and I kind of like the acronym of clear here that we need to clearly State what is the business purpose what are we trying

to ultimately accomplish and how will search help to accomplish that based on that we create a set of goals we lay out the goals of a campaign what do we want people to do and then carry that over into how does that accomplish the purpose we then explain how and define success explain how success is accomplished as people meet those goals how does that fit into the customer Journey where is that in the customer Journey how does it move them from one stage to the next how do we measure that and how do we Define

that as success then we align metrics to that strategy we don't just start with the metrics we start with the purpose the goal defining success and then aligning metrics as we have our strategy and then the final stage is the ideal customer experience how do we relate that through these metrics how do we explain that our customer has seen this and then they did this or they looked for this information and it was a successful visit now what will they need this is where we look at the overall customer journey and how search is a

part of that Journey now getting into some very specific metrics that will assist this one of the things that I like to look at and this can be a part of the reporting if I'm looking at just the cold hard facts of of SEO campaign metrics one of the first things I'm going to look at is that audience overview and I'm going to look specifically at my organic traffic now one of the things I need to caution is making sure and I'm I'm surprised I still have to say this is comparing like time frames you

can compare year over year if you're comparing the entire year quarter to quarter example is I'm looking at first quarter 2017 compared to first quarter 2016. I want to compare like time frames I am amazed at how many businesses still look at month to month to month to month and there's such a drastic difference between month to month you have to compare this quarter to the same quarter last year this month this year to let that you have to compare the like time frames going month to month is is a is chasing your tail so

from here I want to specifically just look at my organic coverage at this point what I'm looking at here is with the audience overview I'm looking at my total number of sessions this year compared to last year and I can see that it's higher uh and in some areas I've seen some dips uh but then when I went to go look at specifically in Google this year or this first quarter compared to first quarter last year where am I at in terms of sessions new users bounce rate conversion rate and transactions that's what's going to

help me as far as getting the first step in my SEO metrics the next is looking at total organic visits this is anything that comes through search now again this is part of the conversation this is everything we can track uh because there are things that are completely outside of this uh this might be a good time to say this I was talking to an analytics provider a couple of years ago and in comparing different analytics systems and I asked them what makes your analytics more accurate than your competitors it was very interesting because this

is the lead engineer and he sort of shushed me this was on the trade show floor and he says in analytics we don't talk about accuracy he says what I like to say is that our analytics are less inaccurate than our class than our competitors and that is really the case when it comes to analytics if you've ever compared analytics from two different systems and looking at the same metrics they never agree I'm always amazed at how many people try to make their Google analytics line up with their omniture analytics and it will never happen

or they'll look at multiple different packages or they'll tell me my agency is reporting these numbers but these numbers are what I'm seeing and they're using two different systems that's because Analytics it's tracking what it can track and what is unclear an algorithm tries to organize it or an algorithm tries to assign things that are unclear to different areas so each analytics program kind of has its own methodology of organizing the information and interpreting it based on that that's where you come up with the we're less inaccurate than our competitors so when we're measuring organic

coverage we're measuring what we can based on this system it may not agree with another system don't try to make it agree because it just simply won't now here I'm looking at my total organic search visits and I can see compared to the the year prior this quarter is up 18 in visits I can look at total conversions and I can see that it's up 30 percent uh and then also what I want to do is look at landing pages and my keyword Concepts now this is a sense because the search engines don't provide us

any keyword data what we can do is look at our landing pages and the amount of visits those landing pages are generating then it doesn't take much to kind of look at those landing pages and see what what are they basically about what are those keyword Concepts now you can go to Google Search console you can go to Bing webmaster tools and you can see which keywords uh are driving traffic to your business through those webmaster portals and you can get the concept of what keywords are driving traffic now one thing I do like about

Bing webmaster tools is that Bing webmaster tools will not only show me which keywords I'm ranking for and which ones are sending traffic to my website but they will also show me which Pages or the recipients of those keywords so they are able to tie together the keywords and the landing pages and so I'll do that in bing uh on also Google search console will do that to an extent but to some degree this is still a manual process of looking at my landing pages and comparing them to the keyword Concepts as I said Google's

trying to push everything together into intent and so evaluate your landing pages in terms of intent what would someone be searching on in order to get to this page and utilize Google search console and Bing webmaster tools maybe some of your analytics in order to figure that out also what I like to look at are comparative metrics uh when I'm looking at the success of an SEO campaign as tied to other types of campaigns I also want to show the value of search engine optimization and what it's providing and so in looking at a source

medium I'm using Google analytics here what I can do here is for this time frame look at the overall numbers of sessions generated through each Channel as you can see there Google on its own is about 67 of all visits Yahoo is providing about [Music] 1.28 percent of visits and then we can see a little less than 20 percent are direct visits so comparatively I can see where my search engine optimization is contributing in comparison to all the other channels and I can get a sense there and terms of I can run a revenue report

by Source where I can see where my search is responsible for the greatest amount of revenue for the greatest amount of orders and also when I look at uh one interesting thing here I can also do a value per session breakdown and what this shows me is uh the email campaigns those by far have the highest value per session visitors coming through the blog are next in value per session and then we can see our search visitors showing up there as a significantly high value per session um and one thing that might jump out to

you there is you can see that Bing has a four pound 27 value per session compared to Google with a one pound 77 that's normal I over the past 15 years it has been a really interesting phenomenon that visitors from Bing or MSN have a higher value even though I will get uh just sheer numbers and higher revenue from Google but they are higher value visitor uh than Google visitors uh that's just a phenomenon that we've just observed for more than about 15 years and really kind of interesting there uh so from a metric standpoint

I like doing comparative metrics to see here's how search compares to your other channels here's what it's driving compared to your other channels in terms of visitors in terms of Engagement in terms of Revenue and revenue per user again I I kind of mentioned this associative metrics using Google search console uh to see some of the keywords that Google is driving uh Google my business I'm going to show that uh as we get into here before we wrap up Bing webmaster tools as I said they will show you the keywords as well as the associated

landing pages analytics uh getting into analytics and looking at your organic traffic I showed you a few reports there uh but that is where people need to live in order to understand what's going on with their search traffic and more and more um alongside analytics I'm seeing a CRM integration with analytics really becoming a a different standard because within the CRM integration I can then look at the entire customer journey I can track the initial touch point of a consumer I can then see how that spreads into different searches so maybe they'll find me first

from a paid ad but then how does a subsequent organic searches contribute to different touch points and then maybe there is a retargeting touch Point uh and so I really like what I'm seeing with modern CRM systems and tracking more of the customer journey and how search is a part of it and that really then gets to the point of looking at that customer Journey that ideal customer experience and it immediately puts it in the context of the purpose of the campaign uh and the goals of the campaign focused around the user experience when I'm

talking with a client laying out expectations really my first question is what makes you money because that's what we want to track there's our purpose we want to look at sales and leads and so I want to look at this prioritized outcomes this gets back to what is the purpose of the overall campaign then we need to look at what are performance goals now not all of these goals carry the same amount of weight what I mean by that are inquiries support uh people viewing videos on like chat subscribes downloads those are all a different

level of Engagement than a typical like or retweet or a pin um that's what I call you know it these are much more active if someone makes an inquiry that's a lead if they contact support if they're viewing videos about new cars that's a performance goal that means I'm engaging somebody and I'm answering their questions uh we can look at people subscribing and asking for more information downloading brochures downloading information this is where we'll attach different value to different actions because some actions will contribute much more in terms of value in the customer experience than

others and so we want to look at the performance goals and establish a level of value around them and then explain clearly the difference between a performance goal and a performance indicator performance indicators visibility visits time on site Pages viewed bounce rate these are all good performance indicators but they are removed from a direct impact on the business goals it's an indirect factor in fact they can even be misleading if that's what you're using because you could see that business goals are excelling while these numbers might go down or they might go up and business

goals go down because it's what are you doing with the information and how are you focusing your efforts I want to focus uh real quickly before I wrap up here on uh Google my business and this is something that Google has done more and more of I'm using actually a local landscaper that I've been helping out simply because I love the numbers that are showing up on this um and it's really cool because you just put your business in and then you set the service area so it can be a zip code it can be

a radius uh and then you can view the insights this is just on the left side is the login panel and it will show you how many searches your business has shown up for in the past month as we can see here we're over we're almost at about six and a half thousand searches where people searched for uh their business we we can see about 8.3 000 views of their local listing and about uh 16 000 actions uh so we can see here this now this probably right here is probably going to be I think

the future of SEO metrics the main reason is this is what happens when you do a search for a local business and the business box shows up in the results and that business box has a picture of the business a description hours uh pictures and phone number and what can happen here just like with the information where Google is showing all the information and you don't even have to click through it this is tracking that type of visibility this is showing you how many times simply your business information showed in the search results and so

now from here we can look specifically on uh what customers how they viewed your business and we can see how many times the business showed up in Search and how many times it showed up on maps in the top graph in the lower graph and this is where I think this is I I think this where reporting is really going to be moving is from that business box in the search results we're now showing in the past month how many total actions people have taken and that is how many people visited the website from the

the inbox information box how many people requested directions and how many people called from that business listing and the far right graph shows you how many people uh the dark green so maybe a little over a fourth of people were looking for the specific business name a little more than or a little less than three quarters of people we're looking for related keywords and because of that saw the business information so from a visibility metric standpoint within Google search results I love what Google my business is doing because it's providing me a view of how

many people are seeing my listing without even clicking on it but then because of the interactions available through smartphone searches local searches map based searches I can track a lot of this local activity and how people are then integrating uh or engaging with my local search result on google.com uh so reporting has changed it will continue to do so that is the only uh that is the only hard and fast rule here uh and so metrics need to focus on uh emphasizing conversion rates optimizing landing pages and it requires analytics expertise much more than ever

and ultimately what we want to get to is a measurement of the user experience like I said that big picture of the user experience did they find what they wanted uh doing task-based user testing where they have to find a specific bit of information uh from the search to the site uh and from that you can gather an understanding of how quickly they're able to find it how they can navigate there both in a desktop and a mobile and this gets to the the micro moment assessment when people are searching for things such as can

I afford it uh show me the new cars where can I get Finance those types of micro moment questions that people type into the search box or speak into their phone that's where we want to assess the experience of what do they see what do they find how easy is it for them to accomplish their objectives and then integrate that into a campaign measurement if you are looking to become an SEO professional then look no further than simply runs postgraduate program in digital marketing so don't miss out on this opportunity Find the course Link in

the description for more information okay so the first question that you might be asking interview is differentiate between do follows and no follows okay so if you take in or listen to my SEO courses on YouTube for SEO we we talked a lot about do follows and no follows and and simply put I mean do follows are just signals to the search engines to follow the link so there's a link on a pointing to site B we're going to basically tell Google Bing and some of these other search engines hey go ahead and follow that

link now I know file is just the opposite so no follow link doesn't allow the search engine crawlers to follow it so if we have a link on our site site a pointing to site B we could put a nofollow tag in there and what that's going to do it's going to signal to the Crawlers hey don't follow this link so in the end of the Crawlers don't follow the link then there's not going to be any link juice passed and so Google is not going to give you credit or give that site credit for

having a link pointing to it or pointing to another site or from another site and so it's all about linking so we can control if there's links on our site whether we want the Crawlers to recognize those or not simply with no follow tags so just a reminder link juice is the reputation or Equity pass from one way website to another so if you have a link on another website and that website is of high quality meaning their page Authority their domain Authority is high they have a lot of content you know they're not spammy

they're really rich and they're relevant then you may want to make sure that the link pointing from that site to your site is a no follow so that way that Google can recognize the link from that side to your site and basically that reputation is going to be passed on to you okay so that's a do follow versus a no follow and why would we do a nofollow well it just pens it really depends a lot of social media platforms like Facebook have no follows if you have a lot of content you may not want

to be pushing out a lot of do follows it could actually look bad from an external linking standpoint and so a lot of sites are really particular about who they want to pass link juice on to and give credit for the link so it's a business decision at the end of the day there's really no hard fast rule here care except from an SEO perspective if I have a site and I have a lot of external links pointing outward to other sites I'm going to be particular about who I allow the search engine to follow

and what links I allow not to follow okay so here's an example of what they look like so do follow is simply just the href notice the nofollow has the the tag appended to it the href tag with a nofollow so if the search engine's crawling your site and they see that no file there they're not going to follow that link and vice versa if there's a link on another site pointing to yours and there's a no follow there you're not going to get credit the search engines aren't going to pick up that link okay

so question two what is 301 redirect and how is it different from a 302 redirect so three one redirects tell users in the search engine specifically that an original page has been moved and this is the keyword here permanently so permanently moved we're going to explain that in a minute so it's just move from one page to another and so if we don't have a page anymore we have a new page let's just say you built a new website with new URLs you want to make sure the old page is pointing to the new page

with a 301 redirect so for 301 redirect is permanent then a 302 is temporary so we want the search engines to recognize that we have 301 permanent redirects in place why because if we have temporary then it might alert Google to not keep that page in its search engine rankings because it's temporary so why would Google want to keep a temporary page or even a page that is pointing to another page on a temporary basis so they may remove both pages from its index okay but if we have something permanent in place Google may say

okay this page is permanently linking to another page or redirecting to another page therefore it's stable it's permanent we're going to keep that new page in the index and eventually remove the old page so really something permanent is more stable in the eyes of the search engine something temporary may not be as stable in the eyes of say Google and if they don't see it as stable then they may remove both pages from the index okay so the idea is we want to be found in Google search index and we get it sometimes Pages go

away for a variety of reasons and if it does go away just make sure you have a new page for it and that new page is a 301 permanent redirect okay so question three why are backlinks important in SEO well we kind of hinted on that a bit with the nofollow because if we have a link from another website pointing to ours and that link from that other website is really relevant and and it has a high page and domain Authority then it's going to benefit us and so backlinks are important because if we have

backlinks from Qui quality body sites it's going to improve the credibility of our site especially if it's a do follow tag so the search engines are going to recognize the relationship between the site that has a link pointing to us okay so it's just going to build our credibility it's going to increase increase our domain Authority and then the net effect of that is if we're credible and we have high domain Authority then that's going to increase the rankings of our pages and when the pages increase in ranking then we're going to get a more

of a Lion's Share of the traffic for certain keywords that our pages are found for and if our pages are found in getting traffic then because we have increased rankings we're likely going to have increased traffic and then it's just a snowball effect so more traffic leads to more engagement and conversions so the whole idea for SEO is remember you have an on-page strategy and an off-page strategy building external links is part of an off-page SEO strategy and we want to make sure that you know we are relevant in the form of a link or

in the form of content on other high quality sites being on a high quality site only benefits us because again increases their domain Authority Google sees this is more relevant therefore pages are going to benefit by ranking higher and therefore when we rank higher we get more traffic so it's a snowball effect so having backlinks is important because it snowballs all the way through to conversions okay so what are the best practices to rank your videos on YouTube this is a great question really great question given the importance of videos especially with SEO because videos

are found YouTube in itself is a search engine so if we have a video how are we going to get it to rank on YouTube well first things first you never want to put a video out there and want it to rank if it's not engaging or informative so make sure you go ahead and follow the best practices of having engaging an informative content in your video now once you have that video in place you want to optimize it and then some of the key factors for optimizing a video are you want to choose a

title that has high search volume in low difficulty just as you would keyword for example for web page you want to choose a title with a keyword in it that has high volume and load difficulty IE low competition okay so you want a nice ratio there and you know what you want to choose a title it's going to get people to watch the video too so it's not all about just choosing a title just for the sake of high volume you also have to choose something that's relevant that's going to be catchy as well and

then with that title goes the description so you want a description that's very relevant to your title okay because most people aren't going to click on a video just for the sake of a title they're going to want to probably get a sneak peek via the description of what it is so again you want to optimize that description but make sure the description is is just as snazzy as the title okay you also want to use accurate and relevant video tags just as you would on Twitter Facebook tag these videos okay so make sure your

title tag length doesn't exceed 100 characters because it will get chopped off so again that goes back to just writing something really short and to the point that's going to grab somebody's attention Okay you also want to upload a captivating thumbnail something that's relevant then that's gonna grab somebody's attention and then again we set it similar to the video tags we want to use relevant hashtags again just as you would with Twitter and Facebook go ahead and throw some hashtags in there that people could see because people search via hashtagging and then this goes about

saying you did all the work created a really great video it's engaging it's a formative you optimized it feel free to promote your video on other social media platforms okay don't just stick with YouTube per se so the best benefit here is if you post it on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever platform of your choice and it gets engagement people click on the link go to YouTube they're gonna like it and then other people are gonna see that engagement they're going to see how many people liked it or how many subscribers you have so promote

your videos to help you with the ranking of the video on YouTube so that does play into it so go ahead and promote it so other people can watch it like it comment Etc and that's going to engage other people to want to do the same so what is mobile first indexing this is a really important and timely question mobile first indexing means Google's just using mobile friendly content for indexing and ranking websites so in other words Google for example has two Bots they have the traditional desktop bot and they have a smartphone bot and

eventually everybody that has a website is going to be migrated over to the smartphone up and so if that smartphone bot goes to your website and starts crawling what do you think they're looking for their smartphone bot they're looking for mobile friendly content if it's not mobile friendly meaning the page isn't designed for a smartphone browser or let's just say the images are way too large or you have to expand the text just to read it you know a lot of these these issues that somebody would have just simply trying to read something on a

web page on their mobile device Google's not going to grab that content so you want to make sure it's mobile friendly so it gets indexed and so if your website has a responsive design Google will rank your website based on its performance on mobile devices okay so you want to make sure that your website is mobile friendly and if you're in an interview and somebody asks this question you can even take it a step further and say look I'm going to measure how friendly my wall my website is for mobile devices and Google search console

because Google search console has a report that will show you what pages on your website are not mobile friendly and it's not a guarantee but I could tell you if I'm Google and I'm crawling your site with my smartphone Bob and that page or one of my pages is not mobile friendly I'm probably not going to index it or rank it so you want to leverage that report in Google search console to see what pages are mobile friendly so that's a little bonus for you to really impress the interviewer who asks you this question because

how are you going to know if one of your pages is mobile friendly or not if you don't look at a report so keep an eye on Google search consoles mobile usability report okay number six list down the most important local SEO ranking factors okay so organic local ranking is just as important as anything else in organic search because if you have a local business you want to use the likes of say Google my business to show up when somebody types in you know looking for a florist or you're looking for a coffee shop so

what you want to do is you want to create a web page for every product and service okay you also want to opt for your business listings on Google my business and and there are plenty of other local business directories out there like Yelp for example or Bing even has one so go ahead and also make sure you have a business listing as well but since Google in the United States has a huge market share you want to start with Google first you want to update your nap citations on your website maintain consistency of your

nap okay so nap is name address phone number so you want to make sure that that's current and consistent so if you have a number on your website make sure it's the same number on Google my business okay you can embed a Google map on your website it could certainly optimize The Meta taxing content not only on your web pages but within your Google my business directory so you can add your business to other local directories like I mentioned Yelp and then also just as important opt for reviews and ratings okay so the more reviews

The Hat you have the better off you are okay so I always say this with with local search three of the main factors in showing up for local search on say Google is obviously the keyword the second is the proximity of where that person is and then third is the reviews so you can't really control the proximity but you can't control the keyword and you can control the reviews to some degree so work hard at getting reviews for your business but at the same time you can certainly work in some keywords let's just say for

your product and service pages on your website but also you can translate that over to Google my business okay so working in those keywords making sure you're you're not number your address your name they're all consistent and and really just spreading your the the business out on other directors that's really all these are really key factors for local SEO okay so question number seven how to avoid duplicate content and getting penalized for duplicate content so for example if you have two different versions of a web page you may result in a duplicate content issue so

it's just SEO 101 you never want to have two two or more pages with the same content so what do we do well we can avoid this and having Google penalize us by again setting up a 301 redirect remember three or ones are permanent we can also use what they call canonical tag and a canonical tag basically alerts the search engines as to which page is the original okay so if we have an original page we want to point to that page with a canonical tag and the third option is opt for preferred domain and

Google search search console okay so if you have multiple no names make sure you set up a primary one in search console so those are ways to work around it of this three I would always go with the canonical tags because that's just a tag that's going to sit on the page it's going to alert Google as to what the original is just in case they get their hands on the duplicate so all the pages that have the same content are going to have the same canonical tag pointing to one page so again three ones

are permanent you could simply just redirect one to the other if you end up having duplication or you could just tell the search engines hey this is the original page or you can go through search console okay number eight what are the tactics to increase a web page speed okay so what are some of the tactics well when you build a site especially for mobile you want to keep it as simple as possible and what I mean by simple as possible really I mean hey use a simple website design don't get overly creative if you

will most websites all website sites have images you're not going to be able to get around that but just make sure you optimize your images made in other words don't have such a large image size if you don't need something very large don't have it okay you want to improve server response time and what do we mean by that well your site's sitting on a server somewhere you can own that server or you can be renting it out from say Amazon web services or let's just say GoDaddy as your register they also have web hosting

well if you have it on say GoDaddy server you may be sharing that server with other businesses and at certain times of the day other businesses may get a lot of traffic and suck up a lot of bandwidth what is that going to do that's going to reduce the server response time for your site and so you want to make sure you have an idea of you know what server your web page your website is on and you want to be able to have some control over that because if your server response is slow that's

going to slow down everything else in terms of loading in the browser and that's not going to be good for SEO okay optimize your code what do you mean by optimize minifying when we see mimifying we mean get rid of some of the Redundant code if you have CSS you know get rid of chop some of the get rid of the JavaScript you're not using so that's what we mean by optimizing code readies redirects okay ideally you just want to have one redirect in place you don't want to create a daisy chain so to speak

of redirecting and redirecting after that that's never going to bode well and it's going to slow things down as well enable browser caching so if you enable browser caching basically if somebody comes back to the page they've been on say two days ago they're probably going to see a cache version of that page and then opt for the content delivery Network as well so these are some of the ways to reduce page speed now if you're curious about the page speed of your website you can always go to Google's page speed insights tool and all

you have to do is just Google page speed insights or even just something generic like Google page speed and you're going to get this tool page speed insights and all you need to do is just plug in a URL when you plug in the URL Google is going to analyze the URL for both mobile and desktop and so here we could see Google gives a score so we can see the score from wall ball and we could see the score for desktop just by clicking on desktop and so here I could see some of the

issues that the site may be having in terms of page load time for their desktop if I flip over to mobile you know here I can see some other issues for example they have a server static assets with efficient cash policy now if you're not sure what the heck that means you can always just click on it and you can see some specifics here and where you can just always Google it as well uh here you got the reduce the impact of third-party code okay so that's another thing uh reduce JavaScript execution time so again

going back to a lot of some of the comments we made about coding okay so sometimes too much code or code not functioning as well as it should will tend to slow down the site okay so you can use page speed insights you can always get a glimpse of how pages are loading simply by also going to for example Google analytics under Behavior okay you can go to site speed and if you click on overview okay Google what Google does is they do a sampling of pages over time and in this case based on 89

Page views they have an average page load time and so you can get a sense of how quick specific Pages load or your site overall simply by looking at the site speed overview report in Google analytics to get a sense of how quick your pages are loading now there's certain factors that do affect load time so obviously the way the page is built with the code the images Etc but also the browser each browser loads differently okay so you want to take a look at it by browser also by country every country has a different

network you can be in the United States and have worse network service than you do say and you know Ivory Coast in Africa okay so it really depends on the network you're on so and also the page every page is built differently so you want to get a sense of what pages are loading quicker and which pages are not you can simply just go to page timings and Google analytics you get a sense of what pages do not load fast and which ones do and maybe hone in on the pages that aren't loading fast and

address those pages first okay so you have two tools at your disposal one Google analytics and one page speed insights okay so let's look at question number nine here so when should an individual Target short tail and long tail keywords okay so remember short tail are usually one to two key words very Broad in nature long tail keywords or maybe three four keywords in a query or maybe an entire sentence those are considered long tail keywords so usually short tail keywords have higher volume but also higher competition longer tail keywords usually have lower uh volume

but also lower competition but the great thing about long tail keywords the conversion rate will tend to be a little bit higher than say a short tail because it's less vague and more specific so you can use short tail keywords if you're trying to drive a lot of visitors because those keywords are going to be vague or Broad in nature long tail keywords are used for targeted Pages such as product pages and articles so if you have a specific product with a long name you can certainly optimize that page for that product name again the

product name may have low volume but this somebody types in exactly that product name you show up the chance of you them converting are going to be very high so you don't have to always be that specific at the product name but try and be as specific as you possibly can in order to get somebody to click on your link in the search engine results and get them over to your site to convert okay so those are really the big differences short tail very broad very vague a lot of volume but also a lot of

competition but hey if you're ranking for short tail keyword you're probably going to get a lot of traffic the conversion rates may not be as high as something say long tail where hey maybe you're just honed in on a few set number of products and you're not care you don't care a lot about the traffic you just care about getting the relevant traffic to your site to convert okay number 10 what are the important elements to focus while developing a website so we're talking in terms of SEO okay so if somebody asks me this question

in an interview what am I going to focus on When developing a website well the answers are right here yes we talked about mobile mobile is so important because a lot of websites are going to be indexed with Google smartphone bot so mobile usability is very important so we need to make sure our website is responsive for mobile just some basic practices when it comes to site architecture navigation we want to have a simple URL structure okay no overly cumbersome the navigation should simply be clean and need okay if you have five products okay maybe

you have uh in your navigation you have something called products with all five listed or you have all five products in the main navigation the key is you just want to make it clean and neat and easy for somebody to find the the rule of thumb is if it's good for the end user probably going to be good for Google but if complicated for the end User it's probably going to be complicated for Google okay you always want to create a site map now what is that sitemap a sitemap is simply just a formatted file

with to that's includes all your URLs and assets your images and your videos they're going to be sitting on your server as well so you want Google or these these Bots to be able to find your pages and assets and by the way you want to take it a step further and make sure you upload that site map which is sitting in the root directory meaning domain.com sitemap.xml okay you want to take that site map and make sure you input that site map location in Google search console that way Google search console has a one-way

ticket to grab the elements in the sitemap another important element to focus on while developing a website is having a robot's text file and all the robots text file is it's like a lock I always say to a house so if you lock a door in your house nobody's going to be able to get in that door so it's all a robots text file is you're telling Google and these other Bots that are coming across your site what's locked and what's not locked meaning what they have access to what they don't have access to so

you want to be able to make sure you have a robot's text file if you're trying to non-index specific pages of your website because if you tell Google don't crawl these Pages or this directory they're not going to get crawled and if they don't get crawled they're not going to get indexed so robots text file is an important element to focus on while you're developing your website and why you're developing your website it could be on a you know in a directory just called new website so you probably want to have new website as the

directory in the robots text file and just to let Google know don't go into this directory because it's my new website I'm not ready to go live yet so you don't want it indexed so there are a lot of reasons to have robots text files that's the main reason sitemap you want Google to get these pages and assets quickly okay you want to make sure that your site architecture navigation is in order you want to make sure your site is mobile friendly and you also want to make sure you have content on your website that's

the key because that's what's going to keep people on the website and engaged and when I say content I don't necessarily just mean words I also mean videos I also mean images you know something interactive okay you want to keep people engaged that's the key behind it trust me if if an end user finds your site engaging Google is likely going to find your site engaging okay so those are good brownie points to bring up if somebody asks you this question in an interview so just a quick recap here it's important to have a better

site structure so the Bots can easily access into next content okay with a responsive design helps to make your website mobile friendly and user friendly would also increase the amount of time a user spends on your website which may improve your site's ranking sitemap is simply just a file that helps search engine Bots to understand the structure of the website okay how many pages are on your website and where are they located along with the videos and images okay and then the robots text just instructs the search engine Chrome dollars to understand what pages should

not be indexed here we wrap up with Advanced SEO full course if you like this video then hit the like button consider subscribing to our Channel and hit the Bell icon so never miss an update for simply not till then keep watching and keep learning staying ahead in your career requires continuous learning and upskilling whether you're a student aiming to learn today's top skills or a working professional looking to advance your career we've got you covered explore our impressive catalog of certification programs in Cutting Edge domains including data science cloud computing cyber security AI machine

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