How do we get the most readers to find our posts on Steemit? Optimizing for Google organic search traffic gives each of us the very highest chance to get found exactly when we are needed which is thousands more times powerful that brute force advertising and spamming. I hope this post is a very effective example of ideal Search Engine Optimization or SEO strategies in practice because all you need to do to get the same results is use a similar format in your posts on Steemit! As you will notice in the strategies I give you below, making this post on Steemit INSTEAD OF MY OWN BLOG is practicing exactly what I suggest about partnering with other websites which have a higher PAGE RANK to help what I write go WAY above any competition trying to just post on their own blog. The odds of me taking a top spot on the keywords "SEO 2017" are almost zero on my own website even though I already have 500+ posts and thousands of readers coming from Google organic search traffic every month! With publishing this on Steemit, I have a chance to take one of the very top spots on a competitive term because of Steemit's page rank which we all collectively increase with every amazing post we write!
Would you prefer to watch the full video course for free? Take it on my website now at http://u.jerrybanfield.com/courses/seo2017?coupon=steem or watch the preview below from YouTube or continue reading here for the tips!
Quick SEO power tip: having YouTube videos on a page greatly increases the odds that some readers will avoid clicking back immediately and stay on this page for a long time. Both of these are ESSENTIAL to getting a great ranking on Google!
Quick SEO power tip 2: REALLY LONG IN DEPTH POSTS CRUSH IT ON GOOGLE! Have you seen a wikipedia page before at #1 on search results? This is the exact format GOOGLE LOVES which is why you will notice this post is LONG and IN DEPTH. My hope is to come at SEO from every single angle making this a comprehensive guide that ranks high in Google. To make this possible, thank you very much to @gmichelbkk for converting the transcription of the YouTube video from GoTranscript into this beautiful post for Steemit, which is much faster to read than the video and has all of the highlights in screenshots! While it would have taken me 5+ hours to write this, it only took about 2 hours to make the video and then collaborate with Michel to get this post in a format read for you! Michel also works to remove anything self promotional such as me selling my courses in these posts to give you the most pure reading experience!
Bottom Line: Two hundred thousand people find me every month on Google and YouTube FREE!
What business system could be more effective than getting found exactly when I am needed for $0? See for yourself below because this is the entire foundation of my business online and you can easily duplicate it by following these tips here!. If you look at my YouTube search it shows 161,000, and with Google search through YouTube and my website search, it adds up very close to around 200,000 results that I'm getting from organic search traffic every month.
Here's the number one tip: think outside of the SEO box.
Don't just think about getting people to your website. This is what I feel like most of us consider as SEO, we need to build up our website and get back links to our it. I'm showing you the best SEO strategies for 2017 and it does not include doing those things primary, if you want to get the very most search results.
Now, let's look at this honestly. Do you really want to get the most results or do you want to do it a certain way? This is really tricky and I've been frustrated with a lot of clients.
They say, "Well, I want this result."
They pay me to help, but then when I do it a different way, "Well, no I don't want it done that way."
"Well, you want these results, right?"
"Yes, but no, not that way."
Organic search traffic is gold online and if you really want to do the very best with getting organic search traffic, videos on YouTube are by far the number one way to do it and I'll give you another formula to do it right after this without videos on YouTube.
So the number one SEO strategy is to work on the world's second largest search engine instead of the first. Google is the largest, but YouTube search is the second largest. I actually get more search results from Google search to my YouTube channel than I do to my website.
Now, I've made massive SEO efforts on my website and they still can't compete with my YouTube channel.
Videos on my YouTube channel get 22,000 views directly from Google search, but they get 161,000 views from YouTube search every month. If you count the follow up from those that goes over to my website, about half my website traffic comes from YouTube, and that's about as much as I get from search.
So just by making video after video on YouTube, you will get that YouTube search traffic. YouTube search traffic is relatively easy to get compared to Google.
I'm going to show you more about that now.
The number one tip I have for SEO in 2017
YouTube search is 161,000 views, but I actually get 22,000 views in addition to that from Google search. Now, this means that people are typing in a Google search somewhere and they find my YouTube videos. That's more than I can get on my website.
Now, there's another huge difference right here. Let me show you this. The average view duration is five minutes when someone finds me in Google search. Now, the average time people spend on my website is two minutes. So not only is YouTube search and Google search much more effective at getting me views and traffic overall, but the views stick.
Not only I am getting way more on YouTube search, but I'm getting twice as long of a viewer. In fact what often happens, many of the views are about the same, but YouTube is producing many more really long viewers, people watching 40 or 50 minutes to an hour. That's giving me the chance to build deeper relationships.
The number one tip I have for SEO in 2017 is go for YouTube, make videos. You will get so much more back out of your time making videos and you know I practice this because this is going up not only in a YouTube video live, but also on Facebook and Skillshare. I believe wholeheartedly in what I'm telling you that's why I'm doing it.
The number one tip for SEO is to look at YouTube to bring your search results much more than your website. All the hustling, tricks and things you'll do on your website are nothing compared to the traffic you can get on YouTube. Most everyone works on their Google search, but there's very low competition still on YouTube.
For SEO, the number one thing, go where there's low competition. Now, I appreciate you getting started with this and we're going to dive much deeper into SEO including website SEO in great detail here. I had to make sure that I get this number one thing out said here first, so that you know this going forward.
The second most powerful strategy for SEO in 2017
The second most powerful strategy for SEO in 2017 is to partner with a third party who already has a very powerful website. All the hustling you're going to do on your own website is nothing compared to what you can achieve when you partner with a third party.
Let me show you an example. This is an actual course that I made and got ranked even though I'm banned from Udemy, I asked them to put this back up and give it to my co-instructor, which they did.
When you search for "hacking course" on Google this is the result.
Now, think about it and the hacking course terminology. These two words are quite competitive. Being up on the number one search result in this produces thousands of dollars in sales a month. This is a great keyword to be on top of.
When I scroll past both ads, the course I made is on top. What you notice is that it's not on JerryBanfield.com, but it's on Udemy.com.
Udemy has a very high page rank and they're one of the top websites in the world. So how did I get this there? I paid the co-instructor Ermin, who now is the only instructor on it, to make the course. I put the course up on Udemy along with a bunch of my own videos in it. I did a bunch of marketing and advertising YouTube videos, and I got this ranked up here at number one on a very competitive search term.
Now, this worked on a bunch of my other Udemy courses. This worked on my Facebook Ads course. There was no co-instructor for that one, so I just got banned and I totally lost that position. I had some of the top courses on search terms for a bunch of different categories doing this. If you searched Facebook Ads course, my course came up first above everyone else's websites who does Facebook Ads just like it is now for hacking course. There are more things you can find just like this.
One of the most powerful SEO strategies to do is to partner with a third party who will give you the tools and ability to rank a page high on their website because on my little website, it's very hard for me to go compete with a website like Udemy, and that's why big websites have huge power.
When you search for a hacking course, not only does my Udemy course comes up, but another Udemy course comes up too. That's two Udemy courses in the top of search results.
I would say that the very best thing that Udemy is good for, is for search engine optimization. However, there are lots of other websites you can do this with. You can do it by posting things in forms. You can do it by partnering with another website that already has the top ranking. You can offer to write a post, put something on their page, and then you can partner with them.
You get them more traffic, and then people find out about you. If you can partner with the website that already has the traffic and the search ranking you want to, then you can do something like this. Being up here in the ranking, allows this course to make tens of thousands of dollars in sales every month. The difference between being first and second on a course like this, is tens of thousands of dollars a month in sales.
You can see that's why this course has a 5,000 votes, and it's probably got at least 10 if not 20 or 30 times as many sales as the next one. Udemy and third party websites that you can collaborate with, will allow you to do things you'll never get to do on your own.
I'm still going to go through and show you how I do things on my website, because even though I've just showed two methods that are way more effective to get a lot more traffic, you probably still will have the desire to do some SEO on your own website.
Now, I take my YouTube SEO as the primary thing I do. Then, I try to also practice good SEO on my website, and I try to make it functional and help it get more search results whenever possible. When I was on Udemy, I completely disregarded my website's SEO. If you can make a really good third party partnership, you can completely disregard your own website's SEO, because that third party partnership will be much more effective.
What you'll notice below, is a few things I can point out. If you do have a Udemy course or some third party website, you really need to work on each of these aspects in the description and the title. Your course title needs to be a clickable title, not something optimized for SEO. You can see that it has "hacking course" in the title, but the title is very clickable.
It also has a short URL for "penetration testing," which is another part of the course, and that's something that people may want to learn about. I recommend a nice short URL like this whenever possible.
Try to avoid really long URLs like the second course. How ugly does this next URL look? Now, you can use really long URLs like this, but shorter ones are much easier for users to share, and to get back links.
Now, the beauty of using a third party website is the ability to use that third party website free coupons to do back-links. One of the best things about Udemy for search engine optimization is that they allow you to get out free coupons. These free coupons generate a lot of sharing, which generates a lot of back-links, which generates great SEO position. Now, you can try to replicate this on your own website, but it's very difficult. Using the right third party website will give you everything to rank up higher.
If you learn exactly what text appears in the Google description, you can do things like write your course description so that it shows up effectively in search results.
I appreciate you reading this and learning how you can partner with a third party website to do amazing things, to rank high in terms that you never would be able to rank in otherwise.
SEO results on my own website
I've given you two very powerful strategies: upload YouTube videos and partner with a third party website. The YouTube videos gives you the most traffic while partnering with the third party website can give you really profitable traffic. I'll show you now my own website and stats in my Alexa account here.
I'm getting about a thousand visits a day or so to my website. You can see that most days, there's about a thousand. My visitors are up by 9%, which is awesome, because I've turned off all my online ads since December 3rd. I've turned off all my online ads and I'm still getting more visitors.
My website's up time is good.
Now, if you want to see exactly what I use to host my website and everything in my business, just go to my resources page on my website.
Here's my organic search traffic. I'm getting about 400 or 500 search referrals a day on my website, which is about 14,000 a month.
Now, that's really good.
Imagining getting that many referrals a day when I first started my website, just seemed amazing. I'm not on a lot of popular topics, Patreon is the most popular topic I'm on. I'm on a lot of technical tutorial subjects.
If you compare this website traffic, I'm getting way more views from Google search on YouTube, and then I'm getting more than 10 times the amount of views on YouTube.
Still, I'm doing pretty good on my website and the search results are actually up 5%. The search results are consistently growing.
Now, I've turned off my Facebook ads so I'm getting a lot less social referrals.
You'll see now on the link referrals that I'm actually getting 9,000 link referrals directly from YouTube, in addition to all of the traffic.
In addition of all the YouTube views I'm getting, I'm also getting 9,000 more views directly linked from YouTube.
YouTube is just an absolutely incredible traffic source, and many of these direct links are also from YouTube.
At least half of my website traffic is directly from YouTube or indirectly as well.
Now, you'll notice this. Now, let's take a look at the minutes.
Now, the average minutes on my website is 1 minute 59 seconds.
If someone comes to my YouTube channel through Google Search, it's five minutes. People stay more than twice as long on my YouTube videos as compared to how long they're on my website. Again, huge sales pitch to do videos instead of website pages.
Now, mobile is a big traffic source, but not for me. Most of my visits are desktop. You can see that 78% of my traffic is non-mobile. Even though people get so excited about mobile, 78% of my traffic is not for mobile.
What I've done, I've broken down the individual pages. I'll show you the depth.
I'll show you how I'm getting 14,000 search results from Google to my website, and how I'm getting results all over the world from YouTube, from USA and Mexico.
The most of my visits are from the USA in terms of one country, but two-thirds of my visits are not from the US. I'm grateful that I'm getting 10% of my visits actually from India. That's really cool.
I made a website that is global. I think if you think global for your website, you'll have the best chance to get the very most search results. This is what I'm doing on my website, and what I'll do going forward is show you more about how exactly I'm doing this on my website.
I hope it will give you some ideas for what you can do on your website because it is worth the time to put some energy into building a nice website once you get people on YouTube. The main way I make money currently and have made money is by sending people from my YouTube channel.
See all this traffic?
My total YouTube channel is 689,000 views in the last month. The main way I've been making money is from sending people from my YouTube channel over to my website.
People go through my website, and then the website's very helpful for making money. It's nice to be able to get people to your website.
I'm going to show you what I do on my website that helps me get so many search results and helps me convert the results I get both in organic search and from YouTube over to sales.
What strategies am I doing on my website?
What strategies am I doing on my website to get the most traffic and to get the most entries?
What's working best for me to get people on my website is word-of-mouth marketing and Google search for my name.
The top entry page on my website is JerryBanfield.com. That's often from word-of-mouth marketing. That's from me showing my website URL on YouTube videos. The majority of people coming to JerryBanfield.com directly are word-of-mouth marketing in YouTube.
Then, the second top page on my website is a direct link from YouTube. The four plus thousand views I'm getting there, it's the direct link from YouTube. This is the second most popular page people come to first on my website.
I'm showing you the certified site metrics with Alexa because Google is a little more difficult in the sense that Google Analytics is so deep. It has so many different things you can do to get the same result. It's a little bit easier to communicate the point with Alexa. You might have already seen Google Analytics, so I'm giving you what might be a fresh approach here.
The next one is an organic search page. Then, this is a YouTube direct link, and then this is the organic search. Out of the top five of my pages, one is word-of-mouth searches for me and a combination of YouTube videos.
JerryBanfield.com is kind of a melting pot. All kinds of people come there. Then, the second top page is from YouTube organic traffic. Then the third top page is from Google organic search directly to my website. The fourth is from YouTube and the fifth is from Google organic search directly to my website.
Out of my top five pages, two of them come primarily from SEO, you could say that I've done on my website. This traffic on this Facebook Ads page, the top 5 entry page, is very valuable. This page has been up for about two years and even though there's a 97% bounce rate, this gets people introduced to me.
I have a friend, he's been in my mastermind group for a couple of years now and he found me originally doing a search on this Facebook Ads account disabled, and that's how he found me.
These are the entry pages on my website where people come in. What you notice is that my website has a lot of depth. There's a ton of pages on my website that people enter.
So what you want to do with organic search is like fishing. You want to have as many lines in the water as possible. Now, I'm going to give you an exact recipe to catch the most fish.
I'll show you what the two top pages on my website for organic search have in common so that you can replicate it. Now, there are so many pages on my website. They are all entry pages. People are coming into the website from there. They are some of my most valuable pages because they are pages people are going directly to.
They are like the doorways to my website. You want to look at each individual page as a doorway. You're getting people in the door with you. Each of these individual pages then are getting people in the door. There are hundreds of these pages that are getting at least 10 people in the door every month.
Now what I'll show you is the total page views. The total page views is different from the actual pages people are entering.
For SEO, you want to make the most out of every single person who is actually on your website. Looking at the viewed pages can help you see what people are doing after they're entering. You can see the percent of time people are spending in places. Then you can see the most important pages to work on in terms of SEO for your entry pages, and then for pages that people are just looking at. You can look and see what you can do to make each of your top pages better.
I'm getting a lot of my top page views on these three categories you can see above. I work and consistently look at these three most viewed pages as a top priority. I look at them over the other pages on my website. I make sure there are good opportunities for me to convert sales on them.
I've shown you the depth I have on my website. Hundreds of pages that bring people in and that have at least 20 people looking at them every month, and that have at least 10 people entering on the website.
A good SEO approach has these top pages that bring people in. This one page alone (#3) brings in about 100 people a day, and this page (#5) brings in about 60 or 70 people a day.
To have top pages that bring lots of people in, but then you don't usually discover pages without having depth, without having all these different pages to figure out and take a chance at having a top page.
I'm grateful you've spent this time with me. I will dive in deeper and show you what some of the top pages on my website look like. I'll give you a formula next, an exact formula to make a top page on your website.
A top page on my website
Thank you very much for continuing with this SEO search engine optimization post. I hope it's the best SEO course available for you totally for free in 2017.
What I'm going to show you here is the inside of a top page on my website. This is one of the most valuable pages on my website in terms of it producing results for me.
It brings in results for me and it simply is creating value out of nowhere. That's the most amazing thing to do with SEO. That's why you want to do SEO. This page brings in 2,000 plus people a month and many of the people it brings in end up watching my videos. They end up getting some help, and then sticking with me over time.
Here's a basic formula for a top page.
A top page should have something like a video on it or something to keep people watching longer. As you noticed earlier in my Analytics, the average person who's watching my video spends about five minutes on it. I've got a video right at the top of this page that someone can click and start watching about the exact topic I've made here. Now, this video's gotten a little old by this point, so maybe I'll make another one on it.
Also, whatever page you have should be immediately helpful.This page has the exact information on it that's needed. If you don't know where the appeal form is, I have a direct link.
People are searching for a solution to a painful problem they run into. They are some of the best types of pages to have online. This one is an acute and painful problem people run into.
"Facebook Ads account disabled" means that you've got your account suspended or banned from advertising on Facebook. This is a very painful thing that people encounter that I'm able to help with based on my experience getting almost every kind of account I've ever created, suspended or banned online.
After having clients have this same problem, I thought about writing a post about it. The best way to get people to come to your website is to give them help with a really painful problem and to give them immediate help for it.
Many people are just looking for the appeal form. They're searching for "Facebook Ads account disabled" and they just want the appeal form.
They don't care about anything I'm going to say, things like, "Don't bother with an appeal, learn how to do something else." They don't care about that. Most people just want to solve the problem in the exact way they think it needs to be solved.
They Google, and then as soon as I show them the Facebook ads account appeal form link, they click on it.
Then, they're completing the form. This helps me get a higher rank in Google because then I'm giving people what they want on the page right away.
Once they go through and they have clicked the link, they close the tab of the post. Even though the bounce rate on this page is really high, Google is very good at detecting if people got what they wanted. What Google ultimately wants is for people to get what they want. When someone searches, Google wants them to find an answer. Google knows that there's a good shot that if they clicked on your website, and closed the tab, then they got what they wanted.
If the user goes and clicks on your website, looks for a minute and clicks back, Google knows that the user didn't find or thinks the user did not find what they wanted. If you want to rank high in search, you need to be able to give users what they want on your page.
You need to be able to give it to them fast. I've developed this page over years, and I've discovered people really want that appeal form, so I put that up there right away. Then, most of the rest of this is to qualify people for the page and this is kind of a Wikipedia style page.
What I found works the very best for SEO is to make a Wikipedia style page. If you are hiring people to write SEO articles of 300 and 400 words, forget it. What you really need to have a top ranking article on a competitive subject is usually something of two thousand plus words.
This is 2,000 or 3,000 words in this post. Then, I've got all of these case studies on the post. A guy literally gave me his phone number to put on this page. Then, there are comments from other people too.
This is Google's basic formula for what it thinks is a really good page. Now, having a Facebook Ads course on Udemy was worth more search traffic than this page every month. I believe I got maybe 6,000 or 7,000 Google organic search results out a month from a having a course on Udemy up in the top subjects.
Now, if you look on YouTube, the traffic doesn't compare to this page. However, for this exact problem, this page works really well.
Now, if you compare it with a "YouTube channel copyright strike" post I have, it gets 274 results per month.
If I show you the number of views on the actual video on YouTube for comparison in traffic, it gets 5,000 views for free every month, while on my website it gets only 274 results.
If you can make a video about a problem, it's ideal because then when someone comes to your page, it has a video and the page. The ideal way to do this, is to put a video on the page, and then you can actually get the video transcribed.
It's faster to make a video. I can talk about 10,000 words an hour while I can only write about 2,000 words an hour. I can make a three to five really in-depth post in an hour of talking. Then, all I need to do is get them transcribed.
This is the formula I've done across my blog. I'll go more into this strategy to show you now how you can make more really deep post like this with much less effort.
Strategy to make a post as fast as possible
What is the very best strategy I've found for making a post as fast as possible that is likely to rank high and get lot of search traffic. The basic strategy I've found is to simply make a video about it, and then get the video transcribed into a blog post.
I've even got my videos transcribed into entire books. I have a video course on "Google AdWords" that I got transcribed and edited into a book, and now my friend Michel Gerard is helping me promote the book by putting parts of the book out for free in blog posts. This is an amazing system if you want to do something like make a video course.
You can make the video course, you can then get it transcribed into a book, and then you can use parts of the book as blog posts, and you can use parts of the video course as free previews on YouTube.
That has worked really well for me. As you can see, Michel has actually made this post above on my website. Now, I actually dictated it. The nice thing is that this post is in my voice. I dictated this and Michel edited it to read better. Now this post is out on my website in my voice.
It's just useless to hire someone in my experience to write posts on my website because it's not in my voice and that works terrible.
Many times, when people are writing posts for someone else, they don't do them creative. They just write more of the same as what's already out there on the Internet. If you want to get search engine optimization traffic, you really need to be able to put things out that are original.
When you hear the way I put all these things together, most of these ideas aren't unique but the exact way I put all of them together is unique.
That what draws Google to see that you have a good website. That's what draws people to your website.
I've got this huge post on my website now with all the screenshots that's intended to be really helpful, that's available for free on my blog. I didn't even write any of it. I did the video tutorial just like the one I'm doing now on camera.
That's a beautiful thing that in the future I have the option to simply hire someone to do more of the same thing and to turn this video literally into a blog post just like this.
In fact, Michel Gerard has turned this YouTube video into this blog post on Steemit that you are reading right now.
Then, the beauty of it is that at the very end of this very long post, the Google AdWords book is promoted. If someone's actually read through this post, it has a very good chance to rank high in organic traffic. If someone reads through it, it even then promotes the book.
That's a complete system from start to finish that I think is just awesome for getting out pages on my website.
Lots of these pages on my website have been created just like that and they are bringing in traffic. Lots of these pages where people are entering are originally dictated as videos, and they're working great to bring in search results.
Look at this "time travel is real" page. It's bringing 800 people a month almost all from search results.
The dictated video is literally just transcribed, and then put on the page. This gives me the ability when someone comes to my website and looks at my blog, to just blow them away. I've never seen someone who doesn't do blogging as their primary thing that has a blog with this many posts on it. Having a deep blog promotes trust and it promotes consistency.
When you see how many things I've made on my website, it gives you trust like I'm serious about my business and that I'm working on it on a daily basis.
You can see some of the blog posts I have on my website in the image above and I have about twice as many as this. What makes for a great website in terms of SEO is having lots of pages with original content on them. The more of these great blog posts I have, the more all my individual blog posts can rank higher.
Now, the problem with this is that it's such a slow strategy compared to doing something like YouTube. I've had my YouTube channel for five years while I've only been working on my website for a couple of years, but still at this rate my website might be a fraction of my YouTube channel in a couple more years.
I've planted a bunch of amazing seeds with my website here and the longer these posts are up, the more of these blog posts I keep putting on, the more search traffic I'm getting to my website every month, and that's giving me the chance to continue to build and grow my business.
The more videos I make, the more I can easily have turned into blog posts. Occasionally, I still write a blog post. Now whenever I write a long email to my email list I go ahead and turn it into a blog post.
I wrote this blog post as an email on my email list and I figured I might as well convert it into a blog post.
Now, I try whenever possible, to convert the things I do into blog posts if I write a long email or description out, so that way I'm using my writing twice. I'm giving the writing I make a chance to show up in search results.
Having a deep blog like this is one of the very best ways I've found. Almost all of my Google organic search traffic that's not on my homepage and that's not directly linked from YouTube, or that people aren't searching for, comes in from my blog, and most of the posts on my blog are based on or dictated from or partnered with a video.
When you do these two things together it's a powerful combination for search results.
Search engine optimization best practices
After you've got your blog post strategy, after you've seen all of the rest of these things about search engine optimization, there are still things you can do to improve the search results you get on your website.
What I call these things are search engine optimization best practices. These are little tips and tricks I hope will be helpful for you that help you rank higher. Now most of these are what you would call small games.
You're playing little games. YouTube is a big game and it grows much faster. That said, it is helpful to polish off the website you already have and to make the best of it as well.
I use the Yoast SEO plugin and I'll give you some quick tips for that. I like Yoast SEO because it's free and it gives me some basic features that really helped me out with getting some SEO. One of the main things to do with Yoast SEO is play around with the options it has.
I have a Jerry Banfield resources page and there is a bunch of affiliate links on this page because I link products and services I actually use. One thing that knocks your search engine ranking down is linking out to a bunch of websites. In search engine terms, there are links called follow and no follow.
Now, most of the big websites only use no follow links. Google search originally was completely based on the idea of reciprocal linking. Google's original name was "Back Rub." You rub my back and I'll rub your back. That means you link to my website and I'll link to your website with the idea that websites that link to each other will then both rank higher.
Well, now this strategy with YouTube and Facebook has been largely ruined because these two websites do no follow to everything. Some of the biggest websites in the world don't participate in this Google search voting anymore.
Then most of the other websites, like smaller websites don't know how to change links to no follow. I think it is ideal on a website to use no follow links on your entire website.
I don't see how to change the entire website to no follow, but right now I've got no follow on my pages with the most back-links and especially the affiliate links. I've used Yoast SEO to change this over to no follow on individual pages and blog posts.
Then, when there are all these links on my website, I'm not essentially giving up all my link juice or I'm not lowering my website ranking with all these links on my website. On the pages where I've got the most links I've set to no follow.
Another SEO strategy is to do some clean up and delete old pages on your website. I had a bunch of old Udemy coupons on pages that didn't work anymore, so I deleted them.
One of the most powerful things you can do with your SEO on your website is to go ahead and delete those old pages that are messed up, that are broken and that are no longer valid, or delete pages on your website that are landing pages or don't have any good content.
What Google would like to see is a website with all high quality pages on it. When you have low quality pages with a bunch of follow back links that are affiliate links or links of poor quality, pages giving a bad user experience, it will not benefit you as Google gets an idea of who you are based on the quality of your pages.
When you use Yoast SEO to no follow certain pages and delete old pages you can get good results.
I've deleted a bunch of these old pages that just have lots of broken back-links that were used for sales and I applied no follow to some others. I try to follow the keyword recommendations by Yoast too. This plugin will help you optimize your pages for best impact.
If you go over to edit a post you can see if the SEO is good or not. When you enter the focus keyword in the plugin's section of the editor, it gives you this nice analysis that shows you exactly what to do.
The nice thing is that if you use Yoast SEO, you don't need to learn all these SEO strategies yourself. You can literally look at these green and red bullet points, and then that will allow you to optimize from there.
I hope these tips are helpful for you with your website especially if you use WordPress and try to get it to rank the highest.
The Google search console
Thank you very much for getting to the end of this blog post. I'll show you a little bit about the Google search console and I'll show you answers to a couple of quick questions. Now you can see that I haven't spent much time in the Google search console.
Why?
Because it's not worth my time to pour a bunch of time and energy fooling around the Google search console.
The one thing I think is really valuable is to look at the crawl stats. Now, I currently use GoDaddy for my managed WordPress and I'm not impressed with how long it's taking to download my website because when I first started it was much faster.
I can see how long Google is taking to crawl and download my page and I can see that it's taking between a half second and a second. That's decent. If you've got a shared service, one of the most helpful things you can look at, is your crawl stats and see how long Google's taking to download your page. If your page is taking longer than this, you more than likely need better hosting. Maybe even at this rate, I could consider better hosting.
You don't want your website crawl time taking a long time because Google looks at it if your website takes a long time to load and a long time to crawl, it is probably going to be a bad user experience. One of my favorite things is this little "Crawl Stats" option in the console and that's helpful then to see what Google is encountering when it comes to your website.
The "Index Status" is a good thing to look at as well. You can see how many pages and files you have indexed. I have 1,800 pages and media files indexed on my website.
That's how many different things Google has found on my website, and it is interesting to take a look at this as well. Now, you might want to spend a whole bunch of time in the "Search Analytics," but you really don't need to. It can help to go look at what people are searching for, but you don't need to obsess over these things. That's why I haven't spent much time with them.
Like I've said, "This is a small game to play."
It's much easier to get into these YouTube analytics and play a bigger game.
I could go over here and do things like, "Okay. Well, what's my click-through? What's my position on this? My average position is 14, my average click-through is okay. What's my average?"
I could go look at all of these things, but that's not worth my time. It's not worth the time to go through and look at all this data. It's worth the time to create more content, to put more on my website.
The only thing you really need this data for is learning. You can see for example the links to a website, and there are 24,000 links to my website on YouTube.
Most of my website is getting linked on YouTube and you can see where the links are.
One of the most helpful things to do is just to sort out and find your clicks, to look at the pages people are actually visiting because based on that you can figure out what to do to make it deeper.
One of the first pages I got a lot of traffic to was one of these Patreon pages, so I made another one, and then I made the top one.
The one thing that's really worth your time is to look at where you're actually getting clicks too.
Don't worry about what your click-through rate or your position is, that's a big waste of time. You can spend all of this time instead doing all these other things like creating content.
Now, I'll give you something else that in my opinion is a waste of time.
SEO backlinks.
Do not buy SEO backlinks.
Do you want an example here? I'll show you doing it wrong.
I had one of the top ranking websites when I started my business and started doing SEO on the term "gaming addiction." I had one of the top websites on gaming addiction called gamingaddiction.net. I had exact match domain. This is back when I played little games a lot. I would look and see where my competition was.
"Well, this articles up here and these ones up here. Where am I at?"
Guess what I tried to do?
I bought backlinks and guess what happened?
Before I bought the backlinks, I was up to like third or fourth somewhere in the middle of the first page on Google, but not at the very top. When I bought the backlinks, I killed it. I killed my website's ranking buying backlinks.
Most of the things you are going to buy to help out with your SEO are likely to mess things up more than they will help. I'm suggesting not to ever buy backlinks. If you want backlinks, put them on your YouTube channel.
I don't recommend going to any individual website just to buy backlink. I recommend to make a real partnership like with the Udemy example I made. Make a real partnership where you're working with a third-party website. Avoid buying any backlinks and I would generally avoid trying to game the SEO system at all.
Don't play games with the SEO system.
Just simply do good work, create good content on your website, and preferably partner that with a Youtube channel.
Create things that really help people, and then you'll be able to get lots of people to come to your website. I'm grateful that my website gets over a thousand people a day who come to visit my website.
As long as I played little games like buying backlinks or like stalking my competition, I never got anywhere. If you want to get somewhere, focus on doing a good job and creating things that help people.
I thank you very much for reading this blog post and you are welcome to take the full video course for free in my University.
I hope you have a wonderful day today.
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Love,
Jerry Banfield