Rootin’ about the internet for a detailed (yet simple) SEO tutorial on how to rank number one on Google?

Well, good news! You’ve arrived at the right place. Through this SEO tutorial let’s unravel together, all the secrets and myths revolving around Search Engine Optimization. We’ve improved and optimized all these SEO strategies and methodologies, hence giving you this definitive guide. Get your reading visor (let’s just say that’s the equivalent of a thinking cap) on, because we’re about to go for a ride.

1. Why start with the SEO basics

Unlike twenty years ago, online search and traffic acquisition is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Besides just money, you’d be spending plenty of time and human resources on it.

Of course, you could simply hand this job over to a company that specializes in this. Based on the company and your needs, there will be different tiers of “tailored” SEO packages for different prices. If anything, that only makes it all the more expensive.

Simply put, you either expand your knowledge on the basic functionalities of one of the important traffic sources or end up racking up your marketing fees.

Worry not though, you’ll learn all you need to, through the course of this post. This ultimate SEO tutorial is all you need to successfully setup and optimize your search engine ranking strategy.

2. What to expect in this SEO tutorial

This SEO tutorial will explain the following:

1. How to do a proper keyword research.
   • All SEO projects, large or small, even a blog post must begin with a keyword research.
2. Where & how to utilize these keywords.
   • Your content page has to abide by a set of rules that are easily implementable, and that will improve your ranking.
3. How to execute link building to get desired results.
   • Although link building matters the most, you shouldn’t never start with it.

Let’s begin, shall we?

3. Proper keyword research is foundational!

Keyword research is crucial to understanding the mindset of your target audience. Making assumptions without actual data won’t get you far if not anywhere. Firstly you have to get supporting data for your assumptions before you can start shaking your money maker. And this is how you do it!

Step 1: Start with long tail keywords

Your focus should be on long tail keywords especially when you are newly starting a business. Over time gaining organic traffic through SEO has become immensely competitive.

A Google search for “leather jacket” will give you about 368,000 results while “buy men’s leather jacket” will pull up 590 results. So, if you have a fashion outlet, then your audience looking to buy men’s leather jacket are 600 times more likely to find you. The math is simple.

As you can see, the second query has a clearer purpose, that is to buy a particular product. In conclusion, long tail keywords are better because of 3 reasons:

• You improve your chances of finding your money-maker keyword having high enough search volume & low enough competition;
• Long tail keywords better conversions – you can easily identify the purpose of the user’s search
• At least 3 words are used in a single query 70% of the time.

Moreover, there are these common phrases can help you achieve desired results,

• Phrases such as “buy”, “get”, “free deal”, “gifts” are used to focus on revenue generation,
• While keywords such as “how-to”, “ultimate guide”, and “learn” are focused on acquiring traffic.

An oldie but a goodie, choose the right goal, before you start your keyword research.

Step 2: Understand the search volume & ranking difficulty

Learning the search volume is compulsory and that’s where keyword research must always start. If you do it correctly you could track two important things:

• How many people search for your product/solution
• The difficulty to rank for your selected keyword

Google AdWords Keyword planner provides a free tool to get the required data. However, for a more extensive research consider one of these keyword research tools.

LEt’s say you want to start a wine e-commerce business.

Wine, that’s a good choice. Firstly, try searching with the relevant keywords that might generate revenue. To get the most of the Keyword Planner, go to “Open Previous Keyword Planner“.

1. Select “Get search volume data and trends” option
2. Enter your keywords line by line or upload a file with all your keywords
3. Select search location, search engine, and 

After you hit the blue button, “Get Search Volume” you can see all the necessary metrics of the focus phrases.

1. Search phrase
2. Graph of the search volume in specific region and time frame
3. Search volume
4. Suggested bid

The suggested bids are just estimates so don’t entirely rely on them.

Step 4: Use keyword synonyms as well

What you need to do is find a query with a high search volume and low keyword difficulty. KWFinder is the best free tool to do this.

1. Enter your search keyword
2. Filter by location
3. Filter by language
4. See the magic happen

This tool will give your keywords SEO difficulty score (1) and the list of the synonyms as well as their difficulty score.



The SEO difficulty roughly translates to:

• 1-10 backlinks for 1-10 SEO difficulty
• 11-20 backlinks for 11-20 SEO difficulty
• 21-33 backlinks for 21-30 SEO difficulty
• 50+ backlinks for 31 and more SEO difficulty (you’d need insane link building skills for it though)

If you select “wine case deals” as your focus query and sell wine in bulk you can lower the backlinks you would need from ~50+ to ~25, to get some organic traffic. Quite nice eh?

Note: You only get three free searches on KWfinder every 24 hours. So be meticulous.

3.1. Recap on keyword research

Experts say that it should take about a couple days or more to have a well grounded keyword research. It is the foundation for your SEO after all.

Repeat these two processes until you have between 5 and 10 money-maker phrases:

• A long-tail keyword, which is a clear alfa-phrase (high volume and low keyword difficulty) and achieves your specific goal (sales or traffic).
• 4-9 word phrases for content marketing to generate traffic for your blog or about us & other pages.

4. SEO on-page

From the keyword research, “wine case deals” seems to be the most favorable focus keyword for getting organic traffic. Throw in some long tail keywords to generate traffic and provide value to your customers. Sounds good? Now let’s see how and where you can include these words.

Step 1: Implementing focus keyword

An SEO tutorial is just not the same without an on-page checklist. To illustrate this let’s take an example from our MarketMeGood blog. For this example article, “seo freelancers” was the focus keyword. You could also optimize landing pages by following these same steps.

The 9 steps to optimize your article:

1. Start the headline title with the focus Keyword (headline should be 70 characters or lesser).
   
   
   
2. Insert a click-bait keyword into your headline such as “best”, “epic”, “awesome”, deal of the year/month, etc. (depending on your goal).
   
   
   
   
3. Add at least one image in your article with the focus keyword as the alt-tag.
   
   
   
   
4. Add your focus keyword in the first paragraph.
   
   
5. Add 3-4 similar LSI keywords in the content; similar queries that answer similar intents of the searcher.
   • Add them here and there in the post.
6. Maintain your focus keywords density between 0.5% and 2% of the content.
   
   
   
7. Add the keyword at the beginning of the URL. Be absolutely sure to create redirects when you edit the URL.
   
   
   
8. Include your focus keyword in the meta description.
   
   
   
9. Use your focus keyword in sub headings.
   
   
   

And now you are done! If you followed these steps, your page is SEO perfect.

5. Link-building

This is a critical step in increasing your organic traffic. Having more links to your content is like getting votes of confidence from around the internet. That is an important ranking factor as supported by several studies.

Hence, you should spend about 80% of your time link-building. This step is essentially redundant unless you’ve really nailed the last two steps above.

Here are the three tested link-building strategies:

5.1. Get your competitors’ backlinks

This method can be greatly automated and hence produces the best results for the time you spend. Your competitors probably spent hundreds of hours finding sources for getting backlinks. But lucky for you, you can do the same in exponentially lesser time, thanks to Linkody. With Linkody, you can automate finding all these websites and have all the metrics available within seconds.

Step 1: Register on Linkody

1. Signup on Linkody
2. Add your domain
3. Add your competitors’ URLs, and
4. Optionally, connect your Ahrefs account

Step 2: Download your competitors’ backlinks

1. Navigate to the Competitors section
2. Filter the list according to your needs
3. Download the list by exporting the filtered list as a CSV file

When filtering, separate different types of sources such as blogs and testimonials as each of them require different types of pitching. You can’t exactly win their hearts with one moving love letter.

Step 3: Email the sources

Email? The 2,000 sources on that list you just downloaded? That would be insane but thanks to email outreach programs, you can automate this process.

Out of all the different tools that are out there, Ninjaoutreach.com is our absolute favorite. It’s so simple to use. All you need to do is upload the list of websites you exported, create a pitch, and create outreach schedules.

Copy all the URLs (cell C2:Cxxx) from the CSV file and simply plug them in the Ninja tool.
Tip: Personalizing the emails with names and site references, increases the response rate by about 50%.

Ninjaoutreach.com takes a while to find all the contact details of the websites you uploaded. Once that’s ready you can group, sort, tag, filter, and start sending mass personalized emails.

5.2. Create extensive posts

These extensive posts are usually one-of-a-kind posts that really long and cover everything on that particular topic.

You will have to spend a lot of time, of course. But, if done correctly, it is extremely rewarding.

Step 1: Do a topic research

Begin by searching for a topic that hasn’t been covered in detail:

• Quora.com is a good place to start the topic research.
• Look inside LinkedIn groups where people tend to seek advice.
• Hubspot is also good as it can generate blog topics for you.

Step 3: Find experts in the field

Alright, now you have a topic that you can create content for. Next you find an expert in the field who wants to collaborate with you. 

For instance, backlinto.com got 600 domains to link to them by publishing a research of 1 millions search results. They did that study with help from their data partners. Together they got more backlinks for one post than some websites could get in an eternity.

You can produce better content and deliver increased value to your readers by delegating your work. Take a look at this  epic guide about epic guides to get some inspiration.

5.3. Guest blogging

Guest blogging is an oldie but a goldie. It is a common practice to request a backlink in exchange for a guest post. Wait, you get an opportunity to guest post, as well as a backlink? That’s a sweet deal! This is also an opportunity to promote content of your own and that of your partner(s).

Step 1: Find guest blogging sites

This takes a simple Google search. Enter “Keyword” + write-for-us into Google and choose what’s most appropriate for you. For example, “cooking” + write-for-us.

But, if you’re looking for a shortcut, we’ve also done that work for you and here’s a free list of 252+ sites that accept guest posts. The list includes sites from more than 39 industries such as lifestyle and marketing, so yeah it’s quite extensive.

Step 2: Contact the sites

We recommend that you go through their blog and research their topic well in advance. That way you can find exactly what that blog is missing and propose that as your guest posting topic.

You don’t want to be that annoying person who request to write a cooking article on a blog like ours. So take your time and do your research.

If you are looking for an in-depth article on guest posting this article is a must see.

5.4. Recap on link-building

The above three link-building techniques have everything you could need:

• First method is fast and effective
• Second one requires some hard work but can produce remarkable results if executed properly, and
• The third is something that works everytime

If you’re still not satisfied with these three methods, then check out this post.

6. Conclusion

Everything you just learnt in this SEO tutorial is procedural and requires some time. You have to repeat these steps periodically to stay atop your competition.

The following two tools help you track your progress as well as your competitors’:

• Linkody.com lets you see all your backlinks and their metrics, and emails you when the backlinks have been implemented.
• Google analytics tracks different traffic sources and which bring the most.

The 3 steps for optimizing and increasing your traffic are:

1. Topic and keyword resarch
2. On-page SEO, and
3. Link-building
   • Getting competitors’ backlinks
   • Collaborating on an extensive post
   • Guest blogging

So there you have it; the ultimate SEO tutorial you’ll need to rank top on Google. Let us know how you found this useful, and your story in the comments down below.

And be a lovable, caring, digital citizen and spread some love social media, will ya? Cheerio!

The post The Only Seo Tutorial You Need To Rank #1 On Google appeared first on Marketing Funnel Automation.