Tip: Everybody wants backlinks, but few provide real value first in their cold outreach. Get high-quality backlinks by giving candidates a list of broken links on their sites and providing highly-relevant alternatives.

Thread 👇

Getting started with SEO 101:

If you to start getting some organic traffic from Google, but don't know where to start, here's how I recommend getting started.

I'll outline:

- On Site SEO
- Basic KW Research
- Longtail Traffic
- Content Approach

Let's go 👇

SEO is about trust.

Everything stems from trust.

If Google trusts your site, it will promote you to searchers.

If people trust your title(s), they'll click your links.

If people trust the content they are reading, they'll share & give backlinks.

Trust signaling is the goal.

How do you signal trust to Google?

- Fast page loads.
- Great user experience.
- Natural, human generated content.
- Bot readable content.
- Good schema structure.
- Long page dwell times.

Basically, providing great content and a great experience gives you a leg-up.

In search results, Google keeps track of these signals:

1. CTR (Click Through Rate) - When people see your titles, do they click them?

2. Bounce Rate - Do people immediately leave after clicking the link?

3. Page Dwell Time + Scroll Distance - Do people read your content?

Here's what you want:

High CTR
Low Bounce Rate
High Dwell + Scroll

✅ People are attracted to your titles.

✅ They actually make it to your fast-loading site.

✅ They stick around and read the content.

Check these boxes and you'll have a great foundation.

Last month, 250k people visited https://t.co/nkcmLxbhzC, mostly from Google search.

Here are some things I've learned about SEO:

1. Second-and-third-order consequences

SEO is a "mind game" of second-and-third-order consequences. The work you do today will not yield results immediately.

Write an article, publish it, and then get no results. This makes you think you "did it wrong". Most people quit here.

Just go in with the expectation that you won't see results for six months after publish.

Instead of getting discouraged, just write more and publish more. By the time you published your 20th article, you might start finally seeing the results of your first.

2. SEO industry is mostly BS

Try to avoid SEO experts and industry nonsense, they are mostly distractions.

*Examples of distractions*: Google algorithm updates, schema markup, page speed, meta tags.

Do you think you’re smarter than Google’s algorithm? Maybe today, definitely not tomorrow.

Write and publish compelling content that answers the searcher’s query. That’s it!

@Moz:

In the initial days of our startup, I had no clue about SEO.

5 years later, SEO is a crucial part of our marketing strategy.

I've built a robust 33-step SEO checklist based on my learnings.

Today, I am sharing it with you 🧵

33-step checklist over 6 categories:
1) Setting up (1-6)
2) Keyword research (7-14)
3) Content creation (15-18)
4) Publishing (19-23)
5) Technical details (24-29)
6) Link building (30-33)

Meanwhile, if you'd like to check out my

Part 1: Setting Up

1/ Set up Google Search Console

Google's free tool to help you monitor your SEO performance. Has the most accurate data.

Can help you:
- Monitor keywords you rank for
- Find website errors
- Submit sitemap

Frequency: One-time

2/ Set up Google Analytics

Google's free tool to help you monitor website traffic.

Pro-tip: Connect Google Analytics with Search Console to get access to deeper insights.

Frequency: One-time

3/ Create and submit a sitemap

Sitemap helps Google find pages on your website easily & effectively.

You can submit a sitemap manually through Google Search Console or setup an automated script to update & submit your sitemap regularly (recommended).

Frequency: One-time

I've been doing SEO for over 15 years and optimized 100's of websites.

Here are the best techniques you can use to rank higher in Google 👇

Answering the searchers' intent is key

Anyone who's doing a Google search wants 1 of 4 things.

1. Information
2. Navigation
3. Transaction
4. Comparison

Let's dive in all 4

1. Informational intent

These are queries like "turkey recipe", local weather and how-to's.

People are looking for help on how to get things done. They'll do it themselves. You just need to give them the right tools.

2. Navigational intent

People using these keywords are looking for something specific. A brand like "Hypefury" for example.

It's not hard to rank for competitors but you won't get a lot of traffic out of it. Focus on the comparison intent (which we'll talk about in a sec)

3. Transactional intent

This is used when people want to buy. The search results are littered with ads and it's pay-to-play.

It's really hard to rank high on these types of keywords AND get any meaningful organic traffic. This is where Google makes its money.

@curaffairs The author doesn't know enough about search to have written that article and the reason he's having those problems is AI algos like Rank Brain and Google's attempts to use natural language processing nothing to do with SEOs.

1/x

YMYL is not evaluated at the site level, but the query level.

Again this is on Google, not SEOs because they want to surface better sites.

And those devaluations are part of Core Updates which SEOs like me recover sites from.

2/

Featured Snippets are not optimized for - you can use certain HTML to be pulled in one but there is no definite use case where Featured Snippets are shown or that your site's will show for it. Also doesn't always come from the #1 result.

& that's Google not the SEO.

3/

Also there are many times when an SEO doesn't want their site in the Featured Snippet cuz it doesn't result in a click to the website. But we have no control over what Google pulls as Feature Snippets except to put in a meta tag to exclude us from them

4/

And Neil Patel is not an SEO. Most senior level SEOs see him as nothing more than a scammer because reportedly he's ripped them off by stealing their content and articles and passing them off as his.

5/