what is SEO ? case study for beginners?

SEO, or search engine optimization. What is it? How should I learn it? If you have a website or a blog but you’re not driving traffic to it, or even if you have a YouTube channel but are struggling to get the views, then SEO will help you drive free traffic to your YouTube channel or your blog. I am driving over 1M visitors, or 100,000 people to my website every month. And 90% of this traffic is free and it’s coming from SEO. So if you also want some kind of traffic for your blog or website, then make sure you watch this video until the end.

Because I will be sharing all the tips, tricks and strategies that I have learned through 7 years of doing SEO for my websites. This video is lesson 7 of our affiliate marketing mastery course, where I show you how to scale an Amazon affiliate website from $0 — $1,000/month. Click on the “I” button here to watch all the videos of this playlist. You should also follow me on Instagram, my user name is “DMANKUR” I take live sessions almost every alternate day, where I answer all your questions, so make sure you follow me. I also created a step-by-step comprehensive checklist on how you can increase the traffic towards your blog form 0 to 5,000 visitors per day. If you want this checklist, all you have to do is like the video, subscribe to our channel and comment with “yes, I want it”. Once we hit thousand likes, subscribers and comments in this video, I’ll make the link of this checklist public in the description section of this video. So now let’s talk about SEO. What is SEO? So let’s say you write a new article in your website. To drive traffic or to promote your article there are 3 options. The first option is that you can promote the link to this article on Facebook wall or in Facebook groups, or in the link section of your Instagram bio. Now since majority of you don’t have thousands of people who are following you, so the maximum number of people who might visit your article will be somewhere close to 100 or 200. The second option is that you can run Facebook ads, Instgram ads, YouTube ads and drive traffic towards your article. But in this case, if you’re not selling a product or a service, and driving traffic only towards your article, then you won’t be able to do it profitably. The last and the most important traffic source is organic traffic. The traffic that is coming from search engines. Like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. So the whole process of SEO is getting your articles or your website ranked number 1 for your target keywords on the Google search results. I’m only talking about Google and not the other search engines like Yahoo or Bing. This is because Google dominates the search engine market. You only have to focus on Google. Once you are ranked number 1 for your target keyword, you will start driving free traffic towards your website or your article. It will be more beneficial for you if I don’t talk more about theory but rather show you everything. So let’s go into my laptop screen, and if you watch this video until the end, I can guarantee you that you will know more about SEO than 99% of SEO experts out there in the market. So whenever I am talking about SEO, I’m primarily talking only about Google because Google has 90% of the search engine space. As you can see that Bing only has 2.45% of the search engine space and Yahoo! At 1.82. So primarily whenever we are talking about search engine optimization or SEO, we are targeting only Google because that is the dominant player in the market. So for the people who are total beginners who don’t know what SEO is, whenever you are searching for a keyword here like “best washing machine in India”, so these are the listings, right? So the process of SEO or search engine optimizationis all about getting your article to the number 1, 2 or 3 position. The reason we want to get it to the top position is because majority of the click rate comes from the first 3 results. So, has there been any time whenever you are searching for a particular keyword, it could be anything like “best movies in India”etc. Have you ever gone to the second page? I have the advanced settings where I am showing a hundred results per search page. But majority of the people have 10 result son the search result page. So have you ever been to the second or third page? And even if you have been then the percentage of the people who are actually visiting the second page is very, very low. So the ultimate goal of the website is to get to the first result for their target keyword. I’ll show you this with one more example. I have opened my ahrefs and using the same keyword “best washing machine in India”. If you’ll go to the search results page here, so the first website that is ranking number 1, Biijilibachao.com, you can see that it’s driving 15,000 of SEO traffic for its target keyword. And similarly, the first and the second ranking is driving 12,000 and the website on the third ranking is driving only 4,000. So if you are a number 1 ranking and if you are a number 3 ranking, there is a huge shift of the amount of traffic you’ll be driving to your website. This is the reason why everyone is targeting the number 1 position. Since number 1 ranking is so important for any website, this is the reason why SEO is so competitive. Now the website who is ranking number 1, gets the most traffic and hence the most profit. And since this video is part of our affiliate marketing mastery course, your target should be to rank number 1 so that you can drive maximum traffic to your website, and hence make more money by selling more product on Amazon. So now whenever we are talking about ranking number 1 there are 200+ factors that make up the entire process of getting your website ranked on number 1, for your target keywords. Now if I’ll be talking about all the 200 factors, then this video will easily extend to 3–4 hours, so I’ll only be talking about the most important factors that make the significant impact on your ranking. But before talking about that, let’s talk about the types of SEO. Primarily there are 4 types of SEO: white hat, black hat, grey hat and negative SEO. Now white hat SEO is what I recommend and what I use. White hat SEO covers all the techniques that you can implement on your website. So that your website gets on the number 1 position, and white hat SEO is what is recommended by Google to do. To compare white hat SEO with black hat SEO,so black hat SEO contains all the techniques that are negative, that are shady and does not comply with the search engine guidelines. And white had SEO is what complies with the,search engine guidelines. So let’s say you write an article that is really amazing, really comprehensive and it really completes the user intent. And let’s say a particular magazine really likes your article and it features your article- and they mention your article in their article. So this creates a back link for your article. Now this is the white hat SEO, because this is done naturally. You are not using a shady technique or kind of link buying, etc. We’ll be talking more about white hat SEO techniques later. I have created a comprehensive video on howto create backlinks for your affiliate website, so you can watch it in our affiliate marketing mastery playlist. In this video I’ll be talking about more of the on-page factor. On how you can get your website ranked number 1 even without backlinks. So make sure you watch this video until the end. The grey hat SEO is in the middle of the white hat and black hat SEO. I don’t even recommend grey hat as well. And negative SEO is whenever one of your competitors builds wire gram or ponlinks to your website. So that your website gives you a penalty. So this is what negative SEO is… We won’t be talking more about- we won’t be talking about negative SEO, rather I’ll be giving you the best recommendation howto get your website number one using just the on-page factors alone. If you’ve seen my video on how to startan affiliate website on this affiliate marketing playlist, then you know that I’ve created a dummy website called “bestdslr.in” And if I check its speed form Asia server and start the test, you can see for yourself that my website is loading at only 1.77s. So if your website is loading under 2s that is what is recommended. And also I am using a very lightweight theme called Generate Press. If you want this paid theme and paid plugin for FREE, then watch my video on how to start an affiliate website, in my affiliate marketing mastery course. So to make your website load faster will really help you in getting your article number 1 ranked. The next step is keyword research. So whenever you are searching anything on Google search engine like “best washing machine in India” in this case, so this becomes a keyword. Now whenever you are writing an article you need to do a thorough keyword research. Like I am using ahrefs here, as I showed you by adding the number 1 result for my target keyword here in site explorer region. And clicking here on the organic keywords. I can find all the keywords for which thisarticle is ranking. And also the position associated with it. Like for best washing machine in India, itis ranking number 1. “Best washing machine”, ranking 3. And also the search volume of the keyword. Now since ahrefs is a paid tool you can also use Ubersuggest by Neil Patel. It’s a free tool and it also gives almost similar data. So once you add the domain name, go to the“top pages” here you can see the article “best washing machine in India” click here on “view all”. And you’ll be able to see all the keywords for which this article is ranking. Now ahrefs is paid tool you do have to pay money for this, but Ubersuggest is a free tool. So here you can also export the keyword listhere, by “export to CSV” and download it for yourself. Now many of the YouTubers I’ve seen… they recommend so many different software and various other tools to find the keywords, but honestly keyword research is not that complicated. It’s very simple. All you have to do is… whatever article you are writing… maybe you’re writing an article, let’s say… best places in India. Okay, so just search for it. All you have to do is search for it. Take the first article, whatever is rankingon Google search engine, copy the URL, go to Ubersuggest or ahrefs, if you are usingahrefs go to site explorer, paste, and enter. If you’re using Ubersuggest free tool, goto Ubersuggest add the domain name, make sure you select the country for which you are targeting,click on search. With ahrefs it’s a one step process becauseyou’ll- like here you can see the keywords for which the article is ranking. I can get the keywords, I can also exportit. But for Ubersuggest you first have to go to“top pages” then you can find the article, whichever the article you are looking forand click here on the “view all” button and download the keywords. I’ve also created a very comprehensive videoon keyword research in this affiliate marketing mastery course. I’ll add the link to the description. All the links that I’m mentioning here in the video, everything is in the description section you guys. So make sure you check the description section. So whatever keyword you are targeting, make sure the difficulty is less. So like, if you are using Ubersuggest you can see the SEO difficulty here, like 35, 43… so anything below 30 is good for a person who is single-handedly managing a website. If you already have an SEO team managing your company, if you’re working for a company, then you can even go for higher difficulty like 45 or 55, 65, etc. If you are using ahrefs again, the keyword difficulty metric here is different from Ubersuggest. So anything less than 20 is good for you. So you don’t have to worry much about it because you can single-handedly get that article ranked. But anything above 20, you will need an SEO team. If you are doing everything by yourself then you have to wait for a longer time because beating that competition will be much more difficult. After selecting the keyword, the other important metric is how amazing your article is. Like here I searched for best washing machine in India. So if you’ll open the first link here…the first search result. You’ll see that this article is very comprehensive. Just looking at the table of contents you’ll see that they have recommended the top 5 models. They have also written a very comprehensive buyer’s guide. So if I am searching for the best washing machine in India, then probably I am looking for a washing machine, right? So I need more information. So when I come into this article, I can see that I can see all the recommended washing machines. Their features, their pros-cons-specs, etc. With their images and also their link to Amazon if I want to buy them. It also has a very comprehensive buying guide,“fully automatic vs semi-automatic” “front load vs top load”. So if I’m looking to buy a washing machine,all of my doubts are covered in this article. So if I’m spending more time on this article,so this reflects goodly in the eyes of Google. Okay, someone who searched for this keyword,spent a lot of time on this article, then definitely must be liking the article and hence, I must promote this. The other important thing about SEO is writing an amazing meta title. Guys as you can see here, like if you’researching for “best washing machine in India” Let’s say if you’re ranking number 4 here,okay but you have an amazing meta title, that is click-worthy. So let’s say… this particular result,number 3. Has 5 backlinks and you have 2 backlinks. But if Google sees that majority of the people clicks on the number 4 result, and end up spending a lot of time on your article, then Google will think, okay that this particular result might have fewer backlinks but people are liking it. And hence it will promote your article in to a better position even without the backlinks. So now we can see there is a general listical article. That you have to write a top-10 type of article. Here, this person has also added the year. By adding the year, it has been seen that the CDR increases because people want the latest information. What other thing that you can do is… If you’ve seen our video on the SEO article,I’ll add the link to that in the description section of this video. I also mentioned that you can also write the month. Like here if you can add like, let’s say the month is April, right now. So you can also say April 2019. This will give the idea to the person who’s searching that okay, this article is the latest article and the chances of the person, your article will be higher. Similarly, you can do the same things fory our meta description as well. Like creating click-worthy titles and creating click-worthy meta description will really help you get to the number 1 position. So make sure your title is very enticing,make sure your title is very click-worthy. Because if you can increase the CDR of your title, then you’ll be able to rank on your target keywords even with fewer backlinks. If you’ll search for, let’s say “coupon”. Usually whenever you are searching for coupons you’ ll see that majority of the results have the month and the year. And this is because all of these websites know that by adding the month and the year in the meta title, the CDR will increase. This is the reason that you’ll see that almost all the website, are using this technique. Like here in “coupondunia.in” you can also see “free delivery”. This will give one more reason for the person whose searching for this keyword to click on this link. Okay, so the meta title is something that you have to keep changing and wearing on a weekly basis and see which one is giving you the best results and which one is giving you the best CDR. Like look at this particular result, likeif you’re searching for “Swiggy coupon”. Look at the result here, “Swiggy coupons& offers”. He has targeted the main keyword here, apart from that he has also written free delivery, and he has also mentioned, 50% off promo code. Now who doesn’t want a 50% off promo code,right? So creating a very enticing title will really help you in increasing the CDR and hence getting your articles ranked. But then again you have to make sure, if some one is clicking here and going to your article, they must also get whatever you are offering in the meta title. Because otherwise, he’ll just hit the backbutton, and he’ll go to the next result. And this instead of helping your website willrather give you a negative SEO. Unless there’s someone who clicks on the back button and clicks on the second result, instead of going to your website, he went to the second result. So instead of helping your website, this willhurt your website more. So make sure whatever you’re offering inthe meta title is also delivered in the article content. So look at the various titles of the variousother keywords. Not just “best washing machine”. You can also add various other categories,like best DSLR, best mobile phone. And look at the theme of the meta titles have. And then try to vary your meta title. Apart from that you should also do a verycomprehensive SEO edit of your website. So SEO audit is all about giving you the technicaldifficulty that your website has. So maybe some of the images are not compressed,or maybe you have a broken link, so all the list of all the problems of your website,will be given to you by an SEO audit. Ahrefs is what I use for my SEO audit, forall my affiliate websites. But if you are not willing to pay ahrefs,so this is another tool called “screamingfrog”. It also has a free vs paid version. You can use the free version also, to do theSEO audit. I know SEO audit is a very complex and a veryadvance step when we talk about SEO. But for all the people who are experiencedin SEO and who are watching the video, they can do their SEO audit here. So this will be all about the technical difficultyof your- maybe some internal link issues, some meta link issue or content length. This will give you a comprehensive view ofthe SEO of your website. Apart from that I also mentioned this in thevarious other videos of my channel. That you should always compress the imagesthat you’re adding to your website. So whatever images that you’re adding toyour website, make sure you first upload it to this website, “compressedjpeg.com”Upload the image and this will give you a compressed version, and then always uploadthe compressed version of your images to the website. Because you would want your website to loadat lightning fast speed. So make sure your website is not heavy withcontent, heavy with the videos. Since you are creating an affiliate website,there’ll be lot of images like this person has added all these images, right? But in your article you’ll be adding a lotof images. If you’re writing a top 10 article thenyou’ll be adding at least 10 articles of the product that you’re recommending. So make sure you compress all the images usingthe “compressjpeg” website. So if you’re following all the videos ofour affiliate marketing mastery course then you know that there are various things thatreally matter on the overall SEO of your website. First is the niche, that you have to go intoa particular niche where the competition is low. Second is the keyword research, you have tofind the right keywords which has low competition and high profitability. I have already discussed all of these in thevarious other videos of this playlist. I’ll be linking all the video links in thedescription section of this video, apart form that, the on-page SEO makes your website extremelyfast. Should you be writing SEO-friendly articles,I also have a video for that. So if you’re following our entire playlist,you won’t have any issue, and as for the backlinks how to create the backlinks, I havecreated a very comprehensive video for that as well in this playlist. So make sure you also check that out. So what are your next steps? Click here to watch the next lesson and clickhere if you want to watch our complete affiliate marketing mastery course where I show youhow to scale a website from $0 — $1,000/month.