hey everyone my name is sam oh! . welcome to. the seo fundamentals course by ahrefs in this course i'll be teaching you. the fundamentals of seo with a heavy focus on execution . while it's a beginner's seo course. i don't want you to be fooled by. the word beginner even for an eight-figure business like ours we don't do anything crazy technical or complicated right from. the start we've stuck with. the fundamentals of seo that led to compounded growth . today our site gets over a million monthly visits from google search alone making seo one of our most effective strategies to get traffic to our site so. the course is broken down into four modules plus this video which is more of an introduction to best seo company in usa,. the course as well as in seo 101 in this video we'll go over. the basics of seo . cover things like what it is why it's important . how it works you'll then move on to module one which is on keyword research throughout these lessons i'll show you how to find keywords to target that can benefit your business it'll also set. the foundation for. the next module which is on-page seo in this module we'll talk about optimizing your pages to rank for those keywords. the next module will be on link building this is one of google's most prominent ranking signals which has proven to contribute to higher rankings in search finally we'll finish off. the course with. the basics of technical seo which will mostly be about best practices . website maintenance all right let's kick things off with. the seo basics we'll talk about what search engine optimization is why it's important . how google works seo stands for search engine optimization . it's. the process of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine's organic search results now let's talk a bit about how they work if you're completely new to seo then it's easiest to think of search engines as libraries but instead of storing books they store copies of websites . web pages so when you search for a query. the search engine will then look through all pages in its index . try to return. the most relevant results . seo helps demonstrate to search engines that your page is that result now you might be thinking why should. i focus on seo when there are so many other marketing mediums well there are three major things that attract marketers to search engine optimization . in my opinion these three things make seo. the best traffic source number one unlike paying for ads search traffic is free number two organic traffic is typically consistent once you're ranking high whereas other mediums like social media . email marketing often result in traffic spikes that usually end up fading to nothing . it makes sense because social media networks are designed to surface fresh content emails often get marked as read forgotten or land in. the spam box whereas search traffic is a result of users actively searching for information .. the number of searches for a given topic is typically consistent month to month . number three you have. the opportunity to reach massive audiences you wouldn't have access to otherwise in fact as of october 2019 there were nearly 4.39 billion internet users around. the world . almost 4 billion of those people are google users this is why search engine optimization is an 80 billion dollar industry . why marketers from all walks of life are adopting . pursuing it today everyone wants their business to get discovered . seo is. the perfect way to do that now let's briefly talk about how google works . there are two parts to this. the first is crawling . indexation . these two things are what actually allows google to discover web pages . create their search index so to actually attain information google uses crawlers also known as spiders which gather publicly available information from all over. the web. the spiders will start crawling from a list of known urls called seeds then they follow. the hyperlinks on those pages . crawl those newly discovered pages . this process goes on . on allowing them to collect a ton of information they then take all of this data back to google servers to be added to their search index . that's what people like you and. i are searching through when we key in a query in google now if you were to search for something . google returned every result that mentioned your words on. the page then you'd end up with really bad results this brings us to. the second part which is google's ranking algorithm google has hundreds of ranking signals . they make tweaks to their algorithm 500 to 600 times per year so to be frank no one knows exactly how their algorithm works but they've given us clues . some guidelines to better are just speculation at best but. i do want to cover a few of. the most important factors that you'll need to understand from a fundamental standpoint first are backlinks backlinks are links from a page on one website to another . google has said on their house search works page that if other prominent websites link to a page that's proved to be a good sign that information is well trusted. the easiest way to understand. the value of a backlink is to think of them as votes when a page receives a backlink it's essentially another website vouching for. the content on. the page .. the more votes you get from credible sources. the higher. the trust . we also studied. the effect of backlinks on search traffic . found a clear positive correlation between backlinks from unique websites . a page's organic traffic second is search intent which represents. the reason behind a searches query . if you think of google's goal for search their job is to return. the most relevant results for any given query so with that said you can discover search intent simply by looking at. the top ranking pages for. the query you want to rank for for example if you search for slow cooker recipes you'll see that. the search results are mostly blog posts with a list of slow cooker recipes so if you try . rank a product page where you're selling a slow cooker you won't be matching search intent . therefore you won't rank now if we change. the query to just slow cooker you'll see that. the dominant types of pages are ecommerce category pages so if you try . rank your blog post of slow cooker recipes then you probably won't rank because you're not matching search intent this is a critical concept to understand . i'll share a simple three-point checklist you can use to determine search intent for any query in. the next module . third is content depth search engines are made up of computer programs so they can't actually read . understand text like you and. i would nevertheless google has poured billions of dollars into creating sophisticated technology that understands content to a certain degree but it's your job as a content creator to provide context about. the subject for example if you look at. the top ranking pages for. the quarry how to drive a car you'll find that they talk about things like fastening your seatbelt familiarizing yourself with. the gas . brake pedals adjusting your seat . mirrors . other things that a first time driver may not know basically you want to be able to answer. the search's quarry. the best that you possibly can . naturally it should lead to content that has depth now it's important to note that depth doesn't always translate to length for example a topic like how to turn off iphone 12 doesn't need to . shouldn't be long in fact. the top ranking page is only 185 words but. the content itself solves. the user's query from start to finish alright so. the basics are in. the book . it's time to move on to. the keyword research module hey it's amo . welcome to. the first module which is on keyword research in this first lesson we're going to talk about what keywords are . how to choose them using a simple four point checklist let's get started so what are keywords in. the context of seo they're simply just words . phrases that people type into search engines to find what they're looking for for example if you are shopping for running shoes you might search for keywords like men's running shoes or simply just running shoes now keywords are actually super important in seo because it sets. the entire foundation for search engine optimization. the basic goal of seo is to rank your pages for keywords that your target audience or customers are searching for . if you're not ranking for keywords that actually get searched then your seo efforts are kind of meaningless for example we rank number one for. the query seo checklist . this keyword is responsible for driving around 1500 monthly visitors from google . that's just in. the us so keyword research is. the process of finding keywords that people are inputting into search engines . we'll get into this process in. the upcoming lessons so how do you actually choose keywords that are worth targeting let's run through a checklist that should help you choose keywords effectively. the first thing to check is if your keyword has search demand search demand represents. the volume of monthly searches made for a keyword . this is measurable with a keyword metric that we call search volume you can find. the search volume for a keyword by using a keyword research tool like ahrefs keywords explorer for example. the query kilometers to miles gets searched around 478 000 times per month in. the us alone but as you can see here in hfs keywords explorer 80 of searches go without a click to a page . that's because google has a handy calculator right here that'll solve. the searcher's problem so search volume alone can actually be a bit misleading which is why it's worth looking at. the second checkpoint which is to check. the traffic potential of. the topic traffic potential represents. the total search traffic you could get if you were to rank at. the top of google for your keyword let's look at. the stats for our seo checklist page in hf site explorer so again we rank number one for. the query seo checklist . it sends us approximately 1500 monthly search visits from. the us but if we look at. the total global organic traffic to. the page you'll see that we get approximately 3 000 monthly visits from google every single month . that's because this page ranks for over 200 keywords . this page isn't an outlier in our study of three million keywords we found that on average. the top ranking page ranks for nearly a thousand other keywords in. the top ten so while you may be optimizing your pages for a main keyword your page will likely rank for hundreds or even thousands of other relevant keywords . because of that. the monthly search traffic potential of. the topic seo checklist is actually higher than its monthly search volume this is what makes traffic potential a much more reliable metric than search volume .. the way you determine traffic potential is by looking at how much traffic. the top ranking pages are getting for example if we go to ahrefs keywords explorer . search for submit website to search engines you'll see that it has a search volume of 1100 monthly searches in. the us now if. i scroll to. the bottom of. the page you'll see a serp overview which shows you. the top 10 ranking pages for that keyword . serp just stands for search engine results page . as you can see our page gets an estimated 5 300 monthly search visits from. the us alone . we rank for over 1300 keywords making traffic potential of this keyword higher than its search volume now it doesn't always work out this way for example. the query keyword cannibalization has a search volume of 150 monthly searches but. the traffic potential is well under 100 so it becomes more of a business decision whether you want to tackle. the topic or not now choosing keywords based on metrics alone is not a good idea which is why. the rest of. the checkpoints are meant to ground you. the next point on our checklist is to assess. the business potential of. the keyword or topic business potential simply represents. the value a keyword has to your best seo service business . value really comes down to your niche as well as your business model so an easy way to do this is by assigning scores between one to three to keywords you're researching. the higher. the number. the more important. the topic is to your business so let's say you have a site about golf .. the way you make money is by selling used golf clubs bringing this back to business potential that means topics where you can organically link building! recommend products to visitors would hold. the highest business value for example people searching for something like buy used golf clubs are likely ready to make a purchase here . now so in my books this would have a business value of three now a keyword like best golf clubs would also be relevant to your site people are likely ready to make a purchase soon but just don't know which clubs to buy but it's actually quite easy to plug your products because for. the golf clubs you recommend you can easily link back to your product pages leading visitors closer to making a purchase from pixelseoservice! so i'd give this a business value of two now a keyword like what is a handicap in golf would be really tough to organically recommend your products but nevertheless it's a way to attract relevant traffic to your site so i'd give this a business value of one so these would hold. the lowest priority .