New to SEO? Brushing up on your knowledge? The Smart Cat SEO tutorial for beginners provides information and tools you need to get started on the road to success.
If you follow the tutorial and use the tools I have used, you will be as successful as I am in matter of months. Do I have to read everything in the tutorials even thought there are videos? Yes, I recommend reading everything so you get a good grasp on SEO Basics. Knowing the SEO basics is a good foundation for your future business.
SmartCatSEO tutorials focuses on the major factors and turns your information-rich website into something Google can recognize. Optimize your website in theses areas to get noticed by Google and start monetizing your blog or webstie today.
Get Started: Get to know Search Engines and how they work
Your Passion: Create quality information-rich Content
Keyword Research: Optimaize your Keywords – Titles, Text, and Meta Data
Building Backlinks: Get quality Backlinks pointing back at your site
Affiliate Marketing: Use Affiliate Marketing to make money from your website or blog
Making money through affiliate marketing basics is obtainable by anyone who makes the effort. This may be the most rewarding with the least amount of effort in all SEO practices we discussed. However, you can’t get to this step without having a popular website with lots of backlinks and good content.
Affiliate marketing basics is essentially making money online by promoting affiliate products. You can sell your own products online of course. But for those who don’t have a product yet, you can start by piggy backing someone else’s product by simply promoting it through your website. In return you get a commission. It can be a one time commission or a repeated commission paid out to you every month depending on the product. You can see how this can become lucrative.
The only work involved is finding a product that is related to your niche market and making it available to your audience. It is a good idea to actually try out the product yourself before promoting it to your now loyal readers. Remember all the hard work you put into getting readers to come to your website? Remember all the hard work you put into the content of your website. Your readers would want the same from the products you promote.
Ways to promote include:
Writing about the product or a review on your website.
Doing a video tutorial on how to use the product.
Doing a podcast about the product.
Sending emails or newsletters promoting the product.
Building Backlinks is key to a successful website or blog. What are they? Backlinking is related popularity. The myth about the more traffic you get to your site the better you rank on search engines is partially true. It helps get lots of visitors to your site. That’s great because to humans that defines a site as being popular. But to search engines a popular site means something completely different.
Search engines will spot a popular site based on the number of sites it is linked to, these are backlinks. In fact, the more “bigger, well-known sites” you have pointed at your site, the more popular you will seam to web crawlers. To get popular, link yourself to the biggest sites out there like Ebay, Amazon, Facebook, etc…
Start building backlinks by connecting yourself to social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Start a new account and name it the same as your website. Social sites love to make links so they have simple steps to link your site back at them. Most blogging software provide link options to these social sites.
Get started right away with:
Twitter - Don’t worry, you don’t have to tweet every 10mins. Every time you write an article on your website or blog post, it will automatically tweet itself. This will open up your website to millions of twitters.
Facebook - Start a Facebook page with your website name on it. Every time you write an article or blog post, it will automatically post on your Facebook wall. You now have made yourself accessible to millions of users.
Linkedin - Same as Facebook without the automatic posts. Your website URL will be exposed to millions of professionals that may be interested in your topic.
It is also smart to link yourself to the obvious search engine sites such like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. In this case, you submit your website to these search engines. Go to their sites and type in submit my website or URL. They each have their own easy steps on how to submit.
E-Bay and Amazon sell products, so it is easy to write a review on some of the products and include your website at the end. You can also include your website on your profile pages.
These essential links are a good start to have but they don’t necessarily get you top ranking. Those that are on the first page of search results are those that have these essentials plus thousands of other links that you don’t see. This is crucial for longterm success. To accumulate thousands of links would take a lot of manual labour and time. Some site have achieved this by simply writing about what they love and over years they grow more popular and gather links organically. There are also site that achieve this level of popularity by using SEO practices and focusing on building links.
Backlink Building is the most challenging part of SEO practices. I found doing it manually like I did with Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon etc… to be grueling and discouraging after a dozen or so sites. And there were no promises of positive results. First I needed to find sites that were related to my topic and at the same time function on html. You can see how this can cost you hours and hours on the computer.
In order to get compete, I find using paid software most optimal. I have tried dozens of free backlink services online but I found they were not giving me quality links and I ended up not getting more traffic or popularity at all. These two are the ones I found to be most effective:
What is your website or blog about and why is it valuable to the end user? Providing useful and appealing content is vital to SEO. Search Engines look for the best results for their searches. When Web Crawlers search for results, they go to sites and pages that:
Are easy to use and navigate
Provide relevant information to the query
Are professionally designed and accessible to modern browsers
Deliver quality, credible content
When creating content for SEO for your website or blog, consider the audience as well as the search engines. People perform searches with the intent to find, fix, treat, solve, understand, or buy something. Search engines provide results to the searchers based on these intents. Creating legitimate and information-rich content that satisfy these intents will get you a bigger audience and a better chance at getting top rankings.
There is a wordpress plugin that helps you optimize your articles while you write called SEOPressor. It tells you what your articles is lacking in order to make best ranking so you can go in a edit your post before publishing it. SEOPressor is a key tool to have and it doesn’t cost very much. A great plugin for your blog!
Keyword Research is one of the most important and vital aspect of SEO. With a bit of Keyword know-how you can make major improvements to your website or blog, including higher returns and more traffic to your site. Keyword research will help you learn more about your customers, your niche market, and changing market conditions.
Web Crawlers that we talked about before, use keywords to sort all the data. With the dozens and hundreds of keywords out there just on your topic alone, how do you know which one will get you more visitors, make your website more popular, and get better ranking? A small difference in keywords will yield completely different results.
For example:
You want to write an article or start a blog about breeding cats. You can title it: Cat Breeding, Breeding Cats, How to Breed Cats, A Starter’s Guide to Breeding Cats. There are so many possibilities. Out of the four options did you know that How to Breed Cats currently yields the most hits?
Here are the results for the 4 options above:
Cat Breeding 27,100 monthly searches
Breeding Cats 22,200 monthly searches
How to Breed Cats 201,000 monthly searches
A Starter’s Guide to Breeding Cats 0 monthly searches
It I were to choose, Option #4 may have yielded 0 results but it still has the term Breeding Cats in it. And A Starter’s Guide gives the audience a clearer message about my site. Also, since I am starting out, I would not want to compete with all the websites aiming for “How to Breed Cats”.
When choosing a keyword you have to consider two things: the best sounding title to attract your audience, but more importantly, the best words to attract Google. It doesn’t stop there. You need to carefully consider tags, meta tags, and even text in your content every time you write. Using the same example as above, an extra letter can yield completely different results.
Breed of cats 201,000 monthly searches
Breed of cat 246,000 monthly searches
To add to the complexity of keywords, results change because they are based on human impulses. Keyword search results is organic and changes along with search engine queries and the users at the other end.
My Biggest Mistake
I would spend hours doing research and writing articles for my website because I really wanted to produce great content for my audience. But, weeks went by and no one read these articles, no one even knew about them. It felt like a waste of time in the end. My biggest mistake was that I only considered my audience. I should have put some effort into researching keywords before I started writing in order to shape my article for both my audience AND Google.
There are keyword research tools that can help you get the most popular keywords in any category to help you select the best one. Keyword tools will help you research your competition, keep stats of your site, and will give you keyword suggestions and more. It is vital to have keyword tools under your belt in order to make money from your website or blog.
There are lots of SEO tools out there but not many on keyword research. I have used Keyword Winner to optimize my websites and I find it to be the best one. It is easy to use, easy to install, does great research and doesn’t cost me every month to use it. It is a one time cost. I paid $50CAD for my Keyword Winner. It’s worth every penny. But I found a place where you can get it for less.
Get Started with SEO by Getting to know how Search Engines work.
SEO is Search Engine Optimization. SEO are practices and techniques people use to optimize their website to increase to their site and get top ranking from search engines. This chapter of the SEO tutorial will talk about how Search Engines work and how it connects to you and your business.
All the information that people put on the web is gathered and organized by search engines. The three biggest ones are Yahoo, Bing, and Google. Google is the biggest one with over 75% of the piece of pie – all the other have less than 10%.
When people do a search, these search engines send out spiders to crawl all over the web to find the most relevant and popular articles and list them for you. These are the search results that you see with a short description under the titles of each one. As you know, there are pages and pages of these search results. To be on the first page, each search engine takes into consideration many factors.
Get started with SEO by looking at the major factors and turn your information-rich website into something Google can recognize. Optimize your website in theses areas to get noticed by Google and start monetizing your blog or webstie today.
Create quality information-rich Content
Optimaize your Keywords – Titles, Text, and Meta Data
Get quality Backlinks pointing back at your site
Use Affiliate Marketing
If you are looking for a place to start writing your blog, there are several to choose from. I have used Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress. I think WordPress is the most powerful one to use if you want to make money. It has a free site wordpress.com and a paid site wordpress.org. You want to go directly to WordPress.org. The only thing you have to pay for at this point is a domain and hosting. Their service is really bad. There is no way to contact support if you have a problem but they provide a forum where others can help you with your problem.
Here are a couple of domain and hosting services you can use that always have good deals: Host Gator and Godaddy. Godaddy has tremendous customer service. There is no cue when you call. And they are very helpful. Host Gator has super cheap deals, which is great if you want to get more than one domains.
