There are three things you need to know if you want to rank higher on Google, get more traffic, get more clicks, and get more customers. First, you need to nail onpage optimization. Get this wrong, and it doesn't matter how many backlinks you build, how much content you create, or how much time, money or energy you you throw at the problem because nothing's going to work. Next is a theory called Audience over algorithms that every great SEO lives and dies by. But don't worry if you've never heard of this before, most people haven't.
So I'll show you exactly what it means and how you can use it to rank higher than ever before. And lastly, you need to use something called next level links. Now, they are a little trickier to get than your standard runofthemill links, but they provide ten times more power, so they're definitely worth the extra effort. So let me show you how it's done, starting with the ever important on page optimization. Also a big thank you to Hrefs for sponsoring this video, but more on that later on page optimization is the most important part of SEO, but fortunately, it's also the thing that is completely 100% within your control. I mean, let's be honest here. One of the biggest issues with trying to optimize a website or a piece of content or a video is that you don't own the search engine, so they're free to do or not do whatever they want. Now, some people naturally don't like this, and so they give up and get frustrated and quit long before their stuff ever had a chance of ranking.
But that's not the answer. The answer is to learn and then play within the rules. You see back in the day, like ten years ago, which in internet years is like 1000 years ago. Hey man, how's it going? You wouldn't happen to know anything about SEO now would you? Hey, so what you're doing with that thing? It looks kind of dangerous. Anyway, back then, all you needed to do was just fill your website with keyword stuffed content and throw as many links as possible at it. And then just like magic, my rankings. But Google's no dummy. And so over time, their algorithm evolved, making those spammy black hat tactics way less effective. And today, not only do those sketchy strategies not work, but they can actually do a significant amount of damage to your overall rankings and even lead to your website being completely blacklisted and removed from the search engine completely. And this is scary stuff, so clearly you want to do this right now. When it comes to on page optimization, there are four things that you want to do to set yourself and your site up for success. So let me walk you through those. Now, the first is technical optimization, which is basically just making sure that your site is built OK. This includes taking a look at where your website is being hosted so that it loads fast, which is a key factor in user experience. And one of the things that Google looks at when trying to decide where to put your website. First page, second page, third page, the next on page factor is content. I'll dive into this deeper in just a minute, but for now, just know that when we're talking about optimizing your content, we're talking about making sure that it's high quality, it's useful, and it's relevant to your audience and what they might be searching for. But again, more on that in just a minute. Number three on the list of onpage optimization is all about internal links and structure. Now, full disclosure, this next part is a little more geek than chic, but it's important. This is because how your website is set up, how your pages are optimized, what parts link to other parts, and how much duplicate versus unique content you have on your site. Well, they all add up to form an overall impression of just how valuable your website is to the search engines. This is why it's important here, to make sure that you only have high quality and relevant information on your site, and that it's well linked and well organized and essentially just has a really good and easy to follow structure. And if for some reason you do need to have content on your website, that just may not be that useful, save for something like an internal business document or customer support documentation.
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Don't worry, you can use the robots meta tag no index, which will stop this content from being indexed on the search engines. Part four is all about design and functionality. This means things like making sure that your website not only looks good and works on a mobile device, but maybe even that it's optimized for a mobile device. This is because more and more people are viewing websites from their phones, and if they have to do that whole pinch and scroll and Zoom thing, it's just not going to go well for you, my friend. Okay, so that's the technical stuff out of the way. And if it all sounds completely overwhelming, don't worry, there's a lot of good people out there who can look after this for you so you can move on to the more important parts of SEO. Things like creating high quality content. And that little thing I mentioned before audience over algorithms. But before I show you exactly how to make sure that you're feeding Google exactly what it wants. First, a real quick message from this video's sponsor. Ahrefs. Ahrefs is an all in one SEO tool set designed for everyone from junior marketers all the way up to SEO experts. I've used Ahrefs as a core part of my SEO strategy for almost a decade now, and I can't imagine trying to rank a website without it. I mean, I guess I could imagine a world without Ahrefs if I had to, but it's a cold and terrifying world that I want. No part of this is because Hrefs gives you everything you need to rank higher from comprehensive website audits that allow you to check your website for 100 plus predefined SEO issues, the ability to analyze your competitor's websites with Site Explorer, the ability to find exactly what keywords your customers are searching for with Keyword Explorer, and a ton of other handy features. Not only that, but when you click the link in the description below this video, you can sign up today for Ahrefs, webmaster tools for absolutely free. So make sure to do that right after this video. And next, let's talk about content and what this whole audience over algorithms thing really is about. Seo was one of the first marketing strategies that I ever really learned about, and I used it to build many different successful businesses, including my first agency. And so SEO was always going to hold a very special place in my heart. That said, things have changed a lot since then. I mean, we still don't have the flying cars that they promised us, but at least the search engines have gotten better at separating the Ham from the spam. I'm not sure if that's a thing we're going to go with it.
In other, less weird terms, Google has gotten a whole lot smarter. For example, back in the day, it was all about those keywords. And if you wanted to rank for a term like, say, marketing, well, all you needed to do was write the spammiest content ever and just fill it with these keywords. For example, welcome to my marketing website, where we talk about marketing strategy and marketing coaching. Marketing consulting, marketing agency marketing, marketing, marketing. Now, if you search the Internet long and hard enough, you'll find that some of these sites still exist. Fossils really relics of a different time, a simpler time, a spammer time. But this approach doesn't work anymore, thankfully, and the big reason for this is that it provides an absolutely terrible user experience. The old way of creating content was focused on something called keyword density, which was literally about cramming as many keywords as you possibly could onto a page. The new way, though, looks at a whole lot more factors, like WDF IDF, which is a formula that uses two factors to analyze sites pages and articles. Idf and WDF WDF stands for Within Document Frequency and describes how often a word is used. And IDF stands for Inverse Document frequency, which is all about how popular a term is on other sites. But there's also something called LSI, which stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It's basically just fancy marketer talk for synonyms or keywords that are closely related to terms that search engines use. So, keeping on with our marketing website ranking article, this would mean that we would also want to use words that were conceptually related to marketing, like digital marketing, social media content, email, SMS marketing, text marketing, lead generation you get the picture. The big takeaway here is that trying to game the system by just cramming keywords onto the page or going too deep down the rabbit hole of WDF, IDF or anything else like that is probably a whole lot more hassle than it's worth.
But more importantly, it's also more likely to lead to a very unpleasant user experience for your visitor. And this means that they're far more likely to click the back button and bounce, which Unsurprisingly will destroy your search engine rankings faster than a Penguin riding a Panda. That's a that's an SEO joke. But by focusing on proven marketing fundamentals like first identifying your market's biggest fears and pains and problems and frustrations, as well as all of their wants and goals and dreams and desires, you can be sure that you're creating valuable content that actually resonates with them, so they're far more likely to stick around. Now, doing all of this is important, and it's a really great start. But there's still one more thing you have to do if you want to claim that top search engine spot, and that's all about acquiring next level links. Here's the deal. If what we just talked about with the audience over algorithms is all about your audience, well, the next level links is all about the algorithm. This is because unless your audience goes actively searching and looking for the links that you have, they're unlikely to see them and definitely don't care. But you know who does care? That's right, the algorithm. And they care a lot. See, think of a backlink as a vote or a ballot cast in favor of your website as a way of saying, hey, I think this website is pretty good. It's a recommendation, really. But like all recommendations, they're not all created equal. For example, if you are applying for a job and your former boss wrote you a letter of recommendation saying just how great you are, how you always showed up early and stayed late, you went the extra mile, and you were just a generally awesome person, well, that's likely to go a pretty long way.
On the other hand, if your old sketchy friend from high school who just can't seem to get his life together and has been sleeping on your couch for three months, says the same thing, well, not only is that recommendation not going to help you, it will also probably do as much damage to your reputation as he's doing to your couch. This is why, when it comes to acquiring backlinks for your website, which are still a very important ranking factor, you want to focus on quality over quantity. And there are two great places to acquire next level backlinks that you want to start with first. And there's really no nice way of saying this. You basically just want to copy all of your competitors backlinks. Yeah, I'd love to be able to tell you to be original and go out there and make your own backlinks but the point is they've already got the links that you kind of need so you might as well just get them to now. The way to find out what backlinks your competitors have that you don't is to use a tool like Ahrefs where you simply put in your competitor's website and then it'll give you a long list of all the links that they have. Start with the links that have the highest Dr which stands for domain rating and then work your way down the list
