How To Become an SEO Expert

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hat’s where you do this we do that and then you start kind of seeing the framework of what a dresser looks like therefore no matter what other kind of dressers. there are out there you start getting a sense of yeah this is a dresser so one of the ways that I’ll kind of guide you through my SEO journey. is kind of giving you the framework of what’s involved in SEO what’s some of the important things are because in inside of that your brain is going to build a framework. okay this is the SEO process then you start seeing what parts are important and I’m hoping I can unlock a certain capacity and capability in your brain where you feel more confident with this process so the first thing I’d like to do is show you the very first site that I launched back in 2012 now 2012 was a very interesting time in the SEO landscape this is when there were a lot of spammers out there there were people that were buying websites and using private blog networks if you don’t know what these terms are I don’t want to make this a video that’s too long so take the words write them down look them up later but keep watching the video and I said I took this course and they said well you got a-you got to do this keyword research to understand what some of the high volume keywords are out there and then you want to look at the competitors and you want to determine if it’s if it’s a low competition keyword so I went and I spent hours doing keyword research and it came across this keyword how many calories to lose weigh and obviously health is all the rage you can sell health products online you can you can do affiliate promotion so I said you know what 33 thousand monthly searches this looks amazing if you google how many calories to lose weight today you’ll see like these massive Authority sites like WebMD and health line and these big fitness blogs and it’s just you know they have internal page articles that show up that are optimized well for this kind of keyword now when back in 2012 it was the era of the exact match domain and what that meant is you you want to buy a domain that contains the keyword in it so for me it was how many calories to lose weight com that’s the domain I bought and I add pan brought like five or six articles I published it on the site and when I hit the publish button you know I was learning a little bit about okay the keyword research then you optimize a page and then you you install WordPress and then you you add some images to the page and you publish it and then you add a few internal pages and and you know I hit publish and I said great now the traffic is gonna come obviously there was no traffic then they said well you got to build a few links to build the authority of your site so I built a few links and and still nothing really happened and I wasn’t really passionate about writing a blog it just felt like I had this blog and like I felt so far away from actually getting traffic and making money I just hadn’t developed any of the skill set I haven’t seen any of the vision so this really wasn’t an opportunity for me to continue to pursue and thank God I didn’t because well every single page in the first five pages of Google is an internal page it’s not it’s got nothing to do with the root domain containing the keyword okay and there’s there’s a reason for that the reason why people were recommending that you include the keyword in the domain is because back in the day Google use that as a strong ranking signal nowadays Google favors other signals such as the brand

Authority how much you trust a specific domain how much it believes that a specific domain domain has expertise and whatever niche that the keyword happens to be in so it’s so much more nuanced approach back then was more simple if I had pursued this back in the day with the old-school tactics I probably would have had results but those results would have been taken away okay so my it might my first swing at a website I launched it I got it off the ground I got some experience didn’t really go anywhere so let’s move on to my second site and here the first one I couldn’t even find a screenshot for my second site however I did so my thinking evolved a little bit I said well if I’m gonna start a site it should be for a keyword that actually has some commercial intent so that if I rank for it and somebody searches for it and they find my website I can probably monetize that traffic somehow so at the time the group I was in was teaching a lot of local SEO so I said you know what Carpet Cleaning seems interesting I lived in Mumbai at the time so I said why don’t I build a website for carpet cleaning. Mumbai so I bought the domain name professionalcarpetcleaningMumbai.com if you go to archive.org you’re gonna see a photo of this website back in 2012 and then if you fast forward a few months you’ll see like a rebranded website of a specific business that I was able to to rent this site out to because I did my SEO I learned a bit more about how to structure page I learned a bit more about how to build links if you look at this if you zoom in on this photo here you see this is the home page it’s got professional carpet cleaning Mumbai so carpet cleaning Mumbai is in the in the domain name and then if you look at the internal pages it says cost of Mumbai carpet cleaning things to know about carpet cleaning what a carpet cleaning Mumbai company does so I actually i optimize the homepage for carpet cleaning Mumbai and then i created all these internal pages for for various related keywords like carpet cleaning Mumbai cost for example because that was some of the best practices back then these are no longer the best practices but within three months of launching the site I actually got it to page one on the fourth month I found a carpet cleaner in Mumbai to rent the site out to he paid me two thousand dollars to redesign the site on to his name and then he was paying me $500 a month for lead gen so every time someone hit the site they’d call the number that was on the on the website and that that call will get transferred to the carpet cleaner he would pick it up and he would take the calls so each day he’d get two or three calls it’s a good situation for him a good situation for me it wasn’t charging me any extra was just sitting there on page one and then that was fine for about three months on the fourth month the site got penalized all of the rankings were gone they went as deep as page ten and I really had no idea why because I bought this domain it had the keyword in the domain I built a bunch of anchor text because I was buying some private blog network sites and buying some links and the anchor text I was using for those links were things like Carpet Cleaning Chicago carpet cleaning in Chicago Chicago carpet cleaning company Chicago carpet cleaning services because that’s what we were getting taught to do at the time but again being new to the industry only six months in what I’m slowly getting at is they were there was something that wasn’t even a part of my mind frame yet and that’s branded SEO okay now now Google had understood that most SEO is were just like Mia they just they spun up a site they started building links they worried about the keywords and then the results would come so Google said okay this is how this is a these guys like AJ are doing it let’s see how the the real companies who actually have a company have a business they have a brand have employees they have a marketing team how do they and what kind of signals do they generate and it definitely wasn’t the type of signals I generated okay but in the meantime I was so excited about these results I also launched the carpet cleaning Houston site lots of traffic within a few months it was on page one within a couple of months I had eight which I was able to rent it out and then literally within 20 days of being able to get it rented out this was also penalized I did the same thing in San Diego I do the same thing in LA I did the same thing in Tucson Arizona and over and over again the sights that I would launch some of them would succeed but even the ones that succeeded would fall off a page one and this is months of my life right this is hard work this is this is work that I sat in front of my computer how super passionate I was taking in what people were teaching me it was working at the time but it wasn’t really working because I wasn’t building anything long-term I wasn’t building anything I can hang my hat on and every few months my progress we just got reset because Google is not interested in showing the results of somebody who is doing things the way I was doing right and then as I started to progress I said well I’m kind of starting to learn some stuff you know I was decent at gray had these automated link building software errors and I was mixing and matching and I just showed you some of the page one results I got so I started I would create all these videos to train my team on how to build these links so I said why don’t I just turn these videos into an affiliate site for marketing so time chamber marketing was born and if you go to archive.org you’ll see a bunch of a bunch of sites they’re a bunch of articles about different automated SEO tools and how to do it and some affiliate links so there’s a there’s an old SEO tool I think it’s still out there called magic submitter so I ranked on page one for magic submitter review for a time got some got some traffic got some affiliate links going got some revenue going so what did i do differently with my fourth site that it’s actually a good thing well in the first three sites I didn’t really have much real unique traffic on there I just put up traffic for the sake of traffic I bought some some $10 articles I put him up there through a few images on there keyword optimized titles and URLs and off we went right that got the job done but it wasn’t enough to really pass some of the the bigger filters that Google has like panda now in this one this was actually the home page was time chamber marketing calm that’s not a keyword that’s my first non keyword optimized website so that’s a good thing that’s actually a brandable name right the internal pages that talked about different reviews different ways to do different things so and that was just you know me creating video content adding some descriptions to it so it’s actually some hard work and real content that went into building out the site and then once I launched the site I started building links to the internal pages about magic submitter review and a review of magic submitter and magic submitter tutorial so magic submitter guide and what happened is I got the rankings and then one day the rankings were gone again at the time I didn’t really understand why I just I didn’t think I was good at SEO I saw a lot of other sites also going from page 1 to page nothing but then I also saw some sites that were just kind of sticking around sticking around sticking around no matter what industry so I started to now that I had a framework of okay I know how to build a site I know what kind of content is required I’m starting to see the importance of branding I’m starting to understand that the type of links that I’m building which were private blog network links at the time they’re they’re really not reliable or keeping yourself out of trouble is really really difficult so now why don’t we fast forward to today whereas you know years ago the exact match domains were highly highly popular now if you look at page one for something like carpet cleaning Chicago you see Yelp homeadvisor Carpet Cleaning Houston you see a local business with a branded homepage name if you look at how many calories to lose health you see health status health line calculated on net eating well woman’s health magazine what are we seeing what’s the trend that I’m talking about here we’re talking about websites that have high domain authority that have lots of branding that are real sites owned by real people those are the sites that are ranking Google right so I wanted to summarize what some of the lessons were on what I did wrong biggest mistake number one was just thinking way too small at first sight I built was how many calories to lose weight calm okay what happens if I if I build an authority site around that topic how far can I expand that beyond how many calories to lose weight calm right I didn’t have the confidence to think that I could compete with some of the bigger the big boys and gals that were on page one that had lots of articles that had lots of authority that had lots of links I just I just didn’t think I was up to the task so I wanted to snipe a keyword but you have to if change your mind frame a little bit we’ll talk more about that number two is obviously link quality is a huge deal when I got into SEO this is just when Google really started getting smart about links back when penguin started rolling out so I had this interesting viewpoint where I was born into SEO around the time when the old guard was kind of getting pushed out and I experienced the old way and how it worked and then almost immediately how those old ways were getting penalized so it put me in a unique position of of seeing the power of the old ways and trying to figure out ways on how to apply that but in a white hat high quality way I didn’t consider brand important branding is extremely important for so many parts of the business some of them are intangible unless you really understand by doing it and seeing the effects because they’re kind of like they’re fuzzy effects but they work because more people trust you you get more yeses and all that stuff but more importantly for our purposes Google thinks that branding is important the way Google understands branding is your brand new anchor text profile how many times people are searching for your brand name in Google and they look for brand quality signals like I mean how much time people spend on your site and all that kind of stuff but really are they searching for your brand do you have lots of branded anchor text in your backlink profile and I thought if content as an afterthought I thought well here are my keywords I’ll pay somebody 10 bucks write an article get the keyword in the title keyword in the URL image optimize some of the pages are yeah keyword optimize some of the images slap them on the site and boom that’s content maybe five years ago not anymore and probably one of my the biggest reasons why my Carpet Cleaning Chicago site got hit my carpet cleaning Houston site got hit is because when you looked at the anchor text profile it was just too much keyword anchor text and there was variety in that anchor text there was different forms of the keyword but there weren’t enough branded signals there weren’t enough URL signals there weren’t enough natural signals there weren’t enough compounded partial signals it was just too much and it worked and it worked quickly and then just as quickly it was gone and those were hard lessons composite lee it took me years to really understand internalized each one of them but I had seen the power of SEO firsthand I saw that I went from nothing to a website that made me 500 bucks a month right before that I was I was trading hours doing what somebody else wanted me to do and now I within just a couple months I was starting to replace some of my salary and I had to figure out how to make these results stick so I could scale it so here’s what I started doing about each one of these when I was thinking too small I started looking at how people built authority sites on their own I started looking at how real brands did it real brands didn’t care about link building they just created great content so I tried that but it’s too slow we don’t have the pockets that big brands do we don’t have the PR to reach that big brands do so it if you want to act like a big brand you can’t because you don’t have the notoriety or the budget but you can look like a big brand if you engineer your SEO campaigns properly but it starts with knowing what you want and you should want an authority site that’s an authority in whatever topic you’re in you don’t want to be an authority in too many topics because that’s not going to work but you want to be an authority in the topic that’s wide enough but niche enough okay and once you start on the process it’s gonna suck before it gets great the first few months are very thankless you do a lot of work if you’re doing it for the first time nobody’s gonna believe in you you’re probably not even gonna believe in yourself if you’ve never seen it actually work so you have to have faith that you create this great content you put up a site you’re doing the outreach you’re building the links you have to have faith that six months one year there’s gonna be results and this is the same pathway that thousands of people have taken before you there’s no reason why your site isn’t one that deserves to get reward like this you can go to fiverr.com you can go to upwork you can you can buy links for five bucks a link 10 bucks link you can do it really really cheaply and a lot of this stuff used to work and there’s a lot of dinosaurs who still think it works but what did I what did I just show you about the short term thinking how you can get results and how quickly they can go away what’s the point of that for see Oh Google wants quality links there’s people out there who own quality websites why doesn’t your website is ever linked from their website it does deserve it it’s just about engineering the right system in order to to know who to target and how to target them how to target them in a way that actually makes them receptive to giving you a link and most importantly and if you’ve tried guest posting in the past you might have seen that all people are happy to respond to your email with a media kit where they say sure I’ll publish an article on my site that’ll be $300 people respond with their media kits all day telling you how much a link on their website cost okay and that’s perfectly fine for them they they built this Authority site they want to monetize it that way good for them and if you have unlimited budget and go ahead and do that but chances are you want to score these links without having to pay the blogger a dime and there’s a way to do that and it took me three years to figure out what that way was but that’s something that we do now on a daily basis and it’s something that I can teach you how to do as well another mistake not thinking about branding or not thinking about it enough in fact it’s the single most important part of a link building campaign and if you’re not thinking about it and if you’re just thinking about your keywords or you don’t think that the value of a homepage link is powerful or if you don’t think that the value to just a random blog post linking to a random blog post is powerful you’re dead wrong high quality websites they generate tons of branded links they generate tons of links to blog posts just because they they have reach they have awareness and just because you’re you’re building brand links to your homepage you’re building links to a page that isn’t really a commercial service page it doesn’t mean that it’s not directly helping you improve the rankings of whatever keywords you want it is because you’re building you’re building a castle and a part of that is building a foundation that will support you know all that all the bells and whistles that you’re going to put in along the way and this is just a part of it so you have to start thinking about brand not as an afterthought but at the very forefront of your mind so you saw how crappy some of the sites were the Carpet Cleaning Chicago sites stuff like that now if you go to outreach mama calm in fact I’ll show you I only have I have about six commercial pages on here I’ve got a case study that’s 6,000 words long and I’ve got one I’ve got four mega authority articles four thousand five thousand words each highly designed written with love and these are the articles that we build links to okay so quality is no longer an afterthought for me quality is at the forefront of my mind if I’m not going to build something of quality I just don’t need to build it right if I get tired of creating content that’s fine I don’t need content I can just build links to these amazing articles here and eventually that’ll get me more traffic to this page it’ll power up my overall domain it will improve the rankings for my service pages because it transfers link juice throughout the site and so for me I’m not worried about volume anymore I’m just worried about quality even if you only do one article a month only if you do one article every two months as long as it’s great content that’s fantastic if you don’t like to write let’s find neither do I go to upwork.com go to problogger net I post the job whatever niche you want get some writers get some samples you’re not going to find the best writer right away so you need to dig a little bit be willing to put in the time once you find that perfect writer who fits your budget and creates great work you’re going to be on your way when you’re sitting there and you’re building a link and you have an opportunity it is so tempting to just want to jam a keyword in there because it doesn’t feel like you’re getting the most bang for your buck or your time by building a natural link or a naked link or a title Tiger branded link or you know some kind of partial like you just want to use that exact match keyword because it just feels good but you have to you have to stop that inclination you have to think of anchor text as essent that’s a greater that’s a part of a greater whole if you build 10 links to a page those 10 anchor text they need to be varied sure you can have some keyword stuff in there but you need to vary it up with branded signals and different types of signals and a part of the reason why we created the link eyo software is it actually has an automated anchor text analysis engine where you put in the URL that it queries all the existing links it categorizes what those links are and it gives you a road map on what you should build next because because of this dangerous inclination of just doing keyword stuffing it’s hurting your chances long-term at a successful business right so going through all these learning lessons now I kind of understand that the framework of what goes into a successful SEO campaign it’s a one-time setup of the site it’s picking the right topics and sticking to just quality it’s how do you build links and how do you scale it with automation without having to pay through the nose every time you score a link and what anchor text should you be using to actually generate results