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Tags – SEO Course

SEO is not rocket science. And, this is coming from a digital marketing agency that ranks among the top 10 in Leicester, Birmingham, and even London.

And, we are self taught, converting what Google is trying to achieve with its customer centricity and applying our knowledge of customer psychology to achieve the rankings. (It’s all social concepts that you need to decipher).

We started off by ranking our property management company on the top of Google rankings in more than 10 cities and then converted our knowledge into a business.

So, of course, with a little effort, you can learn SEO on your own.

And, after achieving the results on the SEO side of things, you will have access to top quality customers, looking to connect with the top rankers on Google.

How quickly can all this happen depends on your industry, locality, and of course the amount of time you are willing to spend on it. (Industry and locality because how quickly you move up the rankings depends on how fiercely your competitors are going for SEO themselves).

Here, please learn not to listen to every source that claims to know SEO. The simplest test is: ask them about their rankings.

So, if someone is telling you that a change in Google’s algorithms will affect your rankings, it is not hard to understand that they are teaching you shortcuts that Google catches onto over time.

In our case, as we said, we translate social concepts into SEO actions. So, the right things that you will do to achieve your rankings will always work.

SEO Course Video

To begin, if you would rather watch a video to learn SEO, please check here:

SEO Course

Apart from some technical SEO, there are 2 main elements to ranking high on Google:

  1. Content
  2. Backlinks

Here is some detail on how you should approach each of these points.

1. Content

The first step of learning SEO is to write quality content that is of use to your audience.

At Axies Digital, Taseer is in charge of our content writing. With a doctorate (PhD) in Digital Psychology, and background in engineering and business management, he understands how to converse with our audience through a digital medium. (Taseer is also a lecturer in Strategic and Operational Management at De Montfort University).

It is important to keep in mind that the rules of writing quality content are quite academic, even for online content writing.

For example: 

  1. To begin, your content should not be plagiarised. 
  2. Then, you need to cite your sources of information in the form of hyperlinks throughout the content, pointing to the research you have conducted to write any piece. Here, once again similar to academic writing, if you are pointing to content of high quality, the quality of your content goes up too. Books, articles, and reliable websites are all good options.
  3. Break down your content into easily readable paragraphs and add headings where appropriate. The one difference here, from academic writing is, the size of your paragraphs needs to be far shorter and make sure that your language is easier to understand.
  4. When covering any topic, make sure that you are building an argument and closing all holes. If your content is too one sided or just trying to make a sale, chances are that it will not help you establish your credibility as a source of information for your target audience.

2. Backlinks

A backlink is when another source cites your website’s pages.

This is basically a reference towards your content.

However, away from the academic way of looking at things where the more references your work receives, the more your writing is seen as credible, let’s look at backlinks as a social concept.

Backlink is comparable to other people mentioning you, rather than just you talking about yourself.

Imagine, you are at a networking event with 50 people. Who is the person there with the highest authority?

The person with the highest authority is the one who is known by the most people in a positive light. And, how you measure this positivity is on the basis of other people mentioning this person.

Of course, other people talking about you has the bigger impact on your standing and the same is the case with SEO. When another website, preferably in a parallel business, talks about you, Google sees you as a higher authority and ranks you higher.

How to Get Backlinks

You may be thinking now: why would anyone mention my website?

And yes, this is the harder part and requires the bulk of the effort when working on your SEO. (Sadly, anyone sitting in a room can work on their ability and produce content after content, but that doesn’t mean that this business should be ranked higher by Google).

Just like real life, you need to build relations with businesses around you.

Then, once you have that relationship, you can form some kind of partnership where both parties can benefit.

For instance, at Axies Digital, we offer our close connections a free blog for their website. As they are aware of our writing skills, most of them are more than happy to receive a blog from us. And, as any respectable person would do, the blog published on their website mentions that it was written by the team at Axies Digital.

So, the business receiving the blog gets free, high quality content, and we get the backlink. A simple win-win.

Backlink Tricks

Let’s clarify a few things:

  1. If you pay for a backlink, it is quite evident as you won’t be the only person paying this source for a backlink. Bloggers come into this category and such backlinks are not regarded as highly by Google.
  2. If you backlink to your own websites, search engines now understand when a hosting is shared and your backlink won’t be valued highly.
  3. If you pay someone to build you 1,000s of backlinks in some obscure country for cheap, you may end up doing more harm than good, as the backlinks need to be relevant to what you do.

Just keep in mind that, at this stage, if you can think of any tricks to get fake backlinks, Google has or will find a way to catch and penalise you. That is why, you will keep hearing that Google updated their algorithm and people lost their rankings. These people lost their rankings because Google caught up with their tricks.

So, the only sure way to get backlinks is through building genuine, professional relationships with fellow businesses.

Tools

Here are a few tools you can use to ease your SEO efforts:

  1. MOZ – You’ll be able to see backlinks gotten by your competitor, giving you an indication of how authoritative a website is. (Don’t worry too much about domain authority and page authority. We rank among the top 10 in London, for Digital Marketing, with a domain authority of just 16).
  2. Semrush – You’ll have tons of keywords you want to start ranking for. So, if you don’t fancy going through Google’s pages everyday to check how you’re doing, Semrush is your solution.
  3. Hotjar – It is important to minimise your bounce rate, i.e. people leaving too quickly after coming to your website. This is achieved by understanding your audience. Hotjar allows you to see where your website visitors are clicking, when they stop scrolling to read a section, and the point at which they left.
  4. Spyfu – See what and how your competitors are doing

So, here you go, now you have everything to get ranked on Google.

 

If you would like to learn more, please check our SEO course and join us on our monthly sessions.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]