Alright, 1.30, it must be time to learn about SEO. If you've seen an SEO book on your table and it hasn't been claimed by someone, they are up for grabs. They're a gift from our next speaker. Lexi's going to like this one. Tony Robbins said our next speaker is the best SEO in the world. What do we think about that?

Celebrity? That's awesome. Alexi approved. I might as well say it, too. I think he's great. I've been referring people to Stephan Spencer for SEO for years. I met him at Traffic and Conversions in San Diego one year ago. We've remained friends. He's become a member of Silver Circle. I get to speak with him on a regular basis.

I've seen the caliber of clients he deals with. And I've also seen behind the scenes, like under the hood of, for clients and like it's,  it's really next, next level beyond my comprehension, and I used to run an SEO business. It's like if you want the best of the best of the best of the best for SEO, he's here right now. Welcome up to the stage, Stephan Spencer, all the way from the USA.

Hey everybody, how are you doing? Okay, that was a little weak. I know I expect a lot. I'm from America. Full-out participation. I mean, we did talk to Tony Robbins just a minute ago. I want everybody to stand up. Yeah, what are we doing here? I know we have a little bit of lunch here. We need to get the energy back moving.

Here's what we're going to do. I learned this from my wife, who learned it from Nam Yoga. It's a simple breathing exercise, and it is so energizing. You're going to love it. Hopefully, you'll use it every day. I'll first explain it, and then we'll do it together. Okay, what are we going to do? Don't do it yet.

As you breathe in. Oh boy. Okay. Again, just listen and pay attention, and then we'll do it together. Okay? You're going to breathe in, and then we're going to hold it and tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, right? And then we're going to breathe out. Here we go. Keep holding. Now we're gonna breathe in a little more. That's a little surprise. And a little more. Do you feel a little buzz from that? Okay, one more time. Okay. A little more. And a little more. Oh, it feels so good.

Okay, you can sit down. Who feels better about that? Anyone? Isn't that cool? It's a great exercise. What we're going to talk about is how to improve your sales with SEO. Search engine optimization is your secret weapon, and that's what we're going to cover in this hour.

I've got three books. You've seen two of them. Let me show you the other because I do have three here with me. This is the big one. A thousand pages. Listen to how this sounds. It's a weapon. It's a literal weapon. A thousand pages. This one is not technically an SEO book, but there are plenty more to take home, and you won't go overweight in your luggage.

This is called Google Power Search, and it's all about how to find anything on Google. Confidential business plans and Forrester research reports that normally cost thousands of dollars are all at your fingertips if you know the right Google queries. I've even found credit card numbers and expiration dates, like files of them, with Google searches.

No, it's not in the book. Lastly, Social e-commerce is all about driving sales through social media. And I didn't bring any of that one, just this one copy. If somebody really wants it, you can wrestle it from me. Those are my three books, and I don't have enough copies for everybody, but I will give everybody a free digital copy of Google Power Search if you email me, which I'll give you my email at the end of the presentation.

Because that one, is now in the second edition, and O'Reilly gave me the rights back so that I could do that, which is pretty darn cool. So that it can be widely distributed. The other two books, I don't have the rights to. Now, I like to optimize everything, not just websites and rankings, but also optimizing myself, and I think you all can benefit from some optimization strategies for your productivity, and your health. Biohacking, for example, is Optimization.

Optimize yourself, not just your rankings. And here's an example of that in action. This was me, believe it or not, ten years ago. "The one that you really want to page. Not using rel nofollowed or direct page rank flow. There are a lot of low-value links on your on your blog." Okay, enough.

I can't take anymore. Oh my God, right? Can you believe that was me? Yeah. What happened? I went on a firewalk. Not a figurative one, but a literal one in my bare feet at a Tony Robbins event called Unleash the Power Within. Isn't that cool? I didn't burn or even get a blister, and I'm like if I can do that, I can certainly change my life.

I can reboot myself. I changed my diet, everything, and workout regimen, and I also got LASIK and a hair transplant. However, the internal changes were actually more significant than the external changes. It was fun going to conferences where I'd speak a lot, and they didn't recognize me, and I'd just be hanging around with a big group of people.

Nobody would know who I was. And then finally, I'd say, you know, "I'm Stephan Spencer." And they're like, "What? Oh my god". And then they, "Oh my god." Parade me around like this is "Stephan, can you believe it?" That was fun for a while. That was fun. But thank you. Thank you. I'm here all week, but a fire walk is so much more than a metaphor.

It's a reboot. Everybody who goes to Tony Robbins Unleashed the Power Within gets to do that fire walk with thousands and thousands of people. And that was in 2009. And then, in 2016, I got married to the woman of my dreams, my soulmate, who I met at another Tony Robbins event. None of that would have been possible if I hadn't taken that risk of taking my shoes and socks off and walking on the 2000-degree hot coals in my bare feet.

You can optimize yourself and not just your rankings. This whole process of my evolution inspired me to launch a podcast called Get Yourself Optimized. It was originally The Optimized Geek, but I rebranded it on James's Advice. Thank you, James, because not everybody self-identifies as a geek. I've had Dave Asprey on, the Bulletproof Coffee executive.

I've had Dr. Daniel Amen on Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. It's just amazing, and there are amazing people on that podcast, Byron Katie and so forth. And then I have a more relevant to this audience podcast called Marketing Speak, where I've had Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, and Seth Godin on, among other greats.

This presentation isn't just about how to optimize for higher sales, but it's really about every day that goes by when you are leaving money on the table for your competitors to take because you are not optimizing your website. Your website is, in fact, broken, and I'm going to prove it to you. But don't feel overwhelmed like you have to read a thousand-page book Because you don't, and by the way, if you do want to take a copy of this.

You don't want to get overwhelmed. Start with Chapter 7, which is on content marketing and link building; it's a fun chapter. It's not super technically dense, and it's a good start. But you don't have to even crack that book open. You just need to think about it; SEO is something that is core to my business. I can't, for example, not have a phone.

I can't just refuse to take phone calls. I need to be able to answer the phone, or somebody on the team needs to answer the phone. SEO is as important as a phone line. You do not neglect it. But you can treat it on a need-to-know basis. You don't need to become an expert. You just need to hire it out to the right people and get it done.

Otherwise, you leave money on the table. You essentially take a big pile of money, and you set it on fire every day. You've heard in multiple presentations that frameworks are king. They're so important. I'm going to give you a framework, and these are the three pillars of SEO.

It's Content, Architecture, and Links. Pretty simple. Content, architecture, and links. We're going to start with the architecture side, the technical stuff, which is all the technical geekery that serves as the foundation. The foundation of your website and your SEO is so critical. If it's a shaky foundation, you're building a house on a shaky foundation, and that's not a great idea.

What we want to do is make sure that we're optimized and well-suited to rank for whatever keywords we're chasing. And I have some good news for you. I found you some money. It's free money. You just need to get up and, basically, pick it up off the ground. That's the free money, and we're going to start with one of the most simple and straightforward technical elements of SEO, and that is title tags.

And you might think, title tags, "Well, surely we've got that right." Nope, unfortunately, you don't. I was able to incorporate a number of your websites into my presentation. Thank you to those who volunteered. You don't know what you're in for yet, but it's going to be good fun, and I'll try to be gentle.

Here we have New Heights Media. Is New Heights Media in the audience? All right. Hello. Do you think ranking for the keyword home is pretty important for your business? No, probably not. Let's optimize the title tag for your most important page, the home page of your website.

That's the most important page as far as Google is concerned. It should not be home New Heights Media, but instead, some keywords that relate to your business. Makes good sense, right? You start with the home page; the most important element on that page, from an on-page SEO factor point of view, is the title tag.

We just work our way down the site tree from the homepage to the secondary level pages to the tertiary level pages, and so forth. The homepage is not so powerful, with a lack of keywords here and just the word home. Then, we have blog New Heights Media for the blog homepage. And we have, for the services page, what you can do and what we can do for you.

Those are not great keywords. There are no keywords present, in fact. That's easy. And she's not alone. This is RomanceUTribe. Where's RomanceUTribe? Hello. All right. Home, RomanceUTribe. I don't know what you do. Let's try podcasts. Your podcast page. Podcast, RomanceUTribe. How about your book page? I don't know what books you have. How many books do you have? Okay. Three books on some topics, Books, RomanceUTribe. These are great opportunities to make simple tweaks and incorporate some keywords. What topics are they? That's great. What are your books about?

Okay, attract clients through online marketing. These are great keywords. We can confirm that and test that by actually using some keyword research tools. We'll see what those are in just a little bit, but we can then incorporate those keywords like online marketing books. RomanceUTribe would be a much better title, and it takes about 30 seconds to tweak that.

Pretty simple. Here, we have FocusonForce.com, which focuses on force. Where are you? Hey, hello. Alright, let's talk about your homepage title tag. It is FocusedonForce.com, Salesforce blog and resources. Well, I'm a little bit confused here because that's not your blog homepage. Your blog homepage has a title tag of just the word blog, which isn't very keyword-rich. Then, your certification courses page only has certification courses. On what topic? I'm guessing Salesforce.com. 

Those would be great keywords to incorporate into those title tags. This is low-hanging fruit, folks. Here we have the Horky Handbook. Hello. Okay, HorkyHandbook.com. The homepage here is the Virtual Assistant Horky Handbook. I would imagine that targeting a more relevant keyword for your exact audience, such as virtual assistant training or starting a virtual assistant business, would be better. Let's now talk about meta descriptions. This one is RomanceUTribe.

Hello again. These are all blank meta descriptions, and you might think, well, meta descriptions, how important are those? It's a second-order activity. It's not as important as titles, not by a long shot. In fact, meta descriptions don't influence your rankings at all. Why would you do it? Why would you spend time on meta descriptions?

Because you can influence the snippet that's displayed in the Google search listing, and you can get more clicks. Because if it says something like copyright 2019, all rights reserved, that's not very compelling. However, if it has a really well-thought-out value proposition and calls to action in the meta description, that's not very compelling.

There's a great opportunity, and you can create this uniquely for that particular page and do it on a page-by-page basis. Again, starting at the homepage and working your way down. And all of your top-level pages have no meta description, they're blank. Same case here for the Horkey Handbook. Now, let's move on to duplicate content.

This is the bane of the technical SEO practitioner's existence. Duplicate content is a real pain. Duplicate content is also related to thin content, and thin content is where Google doesn't see the page to be very useful or Content-rich, so you could end up getting What feels like a penalty, but it's more you're getting filtered. Google wants diversity in the search results if it's showing a lot of the same search listings, what appears to be the same titles and the same Snippets over and over again.

That's not a great user experience for Google searchers, and Google wants to eliminate that as much as possible. If you have a lot of duplicate content, therefore, you will be relegated to the depths of the search results. You'll get randomly chosen, maybe one of your pages, a competitor, or a syndicating partner who has your same content.

Might be the one who's chosen, and everything else is relegated to deep in the search results. Here, we have duplicated home pages. This is Horky Handbook again with a whole raft of pagination pages, but they're not actual pagination pages when you click on them; they all lead to the home page. These are duplicated homepages.

You're competing with yourself when you have duplicated homepages, and this happens so often, you'll end up having, for example, www and non www versions of your homepage. And one doesn't redirect to the other so they both resolve and they compete with each other. You have HTTPS and you have non HTTPS, just HTTP, and they compete with each other.

Or you have situations like this. You can even have entire duplicated websites. Here's an example of educate the property edu, the property education company. These are pages on the property edu.wpengine.com site, which is a staging site. Where's the property education company? Alright, how did that happen? Well, if you look at the homepage, you start navigating the top nav here under About. I mouse over the about and then team, and it shows that the link leads to that property edu dot wp engine.com/team page, not to the property education company.com/team page. You've just exposed an entire staging site to Google bots.

Then, you end up with dozens of pages. By the way, on these pages in the index, there are messages that say there's no information available about this page. Learn why. Have you ever seen search results like that? That happens when you have a Googlebot disallow directive in your robots. txt file, and you tell Googlebot, don't come in here; don't spider these pages.

You can still index them, keep them in your index, and the results, but you don't have information stored about them. That's not a great outcome. We actually, in many cases, want to noindex the page rather than disallow it.

That's a little technical nuance. So you want to remove the disallow from your robots. txt file and let Googlebot in to discover there's a meta tag, a meta robots noindex. Or, better yet, consolidate all these duplicates together with a 301 redirect. All right, now let's talk about site speed, another core issue for technical SEO.

Most of you have slow-loading websites. I hate to break it to you, but it's true. There are so many fabulous tools that will, for free, check your site speed and give you advice on what to fix. For example, PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google. Lighthouse is another free tool from Google, and it's a Chrome extension.

There are also webpagetest.org, gtmetrics.com, and testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com, which are other Google tools based on a web page test. There are lots of options for checking your page speed and getting some free tips on how to fix it. This, uh, this example here is RomanceUTribe again. And the scary message that you see there is not good news.

It took so long that this tool timed out trying to access your web page. That's an opportunity. Then, I checked with a different tool. This is a web page test, and you see you got an F for time to first byte, which is not ideal, and also for caching. But here's the kicker. If you look at the box that I highlighted in red, what is the page load time for the home page? Over a minute 69 seconds.

Nobody's going to wait around for that. What's that meme? Ain't nobody got time for that? Have you seen that meme? Yeah. I should have put it into the slides. Then, you scroll down this tool and see the waterfall graph. See, things that load in parallel. We'll load; we'll seem to load faster in things that load serially on the page. Things like CSS files and JS files and images and things. Some of it can load in parallel, and some of it takes it has to complete loading before the next thing can start loading. And the waterfall graph shows where that happens. Where things load in parallel and where things load serially. It can be as simple as reordering the page.

The order of the Javascript and the CSS files that are called in your HTML, and you've solved it. This is called critical path rendering. Has anyone heard of critical path rendering? Crickets. Okay. It's an opportunity. Here's another site I'm going to pick on. This one is EasyDNS.com. Is anyone from EasyDNS here? Okay, you're in the business, and you need to have a super fast-loading website. Look how much of what it's. It's not terrible, but if you look at the percentage of the total time that the time to first bite takes, it's a huge percentage. You've got some server performance issues, at least the time that I took.

Did the check here with Webpagetest? How did you fix it? Well, there are two books that I'd start with. No, no, seriously, there are really two good, great books on the topic. I didn't write them, but they're another fellow O'Reilly author. One is called High-Performance Websites, and the other is called Even Faster Websites.

They're both published by O'Reilly. The author is Steve Souders, who's kind of a big deal in the page performance or website performance space because he originally was the chief performance engineer at Yahoo. He wrote Y Slow while he was there.

And when he got poached by Google and started working at Google, he created the first version of PageSpeed Insights. He's amazing. You could start with those two books, but you could just hire a PageSpeed kind of performance engineer to come and optimize your servers. Okay, this is Internetmarketingstart.com. I'm spending way too much time over on this side. I'm gonna come over here. Internetmarketingstart.com. Who's from Internetmarketingstart? Oh, of course, you're way over there. Okay. Coming back. Here I come. Okay, here's the bad news. You're an 8 out of 100 on this tool, which is Google's PageSpeed Insights tool.

Definitely an opportunity to improve your performance. And a lot of it has to do with images. Images are often missed opportunities. They're bloated; they're very heavy, and you're not using lazy loading. This is all advice that you get for free from Google: "Start using lazy loading so that images that are not visible on the screen don't load until you start scrolling."

And, you know, just making your images a lot more efficient and not so heavy. That's gonna make a big impact. Here, we have focused on force with a 1 out of 100. Okay, that's an opportunity for sure. And then we have. I should have worn my glasses here. New Heights Media, 6 out of 100. Horky Handbook: 33 out of 100. So we're getting better, but this is still in the red zone. Then I use a tool called Screaming Frog, which is a spidering tool, an SEO spider. It's actually free for up to 500 URLs. If you have a small website with dozens of pages, you could use it totally for free.

It's a limited version. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but you can accomplish so much just with that free version. It's sacrilege. It's like a travesty. Suppose you don't download it and run it on your website. And here we can see it's telling us that there are so many pages or so many images that are slow loading because they're really heavy.

Some images are six megabytes. Holy cow. That's crazy. There are images that are multiple megabytes and are used multiple times on various pages of the website. That's free money. Here, we're also using Screaming Frog on Internetmarketingstart.com. Again, it's not quite as bad, but over a megabyte for an image is really not great. And there are some images that you're using multiple times, like that one is 8X, 300 some K. It could probably be a tenth of that, just by optimizing it. Okay, then we have crawling issues that are also discoverable with this tool. If you have, for example, 301 redirects in place, and they're having it go through a hop unnecessarily through a 301 redirect.

In this case, it's a Horky Handbook, or no, New Heights Media. What's the issue here? 301 redirects. Oh no, these are 404s. We've got 404 errors, and the reason it happened was a lack of a slash or an extra slash that shouldn't have been there or a lack of quotes. I don't know. I didn't look at the pages themselves, but they're super simple errors, such as these are not valid URLs and you're linking to them from your own website.

It's probably a 30-second fix to address this. When you're linking to pages that are broken, and they're on your own website, it's kind of like the broken windows principle. Who's read the book Tipping Point? Yeah, do you remember Broken Windows? That was New York City, and what they did was they addressed the graffiti, the broken windows in the neighborhood, the turnstile jumping at the subway station stops, and all the violent crime went away.

What do you think Google thinks of your website when you have broken images, broken links, old copyright dates, and errors, typos, and mistakes on your website? Kind of like broken windows in the neighborhood, right? So stop it. Here we have the Horky Handbook. This is a site-wide issue. You guys went from HTTP to HTTPS. Good job for that. And you didn't take that extra step of fixing all the links that point to HTTP on all your various pages. They should be pointing to HTTPS now. You're forcing every single visitor who's clicking on a link on your site and every bot visit to go through a redirect hop unnecessarily.

Simple search and replace, essentially, across the entire website. All the HTTP links should be switched to HTTPS. Isn't this fun? I just love this stuff. Depressing you guys. Here we have the Merrymaker sisters. Where are you guys? Hey, alright. Do you want the program subdomain to be indexed or not? No. Yeah, I don't think so either. I'm pretty sure you don't. Yeah, but you do. Yeah, that's not really what you want to have Google visiting or visitors either. There's a lot of mess in there. This is not a great user experience, UX, and a lot of duplicate stuff in there. It's and it's all stuff that is on a subdomain.

You don't even want to be indexed, and then we have New Heights Media. This is so fun. I just love really digging into you guys. Okay, NewHeightsMedia.com.au. Here we have this. It's funny. It's Latin. Does anyone speak Latin? I don't speak Latin, either. I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce this stuff. These are pages that obviously are not meant to be in Google. They're placeholder pages with Lorem Ipsum-type copy. Those are in there, too. And they're all easily discoverable. You just download this tool, Screaming Frog, install it on your desktop, and you hit go. That's pretty much what you do, and you wait for it to finish.

Let me give you a quick case study of the power of finding technical issues and addressing them. The case study is Numerologist.com. And thank you, James, for referring numerologists. Where is, where is Blair? Hey, Blair! All right! Look at that, up and to the right graph. Is that awesome, or is that awesome? That's organic keywords. We started working together in 2017, and then it just took off like wildfire. One of the core technical issues that I figured out had to do with their interactive VSL, their video sales letter at video.numerologist.com. By the way, if you want to see a mind-blowingly awesome VSL, go to that page.

It is incredible. It's so innovative. You give your birth date, and it tailors the video sales letter to you specifically. It feels like it's talking to you and giving you specifically your future. Really cool. But there was a problem, and that was it was showing up with that message saying no information known about this page, learn why. Remember that message I showed you earlier? That was on the VSL homepage at video.numerologist.com and showed up on Google. It was still ranking. On page one, but towards the bottom of page one. Clearly it would have done better if Google could see the content on that page. 

But it wasn't because of robots. txt disallow on the home page; I mean on the numerologist.com site. We didn't know where it was coming from. How was this happening? Turns out it was going through a quick redirect hop at ClickBank. A third-party service that they're using and then back to video.numerologist.com, and it was ClickBank that had a disallow that was blocking the flow of 

 

PageRank and blocking Googlebot from accessing the content on video.numerologist.com.

We fixed that. Kind of did a workaround, not going through that redirect anymore. And that I think you're ranking number three currently for that? Yeah. Number three for numerology. Number three for numerology with that page. That's money. Yep. And then look at the traffic. This organic traffic from Google Analytics is up 570 percent in 12 months.

Boom. Mic drop. Okay. Think about how much you're leaving on the table with your technical SEO issues that you don't even know you have. You know the expression, you don't know what you don't know? Just mull that over for a second. Oh my god, the panic, right? That's pillar number one. That's architecture.

Now we're moving on to links. And how much time we got? Okay, we got plenty of time. Now, we're moving on to links. Let's see what's involved here. Links are still a foundation of the Google rankings algorithm. We still need to have amazing, high-quality, authoritative, trusted, and important links pointing to our site. Let's see because that's what makes us look trusted, authoritative, and important. If we don't have links, we are not going to rank. And it's not a numbers game, and it's a quality game. I like to think of link-building as an investment in your future. It's an asset. Do you remember earlier in the day, we were talking about Rich Dad Poor Dad?

Whose presentation was that? Allen's, yeah. Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And do you remember what the definition of an asset is? It puts money in your pocket. Every month. That's what link building does. Let's say that you got a link from a high authority site. I got one recently from Harvard Business Review. I got my first article published in Harvard Business Review in January. And they linked to my site.

That's a high authority, high trust link. I don't think they're ever going to remove that link. That article is in their repository. It's in their archives. It's there forever. You have that forever. It's very rare that a webmaster or blogger is going to say, "Oh yeah, that resource at Horky Handbook that I linked to. I think I'm going to remove that from that article now because I don't know, why not?"

No. It's going to stay there. Every month, you could take, let's say, a six-month sabbatical. I actually did that once I took a six-month sabbatical from my business. My previous company was a big agency. We were in three different countries, and that was NetConcepts.

I took a six-month sabbatical. I didn't even check my email for the whole six months. Imagine you do that. For six months, and you're not link-building or anything. You just stop everything. You're still going to get traffic sales rankings month after month while you're on sabbatical from the links that you built six months earlier, a year earlier, and two years earlier. It's free money; just focus on link building as an asset that you are going to sell with your company, just like you sell your company with an email list with a retargeting list of all the other assets that go with the business.

This is an asset, and yet you're wasting that asset with wasted links 404s on your website that have links pointing to them. You might think, "No, I'm not doing that." Oh, yes, you are. Okay, let's look at this tool called Ahrefs, and I'm looking at the report's best pages by incoming links. I'm looking at the Merrymakers. Marymaker Sisters and we're seeing multiple websites linking to pages like the Mary Eats page, the Coming Soon page, and the Biz page. These pages don't exist anymore.

What do you do? How do you fix that? Because all of that wonderful link juice that's flowing into your site is blackholed, it's evaporated, it doesn't count, and it's not helping your site. When you get a link to a particular article or blog post, it's like the rising tide that lifts all boats. Every page of your site will benefit, but not if it's blocked at the very first entry point because it's a 404 error. You 301 redirect that page that no longer exists. Let's say that you've removed that service offering. Maybe that post is now elsewhere on your site. You just need 301 redirects so that that link flows the page rank and the link equity over to that new URL.

And if it's a discontinued product, that's fine, too. Just find the most related, closest product that you can redirect to and send the juice that way. Or, if you don't have a related product, go to the category level above it. Here's another example. This is the Horky Handbook again with the freebie page. That's a 404 error with multiple sites linking to it. The eight tips to start a freelance business that also has multiple sites linking to that page that no longer exists. And then you end up having bad links, not just wasted links, but bad links that drag you down. How does that happen? Well, there's this thing called negative SEO.

Who's heard of negative SEO? It's a real thing. Somebody doesn't like you, and they want to sully your reputation in the eyes of Google. Maybe they want to take your rankings away so that they can rise higher in the search results. Maybe they're an affiliate and they don't want you to rank because they want to rank and make all that money as an affiliate  and you're the merchant.

There are many reasons why they would want to take potshots at you, and it works. They hurt your reputation in Google by buying low-quality links. Here's another mind-blowingly evil technique that they use nowadays that's even more effective. They pretend to be you, contacting legitimate people. That links the owners of the sites that are legitimately linking to you, which are really nice links, and says, "Please remove the link. I do not want a link from a spammy site such as yours."

And nobody checks. They don't like to say, are you really from that company? They say, "Okay, fine. Screw you." I removed the link. How do you stop that? Well, you don't! You watch it, and then when that happens, you have to contact them, but this is an insidious game of cat and mouse, where you have to be on top of it, watching for people trying to ruin you in front of, as far as Google's concerned. Yeah, if you're not tracking it, you don't know that it happened. But if somebody removed a link that was a legitimate link, You should be on that. There are so many services out there, tools that will tell you when you lose links or deleted links, like Majestic, Moz Link Explorer, and LinkResearchTools.com.

There's tons of really great tools that do this. Ahrefs, okay? Those are bad links, and let me give you a quick example. Here, we have RomanceUTribe with a trust flow. This is a tool called Majestic, by the way, Majestic.com. Trust flow of 5. And the citation flow is a 41. What a huge discrepancy between the two. This is a situation where trust is minimal; it's actually quite low, and the importance is quite high—well, much higher. It's not super high, but this is, by the way, on a logarithmic scale, like a Richter scale. It's not 41% of the way there in the case of citation flow or importance. It's not 5% of the way there in terms of trust.

No, it's way lower than that. A Richter scale, 5 on the Richter scale out of 10 is nothing in comparison to a 7, right? That's how it works. It's logarithmic. Going from a 5 to a 10 is really easy. Going from a 20 to a 25 is a lot harder. Going from a 40 to a 45 is way harder. But this is skewed in the wrong direction. We want to be more trusted than we are important—not the other way around. Who can you think of who's important but not trusted or trustworthy? Yeah, Donald Trump. Exactly. You don't want to be Donald Trump. Thank you. Yeah, on so many levels. Yes, okay, I'm not going to get political. We need to check our links. We need to use a tool from Linkresearchtools.com called Link Detox, and we need to do it quarterly.

This is not your guy's site. This is a hypothetical example. I didn't want to, like, really crush your dreams. This is site that I actually know, the guy who runs it, and he was flabbergasted to find out that he was well into the red zone with his Link Detox score. What this means is he's toxic. He has so many malware-infected sites linking to him, porn sites, spam sites, and sites in really dodgy neighborhoods linking to him that it's dragging down his own reputation. How do you fix this? It's a lot of work. It's not just a ten-minute job to create a disavow file with those spammy sites and upload it to Google Search Console.

No, Google makes you jump through a lot more hoops. in order to let you back in its good graces. You have to show kind of your mea culpa that you're going to clean up your act. And you might say, "Well, I didn't do it. It was a competitor. It was some affiliate or somebody. They targeted me with negative SEO." That might be true, but Google treats you as guilty until proven innocent. So you need to show that you're not going to do that nasty, low quality link building anymore by reaching out to these webmasters of the spammy sites and demanding that they remove the link. It's a lot of work, involves multiple tools, not just link detox.

I'd recommend using Pitchbox as well. It's a lot of work, but it's necessary if you have that problem, and many of you do. I didn't run link detox on all your sites, but I saw many of your sites had much lower trust than importance, and that caused me concern because that happens a lot when you have toxic links. This example is focused on force. com. We have 23 out of 100 in trust flow and 34 in citation flow, so it's not as bad of a skewing towards less trust than importance, but it still definitely needs to be addressed. This one is New Heights Media. 5 out of 100 in trust flow and 14 out of 100 in CitationFlow.

Definitely needs to be addressed. Oh, and did you see how many sites this newheightsmedia.com.au has? How many? I'll give you a hint. It's right there in the number three. Three sites! It's really impossible, really. It is not just hard but impossible to rank for anything meaningful if only three sites on the entire internet are willing to link to you. How do you get these freaking amazing links? Well, you have to fish with bait. Specifically, link bait needs to be so remarkable. You gave a whole presentation earlier about content marketing, so you need to do effective content marketing. This is an example that doesn't come from me. This is a friend in the industry many of you have heard of, but I'm not going to name him because he likes cutting corners. He paid a relative to go to school for him to go to college and get the degree in his name.

What he did with this is he found it for his client Lifeinsure.com. Twenty things you probably didn't know about death. He lopped off one of the items. He paraphrased the rest of the items and then posted them to their website. But here's where the magic came in. He had power user accounts on Digg. Digg was the Reddit of the day. Once, he got this article on the first page of Digg. It got tons of traffic and tons of links, and his client went from nowhere for life insurance to page one—and it wasn't this article; it was the homepage. Google, Bing, and Yahoo ranked him on page one, this tiny little insurance brokerage with fewer than a dozen employees, for years, for term life insurance, right up there with Geico, State Farm, and MetLife.

One of these secrets is the remarkable purple cow-type content, and another one is the power users, in this case, a Digg power user, but that's no longer relevant because Digg is not relevant anymore. Reddit, on the other hand, is super relevant. It's the front page of the internet. And I have a power user who works for me, who is in the Century Club. Does anyone know what the Century Club is? Does anyone know what the main metric is for your authoritativeness on Reddit? Anyone? Bueller? Karma! Who said karma? You get a book. Did you get a book already? You're going to get a book.

Okay, pass it back. Awesome. Post karma and comment karma. And the one that matters the most is post karma. She's in the Century Club, meaning she has over 100,000 post-karma points. She's a major influencer on Reddit. And guess how I found her? No, but that's a good guess. Nope, not Tony Robbins. Another good guess. Upwork. Nope.

Craigslist. I found her on Craigslist. Pretty incredible. I found Pinterest power users on Craigslist. I found amazing people on Craigslist. Viral content writers. It's a gold mine if you know how to write amazing ads. I put riddles on them, all sorts of crazy stuff. Get these power users on your payroll, or bribe them with gifts, shower them with praise, and so forth.

It's called ego bait. And get them to do stuff for you. This is an example from a past client, OvernightPrince.com. Has anyone heard of Shoe Money, Jeremy Schoemaker? Yeah, big internet celebrity, internet marketer, famous for holding up a six-figure check from Google, way back in the early days of AdSense. I knew that he didn't love his business card. I knew he loved his logo, which is a Superman S logo thing with a dollar sign. It's got out in the bottom of his pool and everything. But he didn't love his logo, I mean his business card, just his logo. I came to him with this idea that I dreamed up for my client, Overnight Prints, which prints business cards and letterhead and stationery, saying, "What if we ran a contest to design you a new business card, like an amazing one, and you help me promote it, and we kind of, run it on your blog."

But the contest itself lives on OvernightPrince.com. He's like, "I'm in. This sounds great." He promoted it on his YouTube channel, on his blog, etc. My client went from nowhere for business cards, like sub-page 10 for business cards, the primary money keyword they were after, to number two. Booyah! There's the evidence. This is an old campaign, but they stayed there for years. It's a quick case study that's relevant to today. Another client is in the room, AminoActive. Where are you guys? Yep, and yep, okay, AminoActive, Max's and Maxine's brands of supplements for bodybuilders. This is just a regular staple piece of content on their site, a blog post.

It's not bad, but it's like meat and potatoes. It's not going to be the viral content piece that you need to spread far and wide. It has a cute title: Grass-fed versus grain-fed is the better way. That's kind of cute. But it's not. It doesn't have the magic, the remarkability, the purple cow factor. If you scroll, you'll see it's just a lot of text with no images. Now, here's a piece that my content team had produced. John did a fabulous job. This headline is like I created a whole link-building strategy with dozens and dozens and dozens of these ideas here. This is one of them. The 10 worst workout fads of all time.

Which sounds pretty smart, but then you start digging into the content and you think, "Wow, this is genius. That's the shake weight." If you read the prose, we don't have time to, but it's awesome. I mean, this guy is an incredible writer. How good are your links? Not great? Okay. Next and finally, the content. Okay, there's supposed to be three. They're popular. Keywords are supposed to be popular, they're supposed to be relevant, and they're supposed to be attainable. Those are the three key factors that make a keyword popular. And then there are the wrong keywords.

Here's an example from your part of the world. Westpac was a client for a while back in the day, and their legal department insisted they don't use the term mortgage anywhere on the website. Genius, right? The legal department equals the business prevention department. Without being able to use the term mortgage, they had to use the term home loan, but nobody searches for home loans. Like, nobody. It's crickets. It's nothing. That's not good. Then we have another example here, which is from Kohl's Department Stores in the States, another client who insisted on ranking for kitchen electrics, but kitchen electrics are not something that anybody ever uses in their common vernacular. I don't even know what a kitchen is. Well, I do know what a kitchen electric is now, but nobody, knows what a kitchen electric is?

Yeah, exactly. It's a small kitchen appliance, like a toaster or a food processor. Everybody's searching for kitchen appliances, on the other hand. And then you guys are doing the same thing. Hello again. I'm not sure what a stargazer is, or a Star blazer or a superstar or a shooting star? But you probably don't want those searchers who are searching for those things even if they are searching like the volumes would be pretty small and they're not yours. I love you. James, is she a plant?

Free ticket every year. Every year. Yeah, I mean, not your target audience. And then we have doorway pages. That happens if you're trying to target a keyword and you don't really have any unique content; you just replicate the same content. It's duplicate content, and it's not meant to be a valuable page, really. Here, this is endurance. Who's endurance? Where's Endurance Treadmills? Hello. Okay, you have treadmills for sale. What is this targeting treadmill? We have treadmills for sale in Adelaide, Brisbane, and Canberra. It's all the same content, and it goes on and on and on in all these different cities. They're all linked from the footer site-wide, which looks like spam. And I think you're probably getting penalized by Google.

You have to stop it. Don't do that now. I'm going to show you a few different tools real quick. This is Soovle. Who's used Soovle? Anyone? Nobody? Oh my God, this is such a cool tool. Have you used it? One person. Check this out. As you start typing your keystrokes, it will auto-complete. Watch, I'm going to start typing in SEO, and it's auto-completing not just from Google but also Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, Answers.com, and Amazon, all simultaneously.

And these are all clickable, and they go directly to the search results of that particular search engine. Isn't that awesome? This is great for keyword brainstorming. Next we have Answer the Public, which you've already heard a couple times, but here I'm going to show you how to use it. We're going to type in SEO into this tool, and this guy starts getting really impatient. He starts picking his teeth and stuff if you take too long. He's like, "Come on, guy, hurry up." All right, here we go. Guess where this data comes from. For this particular tool. Anyone know? Google? Okay. Can we be more specific? Nope. Not Google Keyword Planner.

Who said Google Suggest? James, you get a book. See how this tool works. You actually already have one, I think. So see how this tool works: It extracts all these Google Suggest suggestions, such as questions, who, what, why, when, where, etc. Implied questions are things like prepositions and stuff, such as in, near, for, or that sort of thing.

Then, you can switch to the tab view. And, I mean the pretty kind of graphical view is nice, but I don't want to crank my head to see the results. That's a great free tool. Answerthepublic.com, you all should use it. And then, you have all these great questions that you can answer.

You should probably check to make sure that there's volume for these keywords, but it's great fodder for FAQ (Frequently Answer Question) pages. Is this website owner still here? She had to leave, okay? But suffice it to say that she's got an issue with her FAQs page, which is live first of all on Help Scout instead of on her own site. And it's essentially an error page. So then we got Searchmetrics Topic Explorer.

This one is an expensive tool but well worth it. It's amazing. Watch how this one works. It creates these topic clusters. Not just keywords but actual topics. Google refers to them as entities. But topics include multiple keywords. In this case, I put avocado in, and it gave me all these different related things like jackfruit, avocado toast, and everything like that. And I can switch the views to see these by seasonality, by competitiveness, by semantic associations. Isn't that awesome? And they're color-coded by those. That is another great tool. Then we have Google Trends, free. I mentioned it already when I showed you home loans versus mortgages and all that.

Let me show you how that works. You put in your keywords, separated by commas. In this case, I'm going to compare laptop and laptops. And look at that. The laptop, singular, is way, way more popular than the plural. You might think, "Oh, I'm gonna, I want to rank for laptops." No, you don't. You want to rank for laptops. That's where all the volume is. And then there's this kind of hidden feature that's hidden in plain sight that I love. It's part of this tool. It's here; let me show you. Under Web Search, one of the options is YouTube Search. I don't know of any other tool that gives you YouTube-specific search behavior.

I mean, other than, obviously, YouTube Suggest. Isn't that awesome? I can compare and contrast people's behavior on YouTube. The number two search engine versus on Google, and then we have Moz Keyword Explorer. There's so many features in this that are amazing. Let me just show you one real quick. I'll put in SEO as the keyword, and then I'm going to choose as the option here our questions instead of the default, which is a mix of sources.

Now, I'm getting questions back that are very similar to the answer-the-public tool. And then, finally, SEM rush. Look at this. This is the coup de grace right here. You put in a competitor's domain. In this case, I'll put moz.com, which is not really a competitor; he's an actual friend and co-author on the first two editions of the Art of SEO, Rand Fishkin. But I put in moz.com, and then I go to the organic research tab, and then that shows, he's got hundreds of thousands of keywords, or the company has hundreds of thousands, like two hundred and some thousand keywords that they rank in Google for, and then I switch to click on that link that says featured snippets.

It filters to featured snippets only instead of all, like 200,000. Now I'm getting down to 9,000 keywords where they have position zero. That's what position zero looks like. It preempts the first organic listing, and that's money right there. If you can have a featured snippet, you are the voice search answer. Somebody says, OK, Google, or Hey Google, you know, tell me whatever, and you get an answer back, and you're the featured snippet, that's your text from your website. Voice search is the future, and featured snippets are your gateway to that. Here's what you do: you go after your competitor's featured snippets. First, you download them all, like I just showed you, and then you identify the ones that are weak and in the wrong format, like it's a how-to query, and they have a paragraph snippet.

Really, the best kind of format is a numbered list. For how to boil an egg, one, two, three, right? And you see, your competitor has a paragraph, like I'm going to go in with a numbered list. That is an incredible opportunity. And then, finally, I know I need to wrap up here. EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. I'm going to compare two doctors here. One doesn't have it. This guy just has a very pretty website with a nice-looking office, and there's no credibility there. I don't see all the as seen on logos. I don't see his degrees, and this doesn't look legitimate. Then the competition here, well, it's just another doctor, but he's a celebrity doctor or dentist, actually.

He's got all these logos, he's been on Extreme Makeover, on Larry King Live, and he's got a New York Times bestseller. This guy is the bomb, and he has also had celebrity clients like Katy Perry. So these are sites that need more eats Mary maker sisters Neoprene bags, and there's your free money. Thank you very much. And here's my email. Thank you if you see me; I'm going to be around until tomorrow morning. If you want me to rip apart your website gently, I'll sit down with you for about 10 or 15 minutes, and I'll take as many of you as you want. Just find me. I'll be around. If we don't have time, just email me, and I'll do it over Skype or Zoom with you. Thank you very much.  

Wow. Thank you so much, Stephan. Impressive. I know how hard you worked on that presentation. Like he had to take your input and then customize this whole presentation just for this audience. And that's why the detail is appreciated.