5 Mini SEO Tips to Help You Get an Edge on the Competition

Key Takeaways

hey what's up everybody it's pat flynn from smartpassiveincome.com and today i'm going to share with you five quick mini seo tips to help you gain an edge on your competition on your quest to get to the top of google now you might be wondering why are many seo tips so important when you know there's so many bigger things to worry about when it comes to seo my answer is this the thing is your existing competition the sites that are already ranking in the top 10 in google they're already doing those big seo things that we should all be doing already anyways and they're doing them really well that's why they're ranking so high they're already having the keyword in the url of their pages in the title of their pages in the description they're already building quality backlinks to their site and writing unique helpful content both for google and the users of their site they have a site map in place and all these other things that we should all know and should be doing already anyways it's these small things that can make the difference because when it comes to seo you're actually not competing against the search engines who you're competing against are other websites and all you have to do to outrank another website is just do a little bit better than them and these mini seo tips either these are things that not very many people think about or they don't even take the time to do because they're so small but together they can really make a big difference over time now if you implement one or all these things you know your site's not going to make a drastic change overnight these things take time seo takes time you should know that if you've tried this already but you know if you do this you can get an edge on your competition over time so let's go ahead and get started with tip number one the first tip is to make sure you include images in your blog posts now i know a lot of people do this already but they don't do it properly in regards to search engine optimization you know they'll add images to uh make the posts look better which they often do and they'll add images to strengthen the points that are made in the article which is also good but a lot of people don't know that you can actually do some good seo work with your images the thing about images is google and other search engines as smart as they are they can't look at an image and understand what it's about or what it's relevant to there has to be some kind of behind the scenes data or some metadata with that image for them to understand what it's about so there's three things that you have to be concerned about one is the file name two is the title of the image and three is the alternate text of that image so the first step is to actually find an image that's relevant to your content and then change the file name to match a keyword a target keyword that you're targeting for that post so as you can see here i have an image it has a funky file name because i downloaded it from istockphoto.com and i'm going to change the file name to match the keyword that i'm targeting in this particular post which is seo tips so i just changed it to seo tips and that's the first step the second step is to upload it to your blog post with that file name so i'm going to select files and find it here open and once it's done uploading all you have to do is scroll down and change the title to match the same exact keyword as you did in the file name so seo tips for the title and seo tips for the alternate text and then you're all set and now google can understand what this particular image is about which is beneficial because it shows that your article or your blog post is more relevant to that particular topic which will help you in the search engine rankings and you can also get found by google image search as well so i'm just going to make sure this is the right size and i'm going to insert and insert it to the post on the right hand side and there you go so now i'm going to preview this to show you what it looks like and you'll see that when i scroll over or when i hover my mouse cursor over the image you'll see that alternate text pop up or the title of that image pop up just like that there's seo tips so as you can see now there's some data behind that image that google can read in regards to this particular uh post and image so so that's good so that's step one that's how you should approach images for your blog post now quick thing if you're adding multiple images to your blog post you know i would only do this on the first image any other images below i would you know change the change the file name absolutely and also the title and alternate text but match different keywords that are relevant to the content maybe secondary or tertiary keywords that are relevant to the content in that space that you're going to insert that particular image so i would only do that once you don't want to keyword stuff you want to keep things natural but again this is a great tip a great mini seo tip to help you with your images so be sure to do that the second tip is to decrease the number of words in your permalink or url that's created when you write a new blog post the thing is you don't need all those excessive words in there words that don't do anything for you seo wise you can chop it down a little bit and make it more targeted for your specific keyword by increasing the keyword density of the overall url so if you don't know what that means exactly here's an example as you can see the title of this post is five mini seo tips to help you get an edge over your competition and what you what wordpress usually does is it just creates an exact match url five mini seo tips to help you get an edge over your competition that's a little excessive you don't need all those different words in there so what i'm going to do is i'm going to make this a little bit better for seo i'm just going to call it five mini seo tips and that's it or it could be something like just five seo tips or just seo tips whatever you want but as you can see i took i got rid of a lot of the garbage in there for the url it's still going to be okay in the title and of course the title should be compelling and magnetic and attention grabbing and it's probably going to include a lot of words but you don't need all those words in the url just target your url a little bit better and and you'll be that much better off so i'm just going to call it five mini seo tips and click ok and then when i publish it that's what the url is going to be and also as a side kind of benefit it just is easier to memorize so that's the second tip tip number three is to create a google plus page for your website and you can do this by going to google.com the plus symbol slash business and you can get set up fairly easily the reason this is important is because this is google's social media platform and you know the more involved you can get with google's social platform the better off you're going to be because a lot of search is being driven by social these days and i've heard of a lot of websites who've just seen really good stuff happen as a result of just creating a google plus page and it's still early in the game so you can get ahead of your competition if you get in pretty fast so i would create a page as soon as possible and it's not that difficult to do so i'm going to show you my page for smart passive income and i'm going to show you really quick i'm not going to go in into the ins and outs of a google plus page but i'm going to show you really quick uh where you can add your website so you can get a link back to your site as well i'm pretty sure it's a nofollow link but again it's coming from google so it is relevant and nofollow links are just as important as follow links coming back to your site so this is kind of the stream for uh the smart passive income uh google plus page and then you know just to really quickly edit it you can go to your profile here which is the circle with a person inside and then you can click on edit profile here on the right hand side and then you can see down here under the about section there's a spot for your website and that's where you can change uh this link and have it point back to your blog or your niche site or whatever and that's good and of course i would put an introduction and try to make this you know a real social page and try to connect with people if possible i mean it can only help you and then whenever you come out with a new post you can include a link here on your stream and and write about it and talk about it and try to share it and get plus ones for it and it can only do good for your website so again this is another quick seo tip that'll help you you don't need to spend so much time on it unless you unless you want to uh but it just takes a little bit of extra time to potentially make a lot of things happen for your website so that's tip number three creating a google plus page for your site tip number four is to create a youtube channel for your specific website even if it's a little niche site i would still do this and the reason this is important is not only because you know videos if you embed them on your posts and they're relevant to the content you know that's really helpful for seo and showing authority for a specific keyword that you're targeting but also the channel itself you can create links that point back to your site and remember youtube is owned by google so we're just kind of showing more relevance here integrating ourselves more with google uh to kind of build our our authority for these specific keywords that we're targeting so the way you add links is even if you're not a partner you can do this you have your channel set up you can add graphics and change the colors if you want but the links come into play here so on the right hand side you can see the kind of about area what i'm going to do is click on this edit button and it'll open up these editors i can change the kind of information here i can actually integrate google plus and twitter and facebook which i would do and also here down below this is where you add the links so you can add the title of the link like smart passive income or whatever target keyword that you're targeting and then the url and it's that simple click add and be sure to click on apply at the top and now when i scroll down you should see that link added right there and it's that easy and again that's gonna be very powerful for showing relevance for those specific keywords so that's a great quick and easy tip and again i would try and create videos for your specific site and embed those videos into your blog post try to match the keywords and the tags and make the description relevant include a link in the description back to that blog post or your home page uh and and it'll be all good it can only can only help it does you know that's actually been a really powerful strategy that i've been using on my own niche sites the fifth and final tip has to do with affiliate links so if you have affiliate links on your site or on your blog or niche site or whatever this tip is going to be relevant to you now the idea is to make sure that your affiliate links or links to cpa offers or anything like that are no follow links they have a no follow attribute connected to them what that basically means is it tells google when they're crawling through your page to basically just ignore that particular link and just not count it at all in the overall kind of algorithm and scheme that's going on on your on your site now this is kind of hard to explain and i'm going to use an analogy that just i just came up with i don't know if it's the best analogy but it kind of makes sense if you think of your blog like a juice box right and inside is you know your seo juice or the authority that you have for whatever keywords you're trying to rank for and just your page in general now every time you put a link on your page that's like poking a hole in your juice box and as a result some of that seo juice gets leaked out now sometimes that's okay if those holes are poked by links that are relevant to the content on your page so it's it's good to link out to sites that are relevant to the content on your page but when you link out to a site that is like an affiliate link or a sales page or cpa offer or something like that google you know they see those types of sites as being more low quality and not really that relevant to anything you know they kind of discount them so as a result if you don't put the no follow attribute to them it's like poking a big hole in your juice box and a lot of that seo juice and authority that your site has is going to get leaked out and you're going to have less of it as a result so the idea is again to make sure that your affiliate links have the no follow attribute now there's a few different ways you can add the nofollow tag to your affiliate links uh the first way is through just basic html i'm not even going to show you that because there's some more automated ways that you could do this the first way is through a plugin called tinymce advance and i'll show you this plug-in really quick here it is down below here tiny mce advanced and what this does is it adds a couple more features and plugins uh to your kind of wysiwyg editor and also some other things in the back end of your site some things are helpful some things i don't even touch but anyways the whole purpose of this plugin as far as the nofollow link is concerned is that you can insert a link like you normally would using this kind of pop-up here like you would normally do in wordpress but now this has this advanced tab that's what comes with this particular plugin and you can click on this advanced tab and then once you have your affiliate link in there or whatever link you want to put the do follow tag to you go down to relationship page to target and in that drop down menu it says no follow there at the bottom and i'm going to click on that and hit update and now when i preview this i'm going to preview this and then go into the source code and show you that it actually is a nofollow link and i'll show you what that looks like in html so there's the affiliate link right there i'm just going to right click view page source and this looks pretty crazy but i'm just going to click command f and then type in market samurai and as you can see right there it says rel equals no follow and that means that this particular affiliate link is a no follow link so that's one way to do it so going back here to the post another way that i like to do it is you know i like to put most of my affiliate links through a plug-in called pretty link for a couple of reasons one it makes the link look a lot better so if i open this link up now you'll see it says market dot com slash c slash pat flynn you know a lot of time i mean that one doesn't look too bad but a lot of times especially links that come from amazon there's a bunch of letters and numbers and it gets all crazy but what i like to do here is actually i like to put that crazy link into a plugin called pretty link and i'm gonna do that here for you right now so you can download the plugin called pretty link you can just use the lite version for what you need to do and what you do with this plugin is actually makes your links look a lot better and also at the same time it keeps track of those links which is nice as well so i'm going to put the target url which is this market samurai affiliate link here and then i can create my own pretty link so i can call it whatever i want smartpassiveincome.com i'm just going to call it uh ms1 for now and i i i like to create pretty links for you know even the same affiliate link across different pages that way i can track you know which page is performing better than the others and i can give it a title or description if i want that's just for my own purposes but i'm just going to hit create really quick and there you go it shows the title of the page there and also the link that you would use which would redirect people through that affiliate link and again it create it makes that link all nice and pretty and has your url on it now the point of this for the purposes of the no follow attribute is if you go to the options menu here and then you open up link options you can actually make sure that all links add the no follow attribute by default so any new links that you create automatically have that no follow link and also actually i would change this to a permanent 301 redirect as well update the options now i'm going to go back to the admin and i'm just going to copy that pretty link and now i don't even have to do anything all of my affiliate links that are done through pretty links are going to have that nofollow attribute so it's pretty much done automatically for me so that's that's another benefit and reason why i like to use pretty links so i'm going to go back here to the post i'm going to change that link to the pretty link and so that means i don't even need to deal with this advanced tab anymore even though it is nofollow it doesn't matter if it's there twice so i'm gonna hit update and then publish or save draft or update or whatever and you're all good so that's a no follow link and that'll happen across the whole entire board if you use uh pretty link so that's it those are the five mini seo tips that i have for you today hopefully they're helpful not too hard to implement and i recommend that you do them so you can at least give yourself the best chance to rank better than your competitors so good luck thank you so much for paying attention if you haven't subscribed to the channel already please do and awesome good luck thank you and i'll talk to you next video you