In our last video, we learned a little bit about how Google works, and we found out about ranking factors—the considerations Google uses to determine which content to show in search results. Now, it’s time to start looking at what those ranking factors are, and what impact you can have on them as a writer. At the end of this video, I’ll give you your first homework assignment. I’ll show you a few quick and easy tests you can run to see how your website stacks up right now in terms of SEO.
As a content creator, you’re mostly going to be focusing on on-pageSEO, but it’s a good idea to do a temperature check of the current status ofyour technical and off-page SEO as well.
There are some tools you can use to run a check, so before youwatch the next video, open up a new tab and visit these websites:
PageSpeed Insights is a toolcreated by Google to check on the speed and functionality of your website. Allyou have to do is plug in your website, and it will give you a score andfeedback on what you can do to speed up your website. (These recommendationscan sometimes be pretty technical, so you may want to pass them on to thedeveloper who built your site, or call in an SEO specialist like me to help).
Moz is one of the leading resources and toolsets for SEO folks, andthey also offer a free tool that will tell you more about your current Off-Page SEO status. Just enter the URLof your website, and you’ll get what’s known as a Domain Authority score. Thisis a number out of 100 that tells you how authoritative your site is, based onhow many backlinks you have pointing to it. A higher number is better, but takethis figure with a grain of salt, as it’s only an estimate. This tool will alsoshow you a list of websites that link to your site, as well as which pages onyour site are bringing in the most links.
Finally, if you want to go a little deeper on the different partsof SEO, I recommend checking out this blog article on my site: Everything YouNeed to Know About SEO. This covers each of the sections in a bit more detail.
