SEO stands for search engine optimization it's ultimately the process of Designing creating and Publishing your content in a way that the search engines are going to love therefore you and your content will rank highly now we're going to go into the theories of how these work now search engine we're going to start there right when we talk about search engines there surely are hundreds and hundreds of different search engines but we're really talking about two number one is Google and number two is YouTube those are the number one and two most common search engines on
the web sure there's Bing there's Yahoo there's DuckDuckGo there's all kinds of different search engines and even Amazon is a search engine right and all of them have their own variation of how this works and you can apply SEO to all of those different search engines but again for this um kind of example or for this video we're really talking about Google as number one because of the massive amount of traffic my wife's website has generated over 33 million visits most of those have come from Google because of the content we created and how we
created that content this channel you're watching here on YouTube gets displayed for thousands and thousands of keyword phrases most of my visits and most of the people who have found my videos here found me through the search engine of YouTube many found me from the Google search engine actually and that's how I've grown this channel to about six million views in under three years so let's break this down first you need to learn and understand how the search engines work and probably more importantly how the search engines make money okay so when we understand the
platform what their goals are and how they operate we can then understand what we need to do to become a positive partner because that's the true goal of seos become a powerful positive publishing partner to the platform a lot of P's right there so what how does Google make money well Google has essentially turned itself into the question answer provider for billions and billions of people every single day Google makes money when a user searches for a question searches for a topic searches for something and then the relevant results are displayed with advertising above and
when a user clicks on the advertising that's when Google makes money okay on YouTube it's a very similar situation but it's all done with videos Okay YouTube has a huge catalog of videos and when a user searches just for a video like how to repair a Kenmore dishwasher and they find all the videos there's an ad that sits up top there's ads that can pre-roll there's ads mixed in and when a user views and potentially clicks through those ads that's when YouTube makes money okay so their business model is based upon giving great results for
users so those users keep coming back to the platform if Google starts giving terrible results or if if YouTube starts giving rubbish results for your searches you start searching for how to fix a Kenmore washing machine and all of a sudden you're getting how to fix a lawnmower videos there's a mismatch in relevance and you're going to stop using that platform which means they're going to stop being able to display their advertising which means they don't make any money you go somewhere else and it's game over for them okay does this is this making sense
so the number one overarching goal of the search engines is to have the most relevant results that people love displaying at the very top right below the advertisements right they'll put the ads people can pay for the very top but right below there those organic listings are in Google's eyes and YouTube's eyes the most relevant and the most helpful content we're going to get into what it what it means or or how that starts or how to get there right how to be that most relevant content but you need to understand that overarching theory is
that if Google users start having bad experiences from searching on Google they're gonna go find another search engine that they enjoy more same with YouTube so first and next thing is how does Google and YouTube operate well the first thing they do is they build an index it's essentially a database and technically speaking I'm probably going to get some of these bits and pieces of jargon Incorrect and I'm okay with that the goal of this video is layman's terms as normal people terms right I'm not trying to go nerd out I'm not talking to professionals
here I'm talking to beginners who want to understand how SEO works so Google has an index Google has these little software applications we call them Fighters search engine spiders and they crawl the web this means they go out and they've actually literally tried to understand a they try to find every single page in existent on every single website on the internet and then they build an index they catalog each and every one do you remember the Dewey Decimal System at the library it was this big card catalog and you went and you pulled in the
drawer and you're looking up the topic or the book title and it said where to go find it so Google has digitized this process so the first thing to know is that Google and YouTube the same way with videos they have essentially created a massive database if you will of every single page or post on every single website that has ever been created we're talking probably probably in the trillions of pieces of content that are all indexed and then the Google spiders take all of the data they read top to bottom inside and out they
read the code they try to look at the pictures what with their alt text and the little bits and pieces they can work there they read the actual text on the page they're looking at the title covered all of these bits and pieces in Greater depth in the learn SEO video that's again linked to in the bottom but what they're doing is they're literally trying to understand what is the core topic for every page out there okay so they go find every page which means they follow every link they go read then they try to
understand what every single page on every single website is about and then they use other kind of well essentially it's their algorithm that does this next part and their algorithm decides how strong every page is for every specific keyword phrase and their algorithm is essentially going to connect every page with one or more specific search phrases now YouTube does the same thing with videos so now we're getting into the how to a little bit now that you understand how the search engines work how they make their money how they build an index of every piece
of content they've ever been able to find find and then ultimately they try to connect relevance there's two main factors that are always highly highly highly ranked by search engines relevance and engagement those are the two figures that they're looking for so Google is trying to understand the relevance of your content by reading your content and it looks at who else and what other pages and posts and what other social media accounts what what tweets and what Facebook links and what Instagram updates um what LinkedIn updates are all pointing to your piece of content and
then they create some value within their algorithm that says well for the video learn SEO this one's number one this one's number two this one's number three and they're always readjusting and analyzing so it's the relevance of the content the title option all the bits and pieces you can manipulate on page combined with the relevance of all of the links and all of the social activity pointing to that piece that's the off page side of things then their algorithm crunches all those numbers and essentially it takes every single page or post that's ever been indexed
for that phrase and it ranks in an order and within a millisecond it delivers that first page of results and it neatly tucks in those three four five six ads however many ads Google is trying to put on there today and they all fill right in and that is the kind of calculation that happens in an absolute instance it's damn near Magic how it all works now you understand how this all works so what can we do as content creators one of the biggest skills one of the biggest things you can learn or do one
of the biggest skills and practices it's kind of two sides is keyword research uh in the description below right below the learn SEO link you'll find my keyword research playlist it's several videos we start with a brainstorm and then we get into some keyword research tools I show how to use some paid tools and I show how to use some free tools to help you understand how keyword research works and the reason that keyword research is important is this is what the relevance in Google is based on it's based on keywords okay so learn SEO
is a keyword phrase best lawnmower for Hills is a keyword phrase best chiropractor near me is a keyword phrase so the first thing that you need to understand as someone who wants to rank your page or post highly on Google is you need to understand what is the most valuable keyword phrase for that thing you want to rank sometimes it's a piece of information like a video on how to learn SEO other times you actually want your product page to rank like best lawnmower for Hills if you've got the the hillotron 2000 and that's what
you want to rank for there then you understand you need to focus in on that keyword phrase and really you want to make sure you're focused on a keyword phrase that has a high search volume and low competition and we can go get this kind of data that's what I teach in those other videos so for this video if you notice in the title I don't remember the exact title that I have right now but I know it started out um essentially what is SEO was the main keyword phrase that I was after and then
I had a I think how does it work and I believe beginner SEO was another thing I tried to get in there so I'm I'm intensely focused on one specific keyword phrase with the title of this video and Loosely focused on two other relevant keyword phrases okay that's where the relevance comes in and then Google and YouTube and all the search engines they monitor the engagement if you have Google and analytics on your website Google gets a lot of data about how long people stay on your site about what kind of actions if they click
through to two pages if they visit two three four five pages on average if they stick around on average for 22 seconds or for 2 minutes and 22 seconds and Google's paying attention to this Google's also paying attention to your click-through rate on the actual search engines results page we often call that assert by the way serp you'll see it all capitalized that just means search engine result page so the number one search engine result page has 10 organic links on it to 10 of the most relevant sites that Google believes are the most relevant
sites for that topic then Google's monitoring how many people click on number one how many people click on number two and the moment number four starts getting more clicks by percentage then number three number four is probably going to LeapFrog above number three and this is why the click through rate on your title and your description is so important we need to optimize it for the search engine because it's got to have the right keyword phrase in it but we also need to optimize it for the human in order to get the engagement right it's
the relevance that the Google index works on and it's the engagement that click-through rate that they're monitoring and the exact same thing is true here on YouTube if you notice my uh thumbnails on my channel if you're new to the channel welcome feel free to click the Subscribe button but you may have noticed that my thumbnails here on this channel have changed a lot over the years and I try to get more curiosity inducing more compelling bigger words with bigger text with less words to make it easier for people at a glance to understand what
this what the value they're going to get from watching this video actually is right I'm trying to manipulate in a positive way the click-through rate because that's a engagement signal that will support my relevance signal from getting my keyword research done and placed into the right pieces on my content content now at this point we're talking about the keyword research and and where to put those keywords and how to structure the content on a blog post or on a page you have even more metrics that you can work with right there's the the H1 tags
The Heading two heading three heading four we have the Bold we have the italics we have bulleted lists you have numbered lists there's a lot of different um code based factors that you can leverage to build relevance towards your main keyword phrase on a blog post I'm not going to get into that in depth because again I did that in the learn SEO video so all the nuts and bolts are going to go from that video but now at this point in the video you should fully understand that SEO which is search engine optimization is
the process that we content Publishers use to help Google understand the relevance of our content for a keyword phrase that they've indexed and know that gets a high search volume and then we leverage the on-page content the off-page links with the relevance factors to manipulate you know manipulation is not a bad word it can be used in incorrectly but when we're doing it in our way we're trying to manipulate the search engine results to display us first because we're confident that our content will give the Google user and the YouTube user a great experience and
that metric is then picked up by the search engine they see we've got relevance on page they see we've got relevance off page they see we got good click-through rates and we've got good engagement numbers therefore we solidly land this piece of content that we put out on the search engines high up on the serps for our core keyword phrase we get traffic Google or YouTube get happy users and then the big trick is to go right onto that next post or that next video and do it again and again and again this is why
my wife's website has had 33 million visits most of which come from Google directly it's because she's created thousands of blog posts that are each optimized for a specific keyword and they're optimized for the user experience at the same time we get traffic from hundreds of thousands of keyword phrases each and every month and those posts she wrote back in 2009 2010 2011 are still getting good traffic coming in so we get new visitors we get new leads and we get new customers from content that we published seven eight nine ten years ago today this
is the power of search engine marketing this is the power of content marketing done correctly in my mind and that's why with this newer brand the miles Beckler brand that teaches just everything I know about digital marketing 100 for free that's why I chose to partner with one search engine for years on end to give as much value as I can through videos so I can show YouTube that I'm a serious publisher I'm not someone who's going to come up with a clickbaity title and a great title and then just try to pitch you on
some overpriced course that you don't actually need I'm the kind of Creator here on YouTube who teaches you everything I know for free because I have a successful business and I understand the value of your attention and that value with this relationship that we're working towards has a very high long term number because at some point I might write a book and I might ask you to buy my book for nine dollars or 17 or whatever it is and hopefully by that point in time you will have had enough of my content help you enough
that you think 17 book of course I'm gonna buy that book of course I'm going to review that book for Miles he's given so much value and since I'm giving all of that value and I get good engagement YouTube keeps showing my videos which helps me grow my audience even further
