How to SEO - The definitive guide after 10 years of SEO

By Federico Magni

This innovative guide will take you on a journey through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) from A to Z. The text is based on updated examples faithfully reported from the experiences with the 100 sites built by the Italian author Federico Magni, Senior SEO Specialist for about 10 years, and now founder of the SEOProf.it platform.

Failures and successes on Google are told by analyzing not only the keyword and link building concepts, but also by focusing on the latest SEO strategies to place your site on search engines for a given keyword. In addition to practical suggestions and a bit of theory, you will find the experiences, the case studies verified in the European market, and the situations experienced by the author during his daily work in SEO, with concrete numbers and data.

Written in a very clear and simple way, this SEO course is ideal for those who already know the subject, but also for those who have recently approached it. Recommended for the beginner who wants to start in the best way, but also for those who have a more advanced level and want to improve their skills for a professional growth. It's not a cold reading of false myths, tricks, or outdated content about SEO, but it's a book that gets straight to the point.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Youcanprint
• Release date: Dec 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9788831653008

Book preview

Info)

1. Introduction

Nowadays, phrases like doing SEO is too expensive, or SEO is not convenient anymore because today you have to work on social media, or SEO is dead are becoming more and more popular.

Such phrases typically come from people who have never done SEO, or maybe have done it, but with negative results to such an extent that their perspective got so badly imprinted, just like the effect of a permanent tattoo.

My decision to write this book is fueled by the aim of debunking some myths and by the desire to give a little courage back to those who have worked in an SEO campaign, but without success.

So, first of all, I'd like to thank you for choosing this book, despite the fact that there are quite a wide variety of books, at least 50 of them, which approach this topic and have rather positive reviews.

This SEO guide, will help you discover the basics of doing Search Engine Optimization from the very beginning, understanding keywords, and choosing the right domain and the hosting.

We will continue with the structural elements of an effective website, we will go through the writing of SEO-friendly content and we will study various webpage optimization techniques (OnPage factors).

Further on, we'll talk about the real stuff like link building and the results' metrics by means of key performance indicators.

After that, we will devote ourselves to an effective website analysis from the SEO perspective and we will study the different SEO approaches: for e-commerce, for blogs, local businesses and for YouTube videos.

Finally, we will address the full topic of SEO penalties with their respective solutions in detail, particularly focusing on negative SEO, Google Sandbox and Black Hat tactics.

This is definitely not just another book on SEO, neither is it a trivial and aseptic reading of false myths or miraculous recipes, nor a reading of obsolete SEO content. On the contrary, this is a book that gets straight to the point without too much beating around the bush.

1.1 Why, and what is the definitive guide?

This book is a complete journey through the concept of SEO, an A to Z presentation, enriched with up-to-date, practical examples (which cannot be found elsewhere), faithfully drawn from my experience gained from the 100 websites I've built over the last 10 years.

If you decided to read this text, you are probably bored of the classic 'manuals', but also tired of those guides which promise magical solutions to all the problems of the world, or to all the SEO problems at least.

In order to avoid writing anything that falls into one of these categories, I've decided to aim for some content that cannot be classified either as a cold, academic manual, nor as a miraculous guide with a variety of tricks and stratagems.

Please, rest assured that I did my best in order to deliver a clear text, written in a simple manner, dedicated to everyone who is taking their first steps in SEO, but also to the ones who are familiar with the subject and have known it for several years but now they want to perfect some useful techniques, for their own professional growth and development.

Let's start with two of my actual experiences that I've had in the field of SEO.

Figure 1.1 - Traffic Timeline.

This is a project developed in 2018. It is a 'book price comparison' with 250,000 indexed pages and prices updated in real time, thanks to a few partnerships with some major Italian publishers.

I've always considered that this website is a failure, until now. The figures are really ridiculous in terms of revenue, but it will probably improve in the coming months.

This example depicts a negative experience, but the field of SEO also brings great satisfaction. In fact, you can see below, a report of a website which I consider a huge success.

It is a report on a shopping niche, with a thousand indexed pages. The sales volume provided by this website went from € 10,027.24 in June 2018 to € 32,908.90 in January 2019, literally tripling sales after just one semester.

Figure 1.2 - Traffic results after optimization.

The tricks and the optimizations suggested in order to obtain a successful website will be explained within the next chapters of this book. Unfortunately, we can never know all the infinite variables of a project and that is why failure is sometimes a part of our work (in my opinion it should not be hidden, because it is precisely the failures that make us human and not artificial intelligence).

1.2 Who am I?

Don't worry, I will not tell you the whole story of my life, but only some salient aspects that will help us get a little bit familiar with each other, as we prepare for this journey we will take together, side by side.

I am Federico Magni, and I have been doing SEO every single day for the last 10 years. I specifically created and ranked around 100 sites, providing sales to Amazon, Google, eBay and other big companies.

I recently launched my new start-up company, in order to offer guides and tools for Search Engine Optimization. It's called GetSEOfix.com and it is an All-in-One platform characterized by SEO tools and training guides which help improve the ranking of websites on Google.

I don't like stereotyping, but if I had to label myself, I would call myself a digital entrepreneur, affiliate marketer and SEO Specialist, even if the professional path that I followed up to now has been very particular.

In 1995, I bought my first Personal Computer with Windows 95 and, being able to change the desktop background without reading a tutorial on a blog or watching a video tutorial on Youtube, it was a significant challenge at that time, because there were not many who had the privilege of having an innovative 56 Kb connection back then.

After having created my first websites as a hobby and after Google search engine was created, in the early 2000s I started an SEO collaboration with a Dutch casino. After that, I worked on the ranking of an e-commerce website for a company in Milan, in 2007.

Being a student at the University of Milan, I continued the SEO activity with various projects, trying to experiment with new techniques, until the creation of a real network in 2012, related to the pregnancy topic.

It was the time when the sinking of Costa Concordia was all over the news. Soon after, a similar disaster happened for some of my projects, and I'll tell you exactly what happened.

At that time, not having advanced marketing skills yet, I dedicated myself exclusively to traffic.

The results achieved after 9 months, having around 8000 unique visitors daily, from search engines, and practically monopolizing the main SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) of that particular sector (Pregnancy) were maintained for several months.

Figure 1.3 - Traffic on one of the network's websites.

At first glance, this may seem like a success, but it wasn't really like that.

Sometimes, my colleagues call me stubborn, but I prefer the word 'determined'. If I see some potential, I throw my self in. That's exactly what I did on this occasion, too.

Today, I often say to my clients a phrase like 'You can't eat traffic' because I had to learn the hard way that before jumping into an SEO project, one must study the keywords in order to verify the profitability in advance (maybe with a Google Ads campaign).

The alternative is to work on the ranking for over 9 months to achieve  traffic goals, as in my case study of the pregnancy network, but without obtaining the right conversions and revenue for your business which is, after all, the primary objective.

In the following years, besides developing other websites with SEO in mind, I launched some SaaS (Software as a Service) on the US market in order to improve my Web Marketing skills.

Recently I also help students and companies to grow their business by acquiring customers through search engines.

2. SEO Nowadays

At this point, let's clarify straight away what we mean by SEO and, by all means, let's find out if it still makes sense to practice this art nowadays, given the fact that it has been talked about again and again, for more than 10 years now.

As you may have guessed, this chapter begins by explaining what doing SEO actually means nowadays, compared to a few years ago.

After that, we will talk about the costs and most of all, we will talk about the time needed in order to create a good SEO campaign, without omitting the illustration of how Google works and, of course, a brief overview of the history of search engines, concluding with the advent of RankBrain and all the innovations it has brought along with it.

2.1 What is SEO, exactly?

Just flat out, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consists of a set of practices aimed to optimize one's website in order to improve its position within search results, and thus getting a greater number of visitors.

These techniques make it easier to appear on Google search pages (SERP) in increasingly higher positions and to become more visible to navigators.

I don't want to seem trivial, but I know from experience that certain concepts need to be reiterated more than once, especially to beginners.

Search engines offer spaces reserved for paid advertisements where, with pay per click (PPC) campaigns, advertisers spend money to bring every single visitor on their company webpages.

On the contrary, the organic search space presents a list of relevant results, based on a specific keyword entered by the user, and sorted according to an algorithm, which is constantly updated, in order to offer the best solutions for those who are doing online research, responding to their needs.

Therefore, in this summary preview, you should have already understood that there are two ways of finding a website on Google: the first way is the paid option, through PPC campaigns and the second option is free, achievable through a series of practices which, together, stand for the so-called SEO.

At this point, you're probably wondering: which one is the most convenient?

As I was working on my first e-commerce back in 2007, I found myself saying I want to do SEO because advertising costs too much. And it kind of made sense.

In some cases, this may be true and then, it is really worth studying the opportunity of doing SEO on a website, but not always!

When you find yourself in the situation of having to choose between PPC and SEO, you will surely bump into with the fairly intuitive concept of return on investment (ROI) and then you will ask yourself which way will I earn the most money considering the investment required?

For example, if I spend € 1000 on advertising in a PPC campaign in order to get 1000 users and I earn € 1200, it means I have a margin of € 200. On the other hand, if I could position myself on the same searches with an SEO campaign, and get 1000 users with a revenue of € 1200, I would have a margin of € 1200.

Right? Well, no…

Although at first glance the SEO looks like the simplest and most profitable way to go, we must consider that doing the optimization is not quite enough to get everything perfect forever, because the algorithms change over the years, the competitors are born every day and besides, there are many other variables that come into play. Therefore, we need continuous monitoring and also some actions.

At this point, there are two options: I learn about SEO and take care of it myself, on my own time or I pay someone who already knows how to do it.

Nothing new so far. So what changed nowadays?

2.2 Why is SEO still convenient?

You should know that the average CPC (cost per click, also known as pay per click or PPC) on Google Ads and Facebook Ads has increased exponentially in the last 5 years, as there are