How to Install WordPress Manually

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><h1 class="subject" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, kalimati, arial; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></h1><div class="text" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, kalimati, arial; height: auto; outline: rgb(0, 0, 0) dotted 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="tabs-content-wrapper" id="tabs-content-wrapper" style="margin-bottom: -20px; outline: rgb(0, 0, 0) dotted 0px; padding-top: 10px; position: relative;"><div class="SerialScrollTabs" style="border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; float: left; margin: -94px 0px 0px; outline: rgb(0, 0, 0) dotted 0px; padding: 0px; width: 510px;"><ul class="common-heading-tabs" style="float: none; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px 19px 0px 0px; padding: 5px 0px 0px 7px; position: relative; width: 515px;"><li style="float: left; list-style: none; margin: 5px 2px 5px 0px; position: relative;"><a class="tabs-other" href="http://support.hostgator.com/articles/how-to-install-wordpress" id="btn1" style="background-color: #eeeeee; border-color: rgb(207, 207, 207) rgb(207, 207, 207) transparent; border-left-style: solid; border-right-style: solid; border-top-left-radius: 5px; border-top-right-radius: 5px; border-top-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 3px; color: #3d648d; display: block; float: left; font-family: Arial, Calibri, kalimati, arial, Ubuntu; padding: 8px 15px 6px;" tabindex="1">QuickInstall</a></li><li style="float: left; list-style: none; margin: 5px 2px 5px 0px; position: relative;"><a class="tabs-selected" href="http://support.hostgator.com/articles/how-to-install-wordpress-manually" id="btn3" style="border-color: rgb(192, 192, 192) rgb(192, 192, 192) rgb(255, 255, 255) !important; border-style: solid !important; border-top-left-radius: 5px; border-top-right-radius: 5px; border-width: 1px 1px 3px !important; color: #3d648d; display: block; float: left; font-family: Arial, Calibri, kalimati, arial, Ubuntu; padding: 8px 15px 6px;" tabindex="3">Manual Installation</a></li></ul></div></div>It is not necessary to manually install WordPress as it can be quickly installed via <a href="http://support.hostgator.com/articles/how-to-install-wordpress" style="color: #3d648d; font-weight: bold;">QuickInstall</a>, however, if you are having trouble with this method, this article will cover the steps needed to install WordPress manually.<br /><h3 class="subject2a" style="color: #1a356e; margin: 15px 0px 10px;"><span style="font-size: small;">Step 1: Download WordPress</span></h3><ol><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Download the WordPress package to your local computer from <a class="external free" href="http://wordpress.org/download/" style="color: #3d648d; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="http://wordpress.org/download/">http://wordpress.org/download/</a>.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Unzip the downloaded file to a folder on your local computer.</li></ol><h3 class="subject2a" style="color: #1a356e; margin: 15px 0px 10px;"><span style="font-size: small;">Step 2: Upload WordPress to Hosting Account</span></h3><br />There are three available options for uploading WordPress to a hosting account.<ul><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;"><strong>Upload via FTP</strong> - Please see <a href="http://support.hostgator.com/articles/ftp-getting-started" style="color: #3d648d; font-weight: bold;">FTP Getting Started</a> for more information.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;"><strong>Upload via File Manager</strong> - Please see <a href="http://support.hostgator.com/articles/how-to-upload-a-file-using-the-file-manager" style="color: #3d648d; font-weight: bold;">How to Upload Using the File Manager</a> for instructions.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;"><strong>Upload via SSH</strong> - Please see <a href="http://support.hostgator.com/articles/how-do-i-get-and-use-ssh-access" style="color: #3d648d; font-weight: bold;">How to Get and Use SSH Access</a> for instructions.</li></ul><br /><h3 class="subject2a" style="color: #1a356e; margin: 15px 0px 10px;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" id="3" name="3"></a>Step 3: Create MySQL Database and User</span></h3>WordPress stores its information in a database. Therefore, a database will need to be created.<br /><ol><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Log into cPanel.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">In the <em>Databases</em> section, click the <strong>MySQL Database Wizard</strong> icon.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">For <em>Step 1: Create A Database</em>, enter the database name and click <strong>Next Step</strong>.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">For <em>Step 2: Create Database Users</em>, enter the database user name and password and click <strong>Create User</strong>.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">For <em>Step 3: Add User to the Database</em>, click the <strong>All Privileges</strong> checkbox and click <strong>Next Step</strong>.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">For <em>Step 4: Complete the task</em>, make note of the database name, username and password, as you will need them for <a href="http://support.hostgator.com/articles/how-to-install-wordpress-manually#4" style="color: #3d648d; font-weight: bold;">Step 4</a><img alt="See Below" src="http://support.hostgator.com/img/articles/scrolldown.gif" style="border: 0px; height: 11px; width: 9px;" /> below.</li></ol><h3 class="subject2a" style="color: #1a356e; margin: 15px 0px 10px;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" id="4" name="4"></a>Step 4: Configure wp-config.php</span></h3>The wp-config-sample.php file contains the database information and tells the WordPress application which database to pull information from. This step must be completed to ensure the correct database information is associated with the WordPress installation.<br />The wp-config-sample.php file can be found in File Manager in the folder where WordPress is installed. To modify the file:<br /><ol start="1"><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Log into cPanel.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">In the <em>Files</em> section, click the <strong>File Manager</strong> icon.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">In the pop-up box, select <strong>Web Root</strong> and check the box  for <strong>Show Hidden Files (dotfiles)</strong>, then click <strong>Go</strong>.<div class="look_here" style="background-color: #eae7d5; border: 2px solid silver; margin: 10px 0px; outline: rgb(0, 0, 0) dotted 0px; padding: 5px;">If you don't see the pop-up box, you may have selected the "Skip this question, and always open this directory in the future when opening File Manager" option.<br /><br />To make the pop-up reappear, simply click <strong>reset all interface settings</strong> at the very bottom of your cPanel.</div></li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">From the left navigation menu in File Manager, click <strong>public_html</strong> to expand the folder.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Click the folder containing the Wordpress installation.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">On the right side of the File Manager screen, locate the <em>wp-config-sample.php</em> file.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Right click on the file, select <strong>Rename</strong> and change the name of the file to <em>wp-config.php</em>. Click the <strong>Rename File</strong> button.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Right-click on the <em>wp-config.php</em> file and select <strong>Code Edit</strong>. When the file opens, look for the following information:<div class="code" style="background-color: lightgrey; border: 2px solid rgb(153, 153, 153); font-family: "Lucida Console", "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Andale Mono", Monaco, "courier new", courier, monospace; outline: rgb(0, 0, 0) dotted 0px; padding: 2px; word-wrap: break-word;">define('DB_NAME', 'database_name_here');<br /><br />/** MySQL database username */<br />define('DB_USER', 'username_here');<br /><br />/** MySQL database password */<br />define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password_here');</div><ol type="a"><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Replace<em> database_name_here</em> with the name of the database you created (above in <a href="http://support.hostgator.com/articles/how-to-install-wordpress-manually#3" style="color: #3d648d; font-weight: bold;">Step 3: Create MySQL Database and User</a> <img alt="See Below" src="http://support.hostgator.com/img/articles/scrollup.gif" style="border: 0px; height: 11px; width: 9px;" />).</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Replace <em>username_here</em> with the username of the database you created.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Replace <em>password_here</em> with the password of the database that you created.</li></ol></li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">When done editing, click the <strong>Save Changes</strong> button, then close the file.</li></ol><h3 class="subject2a" style="color: #1a356e; margin: 15px 0px 10px;"><span style="font-size: small;">Step 5: Run the Installation</span></h3>Open a new browser window and go to the installation page to run the installation script. Depending on where you installed the script, you will find it at either of the following URLs:<br /><blockquote class="blockquoteurl" style="background-image: url("/images/articles/webpageiconwithline.png"); background-position: 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat; border-radius: 5px; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: "Lucida Console", "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Andale Mono", Monaco, "courier new", courier, monospace; padding: 4px 4px 4px 35px;">http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php</blockquote><blockquote class="blockquoteurl" style="background-image: url("/images/articles/webpageiconwithline.png"); background-position: 1px 1px; background-repeat: no-repeat; border-radius: 5px; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: "Lucida Console", "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Andale Mono", Monaco, "courier new", courier, monospace; padding: 4px 4px 4px 35px;">http://yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php</blockquote><div style="margin-left: 40px;">Be sure to replace <em>yourdomain.com</em> in the example above with your actual domain name.</div>You should now see a welcome page that says "Welcome to the famous five minute WordPress installation process!"<br /><h3 class="subject2a" style="color: #1a356e; margin: 15px 0px 10px;"><span style="font-size: small;">Step 6: Complete the Installation</span></h3>On this page, fill in the fields for:<br /><ul><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Site Name</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Username</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Password (needs to be entered twice)</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Email address (login information will be sent to this email address)</li><li style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-top: 5px;">Select whether or not to have the search engines index the site</li></ul>Click <strong>Install Now</strong>, and you should be taken to the final screen, showing the following message:<br /><div class="blockquoteok" style="background-color: #f8fff0; background-image: url("/images/articles/message-24-ok.png"); background-position: 10px 8px; background-repeat: no-repeat; border-radius: 5px; border: 1px solid rgb(136, 238, 68); outline: rgb(0, 0, 0) dotted 0px; padding: 10px 10px 10px 50px;">Success! WordPress has been installed.</div></div><hr style="background-color: silver; border: none; font-family: Tahoma, kalimati, arial; height: 1px;" /><div class="links" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, kalimati, arial; height: 15px; margin-top: 10px; outline: rgb(0, 0, 0) dotted 0px; padding-top: 5px;"><div class="share_this" style="float: left; outline: rgb(0, 0, 0) dotted 0px; position: relative; top: -3px;"><span id="sharethis_0" style="float: left;"><a class="stbutton stico_default" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" st_page="home" style="background: url("http://w.sharethis.com/images/share-icon-16x16.png?CXNID=1000014.0NXC") 0px 0px no-repeat scroll !important; color: #3d648d; float: left; font-weight: bold; padding: 1px 5px 5px 22px; text-decoration: underline;" title="ShareThis via email, AIM, social bookmarking and networking sites, etc."><span class="stbuttontext" st_page="home" style="float: left; line-height: 17px;">Share This</span></a></span></div><div class="vr" style="background-color: silver; border: none; float: left; height: 35px; margin: 0px 10px; outline: rgb(0, 0, 0) dotted 0px; position: relative; top: -10px; width: 1px;"></div><form action="http://support.hostgator.com/articles/how-to-install-wordpress-manually" class="helpful" method="post" style="float: left;"><div style="float: left; outline: rgb(0, 0, 0) dotted 0px;">Was this article helpful to you?</div><button name="rating" style="background-color: #3d648d; background-image: url("/images/helpful_button.gif"); border-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-style: solid; border-width: 1px; color: white; float: left; font-weight: bold; height: 21px; left: 15px; margin: 5px 0px; padding-bottom: 4px; position: relative; top: -8px; width: 75px;" type="submit" value="Yes"><span style="font-size: small;">Yes</span></button><button name="rating" style="background-color: #3d648d; background-image: url("/images/helpful_button.gif"); border-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-style: solid; border-width: 1px; color: white; float: left; font-weight: bold; height: 21px; left: 15px; margin: 5px 0px; padding-bottom: 4px; position: relative; top: -8px; width: 75px;" type="submit" value="No"><span style="font-size: small;">No</span></button></form></div></div>

How to Install WordPress Manually

QuickInstall Manual Installation It is not necessary to manually install WordPress as it can be quickly installed via  QuickInstall , howeve...

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SEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single time

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="f0f2" name="f0f2" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 10px;">Note: This one of one of the chapters of <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="1e57e704325c" name="4cb02574e66f" style="background-color: transparent !important; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 213, 210), rgb(255, 213, 210)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;"><a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.secretsaucenow.com" href="https://www.secretsaucenow.com/" rel="nofollow noopener noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Secret Sauce: A step-by-step growth hacking guide</a></span>. Secret Sauce breaks down every channel just like this one, so if you think this is valuable check it out. It’s for sale now.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="eef2" name="eef2" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">SEO In One Day</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="b43d" name="b43d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">SEO is simply not as hard as people pretend like it is; you can get 95% of the effort with 5% of the work, and you absolutely do not need to hire a professional SEO to do it, nor will it be hard to start ranking for well-picked key terms.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="dbdb" name="dbdb" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Of all the channels we’ll be discussing, SEO is the one that there is the most misinformation about. Some of it is subtle, but some of it is widely spread and believed by so-called SEO consultants who actually don’t know what they’re doing.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="d460" name="d460" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">SEO is very simple, and unless you’re a very large company it’s probably not worth hiring somebody else to do.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="8c2f" name="8c2f" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">How Google Works</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="c066" name="c066" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">In order to understand what we need to do for SEO let’s look back at how Google started, how it’s evolving today, and develop a groundwork from which we can understand how to get ranked on Google.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="e8d7" name="e8d7" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">The Early Days of Google</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="98d4" name="98d4" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">The idea for PageRank — Google’s early ranking algorithm — stemmed from Einstein. Larry Page and Sergei Brin were students at Stanford, and they noticed how often scientific studies referred to famous papers, such as the theory of relativity. These references acted almost like a vote — the more your work was referenced the more important it must be. If they downloaded every scientific paper and looked at the references, they could theoretically decide which papers were the most important, and rank them.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="6010" name="6010" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">They realized that because of links, the Internet could be analyzed and ranked in a similar way, except instead of using references they could use links. So they set about attempting to “download” (or crawl) the entire Internet, figuring out which sites were linked to the most. The sites with the most links were, theoretically, the best sites. And if you did a search for “university,” they could look at the pages that talked about “university” and rank them.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="a3ef" name="a3ef" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Google Today</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="1903" name="1903" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Google works largely the same way today, although with much more sophistication and nuance. For example, not all links carry the same weight. A link from an authoritative site (as seen by how many links a site has pointing at it) is much more valuable than a link from a non-authoritative site. A link from the New York Times is probably worth about 10,000 links from sites that don’t have much authority.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="24a5" name="24a5" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">At the end of the day the purpose of Google is to find the “best” (or most popular) web page for the words you type into the search bar.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="2163" name="2163" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">All this means is we need to make it clear to google what our page is about, and then make it clear that we’re popular. If we do that we win. In order to do that, we’ll follow a very simple process that works <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">every single time</em> with less effort than you probably think is required.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="d5ac" name="d5ac" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Gaming the System</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="e596" name="e596" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Google is a <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">very</em> smart company. The sophistication of the algorithms they write is incredible; bear in mind that there are currently cars driving themselves around Silicon Valley powered by Google’s algorithms.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="db56" name="db56" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If you get too far into the SEO rabbit hole you’ll start stumbling upon spammy ways to attempt to speed up this process. Automated software like RankerX, GSA SER, and Scrapebox, instructions to create spam or spin content, linkwheels, PBNs, hacking domains, etc.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="a914" name="a914" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Some of that stuff works very short term, but Google is smart and it is getting smarter. It gets harder to beat Google every day, and Google gets faster at shutting down spammy sites every day. Most don’t even last a week before everything you’ve done disappears and your work evaporates. That’s not the way you should do things.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="0496" name="0496" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Instead of Internet-based churn and burn we’ll be focusing on building equity in the Internet. So if you see some highly-paid SEO consultant telling you to use software and spun content to generate links, or when you see some blackhatter beating the system, just know that it’s not worth it. We’re going to build authority and get traffic fast, but we’re going to do it in a way that doesn’t disappear or cripple your site in the future.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="749d" name="749d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">On-Page SEO</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="3f51" name="3f51" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">The first step in getting our site ready to rank is making it clear to Google what our site is about.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="06e0" name="06e0" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">For now we’re going to focus our home page (our landing page) on ranking for <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">one keyword </em>that isn’t our brand or company name. Once we do that and get that ranking we can branch out into other keywords and start to dominate the search landscape, but for now we’ll stay laser focused.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="478c" name="478c" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Keyword Research</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="4efe" name="4efe" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">The first thing we need to do is to figure out what that keyword is. Depending on how popular our site is and how long it’s been around, the level of traffic and difficulty we’ll get from this effort may vary.</div><h4 class="graf graf--h4 graf-after--p" id="c2e6" name="c2e6" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; letter-spacing: -0.018em; line-height: 1.22; margin: 30px 0px 0px -1.5px;">The Long Tail</h4><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h4" id="60b9" name="60b9" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 6px;">There’s a concept we need to be familiar with known as the “long tail.”</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="e039" name="e039" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If we were to graph “popularity” of most things with “popularity” being the Y axis and the rank order being the X axis, we’d get something like a power law graph:</div><br /><figure class="graf graf--figure graf-after--p" id="d076" name="d076" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 43px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; user-select: auto; z-index: 100;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 364px; max-width: 700px; position: relative; width: 700px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 364px;"></div><div class="progressiveMedia js-progressiveMedia graf-image is-canvasLoaded is-imageLoaded" data-action-value="0*BJTF2S1LVXK5ig75." data-action="zoom" data-height="520" data-image-id="0*BJTF2S1LVXK5ig75." data-scroll="native" data-width="1000" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; cursor: zoom-in; height: 364px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: background 0.2s; width: 700px;"><canvas class="progressiveMedia-canvas js-progressiveMedia-canvas" height="37" style="backface-visibility: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 364px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0.5s, opacity 0.1s 0.4s; vertical-align: baseline; visibility: hidden; width: 700px;" width="75"></canvas><img class="progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image" data-src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BJTF2S1LVXK5ig75." src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BJTF2S1LVXK5ig75." style="backface-visibility: hidden; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 364px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0s, opacity 0.4s 0s; visibility: visible; width: 700px; z-index: 100;" /></div></div></figure><br /><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="4175" name="4175" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">There are some big hits that get the majority of attention, and after a few hits the graph falls sharply. The long-tail theory says that as we become more diverse as a society the yellow end of the above graph will stretch forever and get taller.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="20f4" name="20f4" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Think of Amazon. They probably have a few best-selling products, but the majority of their retail revenue comes from a wide variety of things that aren’t bought anywhere nearly as often as their best-selling products. Similarly, if we were to rank the popularity of the songs played in the last 10 years, there would be a few hits that would garner the majority of plays, and an enormous number of songs that have only a few plays. Those less popular products and songs are what we call the <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">long tail</em>.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="f54e" name="f54e" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="anon" name="anon_d3f9ffda6f67" style="background-color: transparent !important; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 213, 210), rgb(255, 213, 210)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">In SEO this matters because, at least in the beginning, we’re going to go after long tail keywords — very exact, intention-driven keywords with lower competition that we know can win, then gradually we’ll work our way to the left.</span></div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="597d" name="597d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Our site isn’t going to outrank ultra-competitive keywords in the beginning, but by being more specific we can start winning very targeted traffic with much less effort.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="1daa" name="1daa" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">The keywords we’re looking for we will refer to as “long-tail keywords.”</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="67f9" name="67f9" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Finding the Long Tail</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="af43" name="af43" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">In order to find our perfect long-tail keywords, we’re going to use a combination of four tools, all of which are free.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="5692" name="5692" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">The process looks like this:</div><ol class="postList" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); counter-reset: post 0; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; list-style: none none; margin: 29px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><li class="graf graf--li graf-after--p" id="666e" name="666e" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 30px;">Use UberSuggest, KeywordShitter and a little bit of brainstorming to come up with some keywords</li><li class="graf graf--li graf-after--li" id="fe48" name="fe48" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 30px;">Export those keywords to the Google Keyword Planner to estimate traffic level</li><li class="graf graf--li graf-after--li" id="89d2" name="89d2" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 30px;">Search for those keywords with the SEOQuake chrome extension installed to analyze the true keyword difficulty</li></ol><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--li" id="1bea" name="1bea" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Don’t be intimidated — it’s actually very simple. For this example we’ll pretend like we were finding a keyword for this book (and we’ll probably have to build out a site so you see if we’re ranked there in a few months).</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="c3e0" name="c3e0" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Step 1: Brainstorming and Keyword Generating</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="2311" name="2311" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">In this step we’re simply going to identify a few keywords that seem like they might work. Don’t concentrate too much on culling the list at this point, as most bad keywords will be automatically eliminated as a part of the process.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="171d" name="171d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">So since this is a book about growth hacking, I’m going to list out a few keywords that would be a good fit:</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="146b" name="146b" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Growth hacking</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="afcd" name="afcd" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Growth marketing</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="64c9" name="64c9" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Internet marketing</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="3ea6" name="3ea6" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Growth hacking guide</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="f7de" name="f7de" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Growth hacking book</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="cb28" name="cb28" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Book about growth hacking</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="3b75" name="3b75" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">What is growth hacking</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="c3f9" name="c3f9" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Growth hacking instructions</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="3385" name="3385" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">That’s a good enough list to start. If you start running out of ideas go ahead and check out <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://keywordshitter.com/" href="http://keywordshitter.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">keywordshitter.com</a>. If you plug in one keyword it will start spitting out thousands of variations in just a few minutes. Try to get a solid list of 5–10 to start with.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="92ed" name="92ed" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Now we’ll plug each keyword into <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://ubersuggest.io/" href="https://ubersuggest.io/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">UberSuggest</a>. When I plug the first one — “growth hacking” — in, I get 246 results.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="c767" name="c767" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Clicking “view as text” will let us copy and paste all of our keywords into a text editor and create an enormous list.</div><br /><figure class="graf graf--figure graf-after--p" id="5668" name="5668" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 43px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; user-select: auto; z-index: 100;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 493px; max-width: 700px; position: relative; width: 700px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 492.792px;"></div><div class="progressiveMedia js-progressiveMedia graf-image is-canvasLoaded is-imageLoaded" data-action-value="0*BkT8uUYV3p2hsXCI." data-action="zoom" data-height="946" data-image-id="0*BkT8uUYV3p2hsXCI." data-scroll="native" data-width="1344" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; cursor: zoom-in; height: 492.792px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: background 0.2s; width: 700px;"><canvas class="progressiveMedia-canvas js-progressiveMedia-canvas" height="52" style="backface-visibility: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 492.792px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0.5s, opacity 0.1s 0.4s; vertical-align: baseline; visibility: hidden; width: 700px;" width="75"></canvas><img class="progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image" data-src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BkT8uUYV3p2hsXCI." src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BkT8uUYV3p2hsXCI." style="backface-visibility: hidden; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 492.792px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0s, opacity 0.4s 0s; visibility: visible; width: 700px; z-index: 100;" /></div></div></figure><br /><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="3b29" name="3b29" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">Go through that process with each keyword you came up with.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="0cc0" name="0cc0" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Now we’ll assume you have 500+ keywords. If you don’t, try to start with something more generic and broad as a keyword, and you’ll have that many quickly. Ideally you’ll have over 1500.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="7861" name="7861" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Step 2: Traffic Estimating</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="95b3" name="95b3" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Now that we have a pretty good list of keywords. Our next step is to figure out if they have enough search volume to be worth our while.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="2f22" name="2f22" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">You’ll likely notice that some are so far down the long tail they wouldn’t do much for us. For example, my growth hacking list came up with “5 internet marketing techniques.” We probably won’t go after that one, but instead of guessing we can let Google do the work for us. This will be our weeding out step.</div><h4 class="graf graf--h4 graf-after--p" id="b13d" name="b13d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; letter-spacing: -0.018em; line-height: 1.22; margin: 30px 0px 0px -1.5px;">Google Keyword Planner</h4><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h4" id="01df" name="01df" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 6px;">The <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner" href="https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner" rel="nofollow noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Google Keyword Planner</a> is a tool meant for advertisers, but it does give us some rough idea of traffic levels.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="acbb" name="acbb" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Google doesn’t make any promise of accuracy, so these numbers are likely only directionally correct, but they’re enough to get us on the right track.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="3931" name="3931" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">You’ll have to have an AdWords account to be able to use the tool, but you can create one for free if you haven’t use AdWords in the past.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="3e13" name="3e13" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Once you’ve logged in, select “Get search volume data and trends.”</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="f4be" name="f4be" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Paste in your enormous list of keywords, and click “Get search volume.” Once you’ve done so, you’ll see a lot of graphs and data.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="0356" name="0356" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Unfortunately the Keyword Planner interface is a little bit of a nightmare to work within, so instead we’re going to export our data to excel with the “download” button and play with it there.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="cf0b" name="cf0b" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Now what we’re going to do is decide what traffic we want to go after.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="ebeb" name="ebeb" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">This varies a bit based on how much authority your site has. So let’s try to determine how easy it will be for you to rank.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="0046" name="0046" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Go to SEMrush.com and enter your URL, looking at the total backlinks in the third column:</div><br /><figure class="graf graf--figure graf-after--p" id="cf8c" name="cf8c" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 43px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; user-select: auto; z-index: 100;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 278px; max-width: 494px; position: relative; width: 494px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 278.115px;"></div><div class="progressiveMedia js-progressiveMedia graf-image is-canvasLoaded is-imageLoaded" data-height="278" data-image-id="0*aV3sF59d8Bt3Aqqw." data-scroll="native" data-width="494" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; height: 278px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: background 0.2s; width: 494px;"><canvas class="progressiveMedia-canvas js-progressiveMedia-canvas" height="40" style="backface-visibility: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 278px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0.5s, opacity 0.1s 0.4s; vertical-align: baseline; visibility: hidden; width: 494px;" width="75"></canvas><img class="progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image" data-src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*aV3sF59d8Bt3Aqqw." src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*aV3sF59d8Bt3Aqqw." style="backface-visibility: hidden; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 278px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0s, opacity 0.4s 0s; visibility: visible; width: 494px; z-index: 100;" /></div></div></figure><br /><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="dffd" name="dffd" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">As a general rule (this may vary based on how old your site is, who the links are from, etc.), based on the number of links you have, this is the maximum level of “difficulty” you should go after.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="8aa0" name="8aa0" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Number of Backlinks</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="9c06" name="9c06" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Maximum Difficulty</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="9233" name="9233" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">< 30:<40</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="ebd2" name="ebd2" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><100:40–50</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="31d7" name="31d7" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><1000:50–70</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="ca27" name="ca27" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">1000+:70+</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="38fe" name="38fe" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Go ahead and sort the data by difficulty, and eliminate all of the stuff that is too high for your site (don’t worry, we’ll get those keywords later). For now you can simply delete those rows.</div><h4 class="graf graf--h4 graf-after--p" id="1234" name="1234" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; letter-spacing: -0.018em; line-height: 1.22; margin: 30px 0px 0px -1.5px;">Exact Match</h4><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h4" id="d809" name="d809" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 6px;">One important thing to note is that Google gives us this volume as “<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497825?hl=en" href="https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497825?hl=en" rel="nofollow noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">exact match</a>” volume. This means that if there is a slight variation of a keyword we will see it if the words are synonyms, but not if they are used in a phrase, so the traffic will be underestimated from what you would expect overall.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="10c1" name="10c1" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Now with that disclaimer sort the traffic volume highest to lowest, and from this data pick out five keywords that seem like a good fit.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="6208" name="6208" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Here are mine:</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="3838" name="3838" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">growth hacking strategies</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="558e" name="558e" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">growth hacking techniques</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="188a" name="188a" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">growth hacking 101</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="4dde" name="4dde" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">growth hacking instagram</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="d5c5" name="d5c5" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">growth hacking twitter</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="88e6" name="88e6" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Mine all look the same, but that may not necessarily be the case.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="1fb5" name="1fb5" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Keyword Trends</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="18e4" name="18e4" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Unfortunately the “keyword difficulty” that Google gives us is based on paid search traffic, not on natural search traffic.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="6a3d" name="6a3d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">First, let’s use <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.google.com/trends/" href="https://www.google.com/trends/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Google Trends</a> to view the keyword volume and trajectory simultaneously. You can enter all of the keywords at the same time and see them graphed against each other. For my keywords it looks like this:</div><br /><figure class="graf graf--figure graf-after--p" id="0b09" name="0b09" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 43px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; user-select: auto; z-index: 100;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 296px; max-width: 700px; position: relative; width: 700px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 296.094px;"></div><div class="progressiveMedia js-progressiveMedia graf-image is-canvasLoaded is-imageLoaded" data-action-value="0*10BiNkXI3C3mEvYb." data-action="zoom" data-height="676" data-image-id="0*10BiNkXI3C3mEvYb." data-scroll="native" data-width="1600" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; cursor: zoom-in; height: 296px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: background 0.2s; width: 700px;"><canvas class="progressiveMedia-canvas js-progressiveMedia-canvas" height="30" style="backface-visibility: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 296px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0.5s, opacity 0.1s 0.4s; vertical-align: baseline; visibility: hidden; width: 700px;" width="75"></canvas><img class="progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image" data-src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*10BiNkXI3C3mEvYb." src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*10BiNkXI3C3mEvYb." style="backface-visibility: hidden; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 296px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0s, opacity 0.4s 0s; visibility: visible; width: 700px; z-index: 100;" /></div></div></figure><br /><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="00ca" name="00ca" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">The ones I’m most excited about are purple and red, which are “Growth hacking techniques” and “Growth hacking Twitter.”</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="8854" name="8854" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Now we’ll take a deeper look at what the competition is like for those two keywords.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="9264" name="9264" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Manual Keyword Difficulty Analysis</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="4d93" name="4d93" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">In order to analyze how difficult it will be to rank for a certain keyword, we’re going to have to look at the keywords manually, one by one. That’s why we started by finding some long-tail keywords and narrowing the list.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="1a78" name="1a78" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">This process gets a lot easier if you download the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/seoquake/akdgnmcogleenhbclghghlkkdndkjdjc?hl=en" href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/seoquake/akdgnmcogleenhbclghghlkkdndkjdjc?hl=en" rel="nofollow noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">SEOQuake Chrome extension</a>. Once you’ve done that, do a Google search and you’ll notice a few changes.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="2642" name="2642" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">With SEOQuake turned on the relevant SEO data of each site is displayed below each search result.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="a831" name="a831" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">We’re going to alter what is displayed, so in the left-hand sidebar click “parameters” and set them to the following:</div><br /><figure class="graf graf--figure graf-after--p" id="1897" name="1897" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 43px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; user-select: auto; z-index: 100;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 319px; max-width: 700px; position: relative; width: 700px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 318.5px;"></div><div class="progressiveMedia js-progressiveMedia graf-image is-canvasLoaded is-imageLoaded" data-action-value="0*qVN8Re6-d0RqvJ07." data-action="zoom" data-height="562" data-image-id="0*qVN8Re6-d0RqvJ07." data-scroll="native" data-width="1234" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; cursor: zoom-in; height: 318.5px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: background 0.2s; width: 700px;"><canvas class="progressiveMedia-canvas js-progressiveMedia-canvas" height="32" style="backface-visibility: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 318.5px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0.5s, opacity 0.1s 0.4s; vertical-align: baseline; visibility: hidden; width: 700px;" width="75"></canvas><img class="progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image" data-src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*qVN8Re6-d0RqvJ07." src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*qVN8Re6-d0RqvJ07." style="backface-visibility: hidden; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 318.5px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0s, opacity 0.4s 0s; visibility: visible; width: 700px; z-index: 100;" /></div></div></figure><br /><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="d72a" name="d72a" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">Now when you search, you’ll see something like this</div><br /><figure class="graf graf--figure graf-after--p" id="6345" name="6345" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 43px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; user-select: auto; z-index: 100;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 169px; max-width: 700px; position: relative; width: 700px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 168.698px;"></div><div class="progressiveMedia js-progressiveMedia graf-image is-canvasLoaded is-imageLoaded" data-action-value="0*9c46odS5ItXx3F5X." data-action="zoom" data-height="298" data-image-id="0*9c46odS5ItXx3F5X." data-scroll="native" data-width="1236" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; cursor: zoom-in; height: 168.698px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: background 0.2s; width: 700px;"><canvas class="progressiveMedia-canvas js-progressiveMedia-canvas" height="17" style="backface-visibility: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 168.698px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0.5s, opacity 0.1s 0.4s; vertical-align: baseline; visibility: hidden; width: 700px;" width="75"></canvas><img class="progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image" data-src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*9c46odS5ItXx3F5X." src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*9c46odS5ItXx3F5X." style="backface-visibility: hidden; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 168.698px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0s, opacity 0.4s 0s; visibility: visible; width: 700px; z-index: 100;" /></div></div></figure><br /><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="f5b4" name="f5b4" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">SEOQuake adds a ranking number, and the following at the bottom:</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="49fe" name="49fe" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">The Google Index: </span>This is how many pages from this base URL Google has indexed</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="d2a2" name="d2a2" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">Page Links</span>: The number of pages linking to the exact domain that is ranking according to SEMrush’s index (usually very low compared to reality, but since we’ll be using this number to compare it wil be somewhat apples to apples)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="a78e" name="a78e" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">URL Links</span>: The number of pages pointing to any page on the base URL</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="173c" name="173c" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">Age: </span>The first time the page was indexed by the Internet Archive</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="c57a" name="c57a" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">Traffic</span>: A <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">very</em> rough monthly traffic number for the base URL</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="e8ad" name="e8ad" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Looking at these we can try to determine approximately what it would take to overtake the sites in these positions.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="00fe" name="00fe" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">You’ll notice that the weight of the indicators change. Not all links are from as good of sources, direct page links matter much more than URL links, etc., but if you google around and play with it for a while you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it takes.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="4ed5" name="4ed5" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If you have a brand new site it will take a month or two to start generating the number of links to get to page one. If you have an older site with more links it may just be a matter of getting your on-page SEO in place. Generally it will be a mixture of both.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="ef41" name="ef41" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Keep in mind that we’re going to optimize our page for this <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">exact</em> keyword, so we have a bit of an advantage. That said, if you start to see pages from sites like Wikipedia, you will know it’s an uphill battle.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="dbfe" name="dbfe" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Here are a couple of examples so you can see how you should think through these things, starting with “Growth hacking techniques.”</div><br /><figure class="graf graf--figure graf-after--p" id="a54d" name="a54d" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 43px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; user-select: auto; z-index: 100;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 121px; max-width: 700px; position: relative; width: 700px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 121.094px;"></div><div class="progressiveMedia js-progressiveMedia graf-image is-canvasLoaded is-imageLoaded" data-action-value="0*YErpxe0guQCv8f2E." data-action="zoom" data-height="212" data-image-id="0*YErpxe0guQCv8f2E." data-scroll="native" data-width="1228" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; cursor: zoom-in; height: 121px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: background 0.2s; width: 700px;"><canvas class="progressiveMedia-canvas js-progressiveMedia-canvas" height="12" style="backface-visibility: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 121px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0.5s, opacity 0.1s 0.4s; vertical-align: baseline; visibility: hidden; width: 700px;" width="75"></canvas><img class="progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image" data-src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*YErpxe0guQCv8f2E." src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*YErpxe0guQCv8f2E." style="backface-visibility: hidden; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 121px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0s, opacity 0.4s 0s; visibility: visible; width: 700px; z-index: 100;" /></div></div></figure><br /><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="9b82" name="9b82" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">Entrepreneur.com is definitely a big name, and “growth hacking techniques” is in the title explicitly. This will be difficult to beat, but there are <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">no</em> links in the SEMRush index that point direct to the page.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="6e26" name="6e26" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">(By the way, I wonder how hard it would be to write an article for entrepreneur.com — I could probably do that and build a few links to that easily, even linking to my site in the article).</div><br /><figure class="graf graf--figure graf-after--p" id="e1fd" name="e1fd" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 43px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; user-select: auto; z-index: 100;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 159px; max-width: 700px; position: relative; width: 700px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 158.198px;"></div><div class="progressiveMedia js-progressiveMedia graf-image is-canvasLoaded is-imageLoaded" data-action-value="0*hJxs4ukw38FD_rzA." data-action="zoom" data-height="284" data-image-id="0*hJxs4ukw38FD_rzA." data-scroll="native" data-width="1254" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; cursor: zoom-in; height: 158.198px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: background 0.2s; width: 700px;"><canvas class="progressiveMedia-canvas js-progressiveMedia-canvas" height="15" style="backface-visibility: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 158.198px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0.5s, opacity 0.1s 0.4s; vertical-align: baseline; visibility: hidden; width: 700px;" width="75"></canvas><img class="progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image" data-src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*hJxs4ukw38FD_rzA." src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*hJxs4ukw38FD_rzA." style="backface-visibility: hidden; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 158.198px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0s, opacity 0.4s 0s; visibility: visible; width: 700px; z-index: 100;" /></div></div></figure><br /><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="def0" name="def0" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">Yongfook.com, have never heard of that site. 206 total links, not much traffic, this one I could pass up. It does have quite a bit of age and “Growth hacking tactics” in the title explicitly, so that would make it tough, but this one is doable to pass up after a while.</div><br /><figure class="graf graf--figure graf-after--p" id="910e" name="910e" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 43px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; user-select: auto; z-index: 100;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 145px; max-width: 700px; position: relative; width: 700px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 144.896px;"></div><div class="progressiveMedia js-progressiveMedia graf-image is-canvasLoaded is-imageLoaded" data-action-value="0*FXNrc-YR8rEbVY90." data-action="zoom" data-height="258" data-image-id="0*FXNrc-YR8rEbVY90." data-scroll="native" data-width="1246" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; cursor: zoom-in; height: 144.896px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: background 0.2s; width: 700px;"><canvas class="progressiveMedia-canvas js-progressiveMedia-canvas" height="15" style="backface-visibility: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 144.896px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0.5s, opacity 0.1s 0.4s; vertical-align: baseline; visibility: hidden; width: 700px;" width="75"></canvas><img class="progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image" data-src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*FXNrc-YR8rEbVY90." src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*FXNrc-YR8rEbVY90." style="backface-visibility: hidden; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 144.896px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0s, opacity 0.4s 0s; visibility: visible; width: 700px; z-index: 100;" /></div></div></figure><br /><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="a28f" name="a28f" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">Alright, so quicksprout is relatively popular, a lot of links, good age, lots of traffic, a few links direct to the page but not a ton.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="1437" name="1437" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">But</em> the word “tactics” doesn’t even appear here. This page isn’t optimized for this keyword, so I could probably knock it out by being optimized specifically for “growth hacking tactics.”</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="71e0" name="71e0" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Let’s jump down a ways to see how hard it would be to get on the front page.</div><br /><figure class="graf graf--figure graf-after--p" id="f316" name="f316" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 43px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; user-select: auto; z-index: 100;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 147px; max-width: 700px; position: relative; width: 700px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 146.292px;"></div><div class="progressiveMedia js-progressiveMedia graf-image is-canvasLoaded is-imageLoaded" data-action-value="0*qkaFFJtnyEUbhirA." data-action="zoom" data-height="258" data-image-id="0*qkaFFJtnyEUbhirA." data-scroll="native" data-width="1232" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; cursor: zoom-in; height: 146.292px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: background 0.2s; width: 700px;"><canvas class="progressiveMedia-canvas js-progressiveMedia-canvas" height="15" style="backface-visibility: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 146.292px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0.5s, opacity 0.1s 0.4s; vertical-align: baseline; visibility: hidden; width: 700px;" width="75"></canvas><img class="progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image" data-src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*qkaFFJtnyEUbhirA." src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*qkaFFJtnyEUbhirA." style="backface-visibility: hidden; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 146.292px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0s, opacity 0.4s 0s; visibility: visible; width: 700px; z-index: 100;" /></div></div></figure><br /><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="1d89" name="1d89" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">17 total pages indexed? Created in 2014? No links in the index, even to the root URL? This one’s mine. I should be able to front-page easily.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="3409" name="3409" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">So this looks like a good keyword. Now we just have to get the on-page SEO in place and start building a few links.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="a001" name="a001" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">On-Page SEO</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="e1dd" name="e1dd" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Now that we have our keyword selected, we need to make sure Google knows what our site is about. This is as simple as making sure the right keywords are in the right places. Most of this has to do with html tags, which make up the structure of a webpage. If you don’t know html or understand how it works, just pass this list to a developer and they should be able to help you.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="8363" name="8363" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Here is a simple checklist you can follow to see if your content is optimized.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="7487" name="7487" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">On-Page SEO Checklist</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="e9b8" name="e9b8" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>Your keyword is in the <title> tag, ideally at the front (or close to the front) of the tag</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="3cbd" name="3cbd" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>Your keyword is close to the beginning of the <title> tag (ideally the first words)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="cd1d" name="cd1d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>The title tag contains less than the viewable limit of 65 characters (optional but recommended)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="514f" name="514f" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>Your keyword is in the first <h1> tag (and your page has an <h1> tag)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="fa0a" name="fa0a" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>If your page contains additional header tags (<h2>, <h3>, etc) your keyword or synonyms are in most of them</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="5662" name="5662" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>Any images on the page have an <alt> tag that contain your chosen keyword</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="f085" name="f085" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>Your keyword is in the meta description (and there is a meta description)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="2b9c" name="2b9c" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>There is at least 300 words of text on the page</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="f331" name="f331" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>Your keyword appears in the URL (if not the homepage)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="2217" name="2217" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>Your keyword appears in the first paragraph of the copy</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="2d7e" name="2d7e" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>Your keyword (or synonyms — Google recognizes them now) is used other times throughout the page</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="a228" name="a228" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>Your keyword density is between .5% and 2.5%</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="e3b0" name="e3b0" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>The page contains dofollow links to other pages (this just means you’re not using nofollow links to every other page)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="356a" name="356a" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">☐ </span>The page is original content not taken from another page and dissimilar from other pages on your site</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="c672" name="c672" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If you have all of that in place you should be pretty well set from an on-page perspective. You’ll likely be the best-optimized page for your chosen keyword unless you’re in a very competitive space.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="2f4c" name="2f4c" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">All we have left now is off-page optimization.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="7b9e" name="7b9e" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Off-Page SEO</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="95ab" name="95ab" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Off-Page SEO is just a fancy way to say <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">links</em>. (Sometimes we call them <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">backlinks</em>, but it’s really the same thing.)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="0e45" name="0e45" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Google looks at each link on the web as a weighted vote. If you link to something, in Google’s eyes you’re saying, “This is worth checking out.” The more legit you are the more weight your vote carries.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="1818" name="1818" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Link Juice</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="13af" name="13af" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">SEOs have a weird way to describe this voting process; they call it “link juice.” If an authoritative site, we’ll say Wikipedia for example, links to you, they’re passing you “link juice.”</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="615c" name="615c" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">But link juice doesn’t only work site to site — if your homepage is very authoritative and it links off to other pages on your site, it passes link juice as well. For this reason our link structure becomes very important.</div><h4 class="graf graf--h4 graf-after--p" id="4fd5" name="4fd5" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; letter-spacing: -0.018em; line-height: 1.22; margin: 30px 0px 0px -1.5px;">Checking Link Juice</h4><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h4" id="6307" name="6307" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 6px;">There are a number of tools that let you check how many links are pointing to a site and what the authority of those pages are. Unfortunately none of them are perfect — the only way to know what links are pointing to your site is to have crawled those pages.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="bd3c" name="bd3c" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Google crawls most popular pages several times per day, but they don’t want you manipulating them, so they update their index pretty slowly.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="318d" name="318d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">That said, you can check at least a sample of Google’s index in the Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools). Once you navigate to your site, In the left-hand side select “Search Traffic” then “Links to your site.” There’s a debate raging over whether or not this actually shows you all of the links Google knows about (I’m 99% convinced it’s only a sample), but it’s at least a representative sample.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="0796" name="0796" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">To see all of your links, click on “More” under “Who links to you the most” then “Download this table.” This, again, seems to only download a sample of what Google knows about. You can also select “Download latest links” which provides more recent links than the other option.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="af30" name="af30" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Unfortunately this doesn’t let us see much a to the value of the links, nor does it show us links that have dropped or where those links are from.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="6f1d" name="6f1d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">To use those there are a wide variety of tools: If you have a budget I’d go with ahrefs.com as they have the biggest index, followed by Moz’s Open Site Explorer (most of the data you can get with a free account, if not then it’s slightly cheaper than ahrefs), and finally SEMrush, which is free for most purposes we need. MajesticSEO uses a combination of “trust flow” and “citation flow” which also works fairly well to give you an idea as to the overall health and number of links pointing to your site.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="557f" name="557f" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">All of these use different internal metrics to determine the “authority” of a link, but using them to compare apples to apples can be beneficial.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="555e" name="555e" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Link Structure</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="3bba" name="3bba" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">HTML links look something like this:</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="04be" name="04be" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><a href=”<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.somesite.com" href="http://www.somesite.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://www.somesite.com</a>” title=”keyword”>Anchor text</a></div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="3264" name="3264" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Where <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.somesite.com" href="http://www.somesite.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://www.somesite.com</a> is the place the link directs you to, the title is largely a remnant of time gone by, and the linked text — think the words that are blue and you click on — is called the “anchor text.”</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="20fe" name="20fe" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">In addition to the amount of link juice a page has, the relevance of the anchor text matters.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="a10c" name="a10c" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Generally speaking you want to use your keyword as the anchor text for your internal linking whenever possible. External linking (from other sites) shouldn’t be very heavily optimized for anchor text. If 90% of your links all have the same anchor text Google can throw a red flag, assuming that you’re doing something fishy.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="85dc" name="85dc" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If you’re ever creating links (like we’ll show you in the future) I only ever use something generic like the site name, “here” or the full URL.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="ed7f" name="ed7f" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Internal Structure</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="b187" name="b187" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Generally speaking you don’t want orphan pages (those that aren’t linked to by other pages), nor do you want an overly-messy link structure.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="4245" name="4245" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Some say the ideal link structure for a site is something like this:</div><br /><figure class="graf graf--figure graf-after--p" id="b2f7" name="b2f7" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 43px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; user-select: auto; z-index: 100;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 369px; max-width: 590px; position: relative; width: 590px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 368.75px;"></div><div class="progressiveMedia js-progressiveMedia graf-image is-canvasLoaded is-imageLoaded" data-height="369" data-image-id="0*tWHFIzBzG7zq6uii." data-scroll="native" data-width="590" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); box-sizing: border-box; height: 368.75px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: background 0.2s; width: 590px;"><canvas class="progressiveMedia-canvas js-progressiveMedia-canvas" height="45" style="backface-visibility: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 368.75px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0.5s, opacity 0.1s 0.4s; vertical-align: baseline; visibility: hidden; width: 590px;" width="75"></canvas><img class="progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image" data-src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*tWHFIzBzG7zq6uii." src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*tWHFIzBzG7zq6uii." style="backface-visibility: hidden; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 368.75px; left: 0px; margin: auto; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: visibility 0s linear 0s, opacity 0.4s 0s; visibility: visible; width: 590px; z-index: 100;" /></div></div></figure><br /><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="53ee" name="53ee" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">That’s close, but it gets a couple things wrong. First, you’ll never have a structure that organized, and second, in an ideal world every page would link to every other page on its same level. This can easily be done with a footer that feels like a sitemap or “recommended” pages. That allows you to specify anchor text, and pass link juice freely from page to page.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="755d" name="755d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Unfortunately it’s impossible to draw such a web without it becoming a mess, so you’ll just have to imagine what that actually looks like.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="fb6e" name="fb6e" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">We have just one more thing to go over before we start getting those first links pointing to our site.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="4a58" name="4a58" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Robots.txt, disavow, nofollow, and other minutia</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="2dc7" name="2dc7" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Most of SEO is managing stuff that can go wrong. There is a lot of that, but we’ll go over what will cover 99% of needs, and you can Google if there’s something really crazy.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="6a8f" name="6a8f" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">Robots.txt</span></div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="a5d8" name="a5d8" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Almost every site has a page at url.com/robots.txt — even google has one.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="89c8" name="89c8" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">This is just a plain text file that lets you tell search engine crawlers what to crawl and not to crawl. Most are pretty good about listening, except the Bingbot, which pretty much does whatever it wants no matter what you tell it. (I’m mostly kidding.)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="cca0" name="cca0" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If you don’t want Google to crawl a page (maybe it’s a login page you don’t want indexed, a landing page, etc.) you can just “disallow” it in your robots.txt by saying disallow: /somepage.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="e7e6" name="e7e6" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If you add a trailing / to it (e.g. disallow: /somepage/) it will also disallow all child pages.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="db4f" name="db4f" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Technically you can specify different rules for different bots (or user agents), but it’s easiest to start your file with “User-agent: *” if you don’t have a need for separate crawling rules.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="47fb" name="47fb" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">Disavow</span></div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="52c5" name="52c5" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Google will penalize spammy sites, and unfortunately this causes some bad behavior from bad actors. Say, for example, you wanted to take out a competitor. You could send a bunch of obviously spammy links to their site and get them penalized. This is called “negative SEO,” and is something that happens often in highly contested keywords. Google generally tries to pretend like it doesn’t happen.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="b968" name="b968" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">In the case that this does happen, however, you can “Disavow” links in the Search Console, which is pretty much saying, “Hey Google, don’t count this one.” I hope you’ll never have to use it, but if you hire (or have hired) a bad SEO or are being attacked by a competitor, that is how you combat it.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="8016" name="8016" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">Nofollow</span></div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="84fb" name="84fb" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">A link can have a property called “nofollow” such as this:</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="b82d" name="b82d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><a href=”<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.somesite.com" href="http://www.somesite.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://www.somesite.com</a>” title=”keyword” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor text</a>.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="f406" name="f406" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If you want to link to somebody but you don’t want it to count as a vote (you don’t want to pass link-juice), or you support user-generated content and want to deter spammers, you can use a nofollow link. Google says it discounts the value of those links. I’m not convinced they discount them heavily, but other SEOs are so they seem to deter spammers if nothing else.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="7168" name="7168" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">Redirects</span></div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="2067" name="2067" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If you’re going to change a URL, but you don’t want its link juice to disappear, you can use a 301 redirect. A 301 will pass a majority of the link juice.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="b14f" name="b14f" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">Canonical URLs</span></div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="3c92" name="3c92" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If you have two pages that are virtually the same, you can add something like <link rel=”canonical href=”<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.someurl.com/somepage" href="https://www.someurl.com/somepage" rel="nofollow noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">https://www.someurl.com/somepage</a>”> to say “hey, treat this page as if it were that page instead, but I don’t want to 301 it.”</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="a154" name="a154" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">And with that, we’re ready to build our first links.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="9dbf" name="9dbf" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Link Building</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="701a" name="701a" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Link building is where SEO really starts to matter, and where a lot of people end up in a world of hurt.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="3508" name="3508" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">The best way to build links is to not build links. I’ve worked for companies in the past that don’t have to ask for them, they just flow in from press, customer blogs, their awesome blog posts, etc. If this is an option (and we’ll go over a couple of ways to make it more likely) you’re in a great place.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="cb57" name="cb57" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If not, at least in the beginning, we’re going to manually create just a few.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="246f" name="246f" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">We’re going to create them in legitimate ways and not hire somebody in India to do so. That is a recipe for disaster, and I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen that take down a site.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="ef7b" name="ef7b" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Web 2.0s</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="4bdf" name="4bdf" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">The easiest way to build high quality links are what SEOs call “web 2.0s.” That’s just a way to say “social sites” or sites that let you post stuff. Now tweeting a link into the abyss won’t do you anything, but profiles, status pages, etc. do carry some weight. And if they come from a popular domain that counts as a link.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="26f9" name="26f9" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Some of the easiest are:</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="45b7" name="45b7" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Twitter (in your bio)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="be13" name="be13" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Github (the readme of a repo)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="939c" name="939c" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">YouTube (the description of a video — it has to actually get views)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="bfa5" name="bfa5" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Wordpress (yes, you’ll have to actually create a blog)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="24be" name="24be" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Blogger (same here)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="4ff7" name="4ff7" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Tumblr</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="b044" name="b044" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Upvote-based sites (HackerNews, GrowthHackers, Inbound.org, etc.)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="1b48" name="1b48" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If nothing else you can start there and get a half dozen to a dozen links. There are always big lists of “web 2.0s” you can find online, but keep in mind if you’re going to build something out on a blogging platform you’re going to have to <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">really</em> build something out. That’s a lot of content and time, but you have to do it the right way.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="f365" name="f365" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">We generally keep a bigger list of Web 2.0s <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://github.com/austenallred/web20s/blob/master/web20s.xlsx?raw=true" href="https://github.com/austenallred/web20s/blob/master/web20s.xlsx?raw=true" rel="nofollow noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.439216); background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">here</a>. Some may be out of date, but you should probably only build a half dozen to a dozen Web 2.0s anyway.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="8590" name="8590" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Expired Domains</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="483a" name="483a" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Another way to get link juice is by purchasing an expired domain. This is more difficult to do, but there are a lot of options such as expireddomains.net. (Google “expired domains” and you’ll find dozens of sites monitoring them.)</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="cde2" name="cde2" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">You’ll want to purchase a domain that has expired and restore it as closely as you can to its original form using an archive. These sites likely have some link juice to pass on and you can pass it to yourself.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="3b44" name="3b44" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Link Intersection</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="2c1e" name="2c1e" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Another way to find places you can build links is by using a link intersection tool. These find sites that link to “competitor a” and “competitor b” but not to you. Theoretically, if they link to both of your competitors, they should be willing to link to you. Moz, Ahrefs, LunaMetrics and others have link intersection tools that work quite well.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="4cbc" name="4cbc" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Now that we have a few basic links flowing, we’re going to work on some strategies that will send continual links and press, eventually getting to a point where we don’t have to build any more links.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="7067" name="7067" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Your First Drip of Traffic — Becoming an Authority Site</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="1571" name="1571" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Awesome — you have a site that converts well, your SEO is in place, ready for you to drive traffic. Now what?</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="f225" name="f225" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">As you’re probably learned at this point, a site that converts very well but has no traffic flowing to it still converts zero traffic.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="2939" name="2939" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">We’re going to fix that.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="1d7d" name="1d7d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">This section takes a lot of time and effort, and in the beginning you’ll likely wonder if you’re doing anything at all. Remember that class in college that is so difficult it’s the point where most people give up, effectively weeding out the people who aren’t ready to major in a specific subject?</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="2dc6" name="2dc6" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Well this is the weeder-out chapter of growth hacking.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="090b" name="090b" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Take a Long-Term View</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="feeb" name="feeb" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">The reason so many people stumble on this step is the same reason people stumble on so many steps that take a little effort under time — losing weight, investing in a 401(k), etc. In the beginning you’re going to have a little seedling of traffic, and you’ll be looking up to those who have giant oak trees, thinking, “I must be doing something wrong.” You’re not doing anything wrong. The traffic starts as a trickle before it becomes a flood.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="48b5" name="48b5" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">But don’t worry if you’re a startup. Our goal is to get enough traffic that continuing to do this effort will be sustainable (meaning we won’t die before we start to see the rewards), but at the same time we’re building equity in the Internet.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="2c14" name="2c14" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">The type of traffic we want to build is the type that will compound and will never go away. We want to create traffic today that will still give us a little trickle in five years. Combining hundreds (or thousands) of little trickles, our site that converts, and a great product we will create a giant river.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="0596" name="0596" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Future chapters will go into depth on the networks we need to drive traffic from, so in this chapter we’re going to focus on traffic that’s network-agnostic. Traffic that we can’t get by tapping any specific network.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="105d" name="105d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Just to give you some idea of scale, I’ve seen this process drive over 500,000 visits <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">per day, </em>though the build up to that level took almost a full year. What could you do with 500,000 visits per day?</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="ca55" name="ca55" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Monitoring Alerts</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="fe86" name="fe86" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">To start we’re going to use the keywords we found in the SEO chapter, and inject ourselves (and our company) into the conversation wherever it’s taking place.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="d281" name="d281" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">To do this we’re going to use software called BuzzBundle.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="84da" name="84da" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">BuzzBundle</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="2380" name="2380" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">This software lets us do a few things:</div><ol class="postList" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); counter-reset: post 0; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; list-style: none none; margin: 29px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><li class="graf graf--li graf-after--p" id="ae26" name="ae26" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 30px;">Constantly monitor all mentions of a specific topic, competitor, or keyword across multiple locations on the Internet (from Facebook groups to Quora questions to blog posts) where comments are available</li><li class="graf graf--li graf-after--li" id="2bad" name="2bad" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 30px;">Allow us to leave a constructive comment that references our product or company</li></ol><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--li" id="1efa" name="1efa" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Disclaimer: This is not the SEO comment spam you’ve seen</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="461d" name="461d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">This step takes thought, effort, and a real human who understands what they’re typing. I don’t often say this, but you cannot effectively automate this step without it becoming spammy. If you’re trying to replicate the automated SEO spam you’ve seen on various blogs and sites this will probably work, but you’ll get banned, your clickthrough will be a fraction of what it could be, and you’ll be banned</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="e9c8" name="e9c8" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Productive Commenting</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="3057" name="3057" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">We’re not going to fire up some awful software to drop spun mentions of garbage onto various comment sections online hoping that brings us SEO traffic. Our comments must do two things:</div><ol class="postList" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); counter-reset: post 0; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; list-style: none none; margin: 29px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><li class="graf graf--li graf-after--p" id="7326" name="7326" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 30px;">Be contextual. We are <em class="markup--em markup--li-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">only</em> going to talk about the topic presented in an article or tweet, and <em class="markup--em markup--li-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">only mention</em> our company when it naturally fits in</li><li class="graf graf--li graf-after--li" id="2954" name="2954" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 30px;">Contribute to the conversation. I should learn something or have value added to my life by reading your comment</li></ol><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--li" id="bd61" name="bd61" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">If you do these two things a few changes will take place: First, you’ll notice that people click on your links <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">because you’re a thoughtful person who likes to contribute</em>. Second, people will respect your company <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">because you’re a thoughtful person who likes to contribute.</em></div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="3e91" name="3e91" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">And with that disclaimer, we’ll move on to the nitty gritty of how this is done.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="a84a" name="a84a" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Now that all of that is out of the way, let’s fire up BuzzBundle and get to work.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="31a4" name="31a4" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Accounts and Personas</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="717b" name="717b" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">The first thing you’ll want to do in BuzzBundle is go to Accounts -> Add new accounts. This is the starting point for everything we’ll do, as we need accounts to comment.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="03de" name="03de" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">One thing you’ll notice about BuzzBundle is that it lets you use multiple accounts. I find it beneficial to think from multiple perspectives and therefore multiple points of view, but I don’t want to go too far overboard and be spammy.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="2d49" name="2d49" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">I’d recommend doing something simple — create 2–3 personas, each of whom you identify with (or are you), and enter them into your BuzzBundle accounts.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="521d" name="521d" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Personally I don’t even change my name, I just use a different one (eg. Austen J. Allred vs. Austen Allred) or use a few photos, just so it isn’t literally the same name and same photo blanketing the Internet.</div><br /><figure class="graf graf--figure graf--iframe graf-after--p" id="9dfd" name="9dfd" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 43px 0px 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; user-select: auto; z-index: 100;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; position: relative; width: 700px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 528.99px;"></div><div class="iframeContainer" style="box-sizing: border-box; height: 528.99px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; overflow: auto; position: absolute; top: 0px; width: 700px;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" data-media-id="c1b06dc4a5632ef206e1cbad0692ae0a" frameborder="0" height="250" src="https://medium.com/media/c1b06dc4a5632ef206e1cbad0692ae0a?postId=1b903b3ab6bb" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 528.99px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; transform: translateZ(0px); width: 700px;" width="500"></iframe></div></div></figure><br /><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--figure" id="1400" name="1400" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 53px 0px 0px -2px;">Disqus</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="35ae" name="35ae" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Disqus is a comment system used all over the place, and it carries some caveates. Disqus will ban you if you use the same link in every post, so there are two workarounds:</div><ol class="postList" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); counter-reset: post 0; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; list-style: none none; margin: 29px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><li class="graf graf--li graf-after--p" id="a529" name="a529" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-bottom: 14px; margin-left: 30px;">Use a lot of different accounts, rotating IPs or using a proxy every two days or so</li><li class="graf graf--li graf-after--li" id="723c" name="723c" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 30px;">Use your site URL as your “display name”</li></ol><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--li" id="f2d7" name="f2d7" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Both of these work, but the second one is much easier in my view.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="df79" name="df79" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">UTM Parameters</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="e0aa" name="e0aa" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Using links with our UTM parameters here will be very beneficial. We’ll be able to track traffic back to each individual blog or site, and if necessary double down on the ones that are driving traffic.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="e4cd" name="e4cd" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Link Shorteners</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="ef66" name="ef66" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">If you ever start to run into problems with getting your link posted, it may be useful to use a few link shorteners or some 301 redirects.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="1c5a" name="1c5a" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">To keep it simple you can use a link shortener that 301s such as bit.ly, or if you want to spend a little more time you can set up your own site and 301 the traffic from a certain page to your money site.</div><h3 class="graf graf--h3 graf-after--p" id="1c00" name="1c00" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 56px 0px 0px -2px;">Using BuzzBundle</h3><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--h3" id="6ddf" name="6ddf" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 8px;">Let’s get started with the BuzzBundle.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="594a" name="594a" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">First, it’s going to ask you for a keyword. We already have a keyword from the SEO section, but we may want to do something even a bit more generic. For this one I’m going to go with “growth hacking.”</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="d391" name="d391" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">Simply hit “go” and let BuzzBundle get started.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="50bc" name="50bc" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">It will load different content types into different columns, but generally we are going to be scrolling through until we find something that looks compelling and like we can actually contribute to.</div><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="17bd" name="17bd" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;"><br /></div></div>

SEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single time

Note: This one of one of the chapters of  Secret Sauce: A step-by-step growth hacking guide . Secret Sauce breaks down every channel just li...

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