The 10 Most Important SEO Tips You Need to Know with Neil Patel

Hello, hello, everybody. Antonio Damota here. Thank you so much for joining me in another episode of Rise and Grind. It's going to be an epic episode.

I'm super happy to have Neil Patel. He's one of the best marketers in the world. I'm pretty sure you know him already. He has co-founded multimillion-dollar companies like Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and Kissmetrics.

He blogs epic content daily, I think, via his two blogs, neilpatel.com and quicksprout.com. And also he has helped some of the biggest companies in the world like Google and Amazon amongst many, many others to grow their revenue.

He's also got a book coming very shortly that I already pre-ordered and issued those so as well called Assol. And you can do it on Amazon. So to cut it short is a real deal. Neil, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. So Neil, do you want to add something to your intro, to your bio? No, you pretty much did a good job covering it all.

That's great. Thank you very much. Today's episode, of course, it's going to be a masterclass episode. As I said before, you are one of the best marketers in the world.

We discussed that we could talk about the 10 most important SEO tips everybody should know. What's the first important SEO tip we should know? Sure. One of the first and most important SEO tips that you should know comes down to speed.

Most people don't focus on speed with their site. If you can get the site to load faster, you're going to not just get more conversions, but you should see more search traffic. Indirectly, it creates a better user experience. And what you'll know is when you create a better user experience, more people are likely to stay.

They're not likely to bounce back or any of that, which causes people to stay on your site more. navigate more pages, you have a lower bounce rate, and in the end, it should help increase your rankings. So what you want to do is remove anything that causes your site to load slow. Go to Google PageSpeed, type in your URL, and they'll tell you what's making your site load slow.

That's the only thing you should do? I mean, with that information from Google, then you can take it from there? Or should we do something else? Should we limit the number of plugins we use on WordPress?

Or are there any other things to take into consideration? Whatever you can do, right? In other words, you need to remove anything that's unnecessary. There's no necessary limit or any hard rule to follow.

The big rule to follow is remove anything that's unnecessary. All right, that's cool. If you're going out for mobile traffic, use Google's AMP. Google AMP all right That awesome That awesome All right great So once we have our site up to speed what should we do next Link to other websites that are relevant right So if you have a website you want to make sure you linking out to other relevant websites It shows Google what neighborhoods you're in and where they should rank you and what type of content you're producing when you link out.

It helps them with their algorithm. All right. So we should always look for big, big websites, right? Or similar websites to ours, I guess.

That's correct. All right. All right. That's awesome.

So we should write, in every post we write, we should have at least one link to a big website, right? Or to a similar website. If it benefits the user, right? You don't want to link out for no reason.

You want to link out when it benefits the user. Which brings us into tip number three. You should always look for humans first and then search engines second, not the other way around. Okay.

Okay. So what do you mean exactly by that? A lot of people write content to rank. You look at the content that ranks really well.

People love it. Like it has a catchy headline. Yeah, it may have some keywords in there, but they go above and beyond with the content. It's so amazing.

It just naturally does well because people love it. The key is writing for humans first because what Google wants to rank is what humans prefer. Yes, their algorithm may not always do that, but in general, they do what's best for humans, and that's their long-term goal. So if you also focus on humans, in the end, you should rank higher on Google.

All right, so you should have a minimum of 1,000 words, right, and write epic content like you do, correct? Yeah, I even try to shoot for a content that has at least 2,000, 3,000 hertz. Well, yeah, your content is always massive, right? So that's extremely important.

And what about, what's the following tip? The next one is build links from trustworthy sites. In other words, you want to encourage these sites. So if you have a really thorough guide, that's one way to build links from trustworthy sites, because then you can email out everyone in your space, letting them know that you released a guide, right?

A lot of epic guides, neopatel.com has guides in the sidebar that I link to. These guides do really well because they're so thorough that everyone's like, okay, cool, we'll just link to it. So you're a big name now in the marketing industry, but for somebody who is starting out, do you recommend just send an email to your competitors, let's say that can be also your friends, why not?

And so they will link to your contacts. Is it what you suggest to do, just to shoot an email to them? Yes, that's what we do. Tip number five is have analytics.

So if you use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, it'll give you more insights. You can use those insights to figure out how to improve your site. Okay, that's awesome. So we've got the web analytics in place, and what's another tip we should be aware of?

Yeah, write unique and relevant meta descriptions for every page. You don't want duplicate meta descriptions. A lot of people make mistakes on that That the ranking Even Google Search Console it shows you which ones are duplicate and they don like it okay so we should use Google search console to to to optimize them basically yes okay awesome awesome and and for WordPress what's the the plugin that you recommend to use Yoast SEO plugin mm-hmm all right okay awesome and so we are tip number six and what's tip number seven use Use readable and meaningful URLs.

If your post is on creating a blog, then make sure the keyword creating a blog is in the URL. It's not just good for search-ins, but then users know what it is. Like Entrepreneur Magazine does a bad job with this. They'll do like slash article slash like two, three, four, five, six.

People don't know what the article is on by just looking at the URL. All right. Okay. I didn't know that.

I actually read Entrepreneur Magazine a lot. I never noticed that. Do they still do it? Yeah, they'll still do it.

And you write for them sometimes, right? So have you ever told them to stop doing that? I'm just curious. No, I haven't.

All right. All right, that's interesting. Okay, so we should use readable and meaningful URLs only. That's tip number seven.

And what's tip number eight? Build momentum through social signals. Although search engines don't use social media to boost your rankings, it is a good signal because if everyone's going to your landing pages, the time on site's great because keep in mind a lot of people use Google Chrome, Google Toolbar, Google Search and if you see all these people going to your site it provides really good signals on top of that more of those people are much more likely to link back to you.

Okay so every time you publish new content you have to spread it out on all your social media right? Is there anything that works better for you for example? Does Twitter work better for you or Facebook for example? Facebook works better for me.

Facebook works better for you? All right, that's cool. And so what about tip number nine? Use good alt tags and names for your images.

Google image search can drive a lot of traffic, so name your images the right keywords. Don't just put car. Put like Toyota Camp 1999 silver Toyota Camry. That would be a better example of an image name.

All right. Is that very important, you reckon? Have you seen good results when you optimize images? Yes, in the long run, yes.

Short run, no. All right, all right. That's interesting. And what about tip number 10 and last tip?

Create and publish unique content consistently. The ones who keep adding really good content and do it over time tend to rank the best. And how many times should you publish a new content? And I think that's a question everybody asks.

At least once a week. But if you have more time, I would do like three to four times a week, even seven times a week. All right. That's awesome.

Okay so let make a little summary here because I think there a lot of information So tip number one it speed up your website So you should use Google speed tool to check what going on And then you should talk to your developer to fix those problems. Tip number two is to link to other websites with relevant content. So you do that when you are writing your blog post. So you try to find similar competitors of yours that have similar content.

And then the third was write for human first, search engine second. That means that you have to write epic content and give a lot of value. Four, encourage other trustworthy sites to link to you. So when you write something, you contact them asking for a link to your content.

So you have to write, again, to write amazing articles or guides. and the five is have web analytics in place at the very beginning. You mentioned that Google Analytics works well. The six was write unique and relevant meta descriptions for every page.

You recommended use SEO for that or to use Google Console as well, right? Yeah, Google Search Console. Google Search Console. The seven was to use readable and meaningful URLs only.

That means writing, I don't know, website.com slash Neil Patel interview instead of website.com slash interview123, right? Yep.

And eight is build momentum with social signals. So every time you publish something, you spread it out via social media. For example, in your case, Facebook works well. Twitter, I think it works well as well.

And the nine was using the right keywords in your images. I think that's not very known advice, I think. And that's, like you say, on the long run, it's powerful advice. And the tenth and last tip was to create and publish unique content consistently at least once a week, but ideally two to three times a week.

You got it right. That's good. That's a great summary. All right, Neil, I know you're very busy.

Thanks so much for your time and for this quick masterclass lesson. Thank you for having me. All right, Neil. Thank you very much.

Take care. And that's it for today, guys. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Rise and Grind Podcast.

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