The Advanced Guide To SEO

Why Did I Write This Guide?

To my readers, I wanted to give you the most extensive and detailed guide of advanced SEO techniques that exists today. This resource is piled to the top with tactile, immediately actionable things you can do to your website, to improve rankings, performance and traffic. Everything from schema.org to mobile search to link building and site speed. I want you to all be insanely successful and prosperous on the web!

If you’ve read SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO and want more, or you’ve read my other basic guides to SEO and want more – this Advanced Guide To SEO is for you. If you’ve already mastered the basics of SEO like writing title tags, the basics of link building or data research on the web and want more – this guide is for you! It’s for anyone looking to take their success on the web to the next level; bloggers, business owners, eCommerce and even affiliate marketers. This guide provides you with dozens and dozens of things you can sit down and do right now to improve your traffic from organic search on the web.

How Much Of This Guide Should I Read?

I would suggest reading the whole thing! While you may not have to apply every section to your site, you will gain an understanding of the concepts in each part. SEO can be broken into pieces, but it definitely fits together as one big picture, so you’ll want to read it all.

Indexation & Accessibility

You could have the best content in the world, the most amazing audience and even traffic coming from all kinds of places like social media and referrals. But if the search engines can’t properly access, crawl and index your site none of that matters for SEO. That is why in this section you’re going to learn how to look at your website from the search engine’s point of view. You’re going to be able to do a full crawl of your own site, handle migrations, redesigns and much more.

Site Speed & Performance

It is well known by now that Google has said site speed is a small ranking factor (about 1%). This is tiny, but it’s rare for Google to say that anything has a definite effect on rankings. So it makes so much sense to follow this advice. Plus, users love fast and responsive sites. They will feel more in control of their experience, consume your amazing content more efficiently and convert better.

And after section one, the engines are indexing your site better, so let’s take it to the next level. This section will teach you how to measure and analyze your site’s speed and performance, as well as give some advanced actionable ways to improve.

New Search

SEO is growing fast and changing everyday. It’s way more than just title tags and some back links. You have to have a semantically relevant site. One in which the engines (and people!) understand what the page is about in relation to real world things – like the concept of actors relating to movies or people having a birthday.

Read this section to stay ahead of the new search frontiers.

WordPress

The majority of new websites created today are built upon WordPress. QuickSprout.com is built on WordPress and most of my readers have site using this popular CMS. I find most people get the basics pretty good for WordPress and SEO, but we’re going to take things a bit further in this section. You’ll find a detailed walkthrough of setting up the SEO for WordPress plugin, improving your WordPress speed and performance, creating a custom author page and more.

Advanced DataResearch

Part of what makes SEO unique, fun and challenging is that we get to be like detectives on the web. We have to be good at pulling data from different places and getting that data no matter what it takes sometimes. Some new ways have come about lately for doing so. We’re going to walk step by step through nine specific ways you can collect data more effectively.

Keyword Research

I’m sure you’ve all used the adwords keyword tool a lot, but what about other keyword research tools and techniques? That’s what this section will cover. We’re going to go beyond just the data Google has and use other keyword tools, search suggest scraping, internal site search and more.

Link Building With Content

Since Penguin and Panda, it’s harder and harder to build links the old way; through directories, email blasts, commenting, or black hat ways like blog networks and spinning. This section will give you some solid ways to build some content that is link worthy and valuable to your visitors and will keep people coming back time and time again.

Link BuildingTechniques

Although panda and penguin make it harder to build links like we used to, once you have exceptional content you still need to employ some killer techniques to get that content out there, get it in front of the eyes that matter, and get people to link back to that content.

This section has fifteen in depth and actionable ways you can start building links to that content immediately. Everything from obtaining a link worthy domain, to using alerts like IFTTT and more.

Search Verticals

You might conquer the rankings in universal search for your article, post or product. But what about photo? What about mobile and local search? Here I give you some techniques for optimizing search verticals to perform even better on the web.