Harshad Ghodke is an SEO Expert from Melbourne. Harshad started with search engine optimisation fifteen years ago.
How To Become An SEO Expert?
One cannot become an SEO Expert just by reading books or taking an online course. Books, videos, podcasts etc. do help but to become an expert it is really important to have lots of SEO experiments. Search engine optimisation is a lot more than writing optimised titles, meta descriptions and headings. To become an SEO expert, one should have lots of experience working with live web pages and sites.
On-Page Vs Off-Page Optimisation
With recent updates from Google, the weightage of backlinks is decreasing. Earlier, it was easy to rank pages by creating a bunch of backlinks. Now, good content which is relevant to the user’s search query does most of the job. Backlinks are still as important, but content that is unique, helpful, relevant and easy to read matters a lot.
How To Become a Local SEO Expert?
Google changes its algorithm every few months. Local SEO is something that is in demand but very few people understand how to optimise them. Here are some of my tips for optimising a Google My Business listing.
- Citations, Citations and more Citations. Get them as much as you can and make sure the NAP is consistent.
- Keywords in a GMB title helps.
- Keywords in user reviews help.
- Adding relevant categories may help.
SEO Myths
For years, I have been performing tests on my live websites. I have come across many assumptions that are not right.
Here are some of the SEO myths:
- Duplicate content will penalise your website/page.
- The number of backlinks matter for ranking.
- Having video on a page helps the page rank better.
- Having images on a page helps the page rank better.
- AMP pages rank better than non-amp pages.
- Title or meta descriptions longer than the allocated space will cause negative ranking effects.
- Keywords in URL DO NOT matter when it comes to ranking.
- Social signals have a positive effect on ranking.
- Organic CTR can be manipulated to increase rankings.
- Keyword density on-page is a ranking factor.
- Google Ads will help your pages rank better.
- Bounce rate is a ranking factor.
