How to Master SEO Quickly

Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about ranking #1 on Google for your target keywords. 

Of course, I use “ranking #1” figuratively. It actually means earning a respectable position on the top five in the search results, whether it is a blue link, AI Overview, FAQ, or featured snippet.

And it’s easy.

Most content marketers and SEO experts try their best to portray it as a complicated thing. 

They gatekeep the field so newcomers don’t surpass them, or because they’re simply mediocre at their job.

You need to do four things to make Google believe you deserve that front page mention.

1. Keep the site clean

There are two perspectives here. First, from the POV of your audience, the content should be neatly arranged. If they have to use the “site:” operator on Google to find stuff from your website, you did a bad job.

Second, from the technical perspective, eliminate website garbage. 

Website garbage refers to drafts that should be deleted, page templates that are no longer in use, and plugins that fail to serve any purpose. It also includes illogical or extremely long URLs, unnecessary tags in the HTML, missing meta tags in the content, internal redirects, and dead links.

Website garbage is critical because it prevents Google’s search bots from crawling your site efficiently. The crawlers will get confused and derailed from their natural exploratory path and cease to scan deep into your website’s content architecture.

You’d be surprised to know how many web pages, including blog posts, don’t get crawled in any typical business site. The number is even higher for companies without a dedicated SEO and content team.

Clean content organization is crucial for elevating retention and is a great practice from a marketing standpoint. Moreover, it also helps with crawling as the search bot can map your site quickly.

There are plenty of tools like Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs that will help you isolate website garbage, accelerating their cleanup process. Once you discover the issues, attack them with full force. Each moment wasted costs you ranking and everything it brings.

2. Write for humans

You can’t scam your way to the top and expect it to last. Plenty of websites have filled up their blogs with AI-generated but keyword-friendly slop to hog the rankings. It did work in the short term, but the nerds at Google soon discovered it.

Many high-ranking sites using this tactic, with or without AI, fell from grace and lost more than 80% of their organic traffic overnight. Google’s manual penalty marks them forever which translates to a difficult climb back to the top.

The real culprit here was crappy content that added little value. This emerged from the intentions of the website owners. Their goal was to trick Google into serving trash content to their own audience.

Therefore, don’t do it.

If you are producing content for Google, the algorithms may give you a spot in the top five and send some traffic your way. But your content should keep the readers there. Unless your readers or audiences are stupid, I recommend not betraying them with keyword-stuffed word salads.

The first step toward this is to conduct in-depth research. Learning and collecting relevant information about the topic you’re writing about should take an hour or so. At least. Use tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google itself to find out as much as you can.

People can tell if a content piece is good or trash after a minute or so. Good content earns their trust and trash content makes you forgettable.

As you may imagine, writing content is the most difficult part of all the four things you need to do to master SEO. At the same time, it is the most rewarding career path, speaking from experience.

I’ve talked more about how to make your content stick in an upcoming chapter in this book. But basically, do you feel like you’ve wasted your time after reading your draft? Do you think reading a different article on the same topic with an identical title from the internet will give you more information in a better way? 

If the answer to any of those questions is a “yes,” your content is mediocre. You have to outperform everyone else. That’s the business. And it is very doable. I’ve dedicated a whole section to leveling up your skills to become one of the best content writers.

3. Insert the keywords later

For the majority of my writing career, I’ve rarely paid any attention to the keywords. If there’s a primary keyword, I embed it a few times as it’s quite easy. But while typing out the words, keywords take 0% of my thinking bandwidth.

And the reason is simple — I have done enough research about the topic and whatnot so that the keywords come naturally in the flow of content.

You should aim for that as well. To make things easier, glance at the primary and secondary keywords before beginning a section, but don’t pay much attention to them when formulating the sentences in your head.

This will prevent you from communicating effectively. You’ll struggle to break things down and provide clear, actionable advice — a critical ingredient for sticky content.

After completing the draft, do a little “Ctrl + F” to check the diversity and density of keywords. If it’s low, tweak a few sentences here and there to fit them in. Incorporating them this way is much easier as you already know the flow of the content.

4. Build links like hell

Google runs on the research paper algorithm.

We give more importance to research papers that are cited more, come from reputable institutions, and are recent.

Similarly, Google prioritizes websites that are mentioned across the web in different domains.

The two other factors — domain authority and content recency — can be resolved swiftly. 

Domain authority increases with the number of backlinks, so this requires no attention. You can make it look like your content is recent by editing one word from a post and republishing it. Hide the publishing date or add the “updated on” date to make it more legit.

Content marketers and SEO specialists recommend earning links from high-value domains within your niche. That’s bullcrap. Any popular website is fine. 

Google rewarding websites with the highest citations (backlinks) is not a qualitative process. As long as the domain where you are mentioned has good authority and gets decent traffic (you can benchmark yourself), you are good to go.

The only folks who stress over the niche of the target domain believe that Google has a team that manually reviews the backlink quality. 

Of course, the downside is that you’ll probably receive some low-intent traffic that is primarily interested in your content, if at all. With experience, you can find opportunities to make the most out of these situations too, so fret not.

Wrapping Up

SEO has three pillars (according to me) — technical, content, and backlinks. The embedded links will take you to ChatGPT conversations outlining the operational workflow and tool suggestions.

Like I mentioned, the only difficult thing about SEO is that it tests your patience. The gains will come in 3-6 months of time, provided you stay true to the game.

I’ll see you in the next chapter.

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Next Chapter: 5 Tips to Ensure Your Content Is Useful

Previous Chapter: The Goals of a Content Writer

Index (Prologue): What is Content Writing