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Some answers here are already really good, but I think it could be valuable to have the perspective from someone who trained for these interviews very recently and got a job offer as a direct result. So I'm gonna one-up your question and tell you how you can get a job at Google and Facebook in 1 month (1 month's prep, that is.) By the way, brevity isn't my strong suit, so this post might take you a while to get through, but I promise it's worth it, and I'll do my best to answer questions you post in the comments about specifics, because I'm almost definitely going to forget to mention some important things (I prepped for the interviews some 5 months ago so this is based on my memory only.)I'm going to detail how I prepared for technical interviews in ~1 month, after which I got a job at Facebook. The process of getting an interview all the way up to getting an offer will probably take 1-2 months extra after that. For my own experience during the actual interview process, see Jimmy Saade's answer to What is the software engineering interview process like at Facebook London? Note that this is for the general Software Engineering position (in my case, new grad), and nothing specific like Android/iOS developer, or Infrastructure Engineer, or so on.The cool and not-so-convenient thing about tech interviews is that you really never know what you're going to get, so you have to be prepared for a huge range of possible topics, some of which are more likely to occur than others. I'll touch on these below and then outline some very important question-types that may arise and that you should be prepared to deal with.So let's say your interview is in one month. Here's how I would plan said month (assuming a full-time schedule). Note that this is what I would do (and did, actually), so it might not be the optimum approach for you, but I suggest working similarly and switching it up a bit based on how you feel you'd grasp concepts better (e.g. solve and code in parallel, as opposed to what I did which is solve everything then code everything...)Days -∞ to 0 - PrerequisitesI assume that you have taken an algorithms course and know your way around major data structures including but not limited to: binary trees, binary search trees, hash tables, heaps, stacks, queues, graphs, lists, tries... as well as all algorithms related to them (insert, delete, search, find, find max, find min...) and the time complexity for each of these, at least at a high level. For graphs you need to know searches (BFS and its properties, DFS and its properties including cycle detection and the like) and shortest path algorithms (Dijkstra, Bellman-Ford, and A*) at a bare minimum. If you don't know all these, along with Dynamic Programming, you're going to need longer than a month. Pick up Introduction to Algorithms (CLRS) and start studying them first. (Update: I posted an answer here: Jimmy Saade's answer to What should I know from CLRS 3rd edition book if my aim is to get into Google? in regards to which parts of CLRS are relevant for technical interviews.) This is the easy part, as it's all academic and it's just expected that you know all of it. The part that follows below (Day 1 onwards) is the actually valuable part that I can offer you.I also assume that you know a programming language like C++ (or Java) and the built-in functions which actually make it useful (i.e. STL or its Java equivalents). (Update 2: I posted info relevant to this here: Jimmy Saade's answer to What are the most important concepts in C and C++ that should be learnt and understood before a programming interview?). If you don't know STL, spend time learning vectors, maps, sets, unordered maps, unordered sets, queues, stacks, and the entire "algorithm" library (seriously, all of it). These are essentially implementations of what you just learned in CLRS, so that if you need to use a heap you won't actually start to code one during an interview (just use a map or priority queue). You also need to know how to implement a linked list, BST, and a trie in 5 minutes flat, which is a lot easier than it sounds (just build a Node class and an insert function and for interview purposes, you're good.)I do not assume that you know anything about the following topics: parallel programming, computer networks (HTTP/TCP/IP/Ethernet), operating systems/scheduling, threads/processes/parallelism/concurrency, assembly, hardware and hardware-descriptive languages, or whatever else. While these are all valuable concepts to know as a computer scientist (as are machine learning and AI and others), the chances that they come up are close to none unless you state them as skills on your resume, so your time is better spent elsewhere (i.e. working on the topics below). You do need to have some awareness of distributed computing, though, so scroll down to the System Design section for that and make sure you read the MapReduce paper at the very least.Day 1 - The BookBuy this book: Elements of Programming Interviews. Phew. That was hard.In all seriousness, this is the best book on the subject in my opinion, and I'm actually really surprised so little people know about it or use it. (I have no affiliation with this book.) The collection of questions is excellent and to-the-point, it is large (300+ problems, which is the most I've seen in one book), they focus on the right concepts (e.g. several problems are on binary search, which is extremely likely to come up in an interview - more so than any other algorithm), and their answers (and the code provided) are almost all correct and excellent. I say "almost" because there are 1 or 2 problems which have much simpler solutions than the book details, but it's not an issue, especially when you compare it with other programming interview books, which have several answers which are downright incorrect. Plus the online support community is pretty good, with Java code available for all problems (the book has them in C++ only) and an online forum for discussions over at Home - Elements of Programming Interviews. They also forgo all the 'teaching' stuff that other books have where they try to teach you big-O notation and data structures, and focus almost completely on the problems part, which is much, much, much, much more important. The big-O notation and data structures you should learn from CLRS, which is the best resource for them, period. No other book, especially not programming interview books, come close to its quality in teaching that stuff.I also know (through various sources) that several of these problems are actually asked as-is (or in a disguised form) during interviews, which shows how on-point it is. (I imagine a reason for that may actually be its low popularity compared to other interview books, as companies ban questions that are 'out there' from being asked in interviews, which is why you probably won't see questions from Cracking the Coding Interview.) If this happens to you, however, I suggest you tell your interviewer, as it's very easy for them to tell if you know the problem before or not, and if you just recite the answer it defeats the purpose of the interview. Luckily for me, I wasn't asked any of the problems I'd done from the book.Days 2-14 - Algorithms StageGo through the book chapter by chapter, one chapter per day[1], starting at Chapter 5, ending at Chapter 19. Do every single problem. All of them. (To be completely honest, I might've skipped a few, but this was more by accident than anything else, and I definitely did like 98%+ of them.) Don't code, solve the problems only (i.e. find the algorithm). Give yourself a deadline per problem, depending on how hard the problem is (for example, 10 minutes for non-ninja[2] problems, 20 minutes for gray-ninja problems, 30-40 minutes for black-ninja problems) - if you haven't found the solution by then, look at the answer and understand it. If you don't you won't improve. It's important to think of the problems on your own, because it's the way of thinking that matters, as you can't go and recite the book on interview day. If you found a solution, make sure it's correct, and that you have thought of all corner cases.Note 1: The new version of the book (which I linked to) has all the ninja problems in a separate chapter (Ch. 22). This, in my opinion, is a terrible idea. The book I had had the problems which are currently in Ch. 22 spread across the book, each in its relevant chapter. I suggest you go through the relevant ninja problems of each chapter while doing said chapter. For example, on Day 2, do Chapter 5, and the Chapter 5-related problems in Chapter 22. On Day 3, do Chapter 6, and the Chapter 6-related problems in Chapter 22, and so on. I believe the problems in Ch. 22 are ordered accordingly (the ninja problems of Ch. 5 come first, then those of Ch. 6, and so on), so this shouldn't be too hard, but I'm not 100% sure as I have the older copy of the book.Note 2: I sometimes spent hours on a single problem, just because I thought the problem was really interesting and I insisted on cracking it myself. I find these random endeavors useful in the long run, as it develops your critical thinking a lot more than the easier problems, but it also takes time, so you likely can't do this for every problem, if you even want to do it at all.Days 14-24 - Coding StageRepeat the book, this time with coding. You already know the answers, so you should be able to remember the algorithm for each problem pretty quickly (if you don't, look it up. It happens, and it can happen sometimes even if you'd previously figured the problem out by yourself.) This is the coding stage, so don't waste time re-deriving algorithms.I do not suggest you code all problems, especially if you're experienced with ACM-ICPC, TopCoder, or Codeforces and the like (and really, if you're familiar enough with STL, you probably have a decent skill set). Only write the code for problems you feel have complex algorithms, a new data structure you haven't used before (e.g. unordered map for hashing maybe), problems with tricky corner cases (binary search is at the top of this list as its variants are asked often and can be much trickier than you think) or a programming concept you're not comfortable with (these include, but are not limited to, operator overloading, custom comparators, custom hash functions, custom == functions, and much more...) If a problem proves tricky for you, or you implemented it in a way which you feel isn't optimal, look at the solutions the book provides, which are excellent and clean, and will teach you all of the above-mentioned concepts. I suggest you mimic their style of writing code a bit. Some important-if-obvious notes are: use descriptive variable names (none of that 1-letter-variable-name crap) and indent properly, and don't forget to close parentheses and brackets.I also suggest you code all problems from the Greedy Algorithms chapter and almost all ninja-marked problems. The Dynamic Programming chapter is also important if you're not familiar with DP, and can be tough to grasp, so make sure you give it its time.Day 25 - Onto more questionsSo now that you've exhausted the best question reserve and are comfortable enough to step into an interview, you... need to prep even more. Go to Google Interview Questions (Career Cup). This is a dangerous place. Some very good problems exist, but there's also a class of problems that my ACM trainer likes to call "Chuck Norris problems": Problems written where the OP has no idea what's going on and suggests the interviewer required linear time for problems that clearly cannot be done in linear time (like this, which is clearly not linear time: http://www.careercup.com/question?id=14951746), or similar.Now that you've finished Elements of Programming Interviews, you should be easily be able to differentiate between good problems and terrible problems. On Day 25, go through "all" (the last 20 pages or so) the Google Questions (even if you're preparing for Facebook) and make a list of the ones you deem 'good', and by 'good' I mean problems you feel might have actually been asked in a Google interview. You know the question style from the book, so you should be able to tell which are legit and which are questionable. I assume you should have a list of something like 80-120 questions in the end, some simple, some not so much.Also note that very few problems actually have correct answers posted on the site, so mainly you'll have to rely on your know-how to figure them out and make sure they're correct, but given your previous prep you won't find it too difficult to know when you should be sure of your answer and when you shouldn't. This is actually valuable prep for the actual interview, which is a similar experience.Days 26-30 - Solving Career Cup QuestionsSolve all the problems you jotted down on Day 25. Find the algorithm. If you feel it's too difficult, seek help. If you feel it's impossible or the best solution is exponential time, it really might be that the OP was mistaken. Shake it off, move on to another problem. If you still feel like it, code some of the more challenging problems.Several of the Career Cup questions are similar to ones in the book, so you shouldn't have too much trouble with most problems.Day 30.5 - Skip Lists (Google-only)I've heard that Google has recently gotten into the habit of asking about Skip Lists (not sure why). Watch this video:and understand it and know the analysis of the expected run times. After that, implement and test your very own Skip List. I did this just to practice and because Skip Lists are interesting anyway.To be honest, Google can be pretty unpredictable with their questions sometimes, in my experience. They might ask general questions about object-oriented programming or computer networking, Linux commands like grep, theoretical things like the proof of the sorting lower bound, coding questions that rely on some math concept you may have forgotten to be solved, or in-depth programming language questions (e.g. functors/operator overloading in C++). I guess it depends on your resume and what you claim to be proficient in, so my advice is not to put anything on there that you’re not at least somewhat proficient in. It helps to have a degree in Computer Science or Electrical and Computer Engineering, really, just based on the huge variety in the possible questions. I suggest a read-through of Get that job at Google (Steve Yegge) and Five Essential Phone Screen Questions (Steve Yegge). You should probably know most of the topics covered here (I wouldn’t put my money on things like threads/processes/parallelism coming up unless you explicitly state it on your resume, though.) Most of the coding questions in the second link are too easy to come up in an interview, I think, so don’t get too excited by them, and I’d skip the “Special Fast Track Version” section. It’s humorous but I thought it’s way too cynical and off-point. Your choice of text editor, knowledge of OS, or knowledge of one vs. multiple languages will not, in and of themselves, make you fail an interview.On a small note, though I believe Google may ask a lot of non-algorithmic questions as above, the bulk of the interview will still be data structures/algorithms/coding, so all the other things mentioned in Yegge’s blog you should know, but they’re not the main focus.Day 31 - The Non-Technical StuffOkay, so I'm cheating a bit by adding Day 31, but you should also take a day or so to prepare for the non-technical part of the interviews, especially if you're interviewing at Facebook, where there's a non-technical interview. First, prepare questions you want to ask your interviewers about Facebook and about their job and what they do all day. See my Facebook London post for more examples on this. Second, think over your experiences in college/work/whatever - projects you've worked on, teams you've worked with or managed, conflicts you've addressed, hard bugs you've had to deal with, etc. Google-search "behavioral questions" and you'll find thousands of possible questions.Prepare a non-generic answer for "Why Facebook" (hint: the fast pace and culture, the great talent in the company, the mission to connect the world...) and "Why Google" (hint: the diversity of the endeavors, the awesomeness of search and Android, the mission to do awesome things, the company culture...). I wasn't asked these questions in either company (to my disappointment since I was really passionate about both and couldn't wait to show it), but I squeezed in my interest while asking my questions to the interviewer, so use that opportunity if you really want to impart something that you didn't get the chance to.Tips for the InterviewsNumbers 3,4,7,8,9 are the most important points.You might be nervous before an interview, but it'll pass. I was nervous before every single interview. Once the interviewer stepped in and we started talking, I generally had a blast because I really loved talking with them and solving these kinds of problems. Try your best not to be too nervous: do mock interviews and the like. I also recommend scheduling interviews in an increasing-priority order, so that you get used to it and find out your shortcomings by the time you reach your most-wanted company.Practice coding without a compiler/on a whiteboard/paper. I did neither, but I have the C++ syntax memorized and I'm used to coding on a paper in ACM competitions, so you might not need to do this if you're already comfortable enough with your favorite language (you only need to know one language well, by the way, as long as it's reasonably well-known, like C++/Java/Python. They let you use whatever language you like during the interview.)Corner cases can kill you. You really have to practice on finding and dealing with corner cases, and/or recognizing what I call "corner-case-prone problems". Some problems are dead simple algorithmically but can be very tricky to code, and I got 2 of these problems, once in my Google phone interviews, and once in my Facebook phone interviews.After finding the algorithm, stop, pause, and think about how to code it, before you actually do. This is especially true for the harder problems, and I would've failed one of my interviews had I not done this, and as a result, would never have gotten a job at FB. I also might've passed an interview at Google which I failed, if I'd taken my advice in this step at the time.Think out loud about algorithms/ideas as you come up with them. It's fine to pause and think quietly for a bit, but don't stand there for 3 minutes without a word. Always at least give the simple solution, which very well might not have a great run-time, but it won't hurt. I did it in all my interviews no matter how simple the answer was, but I said them directly and noted that there's probably a better solution, then proceeded to think of that. (e.g: Okay, to search a sorted array, we can scan it linearly, but this is an O(n) solution and there's likely something faster). Also, don't be cocky about it (question yourself out loud until you're sure of your method and have a rough proof that your method works). Don't argue with your interviewer. 99.99% of the time, they're right, and you're wrong. One possible exception to this is if they’re challenging your code: they’re either really pointing out a bug to you, or trying to make it seem that way to see how confident you are in your code and if you’ll agree blindly or protest that your code is actually correct (if this happens, don’t panic, just think well about your answer before you give it.)Don't talk through your code line by line as you write it. Interviewers know how to read your code and what if-statements and for-loops are. Only speak about the general structure of the code (which you should've mentioned before anyway, as per Tip #4) while coding. Do, however, mention what you're doing in intricate lines of code (for example, if you want to test if 'x' is a power of 2 via "if(x & (x-1))==0", you might want to mention that.)Questions are so often underspecified, and this is a huge weakness of Elements of Programming Interviews: all problems are specified completely, so you have next to no training on this. Always think of questions you might ask or conditions that might make your algorithm fail if not true. Some examples are: Are all numbers positive? Are they distinct? What is the type of the input (integer/double...)? Can you revisit a grid cell? The book has questions where these properties are specified explicitly in the question: think about what would happen if these conditions weren't there: the solution often breaks down.Don't give up if you don't think of the answer directly. In my last Facebook interview, I got the most challenging problem yet, and it took me about 5 minutes to get to the answer, and I ended up hired. That was actually possibly *the* interview that got me hired, and it was also the one I most enjoyed.Two really important concepts to know well are binary search (and its variants) and searching the state-space using Breadth-First-Search to find some shortest sequence of 'moves' (like this problem: ACM-ICPC Live Archive - Kermit the Frog). Both come up very often.Luck matters. The interview process isn't perfect, and you might not pass it even if you're really good, as it depends on your interviewers and what questions you get (and what type of questions you're strong in, etc.) You can mitigate this factor a lot by prepping a huge amount, but it's always there, and it's important to know. I suggest you read Get that job at Google (Steve Yegge's blog) if you want some more detail about this factor.Ignore Ch. 20 and 21 in the book. They're not great. (Maybe read through Ch. 21 a bit to get an idea but that's it.) Scroll down to the System Design section if you also have to prepare for a system design interview.Undersell yourself on your CV (or at least, don't oversell yourself), especially if applying through a referral. If you write 'expert in C++', they're going to call up their senior-most C++ engineer to get you to crash and burn. I've never met anyone who got anything related to multithreading and parallelism in an interview for SWE, except one person who listed it as a skill. And lo and behold, he was asked about it, and it didn’t go so well.Oftentimes, you'll get a problem which is a variant of a problem you've seen before in the book or on Career Cup, or is the same problem but in a "disguised form" (i.e. it's worded differently but it has the same or a mostly similar solution.) Be careful about these subtle differences; you might figure out (or think that you've figured out) the solution for the problem because you found it very similar to one you've seen before, but a small difference in the problem statement actually means its solution is really really different. As an example, check out question 17.5 - Search for a sequence in a 2D array - in Elements of Programming Interviews. It includes the statement "It is acceptable to visit an entry in A more than once." With it, the solution is DP. If that statement is not included (i.e. it's not acceptable to visit an entry more than once), the solution is branch-and-bound, and there's no DP involved at all. If you wrongly answer DP instead of branch-and-bound or vice versa, the interviewer will know you've seen the other problem before and think you've just memorized the solution, so that's probably enough by itself to give you a "no-hire" recommendation from that interviewer. (I'd also venture a guess that that statement wouldn't be stated by the interviewer at all first, exactly for this reason, and you'd have to ask whether or not you can visit an entry more than once, as per tip #7. The goal is to see whether or not you'll figure out that there's a huge difference in solutions depending on the interviewer's answer to this question.)Again, I probably forgot a whole lot of stuff, so if there's anything specific you want to know, leave a comment. I'll also do my best to keep this post updated with whatever other important things I remember later.System DesignEven though I didn't have one myself, I did prepare for the System Design interviews. I prepared by visiting this site: Hired In Tech, which is decent (not great) and by reading several papers on this site, straight from Google: Distributed Systems and Parallel Computing, mainly the first MapReduce paper (near the very end of the page) and the Chubby paper. MapReduce is very important and I really suggest you read it and understand how it works. After those steps, look up databases, specifically SQL and NoSQL, get acquainted with the CAP theorem, scalability topics, and maybe read up on Hadoop and some problems you can solve with it (Hadoop In Practice is a decent book for these purposes). Try some questions like the "Design a URL shortener" question on Hired In Tech, or something larger scale like "Design a web search engine" or "Design Google Maps", all questions which may be asked (also check Ch. 21 of the book for possible questions and a small idea of how to answer them - though the book's answers aren't great.) But in general, for the system design interview, practicing on questions is less meaningful than fundamentally understanding the above concepts and knowing how to discuss them, as the entire interview is something like a quick conversation between you and the interviewer, where he/she will change the question specifications on the fly to see how you deal with different scenarios.Final AdviceSo, if you really want that job, it’s going to take some time and dedication, but hopefully it’s the enjoyable kind. I personally really enjoyed preparing these kinds of questions and found that, job aside, I really learned a lot and got a good deal of knowledge out of the preparation, and you probably will too.My final piece of advice is to just go into the interview and not be stressed out (this is obviously easier said than done). The engineers want you to be good and they want to hire you – hiring is a pretty expensive process. Some may be easygoing, and some may be less forgiving, but in all cases, the interview is very similar to a conversation between two engineers, and that’s exactly what these companies strive for the interview to be, so just treat it that way, and if you’ve prepared well, it’ll show.[1] - One chapter per day is actually a bit slow since you're not coding, so for shorter chapters such as Chapters 5, 7, 8, 9, I suggest you do 2 per day, which is feasible.[2] - In Elements of Programming Interviews, non-ninja problems are standard problems, gray-ninja problems are somewhat difficult, and black-ninja problems are difficult.Disclaimer: This is my own opinion/advice, and is not endorsed by anyone else in any way.

Before I write anything on my own account, I loved this article and the links within it. It’s flat-out terrific and relevant to the discussion going here. Please give it a read.I also agree with Matthew Bates that we’re obligated to “fly our flag”. If you’re going to talk about fighting climate change, you have to walk the talk.To lead off, I believe that climate change is occurring, that human activity is a contributing factor but not the only factor, and that mitigation can be done prudently.That’s a pretty bland summary, and most of it lines up with most of the answers here. Here are some less bland statements that the other answers don’t touch on as much.Disclaimer: I work in solar energy. Specifically, I research the realities of electricity markets and new technologies and convey them to senior executives and potential clients. If you think that I’m unqualified to speak objectively because I’m immersed in hard data every day, you probably won’t like much of what I write.Here goes:The statement that renewables are too expensive compared to alternative generation is flat-out wrong. It’s just wrong. I can’t believe that so many educated, intelligent people are still repeating this claim.We get called anti-science because many of our arguments are crappy arguments. More on this below.We ought to be thinking about this from a risk mitigation standpoint.“Renewables are too expensive.”Renewables are not “too expensive”. I hear this all the time. It’s false from a basic understanding, i.e. $/kWh; it’s false from a more nuanced perspective of energy economics and externalized costs; it’s false when you look at the returns on invested capital…Here’s the latest report from Lazard on levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). Lazard is a respected investment bank, not a liberal think-tank. The graph on the front page and some of the charts are wonky, but they will give you a good approximation of how “expensive” (i.e. not very) renewables are. I say “approximation”, because Lazard has utility-scale PPA prices at $100/MWh.In Texas, where I live and work, Austin Energy signed a contract for 120 MW of solar from the East Pecos field at less than $40/MWh.I spent a month on-site at East Pecos. It was hot as all get-out.You know who else believes in lower renewables costs? This guy:Berkshire Hathaway has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into renewables. It isn’t because they’re “hippie-dippie environmentalists”, as my twin brother would say. Other major investors? Big utilities, which are about as conservative as it gets.I don’t want to beat a dead horse. It’s not reasonable to expect people to know developments at the cutting edge of an industry that isn’t their own. Solar prices fell 30% last year in a very short span of time, and even the research consultancies are struggling to catch up.But the bottom line is: if you think that renewables aren’t cost-competitive against fossil fuel generation -accounting only for hard benefits like hedging against fuel price volatility, not for shareholder perceptions, environmental benefits, etc. - then you’re way behind the times.If someone wants to put forward a “renewables are heavily subsidized” argument, do it in the comments. I’ll be happy to highlight the states and countries where renewables win without subsidies, but I’ll probably go on a diatribe about subsidies for fossil fuels as well, and that doesn’t fit here.2. We make crappy argumentsLook. I get it. People are angry at being called “anti-science”, at being demanded to fall in line and comply, at policies pushed by liberals whose costs will fall on non-liberals. That 97% stat requires a lot of work before it leads to a useful conclusion.Science is inherently democratic. Anyone can read the papers and studies and form his or her own conclusions.But a lot of the arguments - even those in this question, which are typically enjoyable - are based on unsubstantiated claims, faulty logic, and personal attacks. Let me highlight one of the other answers to this question, because I loved the answer otherwise and because the writer seems like an intelligent and friendly guy:“Realistically speaking, taking sufficient measures to effectively halt and/or reverse the man-made effects of climate changes would lead to a standard of life akin to that of (or below) third world countries for everybody, and would lead to millions of deaths.”It sounds like a measured statement. But there’s no evidence to support it.Here’s what the International Energy Agency claims is necessary in terms of climate funding to meet the stated goals of world leaders and avoid the worst effects of climate change: IEA: $13.5 Trillion Climate Investment Needed By 2030. Set aside for a moment whether it’s actually necessary or not. The claim is that spending it would lead to a huge decrease in standards of living.Here’s a graph of GDP per capita of the U.S. and China. I’ll come back to this one.And here are GDP forecasts: Domestic product - GDP long-term forecast - OECD Data.The IEA is asking for $840 billion per year. World GDP in the OECD - in other words, rich countries only - will average about $47 trillion annually between 2015 and 2030. 1.7% of OECD GDP would be sufficient to meet that pledge.Does that sound like it’s going to cause “millions of deaths” to you?That money doesn’t evaporate. Fighting climate change means investing in jobs, factories, training, research, education. China gets this, which is a big part of the reason it’s spending hundreds of billions of dollars on renewables.It’s called “investment” for a reason.To be clear - renewables will not stop climate change. More on this below. It’s taken more than a century to build up a world energy system that runs on cheap fossil fuels. It will take something similar to build a decarbonized energy system. Renewables can help, and they will. But they aren’t sufficient by themselves.But when your basement is flooded, do you say “Fans aren’t sufficient to dry this out?” Or do you turn all the fans on full blast while you start throwing down towels and looking for Grandma’s heater?Stuff like this drives me up the wall. A lot of conservative arguments have the broad points right: “Where’s the return on investment for fighting climate change?” “Can a liberal government be trusted to spend my money wisely?” “Aren’t subsidies a poor way to promote sound policies?” “Why do all the policies suggested benefit liberal politicians and hurt me and my neighbors?”Conservatives have a lot of excellent points about the wisdom and necessity of implementation and mitigation. But we get the details totally wrong. And that kills our credibility.This is what leads to the “anti-science” stuff. Both sides can write off the yahoos who claim that a snowball on the Senate floor is proof of anything. Both sides understand that Big Oil has hundreds of billions of dollars to protect, and it’s going to do whatever it takes to defend its interests and the interests of its shareholders.But when conservatives make sweeping claims and emotional appeals that don’t stand up to scrutiny, we do ourselves no favors.Here are some more examples:We can’t trust the scientists because they have an agenda. If you don’t trust them, then read the science and explain why it’s flawed. Some conservatives do this; most do not.Like Matthew Bates, I’m a Catholic. My priests have an agenda. According to Scripture, Christ was very clear about promoting an agenda. It’s an agenda I wholeheartedly support and have devoted my life to following; that doesn’t make it a non-agenda.“Judge the tree by its fruits.” If you don’t agree with the science, fine. Say so. Don’t vote or fund or support policies you don’t believe in. But an ad hominem attack is ad hominem even if it may be true.Nuclear would solve our problems, but liberals oppose it, so they’re not genuine. Nuclear will not solve climate change. As others correctly note, renewable energies will not solve climate change. Recycling will not solve climate change. If we’re going to get serious about this, then everyone is going to have to do his or her part - some more than others, according to desire, ability and resources, but it’s going to be a team effort. I’m not proposing solar panels in Siberia, just like I’m not suggesting we frack in the Everglades.With all that said: I support nuclear where it makes sense. It’s definitely an option. But the vast majority of liberals live in or near cities. Of course they oppose nuclear. Nuclear and cities are a terrible combination. Nuke also requires enormous capital expenditure and a transmission infrastructure. If you’re going to do that, you may as well do wind or solar, assuming it’s windy or sunny.If you want to go nuke, go nuke. As above, skip the ad hominem stuff.And my personal favorite…3. Risk mitigationThis argument takes several forms. Chris Everett put it well - we know warming is happening, humans have something to do with it, that “something” is probably a lot, but it won’t be apocalyptic and we should be skeptical of claims to the contrary.In uncertain situations, diversification becomes MORE important, not less.You don’t have to know the precise degree to which humans cause climate change to know it’s a problem. You don’t need to know the magnitude of the problem to know it’s a problem. You need to get these things directionally correct, and that’s all. And even if you don’t know, you need to plan for the future.This is the underlying principle of insurance. You don’t buy it because you’re certain something bad will happen. You buy it because you’re uncertain.This jams another stake into the heart of “X, Y or Z won’t solve the problem, so we shouldn’t do X, Y, or Z.” We need to stop looking at single technologies as if they are THE answer, and start looking at a slate of approaches that are cost-effective, affordable (or better yet, attractive investments), reasonable to implement, and that work with local communities and geographies.It doesn’t matter if the climate was warmer X million years ago. X million years ago, the world wasn’t full of people!If there’s reasonable doubt that a problem is in fact a problem, okay. But does anyone seriously believe that overflowing landfills are a good thing? That if the world is getting hotter, this won’t have some effect on water scarcity, and that water scarcity won’t be a big deal? That oil spills will never happen again, and that when they do, they won’t ruin coastal ecosystems and livelihoods?This applies to motivations, too. We can agree on solutions without agreeing about why the solutions matter.I’m a SCUBA diver. I care a great deal about coastal reefs. They are some of the most beautiful landscapes I have seen, every bit as wonderful as the mountains of Patagonia or the fjords of New Zealand. I’m also an Eagle Scout. Environmentalism is a big deal to me.My boss at my solar startup worked in natural gas for decades. He could not care less about the coral reefs. But he’s a Texan, and he believes in being a good steward of your land and your community.We argue all the time. We work together well.You don’t have to agree on everything. If the basement looks like it’s going to flood, you work together.Last point. China and India.Yes, China and India are responsible for an outsize share of emissions. Yes, action in the U.S. won’t make a big difference to emissions.But the Chinese and Indians are doing their part. They’re scaling up their activities like gangbusters. But China’s GDP per capita, per my graph before, is a fraction of US GDP.Developing countries need help - technology, finance, political cover - to accomplish their goals and strategies. Sitting back and claiming that we don’t have to take action because we’re not responsible for the majority of emissions doesn’t just ignore historical realities. It’s also a dick move.I don’t believe climate change will be apocalyptic. I don’t believe it’s the world’s greatest problem. I don’t fight it because it’s going to affect my quality of life.I do believe that it will hit the world’s poorest the hardest. When I worked in Hawaii, I met diplomats from many of the world’s island nations. As one, they are convinced that climate change is serious.I would be, too, if my country was in danger of shrinking. Or if my citizens were dying by the hundreds of thousands from air pollution.If you want to say “Climate change is not my problem”, so be it. But if you’re going to say “Climate change is not a problem”, you need to get out more.End rant. Hope I didn’t offend anybody.

By - SEOSEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single timeSEO In One DaySEO 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.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.SEO is very simple, and unless you’re a very large company it’s probably not worth hiring somebody else to do. It’s also something that has a lot of faux veneer around it. Consultants want to make it seem incredibly difficult so that they can charge you a lot, but I'll show you exactly how to do it, step by step, and you'll win.How Google Works 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.First, we're going to reverse engineer what Google is doing, and then simply follow their rules, picking the right keywords, and get your sites ranked.The Early Days of GoogleThe 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.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.Google TodayGoogle 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 Wikipedia is probably worth about 10,000 links from sites that don’t have much authority.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.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 every single time with less effort than you probably think is required.Gaming the SystemGoogle is a very 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.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 Scraperbox, instructions to create spam or spin content, linkwheels, PBNs, hacking domains, etc.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.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.On-Page SEOThe first step in getting our site ready to rank is making it clear to Google what our site is about.For now we’re going to focus our home page (our landing page) on ranking for one keyword 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.Keyword Research 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.The Long TailThere’s a concept we need to be familiar with known as the “long tail.”If we were to graph “popularity” of most things with “popularity” being the Y axis and the rank order being the Y axis, we’d get something like a power law graph:https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BJTF2S1LVXK5ig75There 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.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 long tail.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.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.The keywords we’re looking for we will refer to as “long-tail keywords.”Finding the Long TailIn order to find our perfect long-tail keywords, we’re going to use a combination of four tools, all of which are free.The process looks like this:Use UberSuggest, KeywordShitter and a little bit of brainstorming to come up with some keywordsExport those keywords to the Google Keyword Planner to estimate traffic levelSearch for those keywords with the SEOQuake chrome extension installed to analyze the true keyword difficultyDon’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).Step 1: Brainstorming and Keyword GeneratingIn 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.So since this is a book about growth hacking, I’m going to list out a few keywords that would be a good fit:Growth hackingGrowth marketingInternet marketingGrowth hacking guideGrowth hacking bookBook about growth hackingWhat is growth hackingGrowth hacking instructionsThat’s a good enough list to start. If you start running out of ideas go ahead and check out The Bulk Keyword Tool. 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.Now we’ll plug each keyword into UberSuggest. When I plug the first one — “growth hacking” — in, I get 246 results.Clicking “view as text” will let us copy and paste all of our keywords into a text editor and create an enormous list.https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BkT8uUYV3p2hsXCI.Go through that process with each keyword you came up with.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.Step 2: Traffic EstimatingNow 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.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.Google Keyword PlannerThe Google Keyword Planner is a tool meant for advertisers, but it does give us some rough idea of traffic levels.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.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.Once you’ve logged in, select “Get search volume data and trends.”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.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.Now what we’re going to do is decide what traffic we want to go after.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.Go to service for competitors research, shows organic and Ads keywords for any site or domain and enter your URL, looking at the total backlinks in the third column:https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*aV3sF59d8Bt3Aqqw.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.Number of Backlinks:Maximum Difficulty<30:40<100:40–50<1000:50–701000+:70+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.Exact MatchOne important thing to note is that Google gives us this volume as “exact match” 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.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.Here are mine:growth hacking strategiesgrowth hacking techniquesgrowth hacking 101growth hacking instagramgrowth hacking twitterMine all look the same, but that may not necessarily be the case.Keyword TrendsUnfortunately the “keyword difficulty” that Google gives us is based on paid search traffic, not on natural search traffic.First, let’s use Google Trends 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:https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*10BiNkXI3C3mEvYb.The ones I’m most excited about are purple and red, which are “Growth hacking techniques” and “Growth hacking Twitter.”Now we’ll take a deeper look at what the competition is like for those two keywords.Manual Keyword Difficulty AnalysisIn 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.This process gets a lot easier if you download the SEOQuake Chrome extension. Once you’ve done that, do a Google search and you’ll notice a few changes.With SEOQuake turned on the relevant SEO data of each site is displayed below each search result.We’re going to alter what is displayed, so in the left-hand sidebar click “parameters” and set them to the following:https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*qVN8Re6-d0RqvJ07.Now when you search, you’ll see something like this:https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*9c46odS5ItXx3F5X.SEOQuake adds a ranking number, and the following at the bottom:The Google Index: This is how many pages from this base URL Google has indexedPage Links: 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)URL Links: The number of pages pointing to any page on the base URLAge: The first time the page was indexed by the Internet ArchiveTraffic: A very rough monthly traffic number for the base URLLooking at these we can try to determine approximately what it would take to overtake the sites in these positions.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.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.Keep in mind that we’re going to optimize our page for this exact 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.Here are a couple of examples so you can see how you should think through these things, starting with “Growth hacking techniques.”https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*YErpxe0guQCv8f2E.Entrepreneur - Start, run and grow your business. is definitely a big name, and “growth hacking techniques” is in the title explicitly. This will be difficult to beat, but there are no links in the SEMRush index that point direct to the page.(By the way, I wonder how hard it would be to write an article for Entrepreneur - Start, run and grow your business. — I could probably do that and build a few links to that easily, even linking to my site in the article).https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*hJxs4ukw38FD_rzA.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.https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*FXNrc-YR8rEbVY90.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.But 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.”Let’s jump down a ways to see how hard it would be to get on the front page.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.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.(Note: After doing this a few more times I learned that I could probably get Austen Allred’s Blog toward the top of "growth hacking press," so I changed the on-page optimization of one of those pages to focus on that keyword, and we'll see how it goes.On-Page SEONow 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.Here is a simple checklist you can follow to see if your content is optimized.On-Page SEO Checklist☐ Your keyword is in the <title> tag, ideally at the front (or close to the front) of the tag☐ Your keyword is close to the beginning of the <title> tag (ideally the first words)☐ The title tag contains less than the viewable limit of 65 characters (optional but recommended)☐ Your keyword is in the first <h1> tag (and your page has an <h1> tag)☐ If your page contains additional header tags (<h2>, <h3>, etc) your keyword or synonyms are in most of them☐ Any images on the page have an <alt> tag that contain your chosen keyword☐ Your keyword is in the meta description (and there is a meta description)☐ There is at least 300 words of text on the page☐ Your keyword appears in the URL (if not the homepage)☐ Your keyword appears in the first paragraph of the copy☐ Your keyword (or synonyms — Google recognizes them now) is used other times throughout the page☐ Your keyword density is between .5% and 2.5%☐ The page contains dofollow links to other pages (this just means you’re not using nofollow links to every other page)☐ The page is original content not taken from another page and dissimilar from other pages on your siteIf 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.All we have left now is off-page optimization.Off-Page SEOOff-Page SEO is just a fancy way to say links. (Sometimes we call them backlinks, but it’s really the same thing.)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.Link JuiceSEOs 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.”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.Checking Link JuiceThere 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.Google crawls most popular pages several times per day, but they don’t want you manipulating them, so they update their index pretty slowly.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.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.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.To use those there are a wide variety of tools: If you have a budget I’d go with Competitor Research Tools & SEO Backlink Checker 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.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.Link StructureHTML links look something like this:<a href=”http://www.somesite.com” title=”keyword”>Anchor text</a>Where http://www.somesite.com 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.”In addition to the amount of link juice a page has, the relevance of the anchor text matters.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.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.Internal StructureGenerally 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.Some say the ideal link structure for a site is something like this:https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*tWHFIzBzG7zq6uii.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.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.We have just one more thing to go over before we start getting those first links pointing to our site.Robots.txt, disavow, nofollow, and other minutia###Most of SEO at this point is now 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.Robots.txtAlmost every site has a page at http://url.com/robots.txt — even google has one.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.)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.If you add a trailing / to it (e.g. disallow: /somepage/) it will also disallow all child pages.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.DisavowGoogle 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.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.NofollowA link can have a property called “nofollow” such as this:<a href=”http://www.somesite.com” title=”keyword” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor text</a>.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.RedirectsIf 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.Importantly, Google views www.austenallred.com and Austen Allred’s Blog as different sites. So decide on one, and redirect all of one type to the other.Canonical URLsIf you have two pages that are virtually the same, you can add something like <link rel=”canonical href=”https://www.someurl.com/somepage”> to say “hey, treat this page as if it were that page instead, but I don’t want to 301 it.”And with that, we’re ready to build our first links.Link BuildingLink building is where SEO really starts to matter, and where a lot of people end up in a world of hurt.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.If not, at least in the beginning, we’re going to manually create just a few.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.Web 2.0s 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.Some of the easiest are:Twitter (in your bio)Github (the readme of a repo)YouTube (the description of a video — it has to actually get views)Wordpress (yes, you’ll have to actually create a blog)Blogger (same here)TumblrUpvote-based sites (HackerNews, GrowthHackers, The Smartest Inbound Marketing Community Online | Inbound.org, Reddit, etc.)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 really build something out. That’s a lot of content and time, but you have to do it the right way.We generally keep a bigger list of Web 2.0s here. Some may be out of date, but you should probably only build a half dozen to a dozen Web 2.0s anyway.Expired DomainsAnother 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 Expired Domains | Daily Updated Domain Lists for 364 TLDs. (Google “expired domains” and you’ll find dozens of sites monitoring them.)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.Link IntersectionAnother 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.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.Your First Drip of Traffic — Becoming an Authority SiteAwesome — you have a site that converts well, your SEO is in place, ready for you to drive traffic. Now what?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.We’re going to fix that.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?Well this is the weeder-out chapter of growth hacking.Take a Long-Term View 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.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.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.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.Just to give you some idea of scale, I’ve seen this process drive over 500,000 visits per day, though the build up to that level took almost a full year. What could you do with 500,000 visits per day?Monitoring AlertsTo 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.To do this we’re going to use software called BuzzBundle.BuzzBundle This software lets us do a few things: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 Allow us to leave a constructive comment that references our product or companyDisclaimer: This is not the SEO comment spam you’ve seen 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 bannedProductive CommentingWe’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:Be contextual. We are only going to talk about the topic presented in an article or tweet, and only mention our company when it naturally fits inContribute to the conversation. I should learn something or have value added to my life by reading your commentIf you do these two things a few changes will take place: First, you’ll notice that people click on your links because you’re a thoughtful person who likes to contribute. Second, people will respect your company because you’re a thoughtful person who likes to contribute.And with that disclaimer, we’ll move on to the nitty gritty of how this is done. Let’s fire up BuzzBundle and get to work.Accounts and PersonasThe 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.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.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.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.DisqusDisqus 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:Use a lot of different accounts, rotating IPs or using a proxy every two days or so Use your site URL as your “display name”Both of these work, but the second one is much easier in my view.UTM ParametersUsing 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.Link Shorteners 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.To keep it simple you can use a link shortener that 301s such as URL Shortener and Link Management Platform, 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.