Search Engine Optimization

Welcome to SEO Course for Beginners from Courses Buddy!

SEO stands for search engine optimization. And it’s the process of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine’s organic search results.

If you’re completely new to SEO, then it’s easiest to think of search engines as libraries. But instead of storing books, they store copies of websites and web pages.

So when you search for a query, the search engine will then look through all pages in its index and try to return the most relevant results. And SEO helps demonstrate to search engines that your page is that result.

Now, you might be thinking: why should I focus on SEO when there are so many other marketing mediums?

Well, there are 3 major things that attract marketers to search engine optimization and in my opinion, these 3 things make SEO the best traffic source. You’ll find out what they are in this free SEO course.

In this free SEO course, I’ll be talking to you about the fundamentals of SEO with a heavy focus on execution. And while it’s a beginner’s SEO course, I don’t want you to be fooled by the word “beginner.”

Even for an 8-figure business like ours, we don’t do anything crazy technical or complicated. Right from the start, we’ve stuck with the fundamentals of SEO that led to compounded growth.

Well, we’ll go over the basics of SEO and cover things like what it is, why it’s important and how it works. You’ll then move on to the next topic which is on keyword research.

Throughout these lessons, I’ll show you how to find keywords to target that can benefit your business. It’ll also set the foundation for the next topic, which is On-Page SEO.

In this topic, we’ll talk about optimizing your pages to rank for those keywords. The next topic will be on link building. This is one of Google’s most prominent ranking signals which has proven to contribute to higher rankings in search.

Finally, we’ll finish off the course with the basics of technical SEO, which will mostly be about best practices and website maintenance.

What is SEO?

Alright, let’s kick things off with the SEO basics.

We’ll talk about what search engine optimization is, why it’s important and how Google works. SEO stands for search engine optimization. And it’s the process of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine’s organic search results.

Now, let’s talk a bit about how they work.

If you’re completely new to SEO, then it’s easiest to think of search engines as libraries. But instead of storing books, they store copies of websites and web pages.

So when you search for a query, the search engine will then look through all pages in its index and try to return the most relevant results. And SEO helps demonstrate to search engines that your page is that result.

Now, you might be thinking: why should I focus on SEO when there are so many other marketing mediums? Well, there are three major things that attract marketers to search engine optimization and in my opinion, these three things make SEO the best traffic source.

1. Unlike paying for ads, search traffic is free.

2. Organic traffic is typically consistent once you’re ranking high. Whereas other mediums like social media and email marketing often result in traffic spikes that usually end up fading to nothing. And it makes sense because social media networks are designed to surface fresh content.

Emails often get marked as read, forgotten, or land in the spam box. Whereas search traffic is a result of users actively searching for information. And the number of searches for a given topic is typically consistent month to month.

3. You have the opportunity to reach massive audiences you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. In fact, as of October 2019 there were nearly 4.39 billion internet users around the world. And almost 4 billion of those people are Google users.

This is why search engine optimization is an 80 billion dollar industry and why marketers from all walks of life are adopting and pursuing it today.

Everyone wants their business to get discovered and SEO is the perfect way to do that.

Now, let’s briefly talk about how Google works. And there are two parts to this.

The first is crawling and indexation. And these two things are what actually allows Google to discover web pages and create their search index.

So to actually attain information, Google uses crawlers, also known as spiders, which gather publicly available information from all over the web. The spiders will start crawling from a list of known URLs called seeds.

They then follow the hyperlinks on those pages and crawl those newly discovered pages. And this process goes on and on, allowing them to collect a ton of information.

They then take all of this data back to Google’s servers to be added to their “search index.” And that’s what people like you and I are searching through when we key in a query in Google.

Now, if you were to search for something and Google returned every result that mentioned your words on the page, then you’d end up with really bad results. This brings us to the second part, which is Google’s ranking algorithm.

Google has hundreds of ranking signals and they make tweaks to their algorithm 500 to 600 times per year. So to be frank, no one knows exactly how their algorithm works. But they’ve given us clues and some guidelines to better understand the factors that are most important.

In addition, third-party companies like ours have done studies to test and better understand these factors. Now, I won’t bore you with over 200 ranking signals, many of which are just speculation at best, but I do want to cover a few of the most important factors that you’ll need to understand from a fundamental standpoint.

First are backlinks. Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another.

And Google has said on their How Search Works page that if other prominent websites link to a page, that’s proof to be a good sign that information is well trusted.

The easiest way to understand the value of a backlink is to think of them as votes. When a page receives a backlink, it’s essentially another website vouching for the content on the page. And the more “votes,” you get from credible sources, the higher the trust.

And we also studied the effect of backlinks on search traffic and found a clear positive correlation between backlinks from unique websites and a page’s organic traffic.

Second is search intent, which represents the reason behind a searcher’s query. And if you think of Google’s goal for search, their job is to return the most relevant results for any given query.

So with that said, you can discover search intent simply by looking at the top ranking pages for the query you want to rank for. For example, if you search for “slow cooker recipes,” you’ll see that the search results are mostly blog posts with a list of slow cooker recipes.

So if you try and rank a product page where you’re selling a slow cooker, you won’t be matching search intent and therefore, you won’t rank. Now, if we change the query to just “slow cooker,” you’ll see that the dominant types of pages are eCommerce category pages.

So if you try and rank your blog post of slow cooker recipes, then you probably won’t rank because you’re not matching search intent. This is a critical concept to understand and I’ll share a simple 3-step checklist you can use to determine search intent for any query in the next topic.

And third is content depth. Search engines are made up of computer programs.

So they can’t actually read and understand text like you and I would. Nevertheless, Google has poured billions of dollars into creating sophisticated technology that understands content to a certain degree.

But it’s your job as a content creator to provide context about the subject. For example, if you look at the top-ranking pages for the query “how to drive a car” you’ll find that they talk about things like fastening your seatbelt, familiarizing yourself with the gas and brake pedals, adjusting your seat and mirrors, and other things that a first-time driver may not know.

Basically, you want to be able to answer the searcher’s query the best that you possibly can. And naturally, it should lead to content that has depth.

Now, it’s important to note that depth doesn’t always translate to length.

For example, a topic like “how to turn off iPhone 12” doesn’t need to and shouldn’t be long. In fact, the top-ranking page is only 185 words. But the content itself solves the user’s query from start to finish.

Alright, so the basics are in this topic and it’s time to move on to keyword research.

Hey, welcome to the topic which is on keyword research.

In this first lesson, we’re going to talk about what keywords are and how to choose them.

Keywords in the Context of SEO

They’re simply just words and phrases that people type into search engines to find what they’re looking for. For example, if you were shopping for running shoes, you might search for keywords like “men’s running shoes” or simply just “running shoes.”

Now, keywords are actually super-important in SEO because it sets the entire foundation Keywords set the entire foundation for search engine optimization for search engine optimization.

The basic goal of SEO is to rank your pages for keywords that your target audience or customers are searching for. And if you’re not ranking for keywords that actually get searched, then your SEO efforts are kind of meaningless.

So keyword research is the process of finding keywords that people are inputting into search engines. And we’ll get into this process in the upcoming topics.

So how do you actually choose keywords that are worth targeting? How do you choose keywords worth targeting?

Let’s go to a checklist that should help you choose keywords effectively.

The first thing to check is if your keyword has search demand. Search demand represents the volume of monthly searches made for a keyword. And this is measurable with a keyword metric that we call “search volume.”

And that’s because Google has a handy calculator ( Keyword Planner tool) right here that’ll solve the searcher’s problem. So search volume alone can actually be a bit misleading. Which is why it’s worth looking at the second checkpoint which is to check the traffic potential of the topic.

Traffic potential represents the total search traffic you could get if you were to rank at the top of Google for your keyword. So while you may be optimizing your pages for a main keyword, your page will likely rank for hundreds or even thousands of other relevant keywords.

The monthly search traffic potential of the topic “SEO checklist” is actually higher than its monthly search volume. This is what makes traffic potential a much more reliable metric than search volume. And the way you determine traffic potential is by looking at how much traffic the top-ranking pages are getting.

For example, the query “keyword cannibalization” has a search volume of 150 monthly searches. But the traffic potential is well under 100. So it becomes more of a business decision whether you want to tackle the topic or not.

Choosing keywords based on metrics alone is not a good idea.

The next point on our checklist is to assess the business potential of the keyword or topic.

Business potential simply represents the value a keyword has to your business. And “value” really comes down to your niche as well as your business model.

So an easy way to do this is by assigning scores between 1-3 to keywords you’re researching.

The higher the number, the more important the topic is to your business.

So let’s say you have a site about golf. And the way you make money is by selling used golf clubs. Bringing this back to business potential, that means topics where you can organically recommend products to visitors would hold the highest business value.

For example, people searching for something like “buy used golf clubs” are likely ready to make a purchase here and now. So in my books, this would have a business value of 3.

Now, a keyword like “best golf clubs” would also be relevant to your site. People are likely ready to make a purchase soon but just don’t know which clubs to buy. But it’s actually quite easy to plug your products.

Because for the golf clubs you recommend, you can easily link back to your product pages leading visitors closer to making a purchase. So I’d give this a business value of 2.

Now, a keyword like “what is a handicap in golf” would be really tough to organically recommend your products. But nevertheless, it’s a way to attract relevant traffic to your site. So I’d give this a business value of 1. So these would hold the lowest priority.

And anything that has a score of 0 is probably worth ignoring because it’s not going to impact your bottom line. So something like “happy gilmore review” would have a business value of 0 because it has nothing to do with your business other than the fact that it’s a fantastic movie about golf.

Alright, the next point on this checklist is to see if you can match searcher intent.

This is a concept that we covered in the beginning of this course, but it’s something that I’m going to keep talking about because it’s super-important. So again, search intent represents the reason behind a searcher’s query.

Search Intent

Search Intent is the reason behind a searcher’s query. And the way we determine that is by looking at the top-ranking pages for the keyword we want to rank for.

For example, let’s say you have a recipes blog and you wanted to rank for “toaster oven.” Looking at the top-ranking pages, you’ll see that almost all of the pages are eCommerce category pages.

This tells us that the intent of the searcher is likely to buy or at least to shop around for different toaster ovens. So unless you can actually satisfy the intent of the searcher, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to rank high for this query.

And we’ll dig deeper into search intent in the next topic.

Rank Your Keyword

The final point on this checklist is to determine whether you can rank for your keyword.

Search volume, traffic potential, and business potential mean absolutely nothing if you can’t rank for your keyword in the not so distant future. And understanding the level of difficulty to rank for a given keyword takes a bit of analysis and practice.

Now, actually choosing keywords comes down to finding a balance in this checklist.

You have to ask yourself if the topic drives enough traffic and has business.

Does the topic drive enough traffic and have business value to make it worth the effort? And this is the question you should ask yourself before you create pages with the intent to rank in search.

In the next topic, we’ll be focusing on searcher intent.

Search intent represents the reason behind a searcher’s query.

Matching search intent is important to show search engines that your page will fulfill their goal, which is to deliver the most relevant results for any given query.

And while it might sound like you’re trying to satisfy Google, what you’re actually doing is learning what you need to do to satisfy the searcher’s intent.

Identifying search intent is usually quite easy. All you have to do is search for the keyword you want to rank for and then analyze the top-ranking results. And the top-ranking results are a great proxy to understand search intent because Google understands what searchers want, probably more than anyone else.

But how do you analyze the top-ranking results?

You can use a simple formula we call the 3 Cs’ of search intent. And you’ll learn how to use this formula to analyze search intent in this topic.

What is Search Intent?

So again, search intent represents the reason behind a searcher’s query. And matching search intent is one of those must-do things to show search engines that your page will fulfill their goal to deliver the most relevant results for any given query.

And while it might sound like you’re trying to satisfy Google, what you’re actually doing is learning what you need to do to satisfy the searcher’s intent.

Identifying search intent is usually quite easy.

All you have to do is search for the keyword you want to rank for and then analyze the top-ranking results. And the top-ranking results are a great proxy to understand search intent because Google understands what searchers want, probably more than anyone else.

Now, “analyzing” is kind of a jargony word, but I have a simple 3-prong formula you can use.

The 3 Cs

It’s called the three C’s of search intent.

The first C is content type. Content type can usually be categorized into blog posts, videos, product, category, and landing pages. For example, the dominant type of pages for the query “best golf shoes” are blog posts.

The second C is content format. And this applies more to blog posts and landing pages. A few common blog formats you’ll see are how-tos, step-by-step tutorials, list posts, and opinion editorials. For a landing page, that might be something like a tool or calculator.

Again for the query “best golf shoes” you’ll see that all of the top results are listicles, which makes sense because the word “best” implies that a comparison needs to be made.

And the third C is content angle, which often depicts the “benefit.” It’s basically your hook as to why someone should click and visit your page. For “best golf shoes,” you’ll see that every post has gone with the “freshness angle,” which is evident based on the current year being in the titles.

In my opinion, this is the least important and often least consistent among top-ranking pages. Now, this is just one example of search intent for a keyword.

Let’s go through a few more examples to really drill in this concept.

Examples

The first example is for the query “how to swing a golf club.” The dominant content type is clearly blog posts. But you’ll also notice that a YouTube video is ranking ahead of the blog posts. So this tells us that it may be worth creating both a blog post and video to potentially get two different spots in the search results.

As for content format, they’re clearly all how-tos. And seeing as the nature of the topic would require a step-by-step procedure, that’s probably the route you’d want to go too.

And you can confirm this by actually visiting some of the top-ranking pages.

Now, with content angle, it appears as though “for beginners” or “basic” seems to be the right way to approach the topic .

The second example is for the query “golf clubs.” Looking at the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), you’ll see that they’re all ecommerce category pages. Which tells us that when people search for this query, they’re likely in shopping mode.

Now, seeing as content format applies mostly to blog posts and landing pages, it wouldn’t be applicable here since we’re looking at ecommerce category pages. As for content angle, it seems to be mostly about deals — so saving money on golf clubs.

Alright, the final example is for something like “golf bags.” Looking at the SERP, you’ll see something a bit different. We have a mixed SERP. Content type for the top-ranking page is an ecommerce category page. Then we have a couple of blog posts on the best golf bags. And we also have an outlier on how to buy golf bags.

Towards the bottom half of the results, we have more ecommerce category pages. So what do you do? Well, in order to make an educated decision, we still need to lay some foundation work.

For now, you should have the basics of search intent down.

Next, and we’ll be talking about on the first step of the keyword research process: keyword generation.

Keyword research is the process of finding keywords that people are searching for in search engines.

The general process can be divided into two major steps. Step 1 is to generate keyword ideas. And step 2 is to validate whether those keywords are worth going after.

This lesson is mostly about step 1: generating keyword ideas for your website. To do that, you need a keyword research tool.

Keyword research tools show you information on keywords like their search volume, keyword difficulty scores and other SEO metrics. Plus, they should help you discover potential topics worth going after.

How do you use keyword research tools to come up with ideas that’ll keep you busy for years? You’ll learn how to do that in this topic.

So, keyword research is the process of finding keywords that people are searching for in search engines. And the general process can be divided into two macro steps.

Step 1 is to generate keyword ideas. And

Step 2 is to validate whether those keywords are worth going after.

Now, this lesson is mostly about step 1: generating keyword ideas for your website. And in order to do that, you need a keyword research tool.

Keyword Research Tools

Keyword research tools show you information on keywords like their search volume, keyword difficulty scores and other SEO metrics. Also, they should help you discover potential topics worth going after.

There are a lot of SEO tools out there and you’re free to use whichever ones you want. Now, we also understand that some people may not be in a place to purchase SEO software right now.

Alright, so we’re going to be doing some keyword research for the rest of this lesson.

So let’s say that the website we’re doing keyword research for is a golf blog. And the way this blog generates revenue is through affiliate commissions, meaning they promote other people’s products and when someone clicks on one of the links and makes a purchase, you’re compensated with a commission.

Keyword Ideas

So the first step is to come up with a list of seed keywords. And a seed keyword is just a broad keyword related to your niche. So you can go to any free SEO tool and add a few seeds for our golf site. So that might be “golf balls,” “golf clubs,” and “golf hats” to name a few.

Next, go to the Phrase match report which will show us keywords that include any of these phrases. And just like that, you will have some figures about keyword ideas with search volumes and a ton of other helpful metrics

Now, … volume keywords are just way too much to filter through.

So before we continue, let’s take a second and revisit the 5-point checklist from the first lesson.

Again, the 5 things we’re looking for when it comes to choosing keywords are:

1. We want keywords that have search demand.

2. Keywords with traffic potential.

3. Keywords with business potential.

4. We need to be able to match search intent.

And 5. We want to know how hard it’ll be to rank at the top of Google for that keyword.

So when we’re generating keyword ideas, we’ll be able to check off the first 4 points. As for the fifth, we’ll tackle that in the next topic.

Alright, let’s look back at our list of keyword ideas and start checking off some of these boxes. So first, we need to find keywords that have search demand. To do that, you can set a search volume filter to show keywords with a minimum volume of at least 300 monthly searches. And now that list will shrink to your specific keyword ideas which will be easy to manually filter through.

The next point on this list is to see if they have traffic potential.

Traffic Potential

Again, traffic potential is a more reliable metric than search volume because not all searches result in clicks. And at the end of the day, we want traffic not searches.

To check the traffic potential of a topic, you need to look at the top-ranking pages and see how much traffic they’re getting. To do that, you can click on the SERP button beside any of these keywords.

Next up is business potential.

Business Potential

Again, business potential is simply the value a keyword has to your business.

And while monthly search visits seem great, you need to consider the fourth point on the checklist which is to ask yourself if you can match search intent. As you will see, almost all of the top-ranking pages are ecommerce category pages. So searchers are probably in shopping mode.

But we have a golf affiliate blog, so the site probably isn’t selling golf clubs. Meaning, we can’t create an ecommerce category page and therefore, we won’t be able to match search intent. So seeing as this query doesn’t fulfill the points on our checklist, we wouldn’t go after this keyword.

Now, looking further down the list, you’ll see the query “best golf balls.” It has a high search volume and if I click on the SERP button, you’ll see that the traffic potential is around … monthly visits from the US.

Search Intent

Now, in terms of business potential, this keyword would have a value of 3 because our site makes money by reviewing and recommending products. So it would be super-easy to organically recommend products in a “best of” post, which I assume would lead to a fair amount of affiliate commissions.

As for search intent, these are blog posts in the listicle format with the freshness content angle as you can see from titles of the top-ranking pages. So this query checks all boxes and passes our initial sniff test. So I’ll click on the checkbox and add it to my “golf” keyword list.

Now, checking the SERP for all of these keywords would be pretty time-consuming. So there’s a quick technique you can use to find relevant keywords. And that’s to use keyword modifiers. A modifier is an add-on to a base keyword.

Modifiers

For example, if our base keyword is “golf hats,” we can modify this keyword by adding “best,” “top”, or the current year. And modifiers tell us a lot about search intent. A word like “best,” again, tells us that a comparison needs to be made. So searchers are probably looking for listicle blog posts with various different product recommendations.

Now, if a word like “how” or “what” is in the keyword, then it tells us that the top pages will likely be blog posts or videos with step-by-step tutorials or some other informational content.

So with this knowledge, we can actually filter this keyword list down to

a) keywords that likely have business potential, and

b) keywords where we can match searcher intent.

For example, since we’re doing keyword research for an affiliate site, modifiers like “best,” “top”, “vs,” and “review” would likely bring up topics where we can organically recommend products.

Filtering Keywords

So if we go back to the keyword list, we can click on the “Include” filter and paste this list there. Next, I’ll hit the “Any word” tab since we want to find keywords that include any of these modifiers as well as one of our seed keywords. Hit Apply, and we now have a list of around .. keywords that are most likely going to have high business potential.

Moreover, we know that 99% of the time, the results for any “best” type keyword will be listicle blog posts. And we know that we can match searcher intent with our affiliate blog.

Now, if we switch the modifiers in the Include filter to words like “how,” “what,” “who,” “where,” “why,” “guide,” and “tutorial,” then we can apply the list to find informational topics that we could write about on our blog.

And pretty much all of these keywords would be fair game for our hypothetical golf blog. Now, if you plan to use a list of modifiers, then it’s worth noting that you should probably do it with much broader seeds.

For example, you’ll see that we only have … keywords when using the search volume filter paired with our list of informational modifiers. Now, if I change the seed to just “golf,” set the volume filter to a minimum of … monthly searches, and then paste in my list of informational modifiers, hit the “Any” tab, and click Apply, then you’ll see we have a lot more topics that we could potentially create content around.

So if this is a method you want to try, then take a screenshot of this list of modifiers and feel free to use them in your keyword research.

Now, one downside to using keyword research tools is that the list of keyword ideas will usually be limited to words and phrases that include your seeds. But there are other great keywords that won’t necessarily include your seeds. So, how do you find them?

Well, the best way to find these keywords is to look at pages that drive the most search traffic to your competitors’ sites. Because if your competitors are ranking for keywords that are sending them a ton of search traffic, then I’m sure you’d want to get in on the action, right?

Organic Search Competitors

Now, by competitor, I’m not necessarily talking about your direct business competitors. I’m referring to your organic search competitors, which are websites that rank for keywords that you’d want to rank for.

So to find these competitors, go back to your Keywords Explorer, but this time, click on my golf keyword list. Next, go to the Traffic share by domains report, which will show you the websites that get the most search traffic based on your keyword input. In this case, our golf keyword list.

Bottom line is: there should be no shortage of keyword ideas and you should be able to use these two methods to build a solid list of topics to keep you busy for years.

But here’s the thing: even if you’ve checked off these four boxes on the checklist, there’s still one left. And it won’t matter if you don’t rank for your keywords.

So next, we’ll be talking about where to go through a simple process to understand how hard it’ll be to rank for your keywords in Google.

Note: Below writings are the hands-on practice and we hope you will get most of the points.

When it comes to ranking in Google, you need to understand who you’ll be up against before you target a keyword. Otherwise, you could be entering a battle you won’t be able to win.

From an SEO perspective, competitors are pages and websites that rank at the top of Google for your target keywords. So that means your competitors can be different for every single keyword you target.

So there are 3 main things you’ll want to consider before you decide to pick a fight. And those are:

1. Search intent
2. Metrics of the top ranking pages and websites
3. Topical authority of the top ranking websites

You’ll learn about all three individual points in the topic, also we’ll create a list of self-check questions that’ll help you make informed decisions in your keyword targeting.

Well, I’m going to show you how to determine ranking difficulty for a keyword. This will help you understand how hard it’ll be to rank high in Google for your target keywords. So when it comes to ranking in Google, you need to understand who you’ll be up against before you target a keyword. Otherwise, you could be entering a battle you won’t be able to win.

Competitors

From an SEO perspective, competitors are pages and websites that rank at the top of Google for your target keywords. So that means your competitors can be different for every single keyword you target.

So there are three main things you’ll want to consider before you decide to pick a fight. And those are: search intent, metrics of the top ranking pages and websites, and topical authority of the top-ranking websites.

Now, as we go through these points, we’re going to create a list of self-check questions which should help you make informed decisions in your keyword targeting.

Also, in order to see things like metrics of top-ranking pages, you need an SEO tool since Google won’t show you data on other pages.

So I’ll be using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer throughout this lesson. Now, if you don’t have an Ahrefs account, you can use other free SEO tools such as Semrush, Moz, Ubersuggest and a bundle of many others available on the market, some are free and some are paid. These will give you data on the top three pages.

Search Intent

Alright, let’s start with search intent.

The first thing you need to do is look at the SERP and ask yourself: “Do some of the top-ranking pages fail to closely match search intent?”

To find this out, you can go through the 3 C’s of search intent as we discussed in the above topics of this free SEO course. And by the looks of it, they’re all listicle blog posts using the freshness angle. So they do match it.

Also, pay close attention to the titles and URLs of the ranking pages.

In general, if the top pages include the primary keyword or a variation of it in the title and/or URL, they’re likely targeting that keyword. For example, all of the top-ranking pages for the query “how to save money” are exactly about that.

Whereas a query like “best convertible car seat for small cars” is a bit mixed. As you can see, some pages have gone specifically with the angle “for small cars.”

As a result, it’s probably matching searcher intent better than the more broad posts about the best convertible car seats for any car.

This is a sign of weakness in the SERP because it means there’s probably a lack of rank-worthy content out there about the best convertible car seats for small cars.

Now, I don’t want you to take this as advice that you must include the exact keyword phrase in your titles and/or URLs. With this example, finding convertible car seats for small cars is actually a very specific need for a specific person.

Metrics

Now, let’s talk about the metrics.

The first metric to look at is the number of websites that are linking to the page. At Ahrefs, we call this “referring domains.” As I mentioned earlier, backlinks are one of Google’s most prominent ranking signals.

So if a page has a lot of quality links pointing at it, then it’ll be more competitive to rank.

So before choosing a keyword, you need to ask yourself:

“Can I get more quality backlinks than the top-ranking pages?” Now, at this point in the course, we haven’t talked about the attributes of quality backlinks, but our link building module that’s coming out in a couple of weeks should help you answer this question.

The second metric is website authority. At Ahrefs, they call this Domain Rating, which represents the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile.

Domain Rating

Very generally speaking, you should be going after keywords where your website’s DR is in a similar ballpark range as the top-ranking pages. Or at the very least, one of the top-ranking pages should be in the same range as your website.

For example, if all of the websites that rank in the top 10 have high DRs and you have a DR of let’s say, 10, then you may want to consider competing when you’re at a similar level.

So let’s add that question to our checklist. “Is my website in a similar DR range or higher than the top-ranking websites?” Again, this is a very general recommendation but still a decent one to follow if you’re a beginner to SEO.

To see the Domain Rating of your own site, you can enter your domain in Site Explorer and see it here on the Overview Page. Or you can enter your domain in Ahrefs free Website Authority Checker.

Alright, let’s move on to the third part which is the topical authority of the top-ranking websites. Google wants to rank pages from authoritative sources. And this goes beyond backlinks.

For example, if we look at the SERP for “how to unclog a toilet,” you’ll see that this DR 42 site is outranking much more powerful websites with significantly more referring domains. Well, this page comes from a website that’s just about plumbing so it’s likely more authoritative on the topic.

So the question you need to ask yourself is:

“Is my website equally or more topically authoritative than the top-ranking websites” If the answer is yes, then that’s a positive thing for you.

The easiest and quickest way to find out is to just look at the domain names and use some common sense. For example, looking at the SERP for “best convertible car seat for small cars,” you’ll see sites like Experienced mommy, Baby center, Parenting pod, Babylist, and other relevant sites that talk about products for children.

And for domains that aren’t as easily distinguishable like 800bucklup.org, you can just visit the site, hit the About page, and get a general idea of what the site is about.

In this case, you’ll see that they talk about car seat recalls and review car seat brands. So yes, it is topically authoritative on car seats. Alright, let’s look at our full list of “yes or no” questions.

As a very general rule of thumb, the more yeses you can check off, the better your chances of ranking. Again, very general because SEO is quite nuanced. With that said, let’s go through a couple of hypothetical examples for our golf site.

Examples

To set the scene, let’s say you have a website that’s about golf instruction and you also review golf equipment. And your website’s Domain Rating is low at around 15. Alright, so the first example is for the query “best golf grips.”

Let’s start with the first question:

“Do some of the top-ranking pages fail to closely match search intent?” From the looks of it, they all look decent, so I’ll check the no box. “Can I get more quality backlinks than the top-ranking pages?”

Again, we haven’t covered anything about “quality” backlinks yet. So for now, let’s just look at quantity. Most of the sites have very few referring domains. So I’d say, this is a yes.

Next question:

“Is my website in a similar DR range or higher than the top-ranking websites?”

Based on the SERP, there are a few sites with similar website authority, so let’s give this a yes as well.

And finally:

“Is my website equally or more topically authoritative than the top-ranking websites?” Well, all of the top pages are from golf sites and so is mine, so let’s give this a yes as well.

So based on our analysis, it looks like this would be a topic worth going after. Alright, the next analysis is for the keyword “best putters.” Looking at search intent, overall, it looks like the majority of pages are good so I’ll check the no box. But, I do want to touch on this page on “the best blade putters.”

This is more of a focused post and they’re likely ranking high for this because of all of the other factors, like high website authority, lots of referring domains and topical authority. So I would actually exclude them from the rest of this analysis.

Alright, next up, can I get more quality backlinks than the top-ranking pages?

Again, just looking at the quantity of links to these pages, the answer would likely be a yes, seeing as we’re still looking at about a dozen referring domains. But it’s important to realize that getting more links than the #1 page probably won’t happen in the near future. Meaning, getting the top-ranking spot will be tough.

Next: is my website in a similar DR range or higher than the top-ranking websites? The answer is no.

And finally, my website is topically authoritative, so I’ll give this a yes. Now, it looks like we’re at a tie between yeses and noes. And this is exactly why I said:

“As a very general rule of thumb, the more yeses you can check off, the better your chances of ranking.”

Again, SEO is nuanced.

Also, you need to weigh out some of the other principles we discussed like traffic potential and business value. And the best way to make sound judgment calls is through experience.

So it will take time to hone your skills and gain a better grasp of keyword analysis. Understanding how hard it’ll be to rank in Google will be a key skill to your success in search. Why?

Because it’s the first step to getting predictable results. Afterall, if you know what it’ll take to rank ahead of your competition, then it all comes down to execution. And that’s what the next two modules are all about.

Next, I’ll be discussing On-Page SEO which will help with actually creating content that ranks.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines. And it revolves heavily around optimizing pages for search intent. But on-page optimizations also involve creating and optimizing HTML tags like titles and meta descriptions.

If you’ve been exposed to the practice of on-page SEO, then it’s quite likely that you’ve heard conflicting advice.

So, in this topic, you’ll learn some common advice on on-page SEO best practices that are not true today.

Introduction to On-Page SEO

So, the question is what is on-page SEO?

It’s simply the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines.

And it revolves heavily around optimizing pages for search intent. But on-page optimizations also involve creating and optimizing HTML tags like titles and meta descriptions.

Now, if you’ve been introduced to the practice of on-page SEO, then it’s quite likely that you’ve heard conflicting advice. And for that reason, we’re going to discuss both what on-page SEO is and what it is not.

Let’s talk about common advice you might see on on-page SEO best practices which just aren’t true today. And while there are many old-school tactics that are still being recommended, I want to focus on just 3 points to help you navigate the noise.

On-Page SEO is not about stuffing exact match keywords.

1. On-page SEO is not about stuffing exact match keywords. It used to be common practice to include the exact keyword you wanted to rank for in your title, URL, and content.

For example, if you wanted to rank for “Car dealer San Diego” you would stuff that keyword throughout your page despite the fact it doesn’t make sense – grammatically speaking.

Google is smart enough to understand things like connecting words, synonyms, and closely related words and phrases.

In fact, for all of these queries, the top 10 pages are nearly identical. Unfortunately, stuffing exact match keywords is still being practiced today which can lead to poor user experience and poor readability; all things that on-page SEO should not do.

On-Page SEO is not about using specific keywords.

The second thing is that on-page SEO is not about using your keyword a specific number of times on the page. According to one study of 3 million search queries, we found that on average, the top-ranking page ranks for around 1,000 other relevant keywords in the top 10.

Now, can you imagine what it would be like if a top-ranking page had to mention all 1,000 of those keywords at least three times? It makes no sense. The content would be unnecessarily lengthy and create an awful user experience for visitors.

On-Page SEO isn’t about meeting a minimum word count.

The third point is that on-page SEO isn’t about meeting a minimum word count. Some studies have shown that the average content length of the top 10 results is over 2,000 words. As a result, many SEOs have recommended that you create pages that are at least that length. But that isn’t exactly sound advice.

On-Page SEO in 2024

Now, let’s talk about what on-page SEO is today in 2024 and beyond.

Looking at the definition again, on-page SEO is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines. And as I mentioned, this revolves heavily around optimizing pages for search intent. The keyword here is “search intent.”

Translation: the goal of your pages should be to satisfy the searcher’s intent.

How?

Well, we talked about the 3 C’s of search intent which should help you get the basic stuff down like the content type, format, and angle. In addition to this, your content needs to address the things people expect to see.

You’ll also want to nail the more “tangible” items like titles, subheadings, internal linking, readability, and of course, the actual content itself.

These are the things we’ll be addressing in the next topic of our on-page SEO, where we’ll get more tactical and talk about how you can create content that’s optimized for search.

With on-page SEO, there are two main things we need to cover. The first is to ensure that your page satisfies search intent.

You’ve already learnt the 3 Cs’ of search intent. But what do you need to write about in order to satisfy searchers? The answer is to learn from your competitors’ pages.

The top-ranking pages are ranking at the top for a reason. Google and other search engines deem them as the best candidates to satisfy a searcher’s query. So they’re clearly doing something right, at least from the perspective of a search engine.

You’ll learn how to research your competitors’ content in this topic.

Satisfy Your Search Intent

So with on-page SEO, there are two main things we need to cover. The first is arguably the most important and that’s to ensure your page satisfies searcher intent.

We’ve already covered the 3 C’s of search intent which again will give you very basic guidance on the type of content to create, the format to use, and the angle to go with. But the actual content itself is what’ll leave your visitors satisfied or dissatisfied.

So you might be wondering what exactly do I write about in order to satisfy searchers?

Learning from Your Competitors

The short answer is to learn from your competitors.

The top-ranking pages are ranking at the top for a reason. Google and other search engines deem them as the best candidates to satisfy a searcher’s query. So they’re clearly doing something right, at least from the perspective of a search engine.

Now, while the content will vary from topic to topic, the way you research your competitors’ content will be more or less the same.

Let’s go through an example.

Note: Below writings are the hands-on practice and we hope you will get most of the points.

So let’s say that we want to create content that targets the query “best golf club sets.” To start, go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and search for the query. Then, I’ll scroll down to the SERP overview to see the top-ranking pages.

Now, if you don’t have an Ahrefs account, you can use our free SERP checker tool to do everything I’m about to do. Alright, so looking at the SERP, we want to pick out the top 3 or so relevant ranking results.

And by relevant, I’m talking about pages that match the dominant search intent based on the 3 C’s we’ve discussed so many times now. So in this case, the majority of pages are blog posts in the listicle format with freshness as the content angle.

So that means, we wouldn’t look at pages from Amazon or Golf Galaxy because these pages are clearly ecommerce category pages, and are therefore outliers to the dominant search intent.

We’ll also exclude the pages from Golf Digest and Business Insider, since it doesn’t look like they’re intentionally targeting our query. So I’ll open up these three pages in new tabs. And what we’re going to look for are similarities in their content – specifically in the subtopics.

And we’ll also look to deepen our understanding of content format and content angle. Looking at the first page, you’ll see that they’ve created a list of categories for the best golf club sets. So there’s best selling, best game improving irons, and so on.

Looking further down, they have a subheading which is the make and model of the golf club set followed by a brief review of the clubs. The next page also has a summary based on more broad categories like best value, premium pick, and best choice.

And based on the table of contents, you’ll see that they followed a similar structure where the make and model of the clubs are used as subheadings. They also add a brief description of the clubs, as well as some skimmable bullet points. And the final page does pretty much the same thing.

They use subheadings as the make and model followed by a short review. Now, unless you’re a golfer, you may not have caught this minor, but perhaps important detail. All of the pages talk about sets that would appeal more to beginners.

For example, they all talk about Callaway’s Strata set.

And they all include sets from Wilson Staff. In my opinion, these wouldn’t appeal to an intermediate or advanced level golfer. Alright, so at this point, we know that we should create a listicle blog post with freshness as the angle.

We also know that the content should likely be targeted at beginners. A couple common sets that were mentioned in all posts were the Callaway Stratas as well as a set from Wilson Staff.

Now, it’s important to note that you don’t have to include these in your post, but it’s simply an observation I had made. We also saw that the top 2 out of 3 pages had top picks for categories like “best game improvement clubs” as well as “best clubs for the money.”

Finally, we know that the subheadings should be the name of the club set. Another thing I recommend before you start writing is to do a content gap analysis at the page level.

Content Gap Analysis

A content gap analysis at the page level will show you common keywords that the top pages are ranking for where your page isn’t. But since we don’t have a page, we can still find common keyword rankings amongst a few top-ranking pages using Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool.

To get started, go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and paste in any one of the URLs.

Next, head on over to the Content Gap tool. Now, I’m going to take the three URLs we analyzed and put them all in the top section of this tool.

So what this is saying is show us keywords that any of these targets rank for where at least one of them ranks in the top 10. Now, if I run the search, you’ll be able to see the keywords that these pages rank for and the position that they’re ranking in.

As a general rule of thumb, the more URLs that rank high for the keywords, the more relevant it’ll be to your content.

So to narrow our search down a bit, I’ll click on the “intersections” dropdown and select both 2 and 3 intersections. Meaning, only show me keywords where at least 2 of our targets are ranking in Google and at least one of those targets is ranking in the top 10.

From here, just skim through the list and look for interesting subtopics that might be worth adding to your post. In addition, you may be able to learn some interesting things about the audience as well as the language they use.

People who search for this query are mostly looking for men’s clubs. People want to know the best clubs for the money. They want to see cheaper options. And others are looking specifically for a set of irons.

These are all things you should consider as you craft your content.

So armed with this information, you should be able to create a great post with the searcher in mind. And while the content is the most important part, there are also a few more “technical” on-page optimizations you should do.

On-Page Optimizations

Let’s go through a few of the most important ones. First is to include your target keyword in your title when it makes sense.

Include Your Target Keyword

Adding your target keyword to your title should come naturally. For example, there is an article with a title of “45 Best Free SEO Tools (Tried and Tested).”

And “free seo tools” is our target keyword. Now, there’ll be times when it makes more sense to use a close variant of your target keyword.

Let’s take another example, this post is targeting the query “how to get YouTube subscribers.” But our title is “9 Ways to Get More YouTube Subscribers” because we went for the listicle angle.

Short and descriptive URLs

The next thing you can do is to use a short and descriptive URL slug. Short and descriptive URLs help people immediately understand what the page is about before even visiting them.

Just look at these two URLs.

URL 1:

https://abcdef.com/healthy-living

URL 2:

https://abcdef.com/top-10-tips-for-healthy-living

They’re on the exact same topic, but one is much more descriptive than the other.

This part of the URL is called the slug.

And the easiest way to choose your slug is to use your target keyword where spaces will be replaced with hyphens.

Again, you should only do this when it makes sense, so you don’t need to worry

about forcing it. Now, if you’re wondering if you should use sub folders to describe categories, that’s entirely up to you.

Meta descriptions

The meta description is HTML code that’s meant to briefly summarize your page. And search engines often use this text right within the SERP. To my best knowledge, meta descriptions aren’t used as a ranking signal, but they can influence click-through rates.

And for that reason, I think it’s important to add to your pages.

Now, it’s important to note that according to one study of 192,000 pages, they found that Google rewrote meta descriptions nearly 63% of the time. So I wouldn’t spend a ton of time on them, but you should still include them.

Alright, next up is to add internal links to and from your pages.

Internal links

Internal links are links from one page on the same domain to another. And they’re super-powerful because they can pass link authority to other relevant pages and they also help search engines better understand a page’s contents.

How to Add Internal Links?

Watch this video for internal linking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bfVzriR3Rg

Optimizing Images

Now, optimizing your images for SEO is 3-fold.

1. Name your image files appropriately.

For example, this is a picture of a puppy. If you took the photo yourself, then chances are, your smartphone or camera named it something like IMG_ and then a million numbers. Instead, change the filename to something like “puppy.”

Not exactly rocket science, but according to Google, filenames can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image.

2. Use descriptive alt text.

Alt text, short for “alternative text” is an HTML attribute that goes in your image tag. So the syntax would look something like this, where the alt value should describe the image. Alt text helps improve accessibility for those who are using screen readers or if the image fails to load, visitors will be shown the alt text instead.

Now, Google recommends “creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page.” Yes, Google explicitly says to use keywords, but they also say to avoid stuffing keywords as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam.

Meaning, don’t do something like this.

Now, looking back at the syntax, our alt text isn’t exactly descriptive. So let’s change that to something like “puppy sitting on a couch.”

If you use WordPress, just add your alt text here when inserting your images and the CMS should do the rest.

Compress Images

Compressing images makes your image file sizes smaller, leading to faster load times. And PageSpeed is a Google ranking signal.

There are some free tools for compressing images on Google. Just search “compressing image tool” and you will find bundles of them.

Optimize for Readability

And the last thing I highly recommend is to optimize for readability.

Here are 5 simple but effective tips you can use to improve readability.

1. Write in short sentences and short paragraphs because no one wants to land on a page with a huge wall of text.

2. Use descriptive subheadings so people who are skimming the article can easily find the things that are important to them.

3. Use a large enough font that’s easily readable on both desktop and mobile.

4. Avoid using big words. It’s more important that people understand your content. And

5. Write as you speak.

Your content will be more conversational and entertaining to read. A free tool I recommend using is called Grammarly app. It’ll give you some writing tips as well as a readability grade.

I’d recommend trying to keep things at or below a sixth-grade level. Now, there are other on-page optimizations you can do like adding open graph meta tags or OG tags for short. These will allow you to customize the titles, descriptions, images, and other information when your pages are shared on social media networks.

There’s also Schema markup, which is code that helps search engines understand your content and better represent it in the search results.

If you have a WordPress site, then you can add OG tags and schema with plugins like Rank Math or Yoast.

Now again, the most important part of your content is that you’re striving to satisfy searcher intent. Yes, the technical things are important too, but they’re more like the icing on the cake.

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to a page on your website. And these hyperlinks are called backlinks.

While the end result of link building seems simple and makes sense, the part that most people fail to understand and can’t get right is the process. This ultimately boils down to emailing complete strangers and asking them to link to you.

Effective link building is tough. Why is it even worth the effort? You’ll find out in this topic.

What is Link Building?

By definition, link building is the process of getting other websites to link to a page on your website. And these hyperlinks are called backlinks.

Now, while the end result might make sense conceptually and seem simple, the part that most people don’t understand and can’t seem to get right is this: the process. And this ultimately boils down to emailing complete strangers and asking them to link to you.

So let’s go through a few scenarios and then we’ll revisit this definition of link building.

Let’s say that you have a marketing blog and you write about SEO and digital marketing. Now, if some random person, let’s call her Ava, sent you an email and said “Hey, can you link to my post on Facebook ads? It’s really good.” Would you link to her? Probably not.

In fact, you probably wouldn’t even reply or click the link in her email to actually check and see if her content is as good as she claims.

Now, let’s flip the script a bit.

Let’s say your mentor who helped you get started in digital marketing sends you an email. And she asks you to link to a page on her site from a relevant page on yours. Would you link to her? Definitely!

She helped you get started in digital marketing, you obviously trust and respect her, and you’d be willing to bend over backwards for her.

The point of these scenarios is to show you that the process of link building is actually very relational and can sometimes take more time than you might like.

With Ava, you don’t know her. You don’t owe her anything. You don’t trust her. She’s blindly coming in, almost invading your inbox, and asking you for a favor without offering any kind of value in return.

In the second scenario when your mentor asks you for a link, there’s a real relationship there. There’s a sense of trust, respect, and gratitude. So of course you would link to her.

Now, while you can’t and shouldn’t try to become “friends” with everyone just to get links, you’ll find that your best links will usually come from relationships that are sparked from email outreach.

So let’s redefine link building and set the tone for the rest of this topic.

Link building is the process of building relationships with other relevant site owners who want and will link to your content because it enhances theirs.

So this definition isn’t just about you getting something. It includes relationships, relevance, and a value exchange.

Why Link Building is Important?

Now, since effective link building is tough, you need to understand why it’s worth the effort. In short, backlinks are used by search engines like Google to help rank web pages.

And it’s been this way since 1998 when Google created PageRank.

PageRank is a mathematical formula that judges the “value of a page” by looking at the quantity and quality of other pages that link to it. And Google confirms the importance of backlinks on their how search works page.

Under their “ranking useful pages” heading they state: “If other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that’s a good sign that the information is of high quality.” We also found a clear correlation between organic traffic and backlinks from unique websites in our study of over one billion web pages.

So while getting backlinks may be harder than, let’s say, creating a blog post, they’re absolutely critical if you want to rank for competitive phrases. And competitive phrases are usually the ones that’ll drive the most traffic and revenue for your business.

Now, we briefly touched on the main way of getting backlinks, but not all links can or will be obtained through outreach.

So in the next topic, we’ll talk about 3 methods to get backlinks as well as the level of difficulty and effectiveness.

3 Link Building Strategies to Get Backlinks

A strategy is high-level. It outlines the scope of the plans. Tactics are more micro and often focused around smaller steps. When it comes to link building, there are 3 main strategies to get backlinks.

In this lesson, we’ll talk about three link building strategies to get backlinks.

Now, before we get started, it’s important to set the expectations right for this lesson and talk about the difference between a strategy and a tactic.

To me, strategies are higher level in the sense that it outlines the scope of the plans.

Whereas tactics are more micro and often focused around smaller steps.

So the strategy sets you in the right direction and the tactics kind of define how you get there. And we’ll get into a few link building tactics later on in this module.

Creating Backlinks

When it comes to link building, there are three main strategies to get backlinks. You can create them, buy them, or earn them. Let’s talk about what each method looks like, their level of difficulty and effectiveness.

The first method is to create backlinks. Creating backlinks means to manually add links on one domain back to yours. This can be done by adding your website to directories, leaving comments on blog posts, or adding your website’s URL to your social media profile.

Anyone can do this with minimal effort.

So like almost all easy things in life, they’re generally not that effective from an SEO and ranking perspective.

Buying Backlinks

Now, buying backlinks is exactly as it sounds. You pay webmasters or authors a fee, and in return, they’ll link back to a page on your site. Now, this is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can potentially result in a penalty.

That might be anything from losing ranking positions or even worse, getting your pages removed from Google’s search index. Also, buying links isn’t exactly cheap.

In terms of level of ease, if you have the money, it’s super easy to do because it’s just a transaction.

Now, in terms of the effectiveness, I would think that they’re highly effective unless or until you get caught. And in my opinion, the risk isn’t worth the reward, especially if you want to build a business that’ll stand the test of time.

Earning Backlinks

The final way to get backlinks is to earn them. And there are three common ways you can do this. The first and most common are links that are earned through email outreach. This is when you email other website owners and editors and ask them to link to you.

Another way to earn backlinks is by becoming a source for an online publication or media outlets. For example, if a journalist references you in an article, they’ll often link to you and/or your social media profiles.

And the final way is to earn backlinks organically. For example, if someone visits your page from a link on social media, organic search, word of mouth or wherever and decides to link to you, then that’s an earned link.

Now, even though 100%-organic links may sound like the best way to get them, I don’t want you to bank on that. These kinds of links are typically less consistent unless you’re an extremely well-known brand with extremely well-crafted content and you’re already getting significant exposure.

It takes time to build a reputation that’s well-trusted and for those organic links to come in on a regular basis. And if you’re just hoping and waiting, you’ll likely fall behind because your competitors will actually be busy building links by reaching out to other website owners.

Generally speaking, the harder it is to obtain a link, the more valuable it’ll be. And for that reason, we’ll be focusing on streamlined tactics so that you can build a steady stream of backlinks to your page and get more traffic from SEO.

Now, not all links are created equal. Some will help propel your pages to the top of Google, while others can actually hurt your site.

So what makes a link actually good? That’s what we’ll be talking about in the next lesson. Are you ready for the next lesson? If your answer is, Yes. That’s what we call the SPIRIT!

What Makes a Backlink “Good”?

Not all backlinks are created equal. And quality backlinks are a prominent ranking signal. So, in this lesson, you’ll learn the attributes that make a backlink “good”. They are:

1. Relevance

2. Authoritativeness

3. Link placement

What are these attributes and why are they important? How do you distinguish between them? You’ll learn everything in the topic.

You’ll also need to understand the anatomy of a hyperlink and how the different parts relate to SEO. And there are 3 basic parts to a link that matter in SEO. The destination URL, anchor text, and the rel attribute or lack of one.

What are these and how do they work? Why are they important to SEO? You’ll learn all of this in the topic.

We’re going to talk about the attributes that make a backlink good or “high quality.” As I said in the last lesson, not all backlinks are created equal.

For example, if you spammed forums with links to your site, those wouldn’t and shouldn’t hold more weight than let’s say a link from The New York Times.

Otherwise, backlinks would just be a game of quantity and Google’s search results would reward the biggest spammers. Fortunately, ranking on Google doesn’t work that way and quality backlinks are still a prominent ranking signal.

Relevance

Let’s talk about the 5 attributes that make a backlink “good.” The first attribute is relevance. Imagine this for a second. You’re going to visit Greece for the first time next month and you need recommendations for places worth going to.

Now, you have a friend that has lived in Greece for their entire life and obviously knows every nook and cranny. You also have a friend in the US who hates traveling and has never been outside of the states. Who’s opinion would you hold higher? Obviously your Greek friend.

In the same way, links from a website about travel or Greece would hold more weight than links from sites about technology or marketing because they’re more topically relevant and authoritative.

For example, you’ll see that this page is ranking #1 for the query “how to devein shrimp.” If we look at their backlinks and also filter by one link per domain, we can see their backlinks from different websites.

Now, if you don’t have an Ahrefs account, then you can still see backlinks pointing at pages using our free backlink checker tool, which I’ll leave a link to in the description.

Going back to the backlinks report, you’ll see this page from Wikihow which is called “3 ways to peel and devein shrimp.” So the link is on a very relevant page.

Scrolling down a bit, you’ll see this link from a page called “shrimp with garlic sauce” which again is relevant at the page level. But you can also see that it’s relevant at the domain level too just by looking at their domain name: slimpalate.com.

Both of these links are great from a relevance standpoint, whereas a link like this one isn’t very relevant at all. The page is about Firefox 3.5, which is a web browser. It comes from a site about video games and computer hardware.

So an ideal link would be contextually placed within the body of the content where someone is quite literally recommending or referencing you.

Authoritativeness

The next attribute of good quality links is authoritativeness. If you’re unfamiliar with “authority” in the context of backlinks, it basically represents the so-called “link power” a web page has. And this relates to how Google’s PageRank works.

As we discussed before, both the quantity and the quality of links matter. So the more quality links a page gets, the more PageRank it earns. And the more PageRank it has, the more authority it can pass to other pages through hyperlinks.

For example, let’s say that page C has two links: one from page A and one from page B. Page A is stronger than page B, and also has fewer outgoing links. Feed this information into the PageRank algorithm, and you get the PageRank of page C.

Now, this is obviously a simplified version of how PageRank works, but the key point here is that getting links from high-authority pages will likely have the greatest impact on your rankings.

Now, while Google doesn’t provide PageRank or website authority scores, Ahrefs has two metrics that try to quantify it. Domain Rating is their website authority metric and it represents the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile.

And URL rating is page-level authority metric, which represents the overall strength of a page’s backlink profile.

And you’ll find both of these metrics throughout most of our tools, giving you insights on referring pages.

Links

Now, we’ve covered two very important parts of good quality backlinks, but what we haven’t talked about yet is the actual link itself. So let’s break down the anatomy of a hyperlink and talk about how the different parts relate to SEO.

Here’s what a link looks like to your website visitors. And if we look at the HTML code, then it would look like this.

Now, there are 3 basic parts to a link that matter in SEO. The destination URL, anchor text, and the “rel” attribute or lack of one. The destination URL is simply the URL the person will visit when the link is clicked. The second part of a link is the anchor text.

The anchor text is the clickable word, phrase, or image attached to the link. So in our example, Site Explorer is the anchor text, which is the name of our competitor analysis tool.

Google uses anchor texts to better understand what a page is about and what terms it should rank for. But building lots of links with keyword-rich anchors is an example of a link scheme, and may result in a Google penalty as it looks unnatural.

For example, if you had a post on the best golf balls and had a hundred links pointing to it where the anchor texts were all “best golf balls,” then it would look and be quite unnatural. People often use anchors such as the company’s brand name, the title of the page, the URL, or phrases like “click here.”

With most earned links, you have very little or no control over the anchor text, so over-optimization isn’t something you really need to worry about. And the last part of the link we’ll talk about is the “rel” attribute.

Some links contain a “rel” attribute, which is intended to tell crawlers about the relationship between the linking page and the linked page. And the three “rel” values that you should know about when it comes to link building are nofollow, UGC, and sponsored.

Historically, nofollow links told Google that the linking page would rather not associate themselves with the linked page. And for that reason, Google didn’t transfer “authority” through those links.

But then Google added a couple other “rel” values: UGC, which stands for user-generated content, and sponsored, which signifies an ethical paid link. They also announced that going forward, they would look at these link attributes as “hints,” meaning, they may pass value through them at their discretion.

Now, if a link doesn’t have any of these “rel” values, then it would be called a “followed” link. Meaning, the link can pass PageRank and help boost your rankings.

Seeing as this is still relatively new, I’d recommend focusing on building “followed” links, although that’s only partially within your control. Now, it’s important to note that nofollow and UGC links aren’t bad. It’s just that followed links are proven to pass authority.

Link Placement

One final thing I want to touch on is link placement. Prominent links are more likely to be clicked, and it’s believed that Google takes this into account when determining how much authority a link transfers.

For instance, an editorial link is more likely to be clicked than a link in the footer. So, all else being equal, the former would be better than the latter.

So to summarize: An ideal link would come from a relevant and authoritative page where the link is “followed.” It would have a descriptive anchor, and be placed contextually within editorial content. But the truth is, a lot of this is out of your control. What is in your control is how you spend your time building links.

By using these 5 attributes to help qualify prospects, or people that are worth contacting, you’ll spend your time building links that will actually move the needle.

Now, the easiest way for a beginner to start building links is to use tried and tested tactics.

And we’ll be covering a few of them in the next lesson.

Well, we’re going to talk about the step-by- step process to build backlinks as well as three cookie-cutter link building tactics that are tried, tested, and completely beginner-friendly.

Let’s get started with the general process to link building. There are three general stages in link building.

Stages of Link Building

Prospecting, vetting, and email outreach.

Prospecting

When prospecting, you’re searching for relevant pages and websites that might link to you. These might be people who are linking to a similar page as the one you’re going to create, those who have influence in your industry, or people who are passionate about the topic.

The main goal isn’t to find a perfect list of people, this stage is about finding as many people as possible that fit a specific set of criteria. And this criteria is usually dictated by link authority metrics as well as relevance.

As a result, you’ll usually be working with large and very unperfect sets of data.

Vetting

The vetting stage is where you start to refine your list of prospects. These are the people that you’ll be contacting, so you’ll need to visit their websites and validate that they are indeed people worth contacting.

Email Outreach

Finally is the email outreach stage. This is when you’ll finalize your pitches and start emailing your vetted prospects. Now, depending on the link building tactic you use, the way you prospect, vet and craft your email pitches will differ. And this is actually quite difficult when you’re new to link building.

Fortunately, there are a few dead-simple but super-effective link building tactics that are completely newbie-friendly. But before we can get tactical, let’s revisit our definition of link building because there are 3 main parts in it that will help you with prospecting, vetting, and email outreach.

Again, link building is the process of building relationships with other relevant site owners who want and will link to your content because it enhances theirs.

Now, I want to highlight the three main parts from this definition: relationships, relevance, and a value exchange. We already talked about the relevance part in the last topic.

Now we’re talking about mainly the value exchange and what that looks like in some common link building tactics.

So let’s dig into a few easy link building tactics and I’ll show you what each stage of the link building process looks like in detail.

Get Free PR Using HARO

Alright, the first link building tactic is to get free PR using HARO. HARO or “Help a Reporter Out” is a free service that connects journalists with sources and sources with journalists.

Just sign up as a source and select the categories where you’re qualified to answer questions. You’ll then get emails from journalists from various media outlets, looking for sources on specific topics. And these aren’t just your run of the mill publications.

In just this single email, you’ll see publications like Parents.com, Popsugar, and The Houston Chronicle to name a few.

Just skim through the topics and if you find something where you can add value, respond to the journalist with your expert opinion. And if they use you as a source, they’ll usually link back to your site and social media profiles.

Now, the value exchange here is simple. You’re exchanging your expert knowledge for a mention and usually a link from an authoritative site.

Now, looking at the 3 stages of link building, the prospecting part is as easy as it gets. You sign up for a free service and journalists are actually looking for your help, not the other way around, which makes HARO super beginner-friendly.

As for vetting, you can simply scan through the results on a daily basis, but that can be time-consuming. A simple tip you can use is to create a gmail filter so only relevant emails will surface in your inbox.

Just login to Gmail and click on the caret to bring down the search options.

Next, set the “from” field to haro@helpareporter.com. Then, you’ll want to set the subject to HARO within square brackets since all of their emails include that in the subject line.

Finally, set the “Has the words” field to any keywords you want to monitor. And you can also use the OR search operator to include multiple keywords or phrases. Click search to see the results your search filters would include and check out some of the emails to ensure you’re getting relevant results.

If everything looks good, click on the caret again and then click Сreate filter. You’ll then have options to apply labels, mark it as important, or forward it to another team member to take care of.

Now, as for the email outreach part, HARO gives you an email address which will then be forwarded to the journalist. So just respond to the given email address, and write your response.

Now obviously, you’re not going to be the only person emailing the journalist.

So here are a few tips you can use to improve your hit rate.

1. Keep your emails as short as needed. Journalists get tons of emails and if they see a huge wall of text, they probably won’t even give your response a chance.

2. Go after topics where journalists are likely looking for multiple sources.

For example, this query from Best Life is seeking medical experts – as in the plural form of expert.

These kinds of requests will usually be your typical listicle-styled posts. So the more responses they accept, the higher your chances of getting mentioned and linked to.

3. Respond as quickly as possible.

Journalists on HARO will often give a tighter deadline to give themselves time to actually put together a good story. Also, some journalists believe that people who respond faster are better sources.

4. Prioritize questions where you are an expert and use it as the first line in your pitch. There’ll be days where you can’t respond to every relevant request. So prioritize the ones where you have the highest probability of getting sourced.

For example, PopSugar is looking for experts who can talk about why cats scratch furniture and how to stop them from doing it. If you’re a vet, then you might start your email with something like “Hi Jenna, my name is Sam Oh and I’m a veterinarian with 12 years experience and a board member of the cat alliance.”

Clearly, I’m not a vet, but you get my point. When you immediately qualify yourself, as the right person to answer the question, you’ll likely get their attention. Of course, you should be 100% honest so I wouldn’t claim to be a vet when I’m not.

And finally, follow all directions in their query.

For example, this one says “please be sure to include your full name, pronouns, title, and credentials, and the website you’d like linked with your name.”

Guest Blogging

The next link building tactic is guest posting or guest blogging — same thing. Guest blogging is when you create content for another website. And the reason why this strategy works is because there’s a clear value exchange. They get great content for free, and almost always, they allow you to link back to yoursite; whether that be within the content or in the author bio.

Now, guest blogging also provides another great benefit aside from a potential backlink. You get the opportunity to get exposure to someone else’s audience. They’ve already done the hard work in building that audience, you just have to write something that’ll impress their readers.

Now, when you’re prospecting, you’ll need to get a list of websites. And there are a few ways you can do that. The first way is to use Google search operators.

Just go to Google and search for something like intitle:”write for us” wrapped in quotes and then a keyword that’s related to your niche.

In this case, this search query will show us pages that include the phrase, “write for us” in the title and have the word “golf balls” somewhere on the page. And this is a common footprint that websites use to attract guest writers.

See how your expertise can be helpful for their audience or business. We’ll talk quite a bit about outreach in the next topic, so let’s move on to the final Skyscraper tactic, which is the Skyscraper technique.

Skyscraper Technique

The Skyscraper Technique is a link building tactic where you find content that has a lot of links, create your own version on the topic but improve on it, and then reach out to those linking to the popular post and ask them to link to yours.

Now, prospecting and vetting are pretty straightforward. But the hardest part of link building, and the part that makes link building challenging is outreach.

The primary objective of blogger outreach is to convince people with large, targeted audiences to talk about you. And from the perspective of an SEO, you want them to link to your website.

But outreach doesn’t mean broadcasting. It doesn’t mean you should be sending every single person the exact same email like you would through email marketing.

And as you know we’re going to cover how to do blogger outreach that leads to backlinks. We’ll cover the primary objective of blogger outreach, two common approaches, and I’ll break down the anatomy of a good quality outreach email.

Let’s get started!!!

So the primary objective of blogger outreach is to convince those with large targeted audiences to talk about you. And from the perspective of an SEO, you want them to link to your website.

Now, outreach doesn’t mean broadcasting, meaning, you shouldn’t be sending every single person the exact same email like you would through email marketing.

So before we get into actually crafting your outreach emails, let’s quickly talk about who you should be contacting and how to find their email addresses. In general, you’ll want to contact the author of the post if they work for the website.

To find who that person is, you can check places like the website’s About or Team page, their “Write for us” page if they have one, or their company’s LinkedIn profile.

Now, to actually find the person’s email address, the easiest way is to check Contact and About pages. This works best for websites with one author. For websites that have multiple people involved, like Sitepoint or Ahrefs, you usually won’t find individuals’ email addresses on their site.

So to find these emails, you can use a tool like Hunter.io, go to their email finder tool, and just search for their first and last name as well as the domain. Hunter will then give you their best guess.

So it’s time to actually write the pitch.

Now, while there isn’t exactly a streamlined formula for every outreach email you send, I want to talk about the anatomy of a simple outreach email that has been effective for me for many years now.

And there are 5 main parts to a typical outreach email.

First is the subject line. The goal of the subject line is simply to get them to open the email. Otherwise, there’s no chance at getting a response. But you don’t want to clickbait them because that’ll only leave a bad impression.

So when you’re writing a subject line, you want to briefly and accurately describe why you’re emailing them and ideally, evoke curiosity.

So I might use a subject line like:

“New data: best balls for high-handicappers.” In my opinion, the “new data” part evokes curiosity and the rest of the subject line explains the topic of the email.

The next part is the introduction. And while there are numerous ways to write an intro, I think it’s best to start by telling them why you’re emailing them. And the goal of this part is to get them to read the next part of the email.

For example, with our guest posting sample email, I said:

“I was digging through your site and saw that you have a couple of posts on the best golf balls for kids and for distance. But I was pretty surprised to see that you don’t have one for other types of players (i.e. seniors).”

Now, I will admit that the first sentence could definitely be stronger, but I’m basically saying that you’ve done this and this, but it looks like you’re missing out on an opportunity here.

The next part of the email is qualification and justification. Simply asking someone for a favor and expecting them to see a mutual benefit is naïve. You need to show them why you’re qualified and justify the pitch that we’ll get to in a second.

For example, if you’re contacting someone to guest post, then explain why they should accept your post over potentially hundreds of other submissions. If you’re asking them to add your link to a page on their site, give them an actual good reason why they should.

So in our guest posting sample, you’ll see that I said:

“Being a high-handicapper myself, I spent hundreds of dollars on balls and countless hours on launch monitors to find the best ball for me.” So the fact that a) I mention I’m a high handicapper and b) I’ve tested numerous balls and got factual data from launch monitors, qualifies and justifies what I’m about to pitch, which again, is a guest post about the best golf balls for high handicappers.

Now, to really drill in on the concept of qualification and justification, let’s look at an example email for the Skyscraper technique. A little while back, we did some outreach to get links to our blog post on SEO statistics.

Alright, the last part of the email is a simple one-liner to keep the conversation rolling. Simply put, you don’t want to end your email with a cold hard pitch. The purpose of your first email should be to start a conversation.

So you might say something like… Is that something you’d be open to? Is there anything I missed? What do you think? Do you agree with our conclusion? Or whatever.

All you’re really doing is talking to people and starting to build some kind of relationship. Just think about it like an in person encounter. You wouldn’t go to a party and ask a complete stranger to buy you a drink.

You might strike up a conversation, connect with them on a common interest, and maybe buy the first round of drinks expecting nothing in return. And as a result, they might want to reciprocate by returning an act of kindness.

Again, the goal of the very first email you send is simple: start a conversation.

So while there will be times where it makes sense to ask for the link or guest posting opportunity right away, there are a lot of times when it makes more sense to just start that conversation and see where it leads.

The final tip I want to leave you with is to only use your best work when sending email pitches. You don’t want to email anyone and everyone for every single piece of content you create.

For example, if you had a golf site and you created a post on a topic like… “what is a handicap,” there’s nothing interesting or unique about it yet it’s still a topic you would probably want to cover.

Coming up with a good reason for them to link to you on this topic would be tough. Also, time is finite. So it’s worth doing outreach for your best content because there’s a higher probability that it’ll result in backlinks.

Alright, so with everything you’ve learned up to this point, you should be able to create content for your website that’ll get traffic from search engines.

But there’s still one piece to the fundamentals of SEO that we haven’t covered and that’s technical SEO.

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to help search engines find, understand, and index your pages.

Technical SEO is important because if search engines can’t properly access, read, understand, or index your pages, then you won’t rank or even be found for that matter.

To avoid technical SEO mistakes like removing yourself from Google’s index, there are five things you should understand:

1. Noindex meta tag

2. Robots.txt

3. Sitemaps

4. Redirects

5. Canonical tags

These are the foundational things that are good to know when it comes to indexing. You’ll learn what each thing is, why they’re important and how to get it done right.

Throughout the next two topics, we’re going to be talking about technical SEO. And technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to help search engines find, understand, and index your pages.

Now, for beginners, technical SEO doesn’t need to be all that technical.

And for that reason, this module will be focused on the basics so you can perform regular maintenance on your site and ensure that your pages can be discovered and indexed by search engines.

Importance of Technical SEO

Well, so let’s talk about why technical SEO is important at the core. Basically, if search engines can’t properly access, read, understand, or index your pages, then you won’t rank or even be found for that matter.

So to avoid innocent mistakes like removing yourself from Google’s index

or diluting a page’s backlinks, I want to discuss 4 things that should help you avoid that.

First is the noindex meta tag. By adding this piece of code to your page, it’s telling search engines not to add it to their index. And you probably don’t want to do that. And this actually happens more often than you might think.

For example, let’s say you hire Design Inc to create or redesign a website for you. During the development phase, they may create it on a subdomain on their own site.

So it actually makes sense for them to noindex the site they’re working on. But what often happens is after you’ve approved the design, they’ll migrate it over to your domain. But they often forget to remove the meta noindex tag.

And as a result, your pages end up getting removed from Google’s search index or never making it in.

Now, there are times when it actually makes sense to noindex certain pages.

Generally speaking, for small sites, you won’t need to worry about noindexing specific pages. Just keep your eye out for noindex tags on your pages, especially if after a redesign.

The second point of discussion is robots.txt. Robots.txt is a file that usually lives on your root domain. And you should be able to access it at yourdomain.com/robots.txt.

Now, the file itself includes a set of rules for search engine crawlers and tells them where they can and cannot go on your site. And it’s important to note that a website can have multiple robots files if you’re using subdomains.

For example, if you have a blog on domain.com, then you’d have a robot.txt file for just the root domain. But you might also have an ecommerce store that lives on store.domain.com. So you could have a separate robots file for your online store.

That means that crawlers could be given two different sets of rules depending on the domain they’re trying to crawl. Now, the rules are created using something called “directives.” And while you probably don’t need to know what all of them are or what they do, there are two that you should know about from an indexing standpoint.

The first is User-agent, which defines the crawler that the rule applies to. And the value for this directive would be the name of the crawler.

For example, Google’s user-agent is named Googlebot. And the second directive is Disallow. This is a page or directory on your domain that you don’t want the user-agent to crawl.

For example, if you set the user agent to Googlebot and the disallow value to a slash, you’re telling Google not to crawl any pages on your site. Not good.

Now, if you were to set the user-agent to an asterisk, that means your rule should apply to all crawlers. So if your robots file looks something like this, then it’s telling all crawlers, please don’t crawl any pages on my site. While this might sound like something you would never use, there are times when it makes sense to block certain parts of your site or to block certain crawlers.

For example, if you have a WordPress website and you don’t want your wp-admin folder to be crawled, then you can simply set the user agent to “All crawlers,” and set the disallow value to /wp-admin/.

Now, if you’re a beginner, I wouldn’t worry too much about your robots file. But if you run into any indexing issues that need to be troubleshooted, robots.txt is one of the first places I’d check.

Alright, the next thing to discuss are sitemaps. Sitemaps are usually XML files and they list the important URLs on your website. So these can be pages, images, videos, and other files. And sitemaps help search engines like Google to more intelligently crawl your site.

Now, creating an XML file can be complicated if you don’t know how to code and it’s almost impossible to maintain manually. But if you’re using a CMS like WordPress, there are plugins like Yoast and Rank Math which will automatically generate sitemaps for you.

To help search engines find your sitemaps, you can use the Sitemap directive in your robots file and also submit it in the Google search console.

Next up are redirects. A redirect takes visitors and bots from one URL to another. And their purpose is to consolidate signals.

For example, let’s say you have two pages on your website on the best golf balls. An old one at domain.com/best-golf-balls-2018, and another at domain.com/best-golf-balls. Seeing as these are highly relevant to one another, it would make sense to redirect the 2018 version to the current version. And by consolidating these pages, you’re telling search engines to pass the signals from the redirected URL to the destination URL.

And the last point I want to talk about is the canonical tag. A canonical tag is a snippet of HTML code that looks like this. Its purpose is to tell search engines what the preferred URL is for a page. And this helps to solve duplicate content issues.

For example, let’s say your website is accessible at both http://yourdomain.com and https://yourdomain.com. And for whatever reason, you weren’t able to use a redirect. These would be exact duplicates.

But by setting a canonical URL, you’re telling search engines that there’s a preferred version of the page. As a result, they’ll pass signals such as links to the canonical URL so they’re not diluted across two different pages.

It’s important to note that Google may choose to ignore your canonical tag. Looking back at the previous example, if we set the canonical tag to the insecure HTTP page, Google would probably choose the secure HTTPS version instead.

Now, if you’re running a simple WordPress site, you shouldn’t have to worry about this too much. CMS’s are pretty good out of the box and will handle a lot of these basic technical issues for you.

So these are some of the foundational things that are good to know when it comes to indexing, which is arguably the most important part in SEO. Because again, if your pages aren’t getting indexed, nothing else really matters.

We won’t really dig deeper into this because you’ll probably only have to worry about indexing issues if and when you run into problems.

Instead, we’ll be focusing on technical SEO best practices to keep your website in good health.

The first thing you should do is ensure that your site structure follows a logical hierarchy.

Site structure is simply the way you organize content on your website. A good site structure helps search engines understand the relationship between your pages, plus helps search engines to crawl your pages more efficiently.

You’ll learn how to organize your site well in this topic.

The second thing is to ensure your pages don’t load slow. As you may know, Pagespeed has been a confirmed ranking factor for desktop search since 2010. And in 2018, Google announced that they’d be using page speed in mobile search rankings.

You’ll learn how to improve your website’s speed also.

The last thing is to do your best to stay on top of around 50 potential SEO errors. There are potentially hundreds of technical SEO issues that can and will happen to your site. So, you’ll need to find a way to find and manage them.

You’ll learn how to do this in this last lesson of our free beginner guide to SEO with Courses Buddy.

Site Structure

So the first thing you should do is ensure that your site structure follows a logical hierarchy. Site structure is simply the way you organize content on your website.

You can think of it like a mindmap. At the top, you’d have your homepage. Then you’d probably have main topics that branch out from your homepage like your services page, your blog, and about page.

Then from these main topics, you’d probably have even more branches to other pages. These branches represent internal links, which are just links from one page on your site to another. And they help search engines understand the relationship between these pages.

Site structure also helps search engines to crawl your pages more efficiently, which is why having a logical hierarchy is important. Now, what we’ve talked about is pretty basic stuff and you may already be doing this.

But it can get more complex as you add more pages to your site like blog posts, category pages, or product pages.

Page Speed

The second thing is to ensure your pages don’t load slow.

As you may know, Pagespeed has been a confirmed ranking factor for desktop search since 2010. And in 2018, Google announced that they’d be using page speed in mobile search rankings.

Now, you don’t need to obsess over every millisecond it takes for your page to load. Google says:

“The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries.”

So the bottom line is: you don’t want your pages to load slow.

And there are two very basic things that I think every website should do. The first is to cache your website’s content. Caching is basically a way to temporarily store copies of files, so it can be delivered to visitors in a more efficient way. And most web hosting companies that I’ve come across have caching features.

Compress Images

Compressing images makes your file sizes smaller and smaller files load faster. You can use a tool like Image Resizer.

Now, if you wanted to take page speed a step further, then it can get quite technical and complex.

Potential SEO Errors

The final thing I want to talk about is to do your best to stay on top of around 50 potential SEO errors. Trust me, it’s not as bad as it sounds. There are potentially hundreds of technical SEO issues that can and some will definitely happen to your site.

Some of these things include:

Pages becoming broken that still have internal links pointing at them. Orphan Pages, which are pages on your site that have no incoming internal links. And these aren’t great because it can make it tough for search engines to actually discover them.

Duplicate content issues. And redirect chains to name a few.

Now, there’s no point in me going through 50 different potential issues because it’ll only matter to you if you run into them.

So what I recommend you do is run scheduled website audits on your site. And a website audit will give you a full analysis of potential issues that could be harming your website’s SEO performance.

And that wraps up Courses Buddy’s free guide to SEO course for beginners.

Everything you’ve learned in this course should be enough to get you indexed, ranking, and to keep your site in good technical health.

Remember! Don’t forget to blossom!

https://developers.google.com/search/docs

https://ahrefs.com/blog/category/general-seo/

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

https://moz.com/learn/seo/resources?learnContentType=guides

https://www.semrush.com/blog/category/seo/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/category/seo/

https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-seo#

https://searchengineland.com/library/seo

https://neilpatel.com/what-is-seo/