How to Learn SEO : Basics, Tips and Free Resources 2023
There’s a lot to learn about SEO. We’re here to show you exactly where to start.
In this guide, we'll provide you with an overview of the SEO basics. And give you useful tips on how to learn SEO on your own.
What Is SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) describes all processes and techniques that help you rank higher in search engines (such as Google).
The higher you rank, the more people will visit your pages. So the primary goal of SEO is to get more organic (non-paid) traffic from search engines.
How Search Engines Work
To understand how to do SEO, you need a basic understanding of how search engines work.
First, search engines have to discover your page. They use programs (called crawlers or bots) that follow links from known pages to discover new pages. This is called crawling.
After the search engine discovers a new page, it analyzes its content and stores it in a huge database of pages called an index. This step is called indexing.
Finally, the search engine uses various algorithms to pick the best and most relevant pages from its index and serve them as ordered search results for users' search queries. This is called ranking.
SEO is all about making sure search engines can crawl and index your pages and showing search engines that your content is the best (in terms of quality, relevance, and user experience) for users.
Types of SEO
Traditionally, SEO has been divided into two categories:
1- On-page SEO: Includes all the optimizations you do on your website, like content creation, title tags optimization, technical SEO, internal linking, etc. (Further reading: On-Page SEO Guide)
2- Off-page SEO: Includes all the SEO-related activities outside of a website, like link building, content syndication, review management, listing management, etc.
As you can see, this categorization is based on where the optimization takes place.
You may have also come across other types of SEO. They refer to a specific set of actions typical for certain types of businesses or websites and include both on-page and off-page elements:
1- Local SEO: SEO for a local business website, aimed at getting more customers to your physical location (further reading: Local SEO)
2-International SEO: SEO related to websites that serve multiple languages and locations (further reading: International SEO)
3- Ecommerce SEO: SEO aimed at online stores (further reading: Ecommerce SEO)
These specific types of SEO are only relevant to you if your website falls into one (or more) of the respective categories (e.g., if you run a website for a local business).
Essential SEO Skills
SEO consists of multiple disciplines and requires several hard skills. Here are the four most important skills for SEO:
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of finding, analyzing, and choosing the keywords to target with your content.
To conduct keyword research, you'll need a good keyword research tool. It will help you analyze things like the search volume of the keywords, their keyword difficulty, or the search intent behind them.
The latter—identifying search intent behind the search queries—is a key part of keyword research and SEO in general. It helps you satisfy the users and provide relevant, high-quality content.
2. Content Creation and Optimization
Creating high-quality, well-optimized content around your keywords is an integral part of SEO.
Because one of the primary goals of search engines is to satisfy the needs of the users, search engines do their best to rank the most relevant and high-quality content. That means you need to create content that is comprehensive, unique, and trustworthy in order to rank well.
3. Technical Optimization
Technical SEO involves the optimization of various technical aspects of a website. The goal is to make sure search engines can crawl and index your website properly.
4. Link Building
Backlinks are links from one website to another. Search engines use them as indicators of trustworthiness and quality.
The idea is simple: If many authoritative pages link to a certain page, that page is also considered to be authoritative.This is why link building—a set of practices aimed at increasing your number of quality backlinks—has always been an important part of SEO.
Try Out SEO Tools
Some SEO tasks are impossible without SEO tools. That's why learning how to use the essential SEO tools is an important part of learning SEO.