There is no standard way to learn search engine optimization (SEO). Ask anyone who works at SEJ how they got started in SEO and you’ll get a lot of different stories.
It can be frustrating because if your business has any kind of online presence at all, you need to know at least some SEO.
Maybe you’ve just launched that awesome new website and want to get ranked on the first page of Google.
Or maybe your existing website isn’t getting the traffic you want. Or you just want to start a new, in-demand career.
Regardless of your reason for wanting to learn SEO, you’ve come to the right place.
Right now, some of you are probably a little scared. All this talk about search algorithms and keyword research and reciprocal links sounds complicated.
Relax, despite all the technical jargon, SEO isn’t that hard to learn, even for complete beginners. You just have to be willing to put in the time and effort.
This article will give you a step-by-step blueprint that you can follow to build your SEO skills from scratch or improve your existing knowledge.
And while we can’t promise you top Google rankings, we promise you’ll see results if you put in the work.
Your Guide To Learning SEO
Before we dive into the first step on your journey to becoming an SEO Jedi, let’s take a quick look at what exactly we mean by search engine optimization.
According to Google’s developer guide:
“Search engine optimization is the process of improving your website for search engines.”
In other words, it’s determining exactly what changes you need to make to your website to make it more relevant to search queries.
The elements of SEO fall into two main categories: on-page and off-page.
As you might expect, on-page SEO elements are the parts that sit on your website. This includes:
Off-page SEO elements, on the other hand, are ranking factors that come from outside your domain. This primarily focuses on building links and getting other high quality websites to your content.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s dive into the step-by-step process of mastering SEO.
Step 1: Master The Basics
One of the best things about Google is its vast amount of information available. While it won’t give away the secret sauce of exactly what drives its algorithm, the search giant is surprisingly open about what does and doesn’t go into the rankings.
And even better, they’ve provided an extremely useful SEO beginner’s guide for people just starting out in the field. This is a high-level look at how search engine optimization works, including definitions of common terms and the basics of ranking.
If you’re starting your SEO education completely from scratch, this is the perfect place to start.
It will tell you how to get your site up to Google, the best ways to control indexing so that the search engine can find your content and indexing, which will help it understand what your content is about – and what queries it will perform well for.
Every year at SEJ we produce several e-books on various SEO and digital marketing topics. One such eBook is our Beginner’s Guide to SEO, a comprehensive beginner’s guide and how-to guide for many common SEO tasks.
Step 2: Dive Deeper Into The Technical Side
Once you’re sure you’ve got the SEO basics down, it’s time to move on to more technical concepts.
Once again, Google has provided some great resources for your educational purposes.
One good place for further education is Webmaster Guidelines for Maintaining Your Website’s SEO. It can help you get started with intermediate and advanced techniques to improve your ranking or solve other SEO problems.
This includes information on how to deal with duplicate content and canonical pages, using robots.txt files to tell Google which pages to crawl and crawl, creating and submitting sitemaps, and other ways you can help Google understand your site better .
Depending on the type of content you have on your site, you may need to use different strategies to increase its exposure.
For example, videos are a popular form of content that requires additional SEO work to ensure they rank as high as possible.
If you’re using anything beyond plain text (and you should be—no one wants to scroll through a wall of text), check out Google’s content-specific guidelines.
Step 3: Create An SEO Process
By this point, you hopefully have a reasonably good understanding of what SEO is and how it works.
And now it’s time to put that education into practice by developing and implementing your own SEO process.
If you’re working on an existing site, the first thing you should do is perform an SEO audit. This is quite an extensive undertaking, but once again, Search Engine Journal to the rescue!
We’ve created an eBook that will walk you through the entire process of evaluating your current SEO efforts using a helpful checklist.
Once you understand where you are now, it’s time to build a strategy. If only there was another helpful e-book you could use to guide you through that process – oh wait, we have it.
This is a step-by-step guide (plus a template) to building your annual SEO strategy, with month-to-month guidance to help you measure results and improve your rankings.
And when it comes to performance monitoring, Google Search Console gives you tons of analytics and information that you can use to improve your website traffic. It would be very important for you to familiarize yourself with this tool.
Step 4: Optimize Your Content
It is impossible to overstate how important the content of your website is. Content is what brings people to your site, prompts them to take action, and is the whole reason for your site’s existence.
So, once you’ve done the background, technical and strategic work necessary to improve your ranking, it’s time to focus on your content.
Your content strategy should have been a big part of your overall strategy, as discussed in the last step, but this is where the rubber meets the road.
Here, you’ll create keyword-rich (but not overstuffed) copy, build a solid structure that’s easy for bots and humans to read, and improve the overall content experience.
For detailed information on how to do this, watch this webinar.
Step 5: Build Your Backlinks
This has already been touched on, but it warrants its own step.
Your backlinks tell Google a lot about how trustworthy your site is.
For example, if you fall for one of those link farm, pay-per-link scams (which of course you would never do), Google will likely ignore those links.
On the other hand, if the Chicago Tribune directs people to your site, Google might see that referral in a good light and consider that link valuable.
But how exactly do you build links? Did you really expect us to ask that question and then not have another great e-book that answers that question in detail?
Download and read this for everything you need to know about building and maintaining a profitable link building campaign.
Step 6: Don’t Forget About Humans
With all the technical parts of search engine optimization, it can be really easy to forget about the primary purpose of your website: to provide value to real people.
And lest you think that Google search is entirely made up of various computer programs, don’t forget that real people check the algorithm’s performance.
These people are known as search quality raters. They follow an extensive guide to determine how well Google search results meet user needs and rate the quality of your pages.
So always keep that in mind – even with all the title tagging and image optimization and responsive design work you’ve put in, at the end of the day, SEO is all about people.
Step 7: Never Stop Learning
Wow, that was a lot. Now you can just sit back and relax, enjoying your new Sixth Degree SEO Black Belt title, right? Not even a little.
Search engine algorithms are constantly changing.
Some of these are so small that you won’t notice, while others make a big difference in the type of restore queries they generate. And this constant state of flux means the last thing you can do is rest on your laurels.
Fortunately, there is a vast ocean of SEO resources, including this website, where you’ll find all the news as well as regular updates and blog posts on various search engine related topics.
But we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you about some great online courses that will help you take your search engine optimization skills to the next level.
For your convenience, we’ve provided a curated list here, and you can take a closer look at some of them in this post on SEO certifications.
Free SEO Courses For Beginners
Coursera Search Engine Optimization Basics: This 13-hour, 4-module digital course (created by the University of California, Davis) is designed to help you understand how search algorithms affect organic search results. It covers everything from building an effective strategy to analyzing and optimizing your existing website.
Ahrefs’ SEO Training Course: Presented by SEO tool software provider Ahrefs, this program consists of 14 lessons divided into four modules, totaling two hours in length. It will teach you the basics of SEO, including how to do keyword research, technical SEO, and link building for beginners.
Shopify’s SEO Training for Beginners: E-commerce platform Shopify offers a 30-minute course designed to help online entrepreneurs quickly learn the basics of SEO. This course will give you a repeatable framework you can apply to improve your business’s search engine rankings.
Yoast’s SEO for Beginners Training: Another provider of SEO tools, Yoast’s Beginner’s SEO Course features two hours of videos, PDFs, and quizzes to train you in what you’ve learned.
WP Courses Introduction to Search Engine Optimization: This free course is designed to teach you how to improve your website for both search engines and human visitors. It covers the basics of SEO, including performing keyword research, creating great content, and optimizing your site for maximum rankings and traffic.
Bruce Clay SEO Training: Bruce Clay is known as the developer of the first website analysis tool. He now runs a search marketing company (Bruce Clay, Inc.) that provides a wide range of digital marketing services. This online course will teach you how to improve your website rankings with an emphasis on E-A-T. Includes over 15 hours of instruction through 48 videos.
Next.js’ Introduction to SEO: This text-based course offered by the Next.js production framework provides a quick overview of SEO in four pages. Covers search engines and bots and web performance topics, highlighting their use with Next.js.
Hubspot’s SEO Course: This short course offers a free certification and focuses on the business impact of SEO. With six lessons built around 22 videos and three quizzes, he uses Hubspot’s blogging strategy as his primary example when explaining how SEO works.
Intermediate To Advanced SEO Resources
Got the basics down and ready to move on to more advanced topics? There are many great resources, including:
Semrush Digital Courses: Online Visibility and Content Marketing SaaS provider Semrush has compiled one of the best libraries of SEO content available anywhere. These free lessons, usually one hour long, are taught by a variety of experts and cover almost every aspect of digital marketing you can think of – including a dozen on search engine optimization.
Ahrefs Advanced Link Building Course: This 14-lesson course can be completed in less than two hours. It’s designed to equip you with high-level link building strategies—that go beyond traditional backlink tactics. It will teach you how to structure and distribute public emails, validate campaigns and manage your link building team more effectively.
Coursera Advanced Search Engine Optimization Strategies: This free 25-hour course focuses on technical, mobile, and social strategies to improve your website traffic. It will teach you more advanced SEO skills such as improving site architecture, evaluating competitors and developing global strategies.
LinkedIn Learning: Formerly Lynda.com, the educational portion of the social networking site LinkedIn offers a variety of SEO topics, from beginner to advanced. It offers a free trial, but then costs $19.99 per month for unlimited access. LinkedIn Learning has 86 SEO-related videos, many of which specialize in one particular aspect, for example, SEO for e-commerce websites or data structuring for web search engines.
Advanced Technical SEO: The Complete Guide: You didn’t really think we’d make this list and not include another one of our eBooks, did you? We may be biased, but this free downloadable ebook will teach you everything you need to know about technical SEO, including finding the best hosting company, structuring your website to be crawler-friendly, and best practices for pagination, among many other things. useful information.
Google Analytics Academy: While not strictly speaking an SEO course, if you are serious about SEO and improving your skills, this certification is well worth earning. This free course will help you better understand the content and digital marketing industry while allowing you to get the most out of the tools the search giant makes available.
Stay Up To Date And Get Optimizing
As you can see, there is a lot that goes into search engine optimization. Even experts learn new things every day.
Hopefully by this point you’ve learned a bit about the basics of SEO and where you can learn more about them.
And after you’ve studied some of the related material, it’s time to put your new knowledge into action.
Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see results right away – remember, search engine optimization is a marathon, not a sprint. It can sometimes take months for your changes to start showing up on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Just remember, this is an ever-changing environment, and what worked yesterday may not work today. This is partly due to shady SEO experts who gamed the algorithm through things like keyword stuffing and article flipping (ie recreating content with different words).
But the main reason you need to stay on top of SEO is Google’s never-ending drive to deliver better, more relevant results.
Right now, that means focusing more on search intent than keywords, but who knows what that will mean tomorrow?
The only way to stay on top is to keep working once you get there. Because if you kick up your heels, it won’t be long before your hard-earned ranking goes to a worthy and smarter optimizer.
Never stop learning, get out there now and get to the top of the search results!
Featured image: fizkes/Shutterstock
How many months it will take to learn SEO?
If you can learn SEO for a few hours every day, then you can master the basics of SEO within 4-8 weeks and get your first SEO job in 3-6 months. If you can learn SEO full time then you can master the basics even in 1-2 weeks.
Can I learn SEO in 2 months? You want to blog for at least six months to two years to see results. That’s when you’ll know you understand SEO and can grow your organic audience. But, once you get good results, keep building that momentum and keep posting regular blog articles.
Is SEO difficult to learn?
SEO is not that hard to learn. All you need to do is be willing to put in the necessary time and effort to learn various SEO concepts. If you’re new to SEO and wondering what it takes to go from beginner to expert, then this post is for you.
Is Learning SEO tough?
The answer is simple. Learning SEO is difficult because there is a lot of information to read about search engines and how the optimization process works, and it can be overwhelming at first.
Why SEO is so hard?
To summarize, SEO is difficult because search engines are always changing and updating. It could be anything from Google changing the way they look at a certain type of link, including a new major update to their algorithm, or even recognizing something new as a ranking factor.
Can I learn SEO in a month?
Although it’s a career journey, you can really learn SEO in about a month – enough to make a huge impact on your website and therefore your business as a whole.
Can I learn SEO in a month?
Although it’s a career journey, you can really learn SEO in about a month – enough to make a huge impact on your website and therefore your business as a whole.
Is SEO hard to learn? SEO is not that hard to learn. All you need to do is be willing to put in the necessary time and effort to learn various SEO concepts. If you’re new to SEO and wondering what it takes to go from beginner to expert, then this post is for you.
How much is SEO monthly?
Average SEO costs are $100-$250 per hour for US SEO agencies. SEO costs often range from $2,500 to $10,000 per month for US agencies. The average SEO plan costs $2,819 per month (according to Ahrefs). Overseas SEO companies can charge $10-$50 per hour.
How much does SEO cost per month for small businesses? How Much Does Small Business SEO Cost? The average cost of SEO for a small business is $750 to $2000 per month or $5000 to $30,000 for one-time projects. Smaller companies investing in SEO consulting services can expect to pay $80 to $200 per hour.
Do I need to pay for monthly SEO?
If you hire a top SEO company to run a local campaign, expect to pay $500.00 per month. A national or international campaign will require a minimum budget of $2,500 to $5,000 per month. Some companies offer a “trial package” at a lower price, without a contract.
Is SEO a one time cost?
Most SEO projects in 2022 cost between $1500 and $5000 per month based on the scope of the project. A one-time project will run between $5,000 and $30,000, with hourly rates for consultants falling between $100 and $300 per hour.
How much does monthly SEO cost?
Average SEO costs are $100-$250 per hour for US SEO agencies. SEO costs often range from $2,500 to $10,000 per month for US agencies. The average SEO plan costs $2,819 per month (according to Ahrefs). Overseas SEO companies can charge $10-$50 per hour.
Is SEO free of cost?
| The guy | Expenses | Who uses it? |
|---|---|---|
| DIY SEO | Free of charge | Solopreneurs |
| Cheap SEO | $500 to $3,000 per month | Small businesses |
| Mid-range SEO | $3,000 to $15,000 per month | Established businesses |
| Top SEO | $15,000-$30,000 per month | Websites with high traffic |
How much it will cost for SEO?
| The guy | Expenses |
|---|---|
| Cheap SEO | $500 to $3,000 per month |
| Mid-range SEO | $3,000 to $15,000 per month |
| Top SEO | $15,000-$30,000 per month |
| Enterprise SEO | $30,000-$1 million per month |
How much does an SEO cost?
The average cost of SEO for a small business is $750 to $2000 per month or $5000 to $30,000 for one-time projects. Smaller companies investing in SEO consulting services can expect to pay $80 to $200 per hour.
Does Google SEO cost money?
There is no cost to appear in organic search results like Google, and making changes to improve your website’s SEO can make a significant difference to your search rankings over time. Learn more about how Google Organic Search works and get tips for getting started here.
Is SEO a one-time cost?
SEO prices vary and depend on factors such as SEO plan, service provider, and more. Most SEO projects in 2022 cost between $1500 and $5000 per month based on the scope of the project. A one-time project will run between $5,000 and $30,000, with hourly rates for consultants falling between $100 and $300 per hour.
Is SEO a one-time cost?
Most SEO projects in 2022 cost between $1500 and $5000 per month based on the scope of the project. A one-time project will run between $5,000 and $30,000, with hourly rates for consultants falling between $100 and $300 per hour.
Is SEO needed monthly?
It’s worth pointing out that most SEO tactics require monthly attention, including link building and content marketing. SEO is not a one-time project; it needs to be constantly updated, analyzed and adjusted in order to achieve the desired results.
Is SEO a one time thing?
SEO is an ongoing process due to the fact that so many factors play a role in its success. SEO is no longer just about keywords and links, but user-serving sites are rewarded. User needs are constantly changing, and your SEO efforts should evolve along with your audience.
How much does it cost for SEO?
Average SEO costs are $100-$250 per hour for US SEO agencies. SEO costs often range from $2,500 to $10,000 per month for US agencies. The average SEO plan costs $2,819 per month (according to Ahrefs). Overseas SEO companies can charge $10-$50 per hour.
What is main keyword?
In terms of SEO, these are the words and phrases that search engines enter into search engines, also called "search queries." If everything on your page – all images, video, copy, etc. – you reduce it to simple words and phrases, these are your primary keywords.
What is a keyword with an example? Keywords are words and phrases that people type into search engines to find what they are looking for. For example, if you wanted to buy a new jacket, you could type something like “men’s leather jacket” into Google. Even though the phrase consists of more than one word, it is still a keyword.
What is SEO keyword?
Your SEO keywords are the keywords and phrases in your web content that allow people to find your site through search engines. A website that is well optimized for search engines speaks the same language as your potential visitor base with SEO keywords that help link search engines to your website.
How do I write SEO keywords?
Here are nine tips to help:
- For SEO writing, start with keywords. …
- 2. …
- Write for your audience, not for SEO. …
- Mix it up when using keywords. …
- Focus on your headline. …
- For SEO writing, go for length. …
- Keep keyword density under control. …
- Lighten up your anchor text.
What are types of keywords in SEO?
There are 9 types of keywords: short-tail, longtail, short-term, long-term, product-defining, customer-defining, geo-targeting, and intent-targeting. All of these keywords have their own special power that can multiply your SEO efforts when used in different situations. But how to discover all these keywords?
How SEO keywords are used?
First, use your main keyword in the first few sentences of your content, or at least within the first paragraph. Then use that keyword and its variations throughout your content, as shown below. The best practice is to include Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords instead of the exact keyword every time.
How do I find my main keyword?
How to find and choose keywords for your website
- Use Google Keyword Planner to narrow down your list of keywords. …
- Step 2: Favor the low-hanging fruit. …
- Step 3: Check the monthly search volume (MSV) for the keywords you have chosen. …
- Step 4: Consider SERP features while choosing keywords.
How do I find primary keywords?
Find a Target Keyword Start by mapping one target keyword to one page. (We’ll break that rule later by targeting secondary keywords). Before choosing a keyword to target, determine the main topic of the page in question. A theme is the theme of your page, so write your content to reflect it.
How do I find the main keywords of a website?
The easiest way to search for a given keyword on a web page is to use the same “Find on Page” function that you’ve probably used before on a Word or Excel document. Simply use Ctrl F to find all instances of a keyword available on a web page.
What is keyword and its types?
When researching to discover user intent behind a search, we can classify all keywords into four main intent categories: commercial, transactional, informational, and navigational. We will identify what these types are with a brief overview of each type.
What are 2 types of keywords?
When conducting keyword research it is important to consider two different types of keywords, one is high volume keywords and the other is long tail keywords. Knowing each type of keyword can help you target the right keywords with your SEO strategy.
What is a keyword explain?
Keywords are words or phrases in the content of your web pages that match the words and phrases that users type into search engines as closely as possible. Keywords allow you to build an SEO strategy around specific target phrases in a way that is meaningful and measurable.