Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.
In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!
Chapter 1: SEO 101
What is it, and why is it important?
Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!
If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).
For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.
Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.
Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:
- What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?
- Who is searching for these terms?
- When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?
- Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?
- How are people searching for ice cream?
- What words do they use?
- What questions do they ask?
- Are more searches performed on mobile devices?
- Why are people seeking ice cream?
- Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?
- Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?
And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?
Search engine basics
Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.
Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”
What are "organic" search engine results?
Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."
Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.
For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?
It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.
Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).
It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.
Why SEO is important
While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.
Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.
In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.
SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.
Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.
Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.
Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?
Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!
If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.
White hat vs black hat SEO
"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.
"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.
Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.
Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry
Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.
Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)
While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.
Google webmaster guidelines
Basic principles:
- Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
- Don't deceive your users.
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.
Things to avoid:
- Automatically generated content
- Participating in link schemes
- Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)
- Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
- Hidden text and links
- Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.
Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.
Bing webmaster guidelines
Basic principles:
- Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.
- Keep page titles clear and relevant.
- Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.
- Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.
- Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.
- Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.
Things to avoid:
- Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.
- Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.
- Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.
- Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.
- Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.
- Duplicate content
- Keyword stuffing
- Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
Guidelines for representing your local business on Google
These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).
Basic principles:
- Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)
- Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.
Things to avoid
- Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible
- Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses
- Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses
- Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors
- Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines
Fulfilling user intent
Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”
If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?
Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.
Common user intent types:
Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”
Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”
Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”
You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.
Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?
Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.
Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.
Know your website/client’s goals
Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.
What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:
For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.
Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:
- Sales
- Downloads
- Email signups
- Contact form submissions
- Phone calls
And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:
- Clicks-to-call
- Clicks-to-website
- Clicks-for-driving-directions
Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).
You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.
This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.
Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).
We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.
Hey Britney, I think you're off to a good start. My comments below are 100% meant to be constructive criticism as I care very much about the Beginner's Guide to SEO (as do you) because it's where I first learned SEO back in 2009/2010.
However, I wonder if you are getting into the weeds and specifics too quickly with your ice cream example and then going into specific search engine webmaster guidelines. I wonder if this might date the guide too quickly and make it less useful long term?
I also think this chapter needs to be a bit more general. For example your statement of "You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert." is absolutely true for B2B or services businesses, but what about ad-driven businesses who genuinely do make money off of advertising and just need more eyeballs?
I also think the mention of local businesses is important, but that brings up the larger question of talking about the different types of SEO (nationwide, international, local, etc) and how you cover those. Maybe those are going to be in other chapters, but just talking about 1 or 2 here is incomplete.
All that said, I love that you talk about:
The third one there could go into a separate section of "Getting SEO done" in another chapter, and maybe you do.
This is absolutely a great start, but would love to see the fuller outline to see that sections are going in the right place!
Great feedback, John, thank you!
The full outline is here. --Let me know what you think.
Get what you're saying about the ice cream example but I feel that the real world example is good to help noobs wrap their head around?
Disagree with the, "You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert." suggestion because this is the "Beginners Guide to SEO" (not PPC).
The national, international, and local is definitely worth a mention.
Thanks for your kickass feedback! It's much appreciated. :)
YESSS! We are huge fans of the Beginner's Guide To SEO and almost consider it "required reading" for SEOs. Excited to check out the re-write and appreciate everyone at Moz for having the best and most up-to-date, easy to understand, and relevant content on SEO!
Nice, I have not dug into the newly re-written version yet, but will be checking it out soon! Appreciate you guys keeping it modern and up-to-date!
It's been a long time since I participated in moz community. I would like to come back with positive feedback, but i can't.
Considering this is beginner's guide, and first chapter, there are way too many informations, making him cluttered, confusing and overwhelming.
Lets say i'm complete noob, and same as all noobs, all I heard about SEO is that it will help me ranking well. Further search led me to moz. I don't know who you are nor can i trust you, but the title beginners guide is perfect, and it's free, so i've downloaded it, and i start reading chapter I.
There are two scenarios here:
First scenario: i'm reading text presented in this blog post. There are so many new information, jumping from one subject to another, can't keep track. And all i'm reading is what author want to tell me, nothing about what i want to read (let's not forget, i'm noob, my only interest in seo is because it will help me ranking). I'm overhelmed and confused. Then near the end of chapter, I came across: 'Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists?'. Ok, that's it. This guide obviously won't help me to achieve better ranking. Back to SERP's.
Second scenario: guide starts with explication about search engines and information retrieval (long time ago beginners guide started that way), then why SEO is important, then continue with detailed explanations about "relevancy" and "importance", "organic" search engine results (atm without featured snippets, image carousels etc), and maybe user intent. Thats all. Few well explained core concepts, easy to keep track of. Excellent, I understood everything, now i'm happy. Great guide, can't wait to read other chapters.
You gained my trust. Now, in the following chapters, you can start introducing (gradually) user-centered SEO, data-driven content marketing and whatever you want.
It has been almost two weeks since this post was posted. Hopefully it's not too late, and hopefully you will take it into consideration. Despite lack of "sweet words", the only intention of this comment is to help you.
Super solid re-write Britney! Great start to anyone curious about SEO, I dug into The Beginner's Guide To SEO a couple years ago and learned a ton, excited to see you guys are keeping it up-to-date. Stay Golden.
Hi Britney,
Really great introduction to SEO. Excellent writing. Looking forward to Chapter 2! Thanks and praise.
I need the next chapter!! ='(
I like the way you present SEO from a bird eye view of general SEO guidelines instead of technical stuff that are too hard for most people that are not techwise to implement. In SEO we often start by learning about H1s, Metas, and other technical stuff and lose sight about what SEO really is in 2018.
It really is a challenge to help user learn SEO since there is so much outdated stuff on the Web.
I think your article covers well the basics.
I would add a mention about Rank Brain though!
Thanks Britney
Thank you so much Jean-Christophe, I've added more info about RankBrain in the next chapter. Really appreciate your feedback!
Good first chapter one! Looking forward to the following
when will it be next?
Nice rewrite of the beginners guide to SEO! I really liked the first one too and it was darn helpful when I was just starting out with SEO, but this first draft of the new guide is on point. Way more in depth and precise (and that's only chapter one)! Looking forward to the other chapters.
Thank you so much Abel! I learned from the first guide as well, feels like I'm in a twilight zone/an alternative universe rewriting it. Really grateful to you and our entire SEO community for thoughts/suggestions throughout this process, it wouldn't be as solid without you all!!!
Good rewrite article/chapter into SEO. Its really helpful for beignners like me.! Thank you very much. Looking for next chapters.
Do you know any of the following?
Nice post Briteny!
As you say, is basic SEO but that´s good, because in my opinion nowadays the SEO trends are becoming "basic"...
Just deliver good content and satisfy your visitor. Simple and basic... or maybe not??
Timely update, it could also be useful to include a list of some essential tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console for example. In additional to some more preference-based tools, like; SEMRush, Moz and Ahrefs.
Yep, those are included in other chapters. Thanks for pointing that out though AWheller!
Hello Britney. First of all, thank you very much for sharing this kind of information with us. It is very usefull.
I would like to ask you if you, personally, have used the services of any SEO agency and, if so, which one would that be?
I have a travel blog, I am really newbie with blogging and webpages and I am having a lot of troubles with the SEO of my webpage. It would be awesome to read some recommendations by an expert in this area.
Thank you very much
Great SEO article! I will definitely get clients who are asking about SEO to read it.
I am looking forward to read the next chapter!
It's useful both personally and at work!!
Great tips for newbies. i will surely share in my circle.
Thanks and waiting for the chapter-02
Intuition Softech - Mobile app development Sydney
Incredible post.
No se encuentra contenido como este todos los días
Great for Chapter 1; however, you refer to Chapter 2 (...you can skip to Chapter 2 ) but there's no link and nothing comes up in a Google search or Moz website search?
Hi Britney,
Think it's cool in general.
My 2 cents would be to consider making the examples used for your "user intent types" more generic, by which I (probably) mean less specific to the USA.
I don't live in the USA, and I don't know who Issa Rae is, nor do I know what HBOGO is.
Lastly, while I understand what ‘We got y'all’ means, I don't think that turn of phrase is widely used outside of the USA.
In all three examples I can still deduce what the examples are trying to say, but maybe you want to make them more accessible for an international audience?
The very important point in SEO is your competitor. And you do what ever is necesary to be above him. Sometimes is not necesary to do lots of things if you compteitor has not doing so well.
Hi Briteny,
An informative post on SEO. Being a new blogger it helped me a lot in learning all the basics of SEO, its importance, differences between White Hat & black hat, etc. to name a few. Thanks for posting such an insightful article.
Hi Britney,
Nice start for everyone who isn't familiar with SEO and to explain why it is so important! Looking forward reading the following chapters!
Really enjoyed this rewrite. As a new SEO Analyst, the previous guide has been so helpful. Really looking for the next chapter.
The entry to this great post should contain:
"Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online..." BINGO ...and in comes Semantic Search!
Maybe now that you've stated this, Britney, more small business owners will comprehend that SEO is not just about the "Google Machine" but also about the quality you bring to your human customers.
Ok ok, I'll read the rest of the blog... *bookmarked*
Thank you, JL!!!! I thought that was an important point to make! :) Appreciate you noticing that.
Semantic/Entity Search is where it's at! Glad to help and look forward to your continued feedback JL!
Hey Britney,
It’s precise and on-point and love the way it’s written for everyone, novice or beginners even supposedly experts should take time out to enjoy it. Really looking forward to the the next chapter now.
Thanks so much dapogeorge!
Thanks Britney, that is a great article. Whether or not most of it is already known by the reader or not, being reminded of the basics is never a bad thing. Practice makes perfect and explaining yourself to the google employee is a good metaphor I know I've done stuff in the past that wouldn't pass that test!
Thanks for the kick up the butt! looking forward to reading another.
Soooooo happy this is being worked on! I teach Digital marketing to apprentices in the UK and this guide has always been my "go-to" when we get to SEO, only the past year or so it's been, "read it, but thats changed, and thats changed and ... " you get the point. Thank @brittany for working on this and helping a new era of SEO'ers get it right!
Hello Britney,
Thank you for those wonderful checklist which should be considered this 2018. I would add site speed to be the most important factor for SEO in 2018, followed by disavowing bad links and finally contents, quality and unique which provides value to visitors can really boost your organic traffic. Quality contents can bring your high quality backlinks which are even more valuable.
Thank you again and expecting another wonderful post very soon.
Hi!
Great article! I just have one question, when google considers keyword stuffing?
I saw competitors they are using the main keywords very often, plus many others keywords. So when does google considers keeyword stuffing?
Great start for the new re-write. I'm definitely looking forward to the new sections.
It will be very helpful in my professional journey
Hi Britney,
Thanks for sharing the good information about SEO. Few queries - if we have a website having good content and all basic SEO in place like URL Pattern, Page Title, Meta Tags etc.. What else we need to do - like link building (doing long back till 2012) and guest posting for the promotion of an article in search engine? And how we can increase the domain authority of newly build website.
Thanks
Ujjwal
Hi Briteny,
I guess I have a question related to advanced SEO but if someone has something to share please reply. My question is "Google follows LSI and Rank Brain algorithm to understand your content or keywords theme and based on that it gives ranking. But if I do a small change in my search term it changes the result on SERP. For example, "math game" and "math games" both query has different results on SERP.
A single letter can change the results on SERP then How keyword is not having same value it used be had?
In this situation every query related to the page theme should rank on same position if page's content quality is so good.
This question is bothering me from a long time. Please answer.
Hi Pooja,
This would be a great question for our Moz Q&A Forum.
Can you do it for me? I am not allowed to ask questions there.
Hi Britney,
Great post, and definitely something I will share with our new SEO intern. I'm looking forward to the chapter on keyword research - making sure you target the keywords which will bring you the best traffic is such an important part of a sustainable SEO strategy, and so making this clear to any SEO newbie is so important (maybe its even worth more of a mention in this chapter).
thanks!
Thanks for another useful piece of content. We are currently restructuring our brand and I'm finding these articles particularly helpful to ensure we implement SEO best practice across on-site and local search listings.
Hi Britney
Thanks for sharing beginners guide to SEO with us. Just started my career in this field for our new client, implemented some techniques which you proposed here. Learned about local business in Google. Looking forward to next chapter on Link Building.
Hi Brittany,
Regarding the live office hours hangouts link in your article (https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/office-hours), I get "We're sorry, we were unable to locate the site /webmasterhelpforum/en/office-hours." Is the link wrong or am I missing something?
Thanks for a great article!
Dave
Hi Dave,
Thanks so much for reading. You can find the Google Webmaster Hangouts here.
Hope that helps,
Britney
1 part of SEO that's difficult to grasp is that SEO is different every 2-3 months. But the basics stay the same: you need great content.
You can put up all kinds of equipment on a tank, but if the armor is terrible, it has no chance of making it in the field of battle. (read Armor as content)
Спасибо. Полезная статья. Прошу сообщить когда выйдет следующая глава.
Я использую SEO для продвижения своего личного блога.
Читаю статьи для начинающих.
Не понимаю. Мой комментарий блокируется.
Спасибо за чтение Владимира.
Следующая глава должна быть опубликована в течение следующей недели или двух.