Many of you reading likely cut your teeth on Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO. Since it was launched, it's easily been our top-performing piece of content:
Most months see 100k+ views (the reverse plateau in 2013 is when we changed domains).
While Moz’s Beginner's Guide to SEO still gets well over 100k views a month, the current guide itself is fairly outdated. This big update has been on my personal to-do list since I started at Moz, and we need to get it right because — let’s get real — you all deserve a bad-ass SEO 101 resource!
However, updating the guide is no easy feat. Thankfully, I have the help of my fellow Mozzers. Our content team has been a collective voice of reason, wisdom, and organization throughout this process and has kept this train on its tracks.
Despite the effort we've put into this already, it felt like something was missing: your input! We're writing this guide to be a go-to resource for all of you (and everyone who follows in your footsteps), and want to make sure that we're including everything that today's SEOs need to know. You all have a better sense of that than anyone else.
So, in order to deliver the best possible update, I'm seeking your help.
This is similar to the way Rand did it back in 2007. And upon re-reading your many "more examples" requests, we’ve continued to integrate more examples throughout.
The plan:
- Over the next 6–8 weeks, I’ll be updating sections of the Beginner's Guide and posting them, one by one, on the blog.
- I'll solicit feedback from you incredible people and implement top suggestions.
- The guide will be reformatted/redesigned, and I'll 301 all of the blog entries that will be created over the next few weeks to the final version.
- It's going to remain 100% free to everyone — no registration required, no premium membership necessary.
To kick things off, here’s the revised outline for the Beginner’s Guide to SEO:
Click each chapter's description to expand the section for more detail.
Chapter 1: SEO 101
What is it, and why is it important? ↓
- What is SEO?
- Why invest in SEO?
- Do I really need SEO?
- Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?
Search engine basics:
- Google Webmaster Guidelines basic principles
- Bing Webmaster Guidelines basic principles
- Guidelines for representing your business on Google
Fulfilling user intent
Know your SEO goals
Chapter 2: Crawlers & Indexing
First, you need to show up. ↓
How do search engines work?
- Crawling & indexing
- Determining relevance
- Links
- Personalization
How search engines make an index
- Googlebot
- Indexable content
- Crawlable link structure
- Links
- Alt text
- Types of media that Google crawls
- Local business listings
Common crawling and indexing problems
- Online forms
- Blocking crawlers
- Search forms
- Duplicate content
- Non-text content
Tools to ensure proper crawl & indexing
- Google Search Console
- Moz Pro Site Crawl
- Screaming Frog
- Deep Crawl
How search engines order results
- 200+ ranking factors
- RankBrain
- Inbound links
- On-page content: Fulfilling a searcher’s query
- PageRank
- Domain Authority
- Structured markup: Schema
- Engagement
- Domain, subdomain, & page-level signals
- Content relevance
- Searcher proximity
- Reviews
- Business citation spread and consistency
SERP features
- Rich snippets
- Paid results
- Universal results
- Featured snippets
- People Also Ask boxes
- Knowledge Graph
- Local Pack
- Carousels
Chapter 3: Keyword Research
Next, know what to say and how to say it. ↓
How to judge the value of a keyword
The search demand curve
- Fat head
- Chunky middle
- Long tail
Four types of searches:
- Transactional queries
- Informational queries
- Navigational queries
- Commercial investigation
Fulfilling user intent
Keyword research tools:
- Google Keyword Planner
- Moz Keyword Explorer
- Google Trends
- AnswerThePublic
- SpyFu
- SEMRush
Keyword difficulty
Keyword abuse
Content strategy {link to the Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing}
Chapter 4: On-Page SEO
Next, structure your message to resonate and get it published. ↓
Keyword usage and targeting
Keyword stuffing
Page titles:
- Unique to each page
- Accurate
- Be mindful of length
- Naturally include keywords
- Include branding
Meta data/Head section:
- Meta title
- Meta description
- Meta keywords tag
- No longer a ranking signal
- Meta robots
Meta descriptions:
- Unique to each page
- Accurate
- Compelling
- Naturally include keywords
Heading tags:
- Subtitles
- Summary
- Accurate
- Use in order
Call-to-action (CTA)
- Clear CTAs on all primary pages
- Help guide visitors through your conversion funnels
Image optimization
- Compress file size
- File names
- Alt attribute
- Image titles
- Captioning
- Avoid text in an image
Video optimization
- Transcription
- Thumbnail
- Length
- "~3mo to YouTube" method
Anchor text
- Descriptive
- Succinct
- Helps readers
URL best practices
- Shorter is better
- Unique and accurate
- Naturally include keywords
- Go static
- Use hyphens
- Avoid unsafe characters
Structured data
- Microdata
- RFDa
- JSON-LD
- Schema
- Social markup
- Twitter Cards markup
- Facebook Open Graph tags
- Pinterest Rich Pins
Structured data types
- Breadcrumbs
- Reviews
- Events
- Business information
- People
- Mobile apps
- Recipes
- Media content
- Contact data
- Email markup
Mobile usability
- Beyond responsive design
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
- Google mobile-friendly test
- Bing mobile-friendly test
Local SEO
- Business citations
- Entity authority
- Local relevance
Complete NAP on primary pages
Low-value pages
Chapter 5: Technical SEO
Next, translate your site into Google's language. ↓
Internal linking
- Link positioning
- Anchor links
Common search engine protocols
Robots
- Robots.txt
- Disallow
- Sitemap
- Crawl Delay
- X-robots
- Meta robots
- Index/noindex
- Follow/nofollow
- Noimageindex
- None
- Noarchive
- Nocache
- No archive
- No snippet
- Noodp/noydir
- Log file analysis
- Site speed
- HTTP/2
- Crawl errors
Duplicate content
- Canonicalization
- Pagination
What is the DOM?
- Critical rendering path
- Help robots find the most important code first
Hreflang/Targeting multiple languages
Chrome DevTools
Technical site audit checklist
Chapter 6: Establishing Authority
Finally, turn up the volume. ↓
Link signals
- Global popularity
- Local/topic-specific popularity
- Freshness
- Social sharing
- Anchor text
- Trustworthiness
- Number of links on a page
- Domain Authority
- Page Authority
- MozRank
Competitive backlinks
The power of social sharing
- Tapping into influencers
- Expanding your reach
Types of link building
- Natural link building
- Manual link building
- Self-created
Six popular link building strategies
- Create content that inspires sharing and natural links
- Ego-bait influencers
- Broken link building
- Refurbish valuable content on external platforms
- Get your customers/partners to link to you
- Local community involvement
Manipulative link building
- Reciprocal link exchanges
- Link schemes
- Paid links
- Low-quality directory links
- Tiered link building
- Negative SEO
- Disavow
Reviews
- Establishing trust
- Asking for reviews
- Managing reviews
- Avoiding spam practices
Chapter 7: Measuring and Tracking SEO
Pivot based on what's working. ↓
KPIs
- Conversions
- Event goals
- Signups
- Engagement
- GMB Insights:
- Click-to-call
- Click-for-directions
- Beacons
Which pages have the highest exit percentage? Why?
Which referrals are sending you the most qualified traffic?
Pivot!
Search engine tools:
- Google Search Console
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- GMB Insights
Appendix A: Glossary of Terms
Appendix B: List of Additional Resources
Appendix C: Contributors & Credits
What did you struggle with most when you were first learning about SEO? What would you have benefited from understanding from the get-go?
Are we missing anything? Any section you wish wouldn't be included in the updated Beginner's Guide? Leave your suggestions in the comments!
Thanks in advance for contributing.
This is going to be a great guide. Honestly, not even so much for beginners anymore, it's super detailed and covers pretty much everything!
I had a few additional small things in mind, that I believe to be important specifically for beginners.
1. Search Operators: No need for all of them, but the top 10 such as Cache, Site:, Intitle, exclude domain, and a few more.
2. YouTube: No need to go into details, but already 5 years ago we heard that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine. Just a few top factors for ranking well on YouTube.
3. International SEO: You mentioned Hreflang, but I'd also mention a few key examples of things to take into account when going global. I also think that for beginners, even if they will only work in English, it's good to know that there are other search engines in the world as well, and perhaps to have a few words about each one (such as Baidu or Yandex), and their main differences from Google.
4. Google Analytics: This is almost off-topic, as Google Analytics is not an SEO tool. But every new SEO will work with GA, so I would at least cover the basics, and dive into a few very specific examples for SEOs, such as how to handle the Not Provided issue.
BOOM!!! These are the overlooked topic ideas I was hoping to see! Brilliant points Igal, thank you so much!
Agree with Igal, maybe include Google Search Console setup for International SEO
Hello Britney!
In my case the problem was that all that heard and learned about SEO was for blogs.
So it was difficult for me to be sure if those tips would work on my website. I didn't want to have a lot of content on each page. I wanted a website clear that just go directly to the point.
So my question has always been: It is possible to be in first positions without having so much content?
I learned then to have a good structure on the site with clear CTAs and internal links. Plus external links...
But I still feel that the higher content of my competitors is not letting me go up in the list.
Cheers
M
This is a great point Mario and differs greatly from industry to industry. --Definitely worth making note of in the guide.
Thank you!
Britney,
You always have great resources and posts, and with this I am more than positive it will be the same.
What did you struggle with most when you were first learning about SEO?
The concepts on what matters the most. To elaborate there are tiers of SEO that are needed on a site and if you can breakdown what matters the most at the ground level as you perform more SEO tactics for a client the better the results.
What would you have benefited from understanding from the get-go?
That the flow of the site should be in sync. What I mean by this is logic that should be applied to every page such as URL structure, keywords used, Heading tags, and placement should all have a logical flow on the site and page.
Are we missing anything?
Nope if anything offering all this great advice and tips maybe a cert from Moz to show off the new found skills.
Super pumped on this great updated contribution to the Moz community and thank you for all your hard work on this as well.
Great feedback Tim, thank you!!!
Hi Britney, Happy to see this is getting updated! I would consider adding a section on types of featured snippets and strategies for achieving them. That might mean a richer section on content then just linking to the content marketing guide.
Hey Kris!
We will be addressing Featured Snippets in Chapter 2. Apologies if the down arrow (to expand each chapter's content) isn't clear. Thanks!
To respond to the question what would have helped starting out:
I went into SEO wanting to know what I thought was a simple question: How do I raise my website's search rankings?
I needed to slow down and ask the right questions first, but I didn't know what the right questions even were. I wanted to be able to outline the steps I'd need to take, but without knowing how everything interacted it was very difficult to even plan a rough sketch out.
I think it'd be helpful to include a sample "SEO Improvement Strategy for Small Businesses" plan that could help people see what tasking out some of this work might look like and how long it will actually take. It's not a quick process, and no one should feel bad for spending a long time on it- especially if they lack resources.
SEO can feel overwhelming starting out, but seeing a plan could help give people encouragement to what an example strategy would look like.
Excellent TOC, looking forward to this valuable SEO guide, especially “beacons” in chapter 7
Looking forward to watching these roll out and providing some feedback!
I hope some mention of Rel-Prerender makes it in there as it's been created quite a few big wins in page speed over the past 2 years for me.
Early on, I think it would have been helpful to understand where things stood in terms of importance and expertise level. With so many things we need to know, sometimes it's tough for a beginner to know how important something is and how involved it will be. Seeing some visual with level of importance and expertise level could be helpful.
A visual of the elements listed in the guide that shows that it affects Accessibility (not crawlability) would be a nice addition since so many are overlooked because they're not high impact/priority SEO things. I think it would be cool to see which aspects in the list affect compliance for Accessibility Standards since it's so important for:
It could be a simple step to help make the web a better place for all.
LOVE these suggestions Matt!
Level of expertise visual cues is such a great idea and would really help people skim over beginner, intermediate, and expert info.
Web Accessibility is SO important and will be included. --Am ashamed that slipped passed me...but a great example as to why open sourcing this process will make it so much better! Thank you!!! :)
A brief excerpt on the Winn-Dixie lawsuit would be so neat!
^nailed it!
What did you struggle with most when you were first learning about SEO?
Trying to get a feel for things that require fuzzy math and intuition, like how many links you need to build, or at what point a piece of content is long enough. A lot of the 101 guides I've seen treat SEO as if every site exists in a vacuum. They say "Google likes longer content," not "All else being equal, the longer content wins." It's a small distinction, but it helps.
What would you have benefited from understanding from the get-go?
I wish I saw the top search engine ranking factors earlier. A couple of my early contacts put a lot of weight on keyword density and keyword presence in urls/domains, but not as much on links or link quality.
I also wish there was more emphasis on what is, isn't, and might be a ranking factor. Again, a lot of SEO 101 guides say things like "your keyword should appear in your meta description" without ever explaining the benefit, so it's easy to assume that it would have a direct effect on rankings.
Are we missing anything?
First, I really wish there was more coherent 101 level content about SEO and site structure. Specifically, things like whether or not you should optimize the home page for a commercial term, rough guidelines for structuring different kinds of sites (ecommerce, service area businesses, etc.), and the practical limitations of site structure (like how far you can push a .com/austin/hvac/air-conditioning/repair kind of url structure.)
Second, I'd love to see more links to external content for specific issues and industries. I think a lot of people who read your beginner's guide already know what they're going to optimize, whether it's an ecommerce site, a site for a service area business, a lifestyle blog, or whatever else, and links off to other resources that cover those subjects in more depth could be really helpful.
And lastly, I'd love it if all the examples in this guide were related. When guides pull out random, unrelated examples for each new subject, it can be jarring and hard to follow. But if you start off with the premise that everything in this guide is going to show best practices for just a couple of fictional sites, like a poodle groomer in Seattle and an ecommerce site that sells custom snow globes, it's much more coherent.
I've been a huge fan of Moz's beginner's guide since I first read it, and it's still my most recommended guide for noobs, so I can't wait to see how you make it even better.
Including a section on why testing some of those key SEO principles is so important might be helpful. That goes for the search engine ranking factors as well (imo). What some sites consider to be important ranking factors, others will completely ignore and do great.
Information Architecture is so important and often overlooked. That would be a great section to include early on in the guide.
Providing an example website throughout would be really neat and help to tie everything together.
Thank you so much Joe!
This is cool stuff, Britney. Moz SEO guide is my first reference that I give to beginners everytime.
When I was a layman to SEO, basically there were two questions that concerned me a lot:
1) Do I need to be a proficient in web development to be a good SEO?
2) As I started, I heard that Google rank websites based on some algorithms. So, I thought I need to create some algos to make my website rank in Google (I know this one sounds very dumb, but it's true). :)
Thanks
Not dumb at all, really interesting. A lot of mix ups/confusions like that happen early on to SEOs; myself 100% included.
It would be good to establish what exactly is required to be an SEO (and that you don't need to be a web dev guru).
Thanks Praveen!
This is great news and I'm loving the comments. All good suggestions.
I think it would help to start by putting SEO in context. How does it relate to social media and inbound and content marketing? How are organic, local and PCC the same and different? Where do they overlap and (to John Winget's point), how can a small business owner figure out which approach or approaches are best for him or her?
It would be good if there was a way to tie all the local topics altogether. They're peppered throughout so it's hard to see the big picture.
Lastly, citation building. I'm assuming you'll cover that in Chapter 6 but I didn't see it called out specifically.
Ah, putting SEO into a bigger picture context is a great idea! Am going to brainstorm some ways we could visualize how all of those categories work together. If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them! :)
Business Citations will 100% be in the guide, not sure how that slipped through this index.
Thank you so much Donna!
Hi Britney
Great to see the guide getting an update!
With Google now looking so closely at 'search user satisfaction' signals, I think it would be great to include a section on this topic.
For example,
- How to persuade Google users to click on your search listings
- How to understand the intent of a search query
- How to design landing pages that engage search users
I would be happy to write this section if you need any help
Hi Britney - I use the Moz SEO guide all of the time for new employees in my day job, and clients in my side gig. Did you want to add something about AMP and mobile?
Yep, AMP and mobile will be within Chapter 4. Thanks Lynnwoll!
Hi Britney
This guide only needs to be available in Spanish to be 100% perfect. Seriously, it's too complete and there are even points that seem insignificant but that can be very interesting
C´mon man, just leave it like this... This guide is really good stuff, so less readers, less competitors ;-)
You're right.;-);-);-)
Hey. It's amazing to see that Moz are updating their SEO guide again. This was one of the first things i used when getting into SEO.
Great guide for beginners. I'm tired of reading definitive SEO guides that stay halfway through. This article explains each of the points perfectly.
Thank you Britney.
Thanks Sergio! That's the goal; to unfold the basics so the more technical aspects makes sense.
Good news. Can't wait to see the updated version.
Suggestion for keyword research:
Add some information about keyword grouping and explain what to do next with keywords, some people I've talked to have no idea what to do with their keywords once they found them.
Suggestion for technical audit:
Throw in some automated audit tool. Explain how they work and point out that they're far from perfect, but can speed up some processes.
I also have a suggestion related to getting search suggestions and questions (more capable cousin of AnswerThePublic). But I'm totally biased in this case so I'll just swallow it :)
Great suggestions Igor! Does SerpStat do search suggestions and question research?
This is exciting! And yay to more examples and free tools!
What did you struggle with most when you were first learning about SEO?
I think the biggest hurdle was sifting through what was current and what was outdated. As a newb, for example you don't understand that black hat tactics are harmful (let alone what black hat even is).
Also, including points about SEO for eCommerce sites, since it is going to look wildly different to a newcomer.
What would you have benefited from understanding from the get-go?
Once all is said and done, being able to track your progress properly - showing how to bridge the gap between you and the "Not Provided" keywords and maybe including some free dashboards.
Great feedback Lana! Definitely agree on the being able to track your progress properly and bridging the gap between Not Provided keywords. Thank you so much!
Hi Britney,
I learned a ton from your preso at MozCon this year and I'm looking forward to seeing your edits to this already amazing resource. For me the combination of knowledge that I've gained on the technical SEO side (thanks Moz), combined with the practical theories for creating 10X content have been instrumental. I have been able to design content around high volume phrases and show up on page one of the SERP. So I suppose including the 10X principles makes sense to me for a beginner's guide. By the way, I often refer to the SEO Guide as an example of great 10X content.
Really appreciate this Ricardo, thank you. A section on 10X content will definitely be included.
It's always good to update a guide, especially one for beginners, who are generally not aware of all the latest and greatest developments in the subject.
Of course, not all beginners have the same starting point, or the same interests and needs in SEO. So make sure you keep it as easily digestible as you can, while not detracting for the key details and overall quality score of the guide's contents. Sounds easy and fun. Lucky you! And thanks for asking for our contribution. This community has awesome insights and it's great to see them shared here with you.
For geolocation and language specific SEO, please be sure to include info about default/x-default. that's something that is still very useful for many sites. Especially those whose primary language is not English.
Also important:
Schema / microdataformats
JSON / Structured HTML - please explain it and make it easily actionable so that the average newbie (or lazy Dev) can make the most of it and implement it.
Content quality synthesis: what makes a high quality piece of content, regardless of the kind of media asset that it is.
Soft 404s - the lurking danger that you can easily solve with Google Search Console
And be sure to dump PageRank or explain that it is obsolete since years already.
Good luck! I look forward to reading the new version and if it's as good as expected, sharing it with lots of n00bs.
Hi Britney,
It's a great excitement that you are updating your guide.I am looking forward to reading the improved version of your guide!!!!!!!!!!
would you mention some new technologies and their effect on SEO (like AMP,PWA)?
Thanks for all
YAAAA!!! Love your excitement, thank you Leebi!
Will definitely include some information on PWAAMps! :)
Hola Britney!
Good idea to update the guide.
I see missing at least two or three appendixes:
1) basic of Mobile Search Optimization (maybe as an extension of technical SEO)
2) basics of International SEO because more and more also newbies have to deal at least with multilingual websites, especially if they live/work in markets where English is not the main language
3) basics of Local Search, because Local and geolocalized queries are now almost always present in any seo project.
For the international SEO part, you know you can count on my support
Great points Gianluca! Thank you so much, will make sure we incorporate these topics.
Great point Britney,
It would be very helpful for the beginner user, who just started their career in SEO
It is easy to understand and learn what's the main points in SEO.
Thankyou for sharing your knowledge. Keep it up.
This guide is perfect for those who want to start SEO.
Good job.
Looks like fun updating this resource. I have suggestions invlving keyword research and topic models. Looking forward to getting involved.
Can't wait to hear your ideas Bill! Feel free to shoot me an email anytime [email protected].
Thanks!
Very interesting article has helped me a lot of thanks to people like you who help beginners like me.
[URL removed by editor]
There are SEO beginners, and then there are SEO beginners..
Who's your audience? What kind of person do you envision reading this? Are you writing/updating the Beginner's Guide to SEO for the somewhat technical or for the totally clueless about SEO? For the business owner who can hire a SEO wonk or for the sole proprietor of a one-or two-person shop who can't afford the time to delve deeply into SEO, no matter what his skill level may be?
I'd suggest you decide who your target audience is and then write for those people. From there, the rest of us can determine how useful the Beginner's Guide will be.
Carol Buchanan
Our audience ranges from anyone wanting to know what SEO is to high level SEOs looking to brush up on the basics.
mattlacuestaCO made a great suggestion on adding level of SEO expertise visual cues throughout the guide. This would allow readers to more easily skim content at their level and then work their way up.
Image SEO:
Great suggestions Tai-Le! Just curious, how do you currently report on image SEO?
-Was just talking about this today and how there aren't many resources available for image SEO.
We report on keywords that rank in Top 50 (by counting horizontally) and chart the spread of keywords in different tiers. Chose Top 50 since people are more likely to scroll until they find an image that fits their intent. Not surprisingly, we found that high rankings do not necessarily mean more clicks when it comes to image search.
In addition, we also chart out impressions and clicks for top image keywords (from GSC).
That is exciting! I will make sure to keep up-to-date with your next posts.
The worst thing about learning SEO is the period of time that you spend searching for good SEO bloggers. At first you don't understand too much important are Google guideline, so you read about directories and you spend massive time just adding you business to cheap directories and hurting your SEO meanwhile. After a while you start learning to trust only "valuable" and "current ressources", such as Moz, Backlinko and Neil Patel.
Something that areally levelled up my SEO learning was following this blog on a day-to-day basis and by installing Moz Bar, and looking at page authority and domain authority of blog posts before reading them. That became my "quality score" when reading SEO materials.
Thanks for the update of SEO 101, it is right on time as I was waiting for up-to-date information aboout some of the subjects you will be going into!
Great feedback Jean-Christophe! The MozBar really helped me level up my skills as well, thank you for sharing that.
Hey Britney this is awesome, about time it’s updated to a 2017/2018 Guide to help SEO beginners. Things have changed… With the introduction of AI.. Audit tool is very important also an in-depth explanation on link acquisition also Structured data.
It’s not only going to help beginners but will be a great refresher learning tool… For some of us with bad habits.
Can we all take a moment and and say WOW considering how much search has changed in the last 10 years, and that the guide is still very relevant. Great job focusing on core values instead of specific techniques. Thanks moz!
Happy to see this project moving forward. Something to think about, keep the original version available as a historical document. It becomes increasingly difficult to find older SEO documentation as the discipline evolves. While it's reasonable to scrap or replace outdated content, I am persuaded of the value in maintaining the history of SEO, so academics, professionals and interested persons can research the origins and evolution of the discipline and profession.
Great idea, thank you Thomas!
Thanks for this. You know I will have to keep connected to this because as the world keeps changing, these guides will o too. But guess what? Writings like these are genuinely reliable for Digital Marketing or even PPC Marketing.
Hello Britney,
Excellent guide to learn from the beginning what are the main SEO factors.
It is a very useful information for all of us who are starting our journey on the topic of Organic Positioning.
I appreciate that you share your knowledge, because in this way it is much easier for us to learn who we are beginners.
Greetings and I am waiting for new articles
I imagine this will be covered throughout the guide at various points; however, when starting out, the hardest thing for me was understanding and contextualizing the overwhelming amount of data -- often as the only SEO specialist on staff, and only doing it as part of my job.
While it's ideal to know how to conduct detailed technical and on-site audits, it would have been helpful for me as a beginner to have steps for a basic audit. Working in smaller nonprofits, our pages were simpler and conversions not the same as the ecommerce metrics I frequently saw. Knowing how to do a quick, basic audit became helpful for monitoring those pages on a regular basis until I became more comfortable with adding additional data points and understanding how they all fit together to form a larger, more detailed picture of our sites' SEO.
All that I guess to say: As a beginner, what do I really need to know and what can I wait to develop?
@ Britney Muller Thanks! Have you started the work? Would love to see it.
Nice post! :) Really appreciate the time you took to explain writing. This will definitely come in handy and is a perfect way to learn more about search engine science
Great News. I think that you should add a list of resources and tools including free tools at the end of each chapter.
For example for Keyword research - You can include LSI Graph - This tool gives related keywords with concepts like rank brain and semantic search increasing in importance, this tools provides great insight into related and similar words. Also Google search console - This tool will also give you a large number of keywords in which you have appeared in search but have not yet got clicks or get very few
Some more suggestion tools the suggested searches at the bottom of Google search, ubersuggest, keywordtool.io,
Under on Page SEO - the number of keywords to be targeted on a page. Several closely related keyword terms can share the same web page. For example the same web page can rank for many similar terms on the first page of search. A great example was given here: expresswriters.com/what-to-do-with-closely-related-keyword-terms/
Great see that it is getting an overhaul. I often point people in the direction of the guide when they are starting out, as it was a great introduciton for myself.
What did you struggle with most when you were first learning about SEO? What would you have benefited from understanding from the get-go? One of the hardest things at the start was simply knowing what suggestions to trust, there were and still can be, so many conflicting stories and comments. Having the Moz community really helped me find a level playing field and consistent knowledge base that I have continued to trust and feedback into.
Are we missing anything? Any section you wish wouldn't be included in the updated Beginner's Guide? It's been a while since I looked over the original SEO guide, but I would suggest a section for none techs, something that includes guides on tag management tools to help with tracking events and further integrations to boost an SEO's knowledge of a site without the need for dev input on a regular basis which can often be a barrier to success. And also a bit about e-commerce SEO.
Looking forward to the new guide.
Tim
Really great points Tim! Thank you. One of my goals is to make the guide as succinct as possible, and I'm not sure we could do that if we include the various silos of SEO (like ecommerce). However, that's a great idea for potential industry specific guides.
Hi,
Yes, it is very good of you people to update the beginners guide. I'll be very happy to share stuff from what I learned about SEO in last year or so. But my question is - How to contribute? And where to give our suggestions?
Thanks.
Right here in the comments would be great. Thanks!
Sharing my two cents thoughts for your consideration:
For Image Optimization, you might want to mention images to be hosted on same website domain or subdomains. Highly useful to optimize images for driving organic search traffic from Google Image Search.
For Measuring and Tracking SEO, you might want to consider track ranking performance on Google for web pages, since we know that 1 position higher in ranking will lead to an increase in organic search traffic. If the ranking for the web page declines, it may signify changes on the web page or website might have caused the drop, or due to Google algorithm updates. Perhaps it may be useful for beginners to include some troubleshooting guide on SEO issues, i.e. decline in organic search traffic decline, no SEO traffic.
Love this!
What did you struggle with most when you were first learning about SEO?
I think the biggest hurdle was sifting through what was current and what was outdated. As a newb, for example you don't understand that black hat tactics are harmful (let alone what black hat even is).
Also, including points about SEO for eCommerce sites, since it is going to look wildly different to a newcomer.
What would you have benefited from understanding from the get-go?
Once all is said and done, being able to track your progress properly - showing how to bridge the gap between you and the "Not Provided" keywords and maybe including some free dashboards.
For me, the biggest challenge was learning how to implement a process. How do you pull all the technical aspects together into an ongoing project and/or even a service that you can deliver to clients. Examples to help set realistic expectations would be great too - you're not going to "win the internet" in week one!
Exciting stuff! Something else I would add in Chapter 6, Establishing Authority, is a section on topic comprehensiveness and searcher task accomplishment. Links will always be important, but as searcher task accomplishment becomes more of a factor, you shouldn't neglect to create content that answers all possible questions in an organized, relevant way. I use MarketMuse to build my content briefs and have gotten great results because the software generates guidelines based on existing top-ranking content, and tells you how to do it better. (Disclaimer: MarketMuse is also a client of mine, but they wouldn't be if I didn't think they had an excellent product.)
Looking forward to reading the new guide! Keep up the great work, Moz!
Great ideas! Task Accomplishment is so important and MarketMuse looks fascinating! Will definitely check them out, thanks for letting us know.
Hi Britney
In sense of what you can improve or add I don't have the exact recipe but I can share something interesting.
Before few days we did our own experiments for random search keyword for "cheap shoes" in BG language. Using the Moz tools and on-page seo check tools our purpose was to discover why and how exactly Google orders the shops in the first SERP for this search.
We got some interesting results in function of all parameters on-page and off-page. The most strange was that a lot of websites with lower authority and few backlinks were before ones with higher authority+links. Sure we made this for many more different searches and for websites ,not only shops.
So,the real result shows: the holy website content + some basic on-page seo beats all the rest of factors.
The guides are good for theory start with the SEO. But right now the most important and crashing factor (at least in Google) is the correct content (quality,structure,unique,volume).
Great article - wish I would have read it when I just started with SEO. I have 2 blogs and with one of them (the first one) I struggled at the beginning with getting indexed by Google. Later on I put my focus on content optimization. Even now that I am more experienced with SEO, this guide is still great to read and to remember once again the important points in SEO.
i want to become better seo because this is best opportunity for independent work and best earning source but i have notice that at time there is so heavy competition so tel some extra trick for this at now i am using bookmarking directory and social blogs but i want to no know that any structural thing during web dovelopment
¿Cómo puedo ver el contenido? Lo visualizo pero solo aparecen los títulos. Espero que alguien me ayude
Gracias.
This is going to be a great guide for a beginner . Your article is so helpful for the beginners who are working in seo field , everything is in so detailed and covers pretty much everything!
Hi!
Ever thought about publishing a translation? I think it could be very useful for the many people out there who don't speak english.
there are quite few translations already of the guide by others sites (for sure in Spanish and Italian).
It’s something you can do after signing a translation deal with Moz
Hi Britney,
It will be great to see some specifics or best practices say of using keywords? Their placement and importance of easy to read content etc. It would also be nice if free tools and templates could be suggested which will aid in SEO activity.
Also, shedding some light on myths or old practices which are not relevant today will be a good section or a kicker at the bottom of page!
Knowing what is not to be done and how one corrects or de-penalize themselves will also be good to know.
Thanks,
I think it's perfect, I'll be waiting.
Hi Britney,
I have a small local business and since a year ago I try to sell my product online, it´s being really hard for my to appear in the first pages of google since all positioning work is done by me, and I am not a seo professional, I guess we are many in the same situation, when reading your post I notice many newbie mistakes that I am making, so thank you very much for sharing your guide and I hope you help me improve my business.