So, you’ve decided to embark on the journey of learning Search Engine Optimization (or Optimisation, if you’re British) – Better known as, SEO.
Table of Contents
What Is SEO?
SEO is the process of getting your website to high positions in the search engine result pages, or SERPs, for short –
This is done by making your website (and the websites that link to your site) as friendly to search engines as possible.
Google is (obviously) the biggest search engine in the world, and runs on multiple algorithms to figure out which sites rank where. We optimize (and in some cases, manipulate) these algorithms by optimizing 2 main factors of websites.
How Do We Make Our Website Search-Engine Friendly?
There are two main topics that Google takes into consideration when analyzing your website, and where they think it should “rank” for a specific keyword – or keywords.
These two topics are OnPage and Backlinks.
OnPage
OnPage SEO is the process of optimizing the indiviual pages on your website, and the site as a whole to be as friendly to Google (and other search engines) as possible.
This is done by optimizing the code, words, images and just about everything else on your website. Google has over 100 different aspects it looks at when reviewing your pages – Though don’t worry, you won’t have to optimize 100 different things on every single page.
Backlinks / OffPage SEO
Backlinks are other websites that link to your website. Google counts these as websites giving recognition to your website’s pages, and in some times, can help with additional things like ranking you in the map listings for local searches.
Link building is the process of building backlinks to your website. You can actually do specific techniques and campaigns to build links yourself, or have other website owners, bloggers and journalists link to your website for you.
OffPage SEO refers to backlinks, and any other external “signal” that Google takes into consideration when ranking your website – Such as social shares.
How Does Google Work?
Google has a series of “crawlers” which search the web and locate pages across hundreds of millions of websites.
These crawlers then run the page through a “core algorithm”, as well as a series of other, smaller algorithm’s and in some rare cases.. Machine learning algorithms such as Word2Vec & RankBrain.
These algorithm’s analyze various elements of your website and (in extreme layman’s terms) assign internal scores to help decide where your website should rank.
They then compare your website to the various other websites they believe should be shown for a given keyword.
Where Do I Begin, With SEO?
The fact you’ve found this free SEO course is a phenominal start, and we’ll be taking you all the way through to becoming someone who understands, can analyze and implement SEO techniques, strategies and campaigns.
Start lesson now 2 here, and start learning the terminology used in the industry.
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