82 Resources to Learn SEO Basics from Scratch – Netpeak Software Blog

If you’re new to SEO and website audit, start here. Everyone was a beginner once, so we decided to collect fundamental terms and links to reliable resources organized by the subject relevance. Some of the blog posts contain more hands-on information about SEO audits that will help you level-jump.

Follow the jump links to switch to the desired topic.

What Is SEO?

How Search Engines Work

Off-Page SEO

How to Measure and Track Results

SEO Community Resources

1. What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of different practices that are applied to get more quantity and quality traffic to the website. Plainly speaking, it’s all about getting the right audience to reach the highest possible position in the organic search engine result pages (SERP).

Though at first glance, SEO may seem a bunch of dull technical techniques that need to be reiterated each step at a time, it requires strong analytical and creative skills. Despite a good website structure, optimized technical background, proper keywords in the proper places, you should also think about relevant content that should meet the website visitors’ needs and the links from other websites as proof of trust and worthiness of your project. So it’s an undying process.

These days, SEO is vital as never before since many businesses switch online because online means more opportunities and broader audience.

On the one hand, there is a user who has an urge or a question, and he types in a search engine bar, let’s say, ‘how to make a smoothie.’ As soon as he hits ‘Search,’ a list of results appear, he clicks on the one that seems the best fit and jumps to the website to find the answer to the question (in best case scenario).

On the flip side, there’s backstage magic that makes all these things happen. The main point is to decipher the user’s intent, understand what they behave online, what words they are using, and what results they expect to receive.

2. How Search Engines Work

2.1. Crawling, Indexing, Ranking

The web is often compared to an enormous library that stores billions of books. It happens in three stages:

3. A visualized theory on Youtube by Matt Cutts. Easily digested 👌

2.2. Is Everything Going to Be Crawled? Crawl Budget Explained

Crawl budget stands for the limited number of URLs a search robot can and wants to crawl during one visit before leaving your website.

It’s the case for large websites that should optimize crawl budget not to waste it on unimportant pages.

2.3. Ranking Factors

Google ranking systems are made up of different algorithms that come into place when a query is typed into a search bar. Google’s staying up to speed with the extremely volatile world and continually changes its algorithms to improve the search.

However, there are ranking factors that keep being significant despite all the changes.

SERP stands for search engine result pages. On the SERP, you can see organic and paid (ads) results:

In most cases, SEO’s sweet dream is to get not in the first position of the SERP, but the ‘zero position,’ called ‘featured snippet’.

If your web page provides an answer in the form of ‘how-to’ or ‘what is’ tutorial and has a structured data markup (more on this later), it is likely to appear on that extremely clickable ‘zero’ position.

2. A detailed guide to all SERP features

2.5. How People Are Doing Search and How to Understand Their Intent

This is how a standard search process looks like:

SEO’s job is to understand the intent behind a search query. Why are they searching? What do they want to achieve through their search? So ‘search intent’ is the goal a user wants to accomplish by using a particular keyword. Understanding search intent isn’t that easy, but these days it’s hugely important.

1. How to identify search intent through SERP analysis

2.6. Google Algorithms

During the last decade, Google rolled out several algorithm updates that shook up the web immensely and forever changed the game rules. Google algorithms were created to ‘purge’ the internet of spammy and low-quality content and combat thriving Black Hat SEO practices (some of them are still commonly used).

These are the key algorithms and the web evils they fought against:

3. The Google algorithm cheat sheet

3. Keyword Research

Keyword research is a bread-and-butter of SEO. It helps determine what words your audience uses to speak of your business and what keywords can bring you traffic. Keyword research is not a one-time cost. It should be reiterated at any stage of your website development to keep it up to speed.

3.1. What Is a Keyword?

One bite at a time, let’s figure out what a ‘keyword’ term actually means in SEO. In SEO, keywords are the words and phrases that help users find pages with necessary information via search engines. Keywords help search engines understand if the webpages are relevant to the users’ search intent. SEOs are working hard to collect those words to understand their audience’s language and show search engines that their content is most relevant.

Keywords are the foundation for website structure and the content itself.

Go deeper and read the extended definition of a keyword from Moz.

3.2. How to Do Keyword Research

Keyword research starts with discovering your ‘seed’ or ‘primary’ keywords. Since this type of keywords is extremely competitive, this list should be expanded to the keywords that imply the user’s intention. Such keywords are called long-tail keywords.

3.3. Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords consist of more than three words and often look like a sentence: ‘how to make apple juice in a juicer machine’.

They are more specific about the user’s intention. Long-tail keywords have more potential to bring quality audiences – the more intentional one, and that is more ready to convert.

1. Guide to long-tail keywords from Ahrefs.

2. What does the ‘long-tail’ keyword really mean?

4. On-Page SEO

Now let’s deal with this little stumper.

On-page SEO or on-site SEO is the practice of crafting individual web pages to enhance ranking, increase engagement, and earn relevant organic traffic. It deals with both textual and graphic information a page consists of in addition to the quality of HTML source code, and many other technical aspects such as meta tags and structured data.

4.1. Quality Content

Google will never get tired of fortifying the idea that the web should be a place of great content.

Great content should be unique, well-structured, showcased with images / videos, nourished with keywords, and most importantly – it should bring value to the users.

4.2. Title

What induces you to open and read an article? In most cases, it’s a title. Being the main element of the snippet, catchy titles draw users’ attention in the SERP and help to the final decision: to follow your website or keep looking for another result. Just as important, titles provide search engine robots with a clue to what the page is about.

A title tag is an HTML element that dwells in the <head> chunk of the code. It’s an essential place for the keywords that you need for promotion.

4.3. Meta Description

Meta description is another HTML tag that incorporates a pithy summary of the webpage. Quite often, search engines use them in the snippets, just below the title and URL. Meta description is not a ranking factor itself, but it contributes to CTR (click-through rate) improvement for several reasons:

4.4. Header Tags

Header tags (or heading tags) are HTML elements that are used to create headings on the page. They structure the text and divide it into logical parts. Headers tags will help catch user’s attention during the first seconds they hop on your page.

Why should you be vigilant about those first seconds? A harsh truth about online reading is that people have a proclivity to scan the text, not read it word-to-word. Here’s recent research that perfectly demonstrates it.

4.5. URL

A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is a web address that points to a unique resource. Here’s an example of a URL:

URL should be user-friendly too. It means that it shouldn’t be a random jumble of letters and numbers but a human-readable and understandable piece that informs users about the content.

2. And here’s basic dive-in information about URLs from Moz blog.

4.6. Anchor Text

Anchor text is a clickable text that transfers a website visitor to another page using inserted reference. It means that anchor text is a part of the provided hyperlink. Its key features are clickability and readability. Here’s an anchor text in raw:

4.7. Media Optimization: Image, Video, Alt Text

An article furnished with catchy details has more chances to be looked through.

However, a reckless image stuffing won’t do that much.

Each image should go with alt text (alternative tag) to assuage the perception for visually-impaired readers and search robots. Enhance alt text with keywords.

Another tip is don’t host videos on your website because it may slow your website loading speed due to the limited bandwidth.

4.8. Internal Linking

Internal links are all links that point to the pages within one domain. Internal linking is immensely important for SEO because it eases search engine crawling and helps Google find new content. It also helps distribute PageRank around your site and pass link equity to new pages that require an additional boost to get visible.

4.9. On-Page Issues

Thin content is a general term for content that has no value, is stuffed with meaningless and awkward keywords, duplicated or copied content, that is low in word count, and is meant only to promote sales.

Duplicate content is another SEO’s foe. Duplicate content represents pieces of information within one or several domains which are entirely identical. It leads to significant indexing problems and, thus to ranking drops.

Broken links are the links that lead to non-existent pages, files, or images. If everything is set on the technical side, the user will see a 404 or 410 error.

Missing ALT attributes go unexplained to search engines since they don’t understand what is depicted on the images, they ‘read’ what is depicted in the alt text.

5. Technical SEO

Now let’s plunge into technical SEO, major terms, and how they correlate with SEO.

5.1. Page Speed

It’s one of the main ranking factors, and it stands on the crossroad of technical and on-page SEO. For instance, heavy images and videos can hinder page loading speed. At the same time, a lot of redirects, JavaScript and CSS-heavy websites, high server response time, etc. decrease page speed and your chances to hold visitors and search robots.

5.2. Top-Level Domain, Domain, Subdomain, and Subfolder

Let’s look at the example first:

Where:

And the website’s domain structure may be a sink or swim for SEO.

5.3. Website Structure

Remember about one of the ranking factors – a crawlable website? The website structure for search robots is its internal links. If you work out a clear structure, it will be easier for robots to find, crawl, and index the content. Meanwhile, it also positively affects how the users perceive your website – a win-win for all parts.

Get a better grasp of how to build and analyze website structure.

5.4. Directives in Meta Robots, X-Robots-Tags, Robots.txt

SEOs can manage search robot behavior on the website, pointing to the most important pages and closing the least important ones.

Robots meta tag, robots.txt, and X-Robots-Tag are the members of Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) – a merge of different standards that determine the way search robots crawl and index the website.

They are located in different places and share common directives, but their influence is different. For instance, directives in robots meta tags have more power than in robots.txt. Directives in X-Robots-Tags are harder to implement, that’s why it’s a rare case.

Sitemaps are necessary for big websites because they contribute to crawling and indexing.

There are two widespread types of sitemaps: HTML and XML.

XML sitemaps are a text file with links to relevant pages and specific tags.

HTML sitemap is a clickable list of all subpages in the footer of the website. Its purpose is to show readers and search robots what’s on a site, organize large websites, increase SERP visibility, etc.

2. We also covered this topic on our blog: ‘What Is XML Sitemap? How to Create and Validate It.’

3. And more about HTML sitemap here: ‘How to Create the Correct HTML Sitemap.’

5.6. Structured Data

The structured data or schema markup provides search robots with more information about the page and its content. By deploying additional tags and attributes to HTML, you can:

2. In case you want to explore click-through rate in SEO: ‘What Does CTR Mean in SEO?’

5.7. Status Codes

HTTP response status code is a way a server responds to a browser request. If the request is successfully completed, you (your browser) will be returned a 200 OK response code, literally translated as ‘Everything is okay’.

5.8. Redirects

Redirects are a way to lead users and search robots from a page they initially requested to a new one.

There are many redirect types, but the most common are 301 and 302 (these numbers refer to HTTP status codes).

301 ‘Moved Permanently’ redirect is a permanent redirect set when the old one is set out of range. This type of redirect is known for ‘link equity’ passing to a new page. That’s why it’s recommended to opt for this type of redirect.

302 ‘Moved Temporarily’ or ‘Found’ redirect is used to temporarily move one URL to another. This redirect is unlikely to pass link equity, so it should be treated cautiously.

5.9. Canonical Tag

Unlike the 301 redirects, canonical directive is intended only for robots to point to the most representative page among the identical pages (duplicates). Merely speaking, canonicals tell search robots what URL is more preferable to appear on search result pages.

5.10. Server Response Time

Server response time is the time between the moment a browser sends a request to a server and the server responses. This time is measured by Time to First Byte (ttfb).

It’s a tentative ranking factor because the less it takes for a server to respond, the faster the website will load. And vice versa.

5.11. Mobile-First Indexing, AMP

Mobile-first indexing means that among two versions of pages – mobile and desktop-oriented – robots will choose the first one to index. Moreover, Google’s continuously going all out to improve mobile search. New Page Experience Update is about to come, and it also includes such features as mobile-friendliness.

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s an open-source framework used to create a better and more lightweight experience of mobile users.

5.12. HTTPS vs. HTTP

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is a client-server protocol used to transfer data over the World Wide Web. A client (your browser) communicates with the server by sending it individual messages (requests) and receiving the answers (responses).

If you’re more into tech stuff, dive deeper into this subject in this article: ‘An Overview of HTTP.’

HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. The ‘secure’ in the end gives a clue that communication between your browser and the server is encrypted and thus protected. Why is this needed? Under HTTP protocol, your private and sensitive data such as logins, credit card numbers, etc. may be intercepted by attackers. That’s when HTTPS protocol comes into play. It ensures three levels of protection:

How do you know whether the website is on HTTPS protocol? In the address bar, right from the URL, you’ll see a lock icon.

Sometimes a mixed content issue occurs when a website was transferred to HTTPS protocol, but some components such as scripts, images, videos, PDF files, etc. were left on HTTP. Then you’ll see that this website is not fully secure.

Google announced the plan to gradually block mixed content. Read how to check your website for mixed content and fix this issue.

5.13. Hreflang

Hreflang attribute is used to tell a search engine about several versions of the same page in different languages with different URLs.

Hreflang in the raw:

In which “en-US” stands for the American English version of the page.

6. How to Do an SEO Audit

If you’re serious about website performance, regular audits are the core SEO task. SEO audits help give a better understanding of the website, individual pages, and overall traffic. If done timely, many critical issues such as broken pages, duplicate content, broken redirects, or redirect loops will be spotted and fixed, not severely affecting the website. In Netpeak Spider, you can detect 100 issues.

Since each issue deserves a separate blog post, we created an SEO academy in Netpeak Software to cover the on-page and technical audits basics.

7. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO focuses on all actions outside the website realm that can improve rankings. Building a backlink profile is a massive part of it (and it’s proven worthy). However, many other activities can bring results: linkless brand mentions, NAP citations, shares on social media, etc.

6.1. Backlinks

Backlinks are the links that lead to your site from other sites, blogs, and social networks. Google values backlinks a lot, considering them the signs of trustworthiness, credibility, and authority. This makes backlinks one of the top-ranking factors.

2. For those who don’t like reading and prefer to consume information on YouTube: ‘What are Backlinks and Why are They Important?’

6.2. Link Building

The process of obtaining the backlinks is called link building. A robust backlink profile is a great advantage of any website that can easily lead it to the SERP’s first position.

However, not all backlinks are created equal. Some of them have more value than others. What makes that difference? For instance, a link from an old and authoritative domain is more valuable than from freshly-minted, developing domain with low traffic or, in the worst-case scenario, with reduced authority rates.

As you can see, link building is a subtle process that gives tangible results in the end.

That’s why we prepared several guides to link building to help you get a whole picture with all its peculiarities:

8. Competitive SEO Analysis

As an SEO beginner, you should know that learning from your competitors can give you the most valuable insights into what’s working best in your industry. There’s nothing wrong with implementing the practices that were used by competitors in your project. Before becoming a tough guy in SEO, you’ll need to learn from other tough guys 😃

It will help find their weaknesses and strengths and come up with your own strategy. Analyze these important parts of the competitor’s SEO strategy:

But, first and foremost, identify your true competitors on the SEPS.

9. How to Measure and Track Results

Set measurable and specific goals from the outset. Changes without further tracking and analysis won’t give you the main thing: the insights of what optimization efforts worked out and what failed.

To track results, you’ll need some tools:

10. SEO Community Resources

We understand that it might be too overwhelming to find your feet in all these SEO trends, techniques, and information. There are many SEO hubs where you can share your concerns and receive hands-on advice and learn from others. Anyway, the feeling of community is something that you’ll need not to feel left in the lurch.

So if you’re a Quora fan, we suggest joining these topics:

Reddit community, for the high-brow ones:

The GrowthHackers Community is yet another helpful resource. Anyone who has something valuable to share can post an article there. The articles are gathered according to related tags, which you can filter and focus on specific pain points – either SEO or Social Media Marketing, or whatsoever. If you don’t want to sift through numerous posts, you can subscribe to their newsletter and receive only editor’s picks.

SEO isn’t that difficult as it might seem from the outset. With this kit, you’ll get a grasp of the main aspects of SEO. To dig deeper, do several website audits to put your skills into work. For only practice makes perfect.