I'm an IT guy who's been offered an interview next month with an SEO company at an entry level. SEO information seems to be constanlty changing with podcasts and books naysaying each other's methods. I understand that it's all in a state of constant flux but.. Can any of you fine people recommend any trusted resource in basic SEO terms, structures and techniques? 48 💬🗨
kitchenham You can't go wrong by having a good read of Google's webmaster guidelines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a dark art. It's about providing content which is worthy of being served up to a search engines users. Ultimately, it is all about the user. So your content, experience and technology needs to support the user experience. Take that to heart and develop websites which maximise this ethos. So they load quickly. Make sure they are technically competent, which means dotting the i's and crossing the t's. So consider sitemaps, robot text files etc. Content needs to be original and easy to access. Build that content using the code which meets standards. H1, H2 hierarchy so that content is tagged correctly. Then consider images, not too big but marked up accordingly so they are accessible. Code which is tidy and easy to read. No duplicate content. Make sure your site or content management system does not lock a search engine spider in a loop or require additional crawls. You have to remember you don't pay for your website to be indexed so if you have duplicate content, or tags which cause additional machine cycles to index then expect a penalty. Every time your website is indexed and crawled it actually costs a cycle and money. Search engines need you to limit waste. It's not a known fact but if you were building a complex search solution you'd not want to waste machine cycles on content which is duplicated or irrelevant. Research your audience. Give clear paths to conversion and measure everything. Unique traffic, links you develop, time on site, bounce rate and conversion. Then consider one of the larger platforms to support your SEO. Moz is good but use simple common sense and science to run your SEO. Test your market place, use past data to ascertain what has happened and help guide the way forward. Good Luck!
BuildTheFire Great response. Completely agree. Find out what your customers are searching for and make pages that fit that need better than any page on the internet and there you go altnerdluser This is great. A succinct and helpful answer. foreveryoung99 A perfect answer doormass Thank you! But how do you do this for an ecommerce site? When someone searches for "Nike Air Jordan" – is the strategy to have the best content page on Nike Air Jordans?
kitchenham Yes it is the best strategy to have the best content. Most online pages will have generic content. Do something different. Expand on the content add reviews and content that propels your ability to support the user and your potential purchasers. Making sure the standard expectations of a quality online store are there in abundance! Hope this helps!!
cdubalyeu Moz- The Beginner's Guide to SEO has already been mentioned, and it is a good place to start learning. Ahrefs - How to Learn SEO (and Stay Sane) is a much shorter guide, but it has tons of links to other resources. Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide This one is a pretty dry read, but it is very to the point. It is almost like a checklist. chewster1 First thing to be aware of is that SEO is opinionated and make sure you're able to unpack opinion from new information when you're learning new stuff, take everyones guides, blog posts, video content and reflect on it and think critically about it, understand their experiences and point of view, rather than taking you read as truth. In saying that, I find the best SEO learning content out there is in the form of blogs. Some great agency blogs: • Backlinko (Brian Dean) • Elephate • Siege Media (Ryan Stewart) • Seer Interactive (Wil Reynolds) • DejanSEO • Diggity Marketing • Blind Five Year Old Individual blogs: • SEO by the Sea (Bill Slawski) • Kevin Indig SEO tool blogs: • Moz (blog and SEO beginners guide) • Ahrefs blog • ContentKingApp (blog and academy articles) • Hubspot blog (and free Inbound Marketing certifications) Check the publication date of anything you read – be wary if it's over a year old it could easily be out of date. Also something to become conscious of is the difference between white vs. black-hat SEO and that approaches exist, especially with regards to link-building tactics. Where you position yourself on this spectrum will ultimately depend on your risk tolerance, competency and personal morals. There are hundreds of web-apps, desktop apps and other tools that you will discover, you'll have to test them yourself to some extent to understand what they do and what is right for you. Brian Dean probably has the best list of SEO tools and Saijo George has a very long list of broader marketing tools. If you're reading blogs/tutorials, don't take someone's software recommendation to "use tool x to do y" as gospel – there are usually a dozen other apps/ways to do the same thing – understand the tool is just there to help – it's up to you to know what you're doing first, and how to select the best tool for the job. There are some really good forums and communities that you can get some value from. Some SEO Facebook groups are ok once you get past the un-researched beginner questions, there are quite a few private Slack, and discord groups out there. Ahrefs has a blog post on good SEO Facebook groups I think. Also just worth mentioning Traffic Think Tank (although paid at $99 pm) has been very useful to me personally, the price seems to deter most noob level questions (to put it bluntly) and it's run by some very prominent guys who know their stuff There are some good podcasts out there (again just Google around for a good list to test out yourself) personally I like the Authority Hackers podcast and also the Hubspot Skill up series is well put together. Also the Google Webmaster Guidelines and read a leaked copy of the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Worth doing the Google AdWords certification and Google Analytics certification to understand these a bit better. There's a great video series on YouTube by Measureschool to learn all about Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager (GTM), tracking and reporting. Also worth learning how to use Google Data Studio because if you can drive it well, it can become a super powerful client reporting tool.
hammer078 Great write-up +1 on this! —. You have any links to the private slack and or discord groups pls? yghanendra Great information with mostly contains all the resources. Thanks for putting all resources at one place, now it's easy to take a good step forward.
