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Learn SEO in the easiest way for beginner, intermediate, and advanced. It’s all free and you can contribute your insights here. Let’s make SEO knowledge easily accessible to anyone!
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is part of the digital marketing channel that is executed in search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc) organically. Organic means you don’t need the daily budget like paid ads. The main purpose of SEO is to outrank other websites.
Other purposes:
- Increase brand awareness
- Generate high-quality leads
- Drive revenue to business
How Does SEO Work?
This is the journey of how your site is being shown in the search result. Anyone who wants to learn SEO must know this workflow first.
Crawling
Crawling is when your site is being visited and ‘checked’ by bot crawler. Once finished, the crawler comes back to the search engine and tells whether the page deserves to be indexed or not.
Rendering
Rendering is the process where a search engine or browser turns your website’s code (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) into the final visual page.
Indexing
It’s a process when your web page is being indexed in a search engine results page (SERP). All pages that are already indexed can be found (searchable) by a query.
Ranking or Serving
It’s when your web content is finally being served in the search result. The ranking is not random, it’s based on the search engine’s algorithm. This is the main purpose of SEO, to be the #1 in search results.
The Scope of SEO:
This is What You Will Do
SEO involves more than just keywords. You’ll work on content structure, technical setup, on-page optimization, and performance tracking to ensure your site is both search-friendly and user-focused.
Search engines work with keywords to fetch a specific web content (could be article, product page, homepage, etc). Keyword research needed before any web content is created so you are able to address the user’s search intent.
Technical SEO is like the foundation of your buildings, it must be well-structured. Technical SEO includes website taxonomy, site’s speed, URL structure, server performance, and many more.
Your website’s interface, title, button placement, and every element a user can see through, that’s on-page SEO. It’s about how your website is served to users and how to make your site outrank others.
Did you get here from social media posts or other websites? That’s off-page SEO! It’s about the signal that points to a website from other sources, it’s good for your site’s visibility.
This is where your SEO strategy must align with the business objectives, whether it's traffic (awareness), leads, or conversion. Make sure you deliver your work with a revenue-driven mindset, so you can please the stakeholders (and not get cut off!).
Nowadays, many people do the search not only in search engines, but also in LLMs like Chat GPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others. Plus, there is a new feature called Google AI Overview. This is a huge change and your SEO strategy needs to be updated.
SEO Tools to Support Your Work
From keyword research to performance analysis, SEO tools help you make data-driven decisions. They simplify audits, track rankings, and uncover opportunities you might otherwise miss.
Free
Google Search Console (GSC)
Find out how your website is shown in the search result, how many clicks you got, impression, CTR, and ranking for each page.
Free
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Find out how users behave once they enter your website.
Free
Google Tag Manager (GTM)
Set up a trigger to track specific action of your user; lead generation or even conversion.
Paid
Screaming Frog
End-to-end and must-to-have tool to help you identify your site’s structure, all URLs you have, status code, indexability, and many more.
Paid
Semrush
To help you do the keyword research, perform content gap analysis, identify competitor’s estimated traffic, backlink audit, and many more.
Paid
Ahrefs
Almost the same as Semrush, Ahrefs helps you analyze backlinks, track keyword rankings, explore SERP data, and uncover competitors’ SEO strategies.
Free
Google Looker Studio
Your GSC and GA4 data can’t be blended together, their data totally in a separate dashboard. Therefore, Google Looker Studio exists to help you!
Free
Microsoft Clarity
Find out your user activity in each session, where they click, their mouse movement, their duration in a page, and how deep they scroll in the page they are in.
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