Being relatively new in the SEO and digital marketing world, I have used a number of resources to build my knowledge and find ways to easily get answers to important aspects of the industry.
As there are a number of areas that are constantly evolving, it is very important to continue building and growing your knowledge. Below, I have compiled a list of resources and tools that will help any beginner get their foot into the wild world of SEO.
Resources that will take you from Zero to Hero
Moz
There are an endless amount of amazing articles, blogs, infographics, videos, web tools, and etc. that are provided by Moz. I wanted to share two articles they have about early stages of SEO education.
The first is the basics of ‘What is SEO.’
This article breaks down SEO from the bottom up, for anyone who has ever thought ‘why are those pages listed first’ and gives a full breakdown of the important information you need to start learning about SEO. It also has some great infographics and charts to help you learn better, especially for the visual learners.
To follow up the basics, Moz also offers this awesome ‘Beginners Guide to SEO.’
This is a lengthy 10 chapter breakdown of how and why SEO works. It is far more in-depth than a simple beginners guide because it gives you the basics from A to Z in one convenient place.
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Land provides its form of a beginners guide in this article also called ‘What is SEO?’
It is much more in-depth than Moz’s ‘What Is SEO’, but a smooth blend between the two listed above.
I like this one as it provides videos, infographics and still has a 9 chapter breakdown of the SEO basics. The nice addition to this resource is the SEO library, which links other areas of SEO. A lot of what they provide crosses over with the Moz links, but it’s always smart to gather as much information as you can when it comes to SEO.
Right from the SEO masterminds themselves, is the Googles SEO starter guide.
This is a 32 page PDF that breaks down everything about Google when it comes to SEO. From the ultimate basics to how they crawl sites to mobile friendly sites, this PDF provides the info straight from the source.
What I really like about this one is the list of free Google SEO tools at the end. These have become tools I use in my everyday work life for search optimization.
Quicksprout
Quicksprout provides, what I would say, is the next step in SEO online resources. This ‘Advanced guide to SEO’ is a great deep dive into SEO.
It also provides a number of tools to help you get a more detailed look at what you can discover with your site and its overall SEO.
After you've absorbed all the great information from the 5 resources provided above. There are a lot of ways to keep up to date on changes, help build your SEO presence, and dive deep into site performance in other ways.
Below are a list of tools that will help you continue to optimize and adapt to the ever changing world of SEO.
Tricks of the Trade
Google Algorithm Change History
This site provides you with the history of Google’s algorithm updates going back to 2000. Although only a number of these updates truly affect your current SEO strategies today, there are a number of very important updates from the last few years. In addition, this is a great way to see the changes that Google has made since the beginning of search optimization.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner does require a Google Adwords account. However, once you've signed in, you can use this tool to help build your keyword list within your Adwords account.
This tool is amazing for helping you identify keywords that are shrinking or growing in popularity, filter out low-volume searches, and create hundreds of keyword combinations in seconds.
Google Site Speed Test
With site speed being an important factor to organic rankings, this tool points out the different elements of your website that is slowing it down. In addition to that, it will suggest solutions for the specific problem. This tool will also show your mobile speed and compatibility. It is a great tool to check your site and look into what can be improved.
Moz’s Open Site Explorer
This is a fantastic tool created by Moz to take a deep dive into the linking dynamics and domain strength of a site.
There are a number of metrics explored with this tool including domain strength, link, and social metrics, anchor text, and spam analysis. For anyone trying to constantly improve their web presence, you can use Open Site Explorer to check the health of your website.
Moz Crawl Test
Although this requires a Moz Pro account to access, the crawl test provides a detailed analysis of what your site is doing and not doing. The report, which takes about a day to process, is sent to the user by email. It provides information about site links, redirects, duplicate pages, meta descriptions and tags, page authority, external and internal links and if anything is blocked within each page. What is amazing about this tool is that it looks at each individual page within the specific domain crawled and provides all this info for each.
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
Blog writing is essential to building fresh content and providing information to people who are looking for advice or answers. However, a high-quality content may not be read if the headline or title isn't attractive. When you're crafting a great piece of content, try to run your headline through the Headline Analyzer to see if it's engaging. It will provide you with an analysis and score on your headline, so try different variations to get a higher score.
There are endless resources available online that can offer you tips to a successful SEO campaign. There is constant change as Google is updating their search metrics constantly. To stay on top of the trends it requires constant self-education and testing of what works and what is changing.
on
This is was a great piece. I’m going to checkout the Headline Analyzer because sometimes I feel like my headlines aren’t the greatest.
on
Great Article 🙂
I would like to add something as well. I have seen many beginners buying various cheap backlink services from fiverr, seoclerks and such. This is very dangerous, as many of these services use penalized websites to give you links. In the long term these links will effect your website negatively. The best way to build backlink in my opinion is to make your own PBN and of course create great content which in turn will give good backlinks as various blogs or websites related to your niche will give you free links.