SEO or Search Engine Optimization can seem daunting to the beginners. Fortunately there are some good, free tutorials on the Web to get your started. Think of SEO as a step-by-step process; begin at the beginning, and that very first step can be reading one (or a few) of the better tutorials out there. Here’s our list of the best tutorials on search engine optimization, ranked with the best first. (Excerpted from the SEO Fitness Workbook).
- Google SEO Starter Guide – Here’s a concept. To succeed at SEO, do what Google tells you to do! This is an older but basic guide by Google on it’s official todos for SEO success. It’s excellent as a basic guide to On Page SEO, but has ZERO coverage of Off Page tactics such as link-building, and no coverage of keyword theory or selection. Still, you gotta read it. – Rating: 5 Stars
- Search Engine Land’s Guide to SEO – Search Engine Land is clearly the top blog on search engine optimization. They provide this in-depth and pretty useful guide to SEO for their readership. They have a periodic table of SEO factors, which is a completely bizarre way to explain factors that have different ranks. But, oh well, they failed chemistry in High School but paid attention in math. This guide is a useful, basic guide to the subject. – Rating: 4 Stars
- SEO in 2019: The Backlinko Guide – Excellent tutorial on SEO basics from Backlinko. Always nuggets of information even if you aren’t a “beginner.” – Rating: 4 Stars
- MOZ SEO Beginners Guide – MOZ is one of the top providers of (paid) SEO tools. It provides this basic introductory tutorial to SEO. Aimed at beginners, and (over)emphasizes technical SEO. But, hey, it’s free. – Rating: 4 Stars
- Bruce Clay SEO Tutorial – This search engine optimization tutorial, full of SEO tips from industry pioneer Bruce Clay, is a step-by-step SEO guide. Lessons teach you what is SEO and how to optimize a website for search — complete with free SEO tools you can use! – Rating: 4 Stars
- The Weebly Guide to SEO – Weebly’s short, sweet, and to-the-point guide or tutorial to SEO. – Rating: 3 Stars
- SEO – Search Engine Optimization Wikipedia Entry – Wikipedia – the free online encyclopedia – has a great starting point to SEO and SEO topics. It begins: “Search engine optimization (SEO) as a subset of search engine marketing seeks to improve the number and quality of visitors to a web site from ‘natural’ (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results.” – Rating: 3 Stars
- Quicksprout SEO Guide – Billed as an ‘Advanced’ guide, this is really more of a basic or beginner’s look at SEO. Like the MOZ guide, it overemphasizes technical SEO and underemphasizes content marketing. – Rating: 3 Stars
- SEO Tutorial For Beginners In 2018 [Step By Step Easy Guide] – Did you know that 80% of SEO is extremely easy. The other 20% is where things get difficult such as technical SEO, competitor research, backlink analysis, site audits etc. Have you ever heard about 80/20 Pareto rule? It says, 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. The same thing applies to SEO too. – Rating: 3 Stars
- Hobo SEO Guide – Yet another short but good overview to search engine optimization. Updated for 2016, with great embedded YouTube videos from the ‘experts’ at Google. – Rating: 3 Stars
- SEO for WordPress – This guide is by the YOAST folks, who produce the most popular plugins for SEO and WordPress. It is very, very technical and as such completely overemphasizes the technical side of SEO to the huge detriment of the marketing / content marketing side of the equation. So it shows its age and its old, traditional perspective on the subject. But it is a useful checklist of technical things to do in WordPress, for sure. – Rating: 3 Stars
- SEO Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide – SEO is the magic you have to work on your article in order to make Google very likely to include your post as one of the top results whenever someone searches for that keyword. We’re going to dig deep into SEO, but feel free to jump to any section that interests you. – Rating: 3 Stars
- How Google Search Works – Have you ever wondered how Google works? This somewhat cheeky guide is by Google about Google. It’s a beginner’s guide to how Google crawls the Web, and how it ranks the results on the Google search response page. Beginner level, but the basics of SEO are incredibly important! – Rating: 2 Stars
- WordPress SEO – Yet another short, basic, and decent SEO tutorial, this time focused on WordPress. – Rating: 2 Stars
- Learn with Google – Google’s learning site; largely about advertising and very fluffy-fluff. – Rating: 2 Stars
- SEO Tutorial for Beginners – Very basic introduction to SEO. Beginner level. – Rating: 2 Stars
- AHREFS SEO Tutorial in 7 Steps – Want to wrap your head around SEO, but getting scared off by technical terms and complex concepts? This friendly article walks you through everything you need to know to start ranking in Google. – Rating: Stars