The beginners’ guides I will review today will help develop a foundation of SEO knowledge to allow you to make intelligent decisions about SEO moving forward. If you are looking to become an SEO practitioner this is a good starting point, however it is not realistic to expect to be able to perform SEO after reading these guides, at least not at a professional level.
It is also important to note that certain aspects of SEO should not be handled by anyone without sufficient experience; this is especially true when it comes to technical aspects of SEO as well as link-building and toxic link management. Making mistakes in this area can wipe out all organic traffic and even trigger a penalty that can costs tens of thousands of dollars to recover from, in addition to the lost revenue while your site is de-indexed from search-engines.
If you’re a stakeholder at your company and are trying to figure out an SEO solution that can work within your business, than this information will help you better understand SEO and communicate with SEO professionals about the work they are performing. Almost anything you don’t understand within these guides can be found by using Google to search pages on these reputable websites, I have listed them below.
– Moz.com
– Search Engine Land
– Quick Sprout
– Search Engine Watch
– Search Engine Journal
Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
This guide comes directly from Google and is a great place to start learning about SEO. It is important to note that this is SEO as Google would like you to understand it. This is absolutely critical information to understand, but since much of the SEO world is hidden by Google and other search-engines, the SEO industry conducts it’s own studies and tests to understand all of the unknown factors, and sometimes there is conflicting information versus what Google directly tells us. Keep in mind that Google only protects this information to protect us from spammers and unscrupulous digital marketers looking to exploit the system.
MOZ: The Beginner’s Guide to SEO
Moz (formerly SEOMOZ) has become a leader in the SEO industry by providing a suite of low-cost SEO tools that are fairly easy to use. They also have a blog that covers a great deal of authoritative topics on SEO, and they perform industry-leading research that helps everyone’s understanding of SEO.
This guide is a slightly more advanced resource for SEO and does cover some similar topics as the Google Starter Guide, however this information originates from SEO professionals and has been carefully curated to provide the best information MOZ has to offer for entry-level SEO learning.
Quick Sprout: The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO
Quick Sprout is Neil Patel’s company, he is a well-experienced SEO professional, has worked on high profile projects across the globe, and is highly respected in the SEO industry. This guide is very brief and also has some overlap, however this condensed version focuses on highlighting the most important aspects of technical SEO. There is much more to learn but this is another great resource to read and incorporate into your knowledge base of SEO. If you flew through these resources feel free to check out Quick Sprout’s advanced guide to SEO here.