What is the best recommendation you can give for someone like me who has 0 knowledge of SEO?

[JaelenJosh]

Hi, I'm Josh and I am a newbie, What recommendations can you give for someone like me who has no knowledge whatsoever of SEO and is there any tips and tricks you would like to share for similar peers?

Thank you for the responses!

[aimankhanani]

Hey Josh! I am in the same boat. What I do is I keep on reading articles and watch videos. As many people here have told you that there is a course on HubSpot Academy as well, I am attaching a link that has almost everything you need to know. 

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/

[BChiles]

Hey Josh! I'm a newbie too so take whatever I say with a grain of salt, but I did learn something today about keywords. This video helped me understand about specifics and reasons to make keywords and phrases and how to make them findable.

[MatthewShepherd]

Hi @JaelenJosh 

Welcome to the fascinating, exciting, challenging and rewarding world of SEO! A few resources I would recommend to get started:

• HubSpot Academy SEO Certification Course
  
  
• Moz's The Beginner's Guide to SEO
  
  
• Google's Webmaster Guidelines
  (you don't need to pour over every detail of this as a beginner but understanding how Google search works and what they are generally looking for is useful)

General tips for a beginner:

• SEO is a long term strategy that requires consistent effort, good quality content, and a methodical approach, so plan accordingly and stick with it.
• Be prepared for never fully knowing why your rankings or traffic went up or down. We can use best practices, methodical testing approaches, and educated guesses, and have a pretty good idea of what is working or not, but a the end of the day search engine algorithms are black boxes that we can't see inside of and there are too many factors that affect rankings that we can account for fully.
• Know that rankings can change constantly, so not to react too quickly to changes, and sometimes search engines can take a while to crawl and process your content so give your changes time to register. Not every optimisation is going to show results within days or weeks.
• Get to grips with the fundamentals of technical SEO (meta tags, indexing, redirects, robots.txt, canonical URLs) as even the best most optimised content in the world may struggle to rank if search engines can't crawl or understand it correctly.
• Keep really good notes of when and what you optimised on your site and if you want to understand what is working try not to change too many things at once. You want to be able to look at the trends of your traffic and ranking data and identify uplift as a result of your optimisations.
• Get to know Google Search Console, structured data, pillar pages and topic clusters, featured snippets, internal linking strategy, and E.A.T.
• Always question...best practices don't always work for every site and not all SEO advice is equal. Test on your own site(s) and judge using your own data.
• Make sure you understand your audience really well, put yourself in their shoes and write content that solves for their questions and pain points (educate and add value before selling), and optimise for the keywords that your audience use, not just industry jargon or what you think you should be found for.
• Generating inbound links to your content is important but can be hard and shouldn't be done in unnatural ways - this tends to be more of an advanced practice. Think of link building more like digital PR, write content that is more comprehensive or more interesting than what's already out there and then promote it to your network and sites/people that you feel will genuinely find it valuable.
• Know that SEO is actually a huge topic with many sub-topics and specialities. If you want to cover the basics the above should be a great start and will lead to further resources, but if you want to keep improving (which is the SEO way) you will always have something new to learn and test!
  
  

Celebrate your wins, know they may not last, know you'll have plenty of frustrations along the way, find a good SEO community and ask questions, and keep on learning and testing! Good luck!

[Arielle04]

Good

[ARayif]

Nice

[Jnix284]

@JaelenJosh welcome to the bottomless pit, we're happy you're here! 🤓

As @Josh mentioned, there are a ton of resources out there to get your SEO education on tap.

The advice I usually share, is based off of advice given to me when I first started in graphic design, "open your eyes to the world around you, design is everywhere."

For SEO, this means to get on Google (and other search engines) and search, search, search!

Find a question you want the answer to, search for it, then look at how you went about it, what words did you include? what happens if you change the search term based on the initial results? did you get better results? Understand your own search behavior and find the sites that answer your questions best, then lean into their content a bit further - what are they doing that you could be doing?

Let yourself go down the rabbit hole with search predictions - what does Google know about your search that can tell you something about what others users are searching for?

Being new to SEO is a great thing - take advantage of your "fresh eyes" and make as many observations as you can.

Happy learning and best of luck!

[Josh]

Hi @JaelenJosh ,

If you're just looking to understand the basics and not looking to be an SEO pro, here's where I'd start.

• Understand basic on-site SEO such as page titles, headings, Meta info, etc. There are a ton of resources available online including an SEO course in the HubSpot Academy. 
• Understand how content impacts SEO. 
  • E-A-T - Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness.
  • Quality over quantity.
  • Write for the reader first, SEO second.
• Understand how inbound links impact your domain authority and how to naturally/organically grow the number of quality and relevant links back to your website.
• Learn the basic SEO tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEMRush, etc.
• Leave major technical SEO to the experts.
• Continue to learn. I've been doing SEO for 15 years and I am still learning. There are always changes and ways to be better.

I hope this is a good starting point for you. Good luck!

Josh