The Ultimate SEO Tutorial for Marketing Success in 2025

In just 12 months, the team increased organic traffic from just a few hundred visits per month to over 10K—all while driving new customer signups profitably. If you’re using SEO to drive traffic to your site for the purpose of conversions, we hope you’d pick the latter! Before embarking on SEO, make sure you’ve laid out your business goals, then use SEO to help you accomplish them — not the other way around. It’s just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency. If you end up looking for expert help, it’s important to know that many agencies and consultants “provide SEO services,” but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

Help search engines and users navigate your site with internal links. Add your most important URLs to your navigation and footer, and ensure every page on your website receives at least three internal links (with descriptive anchor text) from other internal URLs. When it comes to SEO 101, understanding how search engines work is essential. That’s because search engines fuel search engine optimization, setting the standards that define the strategies, best practices, and tips that SEOs use.

“The position of the backlink on the page does not play any role in SEO.”

Lastly, you will get to know about SEO spam and a brief on falsifying content and links. Taking a step further, Lesson 2 of the SEO tutorial begins with an in-depth explanation of how Search Engines work, which will form the foundation of your SEO practices. Here, you will gain an SEO Anomaly insight into the major vs. minor search engines, along with various international search engines. This lesson answers critical questions about search engine mechanisms, crawling in a step-by-step way. You will know how to optimize website elements with sitemaps, storing, processing, indexing, and ranking.

If you know your way around redirects, optimizing page speed, crawlability, security and structured data, make those your first priority. If not, let your site builder help you out or hire someone with a background in technical SEO. When that’s done, you can start looking at site structure and the content on your pages. Wix has got your covered with thousands of design features, built-in SEO and marketing tools, that will allow you to scale your content, your brand and your business with their blog maker. Not only will this boost your business and ensure that people searching from their phones can use your site, but it is also important to Google.

Start your keyword research

Because search is one of the main ways in which people discover content online, ranking higher in search engines can lead to an increase in traffic to a website. Because search engines like Google consider backlinks as votes of confidence. Meaning, when a high-authority site links to your page, it’s like that site is vouching for the quality and relevance of your content. These inbound links, called backlinks, are crucial for search rankings.

• At IBM, we know how rapidly tech evolves and recognize the crucial need for businesses and professionals to build job-ready, hands-on skills quickly.
• Learn what search engine optimization is, why it matters, and all the need-to-know basics to start yourself off right.
• There are a lot of factors that go into ranking – relevancy being a critical aspect.
• Optimizing your landing pages with keywords can improve your Google’s Quality Score and increase your site’s visibility.

Keyword clustering is the process of grouping keywords based on search intent. You can think up keywords on your own and look at Google’s search suggestions for inspiration. But it’s generally best to find keywords through keyword research tools.

There are many search engines, but only Google has made by far the most advances in Information Retrieval, Natural Language Understanding, and Natural Language Processing. While SEO experts agree that “white hat” is the way to go, there are different opinions on the acceptability of various link building techniques (including link buying). Black hat SEO is a set of unethical (and usually spammy) practices to improve the rankings of a website.

Getting others to link to your site can be difficult, but one of the easier ways to get links is to scope out your competitors, and find out who’s linking to them. Make sure you don’t have “orphaned” pages – pages that aren’t linked to from anywhere else on your site. Ideally, visitors should be able to navigate from your homepage to any other page on your site with only a handful of clicks. Learn all about visual search optimization with Crystal Carter in this Whiteboard Friday episode. Favicons are little icons that appear next to your Google listing on mobile. While small, using an attractive, eye-catching favicon can help make your listing stand out.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of optimizing the performance of a website by changing its structure and content to increase its visibility and web traffic. It helps in improving the quality of your website and increases the viewer-to-customer conversion rate. It is a crucial aspect of digital marketing that focuses on enhancing the visibility and ranking of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). The primary goal of SEO is to drive organic (non-paid) traffic to a website by improving its relevance and authority in the eyes of search engines. This Specialization will teach you to optimize website content for the best possible search engine ranking. Each course is intended to build on the skills from the previous course, thus we recommend you take the courses in the order they are listed.

From tracking rankings to auditing SEO content, SEO.com makes doing SEO yourself easy. SEO analytics tracks, measures, and evaluates your SEO performance. Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 offer a free solution for tracking rankings, traffic, conversions, and other valuable SEO metrics and are popular SEO analytics tools. SEO tools are software applications that aid in analyzing, tracking, and optimizing website performance, including keyword research, backlink analysis, and site audit functionalities. PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is a type of digital marketing where advertisers bid on specific keywords they want their ads to show up for in search results.