Learn SEO

This guide is written for readers who want to learn search engine optimization at their own pace. It draws on the author's years of consulting and agency work, and it presents methods the author says have been tested against Google's own guidance. The opening chapters show how to build an SEO plan informed by what you know about your audience and your market.

The author writes as an inbound marketing specialist and SEO coach with more than twenty years of experience helping inventive companies grow. Readers learn how digital marketing agencies handle on-page work and how to apply the same methods to any website, from structuring pages to making content easy for search engines to interpret.

Other sections explain Google's quality guidelines and the major algorithm changes of recent years, along with what they mean for site owners. The book also covers customer-focused SEO, showing how to raise click-through rates, lower bounce rates, and increase sales and conversions. Readers are walked through spotting problems on their own sites and fixing them one at a time, with the goal of steadily growing traffic and time spent on pages.

Content gets close attention, from producing quality material and designing effective pages to applying SEO copywriting and content quality guidelines. Step-by-step checklists support content audits, which combine these skills with keyword research and topic development. The closing material covers link building, explaining why backlinks underpin off-page SEO and how to earn links that are genuinely useful and relevant to a site.