Having a great search engine optimization (SEO) strategy can attract more traffic to your site, which can result in more potential clients, customers and/or website revenue. However, SEO can be difficult to understand, let alone master, especially when you work in a competitive industry in which other businesses are vying for the same attention as you are.
In order to help you improve your website’s SEO, we’ve created a list of some of the top tools and resources you can use. By following some of these resources and implementing SEO-specific tools, you should be able to organically grow your audience and engagement rates to scale your business and reach your goals.
[Read: 7 Tips to Improve Your Google Search Ranking]
Google Webmasters Central Blog
The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog offers news, resources and insight to help webmasters optimize their sites. Their blog covers a variety of topics including new updates to Google’s browsers, coding tips and invitations to web seminars and events. They also have official Twitter and YouTube pages for more news and videos on how to improve your SEO and website.
Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide
Another Google resource is their SEO Starter Guide. If you’re new to making a website and launching for the first time. This inclusive and robust resource offers how-to guides on getting started building your website and optimizing it for SEO. The guide will tell you how to write and modify SEO and help you promote it, so your site gets as many clicks as possible.
Neil Patel
Neil Patel is the co-founder of the marketing agency NP Digital and his blog offers many articles about how to scale your small business using tools already at your disposal. Because there are so many different resources and guides on SEO online, it can be hard to know where to start and what can be useful to you. Neil Patel’s beginner’s guide consolidates many important SEO resources and links into one place to save you the time of finding these teaching and free tools.
[Read: A Guide to Driving Traffic to Your Website]
Mangools markets their SEO guide as “the beginner's guide even your grandma would understand.”
Brian Dean
After unsuccessfully launching five online businesses, Brian Dean launched a successful personal finance blog in 2012 based on good SEO practices. Eventually, he founded and launched Backlinko, a website that helps marketers and business owners learn from his experience. Today, Backlinko is one of the most popular marketing blogs and Dean is recognized as an SEO expert. His blogs are easy to understand and include helpful visuals to help novice writers and industry experts alike.
Moz
Moz is a marketing agency that offers a SEO guide with resources from how to make your site friendlier to search engines to building links. It offers a hierarchy of SEO, a clear visualization of your essential needs and how by building upon them step by step, you can stand out. Once you see your website structured as a whole, you'll begin to understand why one step is so crucial for the next steps.
SEMrush
SEMrush offers all-encompassing SEO and content marketing courses taught directly by field experts. These classes range from one to four hours with classes on subjects from beginner’s SEO to competitive research to social media marketing. They end with examinations to test your ability on how you’ve grasped the material and what you need to improve upon.
Mangools
Mangools markets their SEO guide as “the beginner's guide even your grandma would understand.” This nine-chapter guide outlines the basics of SEO and will help you build upon your on-page SEO, keyword searches and user experience (UX). Its unique visual style will keep you engaged as you grasp the concepts taught.
Search Engine Journal
Search Engine Journal offers a free pdf e-book that is built around their three core components:
- Understanding what types of content people need or want.
- How search engines work.
- How to properly promote and optimize your website.
The e-book will teach you how to use those components through eighteen reader friendly chapters, that not only offer you technical information but professional information as well such as what SEO challenges you’ll face in your career.
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Land is a well-respected SEO publication founded by Danny Sullivan — one of the earliest people to popularize the term “search engine optimization” — and Chris Sherman. Search Engine Land’s guide SEO will help you master the science behind good SEO. The guide is broken into nine different chapters and is written around the periodic table of scientific elements to help marketers have a strong visualization of SEO. It focuses on the fundamentals and what needs to be understood and prioritized.
Yoast SEO Academy
With over eight million active installations, Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress websites. For WordPress users, Yoast is an excellent option to help marketers, web developers and business owners improve their websites, develop technical SEO skills and, ultimately, develop a process or strategy to outrank their competitors. While the plugin is an excellent resource for WordPress users, Yoast’s SEO Academy can help you understand the fundamental elements of SEO and apply them to your own website, regardless of your content management system.
[Read: How to Build a Marketing Department for Your Small Business]
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