How to Learn SEO for Free in 2023
Did you know you can learn how to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for free?
Yes. With thousands of resources available online today, it’s 100% possible to learn SEO for free!
I’m a self-taught digital marketer specialized in SEO and I’ve been working on SEO since 2011.
In this blog post, I will share the best SEO resources written by some of the top SEO experts in the industry. All these resources are 100% free!
So, let’s get started.
SEO Basics
If you’re looking to get started with SEO, you need to learn and understand the basics. In this section I’ve listed some of the top reliable resources that cover the basics of SEO:
How Google Search Works (For Beginners)
In this article, you will learn how Google crawls, index and rank pages on search result pages. It discusses the three basic steps Google uses to get your web page to appear on the SERPs.
How can you miss out on the guide from a search engine that has close to 93% market share? While different search engines have different factors, they consider in ranking websites, a guide from Google for SEO is something you should not miss out on.
Backlinko was recently acquired by SEMRush for an undisclosed amount. This SEO Fundamentals hub was created by Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko. If you’ve just started learning SEO, this guide is one of the best ones you should read.
SEO Fundamentals: Your Guide to SEO Success Factors
This SEO guide by SEJ will help you understand the key success factors of SEO and learn how to create content that attracts your target audience.
Moz is the pioneer in developing SEO tools for web developers and marketers. This guide by Moz is one of the most visited beginner SEO guides by beginners. Although the guide was created in 2014, the last update was on 28th July 2021.
SEO Fundamentals: Introduction to SEO Concepts for Beginners
One of the hidden gems among all the popular sites. This guide by Reliablesoft covers everything you need to know about SEO and get started with your initiatives right away.
Keyword Research
When you optimize your website for search engines, you target keywords or phrases that people search for. You want your site to rank for relevant keywords. To find the keywords that your potential customers searching for, you need to perform keyword research. In this section I’ve listed the best free resources that will help you conduct effective keyword research:
How to Do Keyword Research for SEO
This beginner’s guide to keyword research teaches you the exact keyword research process Ahrefs used to grow their organic search traffic. The only downside of this guide is that they use Ahrefs tool to perform keyword research which you can’t use for free! (Need to subscribe for $$99)
Keyword Research for SEO: The Definitive Guide (2023)
With this guide, you will learn how to conduct thorough keyword research and choose the right keywords for your websites. You will also find some advanced keyword research tips in this guide.
The Ultimate Keyword Research Guide for SEO
An excellent guide that tells you why keyword research is important and how it relates to your business goals. One of the best keyword research guides that you should read.
Note: Like Ahrefs keyword research guide, this guide uses SEMRush keyword research tool. Unlike Ahrefs, you can get a 7-day free trial to use the tool with this link: SEMRush SEO Suite
Keyword Research: The Complete Beginner’s Guide
In this in-depth guide, the author, David Hartshorne covers everything you should know about keyword research. And you can also learn the difference between keywords and search queries.
Keyword Research for SEO: The Ultimate Guide
A comprehensive keyword research guide by Yoast SEO provides an in-depth explanation of the concepts of keyword research and dives deep into search intent that enables better content creation.
List of free keyword tools that you can use:
- Google Keywords Planner
- Google Trends
- Bing Webmaster Keyword Research Tool
- Answer the Public
- Keyword Surfer (Chrome Extension)
- Google Autosuggestion
- Keyword Sheeter
- Wordtracker Keyword Research Tool (Limited to 12 searches a day)
Technical SEO
Technical SEO may sound complicated but it’s not difficult if you understand the concepts and how it works. If you fail to fix Technical SEO issues that your site may face, you’ll have difficulties in getting the organic search traffic your site deserves. In this section you’ll find the best free resources for Technical SEO:
Technical SEO: The Definitive Guide
This is a beginner’s guide to technical SEO by Brian Dean that covers every important component you should evaluate and fix in 2022. You will learn everything from crawling to website architecture.
Technical SEO [Beginner’s Guide to SEO]
Acquire basic technical SEO knowledge to optimize the technical part of your website. This guide will provide you with enough technical understanding and enable you to provide suggestions to developers to make necessary changes.
The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO
In this guide, Patrick Stox has written it in simple layman’s terms to help you understand the basics of technical SEO and spend time on the part which maximizes impact on your organic traffic growth.
Advanced Technical SEO: A Complete Guide
In this guide, SEJ has come up with a few chapters of Technical SEO that matter the most. I would suggest you read every chapter as it will help you understand technical SEO and why it is one of the most important parts of SEO.
Technical SEO 2023: The Ultimate Guide
I’ve written this guide to help my followers and audience easily identify technical SEO issues and get them fixed. In this guide, I’ve provided step by step guide on resolving some of the most common technical issues.
List of tools that you’ll need for technical SEO:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Microsoft Excel, Google Sheet or Sheet
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Free Sitemap Generator (HTML & XML)
- Broken Link Checker (Chrome Extension)
- GTMetrix
- Lighthouse
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing elements on web pages in order to improve search visibility and increase organic traffic. Search engines crawl your web pages and understand them depending on how you optimize your title tags, headings, content, images, internal links and many other factors to determine where you should rank on the search result pages. In this section, I’ve listed the top free on-page SEO resources that will help you get started:
On-Page SEO: Big Guide to On-Page Optimization (2022)
This is a step-by-step on-page SEO guide that covers the most important page-specific SEO practices that you should implement on your website. It also explains why initiating on-page SEO is essential for your overall SEO strategy.
The Complete Guide to On-Page SEO
In this guide by SEJ, you will discover crucial on-page factors that can make or break your SEO efforts. This guide answers common questions beginners have on on-page SEO.
If you’re new to SEO and looking for easy-to-follow on-page optimization techniques, then you need to check out this guide by Mangools. It also answers all the basic questions beginners have in their minds.
In this guide, Joshua debunks all the misconceptions of on-page SEO and how you can optimize them even if you don’t have any technical knowledge.
On-Page SEO: The Definitive Guide (2023)
Brian Dean offers c complete guide to on-page SEO that covers everything from optimizing your content to writing effective titles and descriptions.
Link Building
Link building is an SEO process of building or earning hyperlinks from a website to improve search engine rankings that lead to increased organic traffic. Although Google Algorithm is constantly evolving, backlinks remain one of the most important ranking factors. This is because links provide signals for Google to determine whether your web pages are resource-worthy to be referenced by other sites. In this section, you can find some of the best free resources on link building:
What is Link Building? A Beginner’s Guide (2023)
One of the best link building guides that you don’t want to miss out on. The guide talks about link building from scratch and a list of strategies you can try out right away
Link Building Strategies: The Complete List (2023)
In this guide, Brian Dean has listed 170+ strategies, tips and tactics for link building. Don’t expect to implement every single strategy. Choose the one that suits your niche because some of them may not apply to your industry.
Link Building for SEO: The Beginner’s Guide
This awesome guide written by Tim Soulo is beginner-friendly and offers actionable advice on link building. Learn everything from link building basics to top link building tools that can help you improve your search presence.
How to Get Backlinks Like an SEO Pro (New Guide for 2023)
If your goal is to get more backlinks for your site, you have to check out this guide by Nathan Gotch. In this guide, you will learn everything about backlinks, the characteristics of quality backlinks, the types of backlinks to avoid, and many more.
Ultimate Guide to Link Building: Ways to Build Backlinks in 2023
I’ve written this guide to help marketers to focus on the right channels to build backlinks. There are a lot of outdated link building methods that do not add value to your site. You may want to stop wasting your time on those techniques and focus on the ones that work.
List of free tools to check your backlinks:
- Free Backlink Checker by Monitorbacklinks
- Google Search Console – Links
- SEObility
- Free Backlink Checker by Website SEO Checker
SEO Audits
SEO audit is a practice of analyzing and evaluating various components related to SEO that impact your site’s ability to rank on search result pages (SERPs). This is the first thing you ever want to do before implementing any SEO strategies to your site. You don’t want to implement tactics on a site that has errors and issues in terms of SEO. In this section, I’ve listed the best free resources that will help you conduct a comprehensive SEO audit.
How to Perform an SEO Audit of Your Website (Checklist Included)
You will learn how to perform an SEO audit for your website and identify all the issues that impact your site’s SEO performance. Use the guide and checklist to fix all the issues that you encounter.
A 15-Step SEO Audit Checklist for 2023
Learn how to do an SEO audit in 2022 with Brian Deans actionable steps. This is the same process he has used to improve Backlinko’s organic traffic by 28.55% in 2020.
The Definitive Guide to Running an SEO Website Audit
Boost your search engine rankings and improve your revenue by conducting an SEO audit. Neil Patel guides you through the entire SEO audit process from evaluating your website to getting SEO issues fixed.
Non-Google SEO
I agree that Google has the major share of search engines with a whopping 93%. But there are alternative search engines like Bing, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Amazon, Lazada, Shopee and more.
Did you know that Shopee and Lazada are in the race with Google to become the #1 product search engine in Southeast Asia?
Amazon has already surpassed Google to become the number one product search engine in the world.
And I know what you’re thinking.
Are alternative search engines worth your time and effort?
Well, it depends on your target audience. If you have a huge audience in other search engines, you need to work on your site’s search presence on those search platforms.
In this section, I’ve listed the best free resources on SEO for Non-Google Search Engines:
The 2021 Bing SEO Guide for Beginners
In this guide, you will get to know the ranking factors Bing uses to rank web pages that are completely different from Google. And you will also learn how to optimize your site for Bing.
The Ultimate Guide to Bing SEO
Neil Patel talks about the advantages of Bing as all the marketers are focused on Google. As the Bing Desktop search has grown by 26.8% since 2019. So, this is the best time to optimize your content for Bing.
Revealing the Secrets to Russian SEO – Yandex SEO Made Simple
There are very limited information on Yandex SEO available in English. In this guide, Matthew Woodward reveals some of the interesting things about Yandex and how the algorithm works.
The Ultimate Guide to Yandex SEO
This guide will teach you everything that you need to know about Yandex SEO. It also uncovers how the common SEO elements work with this specific Russian search engine.
Guide to Baidu SEO – China #1 Search Engine
If you’re targeting China, then you need to focus on getting your site ranked high on Baidu. This guide discusses everything you need to know before starting Baidu SEO and how to optimize your site for the Chinese search engine.
Baidu Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Massive Guide
In this guide, the author has covered the most important components of Baidu SEO and guides the readers on how to build a Baidu SEO strategy that works from scratch.
Amazon SEO in 2023: A Comprehensive Guide
Amazon is the #1 product search engine today. As most people think that an SEO guide for Amazon is impossible to be taught in a single article, Seller Interactive has come up with a guide that covers everything. Get to know how Amazon’s search engine works and how to implement the right strategies to rank your products higher on product search results.
How to Master Amazon SEO and Move Your Products up the Search Rankings
This guide shares realistic results to expect from Amazon SEO. You will not achieve overnight success by implementing SEO techniques for your product pages. It will take time as the generic SEO. As the algorithm of Amazon product search is constantly changing you need to be aware of it and make necessary changes to dominate the search results.
Lazada SEO: How to Rank Your Products in Lazada Search Results
Lazada is one of the top online marketplaces in Southeast Asia with millions of daily visitors. If you’re selling your products through Lazada, this guide will help you optimize your product pages to rank higher on Lazada search result pages.
SEO Shopee: A Great Helper to Reach Customers
Shopee is the number #1 online marketplace in Southeast Asia. The competition has grown for businesses to sell products as there are hundreds of others selling the same products. In this guide, you will learn how Shopee SEO works and how you can optimize and improve your product pages to get in front of your potential customers.
How to Do Naver SEO 2022: The Ultimate Marketer’s Guide
I don’t think most of you ever heard of Naver. Naver has 59% of the search engine market share in South Korea compared to Google with 32.7%. It’s a search engine like Baidu that uses the Korean language. In this guide, you will learn everything about Naver SEO which includes their algorithm and ranking factors. Naver remains one of the most underrated search engines with huge opportunities for global brands.
Search engines and social media networks are still new, and we won’t know what will happen in the next 50 years. Despite DuckDuckGo’s extremely small market share, it has been exponentially growing and offers complete privacy for the users. It does not store users’ personal information or search history. There is a trend of users making a switch to DuckDuckGo from Google due to privacy concerns. In this guide, you will get to know the factors that matter the most to rank on DuckDuckgo’s search result pages. It’s quite easy to understand and implement.
YouTube SEO: How to Rank YouTube Videos in 2023
We define YouTube as a video search engine. As people’s attention spans are getting lower over the years, videos are getting popular among people who are bored to consume other content like blog posts and infographics, In this guide, Brian Dean shares the exact process he used to grow his YouTube channel to over 189k views per month.
YouTube SEO: The Ultimate DIY Guide to Start Video Marketing
YouTube is the 8th most visited website in the world. Even Google was dethroned to 2nd place by Tencent’s TikTok. However, YouTube remains one of the top video search engines that people visit. With this guide by Kinsta, you’ll be able to optimize your YouTube videos and boost your brand’s search presence.
CMS For SEO
Over the years there’s been a debate on the best CMS for SEO. Those days are gone from my point of view. As SEO has become the number 1 thing for any website today, most of the popular CMS allow users to make SEO changes easily without any complicated coding or extensions. If the CMS offers the flexibility to conduct SEO audits and implement technical SEO and On-Page SEO, they’re good enough to help the website to rank on search results.
In this section, I’ve listed the best free resources for implementing SEO for CMS including WordPress, Webflow, Wix, Shopify, Magento, CMS Hub, Drupal, and Joomla.
Ultimate WordPress Guide for Beginners (Step by Step)
In this guide, you will learn the top WordPress SEO practices to improve the site’s search presence and get more organic traffic. Check out some of the actionable steps you should take to optimize your WordPress site for search engines and offer the best user experience for your visitors.
WordPress SEO: The Definitive Guide
Yoast SEO plugin is the number #1 WordPress SEO plugin used by almost 5+ million WordPress sites. Although this guide primarily focuses on optimizing WordPress sites using Yoast SEO plugin, most of the SEO practices covered in this guide are still applicable to other SEO plugins.
A Marketer’s Guide to SEO in Webflow
Approximately 55,250 companies are using Webflow as their CMS. And the best part of Webflow is that it comes with SEO-friendly features that allow you to easily optimize the site. This guide is created by the Webflow team that dives deep into everything you need to know and implement for better rankings on search engine result pages.
The Ultimate Guide to Webflow SEO
This guide is divided into a few chapters to provide an in-depth explanation of Webflow mechanisms and how to make SEO tweaks to your site. It also covers everything from on-page SEO to Webflow SEO best practices.
Shopify SEO Guide: Your Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide to Rank #1 (2022)
With this Shopify SEO guide, you’ll be able to optimize your Shopify store and get more organic traffic and sales. The guide will also walk you through 8 key steps that are essential for your Shopify store to improve search rankings.
Shopify SEO: The Definitive How-To Guide for Beginners
This guide covers the basics of Shopify SEO and the methods to grow your store organically without relying completely on paid advertising.
Wix SEO: 11 Tips to Improve Your Website’s Performance
In this guide, you will learn how to improve your Wix site’s SEO performance. James Brockbank has shared great insights into Wix SEO.
In this article, Neil Patel shows the best ways to improve your Wix site SEO. He also covers both pros and cons of using Wix for SEO.
The Ultimate Guide to Magento 2
This Magento SEO guide offers actionable tips to get your Magento store completely optimized for both search engines and visitors. The guide is focused on helping you to maximize your online store’s SEO performance.
Magento 2 SEO Guide – The All-In-One Definitive Guide
One of the most comprehensive guides you’ll find online on Magento SEO. Learn how to boost your ranking results with the right SEO strategies that work for Magento.
How to Execute Your SEO Strategy In HubSpot’s New CMS Hub
With Hubspot new product CMS Hub, a standalone CMS like WordPress you can easily optimize your website. In this guide, you will learn how CMS Hub helps with SEO and implement strategies that work.
How HubSpot CMS helps with SEO Performance
This article explains how you can optimize content for SEO and performance in search when you use Hubspot CMS. The best part of HubSpot CMS is that it comes with tools that can help you scale your SEO efforts.
The Ultimate Drupal SEO Guide: Tips, Modules, Checklist and More!
The websites that run on Drupal, a robust CMS with hundreds of functionalities. Deepak Singla listed all the ingredients that will help you optimize your Drupal site for search engines.
The Full 2021 Drupal SEO Guide
Like plugins for WordPress, Drupal has SEO modules that help you to focus on on-page and technical SEO. This guide discusses combining Drupal SEO modules along with third-party SEO tools to maximize SEO efforts.
Joomla SEO Made Simple – A Complete Step-by-Step Guide
In this guide, the author Parvez Akther uncovers everything you need to know about Joomla SEO and listed all the important factors that should be evaluated and optimized.
25 Easy Joomla SEO Tips to Boost Your Site Rank Fast (2021)
This resourceful article listed 25 Joomla SEO tips you can follow to optimize your Joomla website and improve your presence in search result pages.
Conclusion
There are tons of resources on the Internet where you can learn SEO and apply them to your website. It’s all about putting your knowledge into action. You need to continuously experiment with different SEO strategies for your website as there’s no one-size-fits-all.
And make sure to keep yourself informed with constant algorithm changes to search engines. If you haven’t started optimizing your site for search, you need to start it right away. Don’t miss out on the huge opportunities SEO has to offer for your business.
Are there any other resources to learn SEO for free in 2023?
Share them with us by commenting below.
