How to Learn SEO: A 2024 Guide

Businesses need successful websites to draw new audiences. With many businesses competing for traffic, ensuring your website appears on the first page of online search results can be challenging. Good SEO can help ensure your website has the best chance of being displayed to your target audience, increasing traffic and high-quality engagement. In this guide, learn about SEO fundamentals and how to apply them to achieve maximum results on your website. 

Read more: SEO Jobs: Types, Salary, and How to Get Started

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization and refers to using keywords, website structure, and metadata to help your website rank well in a search engine’s results. SEO increases organic—or non-paid—traffic. When a business pays for its website to display on the first page of results, that’s considered pay-per-click (PPC), and SEO isn't necessarily required.

Good SEO for your website increases the likelihood that a search engine will rank your content higher than others. This ensures that users searching for your product, service, or topic will click on your site rather than competitors.

Read more: E-commerce SEO: How to Drive More Traffic to Your Online Store

What part does SEO play in marketing?

SEO plays a key role in your marketing strategy because it helps increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website, thereby increasing conversions. SEO is important to create brand awareness and reach target audiences. It helps search engines align your website with potential customer needs so that visitors look specifically for what you offer.

Keep in mind that ranking on the first page of search results can significantly influence your organic marketing strategy. In a survey by Statista in 2023, 50 percent of global marketing professionals cited search engine optimization as a significant contributor to their firm’s marketing goals and performance [2].

Read more: SEO Marketing: What It Is and How to Get Started

How to learn SEO

Learning SEO is all about understanding why it's important, the strategies involved, and how to apply these strategies to your own website. The good news is that you don’t have to be an SEO expert to start.

1. Learn SEO fundamentals.

To begin learning SEO, it’s best to ensure you grasp the fundamentals. You can start by understanding how a search engine works. Search engines like Google send out crawlers, also called robots or spiders, to collect information on every website they come across. The crawlers follow the various links from one website to another and catalog identifiers such as text, URL, and title tags to discern the focus of every page. Then, they take that information back to Google, which evaluates it and ranks the website in an internal index based on quality and quantity.

For example, a website containing text that hasn't been updated for years may not rank highly. On the other hand, a website with high-quality, authoritative copy and regular updates will rank much higher. When someone searches for a website, Google will display sites that offer the best value to its users, according to their standards.

SEO is all about using different methods to demonstrate a website’s value to Google so that it can rank highly in search results.

2. Understand the four pillars of SEO.

The SEO strategies you will use typically fall into four categories: technical, on-page, content, and off-page. Each has its value and importance, so it’s up to you to try each approach and see which ones work best for your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO makes your website visible to search engine crawlers seeking your pages. It’s focused on user experience (UX) because the search engines want to provide their audience with sites that are easy to interact with. Technical SEO strategies include:

• Crawlability: Ensuring your website is easy for crawlers to navigate, often by using a sitemap

• Mobile-friendliness: Creating a website that is formatted for smartphones and tablets

• Page speed: Ensuring your website loads quickly

• Website structure: Designing your website so that it allows users to easily find what they’re looking for

On-page SEO

On-page SEO involves strategies that make your website easy to understand. Specifically, it encompasses internal actions taken within a webpage to improve its ranking. On-page SEO strategies include:

• Title tag: Making sure each page has a relevant title with keywords

• Meta description: Adding short summaries of each page that describe the content

• H-tags: Using headings and subheadings to divide content into readable sections

• URL slugs: Ensuring that the link section after the domain is unique to each page and includes keywords

• Keyword optimization: Adding keywords to content to help readers find what they’re searching for

• Internal links: Providing links to other pages on your website, which makes the entire structure stronger

• Alt text: Adding descriptions of images to make them searchable

Content

Content SEO strategies are about demonstrating the value of your website’s content to both the search engine crawlers and your audience. Some content SEO strategies include:

• Relevance: Ensuring that content on the page matches the keywords and title used

• Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-E-A-T): Using high-quality, researched content in blogs and other copy to demonstrate your company’s credibility, value, and legitimacy

• Exhaustiveness: Writing long-form content to increase your search engine ranking

• Call to action: Encouraging users to engage more with your website to increase time spent on the website, which attracts crawlers

• Recency: Updating the information on your website regularly to demonstrate to the crawlers that the website is active

• Variety of content: Using copy, videos, and images to create a rich and varied website experience

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO involves strategies that demonstrate your website’s value as it exists outside of the site itself. Some of these strategies include:

• Backlinks: When other websites link to your website from their own, demonstrating your website’s authority and value

• Local search: Making sure your website is searchable by local databases through the inclusion of maps, addresses, and contact information

• Reviews: Positive online reviews from customers, which increase your website’s presence and authority

• Social media profiles: Staying active on social media to demonstrate your company’s legitimacy and make it easier to find

3. Practice what you’ve learned.

Once you feel confident using some SEO techniques, it’s time to apply those to your own website. Start by visiting your website like a customer would. Look over the landing page and read the copy. Here are some questions to ask yourself while reviewing your site:

• Is important information missing?

• Is the website easy to use?

• Are there engaging blog posts and a contact form?

• Does your website contain sections where valuable keywords should exist?

Try different methods and then monitor your website's traffic and conversion impact. You may start seeing results faster than you would expect.  

4. Keep up with Google.

Google, the leading search engine website, constantly updates its algorithms and indexing processes, so it’s essential to stay updated with current trends. Knowing what Google looks for in indexing and ranking is crucial for keeping your SEO strategies relevant and useful.

5. Be a lifelong learner.

Staying curious and excited to learn about new SEO strategies is key to enjoying the process. This allows you to continually improve your website offerings and create lasting change while helping you stay on top of emerging trends such as search AI. 

Keep learning with Coursera

Search engine optimization (SEO) revolves around creating and optimizing reliable content to assist visitors in finding answers to their queries. Typically, SEO outcomes become visible once a website undergoes crawling and indexing by a search engine. You can learn SEO by starting with the fundamentals, understanding the four pillars of SEO, staying abreast of Google's SEO policies, and learning new SEO strategies as they develop.

On Coursera, you’ll find a variety of courses and certificates to sharpen your SEO skills, like the University of California, Davis’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialization. Get started now with this five-course series to help you build your skills in marketing, influencing, and data analysis.