
Learn how search engines like Google and Bing shape daily life and business, and how a strong web presence drives growth across modern search engine optimization.
Explore the rise of the biggest search engine, from rivals like Yahoo and Alta Vista to Google's dominance at 81.5 percent, and why optimize for Google unless you target China.
Discover how search engine optimization uses hundreds of ranking factors and algorithms to rank pages for chosen keywords, earn Google's trust, and attract free traffic from the SERPs.
Ensure Google spiders can crawl and read your pages, index the ones you want to rank, and block pages you do not want appearing in results.
Understand how keywords shape a page's topic and traffic by optimizing content for a single keyword phrase, while focusing on relevance in organic results.
Understand search volume as a key metric for keyword targeting and traffic, and use free or paid tools to estimate volumes, knowing data is approximate and fluctuates.
Explore the sales funnel, from awareness to buying, and learn how user intent guides keyword strategy as customers research problems, compare solutions, and decide to buy.
Identify how the awareness stage uses informational keywords as potential buyers seek information to understand the problem, not yet defining it or seeking a solution.
Learn how navigational or go keywords drive the consideration stage as buyers research services, compare alternatives, read reviews, and gather information to inform buying decisions.
Target transactional keywords with high commercial intent, such as best, cheapest, buy, or top for sale, to capture users ready to purchase.
Examine post purchase keywords used by customers after buying a product or service to evaluate satisfaction or seek information on use and maintenance, signaling a new buying cycle.
Identify seasonal keywords using Google Trends, track yearly spikes, set country and period, and examine regional and city interest with examples like Super Bowl score and red roses.
Explore how seasonal and non-seasonal keywords differ in search demand, with examples like Google, Microsoft, toothpaste, and milk, and learn to extract quick insights using trends data.
Understand keyword difficulty as an estimate of ranking difficulty amid competition, based on tool scores. Ten spots exist on Google's first page, and higher search volume increases ranking challenge.
Compare head keywords and long-tail keywords to show how long-tail terms are easier to rank, highly targeted, and more likely to generate revenue with quality content.
Optimize each web page for a single keyword, with one keyword per page and a cohesive main topic across related pages, with each keyword having a dedicated page.
Identify and use keyword research tools, balancing paid and free options like google suggest and google's keyword planner to save time and improve your keyword targets.
Understand keyword intent to align content with user queries, ensuring pages satisfy user needs; Google ranks pages based on how well they match search intent and user satisfaction.
Analyze keyword intent by examining top serp titles, questions, and related searches to craft content that answers user needs for home insurance, such as comparing options, prices, and providers.
Uncover how to interpret keyword intent for 'French toast recipe' by reviewing top results and related searches, then model content around brioche and quick and easy variants to remove ambiguity.
Avoid fact keywords that can be answered with a single word or number. Google often displaces these numbers in a feature snippet, reducing clicks and rankings.
Learn to prevent pogo sticking by aligning page content with keyword intent, delivering quick answers, and using high quality, scannable content with relevant images and internal links.
Identify three query types—informational, consideration, and transactional—and tailor content to user intent to rank in serps. Near me queries favor local transactional pages, informational needs long-form articles.
Explore how informational queries drive searches, emphasizing step-by-step procedures, detailed information, ideas, tools and calculators, and how Google answers in answer boxes with text, images, and videos.
Create highly informative, benchmark-rich content for the consideration stage by delivering detailed reviews, buying guides, and benchmark results that compare processors with other options, using numbers, charts, and multimedia assets.
Explore transactional queries as buyer keywords and use a keyword list generator to surface buy-at terms, then study top serps for product models and direct purchases.
Google uses data about you, including browsing history, location, and clicks, to personalize search results, showing hotels near you or in destinations you've explored, like Cancun, Mexico.
Explore vertical search, a type of specialized search engine like Yelp and YouTube, and learn how Google offers images, maps, and videos, shopping, books, flights, and finance search products.
Explore universal search, where Google blends results from vertical engines—images, maps, videos, news, and shopping—into the main results, including images, recipes, and maps.
Compare lexical search with semantic search to show how intent guides results. Google analyzes pages, links, and user queries to infer meaning and provide relevant results.
Explore how Google understands the web as a network of entities and relationships, using knowledge graphs and knowledge panels to display attributes of people, places, things, and related entities.
Explore query disambiguation in search, where Google uses location, login status, and browser history to resolve ambiguity and present relevant results via drop down menus and knowledge panels.
Google resolves ambiguity for queries with unclear intent by delivering diverse results from multiple sources, including product, information, photos, and local pages to cover various user needs.
Learn why some queries require fresh, up-to-date information and how Google prioritizes pages with the latest data, like baseball games tonight, Dow Jones today, and gold price today.
Compare keyword difficulty estimates from tools like Age Lifts, Moore's keyword Revealer, and Moz to gauge ranking effort for target keywords before building a page around a focused keyword.
Analyze metrics for keywords across easy, medium, hard, and insanely hard rankings, and learn that a new website should target very easy or easy keywords before pursuing harder terms.
Understand how domain authority and page authority are estimated by third-party tools like Majestic, and why referring domains, indexed pages, and keyword rankings drive site authority.
Compare trust flow and citation flow as Majestic metrics and see how seed-set trusted sites like Wikipedia, Forbes, New York Times, Microsoft, and NASA influence link quality and site trust.
Explore how keyword difficulty scores from tools like Moz, Revealer, and keyword finder guide keyword choice, noting that scores vary, factor page and domain authority, and influence new site rankings.
Discover how all in title signals influence ranking, how to use the allintitle operator to estimate keyword difficulty, and why RankBrain can rank pages without exact titles.
Discover how keywords in urls signal competition and how to use allinurl and advanced search to gauge keyword difficulty, including dynamic pages with query strings in serps for ranking insights.
Discover how word count in keyword phrases affects ranking difficulty; longer phrases tend to rank easier, and use the keyword explorer to filter results by word count.
Understand how Ahrefs ranks sites in the top 10 by backlink quantity and quality, site age, and on-page optimization; learn how keyword difficulty shapes rankings.
Analyze how the number and relevance of contextual links and anchor text shape ranking difficulty for target phrases, with examples from coffee and insurance keywords.
Explore how serp volatility signals whether pages match keyword intent. Learn to identify stable top results versus fluxing rankings to outrank poorly matched pages that are not well optimized.
Analyze the number and quality of internal backlinks, including internal contextual links, and their impact on search rankings for pages in the top 10.
Analyze how page authority and external backlinks shape search rankings, comparing backlink counts and contextual backlinks across pages for keywords like best coffee creamer for weight loss.
Focus on organic traffic as the key metric, using backlinks from high-traffic pages to boost rankings in Google search results; evaluate links with site explorer before targeting a keyword.
Learn how external backlink relevance drives search engine optimization by evaluating anchor text and topical alignment with source pages, using Majestic to assess trust flow and contextual links.
Brand mentions show how hard it is to outrank a site, as Google considers brand signals from social media and the web; compare mentions, sentiment, and reach for branded keywords.
Highly focused niche coffee sites outrank large authority sites because every page centers on coffee, as Rosty coffee dot com and Cordner demonstrate, while broader sites cover many topics.
Identify easy-to-rank keywords by analyzing the 10 results, where article submission sites, forums, and Q&A sites often rank with few backlinks, while Google shifts SERP rankings to reflect user intent.
Monitor reviews and ratings to protect your online reputation; address disgruntled feedback promptly, as excessive negative reviews may influence Google and hurt your website performance.
Learn how referring domains measure a page's authority by counting unique linking sites, and assess how domain authority and page authority of linking pages affect search rankings.
Define your SEO objectives—branding, traffic, sales, or lead generation—and target keywords that communicate why your company is the best choice, boosting organic search traffic and leads.
Explore how keyword research tools reveal brand popularity through monthly searches and cost per click, and examine brand associations and questions to guide content and campaigns.
Use keyword research tools to generate lead-generation content ideas and tailor-made content, including e-books, articles, infographics, and videos for home security audiences, answering common questions to build trust and leads.
Assess keyword difficulty for new sites. Prioritize sites with high domain authority by selecting the best keywords and creating informative content; keep the home page focused on your brand.
List broad keywords for your site, then use keyword explorer with Google to refine by relevance to your business and target market, considering your site type.
Generate keyword ideas by using the keywords explorer, applying filters to target terms (e.g., difficulty ≤10 for new sites) and including buyer, informational keywords, and questions.
Identify your main competitors by using site explorer to search your domain, then review the competing domains listed in the SERPs to build a comprehensive list.
Identify the keywords your main competitors rank for and evaluate whether to target them using site explorer data and their top pages by traffic.
Explore how online communities build authority and rank for keywords. Use site explorer and Google filters to uncover easy, recipe-related keyword targets.
Discover free article submission sites to uncover low competition keywords, examine rankings with site explorer, and identify easy keywords related to your niche for higher rankings.
Explore how niche forums reveal easy keywords and content ideas, using site explorer to rank keywords by difficulty and select suitable topics for your site.
Discover how large ecommerce sites use authority to rank for many keywords and learn to outrank them by building a topically focused site with backlinks and niche keyword selection.
Identify weak sites with low authority and use keywords explorer to filter low-difficulty buyer and informational keywords, then analyze SERP URLs to outrank rivals.
Explore how on-page search engine optimization makes pages highly relevant through title tags, meta descriptions, headings, and content, while off-page search engine optimization builds authority with high-quality links.
Craft concise, unique title tags that describe each page and include your focus keyword. Limit length to around 55 characters to boost visibility in search results and avoid duplicates.
Learn how the description meta tag shapes the snippet shown in Serps, guiding users to click your listing. Keep each page's description unique and under 155 characters.
Explore image optimization basics for SEO, using alt text, file name, caption, and description to help Google understand images and pages, while avoiding keyword overuse; more on this later.
Robots.txt communicates with search engine bots to crawl or restrict access to your site, using a simple file placed in the root directory, with caution that anyone can read it.
Discover how the .htaccess file acts as a secure, extensionless Apache configuration tool for Linux servers, enabling url rewriting, access restriction, and redirects in folders or root.
Balance keyword usage by crafting naturally flowing copy that reads well aloud for users and search engines, while using keyword density thoughtfully with LSI to convey page meaning.
Apply the focus keyword across the page title, url, h1 tag, meta description, first 100 words, and key spots in the body, image alt text, and h2 tags.
Learn how HTML header tags, especially the H1, structure page content, signal relevancy to Google, and guide readers with H2–H6 while maintaining unique, top-of-page headers.
Learn how URL structure and on-page elements convey context to users and search engines, optimize for silos, and avoid dynamic parameters that confuse ranking.
Fresh content alone does not guarantee ranking; relevance and popularity drive top results. Keep content up to date, add backlinks, and promote older content to build authority.
Learn how inbound and outbound links influence Google rankings, emphasizing relevance, authority, and link age, while avoiding blackhat tactics that can trigger penalties.
Master technical SEO and WordPress SEO by mastering anchor text as a key ranking factor, balancing exact match with varied anchors to improve visibility without Penguin penalties.
Explore how dofollow links pass link juice and influence rankings, and why nofollow links protect your site when linking to untrustworthy or paid sources. Maintain a healthy, diverse backlink profile.
Explore how follow links boost pages in the serps based on link count, incoming links to the linking page, link age, and topical relevance, with contextual links strongest.
Learn about the three types of links—editorial, outreach, and non editorial—and how Google values editorial links most, while social media and exact-match anchors can influence rankings.
Identify onsite and offsite duplicate content and how they affect search results. Ensure unique titles and descriptions, manage WordPress archives, internal linking, and use noindex to reduce duplicates.
Evaluate a keyword's commercial intent by examining PPC ads history, CPC values, and landing pages to determine potential sales or value for users.
Learn how stemming reduces inflected words to root forms, handling plurals and exceptions. Understand why computers struggle to distinguish words like cats from catamaran.
Lemmatization uses dictionaries to map inflected words to root words, unlike stemming that may produce non-English forms and is slower, supporting sentiment analysis, document clustering, and information retrieval.
Learn how latent semantic indexing keywords boost topic depth by including contextually relevant terms, and use the any topic tool to extract LSI keywords, assess relevancy, and adjust keyword densities.
Learn how TF-IDF analyzes word relevance using term frequency and inverse document frequency, compares it to LSI, and guides how often keywords should appear to match top pages.
Use tf-idf and NLP to identify relevant topic words and ideal frequencies, benchmarking your article against top Google results and detected entities and sentiment.
Explore how natural language processing helps Google understand the web as entities - people, places, objects, businesses, numbers - and their relationships, with entity salience identifying the main subject.
Explore Google's natural language API to analyze text with entities, salience scores, sentiment, syntax, and categories, and learn how to use these insights to optimize articles for a specific topic.
Explore how sentiment scores are calculated per entity and combined into an overall article sentiment, and how nearby adjectives like best, beautiful, or pretty influence each entity's score.
Identify variations of the primary keyword, such as best lawn sprinklers and best sprinkler, and use these bolded phrases on your page in the page optimizer pro section.
Identify secondary keyword phrases to add to page content using H2 and H3 tags, leveraging Google Trends related queries to boost relevance for the primary keyword like best lawn sprinklers.
Identify questions for the FAQ section by using Google's people also ask results to answer reader queries, boosting organic traffic and making your page more relevant to target audiences.
Analyze top ranking pages for a keyword by examining design, features, and monetization (affiliate, products, lead-gen); identify authority, backlinks, and keyword opportunities to guide informational articles.
Analyze keyword intent for best lawn sprinklers by reviewing top results and PPC ads, compare features and pricing, and craft concise titles around 65 characters.
Explore practical title tag optimization techniques, including power words, front-loading keywords, adding month or year, using numbers and brackets, and proper title case for fresh, clickable WordPress SEO.
Craft a concise description tag that summarizes the page, noting it's not a ranking factor but boosts click-through by targeting your audience with the primary keyword.
Explore how Google handles special characters in titles and descriptions, including checkmarks, trademarks, and symbols, and learn to test their appearance in search results using simulators.
See how to spy on competition for title and description ideas by analyzing serps, emojis, table of contents, and ads to inspire your optimized meta content.
Craft concise, keyword-informed urls that preserve meaning, balance primary and secondary keywords, and avoid changing the slug or intent to boost seo performance.
Add the page title and description using the All-In-One SEO plugin, set the canonical URL, and draft the page with the Gutenberg editor.
Perform detailed research to flesh out the outline on why sprinklers get stuck, identifying mechanism parts and how to handle it, using articles, niche forums, YouTube videos, and manufacturer docs.
Verify article uniqueness using reliable tools like Copyescape to ensure 100 percent original content, avoid plagiarized material, and confirm outsourced writing passes quality checks.
Improve page credibility and conversions by ensuring flawless spelling and grammar through tools like grammar wordly extension and Word's spelling and grammar checks.
Learn to check readability with the Hemingway editor, aim for an eighth-grade level, break up sentences, and replace hard words to keep articles readable and rank well in the serps.
Leverage several LSI keywords on your page to help Google understand your content and boost rankings for the target phrase, aiming for a near-perfect article score of about 99 percent.
Compare article entities using Google's MLP tool to identify content gaps, then optimize by adding topics from the top ranked article to improve ranking potential.
Analyze entropies, entities, and categories to understand how Google determines article relevance, comparing sentiment and category confidence for gardening and landscaping, yard and patio, and top ranked articles.
Keep h1 and h2 headings relevant to the topic. Use Screaming Frog to detect irrelevant words in headings and adjust headings and widgets for Google-friendly pages.
Identify above the fold area where ads should not appear, and place ads or affiliate offers after the first or second paragraph to avoid Google penalties and protect the call-to-action.
Balance keyword variations, LSI terms, and secondary keywords across headings, images, and file names; place exact-match keywords at the H1, first 100 words, and last 100 words.
Design web pages to be clean and simple with one clear call to action. Use a consistent color scheme and fonts from top brands; avoid using R to play videos.
Use a WordPress breadcrumb plugin to add breadcrumbs, activate the plugin, place the breadcrumb widget in a sidebar or footer, customize trail text, and enable on pages and posts.
Add structured data by implementing article, organization, and Web page schema on your page, and validate with the Google structure data testing tool to compare with top ranking pages.
Add schema markup for article, organization, and web page types, test with Google's structured data tool, and implement via a Gutenberg block.
Add your site to Google search console and verify all domain variations with a dns verification code. Then request indexing for urls, monitor propagation, and reindex after major changes.
Run your page through Google's PageSpeed Insights to analyze mobile and desktop performance, spot issues, and learn how to reduce time to first byte for faster loading.
Learn where to source articles for amazon affiliate sites, and why you must tweak any bought content, with emphasis on writing key articles yourself and outsourcing supporting content.
Discover how image optimization boosts page speed and user experience by using the right image types, scaling, compression, lazy loading, and descriptive text and file names.
WordPress automatically generates image sizes from each upload in the media library—thumbnail, medium, and large—to help pages load faster by using the right size.
Learn to make images responsive with CSS by setting max-width to 100% and scalable height, ensuring images fit any screen from desktop to mobile without pixelation.
Explore how the HTML5 picture element uses source elements with media queries and srcset to serve retina and standard display images, with a fallback to the img tag when unsupported.
Learn how WebP enables smaller image files with lossy compression, boosting page load times, while understanding browser support and how to convert existing JPEG or PNG files to WebP.
Show how to serve WebP with a picture element and fall back to JPEG when browsers like Internet Explorer or older Firefox do not support WebP, with practical examples.
Demonstrates lazy loading images and videos to reduce page requests and size, dramatically speeding page load from 4.21s to 1.3s using the Lazy Load by WP Rocket plugin.
Craft accurate alt text to describe images for visually challenged users and help search engines understand context. Avoid spammy keywords and over-optimization, as Google penalizes misleading descriptions and keyword stuffing.
Name image files with concise, accurate descriptions; use dashes, not underscores, avoid uppercase and keyword stuffing, and include model, year, or artist name in the text.
Place images near the related text to maximize impact, ensuring they align with the nearby H2 and H3 tags and the surrounding content, including the image's art text.
Learn safe search blocks explicit content, lock the filter, and organize adult content in a separate folder with a method tag to signal explicit pages to Google.
Optimize images with a plugin by configuring settings, entering an API key, and enabling auto optimization to compress uploads and resize large images to the largest thumbnail width.
What You'll Learn
How to Build 100% technically perfect, well SEOed websites: This course will give you a super solid foundation in technical SEO
On Page SEO: On Page SEO is covered in great detail here. Every factor is discussed with examples - including using Google's NLP tool
Build blazing fast WordPress websites : You'll see - with a live example - how to build websites that load extremely fast, with TTFB less than 0.2s - on a shared hosting account. You do not need to spend $100s a year on hosting - and you can do these quick optimizations in less than 30 minutes in most cases!
Every technique you need to know to build super fast, high performing websites is discussed with examples. These include
How to use speed testing tools
Factors that influence site speed
TTFB
DNS response times
DNS prefetch
Prerendering and preconnect
GZip compression
Code bloat
Optimizing CSS and JS
SSL speed
Testing SSL certificates for vulnerabilities
SEO Schema and structured data: You'll discover how very easy it is to add JSON LD schema and structured data to your WordPress website.
You'll see how to
Use Google's Data Highlighter and Data Helper tools
Add product schema
Add ratings and reviews
Recipes
ItemList
Events
Article schema
Local business schema
Debugging JSON LD schema code
Do a technical SEO audit: You'll get a thorough understanding of the important technical SEO factors that play a key role in helping your website rank in the search engines - and how to do a technical SEO audit.
Master WordPress: Just about everything you need to know about setting up WordPress sites and adding and modifying content is discussed here in great detail. You'll learn ...
How to use cPanel
Register a domain
Setup web hosting
Configuring WordPress
How to add themes and plugins
How to use the Gutenberg editor
create .htaccess files
Create robots.txt and XML sitemap
Master WordPress Gutenberg editor
Understand search intent: Unless you understand search intent, you will not be able to create content that ranks in Google. In this section you'll learn about
The kind of keywords you would never want to target
Different types of search queries
Different types of content
Pogo sticking
Entity search
Query disambiguation and query deserves diversity
Understand keyword difficulty: Unless you know the difference between easy and hard keywords, you will not be able to choose keywords to target.
In this section you will see exactly how to get to know whether a keyword would be easy or hard to target.
Master keyword research: This is a critical skill for any SEO. There's a science and an art to this. You'll get to learn how to do keyword research by seeing how it's done.
You will learn exactly how you can find low competition keywords that will be very appropriate for your site - no matter what your niche is.
How to find 100s of easy keywords in any niche: This is one skill you will need to master if you are going to be an SEO. The lessons in this section will help you master this skill.
Understand how to write highly optimized SEO content: Writing SEO optimized content is not the same as writing content. You will get to see the exact steps you need to follow to write highly optimized SEO articles. These are the kind of articles that can rank for 100s or even 1000s of different keywords. You'll learn (with a detailed worked example) ...
How to identify variations of the primary keyword
How to identify secondary keywords
Optimize the title and description tags
Use proven techniques to increase your CTR in the SERPs
Craft your page's URL
How to do in-depth research
Improve your reading scores easily
Use Google's NLP tool to maximize your chances of ranking high
Add schema
Make your articles highly relevant topically
Create .htaccess files: You'll see how to create and modify the .htaccess file. You'll learn how to use .htaccess to
Setup redirects
Disable directory listings
Password protect individual directories
Block certain IP addresses
Protect the wp-login.php file
Add custom http headers
Create x-robots tags
Make your WordPress website more secure
Optimize images: This is another important skill every SEO needs to have. Unoptimized images can make your pages very slow to load and reduce your site's conversions. There's a lot more to image optimization than using a plugin to reduce image sizes. In fact, you will not want to use plugins to optimize images. You'll learn about ...
Best image types for the web
WordPress image sizes
HTML5 picture element
Using WebP images
Lazy loading images
Using free tools to reduce your image sizes by upto 90%
Optimizing alt text
Image filenames and SEO
Optimizing for SafeSearch
robots.txt: robots.txt is a file every SEO needs to know about. Mistakes in this file can seriously hinder your site's performance. In this section, you'll see how to ...
Create and validate your robots.txt file
Avoid common mistakes
Create meta robots tags
Avoid conflicts between robots.txt and your website's XML sitemap
Avoid conflicts between robots.txt and meta robots tags
International targeting and hreflang: If you are going to be working on very large sites that target multiple countries, you will need to know how to use hreflang. In this section, you'll see ...
How international targeting works
What ccTLDs are and when to use them
How to determine the best ways to implement international targeting for your website
The intricacies involved in creating multilingual URLs
How to use canonical tags with hreflang
How to get XML sitemaps to work well with hreflang
How to debug hreflang tags
XML sitemaps: Your website's XML sitemap - along with the robots.txt file - plays a key role in optimizing your crawl budget. Mistakes in XML sitemaps are all too common. And these seemingly benign mistakes can reduce your site's crawl budget. In this section you'll see ...
What crawl budget is and why you should care
XML vs HTML sitemaps - the differences
How to create video and image sitemaps
How to create and validate your XML sitemap
How to maximize crawl budget
How to avoid common errors in creating XMl sitemaps
Setup a CDN: By configuring a Content Delivery Network for your WordPress website, you can make your website a lot faster, more secure, increase availability and reduce the load on your server. In this section, you'll learn how to do this for free - and it takes only a few minutes!
Implement HSTS: By implementing HSTS for your WordPress website, you will make it more secure - and improve security. You'll learn how to do this, and see the prerequisites a website should satisfy before you can implement HSTS.
Requirements
A computer with an internet connection
A strong work ethic
Who this course is for
Webmasters
Web designers
Web developers
Bloggers
Business owners
Writers
By learning the skills taught here, you will be able to
Build highly optimized websites - this is a skill companies value a lot
Master technical SEO - This is exactly what is needed to rank in Google and other search engines
Write highly optimized SEO content - another very valuable skill companies are willing to pay a lot for
Create websites that load extremely fast without spending much - another highly lucrative skill. There are companies that do just this and nothing else.
Master WordPress - Everything you need to know to create WordPress websites is covered here in great detail