SEO Basics

Helping search engines understand and index you.

SEO Basics is taught here in 14 lessons, running from How search engines crawl and index through to Site migrations, redirects and recovery. Each lesson takes one topic, shows the working code, and links onward to the next, so the course can be read straight through in order.

Lessons

1. How search engines crawl and indexThe three-stage pipeline - crawl, index, serve - and the controls that decide whether a page enters it at all.
2. On-page essentialsTitles, descriptions, heading structure, internal links and structured data - the parts of a page a crawler actually reads.
3. Technical SEO and measuring itCanonicals, redirects, Core Web Vitals and the Search Console reports that tell you what is actually broken.
4. Keyword research and search intentSeed keywords and expansion sources, how to read volume and difficulty, the four intents, and mapping each intent to the page type that satisfies it.
5. Site architecture, URLs and internal linkingFlat versus deep structures, hub and spoke layouts, stable URL patterns, breadcrumbs, and finding the orphan pages that never get crawled.
6. Structured data and rich resultsSchema.org vocabulary, JSON-LD in practice, the types that produce visible results, validation, and the eligibility rules people ignore.
7. Content strategy: topic clusters and briefsPillar and cluster planning, mapping keywords to URLs, writing a brief that produces the page you planned, and preventing cannibalisation.
8. Page speed and Core Web Vitals optimisationThe causes behind LCP, INP and CLS, image and font loading that actually helps, render-blocking resources, and how to read lab data against field data.
9. Local SEO and Google Business ProfileBusiness profile setup and categories, NAP consistency, local landing pages that are not doorway pages, review practice, and multi-location structure.
10. Link building and digital PRAuthority versus relevance, the link types that are worth chasing, campaigns that earn coverage, and the tactics that attract penalties.
11. International SEO and hreflangCountry and language targeting, correct hreflang syntax and return links, choosing between ccTLD, subfolder and subdomain, and the failures that silently disable the whole cluster.
12. E-commerce and faceted navigation SEOCategory and product page patterns, controlling faceted URL explosion, pagination and canonical decisions, out-of-stock handling, and product markup that survives a catalogue change.
13. SEO for JavaScript-rendered sitesHow rendering is handled, the difference between SSR, prerendering and client-side rendering, hydration and SPA routing, and how to see what the crawler actually receives.
14. Site migrations, redirects and recoveryPre-migration inventory, URL mapping and 301 rules, staging controls, launch checks, monitoring for traffic loss, and what to do about a manual action.

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