What are the best free SEO resources online?

Whether you are a fresh-faced SEO newbie just starting to learn the ropes, or an SEO veteran who can recite the ins and outs of every Google update ever, it is safe to say that we can all agree on one thing: SEO is a complex subject.

Sure, the basics of SEO aren’t difficult to grasp. The issue lies in the fact that there is no exact formula for achieving that coveted number one spot.

Everything we know is based on the small amount of guidance provided by Google, a good dose of speculation, a healthy amount of testing and the general consensus from the SEO community.

With so much information about SEO available online, compounded by a fair amount of conflicting opinions, it can be difficult to know where to turn for the most accurate guidance.

In this post, we share our pick of the best free SEO resources. These resources have been chosen for their accuracy, reliability and ease of understanding.

The Big G

What better place to find out what Google wants than from… well, Google? It therefore makes sense to kick off our list with the Big G themselves, as they have a number of resources available for keen SEOs.

For anyone new to SEO, you may be wondering why on earth you would need to look elsewhere for learning resources, when Google is surely the most reliable source. The trouble is that Google doesn’t give that much away. Google’s SEO Starter Guide is a great place to begin, as is their help center on How Search Works.

More of a video person? You’re in luck, because there’s even a Google Webmaster YouTube channel.

Google may be head honcho in the search engine world, but it’s certainly not a lone wolf. It would be remiss of us not to also give a shout out to Bing’s webmaster guidelines for SEO and Yahoo’s website ranking help page. They are not quite as detailed as Google’s offering, but it is still worth familiarizing yourself with the approaches of each search engine, albeit very similar ones.

Moz

Although Google provides a lot of helpful information, it is not always particularly easy to digest. Written by the uber nerds at Google, the information does not often translate smoothly to the layman. This is where Moz excels.

Having been around for 13 years, Moz is the go-to resource for many SEO practitioners. It is run by SEO super guru Rand Fishkin, who has a knack for explaining things so as to not make you feel like an idiot. He also has a completely wacky but utterly endearing range of shirts.

As well as providing wonderfully useful and actionable information, it is presented in a way that is genuinely easy to understand. Start with the Beginner’s Guide to SEO for a solid grounding and then explore the plethora of other handy info.

A particular favourite of mine is the Whiteboard Fridays. In our Yellowball office, we take ten minutes every Friday afternoon to gather around and watch the latest Whiteboard Friday. Popcorn optional but encouraged.

Backlinko

If link-building is the absolute bane of your life, then Backlinko is for you. Run by link-building mastermind Brian Dean, he provides clear link-building strategies, advice and case studies to help you break through the inertia of building backlinks.

Utilizing a healthy combination of text and videos, the content is engaging and extremely useful. His suggestions are clever and make absolute sense but are not difficult to understand. You’ll come away wondering why on earth you didn’t think of it.

Okay so it’s not completely “free” in that you do have to provide an email address to unlock the content. But trust me, it’s so worth it.

Quicksprout

A great all-round resource for SEOs and marketers alike, Quicksprout is run by Neil Patel – certified online marketing wizard. His most handy learning resource to date is The Advanced Guide to SEO. Formatted as an infographic, it looks good, it’s detailed and it’s highly useful. What’s not to love!

Neil Patel is also a big advocate of longer form content, often posting articles in the 5000+ word range, diving into a subject head first and emerging with actionable points. These in-depth pieces can be particularly useful if you are looking for more information on a specific aspect of SEO.

Search Engine Watch

Okay, so we may be a little biased here, but we couldn’t not mention our own free SEO resource. With a range of highly talented and in-the-know contributors (ahem), the articles cover a range of topics within the expansive SEO universe.

From addressing simple how-tos for beginners through to tackling the more complex issues that nobody wants to talk about but everyone wants to learn about, Search Engine Watch is a treasure trove of handy resources. You’re welcome!

Best SEO blogs

SEO is constantly changing and if you want to stay ahead of the game then you have to keep learning. This is why it is crucial to stay up to date on the latest updates and trends. Below we share our favorite blogs for staying tuned in to the strange inner workings of the SEO industry:

• Ahrefs Blog
• SEMRush Blog
• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Quicksprout Blog
• Yellowball SEO Glossary
• Kissmetrics Blog
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Moz Blog

There are loads more authoritative blogs on the topic of SEO and if we were to provide an exhaustive list then we’d be here all day. And so would you. Knowing you’re a busy person, the above blogs are a useful place to start and you’ll soon work out your own favorites for staying up to date.

Twitter accounts to follow

Sometimes it can be difficult to stay afloat of all the latest news and insights across all the various SEO blogs. So why not follow the best SEO practitioners on Twitter and absorb your daily SEO insight whilst mindlessly scrolling through your Twitter feed? Here are the ones to follow:

• Rand Fishkin – Founder of Moz
• Barry Schwatrz – Founder of Search Engine Roundtable
• Aleyda Solis – International SEO Consultant
• Danny Sullivan – Founding Editor of Search Engine Land & Marketing Land
• Neil Patel – Co-Founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar & KISSmetrics
• Jon Cooper – Expert Link Builder
• Julie Joyce – Owner of Link Fish Media and Co-Founder of SEO Chicks
• Matt Cutts – Former head of the Webspam team at Google

Practice makes perfect

You can read all the free SEO resources in the world but if you’re not putting what you’ve learnt into action then you’re not going anywhere. SEO is a fine art. Trying, testing and reiterating are all necessary in order to improve on your strategy and success rates.

You can’t master SEO overnight, but with a little resourcefulness and dedication, you’ll soon be taking your place among the SEO professionals. Practice makes perfect; there’s nothing better than learning from experience.

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Google Updates SEO Advice for Tabbed Content in Mobile First

Google has previously confirmed that for mobile first indexing, having content in tabs is fine. It makes for a better user experience on smaller mobile screens, so Google has been clear that they don’t tend to demote content behind tabs, something that had been done on desktop sites. In the last Google Webmaster Office Hours […]

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How Google Handles Ranking Pages of Identical Products on a Site

It is pretty common for ecommerce sites to have identical products, or near identical products, listed on their websites.  Sometimes there is a color variation, sometimes a minor size difference, or merely a difference in the model number.  For those sites that choose to leave these identical or near-identical products on individual pages, how does […]

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Google: Time to See Higher Rankings From Improving Content Quality

If you are suffering from Panda issues, or suspected ranking issues related to low quality content, the most obvious fix is to improve content quality.  But after you make major site-wide changes to improve the quality of that content, how long does it take for Google to adjust their ranking signals accordingly for the new […]

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Recreating Viral Video Success: Squatty Potty

Back in June, I spoke at VidCon and said, “Traditional influencer outreach works if you’ve got breaking news or the latest Harmon Brothers video.” Well, I guess that I should be careful what I wish for. Today, I got an email from Matthew Faraci of Agility PR Solutions announcing “a brand-new Squatty Potty video campaign […]

The post Recreating Viral Video Success: Squatty Potty appeared first on The SEM Post.

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How Links in Headers, Footers, Content, and Navigation Can Impact SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Which link is more valuable: the one in your nav, or the one in the content of your page? Now, how about if one of those in-content links is an image, and one is text? Not all links are created equal, and getting familiar with the details will help you build a stronger linking structure.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about links in headers and footers, in navigation versus content, and how that can affect both internal and external links and the link equity and link value that they pass to your website or to another website if you're linking out to them.

So I'm going to use Candy Japan here. They recently crossed $1 million in sales. Very proud of Candy Japan. They sell these nice boxes of random assortments of Japanese candy that come to your house. Their website is actually remarkably simplistic. They have some footer links. They have some links in the content, but not a whole lot else. But I'm going to imagine them with a few more links in here just for our purposes.

It turns out that there are a number of interesting items when it comes to internal linking. So, for example, some on-page links matter more and carry more weight than other kinds. If you are smart and use these across your entire site, you can get some incremental or potentially some significant benefits depending on how you do it.

Do some on-page links matter more than others?

So, first off, good to know that...

I. Content links tend to matter more

...just broadly speaking, than navigation links. That shouldn't be too surprising, right? If I have a link down here in the content of the page pointing to my Choco Puffs or my Gummies page, that might actually carry more weight in Google's eyes than if I point to it in my navigation.

Now, this is not universally true, but observably, it seems to be the case. So when something is in the navigation, it's almost always universally in that navigation. When something is in here, it's often only specifically in here. So a little tough to tell cause and effect, but we can definitely see this when we get to external links. I'll talk about that in a sec.

II. Links in footers often get devalued

So if there's a link that you've got in your footer, but you don't have it in your primary navigation, whether that's on the side or the top, or in the content of the page, a link down here may not carry as much weight internally. In fact, sometimes it seems to carry almost no weight whatsoever other than just the indexing.

III. More used links may carry more weight

This is a theory for now. But we've seen some papers on this, and there has been some hypothesizing in the SEO community that essentially Google is watching as people browse the web, and they can get that data and sort of see that, hey, this is a well-trafficked page. It gets a lot of visits from this other page. This navigation actually seems to get used versus this other navigation, which doesn't seem to be used.

There are a lot of ways that Google might interpret that data or might collect it. It could be from the size of it or the CSS qualities. It could be from how it appears on the page visually. But regardless, that also seems to be the case.

IV. Most visible links may get more weight

This does seem to be something that's testable. So if you have very small fonts, very tiny links, they are not nearly as accessible or obvious to visitors. It seems to be the case that they also don't carry as much weight in Google's rankings.

V. On pages with multiple links to the same URL

For example, let's say I've got this products link up here at the top, but I also link to my products down here under Other Candies, etc. It turns out that Google will see both links. They both point to the same page in this case, both pointing to the same page over here, but this page will only inherit the value of the anchor text from the first link on the page, not both of them.

So Other Candies, etc., that anchor text will essentially be treated as though it doesn't exist. Google ignores multiple links to the same URL. This is actually true internal and external. For this reason, if you're going ahead and trying to stuff in links in your internal content to other pages, thinking that you can get better anchor text value, well look, if they're already in your navigation, you're not getting any additional value. Same case if they're up higher in the content. The second link to them is not carrying the anchor text value.

Can link location/type affect external link impact?

Other items to note on the external side of things and where they're placed on pages.

I. In-content links are going to be more valuable than footers or nav links

In general, nav links are going to do better than footers. But in content, this primary content area right in here, that is where you're going to get the most link value if you have the option of where you're going to get an external link from on a page.

II. What if you have links that open in a new tab or in a new window versus links that open in the same tab, same window?

It doesn't seem to matter at all. Google does not appear to carry any different weight from the experiments that we've seen and the ones we've conducted.

III. Text links do seem to perform better, get more weight than image links with alt attributes

They also seem to perform better than JavaScript links and other types of links, but critically important to know this, because many times what you will see is that a website will do something like this. They'll have an image. This image will be a link that will point off to a page, and then below it they'll have some sort of caption with keyword-rich anchors down here, and that will also point off. But Google will treat this first link as though it is the one, and it will be the alt attribute of this image that passes the anchor text, unless this is all one href tag, in which case you do get the benefit of the caption as the anchor. So best practice there.

IV. Multiple links from same page — only the first anchor counts

Well, just like with internal links, only the first anchor is going to count. So if I have two links from Candy Japan pointing to me, it's only the top one that Google sees first in the HTML. So it's not where it's organized in the site as it renders visually, but where it comes up in the HTML of the page as Google is rendering that.

V. The same link and anchor on many or most or all pages on a website tends to get you into trouble.

Not always, not universally. Sometimes it can be okay. Is Amazon allowed to link to Whole Foods from their footer? Yes, they are. They're part of the same company and group and that kind of thing. But if, for example, Amazon were to go crazy spamming and decided to make it "cheap avocados delivered to your home" and put that in the footer of all their pages and point that to the http://ift.tt/2yViyvr page, that would probably get penalized, or it may just be devalued. It might not rank at all, or it might not pass any link equity. So notable that in the cases where you have the option of, "Should I get a link on every page of a website? Well, gosh, that sounds like a good deal. I'd pass all this page rank and all this link equity." No, bad deal.

Instead, far better would be to get a link from a page that's already linked to by all of these pages, like, hey, if we can get a link from the About page or from the Products page or from the homepage, a link on the homepage, those are all great places to get links. I don't want a link on every page in the footer or on every page in a sidebar. That tends to get me in trouble, especially if it is anchor text-rich and clearly keyword targeted and trying to manipulate SEO.

All right, everyone. I look forward to your questions. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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Duplicate content FAQ: What is it, and how should you deal with it?

There are a few questions that have been confusing the SEO industry for many years. No matter how many times Google representatives try to clear the confusion, some myths persist.

One such question is the widely discussed issue of duplicate content. What is it, are you being penalized for it, and how can you avoid it?

Let’s try to clear up some of the confusion by answering some frequently-asked (or frequently-wondered) questions about duplicate content.

How can you diagnose a duplicate content penalty?

It’s funny how some of the readers of this article are rolling their eyes right now reading the first subheading. But let’s deal with this myth first thing.

There is no duplicate content penalty. None of Google’s representatives has ever confirmed the existence of such a penalty; there were no algorithmic updates called “duplicate content”; and there can never be such a penalty because in the overwhelming number of cases, duplicate content is a natural thing with no evil intent behind that. We know that, and Google knows that.

Still, lots of SEO experts keep “diagnosing” a duplicate content “penalty” when they analyze every other website.

Duplicate content is often mentioned in conjunction with updates like Panda and Fred, but it is used to identify bigger issues, i.e. thin or spammy (“spun”, auto-generated, etc.) and stolen (scraped) content.

Unless you have the latter issue, a few instances of duplicate content throughout your site cannot cause an isolated penalty.

Google keeps urging website owners to focus on high-quality expert content, which is your safest bet when it comes to avoiding having your pages flagged as a result of thin content.

You do want to handle your article republishing strategy carefully, because you don’t want to confuse Google when it comes to finding the actual source of the content. You don’t want to have your site pages filtered when you republish your article on an authoritative blog. But if it does happen, chances are, it will not reflect on how Google treats your overall site.

In short, duplicate content is a filter, not a penalty, meaning that Google has to choose one of the URLs with non-original content and filter out the rest.

So should I just stop worrying about internal duplicate content then?

In short, no. It’s like you don’t want to ignore a recurring headache: it’s not that a headache is a disease on its own, but it may be a symptom of a more serious condition, so you want to clear those out or treat them if there are any.

Duplicate content may signal some structural issues within your site, preventing Google from understanding what they should rank and what matters most on your site. And generally, while Google is getting much better at understanding how to handle different instances of the same content within your site, you still don’t want to ever confuse Google.

Internal duplicate content may signal a lack of original content on your site too, which is another problem you’ll need to deal with.

Google wants original content in their SERPs for obvious reasons: They don’t want their users to land on the same content over and over again. That’s a bad user experience. So Google will have to figure out which non-unique pages they want to show to their users and which ones to hide.

That’s where a problem can occur: The more pages on your site have original content, the more Google positions they may be able to appear at throughout different search queries.

If you want to know whether your site has any internal duplicate content issues, try using tools like SE Ranking, which crawls your website and analyzes whether there are any URLs with duplicate content Google may be confused about:

How does Google choose which non-original URLs to rank and which to filter out?

You’d think Google would want to choose the more authoritative post (based on various signals including backlinks), and they probably do.

But what they also do is choose the shorter URL when they find two more pages with identical URLs:

How about international websites? Can translated content pose a duplicate content issue?

This question was addressed by Matt Cutts back in 2011. In short, translated content doesn’t pose any duplicate content issues even if it’s translated very closely to the original.

There’s one word of warning though: Don’t publish automated translation using tools like Google Translate because Google is very good at identifying those. If you do so, you run into risk of having your content labeled as spammy.

Use real translators whom you can find using platforms like Fiverr, Upwork and Preply. You can find high-quality translators and native speakers there on a low budget.

Look for native speakers in your target language who can also understand your base language

You are also advised to use the hreflang attribute to point Google to the actual language you are using on a regional version of your website.

How about different versions of the website across different localized domains?

This can be tricky, because it’s not easy to come up with completely different content when putting up two different websites with the same products for the US and the UK, for example. But you still don’t want Google to choose.

Two workarounds:

• Focus on local traditions, jargon, history, etc. whenever possible
• Choose the country you want to focus on from within Search Console for all localized domains except .com.

There’s another old video from Matt Cutts which explains this issue and the solution:

Are there any other duplicate-content-related questions you’d like to be covered? Please comment below!

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