In the vast majority of SEO trainings, you are told what to do, and in some cases how to do it, but I don’t know of any course that tells you why it works the way it does. Do you need to know this to do SEO? No you do not. But my understanding why things work the way they do, you will be inoculated against the rumors and outright lies that circulate in the SEO community. That’s why this course exists. Yes, I will tell you what to do and how to do it, but we also know the underlying why for both of those.
Here’s a brief outline of the course.
Introduction
This is where you are now. In addition to this page, you’ll find the usual “How to use this course” and an introduction to the “SEO Lab” once I release it.
How a Page Get’s Ranked
The path through the machine that every page takes from the time of his published to seeing it show up in surge results.
Search Engine Architecture
The detailed block diagram oh how Google, and any other modern search engine, is constructed.
Critical Search Engine Internals
Hey deep dive into the most critical aspects of search engine construction. This will cover in greater detail the blocks from the previous section that are most critical to SEO.
What About RankBrain?
Just what is this thing really? The answer will probably surprise you.
How SERPs Get Created
This acronym stands for search engine result pages. Previous sections covered the structure of a search engine and a high-level and dived into specific details in certain sections. Here, we will put it all together and walk through the life of a page from publication to ranking.
Canonicalization
This big word is also a large part of what makes search work end it is surprisingly hard to get right. Google has been live for several years before they got it right and it evolved a number of times since then.
Linking
This section is of particular importance to me because it is what I am both known for. Plus, the handling of links is one of the two most important innovations that lead to Googles preeminence in search.
PageRank
This is the other innovation that the founders of google brought to search engine technology. It’s also a fun play on words, since it is an algorithm that assigns numeric ‘ranks’ to pages and it is the last name of the founder that originated the algorithm.
Text Analysis/Processing
In the beginning of Google, there was very little actual processing of text beyond the essentials of indexing. Starting some years later, and accelerating in 2011, this has become a significantly more important aspect of ranking.
Results Augmentation and Personalization
Here I go into more detail about some of the additional processing that is done between the actual ranking algorithms and the way search is presented to end users. This extends the material from the previous chapter on how SERPs get created.
The Primary Ranking Signals
The widely spread rumor is that there are some 200 different ranking signals at Google. I consider that somewhat apocryphal, but it might actually be true. What is simply not true is that you would need to know and try to optimize all of those signals. Moreover, many of those signals are almost certain to be negative signals used to control spam, so as long as you are using search engines for the right reasons — providing value to humans – there are actually less than five signals that you should focus on.
A Gentle Introduction to AI
The purpose of this chapter is to demystify AI and set up the foundations for the next two chapters. In particular, I’ll cover all the major core algorithms and concepts that have been bandied about for a decade and more so you can recognize where they might be used, but more importantly, where they can’t possibly be part of ranking.
Google and AI
Google has been using various lightweight AI algorithms for several years now. That will expand rapidly from here!
SEO and AI
Thanks to OpenAI and numerous open source projects, AI is now widely available to everyone. In this chapter I will suggest some ways AI can be used today for SEO, and predict some emerging techniques that should be available to us in the short term.
The “Doing” of SEO (now & later)
This is the “nuts and bolts chapter”. The reason it is placed at the end of the course is because in this chapter I don’t have to tell you why you should do what I will suggest — by the time you get here, you will know why!
Stuff to Ignore/Avoid
There is so much garbage circulated in the SEO community, this chapter could become the single largest chapter of the course. By this point in the course, you will be able to spot most of these by yourself, so I’m going to restrict myself to covering just the biggest and worst lies and the most dangerous tools and methods.
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