SEO from first principles
How organic search actually works, in the order the ideas depend on each other - so the daily feed reads as news rather than noise.
13 modules · about 94 minutes end to end · free, no signup
Before you start
Written for someone who can build or brief a website but has never owned search performance. No prior SEO vocabulary assumed; every term is introduced where it is first needed.
Foundations
How the system actually works, before any tactics.
- 01Crawling, indexing, servingWhat actually happens between you publishing a page and it appearing in results?7 min
- 02What "ranking" actually meansIf there is no formula, what is being decided when results are ordered?6 min
- 03The results page is not ten blue linksWhere does the click actually go on a modern results page?6 min
- 04Intent is the unit of workWhy do two pages about the same topic rank for completely different queries?6 min
Core mechanics
The levers you will actually pull, and what each one moves.
- 05Making a site retrievableWhat has to be true before a page can rank at all?9 min
- 06On-page: matching the job to the queryWhat makes one page a better answer than another?8 min
- 07Links, entities and reputationHow does a search engine decide a site is worth trusting?7 min
- 08Measurement: what the numbers meanWhich number tells you the truth when they disagree?8 min
Working like a practitioner
Diagnosis: what to do when the numbers move and nobody knows why.
- 09Diagnosing a traffic dropTraffic fell on Tuesday. What do you check, and in what order?9 min
- 10Algorithm updates, and how to respondA core update is rolling out. What is the correct thing to do?7 min
- 11Spam policies, manual actions and penaltiesWhat is the difference between ranking badly and being penalised?7 min
The frontier