Find here an overview on all chapters this tutorial:

Search engines use hundreds of ranking factors internally. A few of them are made public by the search engine providers, but most are not. Because of that, trying to "guess" the exact factors and optimise for them does not work very well. Google itself recommends a more natural approach: focus on the overall quality of your website. These quality points are what we call the Factors of Success.

Factors of success come in two groups, often called on-page and off-page factors:

In this course we look at on- and off-page factors for the following parts of a website:

Please read the sections carefully so you can see the difference between on-page and off-page factors. SEO is often about making lots of small changes to a website. On their own these changes may look tiny, but when you combine many of them, the result can be a clearly better user experience and much better search rankings.

Page speed has been one of the most important SEO ranking factors for years. Google wants users to have a good experience on the web, and only fast-loading pages can deliver that.

A static site is a website that is already built as a set of ready-to-serve HTML files. Nothing has to be calculated when a user opens a page. This is one of the big advantages of using Jekyll together with the template system J1: when a visitor opens a page, the server simply sends the HTML file. No database is queried, no files are combined on the fly. The result is a much faster page load and a much better user experience for your visitors.

Beside lower rankings, slow pages also have a bad effect on your Bounce Rate. The Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate usually means visitors did not find what they were looking for. Visitors come to your site (from a search, an advert, or a link elsewhere) hoping to solve a specific problem. If they do not see a solution quickly, they go away again.

More and more people use the web on a smartphone, often with a slow connection. Fast-loading pages are therefore also a way of making your site mobile-friendly. Google announced a search algorithm update focused on mobile page speed back in July 2018, and mobile speed has been a ranking factor ever since.

In short: if your site is a static website, you do not need a special speed optimisation strategy. It is already fast by design. If you still see a high Bounce Rate, the cause is definitely something other than page speed.

The quality of your content is so important that it is worth repeating: content is the cornerstone of all SEO work. A clear content strategy is critical for SEO success, because almost every other factor depends on it. Good content means:

Websites use a lot of written language, so it is very important to avoid spelling and grammar mistakes. Clean writing also helps machine translation. This website is written in English, but a service such as Google Translate can translate it into more than 100 languages - and it does that much better when the source text is clean. Good content and good writing together reduce the bounce rate of your site.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the language used to build all web pages. It uses tags such as <p> (a paragraph) or <h1> (a top headline) to describe what each piece of content is.

There are over a billion websites on the internet. Many of them were built a long time ago and still use very old HTML. Search engines prefer modern HTML, and humans usually find old, badly-built pages harder to read.

The biggest improvement in HTML5 (the current version of HTML) is the support for semantic tags. The word "semantic" means "carrying meaning". A semantic tag tells the browser what kind of content it contains, not just how it looks. This makes the page easier to understand for browsers, search engines, screen readers, and many other tools.

For example, instead of using a generic container tag like:

you can use the dedicated HTML5 tag for a blog article:

Both look the same on screen, but the second version tells the browser and the search engine that this is an article. That extra meaning helps a lot for SEO and accessibility.

To learn more about building accessible, semantic websites with HTML5, see:

HTML5 also adds something called APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). An API is just a set of commands one program can use to talk to another. HTML5 APIs let web pages do more complex things, which is why HTML5 is also a good choice for mobile applications: many of its features were designed with phones and tablets in mind.

HTML5 brings many new features. To display sound, video and graphics directly in the page, the new <video>, <audio> and <canvas> tags were added. HTML5 also supports SVG (scalable vector graphics), MathML (a language for writing mathematical formulas), and modern layouts based on a flexible grid system.

With semantic tags, your pages also become easier to read for people with disabilities. Screen readers (programs that read web pages out loud to visually impaired users) use the semantic tags to know which part is the main content, which is a header, which is a footer, and so on. New structural tags like <main>, <section>, <article>, <header> and <footer> exist exactly for this purpose.

Structured Data is extra information that you add to your page so that search engines can understand the meaning of the content - not just the words on the page. With structured data, a search engine can build richer result pages (such as knowledge panels) and present your information in a more useful way to users.

Common data formats:

Site architecture is just a fancy name for how your pages are arranged and how visitors move between them. It includes things such as:

Good site architecture helps both users and search engines find what they need. The template system J1 already gives you a lot of help here, because it builds many of these structures for you.

Site architecture also tells search engines which of your pages are the most important. By organising your site clearly, you point both visitors and search engine bots toward your key pages and you make the topic of your content easier to understand. In short, the goal of site architecture is to make your site easy to use.

When site architecture is done well, the SEO benefits are clear:

Link Building means getting other websites to link to your site. Good link building can improve your search engine rankings and increase the number of people who find you. Bad link building, on the other hand, can lower your rankings and reduce your reach.

Link building is not easy. Many different strategies exist, and they differ in how much effort, expertise and money they need. Getting other people to link to your pages is one of the hardest parts of SEO, which is why so many website owners struggle with it.

A lot you’ve learned. Time to summarize what is behind you has worked on. The last chapter should help with that. Summarize section offers some handy sections to remember what has been presented in this chapter. And gives an outlook of what could be done next, an overview of all chapters of this tutorial, and useful links to learn more.

See all sections below:
Recap · What has been done, what’s explored in current section
What Next · Find to go further, what’s planned next
All Chapters · The full chain, all chapters
Further Reading · List of helpful links to get more