FREE COURSE, CERTIFICATE INCLUDED
Free SEO course for beginners
Learn how search engines find, read, and understand your site, in short video lessons made by the people who build Yoast SEO. The whole course is free, takes around two hours of video, and you get a certificate and badge when you finish.
No payment details needed.
2 hours of video
Split into 20 short clips
Certificate included
And a badge for your site
No experience needed
Start from zero
Why start with SEO fundamentals
SEO looks like a long list of tactics until you understand what search engines are actually doing. This course covers the mechanics first: how search engines find your pages, how they read them, and what makes a page easy or hard to understand. Once that clicks, the tactics make sense and you can judge advice for yourself instead of following it blindly.
Who teaches this course
Every lesson is made by the SEO and WordPress specialists at Yoast, working with trained teachers.
- They build the #1 SEO plugin for WordPress.
- Between them, they have more than 100 years of WordPress experience.
- Companies including Facebook, eBay, and The Guardian use Yoast.
Go at your own pace
No deadlines, and your access doesn’t expire.
Pick up where you left off
Your progress is saved automatically.
Works on any site
The fundamentals apply whether or not you use WordPress.
What topics are covered in the course
How search engines work
The groundwork for everything else. How search engines find your site, how they read it, and where the Yoast SEO plugin helps.
Keywords
What people type into a search engine to find you. What keywords are, why they matter, and how to use them in your text.
SEO copywriting
How to write text people want to read and search engines can understand. Original, readable, and findable, and how to get there.
Site structure
How search engines find their way around your site, and how to organize your pages so the important ones stand out.
Crawlability
You might be blocking search engines without realizing it. How to check, and how to fix it.
Rich results
Sometimes a search engine shows more than a plain result: ratings, images, videos. What rich results are and how to work toward them.
I much better understand the inner-workings of SEO, how it functions, what Google is looking for and why. Breaking it down as you did made the information easy to retain.
Lynn Tall – Founder and Owner, Rugadvocate
What you get
Yoast SEO Premium
Keep going after this course
You’ve covered the fundamentals. Yoast SEO Premium opens the rest of Yoast SEO Academy, from keyword research and copywriting through to technical SEO, and gives you the plugin to apply what you learn.
- Every course in the Academy, each with its own certificate
- New courses added to your plan as they launch
- Yoast SEO Premium plugin, with guidance built into WordPress as you write
- Local SEO, News SEO, and Video SEO plugins
- One seat for the Yoast SEO Google Docs add-on, check drafts before they reach WordPress.
- 24/7 support from real people
Yes. You get the full course, not a sample, and you do not need to enter payment details. You need a free MyYoast account so we can save your progress and issue your certificate.
Yes. You get a Yoast certificate and a badge when you complete the course. The badge only appears once you have actually finished, so it means something.
The videos run to around two hours in total. Watching everything, reading the materials, and taking the quizzes takes longer.
No course can promise that, and it’s worth being careful of any that does. What this course does is help you understand how search engines find, read, and understand your site, so you can make better decisions about it. Better decisions improve your chances of being found.
No. The fundamentals apply to any site. Some lessons show how the Yoast SEO plugin handles a task, and those are marked, so you can follow along or skip them.
No. The course assumes no technical background, and technical concepts are explained in plain language before they’re used.