SEO
Courses on technical SEO, content strategy, link building and search performance measurement.
Verified courses first, then the rest of the category
A free introduction to search optimisation from the company behind the most widely installed WordPress SEO plugin, which makes it a primary source for how that plugin expects a site to be set up. Free from Yoast academy.
Not independently verified
How a site is organised and internally linked, which is the structural decision underneath most ranking problems. Included in the Yoast premium plan, which the academy prices at 118.80 US dollars per year for every course plus the company plugins.
Not independently verified
A free course on structured data, one of the few areas where a small technical change has a direct and visible effect on how a page appears in search. Free from Yoast academy.
Not independently verified
Whether search engines can reach and index pages at all, the precondition for everything else in search work. Included in the Yoast premium plan, which the academy prices at 118.80 US dollars per year for every course plus the company plugins.
Not independently verified
The hosting and server side of technical SEO, which most search courses leave out entirely. Included in the Yoast premium plan, which the academy prices at 118.80 US dollars per year for every course plus the company plugins.
Not independently verified
A curated selection of Ahrefs’ published video output assembled as a course, running to twenty-eight lessons and nearly six hours. Free, and a compilation rather than a designed syllabus.
Not independently verified
The deeper treatment of structured data, following the free beginner course in the same catalog. Included in the Yoast premium plan, which the academy prices at 118.80 US dollars per year for every course plus the company plugins.
Not independently verified
Search optimisation as it applies to a Webflow build, covering the settings and structure decisions that affect indexing. Free from Webflow University, with an account offered to track progress.
Not independently verified
Product training for the company Shopify plugin, narrower than its WordPress material and useful only to Shopify merchants. Included in the Yoast premium plan, which the academy prices at 118.80 US dollars per year for every course plus the company plugins.
Not independently verified
Free product training for the Yoast SEO plugin, distinct from the company general SEO courses and useful only if you use the plugin. Free from Yoast academy.
Not independently verified
About this subject
Courses on search engine optimisation: how search engines find and understand pages, what makes content worth ranking, how links are earned, and how any of it is measured. SEO is unusual as a subject because the system being taught is owned by someone else, changes without notice, and is never fully documented. That single fact should shape how you read every course in this category.
Guidance
Verification tells you that a course delivers the material it advertises. It cannot tell you whether its methods will rank anything. These are the things worth checking yourself.
Nobody teaching SEO controls the ranking systems, and nobody outside them knows exactly how they work. A course can teach you what is understood, what is observed and what is officially documented. A course that guarantees a position, a traffic figure or a timeline is describing something it cannot deliver, and that is a reason to look harder rather than to buy faster.
Search changes continuously, and some of it changes fast enough to invalidate tactics within a year. Material on crawling, indexing and site structure ages slowly. Material on specific ranking factors, tools and result formats ages quickly. Where a provider publishes a last-updated date we record it; where they do not, the listing shows only the date we checked the page.
Much of the best free SEO training comes from the companies selling SEO software, and it is often genuinely good. It is also, unavoidably, teaching a workflow that runs through their product. Learn the concept and then decide about the tool, rather than the other way round.
Technical SEO, about crawling, indexing, structure and speed, and content SEO, about what a page says and who links to it, are different work and often different people. A course titled simply SEO may be almost entirely one of them. Read the syllabus rather than the title.
Some techniques taught in this field carry a real risk of penalty, and some are simply the sort of thing you would rather not explain to a client. Prefer courses that state the risk of a tactic honestly and say which practices are against a search engine published guidelines.
Standards
The published standard applies unchanged. These are the checks that tend to matter most in this subject.
A verification says nothing about whether the techniques taught still work, whether they are safe to use, or whether they comply with any search engine current guidelines. Search systems change independently of both the course and this directory.
Questions
No, and a course claiming otherwise is claiming control over a system it does not own. Where public marketing makes that kind of promise it is exactly the sort of statement a verification examines.
Check the last-updated date where the provider publishes one, and prefer material on fundamentals if it is older. A verification here is dated too, and it stops being current at its re-check date rather than standing indefinitely.
They are often excellent and usually free. Just read them as training in a workflow that includes their product, and separate the concept from the software before you commit to either.
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