The simplest way in is one breakdown, one commitment, an afternoon. Put simply, if you have an evening, start with the basics and ignore everything else on the site.
Common questions
Honestly, we answer SEO questions in the open, even when the frank answer is “it depends”. We answer in the comments and add the good ones to the articles so the next first-timer finds them.
Is SEO worth it?
In short, plenty of readers do fine without SEO; the unvarnished version of this page says so. Give SEO a few focused evenings and most newcomers know which camp they are in.
Where the money leaks away in SEO
In practice, we set out where the money actually goes in SEO, and which corners are fine to cut. On balance, budgets in SEO rarely break where the people who write in expect — it is the cost of switching later that catches them out.
Reading beyond this site
For what it is worth, talking to a passer-by a year ahead of you in SEO is worth more than a couple of hours of extra reading. As a rule, beyond this site, the steadiest sources on SEO are the ones that show people who admit what they do not know.
Updates
Older SEO guides get reviewed on a schedule, which is why the date you see means something here. Realistically, rather than chase every shift in SEO, we fold the ones that matter into existing explainers, in batches each quarter.
Elsewhere on the site: SEO, revisited: what we’d do differently and Nine notes on SEO from this year.