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Keentune
SEO curriculum 28 chapters
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199 concepts
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Everything the adaptive question bank can teach and test in SEO, from foundations through advanced practice. Work through it in order, or start practising and let the questions find your level.
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A free 16-minute primer — the mental model, the mistakes beginners make, and what to practise first.
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Crawling, indexing and serving are three separate stages that fail separately.
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URLs are found by links, sitemaps and redirects, not by "submitting a site".
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Being crawled does not guarantee being indexed.
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Search engines choose one canonical among duplicates; your tag is a signal.
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Ranking is per-query, contextual, and not a fixed site score.
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No documentation promises placement; treat any guarantee as a red flag.
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Two people can see different results for the same query.
B. Search Essentials and quality expectations
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The minimum: accessible, not blocked, indexable, content-bearing.
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Policies define what gets a site demoted or removed.
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Content written for people that also happens to be findable.
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A human reviewer's penalty, visible in Search Console.
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A ranking drop is not automatically a penalty.
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Fix, document, then request review.
C. Crawling and Googlebot
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Distinct crawler user-agent strings for web, image, news and ads.
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Reverse-DNS verification versus a spoofed user agent.
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Crawl demand and host load; why you cannot simply "ask for more crawling".
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Slow or erroring servers reduce how much gets crawled.
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Fetch and render are separate steps with separate delays.
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Crawlable <a href> links are the primary discovery path.
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A page nothing links to may never be found.
D. robots.txt and crawl control
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One robots.txt per origin, at the root, per scheme and port.
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User-agent groups, Disallow , Allow , and longest-match precedence.
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A blocked URL can still be indexed from links — the classic confusable.
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Blocking a page hides its noindex , so the page stays indexed.
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Blocking CSS/JS can make a page render wrong to a crawler.
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Declaring sitemap locations inside robots.txt.
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It is not access control and not a security boundary.
E. Indexing control and noindex
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The robots meta tag that keeps a crawled page out of the index.
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The HTTP-header equivalent, needed for PDFs and other non-HTML files.
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Per-page directives beyond indexing: snippet, archive, image preview.
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The most restrictive directive generally wins.
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Temporary removals versus a permanent fix.
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Pages that exist only to catch queries.
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A "not found" page that returns 200 and confuses indexing.
F. Canonicalisation and duplicate content
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Parameters, session IDs, http/https, www, trailing slash.
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A hint that consolidates signals, not a command.
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Declaring a page as its own canonical, and when it helps.
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Syndicated content pointing back to the original.
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Canonical fighting sitemap, redirect or internal links.
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Duplicates cause consolidation, not punishment.
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Faceted navigation and which parameter URLs deserve indexing.
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A discovery aid, not an indexing guarantee.
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Required loc , optional lastmod , and the size limits.
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A lastmod that always says "today" stops being useful.
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Splitting large sites across multiple sitemap files.
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Canonical, indexable URLs only — never noindexed or redirected ones.
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Image, video and news sitemap extensions.
H. Redirects and site moves
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301/308 versus 302/307 and the signal each sends.
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Server redirects beat meta refresh and JavaScript hops.
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Chains and loops that waste crawl and lose signals.
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Redirecting everything to the homepage reads as a soft 404.
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Scheme change as a site move with URL changes.
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Sitemaps, Search Console change of address, internal-link updates.
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Gone versus not found, and when the difference matters.
I. URL structure and site architecture
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Words over opaque IDs, for users and for link context.
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When a parameter is fine and when a clean path is better.
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Click depth from the homepage as a crawlability factor.
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Topic hubs that gather related pages.
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The trade-off, and the absence of a documented ranking rule.
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Changing URLs costs signals; keep them stable when you can.
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The title link is generated, usually from <title> but not always.
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Descriptive, unique, page-specific; boilerplate gets rewritten.
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Truncation is a display effect, not a documented ranking threshold.
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Repeating a phrase in the title as a spam signal.
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It influences the snippet, not the ranking.
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Snippets are query-dependent and may ignore your description.
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max-snippet , data-nosnippet and nosnippet .
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Structured-data-driven site name and the favicon requirements.
K. On-page content and structure
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Headings describe structure; they are not a keyword slot.
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Text that names the thing instead of "click here".
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Substantially similar pages compete with each other.
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The documented anti-pattern, and why density targets are folklore.
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Text locked inside an image is not read as content.
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Updating for real change versus re-dating unchanged pages.
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No documented minimum length; sufficiency is about the query.
L. Internal linking and navigation
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<a> with href is what a crawler follows.
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Click handlers and <div onclick> are not links.
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Anchor text as context for the destination.
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Hierarchy for users and for breadcrumb rich results.
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Reachable deep pages versus infinite scroll with no links.
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Site-wide navigation as the crawl backbone.
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Where internal links concentrate attention.
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Alt describes the image's purpose; it is accessibility first.
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Descriptive filenames and surrounding text.
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srcset and the sizes a crawler can pick up.
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Lazy-loaded images that never load for a crawler.
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Declaring images and their licence metadata.
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A crawlable video file plus a supported player and thumbnail.
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VideoObject fields that unlock video results.
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Clip and seek markup for chaptered results.
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Size, format and accessibility of the thumbnail URL.
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Text that makes video content indexable and accessible.
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Declaring video location, duration and publication date.
O. Structured data fundamentals
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Machine-readable meaning, eligibility for rich results.
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JSON-LD versus microdata and RDFa.
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Missing a required property disqualifies the result.
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Markup must describe what a user actually sees.
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Valid markup makes you eligible, not featured.
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Validating markup and reading the error output.
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Marking up content that is not on the page.
P. Rich result types and schema vocabulary
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Types, properties and the schema.org hierarchy.
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Headline, author and date fields for article results.
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Price, availability and review properties.
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Whose reviews qualify, and self-serving review markup.
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Question/answer and step markup and their eligibility changes.
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Position and name properties that render the trail.
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Time, location and ingredient fields.
Q. Search intent and keyword research
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Informational, navigational, commercial and transactional.
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Read what already ranks to infer what the query wants.
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Volume against specificity and competition.
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Covering a topic rather than a single phrase.
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Two pages chasing one intent split their own signals.
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One primary intent per page.
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Keywords in a domain name are not a documented ranking lever.
R. Helpful content, expertise and trust
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What "created for people first" means operationally.
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First-hand experience and demonstrated expertise as quality concepts.
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Trust as the central member of the E-E-A-T set.
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Higher scrutiny where money or life is at stake.
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Bylines, credentials and about pages as trust surfaces.
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Mass-produced pages with little added value.
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Third-party content parasiting a trusted domain.
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How content is produced matters less than whether it helps.
S. JavaScript SEO and rendering
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Crawl, queue, render, index — and where JS content can be missed.
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CSR, SSR, hydration and pre-rendering trade-offs.
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Titles and canonicals injected by script.
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Real URLs for SPA routes instead of fragments.
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A blocked bundle renders an empty page.
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Content behind scroll or click events may never render.
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Reading the rendered HTML to prove what was indexed.
T. Page experience and Core Web Vitals
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Largest Contentful Paint: what element counts and typical causes of a slow one.
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Interaction to Next Paint as the responsiveness metric.
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Layout shift, its usual causes, and reserving space.
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Real-user data versus a synthetic lab run.
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Good/needs-improvement/poor at the 75th percentile.
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Secure connection and no deceptive interstitials.
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Page experience does not outrank a better answer.
U. Mobile-first indexing and rendering parity
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The mobile rendering of a page is what gets indexed.
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Content hidden on mobile is content you may not be indexed for.
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Markup and metadata must exist in the mobile version.
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One URL versus m-dot, and the annotations m-dot needs.
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Configuration that makes a page usable on a phone.
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Intrusive popups on small screens.
V. International and multilingual SEO
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Telling search engines which locale a page serves.
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Language, optional region, and valid code formats.
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Every hreflang set must reference back, or it is ignored.
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The fallback for unmatched locales.
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Conflicting canonicals break hreflang clustering.
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ccTLD, subdomain and subfolder locale strategies.
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IP-based redirects that trap users and crawlers.
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Machine-translated pages as a quality risk.
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Unique descriptions, images, price and availability.
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One URL per variant versus one canonical product page.
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Keep, redirect or remove a discontinued product.
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Filter combinations as a crawl-budget hazard.
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Category pages that earn their own intent.
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Genuine review content and the rules around review markup.
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A verified business listing as the local foundation.
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Name, address and phone consistency across the web.
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Choosing the primary category that matches the service.
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Address-visible versus service-area business types.
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LocalBusiness markup and its relationship to the profile.
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Soliciting reviews honestly; never buying or gating them.
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A real page per location, not a template with a swapped city name.
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Distance and prominence as documented local factors.
Y. Links and spam policies
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Links as discovery paths and as endorsement signals.
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Buying, exchanging or mass-generating links.
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The original hint and what it does not do.
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Labelling paid and user-generated links precisely.
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Networks built purely to pass signals.
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Over-optimised anchor profiles as a spam tell.
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A last-resort tool, not routine hygiene.
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Showing crawlers different content than users.
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Redirects that fire only for some users; injected spam pages.
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Repurposing a domain's history for unrelated content.
Z. Search Console and measurement
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Domain versus URL-prefix properties and what each covers.
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What each metric counts and how CTR is derived.
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An average of positions where you appeared, not a rank tracker.
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Why filtering changes which totals add up.
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Missing rows and why totals do not reconcile.
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Indexed state, canonical chosen, and last crawl.
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Excluded, crawled-not-indexed and discovered-not-indexed states.
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Errors, warnings and valid items by markup type.
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how an analytics tool groups hits into sessions, and what counts as an engaged one.
AA. Diagnosing traffic changes
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Separating a serving failure from a ranking change.
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Rule out tracking and property issues first.
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Check for a manual action before rewriting content.
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Falling impressions can mean falling demand.
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A layout change can cut clicks without moving position.
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Broken redirects and lost canonicals after a migration.
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Hacked content and safe-browsing warnings as a traffic cause.
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5xx bursts, timeouts and DNS failures during crawl.
AB. Large sites, crawl budget and hygiene
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Crawl budget is a large-site concern, not a small-site tactic.
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Host limits versus interest in your URLs.
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Parameter explosion consuming the budget.
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If-Modified-Since and 304 responses to save crawl.
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How 4xx, 5xx and redirects change crawl behaviour.
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Accurate change dates that focus recrawling.
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Reading server logs to see what was actually crawled.
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Sequencing a migration so crawling is not wasted.
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