So you're new to SEO.
Someone here mentioned the pillar of SEO is links, site speed & content, almost right...
Links - There are so many different types of links, and link building is a bit of an art. I always see it as a bit of a pyramid, you need your fundamental links (directories, forums etc), mid level links (guest posts, niche edits) and top tier (popular news outlets and high authority sites). There's also ******** and nofollow links to consider, what anchor text to use and avoiding being penalised by Google for un-natural link building. This is perhaps the most dangerous part of SEO if you don't know what you're doing, so read all about it before jumping in.
On-site - The technical side of your website needs to be sound to stand the best chance of ranking. If you're going against a competitor who has a better site speed, cleaner code or better internal linking, you're going to find it harder to outrank them with the other two parts. Read all about site speed, canonical, internal linking, etc.
Content - Write contents good. Answer the users question in the best way you can, and answer their next few questions as well to avoid them leaving your site. Google punish thin, and low quality content. You can outrank some competition by just purely having better content than them, that serves the user better.
Being in SEO for a while, I don't like Moz, it doesn't have much useful information. However, it's great for a starter, and whenever I bring someone on at work I recommend that they read through
https://moz.com/learn/seo just to get the fundamentals down. It'll never teach you the nitty gritty, but it'll get you started. Then starting reading guides on here.
And finally, never take what Google says as gospel. They say what favours them, what they want people to do, even if there algorithms aren't capable yet of rewarding or punishing that behaviour.