Learning SEO - Search Engine Optimization and Marketing

This new top 10 learning SEO resource is an extended and updated version of my previous top 5 list. I just had to do it as the old list was not sufficient to cover the best resources I have been using since I started learning SEO and becoming an Internet Marketing Consultant.

Since its a rather long article it has been placed on its own page.

I have been working very hard since I started with learning SEO! Reading article upon article about learning SEO and SEO in general. I have been learning a lot. Lots of new stuff and I am very excited about putting the newfound material into action. But first I want to share the most important resources that has given me a real boost with learning SEO.

If you are eager about learning SEO like me, you want to get a broad and balanced view of the SEO world. The big SEO companies might not share the same information as the passionate guy having a blog about it. And I continuously find excellent tips and insights on other SEO’rs blogs. The commercial sites want primarily you to buy their products and services so they will naturally not share as much and keep their “secrets” for themselves. Also there is quite a bit of misleading information from persons and services promising high rankings in no time etc (and too many ads, you know how it goes…). All in all don’t take information from one source as a fact unless you can cross check it with another. There are very few topics in SEO that are not under discussion. You will have to make up your mind on what information to take into consideration, techniques to use etc.

This top 5 learning SEO resources for newbies (and intermediates too) will help you not to waste time on scanning seemingly endless information on this topic. It will help you to quality information right away. I have compiled this list so you will have a very good start and balanced overview of the world of SEO. And you will be equipped with a lot of knowledge, ideas, tips and tricks and howto’s when you are done. I recommend going through them all.

1. SEOmoz has a well written and in depth tutorial for for the beginner, namely Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

SEOmoz is very serious about SEO, you will find a lot of material there, but you will have to pay for some of it. However they have a lot of freebies that will give you a perfect start with learning SEO.

2. Web CEO has an excellent free course bundled with their free version of their program.

Some of the course is targeted at using their program, but you will learn a lot about SEO in general. I find the course almost invaluable and a real booster in my learning SEO process. As far as I can judge their free program is a real asset when it comes to set up, optimize and measure sites. All the technical aspects. Who wants to use a gazillion different web-tools for this anyway?

3. SEObomb’s article; The Ultimate Guide to Make Your Blog Search Engine Friendly.

Is aimed at WordPress blogs in particular but is a goldmine for any becoming SEO’r. I suspect some of the Word Press plugin information there to be a bit outdated as it seems to me that Word press has implemented some of them now. Anyway, this article is a must read!

4. Trey Perry’s article, 10 Things SEOs Don’t Want You to Know is a good source of information to balance your view on SEO.

Down to earth and to the point information that will set your head straight. I like that!

5. A list apart’s Andy Hagans rather excellent article, High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization makes a lot of sense.

It became clear very early in my learning process that accessibility and SEO goes hand in hand. It’s just common sense and all aspiring SEO’s should know more about it.

As a computer geek I tend to find all kinds of technical stuff fascinating. I just love to figure out stuff, just pressing the buttons and see what happens. This drive to explore is certain a benefit when it comes to learning SEO.

There is a lot of technical information out there to figure out if I want… However the technical part is just one side of SEO. And technical SEO is similar as doing clean optimized xhtml code and css style sheets in appliance with the w3c standards. That makes any website better, both for the user and the search engine robots.

There are no simple on site tricks that will magically transform mine or anybody else’s website to a hot spot on the net. Only quality content and quality link-building will do that. However upon saying that, I realize there are certain Black Hat “magic” tricks but as far as I now, all Black Hat is spamming? I have to check that out some time. Any comments on this?

There are a couple of good reads about going beyond technical SEO over at johnon.com and searchenginewatch.com.

Some people write that Meta tags are not important anymore - thats not so. However they are not so important as they used to be. Well to find out more about I looked into the source code of SEObomb and snatched his meta descriptions. I found descriptions of the tags here.

My meta tags now looks like this:

<meta content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ http-equiv=”Content-Type”/>

<meta content=”index,follow” name=”robots”/>
Tells the robots to crawl all the the pages following the links.

<meta content=”global” name=”distribution”/>
Tells ALL the searchengines worldwide to crawl the site

<meta content=”website design, graphic design, seo, web developement” name=”keywords”/>
These are my keywords. I try not to use too many. 1 - 4 keywords pr. page is advisable.

<meta content=”Are you looking for freelance website design - graphic design ? Web developement ? Ishwara Design can do SEO too” name=”description”/
Meta content. This string is very important! Some of the searchengines will use this description when listing any site in the search results.

Finding keywords are the first thing to do when starting a SEO process. I am using my own design page Ishwara Design site for training purposes. After some research (in Web CEO) I found out that I want to use these keywords for my site: website design, graphic design, seo and web developement.

All the keywords are deferred of competition from other design businesses. We are talking of many millions pages here! It proved to be very difficult to find an angle to avoid the massive competition on keywords in my line of work. However I found out that there is a huge difference in using “website design ” instead of just “web design”. The KEI - Keyword Effectiveness Index for “website design” is 116,618 and “web design” is only 0,924.

There are obviously a lot of programs to choose from to do SEO. As the time goes I will check out some of them. However for now there is one that stands out from the crowd, namely WEB CEO. This is a very good program for many reasons. First it comes in a free version. Most of the tools are available in the free version.

You can take a free SOE course and get a basic knowledge of SEO. The free course is called CSEM (Competent Search Engine Marketer). They even throw in a certificate (available on their website) when you have done the course. I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on it in terms of flashing it in your CV or such. As it is a very basic course. But for me it makes the task of learning more fun when I get a reward for my effort! At the time I am writing this I have completed about 30% of the course and I am enjoying it a lot.

One of the first sites I stumbled upon was www.seobomb.com. Probably because this guy really knows what he is talking about and knows how to make his blog visible on the net. I was also happy to see that a Norwegian is behind this great page! This site has a lot of excellent articles and resources and is a good place to start on any SEO quest.