How did you learn search engine optimization?

[arjan]

Hi,

How did you learn seo to increase user engagement & increase ranking of website.Because there is practical knowledge & implementation required and it comes when we invest time on these things.

What blogs and forums follow to increase your knowledge?Actually i have intern with seo company where i have invested time on off-page and on-page.I saw most of the people spending time on link building than learning on-page seo which is more important as off-page.So how do you analyze that which technique is best for you and absolutely ethical.

 

[MatthewRJones]

Hi Arjan the internship with the SEO company is probably the best way to learn. Why not set your own website up and have a go with that?

Matt

 

[Ste Hughes]

Just did it.

Set up about a dozen smaller sites on all sorts of niches. Each site was then used to experiment with tactics and tricks until I got a reasonably reliable method down and went out there with it. Worked well for me and took about 6 months to get my head around it all.

Still use those sites today for testing things on. Never stop testing, never stop learning.

 

[arjan]

Hi Arjan the internship with the SEO company is probably the best way to learn. Why not set your own website up and have a go with that?

Matt

You have asked good question to open a company but i have tight budget now so i am delaying.But if you could provide me clients then i can work on it coz my budget conditions will allow me to do so.

 

[arjan]

Just did it.

Set up about a dozen smaller sites on all sorts of niches. Each site was then used to experiment with tactics and tricks until I got a reasonably reliable method down and went out there with it. Worked well for me and took about 6 months to get my head around it all.

Still use those sites today for testing things on. Never stop testing, never stop learning.

Which technique worked well and you are using on website?because some techniques does not work on all niches.

 

[fisicx]

I used the right technique for the niche. I found the right technique but doing lots of research and lots of testing. Maybe you should ask the SEO company you work for for advice

 

[Ste Hughes]

Which technique worked well and you are using on website?because some techniques does not work on all niches.

Why on earth would I reveal the answer on an open forum for experiments that have cost me 100's of hours and over £1000

 

[StevePoster]

It is important to have lots of available resources according to the websites that you are handling. Blog sites that are referring to the behavior of the search engine like searchengineland and moz.

 

[iamlijo]

try seomoz.org

 

[fisicx]

try seomoz.org

I'm assuming you mean moz.com. They changed in May2013

 

[seo-site]

"which technique is best for you and absolutely ethical"

create great content and wait for visitors to link to it...this techniques is 100 ethical but whoever believes in it is silly ... Do you want to learn seo? creste a couple of websites and promote them differently. see which one will get penalized and which one will last in google search results. good luck

 

[plumbingpassion]

You can follow some good blogs like searchengineland and kissmetrics blogs

 

[mixtureofmarket]

learning SEO by yourself is good because it is way cheaper to rank and promote your site. You can always read tutorials like kissmetrics blogs, socialmediaexaminer for social SEO. But if you don't have time to do it, I think you can always outsource SEO specialist.

 

[johnzakaria]

It comes from creating unique conyent, doing on page seo by optimizing your posts, doing of page seo by building high PR backlinks, if you need sites in which you can learn seo you can visit backlinko.com

 

[DexSmart]

Be where other top SEOs are. You will learn the best stuff. Don't waste time on communities where you will see the same question or people talking about same stuff over and over. Filter the info and you will learn what you are interested in short time. I guess that once you want to learn and find out the info you can. Good Luck.
PS: MOZ it's really a nice place.

 

[johnzakaria]

I learn SEO from the mistakes of other people and from big marketer who have a reputation

 

[Glenn Rodgers]

This is so beginning question and SEO is not so tiny field that any one can learn by the help of just one forum posting. The only why to learn is your experiences and mistakes.

 

[Deepanshu Gahlaut]

Hi,

How did you learn seo to increase user engagement & increase ranking of website.Because there is practical knowledge & implementation required and it comes when we invest time on these things.

What blogs and forums follow to increase your knowledge?Actually i have intern with seo company where i have invested time on off-page and on-page.I saw most of the people spending time on link building than learning on-page seo which is more important as off-page.So how do you analyze that which technique is best for you and absolutely ethical.

From the trusted sources for ex- MOZ, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Marketing Land, Dejan SEO, Stone Temple Consulting and many others.

 

[intelligentppc]

IMO most SEO 'experts' are not experts at all. Google is constantly changing their algorithm with the prime motive to stop people like this gaming the system. Unfortunately these days Google tends to favour the big brands and small businesses looking to rank for, let's say, 'hotel in Devon' are being drowned by the likes of Expedia and TripAdvisor.

I have always thought SEO to be a ridiculous sell - 'We will do things to improve your ranking, charging you a fortune, but it may take a year or 2 and there is no guarantee that what we do will work. We can show you something that worked last year but Google will probably have changed their mind by then and closed that avenue'.

If you want instant, measurable results from a marketing budget, put it into PPC. It isn't perfect but it's far more reliable than SEO as a traffic source.

 

[JoeInTheMiddle]

I've been working in SEO/Digital Marketing for just under 2 years now and, apart from six weeks tutoring at the start of my first job, everything I know is self taught. I came into the market just as Penguin hit so I learnt very quickly that SEO is subject to massive change.

For me there are two aspects of SEO that will forever be a constant.

1. A great looking, user friendly and technically sound website - If you ensure your website is easily accessible and understandable for customers and search engines you're off to a good start.

2. Create great content - Outreach or link building methods will change but one thing that will always help your site is great content. If it really is good enough it should outreach itself.

Hope this helps.

 

[intelligentppc]

So are SEO experts simply content writers these days?

 

[lynxus]

So are SEO experts simply content writers these days?

Pretty much.

The way I see "SEO" experts / companies is:
If I pay them £££ a month, I expect a constant increase in relevant back links.

For these to happen, I expect content to be written, blogs to be posted and links to be added where ever its relevant to my industry.

I have however, given up paying people now.
They either lie, dont do what you pay them for OR state "that it takes time" when to be honest, is BS if they do it right.

I have done things myself and seen boosts within weeks ( and drops when doing things wrong )
Albeit not massive boosts. But in the correct direction.

If an SEO agency cant even do then ( and in my exp, this is often the case ) then they are a waste of time.

The problem is,
For me ( and im sure a lot oh here ) , Any "half decent" company requires £1000's a month and for me this a vastly out of my league.

Id rather spend £100 on PPC then risk £100, 200, 300, 400 a month of some sham SEO.

The industry in my opinion is largely based on smoke and mirrors. No guarantees and a whole load of BS.

Dont get me wrong, There are people out there who are good at SEO. They however generally are not cheap and I personally have given up risking money time and time again on usless punts.

 

[intelligentppc]

The industry in my opinion is largely based on smoke and mirrors. No guarantees and a whole load of BS.

This x10

 

[taskbarge]

I agree with lynxus. It is very difficult to find a genuine seo experts these days as everyone claims them as specialists.

 

[Tin]

To answer the topic of this thread - I learnt seo purely by accident 18 years ago and although it's been my main occupation since then, it wasn't what I planned to do as a career. I listened to others, I experimented and I worked at it until I felt able to make some sense from my findings. From thereon, it's been a learning curve that I devote enough time to, to be reasonable at it.

Just adding my 2c into this to bring a balance on things about seo.

PPC is fine and dandy but it's spend,spend,spend if you want traffic. That's a fact.

I did some seo work for a London company in 2007. They gave me a few keywords, I spent a few hours doing some on-page seo, waited 3 weeks total and their main keyword went to #1. It had never been anywhere near page 1 previously.

It remained at #1 for 6 years, nobody, and I mean 'nobody' did any additional seo work on that #1 ranking for 6 years until it moved from #1 down to #3 in 2013. They got hold of me and I brought it back to #1. That was last year. They are still at #1 for that (and other) keywords and if they ran that keyword through Adwords the cost per click is currently £31.

Their main keyword sees close to 60,000 searches a year, they rank #1 for it and being conservative let's say they get just 20% of clicks from that 60,000 = 12,000 visitors a year on just one main keyword.

Now let me think here;...
12,000 visitors at £31 a click if they ran Adwords = £372,000 a year spend with Google. Now isn't that a bargain?

Let's be ruthless and half that visitor count and say that at position 1 they only get 10% of traffic from that ranking then that's still a click cost on Adwords of £186,000.

I spent three hours of my time seo'ing their main keyword and there's a bunch of other keywords on page 1 directly as a result of my initial work. Seo doesn't always have to be difficult but I agree, it is a cesspit out there and has been for years.

Yes, PPC is an instant page 1 ranking and if you're happy to pay for every customer you get then stick with it but a decent seo can bring something quite special into the marketing mix that doesn't gobble money like Adwords can over time.

I don't have any problem with PPC whatsoever but c'mon guys... there's always two sides of the coin.

It's simply horses for courses, sometimes PPC is absolutely the right route to take for a client and sometimes seo is... and of course; sometimes both makes the most sense.

It's all about giving the client the best bang for the buck surely?

Ray

 

[JamieM]

Hi Ray,

That CPC of £31 doesn't seem right to me for a keyword that only gets 60,000 searches per year. Are you sure about that?

 

[SIC2014]

Hi Arjan

This would be a good place to start:

Google: moz beginners guide to seo


Good luck!

 

[Tin]

Hi Ray,

That CPC of £31 doesn't seem right to me for a keyword that only gets 60,000 searches per year. Are you sure about that?

Hi Jamie, it is right and I'm as surprised as you are given the amount of search behind the keyword.

 

[directmarketingadvice]

Now let me think here;...
12,000 visitors at £31 a click if they ran Adwords = £372,000 a year spend with Google. Now isn't that a bargain?

Let's be ruthless and half that visitor count and say that at position 1 they only get 10% of traffic from that ranking then that's still a click cost on Adwords of £186,000.

The problem with this is that it's survivorship bias. It's taking your success and using it as a typical example of SEO.

If every SEO was as good as you, then hiring an SEO would be a very different proposition to the one currently facing business owners.

Seo doesn't always have to be difficult but I agree, it is a cesspit out there and has been for years.

And it's getting worse.

As Google's raised the bar, not only can fewer SEOs clear the bar (but, strangely, there doesn't appear to be fewer SEOs), there's a massively increased risk that they will actually harm the site's ranking, and that the shelf life of their links is probably getting shorter and shorter.

Couple that with Google giving less and less of the first fold to free listings, and the attraction of SEO should be far less than it was, say, 3 years ago.

Just my 2p,

Steve

 

[CubeSEO]

In answer to the question about "absolutely ethical" - no such thing.

Many like myself in the industry are waiting on the next big Penguin update. Google penguin is interesting on the ethical side. People learned that taking certain actions resulted in higher ranking in Google. These actions went on for years, various crap link building, then Google penalised many / most websites that had implemented this.

In the mid 2000 it was almost impossible not to use these tactics - if you didn't clients would go somewhere else where they did and clients would get results.

Then Google, years after the fact, penalised the websites. Now they have waited nearly a year before updating this algorithm again - there is little ethical action within Google - if you threaten their advertising revenue then they will take action - just business.

This is what Google consider okay re SEO - http://static.googleusercontent.com.../search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf - it is all on-site optimisation.

Google consider link building to increase your rankings as spam. However no site will rank well in any decent vertical without decent links.

So bringing this back to learning - I think the best way are some forums, but watch for anyone selling anything that looks too good - as it will be. Think long term, add in social, watch engagement metrics, bounce rate, and get dam good links without targeted anchors from very good sites.

 

[The Byre]

The industry in my opinion is largely based on smoke and mirrors. No guarantees and a whole load of BS.

Abso-f**king-lutely!

We are on page one of Google with no SEO meaures whatsoever. What we do have is loads of useful content and people post links to our content, because it is so useful.

We also have the key search words in the website's heading. If you are an aardvark farm in Clacton, then title you home page 'Clacton Aardvark Farm' or similar.

 

[Annoying Donkey]

Couple that with Google giving less and less of the first fold to free listings, and the attraction of SEO should be far less than it was, say, 3 years ago.

An element of truth there... which makes SEO/Link building more important. Getting traffic from a good link can offset the number one placing being pushed down the page...

 

[Annoying Donkey]

We are on page one of Google with no SEO meaures whatsoever. What we do have is loads of useful content and people post links to our content, because it is so useful.

I don't see you on page one for 'Clacton Aardvark Farm'

 

[The Byre]

I don't see you on page one for 'Clacton Aardvark Farm'

We had to close the aardvark farm, when the neighbours complained that the aardvarks were varking too aard.

 

[splinterteal]

best way is to get a job at an agency, ideally technically orientated role (doing actual on-page and off-page SEO)

or

have multiple sites and SEO them, ideally in various industries + various methods

also, you have to be pretty good with web design / technical stuff

I've been lucky enough to have worked on a massive amount of SEO projects in an agency throughout the whole campaign cycle so personally I think it's probably the best way to learn it

 

[RealEcon]

Just did it.

Set up about a dozen smaller sites on all sorts of niches. Each site was then used to experiment with tactics and tricks until I got a reasonably reliable method down and went out there with it. Worked well for me and took about 6 months to get my head around it all.

Still use those sites today for testing things on. Never stop testing, never stop learning.

^^^This

 

[JonnyMP]

Almost everything I know about SEO comes from my own personal experience. When I first started out online, I took time to watch all the Matt Cutts SEO related videos on Youtube and read the Google Webmaster blog which contains lots of great information on SEO. Over time, I applied this information to my own sites, so now my SEO knowledge comes from my own experiments with my website as to what helps ranking and what does not.