I’m asked a lot of times when I tell folks what I do how I learned Internet marketing. People are usually surprised when I say I’m all self-taught, but the reality is, there is no real way to learn Internet marketing *other* than being self-taught. A traditional marketing degree might offer you insight into certain aspects, like approaching folks to get links or helping you optimize site conversions. A business degree might help you in other aspects, like negotiating site sales or grasping how to monetize a website. But, in an industry where the textbooks would be outdated before the end of a semester, your only real choice when learning Internet marketing is to dive in, learn and experiment.
When I started learning SEO, forums and IM conversations were the “textbooks” we used to learn Internet marketing. But that was a decade ago and we were a much smaller community then and the information was much more consolidated. Gems were a bit easier to find, bullshit was a bit easier to spot and it was a bit easier to find who knew their shit and make friends to discuss all your newfound knowledge and experimentation with. Blogs and today’s version of “social media” were non-existent and it was harder for people who couldn’t earn their keep to be given a public platform to spout theory rather than experience.
These days, folks entering the industry often ask me where they should start learning, feeling daunted by the amount of information and their inability to determine the wheat from the chaff. Below you’ll find a few suggestions for someone new to organic Internet marketing (which truly is simply an adapted and evolved form of SEO, but we’ll get into that in another post) so they can learn SEO while avoiding as much false information and red herrings as possible.
WebmasterWorld.com forum libraries
Each forum at WebmasterWorld has a “library” (you can find the link at the top left of each forum page – here is the link development library as an example). These libraries are hand picked by the moderators of each forum. Go back to the very beginning and read from old to new and you’ll find one of the best historical timelines available of each topic. Learn what used to work and what still works.
One of the biggest advantages old school SEO folks have over new school SEO folks is a historical understanding of the industry and the methods employed within it over a long period of time. Additionally, because most of the WMW forums have changed “moderator hands” many times, and many of the most elite and knowledgeable SEO folks were moderators there at one point in time, you also get to learn from some of the best in the industry by reading what they felt was important enough to bookmark as a library post.
SEOBook.com membership
Aaron Wall shot himself to fame when he created “SEOBook” and for a long time, it was the closest thing there was to an “SEO textbook”, which he frequently updated as the industry evolved. Aaron stopped sales for and updates to the original SEOBook a while back and changed it to a paid subscription forum. I’ve had access to the member only forum since its inception, and hands down, if you can afford the subscription fee, would be the number one paid resource for learning SEO I’d recommend. If you take the time to become involved in the community and put into action what you learn there, you’ll make the money you paid for the subscription back… easily.
SEO conferences
Conferences are a great way to learn SEO, but not necessarily in the manner you’d traditionally think. Sure, the sessions can be informative and site clinics can give you specific information for your own site, but some of the best knowledge you’ll find will be in the bars after the sessions of conferences like SMX, PubCon, SES and more. Here you can mingle with folks who have been in the trenches of this industry for a long time. Don’t be shy, walk up to someone you want to chat with and offer to buy them a beer. I can assure you, no old school SEO turns down a free beer.
However, don’t then immediately start trying to pick their brain for information. Make connections. Start building relationships with people and listen as experienced folks sit around discussing the advantages noindex can have on internal link popularity and the tests they’ve run to come to those conclusions. After a while of networking and attending various industry events (local ones will do too), those relationships will flow from “conference only” to discussions via email and IM. You’ll make good friends and get good information. Win all around.
Cream of the crop
There are tons of people sharing good information out there. However, there are a few vocal folks out there that I keep on my personal “cream of the SEO crop” list (keep in mind, I’m old in this industry and it takes a lot to inspire/make me really think these days). Those folks include, but are not necessarily limited to (and are listed in no particular order):
Read their blogs, attend their conference sessions, listen to the information they freely share and put what you learn to the test.
It all means nothing without experimentation
You can learn SEO all you want, but at the end of the day, everything you learn is useless unless you actually experiment with what you’ve learned. Never take anything as gospel, (even from me). Always put everyone’s theories to the test. If you need to create a few “play” sites, do so. But test everything you’re told and come to your own conclusions.
And never STOP learning. Even after a decade, I learn new things on a regular basis and am constantly testing them to form my own opinions and expand on the experience and theories of others. The day you think you know all there is about SEO is the day you fail AS an SEO.
About the Author
Rae Hoffman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Outspoken Media as well as the author of the often controversial Sugarrae Blog.
Get social with Rae at Sphinn | Twitter | WebmasterWorld
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{ 29 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow Rae, great post for sure! And I’d agree big time with all of the items on your short list….but would like to add a few. Forums? I’d also recommend both SEOChat.com and forums.digitalpoint.com. Membership sites? SEOmoz.com is also spot-on! And experts? blumenthals.com/blog, davidmihm.com/blog and localseoguide.com all offer terrific LOCAL search help while Danny’s spot at searchengineland.com is still a great aggregator for all things SEO!
:-)
Jim
Could not agree more on the webmasterworld.com forum libraries, It’s the first place I recommend for SEO knowledge. And the buying a beer advice works wonders, especially when you buy them a beer on multiple occasions, you’ll eventually have their attention. A worthwhile effort.
Hi Rae,
Great post, and I love that you ended it with by stressing to “experiment”. What do you feel are the best tools, or at least the necessary tools, to measure the success of experiments?
-@sully
Whether or not you rank. LOL.
Self learning and building relationships with people in the SEO community pushed me to what I know. And everyday that passes, I have more to learn, so your advice is spot on from personal experience.
Nothing like a beer and a bar trick to break the ice with the industry vets ;-) Nice post, I will be sending SMB owners here when they ask where they can learn SEO.
how can a ‘learn seo’ post not mention of Google’s webmaster guidelines!?
;)
Nice use of the literary term “red herring”. (Look, I used my English degree for something in this field).
FWIW as someone relatively new to the industry, the most real-time applicable information I’ve gotten has been at industry conferences- especially Internet Marketing Spring Break. The presentation content is relevant and timely, yes. But the collaborative and, at times, contested discussions between panelists and audience members (even long after the meetings have ended) offer tremendous insight and unrivaled gems. As you astutely pointed out, the great advantage old school SEOs have over noobs is that their experience provides context to understand the scope, breadth and reason behind adaptations. When time is money, mining these experienced minds at a small industry conference is fantastic ROI relative to every other medium. Yes, the barrier to entry (cost) is higher. You get what you pay for.
Great stuff Rae – I’m of the opinion that all site owners should learn at least a little SEO. If not, they’ll fall prey to the snake oil salesmen that somehow manage to fool people into believing they can buy #1 on Google.
Information like this is exactly what those new to the industry need to get their feet wet. I got involved with Internet Marketing about 4 years ago and something like this would have been instrumental for me. I found Webmasterworld to be hugely useful in my early days and still visit daily to get some additional insight as well as assist others if I can.
I can’t afford all those fancy memberships (yet), but I have to say the single most crucial piece of the SEO puzzle is trial & error. Go out and experiment, don’t just follow the tracks the pioneers like Rae have laid out for us. You won’t break any new ground that way. Go test your own theories, break your own ground. You never know, you might make it to top of someone’s list some day!
Rae,
Great post. I would add resources like the “unfair advantage” from Planet Ocean, aa great SEO 101 read for business owners. It covers all the basics of SEO and clears up a lot of the BS in the industry. Every SEO buyer should read up on best practices before hiring a consultant or taking on SEO in house. Best practices can be learned and implemented by almost anyone with time and patience. Ranking for highly competitive keywords takes experience, a dedicated team and a long term strategy. For areas like external link building and web page content writing, I recommend hiring someone with a background in traditional marketing who can come up with creative ideas. Creativity is difficult to “learn” and marketing is a skill that is developed over time. I also recommend taking advantage of tools like Twitter search to find people in the SEO field and begin following. @seanhecking
Here here Rae. I’ve always contended that the best site for learning SEO is your own. Nothing beats practice and hands on experience when it comes to learning something as fluid as Internet Marketing. And for the folks who aren’t able to make it to conferences I’ve often found Twitter and Facebook can be a good way to build friendships with industry figures (even if it’s not quite as quickly effective as buying them a beer in person).
PS – It may be the new kid on the membership block compared to SEObook or SEOmoz’s members’ area, but I’ve found @theGypsy’s SEOdojo to be a great place to go for knowledge and advice. I’ve made some great new contacts there as well as re-establlishing links with a few older ones. Definitely another one to add to the list as being well worth the price for membership.
I’ve been taking part in the Tampa SEO Meetup (organized by Steve Scott, owner of Tampa SEO Training Academy) for a while now. The payoff in camaraderie I have found and the contacts I have made there is absolutely worth the drive.
While my wife and children are still in NYC and as I’m doing my best to support them I can’t afford flights and hotel accommodations to attend conferences like SMX, PubCon, SES (or even membership in Aaron Wall’s paid subscription forum), but that’s ok. While I’m down here in Hernando, Fl caring for my 90 year old mother and mentally disabled sister I get so damned frustrated at times, but every single day I remind myself that you started out down here too and under incredibly difficult circumstances, just a few miles away from where I am now, and because of that you’re a constant encouragement to me that if you could do it then so can I. Between the SEO Meetups, the info on the Web, in books – and through my own experimentation – there’s enough to enable me to get my clients sites to rank very well in the SERPs and steadily pick up larger accounts as word gets around that they’re making more money from their sites.
You’re an amazing person, you give away so much and this post is just one more example to me of how much I have yet to learn. Thanks for your posts, for your tweets, and for your constant encouragement.
Hang in there Suthnautr! What goes around, comes around.
Excellent suggestions Rae. I have two more suggestions I have for those wanting a very in-depth view of how search engines work would be the following:
1. Check out The Anatomy of a Search Engine. This is the paper that Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote while creating the original version of Google while at Stanford. Some of the details have changed since then but this gives a great overview of how a search engine operates.
2. For anyone with software development skills try to write a basic crawler and parser (indexer). Take some suggestions from The Anatomy of a Search Engine and see what you can do. Consider it a research project if you like but you’ll learn a massive amount by doing this. It also gives you even more respect for those who have created full-fledged search engines.
I am fewer than six months into my first year of strategic SEO, and I absolutely love simple articles like these that help people like me get out of the gate. I really appreciate the sincerity I have seen from the SEO community and am impressed with the willingness of seasoned veterans to craft posts like this; designed for people like me.
Cheers!
“…some of the best knowledge you’ll find will be in the bars…”
When I first started going to conferences a couple years back, I kept thinking to myself that this was all just an excuse to get tanked with fellow SEOs. At PubCon that year, the veil was lifted. I now keep two sets of notes — regular session notes, and conversations / epiphanies scrawled out on hotel letterhead before passing out.
The latter have proven infinitely more valuable.
Lots of good links and ideas. I’ve been self-teaching for a couple of years. My sites stay on page one but move up and down the page. Always more to learn.
Thanks!
Rae,
This article sounds like many of the conversations we have had together since generally the best “sessions” of a conference are in the speaker lounge or at the bar ;)
Although SMX Advanced sessions are frequently a must attend.
,Michael Martin
I like this a lot. It sounds like a word for word account that a lot of us probably followed similarly, with one name changed or one resource flipped here or there. Thanks for the write-up, Rae.
Hey, Rae!
Nice, solid, useful information. And while I acknowledge the major part of it, I tend to disagree with Internet marketing being solely a self-taught profession. You see, from my experience, most modern-day marketers are trying to break with tradition and to denounce standard Communication theories (pertaining to PR, Advertising, Marketing and so forth), instead of trying to harmonize classical Communcations theory with today’s practical aspects of Internet marketing. Subsequently, traditional Communications experts tend to frown upon Internet marketing, probably out of fear for their profession and mis-understangin. In my opinion, offline Communications and online marketing are two interdisciplinary and complementary assets which should function together in a perfect symbiosis. At the moment, this couldn’t be further from the truth, as both “schools” battle eachother in trying to establish the hierarchy in the food chain and this works to the industry’s disadvantage, in my opinion.
Horia Neagu
The SEO Wolf
Good article and great xmas present to some great friends
All aspects of Online Marketing are best understood through doing – therefore the best & brightest in the field are always self-taught.
Rae,
Great post! I’m immediately including a link to this site when former colleagues and friends ask how to learn internet marketing. In one instance, specifically, “I need to learn SEO and email marketing” which was preceded by, “I’m looking for a new job.”
The lengthy writeup I often provide encompasses a few of the items you’ve written, but your example of reading through the library history of webmasterworld.com is great. The bottom line is there is no substitute for real world implementation, trial and error of just doing it and connecting with folks that have been doing internet marketing, to really get a feel for how things work. Like I conclude each of those emails…you can’t learn to swim by reading a book. Well, you can, but you have to jump in the water at some point to put practice to the theory.
could not agree more. Testing and trying things out is essential. You shouldnt always take what people say as a given.
Thanks – what a great post.
Being new to the SEO/SEM industry myself, I started recently with minimal “real” experience and a healthy dose of “I like the interweb”.
Thanks for including the “Cream of the Crop” section – it’s nice to be pointed in the direction of folks who know what’s up.
Thank you, Rae. I’m learning SEO, sometimes I don’t know how to start and what to read, here you guide me. thank you again.
The best seo skills come from experience and can’t be learned. Experimenting and documenting the changes is the best way to go if you are starting out, and read through the basics so you have a starting point.