Search engine optimization has completely changed the international marketing arena. With the explosion of online business that’s been happening since the nineties, you no longer need a massive budget or a rich financier to start turning a profit. While SEO has certainly made success much more accessible, applying it correctly takes a certain level of expertise. Here are some of the best ways to learn SEO…
Courses and Guides
As with many skills, the internet is bursting with free resources for learning SEO. Do a quick search, and you’ll find whole series’ of blog posts for going from no knowledge at all to being an SEO expert, or pretty close anyway! If you don’t want to have to read masses of text to start getting a decent rank on SERPs, then there are various tutorials and seminars on YouTube, explaining the basic principles, best practices with writing web copy, how to use WordPress plugins effectively, and so on. If you prefer a more hands-on approach to learning a new skill, then there are also comprehensive SEO courses supplied by companies like Gotch SEO. Whatever style of learning works for you, believe me, it’s out there!
eBooks
From Flickr
Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble and other major eBook distributors have opened up a great way for people like you to gain an affordable, albeit informal, education on SEO. These days, it’s even pretty easy to find sites that will send you a free eBook on SEO simply by signing up to their newsletter (which you can then filter to spam if you want!) If you like to learn things the good-old-fashioned way, then these eBooks on SEO could be the perfect thing for you. When you’re browsing, just make sure that you’re checking when these books were published. SEO changes very quickly, and any books that were published a year or two ago may contain information that is no longer relevant. Optimizing press releases, for instance, was once a very effective tactic, but has since fallen from grace due to some sites abusing it. This is just one of the methods which has been rendered useless or even counterproductive by Google’s ever-changing algorithm.
Just Do It!
You could read all the books on playing guitar that you want, but that won’t make you a great guitar player! Similarly, you can only get so far by reading about SEO and watching seminars on YouTube. Effective SEO is a practical skill, and like with any practical skill you’re only going to get better at it by practice, learning from mistakes and tweaking your technique until you find something that works. Starting a blog apart from your business is one of the best ways to get practice in. This will be your proving ground, where you can write and publish content about anything you want, and monitor what your strategy is actually doing for the site, without affecting your business’s bottom line in the slightest. Reading is important, but if you want to learn how to swim you have to jump in the water at some point!