I have stumbled across SEOMoz and SEOBook but the price point seems fairly steep for me (student/founder). Are these worth it or are there other better resources for learning the ropes of seo?
I'm the founder of SEOmoz, but I'd say if you're just learning, you can do it for free. Both SEOBook and SEOmoz (as well as other software/tools/community offerings like WebMasterWorld or Raven) are great for when you've settled into SEO as a marketing practice and need the shortcuts those services can help provide in automation, data and expertise.
Rank was invited to speak at a dinner at YC on SEO and blew the doors off. The links above are great. You should also check out SEOmoz's Search Engine Ranking Factors list ( http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors ). Description of the methodology for building the list:
"Every two years, SEOmoz surveys top SEO experts in the field worldwide on their opinions of the algorithmic elements that comprise search engine rankings. This year features contributors from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, the Ukraine, the Dominican Republic and many more.
Each participant was asked to rate more than 100 search ranking factors along with specific questions about hot issues in the SEO field. This document, representing the collective wisdom of expert practitioners, is, in opinion, one of the most useful resources for SEO practitioners of all varieties, helping to provide transparency into what matters (and doesn’t) for best practices in search engine optimization."
Disclosure: I'm one of the people listed in the ranking factors report, I've known Rand for many years and I'm an occasional speaker at industry events (I decided to take a couple of years off, am returning 2011).
That said, the SEOmoz guides and resources are awesome, as well as the community in general. Ditto SEObook, and the vast wealth of knowledge in the community at large. I'd say start with SEOmoz, and then if you've got any questions, feel free to ping me an email. I'm not hard to find around the web, and I spend time each week offering advice free of charge to people getting in to the industry. It's my way of paying back those who helped me, many years ago.
Yea, Rand's stuff us all top tier and legit information. The SEOMOZ blog is a really great resource for beginners. Stay away from the YOUMOZ posts though since they are essentially guest posts and usually shamelessly self-promotional.
Also, check out the Matt Cutts videos on youtube. They clear up a lot of stuff that people new to SEO have thrown at them (industry bullsh*+).
SEOmoz is indeed fantastic, but I'd also highly recommend lurking in the WebMasterWorld forums. Like HN, WMW has a very simple design, an extremely high signal to noise ratio and very little advertising/spam.
Great to have you here! If I may ask a question - I was trying to search online as to how search engines really use the nofollow tag but could not really find much information.
Would I be right to suggest that although Google publicly says the no follow tag passes no page rank or authority, in reality it does, albeit not to the same level as a follow tag?
Both of them have blogs available for free. Skip back to early 2006, start reading. (I recommend 2006 as both routinely published on beginner-friendly topics back then, but their focus has become more refined since then. There are only so many ways you can say "Your title tag is really freaking important, and you should get links." By the way, your title tag is freaking important, and you should get links.)
SEOMoz has a quite decent beginner's guide as I recall.
I've got a couple dozen articles on my blog on the subject, but they're not arranged in any sort of coherent fashion, and most are not filed under the SEO category. I'll trade: if you want to grab all the relevant URLs and organize them by theme, I'll let you ask me anything you want to for an hour. (That may or may not be a good deal.)
Your chat-for-an-hour offer made me think of Hacker Roulette. Participating HN members with info to share or a project to discuss would sign up and then be paired off to meet up (if near each other) or talk (Skype, IM, email) about what each was up to, bounce off ideas, brainstorm, whatever. Could be interesting.
There are 494 posts on the blog, and they're mostly organized chronologically based on what I was working on at the time. Probably about 50 of them are about SEO, and only 28 are categorized. I could track down the rest of them, but I don't have the patience to weed through a hundred posts from 2007 looking for where I initially described my core SEO strategy.
I don't need links from SEOMoz -- I just want an outline that I can refer people to, because the experience of trying to find specific topics in my blog is terrible.
There are a fundamental rules and building blocks of SEO. From simple things such as definitions to page rank and beyond, it's important to find a way to grasp the basics. SEOmoz and other online tutorials are a great way to start.
Personally, I learn with a "hands on and explain it to me" approach. Combining a seminar series like this http://www.seomoz.org/seminar/series with lessons about what works, what doesn't and why can teach you the basics.
Beyond the basics, it's about experience. The folks who are the best at SEO have a wide base of experience gearing content toward diverse audiences. A combination of knowing what people want and being able to deliver the right message to those people at the right time is as much a part of traditional marketing as it is SEO. After you learn the technical building blocks of optimization, increasing rank, exposure is more about user interaction and traffic.
Experiment with your own content using the help of excellent tutorials like those found on SEOmoz and you'll be well on your way to successfully optimizing pages. You don't necessarily need to pay for subscriptions, but sometimes it will save you time to have everything assembled in one place and presented in one style.
Just remember... it's not about tricking search engines... it's about helping users find the best of whatever they're looking for and for search engines identify and categorize your content properly.
>> Just remember... it's not about tricking search engines... it's about helping users find the best of whatever they're looking for and search engines identify and categorize your content properly.
I really like that line, thanks. I normally dislike the term SEO because it can be associated with so many unethical or spammy tactics, but that's a really good way of putting legitimate SEO practices.
I see Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz commented on here which is neat. I've thought about becoming a member of his site, question is, is it worth it? I'd love some feedback from people that use SEOMoz's tools.
I just wish that particular line was actually true.
It's not about content. It's about finding the right word combination to convince Google (and friends) that your site is the most relevant one for a keyword and then finding lots of folks to link to it.
I hope that one day it'll be as simple as "the best content wins" but anybody who searches for nearly anything on the internet knows that's not true today.
The About.com's of the world don't have the best content, but my god do they have link-farming and keyword targeting down to a science.
I guess it comes down to how you think about it...
For example: I use a variety of synonyms and phrase combinations when writing copy not to trick SE's but to help people who are searching realize that my content will answer their question or solve their problem.
At the end of the day, I truly believe that it is about content. If I create, distribute, optimize (etc), the best content, that has a huge positive effect. People recommend my content, trust that I'm a valuable source, etc. All things that are important in our new social internet.
About.com, Mahalo, etc rely on the lowest common denominator of content and spreading as much as quickly as they can. It's working right now, but I'm quite confidant that won't work for long.
Know that SEO in general is the act of second-guessing several algorithmic black boxes. I'd argue that, besides some fairly simple guidelines, SEO is a bunch of blind guys in a dark room walking around with short sticks, excitedly blogging when they think they've hit something.
I'd second the suggestions of reading through Matt Cutts' blog as well as SEOmoz, but here are some consistently referenced tips that I think are defensible.
1) Robots can't parse your images. Render your text with @font-face, not as a JPG.
2) Make sure your URL, your <title>, and your <h1> and <h2> have keywords that are relevant to the material on the page.
3) Register with Google and Bing's webmaster tools, and make sure the keywords they think your sites are relevant for are reasonable. Use Google Analytics to see what organic keywords are sending you traffic. Measure what you want to improve.
4) Generate original content.
5) Get backlinks. Good linkage from HN/reddit/delicious/twitter/whatever can generate multiple orders of magnitude more traffic than long-tail search traffic.
Why not (1). Well yes (1) too really but: Google use a "game" to get people to describe images and if there's text it can be OCR'ed. Google are quite good at OCR. I doubt they pass all headline images through OCR but I can imagine they might do subject comparison between text and replacement images (eg in pages using Fahrner Image Replacement) to sample whether the text Google is reading matches the images the user sees.
Does anyone have a link to statistical documentation of the efficacy of these "SEO" guys? And further, distinguishing the results of their black magic from simply improving the inherent meaningfulness of the site in question and letting the search engines do the work of finding relevant pages? Every "SEO" guy I've ever met felt to me like a used car salesman whose methodology has all the rigor of reading chicken bones and goat entrails.
> methodology has all the rigor of reading chicken bones and goat entrails
SEO is supposed to be about the natural movement of the website by throwing things into the soup to make it taste better and as such move up in an organic fashion. The proof is in tracking the keywords or phrases you are hoping that will move up... I have been using AuthorityLabs.com for about a month now to track rankings and it has been working pretty well. It is a service worth paying for.
I could give you more case studies than I can shake a stick at. Ditto the guys at SEOmoz, Distilled, Bronco, Ayima, SEO Gadget, Verve, Outspoken Media...
Disclosure: I know most of the guys at those companies. That aside, their work and expertise speaks for itself.
Maybe I was tired when I read it, or lack of technical background to understand it entirely, but I did not quite understand how any of those sites got inbound links from other sites outside the control of the person who is building the empire so that any of them can get pagerank to pass it onto the higher level sites to start with.
My company has built a tool that aims to give you the basic page analysis from an SEO perspective fairly quickly. We had some decent reviews from people a few months back.
Whatever your skill level, there's no more effective way to learn SEO than doing SEO.
Best way to start: your personal brand. Launch a website with the intention to win the #1 rank for your full name. It will teach you most of what you need to know.
Learning SEO:
-Whitehat- Create a website, focus in on a few keywords, create original content, create a community (shift from website), advertise moderately, find users who love what you have done for them and will share the love with their 90,000 friends on Twitter for a tshirt.
-Grayhat- Hire someone on fiverr to do all of the dirty work for you. You're ethical, your employees -- not so much.
-Blackhat- dump in a lot of money, barely any ROI, would have been better off buying 50 domains + a year on a linode 512, everything that's new is old, all that is old will be seen again, you're probably the innocent bugger who will get removed from the index on his first try.
I know this is SEO, because I read it on the internets. Right?
Forgot to mention, I opt'd into the 50 domains and a Linode option. Somedays, I just sit at the computer writing articles for hours. Its always fun to watch articles getting linked only hours later by some random Googler and wondering what that Google machine's next move is.
They're aimed at people with little or no SEO experience, and intended to be useful to everyone whatever tools they choose to use. Feedback is very welcome.
Totally agreed. I started a niche site (a directory for notary publics that funnels visitors into a paid app that helps notaries manage their businesses) as a lightweight SEO experiment.
It's only been ~6 weeks but, even if I can't get many of the visitors to convert to paying customers, I've learned far more in the past few weeks than I could have learned through meetings/reading/dreaming.
I have a book on SEO titled, "Google Secrets". I strongly recommend it as something "worth a read". It has all the related info that one needs to know on the subject and tips on improving the ranking on Google as well. The name itself is suggestive.
The Art of SEO is a great resource if you're just getting started and are interested in White-Hat stuff.
If you're more interested in aggressive marketing and link building, stay away from the majority of forums (because they're full of guru crap) and read as much as you can from bluehatseo.com and anything in Eli's blog roll.
To start, though, I'd check out http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-op... and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-ways-to-learn-seo.
Best of luck!