Ask HN: Best resources to learn SEO?
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?
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!
"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."
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.
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*+).
Edit: I knew there was more to that account than just Matt, but didn't realize he had his own playlist for questions. I think the link you want is for "Matt's Grab Bag:" http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp#grid/user/84...
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?
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
They're the only paid toolset that I use (for SEO). That's about as good a recommendation as I can give.
That said, if you're not running a fairly serious site, I'd give it a miss. It's not a toolset for just playing around with (hence the price).
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.
With (2) avoid stuffing.
(4) & (5) <- this is all it takes!
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.
Now I monitor my rankings, analytics, affiliate sales etc via iphone: http://www.seoiphoneapps.com
Disclosure: I know most of the guys at those companies. That aside, their work and expertise speaks for itself.
If this doesn't blow your SEO mind, I don't know what will http://www.bluehatseo.com/seo-empire-part-1/
I'd recommend you run the tool against some sites, and tweak things around.
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.
This presentation was a good introduction: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-comprehensive-intro-to-seo-powe...?
Also, a great article from patio11: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/
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.
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.
First hand experience FTW.
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.