When I first started out doing SEO, I didn’t really know where to start. Since then I’ve read a lot of information and done a lot of testing on websites to gain my knowledge so I thought I would share with everyone how I got a start and learnt more about SEO.

SEO software

IBP: When I first started out looking into SEO I downloaded the free trial version of IBP (Internet Business Promoter). Even though I have no need for this software anymore, it was a great learning curve for me.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to change on your website. IBP will crawl through a page and make recommendations about what you have to do to rank for a particular keyword. It will look at all your competitors for that term and also tell you what they’re doing too! It’s a really great tool if you’re just starting out as it will tell you what elements you need to change (eg. title tags, description tags, h1, h2 tags, etc).

There are some really fancy tools on there and for the limitations of the free trial version it’s still worth downloading and having a play with.

You can download the free trial version of IBP here:-
http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/download/index.htm

SEO for Firefox: For those of you still using Internet Explorer I highly recommend you change to Firefox as it’s a much faster browser… and it’s not Microsoft! There are some great plugins you can get like SEO for Firefox. This plugin will allow you to see at a glance some very handy SEO information about a site such as:-

• Pagerank
• Google Cache Date
• Age of the site
• Yahoo inbound links
• Alexa ranking

The other great thing this tool does is add this information into a search results page so you can see at a glance info about sites in the serps. You can get SEO for Firefox here.

Education
There are a million blogs out there about SEO, many of them good, many of them mediocre. I would recommend reading some of these blogs as a start then finding out what area of SEO you would like to focus on and find someone writing about the topic.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
Matt is the head of Webspam at Google. He writes on his own personal blog about Google stuff, SEO and other topics. Some of the posts can be very technical but once you get an understanding of SEO sometimes they can be very helpful. The thing I find very useful with Matt’s posts is that if you read between the lines with his posts you can get some very insightful info. Sometimes it’s also helpful to read other people’s overviews of his posts to get a broad overview of what the industry thinks about a certain topic.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog
SEOmoz is probably one of the best SEO blogs on the net. Updated daily it’s chock full of information for newbies to advanced SEO’s. Well worth a look.

http://www.seobook.com/
Aaron Wall is one of the most talented SEO’s and markets himself very well. His insights into the SEO industry as a whole are great. His blog doesn’t go into too much detail about SEO strategy and the things you need to do to improve your website however, he does have a training program and a few free videos which are a good place to start.

http://blog.sitemost.com.au/
This is a great Aussie blog that gives loads of great insights into strategies you need to employ to have a holistic approach to SEO. They also have loads of tips, tricks and basics that you need to know to be able to SEOify your website.

http://www.webmasterradio.fm/
This has to be one of the best resources of SEO info on the net. Podcasts and live feeds from experts all around the world create a vault of information that is priceless in terms of learning about SEO. The only thing with listening to these shows is you need to go through a lot of guff to get to all the good bits….. but it’s well worth your time.

Testing
The best way to learn about SEO is to test things on your own website. If you can, set up a couple of websites and try different things. If you’re looking into SEO for a work-related site perhaps try downloading the trail version of IBP (or some other type of SEO software) to get you started.

Conclusion
Ultimately to be a great SEO you will need to have your finger on the pulse on a lot of different aspects of SEO and online marketing. It may sound scary that you have to read, test and SEO your site day in and day out, but ultimately SEO is something you will learn over time. The thing to remember is that SEO isn’t just about keywords and gaming the engines with cloaking, hidden text or black hat SEO techniques. It’s about building legitimate sites that add value to the net and it’s users. If you keep this in mind whilst building your websites, the rankings will follow.