What did you do in order to become more proficient at SEO?

[yoursurrogategod]

Hi, I recently obtained Simple SEO. It's a pretty concise book and I like it. However, I'd like to actually try the tactics in there out. What would be the best way to do this? Start a WordPress blog and play with various on-page and off-page factors until I get things right?

 

When trying to become more proficient at this skill, what did you do to become better at it?

 

Also, if you derive some form of income from this practice, I'd love to hear your story. How did you get your first customer? What did you learn? How would you do things differently?

[JonnoTheDev]

SEO is a trial & error game. Sure, there is plenty of material out there regarding on-site optimization such as page titles, descriptive anchor links, friendly urls, meta data, etc. However, off-site is key i.e link building, etc, but remember too much, too soon and Google may find you out and de-index your site quickly. Google's algorithms change often, that is why there is no black and white, 'do this and your site will rank' method. People who are good at SEO will never reveal their methodology, i.e the tools they use.

[KevinM1]

The best thing to do is write good, semantic code and have good, relevant, non-repetitive content. Other things like sitemaps and well-crafted meta tags help, but SEO is largely about how relevant and well structured content is. If you have a well designed site with good content, the backlinks will come.

 

If you're looking to see how frivolous all the supposed 'rules' are, use Firefox and install the SenSEO extension. According to it, this particular thread scores higher than the index of Stack Overflow.

[yoursurrogategod]

SEO is a trial & error game. Sure, there is plenty of material out there regarding on-site optimization such as page titles, descriptive anchor links, friendly urls, meta data, etc. However, off-site is key i.e link building, etc, but remember too much, too soon and Google may find you out and de-index your site quickly. Google's algorithms change often, that is why there is no black and white, 'do this and your site will rank' method. People who are good at SEO will never reveal their methodology, i.e the tools they use.

The best thing to do is write good, semantic code and have good, relevant, non-repetitive content. Other things like sitemaps and well-crafted meta tags help, but SEO is largely about how relevant and well structured content is. If you have a well designed site with good content, the backlinks will come.

 

If you're looking to see how frivolous all the supposed 'rules' are, use Firefox and install the SenSEO extension. According to it, this particular thread scores higher than the index of Stack Overflow.

Thanks guys. I realize that one would need to be vigilant. I'd probably setup an app that checks the ranking of pages that I'm supposed to be keeping track of and notify me if it falls appreciably in ranking.

 

But another question that I don't know how to answer is this: How to practice? The algorithms that drive search engines change from time to time, that's a given. My question is this. How to best get a feel for how this beast works? I obviously don't have the source code for this thing, I can setup a site and play with its ranking. Is it possible to muck with the meta tags in a wordpress blog?

Edited February 6, 2013 by yoursurrogategod

[JonnoTheDev]

You can setup any dummy website or websites for testing your SEO using wordpress or even a single 1 page site and try to rank it for certain keyphrases. You can play with meta data in wordpress if you like using plugins or adding to the code yourself.