There are plenty of websites out there that will teach you about SEO and Internet Marketing. Some sites, like SEOmoz or SEObook, will share their knowledge with you for free (because you’re paying them by clicking on the adverts or affiliate links scattered throughout their sites or by paying for their premium training and tools) while others, like Search Engine College, will take your money in exchange for a structured course that will train you in whichever aspects of Internet Marketing you choose.
My personal favourite is the SEO Training Dojo, which has a fantastic community of very knowledgeable people who are always happy to chat and offer advice in the community’s Skype chatroom. The Dojo also has a huge library of training articles and videos compiled from sources across the web that cover nearly every aspect of SEO and Internet Marketing and they now produce a weekly podcast where the Dojo’s team of so-called “Regulators” go over the latest news from the SEO world along with regular guest experts.
But are any of these sites really The Best Site For Learning SEO?They’re all great resources for learning about the latest changes in Search Engines and the newest theories about how to achieve the best possible rankings in search results, but there’s really only so much you can ever learn about SEO just by reading articles, no matter how well written and researched they may be.
The simple truth is that there’s only one website where you can truly learn everything you need to know about SEO…
Your own.
I doesn’t matter how many SEO blogs you subscribe to or how many “SEO Experts” you follow on Twitter. All that reading is great for teaching you the theories of SEO and giving you some good ideas about what may or may not work but unless you get your hands dirty by experimenting and testing those theories and ideas on a site of your own you’ll never really learn anything.
Granted, if you already have a website for your business and it’s an important part of your customer development you probably won’t want to try experimenting with anything too extreme because you can’t afford to put a foot wrong and accidentally tank your money site’s rankings if you push the SEO envelope a little bit too far.
So that’s where you go out and set up a new site all of your own and carry out your experiments there, far away from your main site.
How To Set Up Your Own SEO Test Site
It’s easy enough to do. Just pick a subject that you’re interested in and register a suitable domain name. In fact, if you follow this guide by Glen “ViperChill” Allsopp, that’ll take you through the basic stages of getting your site set up and established. Don’t worry too much about the later stages of the guide where Glen goes into detail about the steps to monetize your site through affiliate programs, just concentrate on creating a site that can rank well for searches related to your chosen niche (of course, if you then want to start earning some money from the site as well then go for it and good luck!)
Obviously WordPress is far and away the easiest and most flexible platform for you to use to build your site and with the wealth of SEO tools and plugins available for it (like these awesome ones from Yoast) you can tweak and test to your hearts content. Just make sure to keep a record of any changes or experiments that you make so that you can cross reference them with your analytics and identify the effects of your tests.
Of course, you don’t have to use WordPress all the time. There are plenty of other CMS’s out there that you can use when creating your testing sites and it can be helpful to familiarise yourself with as many of the as possible, especially if you have to work with one or more of these alternate CMS’s as part of your day job. Some of the most popular systems that you’re likely to come across are Joomla, Drupal and (to a lesser extent) MODx. Each of them has their own particular features and benefits and they’ve all built up loyal communities of users who are only to happy to share tips and tricks for getting the most out of these systems.
Testing Is The Only Way To Really Learn SEO
Using WordPress as your primary system for developing tests and devising new strategies is a great way to get started but if you can then take what you’ve learned from your SEO tests on WordPress and figure out how to apply the same ideas to one or more of the other CMS’s not only will you be able to demonstrate that the effects are not simply a fluke of using WordPress, let’s face it the more data you can gather the more reliable your conclusions will be, you’ll also be building new skills for yourself as you learn to use these alternate systems so you won’t need to be reliant on WordPress for all your sites.
The point of all this is to test, test and test again. If you read a blog post that tells you the Meta Keywords tag is completely useless for improving your rankings in Google but can still help you to rank in Yahoo searches then don’t just take their word for it. Devise a test and try it for yourself. If you notice an upswing in your referral traffic from Google Image search after revising your image ALT tags then test that as well. Identify what works and what doesn’t from your own results. That’s the only way for you to move on from learning about SEO and actually learn SEO.
Image Credits: cogdogblog & comedynose
