
Ask HN: Best resources to learn SEO? - msencenb
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?
======
randfish
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.

To start, though, I'd check out [http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-
search-engine-op...](http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-
engine-optimization) and <http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-ways-to-learn-seo>.

Best of luck!

~~~
webwright
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."

~~~
percept
He _should_ change his name to "Rank." ;)

~~~
webwright
Hehe, funny slip, eh? I wish HN would let edits happen after 15m. I caught
that too late!

------
patio11
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.)

~~~
jroes
<http://gist.github.com/572548>

~~~
patio11
Please send me an email at your convenience. (The offer is still open to the
OP if you can expand on this list.)

------
RBr
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.

~~~
leftnode

      >> 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.

~~~
enjo
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.

~~~
RBr
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.

------
mceachen
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.

~~~
nsfmc
So, can somebody tell me why this isn't true? Or what about this misses the
point?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I'd say apart from (1) he has it down for the basics; see
<http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors> for some confirmations.

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!

------
ataggart
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.

~~~
gscott
> 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.

~~~
hotmind
SEOcockpit: <http://seocockpit.com> is also good. They start at $10 /mnth.
I've no affiliation with them whatsoever, but I've used the service.

Now I monitor my rankings, analytics, affiliate sales etc via iphone:
<http://www.seoiphoneapps.com>

------
alexkiwi
SEOMoz's free guide isn't bad to help you get started with on-site SEO. The
best tutorials for tactics in my opinion is from Blue Hat SEO (Eli).

If this doesn't blow your SEO mind, I don't know what will
<http://www.bluehatseo.com/seo-empire-part-1/>

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
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.

~~~
alexkiwi
wordpress, blogger, digg, pligg, and other social sites push links to the mid-
level sites

------
zippykid
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.

<http://www.pearanalytics.com/>

I'd recommend you run the tool against some sites, and tweak things around.

------
joshklein
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.

------
sachitgupta
I was in a similar situation (I don't know about you, but I'm at a fairly
beginner level).

This presentation was a good introduction:
[http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-comprehensive-intro-to-seo-
powe...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-comprehensive-intro-to-seo-powerpoint-
slide-deck-)?

Also, a great article from patio11:
<http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/>

------
ambiate
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.

------
lizrice
We've got a series of free PDF guides to different aspects of SEO at
<http://www.pluginseo.com/paint-by-numbers-seo>.

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.

------
basicxman
I have found the absolute best way to learn SEO is via experience. There's
just nothing better, period.

~~~
paulsingh
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.

First hand experience FTW.

------
vyoma
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.

------
adityakothadiya
Try this - <http://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-guide/>

------
kefs
Sweet! Thanks HN! I was just having to do some quick SEO learning today.

------
iworkforthem
wolf-howl.com is another SEO blog that's a must read for me.

------
rsoud
SEOBook has an awesome resource section for beginners

------
ddemchuk
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.

