STEP 5: Know what's happening in the world of SEO. STEP 6: Rinse & and repeat. With that in mind, while you shouldn't be spending all day reading SEO news, it's important to be in the know. Podcasters often interview smart SEOs about their successes, failures, and experiences, making podcasts a great way to keep up to date while traveling.
For example, in this episode of the Authority Hacker podcast, Bibi, an expert in link building, shares her creative approach to linking outreach emails. Facebook has an active community of SEOs who are always willing to answer questions and offer advice if you need it. In fact, our Facebook group, Ahrefs Insider, has almost 17,000 members and is very active. Anders Ericsson theorized that learning a new skill requires 10,000 hours of practice.
I'm sure you'll understand SEO well in that time, but the truth is that you never stop learning. I have been involved in SEO for more than 11 years and I learn new things all the time. Learn what search engine optimization is, why it's important, and all the basics you need to know to get started in the best way. Download your free quickstart worksheet.
One of the best and fastest ways to learn SEO is to follow a good SEO course. A high-quality course will help you understand SEO without having to spend endless hours searching for this information in random resources on Google, Get Started. SEO theory will tell you what you need to do to make your website compatible with SEO, but it's how you apply SEO principles in practice that will make the difference in your ranking and traffic. But maybe, instead of doing SEO yourself, you're a CMO, VP of marketing, or business owner who would love to learn more about SEO so you can manage relationships with an in-house SEO team or third-party provider.
The reason I set 6 months as a minimum period is that SEO takes time to work and you may have to wait a couple of months (or more) to see the impact of SEO-related changes on a website. If you want to take a more guided approach to learning SEO or training your entire team, check out Moz Academy's SEO Essentials certification. As with SEO books, many of the best SEO conferences don't just focus on SEO, but overlap enough to be useful for anyone who wants to dive into what SEO is. With Google Chrome, see key SEO metrics instantly for any website or search result as you browse the web.
Many popular publications also offer space for SEO-related content, such as Mashable, Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, and of course writers like Jayson DeMers, John Rampton, and I cover SEO here at Forbes. It's possible to learn to do SEO on your own, you don't have to be an SEO specialist or expert. Classes can be a great introduction to digital marketing, but if you want to become good enough to do some real SEO work, get ready for some extracurricular activities. I started SEO 20 years ago and it took me a couple of years to understand what SEO is and how it works.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and, since the whole process has to do with how to increase the visibility of a website in search engines, it makes sense to know how search engines work. By investing a few hours a month, you'll be able to become a true SEO expert, and then you'll have the knowledge to know what the people you hire should do to do SEO for you, and you'll be able to better assess their preparation before hiring them. The magic of SEO is that people can find your content at the exact moment they're looking for an answer using a search engine. A good SEO auditing tool, such as Site Crawl from Moz Pro, will detect problems such as broken pages, links that don't work, duplicate content issues, and other technical SEO issues.
There are more than 255 SEO ranking factors to consider when optimizing a website and, for ease of reference, they are divided into several sub-processes. If you're just starting out with SEO and wondering what it takes to go from novice to expert, then this post is for you. .
