Mods Note: We usually don't allow specific SEO tools & products to be mentioned we are going to make an exception here. If your unpaid mod team thinks any message is spam, we are going to delete first and ask questions later. You can mention specifics but be honest and fair. Share the good & bad so your insight is more valuable to others.

Please share your experience.

Wow, that's a loaded question!

I don't feel I can give you any assistance however my experiences may do. I've been constructing sites since 1993 and realised rapidly what was required from my type of sites, basically company technical product brochure sites.

I used to experiment with trying different keywords, urls, headings etc to see how they worked in the various search engines at that time and rapidly became adept at learning what worked with each engine. This soon became noticed and I was approached by AltaVista, then #1, to help them in their research and algos. This I did for a couple of years and then in 1998 I was again approached to see if I would be interested in trying a new search idea ... by Google! Once again I did this for a couple of years and the rest of G's history is well-documented.

The easy answer to your questions is that I have never taken any lessons from anyone, it's all been my own experimentation of trial and error, and the only person I can think of who ever gave me any advice was the late tedster when I was experiencing a specific issure and it took the two of us a couple of months to resolve it. It was a Google algo update refinement that they never told anyone about.

I wouldn't have a clue of what to recommend or even where to go, good SEOs are worth their weight in gold and are very unlikely to give free courses or lessons, maybe not even paid ones, I simply don't know.

Many of the SEOs on this forum board are all self-taught and many are the grey side of 50+, I'm 67, therefore there were no such courses or lessons when we started out, however what I do know is that whatever it is they are teaching these days does not appear to be that good since I see many, many SEO mistakes on many websites ... sure they like nice and arty-fartly but as for SEO, many are diabolical.

I was actually asked by my county university a few years ago if I would give some lectures in SEO since one of my young apprentices was teaching them more about SEO in lessons than the "teacher" knew, I declined due to pressure of work.

It'll be interesting to read what other older-hands have to say.

The really smart people aren't sharing their best information but if you are just starting you don't need that advanced information. The self proclaimed gurus will promise they know everything but if they really did they wouldn't be selling you courses online or their poor imitations of Google link tools, they'd use their inside information to rank #1 for the top money terms. Don't blindly follow any advice including what I'm saying right now. Use your own cognitive skills to read between the lines and see through the bravado & bluff.

If you are totally new, start by watching the free youtube videos Google webmaster central puts out. It will give a a very basic understanding of the major moving parts but it won't empower you to exploit Google's weaknesses. To do that you will want to do so trial & error learning. Launching a bunch of sites and try to rank them in different ways. Occasionally I like to intentionally try to get a site banned from Google to better learn what is their actual limit of abuse they will accept. This trial & error sounds easier than it is. Google has so many moving parts and they often influence each other so its often impossible to truly isolate a single factor. That's ok you usually will learn enough through the experience that you can move in the right direction towards better rankings even if your moves might not be at the optimal speed or distance it will be close enough to be helpful.

PS Be careful when following old advice. Much of it is no longer useful.

@Fredlaf1009 ... First, Welcome to Webmasterworld!

The concept of SEO is pretty simple: marketing and commonsense.

Most folks know what works without having to "take a course" or pay zillions of goobers to "experts" who are more snake oil salesmen than actual experts.

You will learn more about "seo" by reading the many seo topics at WW than any other resource I know ... with real examples of what works, what does not, and all the speculation of what each of those opposites might actually mean.

For me "seo" has always been Content Is King, Be the Best, Be Unique, and Don't Do Something Stupid. The later is buying links, link farms, etc.

Over the years the search engines (dang near all of them) have become wise to the shortcuts, tricks, scam and spam, and nefarious black hat and have altered their algos to prevent abuse of their systems.

SEO these days means Code Right, Code Clean, Have Good Content And User Experience ... and at the same time let the search engines monetize YOUR content along the way. Whew!

I suspect there's near 1,000 man years of seo experience right here at WW ... but you have to look for it, read it, make your own decisions ... and go from there. That said:

I do not recommend paying dollars to learn SEO as MOST of what you can get from those kind of things is probably 10 years out of date, and 20 algo changes behind the times.

The only two places I check are here and Marie Hayes. I like her newsletter.

There were no courses when some of us started. We just did it and read WebmasterWorld. This was before blogs existed and way before YouTube videos.

Learn HTML.
Take a class in PHP.
Then take a class in WordPress or better yet start building websites with it.

There is lots of advice out there but some of it is by people who are better at promoting themselves but who know nothing about coding because they don't come from an SEO background. They get their information from blogs and have few original ideas. They excel at rewriting existing content then republishing it, regardless if it is correct or out of date.

Here are some reliable names:
Bill Slawski - Read his blog
Dave Davies (Beanstalk Internet Marketing) He and Jim Hedger have a podcast, Webcology
Follow Cyrus Shepard on Twitter

Read WebmasterWorld. Get an internship somewhere. Work in an office or a restaurant as a waiter as you learn.

Give yourself five years to become adept. There's a lot to learn.

The worst SEOs are the ones who read online for a year or two and think they know everything. They are too ignorant to know they are ignorant. Don't be one of those.

Good luck!
;)

Roger Montti

I forgot to mention my two most used resources:

[w3schools.com...]

[w3.org...]

Learn HTML.

Make sure it is HTML5!

Wow, I didn't expect to get so many detailed answers. Thank you guys for all the advises! The first step was made, now I created a plan for myself and will start my SEO learning journey.
Many thanks!

Having a PLAN is actually step one! Congrats! Can't tell you how many clients in the past have had nothing more than a "desire" to be on the web.

Whew!

Get all the "mechanicals"* done, but pay attention to Don't Do Something Stupid!


^{* HTML5, CSS, any programming/framework/database, and develop your CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT!}

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Lots of good resources out there, subscribe to moz top 10 for an ongoing round-up of good articles from various sources.