The Most Effective Way to Become an SEO Master

Posted: 11 Jul 2012 07:09 AM PDT

A couple of months ago a friend of mine asked my help with one of his websites. It is an online store that sells sports equipment, and he hired a local web agency to revamp the design and the site structure.

Long story short the agency completely destroyed the optimization he had on his site, changing all permalinks, putting the same title tag on all pages of the site and so on. As a result the good rankings he had disappeared over night, and he was pretty pissed.

He set up a meeting with the agency to discuss the issue, and he asked me to go along with him to back him up and to give my take on the issue.

After talking for 5 minutes with the guys who owned this web agency I realized they didn’t have a clue of what they were talking about. I pressed them a bit with some technical questions and one of them said:

“Hey man, I know this stuff, I am even doing the Google course!”.

To which I replied:

“What Google course? Google doesn’t offer any SEO course officially.”

The guy started mumbling and couldn’t explain what course he was talking about. Then I asked them:

“Okay forget about courses and books, just give me the URL of a couple of sites you managed to increase the search rankings and the traffic. And please show me the Google Analytics so I can see the organic traffic numbers.”

Silence…

In the end the guys admitted that they didn’t know much about SEO, and I gave them a to-do list of things they should do to fix my friend’s website.

But my point is: there’s only one way to effectively learn and become good at SEO, and that is by getting your hands dirty and doing it.

Sure, books and courses can help, and there are some good ones out there, but all the books and courses together represent only 10% of your learning curse. The rest will come from hands-on experience. From building 10 websites from scratch and failing with 9 of them, while making one to the top of the search rankings and seeing your organic traffic explode.

Only when you try to do the stuff yourself you’ll understand and learn what works and what doesn’t, which methods are effective and which are not.

I was inspired to write this post after reading a similar post on Shoemoney’s blog: If You Are Such a Hotshot SEO, Why Are You Trolling For Clients?.

If you are starting to learn about SEO stay tuned for tomorrow’s post as well, when I’ll review a set of SEO tools that can get you going a lot faster.