How to Learn SEO: Part One
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) remains one of the most interesting, misunderstood, and effective branches of internet marketing. From the early days in 2002, when 30 or 40 marketers stood around awkwardly at Mountain View for the first Google Dance and management didn’t know what SEO was, to 2008 when Google was spending more than $1 million on a party for several thousand people and SEO was the hotness, to the current era of ubiquity where the inclusion of SEO is taken for granted in most web projects, SEO and how we pursue it has changed a lot. What hasn’t changed, however, is how challenging it is to learn this most varied of subjects.
As a 20-year veteran of the industry I am often asked, by colleagues within and outside of ASICS Digital, how to learn SEO. It’s a salient question because there is no degree program or even a standard path to follow; if you ask established SEOs how they got into it, you will hear many different stories. Furthermore, the internet is awash with a wide range of sources of varying credibility, and it can be difficult for new people to distinguish the knowledgeable from the merely glib.
In this post, I will begin to describe the information and skills that are necessary to become an excellent search marketer, not just at ASICS Digital, but at any company. You probably don’t have to learn all of this prior to your first entry-level job, but you should be at an intermediate level of understanding in most things by your second or third year on the job. In an ideal world, however, you’d learn SEO in the order I describe so that you don’t pick up bad habits and get incorrect ideas fixed in your head.
Baby Steps
The first thing you should study on your path to SEO mastery is marketing. No, not internet marketing, but just regular old marketing. If you don’t learn about the difference between advertising, direct marketing, and publicity, then you will not have a clear understanding of what you are trying to accomplish and you will fall for every new industry buzzword. Once you have a grounding in the basics, then you are ready to start reading Doc Searls and Bob Hoffman.
Next, you need to become familiar with the basics of HTTP and HTML.These are part of the fundamental plumbing that holds the internet together, and you should be solid on what the standards are so that when a website deviates from it, you will be able to recognize the problem. Here, you should rely on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the volunteer group that decided on the standards. The standards are published in Request for Comments (RFC) form, and are often best found on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) website because they very conveniently link to the related documents and updates. O’Reilly technical books are a widely respected source for information on these subjects, and as a plus, when technical folks see that you have some O’Reilly animals on your desk they’ll recognize that you know where your towel is.
More Baby Steps
The next thing you should pay attention to is the more modern internet technologies, such as XML (so that you can understand XML Sitemaps), JavaScript, AJAX and lazy-loading, and server-side JavaScript. Again, you don’t need to be able to write any of these, but you should be able to read them to find the points that are relevant to your work.
Your other stab at modernity should be usability. This is important for a number of reasons. First, due to the long dark history of bad SEO, many people will associate SEO with “keyword stuffing” and other poor tactics that make websites hard to use and undermine the whole point of bringing people to a website. Second, good usability is increasingly aligned with what search engines are looking for, and so good usability often equals good SEO.
The single-best free online source of information about usability is Nielsen/Norman Group’s collection of articles. From early research about how web users read to more recent findings on faceted navigation, you should read everything you can find time for. You will also find Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think” to be a very useful introduction to usability testing.
Toddling Along
I still don’t think you’re ready to learn SEO (although certain elements have already started sneaking in). I’m sorry, that may seem ridiculous, but unless you want to mindlessly repeat what people have told you about SEO and waste a lot of your time and energy on irrelevant details, you first need to learn how search engines work. The formal subject is information retrieval, and while you don’t need to know as much as someone who will be writing a search engine, you should be very familiar with the basic concepts.
In order of use, the first component is the crawler. Here it may be helpful to spend some time playing around with various crawlers that imitate Google to some degree or another, such as Screaming Frog (I use the professional version of this). (I originally used a Perl script to crawl sites, but thankfully there is commercial software to do this now. We live in The Future!).
The second component is the indexer. Here, it is a good idea to acquire a basic understanding of what an index is; if you have any friends who have degrees in Computer Science and/or are software engineers, they should be able to help you with this. You can also try making your own.
The third is the query processor. Start with a clear understanding of what is a search query. For this subject, a lot of the materials are a bit technical, but by this point in your SEO Voyage of Discovery, you shouldn’t be afraid of things that look complicated, so just dive in and do your best. By reading about how different search engines work, you will get a better understanding of what they have in common. Topics to study include stop words and natural language queries. You should probably learn a little bit about machine learning so that you can understand RankBrain.
And now we come to the most-obsessed-over, most-contentious part of the search engine: the ranking algorithm. That’s a bit of a misnomer because it is actually a collection of algorithms that work together. For this, you need to start learning about tf-idf; and co-citation and co-occurrence. Other items will pop up in your research, and once you understand the pieces you can move on to the Google algorithm itself.
There have been numerous updates and improvements over the years, so here are the minimum pieces that you should try to understand: PageRank, which was how Google used to understand which pages are authoritative or important compared to pages within a website and compared with pages at other websites; Hilltop algorithm; Panda update; Penguin update; and Fred.
At this point, you are finally ready to start learning SEO… which I will address in my next post.
Do you think ASICS Digital could be the right fit for you? Check out our open roles: https://runkeeper.com/careers/openings
