SEOs learn by. doing?

experimenting?

[iamlost]

Bruce nailed it.

Barry Schwartz (rustybrick) at Search Engine Roundtable notes [seroundtable.com] a recent Twitter poll by Carolyn Lyden:

...results showed 77.4% of SEOs learned SEO "hands-on", then 10.7% through do-it-yourself courses, 9.8% said they had a mentor teach them and only 2.2% said they took courses on SEOs.

To which Bruce Clay commented:

Totally agree... 25 years ago what else was there? And now, with the complexities of search and availability of training I would bet that 100% have read blogs and have thus taken these training opportunities. In fact, only a few of us are still experimenting - most just read and act.

only a few of us are still experimenting - most just read and act.

To which I’d add: most are tool driven rather than being tool drivers. All stampeding together... ‘we’ don't need no stinkin' differentiation!

Competitive advantage, folks. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of competitive advantage in the morning.

[engine]

At the start, there was no other way. There weren't many tools back then, either, and I was making good use of databases and spreadsheets.

Today you can read about tools and subscribe to make the job easier. But, yes, today, you still have to experiment and test.

[tTow]

thats true I'm learning programming in college and want to start learning SEO too

[Essex_boy]

I was just curious as how you should do, so I set a Aff site and played away !

Knew I was on to something when I started to out rank the main suppliers, some years later I set an ecom site that too out ranked the supplier by miles.... So he stopped supplying me !

[engine]

So he stopped supplying me !

That was not a forward thinking supplier: They should have offered you a job. :)

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

There is a happy medium. Do what you know works if you can reasonably expect it to keep working. As for the more shady or wild stuff let someone else do it and watch them closely for tidbits of valuable info no tool is going to show you.

As I type this I'm watching a few dozen domains that are hitting WAY above their value to the tune of 500k indexed pages+ and getting millions in monthly pageviews for pure scraped spam. Not joking, a few of them are top 10k Alexa ranked and got there in less than a year from launch.

Hard to believe... I know... but trust me it's our current reality.

[dojo]

There is so much information nowadays, it's pretty overwhelming to try learn on your own, without a plan. So I'd say a mix of few non-expensive courses (udemy comes to mind), few good SEOs to follow and a lot of tinkering on your own test websites, so that you're not messing up clients' websites.