The Door in..

Where does one begin?

[huck555]

If you had to make yourself a search engine expert ( or appear as one) in say about 2 weeks.

How would you do it?

Books? Web sites? General forums?

What's the hook it all hangs on?

huck
sundance, utah

[digitalv]

If I were in that position ... I'd hire a real search engine expert to answer whatever questsions were asked to me.

How did you get in a position where you have to pretend to be an expert? You must work for the federal government :)

[outland88]

I would read Brett's writings. They're pretty thorough. Do a search for them. It'll keep you out of trouble with SEO and keep your site from being banned.

[outland88]

>What's the hook it all hangs on?

You haven't been watching Leonardo in "Catch Me If You Can" have you? To much HBO might be bad for some people.

[photonstudios]

SEO is really not that complicated as it may seem. The most importnat part of SEO is link development with appropriate anchor keywords linking to your site. It's the most important factor that SE's use to rank your site. Other than that, research the keywords using WT and make pages optimized for 1 or 2 of those keywords, putting them in the title, h1, bold, link etc...You can also score high for some keywords if you just link to them from all your pages on the site (good pr distribution) do internal linking structure is important too for humans and se's...There are many other little things that make an expert SEO like: web log analyzing, sitemap, quality content etc...Just keep reading the articles at webmasterworld and there are tons of seo contnet sites u can read from.

[edited by: agerhart at 11:21 pm (utc) on April 9, 2004]
[edit reason] no URL drops [/edit]

[zgb999]

Read Brett's writings and be aware that in most books, forums... you will find information that is outdated or misleading wich is difficult to discern but which might let you burn your fingers...

Be aware not to do anything that is only for search engines but try to do everything for a visitor (like that you keep out of the traps search engines have out there).

[neuron]

I have a buddy who is the only person I would say knows as much about computers as me, though his skill set shares little with my skill set.

There is simply too much information out there to know it all. In a constantly changing set of rules and accepted practices, it might be better to know how to find the information rather than knowing the information itself. Such is the nature of SEO expertise.

I put my head down about a year and a half ago, knowing the SEO scene at that time and worked steadily on a set of sites until just recently poking my head out of my hole to see what had changed, just in time to see the status quo that existed for a couple of years shift dramatically, where change is now the norm.

I would recommend you just learn the basics. the best seo is an information rich site properly linked internally and externally, and then stay tuned in to a site like this where you can keep your finger on the pulse of seo.

[layer8]

Best thing to do is walk into the meeting with a bandage on your head, explain that you banged your head and now you can't remember anything.

Act as though you are confused - one minute Google is the best search engine in the world and then say how great they used to be and that Google is a pile of rubish (THIS WILL SCORE EXTRA POINTS AND YOU WILL BE PASSED OFF AS A SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION EXPERT).

If your question is genuine take 2 weeks to learn what makes a top 5 site, use tools to build a map of the internal linking structure.

Study the 'behind the scences' aspects, think about a website as a network that links interconnecting nodes (web pages) to the network (your index page).

If all else fails, remember Brett is KING! and Google will take over the world, Bill Gates is an anagram for Blag e-List, if you blag a good e-list of words and technical phrases you will be passed off as a true technical guru my friend.

[IppTak]

Just scour through this forum. Read, read, read, right here at WebmasterWorld.com. Go all the way back into the history and old messages. That's what I did, and I can definitely consider myself as an "advanced" SEO person.

I think if you read most of the forum, you would easily become a semi-expert. Afterall, there is no ABSOLUTE answers in SEO, so collecting all the information and people's opinions will make you become pretty darn good.

Good luck.

[Harry]

I agree with IppTak. I have learned from all the people here and I find that I do much better than most people I meet live.

I've talked to SEO companies to ask for some help, and every time, it turns out the experts aren't so great after all. And I don't even consider myself an advanced marketer.

[IppTak]

Yep, I have also seen these so called "experts" charging rediculous amounts of money to help these companies....while all they needed was WebmasterWorld.com and some HTML skills.