Ways to Become an SEO Expert

Are you curious about how to improve your SEO skills? Are you a small business owner who wants to know a bit more about SEO?

Recently, someone emailed me to ask what resources I use and think are best for learning about search engine optimization (SEO). With some of these resources, you may wonder what is the relation to SEO. Magazines.com may seem like an odd choice, yet it works to help you with your website and SEO if you let it.

Below are the first nine of my top 27 resources, including websites and online training, that have helped me develop my skills.

This list is in no particular order. Here you go!

1. SEO Book: Aaron Wall, a delightful SEO blogger, wrote the big great book of search engine optimization. If you have the time and inclination to learn SEO, then this book will get you on your way. It’ll take study and work — no magic results unless you take action — yet the rewards you reap will help you achieve your online marketing and sales goals.

2. CopyBlogger: Thanks to Copyblogger, I wrote 9 Effective (and Slightly Badass) Ways to Use Facebook, which has been read way over 2,000 times in its short life.

CopyBlogger is my all-time favorite copywriting blog. It offers numerous articles about content creation, SEO copywriting, engaging your readers, and even idea generation. When I need inspiration for writing an article, I often come to Copyblogger. Top Tip from the Site: Use Magazines.com for headline ideas.

3. Magazines.com: If you create niche websites, then this is a great place to start research and uncover interests people want to know more about. You might find magazines on golf, fishing or knitting here. That, in turn, can generate ideas for you to pursue in terms of website or product creation.

What if you are not a niche website owner? You can still use Magazines.com to generate headline ideas for your pay-per-click campaigns and avoid the common AdWords mistake of not writing the right kind of headline.

4. The Thirty-Day Challenge: If you are willing to work hard for 30 days, then this FREE training may appeal to you. Over the 30 days, you will have access to videos and podcasts that teach you how to use social bookmarking sites to promote your work, how to increase your site rankings and more. It is a lot of work! So, this is only for those willing to devote the time to it.

5. Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool This will provide you with limited access to keyword research results, yet even this free version gives you some great data. If you like the tool, you can purchase a monthly subscription to WordTracker, which is an economical way to test it out.

6. Keyword Discovery: This is another research tool that provides insight into what key phrases will receive the most traffic. Once you determine there’s traffic for a keyword, then you know what you should be writing about to get more visits to your website.

7. DoshDosh: I have affection for the writer of this blog. Observe how she or he uses links inside the blog posts to encourage you to visit more pages. That strategy is also known as “internal linking.” This site provides a good example of internal link strategies as well as numerous articles on juicy topics such as gaining more traffic
with StumbleUpon. I read DoshDosh on a regular basis.

8. Bloglines: Bloglines offers a way to organize your subscriptions to various blogs and RSS feeds. I’ve created folders called ‘internet marketing,’ ‘poetry,” and a few others to help me keep my feeds organized. Once you have your folders set up, you can easily add new feeds to them and then scan through several blogs in a short period of time to check out items of interest in your field. I use Bloglines to help me keep up with the latest in SEO and underwater basket weaving. (Just checking to see if you’re awake.)

9. Social Poster: This tool is free and allows you to post your articles to social bookmark sites quickly. If you’ve socially bookmarked your articles before, then you know how time consuming it can be to copy and paste the headline, URL, tags and so on each and every time. Social Poster removes some of the drudgery by allowing you to input the information one time. Your information either appears automatically or you click and drag to input it.

Do you have favorite SEO resources? If so, we’d all love to hear about them. Please post your favorites in the comments below.

Tagged as: copyblogger, online marketing, search engine optimization, SEO, seo book