Month: June 2017

I had someone who was reading my previous entries in my Learning SEO series ask about using SEO forums to learn SEO. I promised that I would write a post about the value of SEO forums for learning.

Back in 1998 I became a moderator of a couple of forums on small business and website promotion on Yahoo Groups. Those lead to me becoming a moderator at Cre8asiteforums, joining forum owner Kim Krause Berg along with a number of other moderators such as Ammon Johns and Jill Whalen.

Cre8asiteforums was (and still is) a tremendous place to talk about and learn SEO and web design and usability and accessibility. One of my favorite individual forums on the site was one called “The Website Hospital,” where people would bring their site’s URL and concerns about it, and ask questions. That was where I learned a lot about auditing sites and seeing what worked well on them, and what might need some help. This thread is a good introduction to it: Getting Started in the Website Hospital.

There have been other SEO forums that I’ve gotten a lot of value from over the years; one of those is Webmasterworld. Most of the members of that forum are practicing SEOs or siteowners, who enjoy sharing their experiences. It reminds me of a weather vane, in that people are often open with information about changes that they experience to rankings and traffic to their sites. You can see changes taking place on the Web from what they write. It is a pretty good place to use to learn SEO.

Continue reading “Learning Through SEO Forums”

There are a few SEO books and courses online that are free and really helpful when it comes to learn SEO. Some of those are more about things like Information retrieval and how search engines work, than about doing SEO. But, knowledge can make a difference, and having an idea of how search engines work can possibly give you a competitive advantage over others who haven’t had a chance to read these SEO books and learn from such resources. I’ve come across a few books that are online and free, and worth spending time with, and thought it might not be a bad idea to share them.

The first two volumes I found are ones that focus on one of the important ways that search engines understand the content of web pages, rating them based on information retrieval scores. Having an idea of how a search engine might rank a page, based on more than just something of an understanding of how PageRank works can be really helpful.

Introduction to Information Retrieval by Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze

Continue reading “Learning Through SEO Books”