The Month After
Forgive me blog for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last post. So much has happened that is blog worthy and SEO related.
October 1st I found myself in Seattle, sitting in rapt awe as Rand Fishkin explained SEO gospel.
SEOMoz’s SEO training was awesome. Now, I’m a newbie, so please remember that I see things from that perspective, but I was amazed. I think my head was going to explode. The “training” could better be termed “The State of Search 2007”. Rand pretty much started at the beginning and explained the what, how and why of SEO.
It was great!
More “expert” people might say that it was to basic, but it was exactly what I needed.
I came away with two key things:
1) A Filter. There is so much crap information online about SEO. It VERY difficult to decide what is and what isn’t: useful, accurate and unbiased SEO information.
Rand gave a exact view of where the industry came from and where it is now. Based on that information it is easy to see and filter out bad / outdated information.
2) I learned that I think to small. I had a bunch of little questions that I wanted to learn the answers to. What I learned instead what that I wasn’t even thinking in the right scale. The minutia that I was worried about was so irrelevant that it didn’t even matter. Real SEO’s are playing a much bigger game.
I think more than anything the training was a mindset changing experience. It took a couple days to let everything sink in and recalibrate my thinking.
The most exciting part… I found out that I am at least headed in the right direction with my own projects. That was encouraging.
Now on to bigger and better things!
PS: Thanks Rand! You rock!
SEO Newbie
Disclaimer: I am NOT a search engine optimization expert! Everything you see here are my musings and should not be taken as professional SEO advice.
Ok with that out of the way, let me explain why this site is here.
This blog / site is really here to help me. To give me an area to take notes about the stuff I am learning and trying. Without giving away the site / project involved, (ie: trying to avoid bad cross links and too much shameless self promotion), I want to experiment with various SEO techniques in a controlled manner. I have 10 small sites to experiment with (they get between 30-200 unique visitors/month). I want to see the effect various techniques can have on a site and on traffic.
By not mentioning the site or keywords involved, I think I can keep these little experiments free of outside influences. But at the same time have the numbers and results open to public debate. The possible side effect being, that people are welcome to give suggestions and comment.