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Back when the internet had just started becoming popular SEO was a function that only a few so called gurus knew how to do. It was mostly trial and error processes that sometimes worked, yet often did not provide the traffic increases we hoped for. Quite a bit of what was done was simply making changes that seemed to be right, and then watching the listings go up or down to know if it was working or not. Nothing was just plain known back then and everything had to be figured out. You needed to really apply yourself and your time to figure out what made the algorithm happy, and what didn’t. Today things are quite different. Now there are a set of known techniques, things that really need to be done, that will get your site to be search engine friendly. It’s all code updates, content changes and inbound linking today.

Back when I started doing this optimization thing the term SEO, or optimization for that matter, wasn’t even known. At that point in time the engines utilized the meta tags to rank a site. The site that had the most repetitions of a keyword turned out to be the one who ranked #1 for it. It was crazy times. Google wasn’t even online yet. All you had to do to be the #1 listing was add keywords to your meta tags. It was an incredible easy time to make some money online.

We learned back then that the title tag was also important and things like this began to be some of the work we always had to do. The meta tags fell to the wayside eventually because it was such an abused system. Search engine algorithms had to become more sophisticated and find some other method to figure out what your site was about, and which out of all the sites was the most important one. To further complicate things the ‘net was growing in leaps and bounds and sites were popping up like kernels of Orville Redenbacher popcorn. There has been no more exciting, captivating and eye opening time of life for me since the sixties, which is when I grew up. Woodstock and everything!

When it was realized the optimization of a site was required if you wanted to be a successful business the whole idea of SEO, or optimization, was just starting to take shape. Frankly, I had no idea what to do to approach these new requirements that the engines had, and of course, they didn’t let you know what they thought was important! Slowly, by trial and error and gains and losses, we all began to figure out which things we could do that would help a site. A lot of common sense went into all this research and trial and error. We also discovered things that we definitely did not want to do.

Over the past years all of that work that used to be kept secret, or was very complicated and experimental, is now all common knowledge. Along with this new status of SEO as being common knowledge comes the ability to learn how to SEO yourself. You can take a seo training course, or you can go online and learn it from the many sites that have blogs and forums. Today all of that trial and error, and experimentation of yesteryear, is all set standards and regular procedures.

There are quite a few ways for you to learn SEO today through online tutorials and courses. Be sure to choose a SEO tutorial that will show you the coding changes to make as well as provide information about inbound linking and how to begin generating these valuable backlinks to your site. Today, it’s all a matter of learning what SEO is and then getting the job done … it’s no longer a specialty field that you need to hire a technical guru for. SEO has settled down and become a standard part of web development.

Robert (BK) Kelsey runs Ethical SEO Service and offers Ethical SEO Training as an affordable introduction to SEO (enough to optimize any website), as well as an Advanced SEO Training Course.