Learning SEO

[Q]

I know this isn't really 'programming' but I thought this would be the most appropriate place to ask.

I am pursuing a degree (BS) in marketing, and am going to be a senior next year. I want to use my degree to work with online marketing, mainly in working with search engine optimization. I worked for a web company this past summer, but didn't learn much besides using Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing.

How can I get more practical..well practice..with learning SEO in more detail?
I have seen job listings looking for someone with knowledge in SEO, brand building, PPC knowledge, etc and this is the type of work I want to do. I am having trouble finding internships for this though (I'd even work for free, just to learn) in order to get more hands on practice.

Any tips?

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

Given the nature of the industry, you have precisely 3 options.

1. Experimentation
2. Find someone who does it for a living, and get them to teach you.
3. Industrial Espionage.

3 will tend to get you arrested. 1 is time consuming. 2 sounds nice, but any current techniques become rapidly outdated, and you (and anyone teaching you) has to fall back to 1.

The reality of the situation, at least on the natural side, is that any SEO knowledge you have will necessarily become outdated rapidly. It is, after all, in the best interests of the Search Engines to prevent SEO from really working - they want to find appropriate content, not well optimized content. And if they were to stop, their search engine would thus not provide good results, and people would stop using it - meaning optimizing for it would be utterly pointless anyway.


As for branding, PPC and the rest, that isn't really SEO at all - it's just good old advertising, and certainly their are universities around who could teach you that.

 

[El Guaraguao]

Well, my source of SEO techniques\references, just went to shit. mininova had some pretty good eBooks on learning SEO. Since mininova just entered fail-world, I really don't have any good definite resources right now. But I would suggest looking on other torrent sites for some good SEO ebooks.

 

[troytime]

I'm an SEO would be happy to help out.

Start out here
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization

Some of the stuff in it are out of date (like overture and wordtracker)
For keyword expansion and research, stick with the google external keyword tool (just google 'external keyword')

the seo toolbar from seobook is pretty handy for analyzing your competition.

Are you on google wave? I've set up a wave with seo resources (i have an apprentice seo right now and we're using wave to share info)