SEOmoz recently conducted an seo industry survey of more than 3,000 respondents and learned that seo’s are in fact mostly self taught. Interestingly enough self employed consultants are the majority of self learners. I imagine a lot of them were teaching each other in forums, bars (don’t laugh I’ve learned a thing or two about seo over drinks) and more recently on blogs as the community shares and analyzes information regularly. Rand Fishkin advises us to take this survey with a grain of salt.
…..The survey also did not attempt to control for any particular biasing, so there is certainly over-representation by those more likely to read SEOmoz, those more likely to take surveys, and those more likely to have found information about the survey itself (via email to SEOmoz members and posts on sites like SearchEngineLand and SERoundtable or others).
Nevertheless the survey reveals some trends and provides some insights. I’m just looking at the seo training here but head over to SEOmoz and take a closer look at the entire survey to get a better understanding of the seo community.
In general, we can see that most respondents are self-taught, followed by on-site training and formal classes. However, this graph breaks down responses by the type of company a respondant works for, and helps to answer questions like “If a respondent works at an SEM agency, how likely is it that he or she learned SEO and how does that compare to respondents at other types of companies?” The chart indicates that respondents from SEM agencies, and non-self-employed respondents in general, received on-site traning more often than, for instance, self employed consultants. This is probably not surprising, but knowing this kind of difference in source of SEO education might indicate broader differences between self-employed and non-self-employed SEOs. We’ll look at differences between these groups in more detail below, and this might be a great starting place for further analysis of the data by the reader.
David, first I like to thank you for joining my blog community on MyBlog. It is nice to see people find it interesting to read my blog even though it has nothing to do with SEO!
But then so is sales have nothing to do with marketing. You can either sale or you cannot, and all the theories in the world are not going to teach you how to do it. It is an innate knack. You pick it up in bars and other strange places. You do need the basics but after you have gotten the idea of the supply and demand and the sizes, you have to learn how to shpill..:)
I tend to learn from different people, and never stop learning. Through interactivity with different individuals and social groups I tend to build and expand my knowledge.
Saying all this, I do confirm the survey is right, but good ol’ Rand would never admit that because he would not want to lose the premium members and disappoint his darling friend Vanessa and her boss Ignition Partners. So they keep saying SeoMoz is the best..:)
I hope my rant served its purpose, and here to learning on the job!
P.S. Rand Fishkin does know his Stuff, but having IP controlling them with seed money is a bit restrictive in the age of Viral Marketing.
Thanks for dropping by Igor, I enjoy the seo noise more than the signal. On the job learning is really the only way to learn anything IMHO. Yes you can get basics from courses but until the rubber meets the road you have no idea. Unfortunately there’s a lot of bs out there as you’re well aware and so I do promote some sort of training. I’m also in this part of the world, Singapore and like to hear about others living here so your blog is a natural for me to read.
Agreed with you David… For me, most of me SEO and PPC knowledge are self-learnt… from all the amazing resources that are available with just a click away from Google!
But to really get a hand in SEO , i strongly believed we need to get our hands dirty from the beginning… only when one try, he/she will know more about optimization.
Anyway, great speech for the search seminar organized by eguide. Although the self-promotion from eguide at the very end kinda spoil the thing…
See you around soon david!
There’s certainly a great deal of SEO/M education in our forums,
blogs, conferences, and white papers..slef taught as if by
“oh wow, ck this out? Did I do that?” Maybe not so much. *-)
I’m with the rest of the commenters here. I’ve been learning all my SEO by getting my hands dirty. There are so many resources out there. The toughest part is deciding who to listen to!
Hi David,
I couldn’t agree more with you! Well even I have been through a formal course on SEO or SEM, there has to be some experimenting around to know how to spot trends and to gain proper insights from the results. Same goes for web analytics.
Anyway, grab me along the next time you are speaking! I’m just a desk away!
Joanna
Good stuff, David. Agree with everything mentioned so far. As an sem firm, we’ll teach folks that come in and even have them do a course / outside training, but I’ve known far more people (like myself) that are primarily self-taught.