In today’s world, having an online presence is a vital factor for any company no matter its size. With that said, just having a website is not enough to make your company successful online. After a website is created, it is critical to engage in SEO to make that site more visible to the people looking for its products/services. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a webpage in search engine’s natural, un-paid search results. As someone new to the practice, SEO can be somewhat overwhelming at first. So whether you are looking to become an SEO or simply learn SEO, where is a good place to start as a beginner to SEO?

Take Your First Steps – The most important thing to do to get started as an SEO is to “live” in the internet. If you haven’t already, create social media accounts for yourself and your company to get both your personal brand and your company’s brand out there on the web. At a minimum, create accounts on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. This will allow you to connect with other people and increase brand awareness.

Follow Industry Leaders – After you have set up your personal social media accounts find SEO industry leaders and companies to follow. Examples I recommend include Rand Fishkin (MOZ), Larry Kim (Word Stream), MOZ, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Journal. These industry figures share great content daily and reading this content is a great and free way to improve your knowledge of SEO. Through the art of social media, after you find a few industry leaders they will lead you to more and in no time you will have a plethora of SEO knowledge at your fingertips.

Read and Follow Informative Blogs – In addition to following industry figures on social media, read and follow many industry blogs. Like figures on social media, most blogs frequently post new content and are also a great way to learn about SEO. Good blogs to follow are the MOZ Blog and the Distilled Blog.

Do Online Training – One of the best ways to learn SEO is by doing online training. Some online training can be expensive if you are starting out on a tight budget, but don’t let that discourage you as there are a lot of free resources available as well. Some online training can be as simple as self-paced reading, while other options include self-paced classes or instructed classes. Just find whatever options best match your needs and start as soon as you can. Here are a few good training sites to try: Free – MOZ Beginner’s Guide and HOBO, Paid – Market Motive and Distilled.

As a recent beginner to SEO, these are the support tools that I found to be the most helpful to me. Therefore, I decided to share my beginner’s path to help out others looking to embark down the SEO path. Hopefully, these steps and tools also help you to get started. We all are looking to grow our knowledge, so if you have any other tools/sites that you found helpful, let us know!