A good friend and industry colleague Roger Montti made a post on Facebook. It was nothing too controversial or deep in hidden meaning, but was a simple question....
TECHNICAL SEO?
Can't we just continue calling it on-page organic SEO?Or does calling it Technical SEO make me look smarter?
https://www.facebook.com/martinibuster/posts/10155408996788012?pnref=story
The post is linked to above and is a damn good read with lots of discussion around what Technical SEO is and how it is used on a day to day basis. Lots of different opinions were shared and many of them from the "great and the good" of SEOs.
What became apparent was many SEOs who work in the trenches every day, truly aren't that technical. Yup, I said it. The people we look to for wisdom, knowledge and answers within the search community don't know it all :)
This has been mirrored in many discussions I've personally had with search guys 'n' gals. I'm of the opinion that to be a great SEO you truly do need to understand the deep and fundamental aspects and have technical knowledge of why and how things work.
It's my aim with this training to help forge knowledge of what I believe is "Tech SEO" and increase the wisdom within our industry, making us all collectively and individually more enriched at being able to deliver even more for our and our client's sites.
I was in a quagmire and needed the simple question answered,
"How can I help our customers and SEOs in general became better Technical SEOs?"
I searched high and low, hoping to find a comprehensive Technical SEO training program, but found nothing of any true value.
The best I found was an excellent training schedule for Junior SEOs posted on Moz.com by David Sottimano. The post was great and gave a junior SEO a schedule and great underpinnings to learn true SEO.
However, there was nothing that brought that philosophy together in one place and nothing that expanded further upon it...
So I did what any SEO does when a problem is in front of them. I tried to solve it... Things will adapt and change within the course with new sections and higher quality and new content to come, but in this... the first version of the course I will aim for competence in the content, no matter it's source.
I will be borrowing heavily from work other's have already done; whether that be written content, videos from Youtube or elsewhere.
What this won't be, is a full SEO course from start to finish. It won't touch topics that are well understood or detailed information is already available.
This is the hole I am aiming to fill in our collective knowledge and wisdo and having the information in front of you to learn from and with, is more important than it being new and unique to this collection of training materials.
In all the sections in this training, I will give a base level of knowledge and information.
You should use this as a minimum level of training and further research these topics. You're an SEO, and using those skills in your favourite search engine to help find extra information and knowledge is a wise thing to do and not only expected, but essential to your knowledge expanding and becoming the best Technical SEO you can be.
Although much of this training is theoretical there are parts that you will need access to a dedicated server or VPS. I would strongly suggest a Linux distribution but you should be able to work within an 'Nix derived system, which will include BSD, MacOS and older version of Unix such as Solaris etc.
So here is, what I believe is, the most comprehensive technical SEO training there currently is. I hope you enjoy it.:)
Jason
Chief Tea Boy @ TDN Towers