Digital Marketing, specifically SEO, can be a difficult field to break into if you don’t have a website of your own to build and experiment with. To that end, I suggest any folks looking to get into digital marketing to build a website and practice on it as a live test of their skills. You should pick a website to develop that you have a genuine passion for rather than making your first attempt on a commercial endeavor or something more business oriented, unless of course that’s your passion and you can get excited about writing about it.

Back in the olden days, the only real option was to build something yourself in HTML and CSS, and you had to get to the server up a snowy mountain, uphill both ways, I suggested to folks that they take the W3Schools courses on HTML, CSS, Javascript etc. These courses allowed you to learn at your own pace and had some cool little modules baked in that let you test code, and mess with the concepts that were being taught in real time.

Flash forward to current times, you can take a number of courses dedicated to web design, Google analytics, SEO or Social Media that have curricula specifically tailored to E-learning, rather than a bunch of modules that were super cookie cutter.

Rather than needing to extract your basic SEO acumen from rambling conversations with various SEO personalities, there are a number of guides, ebooks, and how-tos that contain a wealth of information that one used to have to piece together from a ton of different playbooks and resources. I’m talking about the days before Moz and the various “search engine” news publications where you can extract tips on a daily basis. In the before times, in the long long ago you had to bow and scrape to get into secret networking groups to learn even what is considered basic tactics now.

Some of my favorite guides are:

• The ol’ bible of beginners’ SEO from Moz
  • https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
• Any number of the guides on SEO
  • https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ebooks/
• Intellitonic’s SEO Ebook which features basic tactics and guides to guides
  • https://intellitonic.com/digital-marketing-essentials-ebook/

Here are some of the courses pertaining to web basics that I’ve personally found valuable:

General Web Tutorials
• https://www.w3schools.com/
• HTML
  • HTML hub: https://www.udacity.com/blog/2021/03/html-web-design-anything-and-everything-you-need-to-know.html
• CSS
  • https://www.udacity.com/blog/2021/03/css-basics-beginner-friendly-guides-to-css-to-get-your-designs-off-the-ground.html

There are also tools you’ll need to measure your progress and make sure your SEO work is on track. These Google tools will tell you how much organic traffic you’re getting, what keywords they used, and what they’re doing on the website:

• Google Analytics
  • https://analytics.google.com/
• Google Search Console
  • https://search.google.com/search-console

Once you have your first website off the ground, you’ll have your own sandbox for building your SEO skills, which can then branch out to the business world.