Many people have stated that you can learn everything you need to know about SEO for free, from forums and blogs.

Backlink building, keyword density, meta tags, all of these different elements are well discussed in public forums. Think thats it? There are many very effective techniques are not publicly discussed.

The best way you will learn advanced SEO techniques is to do your own testing. Google, Yahoo, and MSN change their algorithms all of the time. You just can’t keep up without testing out things yourself.

Here is an example of a test I did last year. I had never registered domains with dashes so I tried it out. I did not expect any great results but I just wanted to find out if it made a difference somewhere. A lot of theories fly back and forth on the boards and some of them are BS. For anyone who has been doing their own testing, you already know that. If not, you might be in for a few suprises.

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying — reading about SEO is good: but you should be testing out the theories you read about. (In fact, you should be doing this in nearly all areas of business.)

There is no rule that you only need one site in a niche. Make a few sites for you niches and use different SEO techniques on each. Then, you can take the best techniques and apply them to other sites you run.