I'll admit i started (and still am learning) on here... just starting with the basic tips, and learning as i went along
I already had some programming experience and things so it wasn't to difficult for me. Already knowing about <title> and <h1> tags, I just didn't realize how they impacted the search engines. I read about it on digitalpoint.com. Also, websitegrader.com was helpful. And this link helped me find out what most pro's thought was the most important: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
By surfing the web until it all sunk in and the puzzle pieces started to fit together. Signed up for digital point in July 2007 and didn't start using it effectively until a few months ago. I bought SEO Bible in Dec. 07 and couldn't make heads or tails of it and gave it to a friend. Now I read it and find that I have come a long way without it.
hmmm... my brother teaches me allot... friends in this field... and im new at forums.digitalpoint.com which my brother reckoned me to join, its great great help...
I first learned SEO through DP. Reading this forum has expanded my understanding on this field. Then I read Aaron's SEO book. I wasn't that impressed. I felt that I had learned from forum sites everything that he talked about in the book. Still the book is popular these days.
Honestly I learned most of my seo tips from the book HTML for Dummies. I was trying to learn how to build websites then when I started to get curious about seo and doing some basic research I quickly realized that the main ingredient to seo is proper html formatting....Go figure. That was just a short 16 months ago and now i have my site ranked number 19 for the keyword phrase Internet Marketing Techniques. The site is only 10 months old and has been in and back out of the sandbox (Google of course). For seo tips that work see my signature.
My learning process started in the forums of SEO where I picked up tips from seo gurus and applied them to our sites in the hopes of achieving rankings.
From documents of my former SEO specialist, then Danny Sullivan, some ebooks. Meanwhile I had ab 10 sites to do SEO. It was in 2005...
+1 I started learning SEO from my experience owning and running a oscommerce shop selling consumer electronics. keep wondering why i wasn't getting any sales and no traffic even tho i had submitted the website to GOOGLE. One of my best friends basically taught me the fundementals of Online marketing and SEM, and pointed me to forums such as Digital Point, where I found new ideas and if there was anything i didnt know GOOGLE was there to help. Basically with a lot of trial and error, and been flexible and open to new ideas i was able to grasp SEO and evolve with the industry. I don't think I ever read an ebook or an actually textbook on SEO, mostly everything i learned was from forums and websites. IMO You don't need to attend University to be good at SEO, the information available to everyone on the internet is going to be much more useful then textbooks still telling Uni students that Meta Tag keywords are still been used by GOOGLE.