“Sandboxing” in most technical communities is a term for the stage of development where you learn by doing. You test new ideas in a sandbox. You see what does and doesn’t work in a safe environment.
What is the SEO Sandbox?
SEO is tricky, because you both have to learn by doing it and you can’t really test ideas without putting it out in the real world and letting search engines crawl, index and interpret your website.
Most SEO training providers (like Moz) teach the fledgling SEO how to do the job by starting at step one – the creation of a brand new website. This is not aligned with the real world of working in search engine optimization for a few reasons.
- 95% of the work involves improving existing websites
- Websites can take months or years to gain meaningful SEO traffic data
- Building a website from scratch is a nice-to-have skill set for the actual job
When I started thinking about how I wanted to teach people SEO, it was with a real-world, real-job scenario in mind. I want to teach skills that can be put to use immediately, and with great results.
If 95% of the work is about improving an existing site, why not let you take action on existing sites? Well, mostly because existing sites tend to be tied to a real-life business and are nerve-wrackingly high-stakes.
Again the idea of “sandboxing” comes in here! I want you to be able to access and play with low-stakes sites. I’m going to give you the keys to the tools you need, the back end of the site, the analytics for the site, and let you build or demolish sandcastles for the sake of learning.
More information coming soon!
This page is a placeholder for the exciting things to come. I will be adding links to the sandbox sites themselves (gotta get ’em indexed, after all). I’ll also be accepting applications for the beta group of trainees who will get to run through the course at a reduced rate.
Later, I’ll be reaching out for potential partners, and experts who want to offer their knowledge to the community.
If you’d like to stay abreast of the SEO sandbox news as it breaks, please pop your email in the form below. I won’t spam or sell your info, and you can unsubscribe from those like 2-3 emails whenever you want.