No April's Fools stuff from us this year - the search world is overrun with pranks. I do have have an important question that I'd love to get answers to. I'll start by providing my own.

In 2001, the company that would become SEOmoz (at the time just Gillian, Matt & myself) began taking on some e-commerce development projects. Previously, we had designed static websites in Flash & HTML and done some consulting in usability, but with the addition of Matt to the team, we were ready to take on some beefier projects. We designed and developed several sites for clients and were struggling to help them get more traffic and sales through search and thus, hired a local SEO firm to help us. We had terrible luck and by mid-2002, I was lurking on forums like SEOChat, HighRankings, Cre8asite and Sitepoint (too cheap to sign up for WebmasterWorld). In 2003, we reached a turning point with one of our clients, achieving successful rankings for the first time. We took a few more clients and in 2004, were providing SEO services as part of our work. 2004 is also when the first incarnation of SEOmoz launched, providing tools, research articles and the nascent beginnings of a blog.

My learning process started in the forums of SEO where I picked up tips from folks like Donna, EGOL, Webby and applied them to our sites in the hopes of achieving rankings. The SEO blog scene was, by and large, a deserted landscape until late in 2004, but looking through the forums today, it appears the signal to noise ratio is so low that blogs make for a better learning experience.

All of this brings me to my question - how did you learn SEO? What got you started in the field?

In addition to filling out the above poll, I'm hoping to hear some stories in the comments - with formal education largely impossible, it's fascinating to hear how search marketers were able to navigate their way into the niche field of SEO/M.