I'm finally back in Seattle after a very nice trip to Florida. On the plane, I was thinking more broadly about the SEO industry and how quickly demand is going to outstrip supply (note the high number of SEOs wanted on CL) with regard to talented professionals. Sadly, there is no formalized training for our industry, and the learning process can be arduous and require great persistence (particularly as competition increases and new operators feel success less and less).

As a recent email to me noted, SEO is simply a form of marketing, but no university level marketing degree I'm aware of would provide a decent background for a professional seeking to enter SEO. In fact, unless you fall into the practice through experience, I'm unaware of any formalized training whatsoever. I suspect that the next year or two, however, will bring some forms of "certification" in the industry, but gaining widespread acceptance will be a challenge all its own. There are a few organizations who could muster the support to take on such a project - SearchEngineWatch is the first that comes to mind.

I did a few searches to confirm these suspicions and came away with mixed results. Dan Thies has a course that I'm sure is excellent. Bruce Clay has a type of certification through SEOToolSet (which I'm not familiar with). There's a few more that appear "real", but have no connections to anyone I recognize.

I also note that while some parts of the SEO game are teachable, others are not. For example, you could teach fairly standards form of:

• keyword research
• paid search marketing
• on page optimization (there could be some conflict here)
• canonical issues, robots.txt, .htaccess and other standard webdev protocols
• basics of link popularity
• IR fundamentals

But certain issues simply don't fit well into a classroom (or online class's) program:

• link building
• black hat tactics
• content generation
• social networking online
• public relations in the blogosphere
• link baiting
• competitive analysis (could go either way on this one)

I'd be interested to see who else takes up the crusade - it's a rare industry that has so few training options available, but such is the way in our tiny niche... for now.