There are a lot of online courses that’ll teach you pretty much anything you need to know. What I would recommend to get the fullest background for free is to check out UC Berkeley’s SEO Fundamentals and Business Applications course.

Berkeley is easily one of the top 10 academic institutions in the U.S., and their public courses allow anyone anywhere in the world to access college-level studies in pretty much anything you can dream of. There’s a great story arc in Saved by the Bell where Jessie and Zach have to choose between Berkeley and Stanford.

To complete the college experience, order a pizza, get stoned, and look up Search engine optimization and every other term you read about in the lessons on Wikipedia.

Then write a blog about it and submit it to SEO Moz and all those other places people will tell you to go. If one accepts it, you get an A, and if not, you need to retake the course until you move on to the next one.

After about a year of this, you’ll be a pro, which is to say you’ll be getting paid to do it…so long as you have your own blog and each “report” includes an anchor link back to your site with anchor text like “SEO expert,” and “digital marketing consultant,” and the like.

Have fun ;P