Resources to learn state of the art SEO

I have ranked a lot of websites, short answer: content.

Basically just follow Google's guidelines and have the content and you can rank in highly competitive areas where there are much larger players.

Wrote a lot here: https://respiroc.com/blogs/software/seo-and-ppc-search-ads

I have even succeeded with "blackhat" stuff like brandjacking, ranking first on other brands ;)

Definitely lots of creativity on BHW, from the black hat side of things. They often try to exploit things quickly in a churn and burn fashion. Most of their advice shouldn't be followed because eventually they get punished for their methods. With that said there is still tons of general marketing wisdom to be gleamed from them. Especially the older threads that go over buyer psychology and such. It's Googles favorite forum anyway, they like to keep up with the baddies.

https://www.blackhatworld.com/

I would pay attention to ChatGPT et al. Maybe that's killing SEO a little bit, no? You can't quite optimize for queries to a static model that has already been trained. Perhaps long term you can influence the next model release by carefully injecting content on the internet to be crawled by GPT models, but nothing you can do short term.

I like this one. I got it about 5 years ago but honestly it is all the white hat stuff that should work today too. And I imagine they keep it up to date anyway. https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/

I'm currently working on ranking my website. As others have said follow googles official SEO. Share your project around the web and write a lot of content. Content is truly king. As soon as I started adding more articles, my search appearance numbers really started to go up.

my favourite reference is google's official seo guides and open graph protocol.

1. they are straightforward and latest, and very fundamental

2. they are not hacky, getting them right gets my website on google's search results very well

Other than ensuring you have basics of on-page SEO right, it’s basically about good content. There are tons of gimmicky material around, no need to follow that.

Let your content be so good that people want to link back to you.

Other than that, stick with the basics and read Google guidelines (as another commentator pointed out.)

Source - My experience of ranking few of my own websites in last 14-15 years.

I think Neil Patel has the best resource on SEO https://neilpatel.com/