Hello, I'm new here !!!!

Hello White Hat!!!

Some general wonderings for a newbie...I want to get started in SEO, maybe a business etc.

Whats the best way to get certified in California and any advice on just about anything SEO wise would be appreciated.

Find a problem people are having, find those people, solve it for them, and make sure you get paid.

SEO is really easy if you're focused on the "long tail" keywords of your problem, unless of course other IM'ers have been fighting over the niche for years. Avoid those, especially to begin with, because you're not gonna rank for big general keywords like "web design" or "life insurance" without a very big budget.

To do SEO, just don't do anything to let Google know that you're a spammer. Make sure that visitors like the page they land on, make sure the backlinks and social signals look natural, and make sure the onpage stuff isn't over-optimized.

So do I need to get Google certified? Take a course?

You don't need to take any courses or get certified. Just read up as much as you can and provide the best service to your clients. If you're doing white hat seo, you shouldn't need to worry about Google taking action against your sites.

Uh, no. There is no course or certification. Most people start with a domain name and a web host. If you don't want to waste a lot of time learning how to design websites, use Wordpress. Your total investment can be as low as $25/yr for these things. Then get some people with some problems to your site and make money from solving the problem. For example, and there is a lot of advice about this here, become an affiliate for a product and get some targeted search engine traffic to the website for the problem that this product solves.

While investments are needed in order to start replicating your success and making it a larger operation, it's just money down a hole if you don't know how to succeed with this yet. There is so much free, high-quality information that I would avoid any course entirely.

You don't need a certification for SEO man. Most if not all top SEO's are self taught. Those 4 day seminar courses that promise you a certification for 2k are a sham. Only way to learn is to read and test. Look around the forum and there will be plenty of information for you to soak in and get you up to speed. Gluck

If you want to learn more and completely about the SEO than you need to be update about the regular updates of the Google. You can follow moz blogs to get latest new and updates about the Google.