This week at the Distilledathon in London, our all-company meeting taking place as you read this (if you read it before January 28th, 2012), we have a day we’re calling a “Ship-a-thon”. Inspired by hackathons across the world, we’re aiming to make waves and ship some awesome products to make Distilled, and the SEO community, better.
To that end, today we have announced DistilledU.
(logo possibly in progress)
You can sign up here to know when we launch it to the public. But let me tell you a bit more about DistilledU.
The Vision
DistilledU has been the brainchild of numerous people at Distilled, including Will, Tom, and myself. We love teaching people, as is evidenced by our SEO Events and SEO blog, both internally and externally.
We originally dreamed up DistilledU for our own internal purposes as we grow and train new hires, but we decided to be as transparent and helpful as possible, so therefore we are going to release it to the public.
As many as you know, we partnered with SEOmoz a few years ago. We see DistilledU as being complimentary to SEOmoz’s tools and resources. SEOmoz helps you to do SEO on your site or your client sites, though some SEO knowledge is required to use these tools to their full advantage. DistilledU is being created to help you learn SEO so that you can make better use of the tools and other resources available to you.
What’s in DistilledU?
I’m so glad you asked! The TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) version is that DistilledU will be a place for everyone to learn something new about SEO, or to learn SEO for the first time.
We’re creating checklists, videos, guides, linking to external resources, and generally trying to provide as much value as possible to everyone enrolled in DistilledU. We’ll also have different levels of achievements for you to attain as you move through the lessons and modules.
What Topics Are There?
Today is the first day that we have worked hardcore on it, and we’ve built out the following modules in their version 1, possibly beta-ready form. They are:
- Keyword Research
- Information Architecture
- Onsite Optimization
- Technical
We’ll be building out more materials, guides, spreadsheets, templates, and more as we go and as you tell us what would be useful!
Here are a few shots of what you will see once we open up the private beta:
A module, this one about Information Architecture. Many will include videos.
Tick off your accomplishments as you work through the modules
Test your new knowledge with flipcards (notecards for the web, essentially)
The Launch Plan
We need a few more weeks to build out more content so that DistilledU is as useful as possible to you. Then we plan to open it in private beta to work out remaining bugs and gather user feedback. Then as soon as we feel DistilledU is war-ready, we’ll launch!
Watch this space for updates. We’ll be in touch 
John Doherty is the head of and consultant in the Distilled New York City office. His work time is filled with data consumption and strategic awesomeness, while his free time consists of extreme sports, travel, and bicycle riding in Brooklyn.
Are you guys kindly offering to deliver all my staff training for me? Excellent
Looks like you have all been busy. This should be fun.
That is exactly what we are hoping to do! As I said in the post, we are going to be using it internally to train staff, and after that we will allow others to access it.
It’s a great idea!! …can’t wait for this
Thank you for sharing
So is this a University we can graduate from? I.e. will there be objective assessments and lovely badges to collect?
Looks great! The check lists are a brilliant idea. Looking forward to it
Great! I love the gamification of DistilledU… Signed up, because I think it will be an excellent way to maintain fresh my own SEO knowledge (also about basics) and because it is a great way to learn new things too and reinvigorate what you think you know well already.
Kudos to you.
Thanks Gianluca, and well said! We are quite excited to be able to share our knowledge wider and help people out with their SEO knowledge.
I am a locust for SEO knowledge, thanks Distilled and could not agree with Gianluca more, never lose focus of the basics.
Great idea!
Some stuff I’d love to see (from my experience as a consumer)
And finally – thank you guys, what a fab idea. I can’t wait to get started.
This is fantastic, Distilled crew! I’ve learned so much from you guys, from attending SearchLove last fall to Tom’s Google Docs Unleashed to Mike’s Excel for SEOs. And that doesn’t include all the fine blog posts. I predict DistilledU will become a huge hit! I’ve signed up!
Muy fabuloso! I’ve been looking for a comprehensive all in one SEO training besides the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. But this looks even better with gamification and tracking
That is the plan, Joe. We’re very excited about the possibilities.
So how DistilledU any different from Moz or SE Land, or even V7 forums? The content is already out there. How do you really differentiate?
Thanks,
Vitaliy SEO Instead
Hey Vitaliy – Thanks for your question/comment. Apologies that it was caught in the “Pending” queue for a few days.
DistilledU is meant to be a place that brings together all of the content that is out there on the Internet and put it into a digestible, understandable, navigable way that can be used to teach new SEOs, and will also provide value to experienced SEOs.
We are also creating new content and will be including a lot of our own case studies, templates, checklists, and other materials that we hope will be useful to others.
Of course, we will also link to the great resources that you have mentioned that are available in the blogosphere, according to topic, so that they are of more use to those enrolled in DistilledU.
Thanks for your question and I hope this helps.
John
The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know Socrates 470 BC
The more you know, the less you understand Lao-Tse 604 BC
The more I learn, the happier my clients are Nick Simpson 2012 AD
Boom. What a great comment.
Biiiiig SEOMoz fan. If they endorse Distilled, I can’t wait to see the sparks!
Thanks Peter! We’re looking forward to showing it off.
Great will you offer online Classes i like to learn new thing from your staff?
Online classes of sorts, yes. It’s more of a self-study program where you go through and moderate yourself. We want you to take responsibility for your learning!
Thanks Distilled
Would love to practice SEO from you Guys. You are immensely awesome people in SEO who can definitely make a lay man into SEO Guru.
Waiting for DistilledU to start soon.
This sounds amazing! And if you guys do it right – which I am pretty sure you will – this could be the first stepping stone towards a long awaited certification recognized by the whole industry. Look forward to this!
John, Is some sort of certification / recognition in the plans?
Hey Donna – This is the kind of detail that we are still working through. There will most likely be a certification of having completed DistilledU, but we are very undecided at this point as to if it will be an “industry certification” of sorts.
Hey guys, this is excellent
I’m sure that there are going to be some great tid-bits here and bit that all SEO’s can use, be they old or new
Can’t wait, signing up now!
Hey Guys,
Any recent news on progress?
Regards,
Vahe
Hi Vahe – DistilledU is in private beta right now and we are actively working on it internally. More content is being created every week!
We’ll have an announcement once it’s finally ready.
Hey – I just thought I’d update you guys here on the public beta launch: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/distilledu-public-beta/
In case you hadn’t seen it…