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No, don't panic! I'm not about to get all biblical on you today. Instead I want to encourage you to open your eyes as you wander around the Net and start to see things that will help you develop your knowledge as you learn from what you're seeing.

You see, we should always be learning from what we see around us. There are so many examples of what to do and how to do it our there on the Net, yet we don't always notice those examples and when we don't notice them we don't learn from them. Sometimes those lessons that are there just waiting for us to learn are far more valuable than anything we might pick up in a tutorial or on a Webmaster board.

Take search engine optimisation for example. Most people look to the various search engine boards and search engine optimisation blogs for the help they need to understand the process of optimizing their sites and pages for the search engines. Sometimes they'll find the information they're looking for ... but more often than not they're going to pick up some rubbish that's not going to be helpful for them at all.

Yet there is one place that they can always find search engine information that is guaranteed to be helpful and correct. But people don't look there; it doesn't even cross their minds that the search engine results pages have a heck of a lot to teach each webmaster. You don't even have to go to any of the listings on the results pages to learn some lessons ... just the listings on the results pages can teach you things.

Don't believe me? Type a keyword phrase that's important to you into Google and have a look at the first search engine results page that Google returns. Check out the words that are highlighted on that page; not only in the links to each website but in the websites' descriptions as well. Do you see anything there in those lines of text that catches your eye?

Are all the words that Google has highlighted exactly the same as the words you typed into the search box? Or are some of those words that Google has highlighted variations on the words in your chosen term?

Just as a trial ... to see if I could replicate in some other place what I had found for a local search term where I live ... I typed in - photographers in Reno - and found that Google was also interested in telling me about photography in Reno too. Now if you were building a website for a Reno photographer what does that tell you about the keywords that you could be using?

In some places the example is even clearer. Every one of those Reno examples includes the word 'photographer' but in smaller towns you might find - as we did - that the word 'photography' might also be picked on a site up by Google and returned on the first search engine results page even when the word 'photographer' doesn't appear on the web page that Google is listing.

Now that really should tell you something about search engine optimisation and it's something that you probably won't hear on search engine boards. But it's a lesson that's waiting for you on just about every search engine results page if only you're alert enough to see it.

And there are lots of lessons just like that one out there on the Net. Those lessons are everywhere; they're on your own sites, they're on competitors' sites, they're on sites that are totally unrelated to what you do on the Web, they're just sitting there waiting for you to see them and understand what they're trying to teach you.

All you have to do is to be willing to go looking for answers yourself instead of relying on others to spoon-feed you what you need to know. The chances are that the lessons you teach yourself will be far more important to you than what you might pick up from others.

The same principle applies to whatever you're doing. The answers are out there and the sooner you go looking for them the faster you will develop in this industry ... or any other for that matter. The longer you remain dependant on others for advice and help the slower your development will be and if you really want to get ahead then get out there and seek out the information that you need for yourself.