Is SEO Difficult To Learn From Scratch

This is yet another question from those just starting out their online ventures.

A lot of people worry, that SEO will be too difficult for them and they will never get their website off the ground.

I can assure you (no matter what you’ve already been told about SEO), that it’s very simple to follow the process of optimizing your website for search engines.

Table of Contents

How hard is SEO

SEO is a very easy process of basically making your website user-friendly.

woman shocked when looking on her laptop — *SEO is easy* but requires patience and good practice.

In general, everything below makes up for around 90% of good SEO practices:

page load speed
mobile responsiveness
secure protocol (HTTPS)
no malware or intrusive advertising
original content
eye-catching titles
image optimization
internal and external backlinks

And that’s pretty much it.

So, all of the above combined almost always guarantees very high and prominent Google positions.

Exemptions are sites with thin content, keyword stuffing, YMYL (Your Money Your Life) websites, and sites with illegal content.

How hard is SEO for a newbie

As a newbie, you cannot know everything about SEO.

If you’re just starting out, the best approach would be to learn one step at a time, however, a lot of things should be done even before your website goes live.

men standing against the wall at different heights — *Get SEO basics right before launching your new website.*

I call it a Holy Trinity – Fully Secure, Quick Loading and Mobile Friendly website.
Mr Worthy

You should get all this right from the very start.

If you’ve chosen a good server and a properly optimized WordPress theme, all you have to do is start focusing on other important things, like content creation.

Creating SEO-friendly content

This isn’t about putting every possible keyword within the content you’re writing.

It’s more of creating useful and original research, which is easily readable by humans and search engine crawlers.

As a rule of thumb, you should always aim to include your main keyword around 2-3 times in a single blog post.

SEO friendly practices and content — *SEO isn’t about the article length. It’s all about quality and post structure.*

Your article should be made of at least 600 words and contain internal links pointing out to other useful blog posts on your website.

The length of the article isn’t that important as long, as it has been originally researched, well put together, and fully satisfies your user search intent.

In fact, blog posts containing 600-1000 words tend to rank faster on Bing and Google.
Mr Worthy

Such articles are called “response posts“, and you should write around 20-30 of them from the very start. They take around 4-8 months to rank on page 1 of Google.

speed of light - disorted city highway at night — *Response posts will always get noticed and ranked faster by Google.*

Don’t create e-book-style posts of 3000+ words at the beginning, as they will slow down your whole website from acquiring good rankings.

Those articles are called “pillar posts” and take approximately 1-2 years to rank on page 1 of Google.

Such blog posts can be created later on when your website has already gained some trust and authority within search engines.

Learning SEO as you go

Each article you create and publish on your website will get you better in SEO.

You will soon realize, that writing original, thoroughly researched content, will result in your website reaching the top of Google in a matter of few months.

By that time you will know, what image optimization is, what headlines are and how to optimize content for a better read.

learn SEO as you go - basics listed — *Don’t try to learn everything about SEO in one day.*

It will all come naturally, so don’t try to learn everything about SEO right now.

Instead, keep creating interesting content, that you regularly publish on your website.

Google loves active blogs. Keep writing and Google will fall in love with your site sooner than you think.

Conclusion

SEO is constantly changing due to the fact, that search engines AI (Artificial Intelligence) evolves pretty much every single day.

Nobody in the world is able to keep up with every little change Google or Bing makes. Some changes happen behind the scenes, and those are the most dangerous to your website.