SEO - How long will it take to become good at it?

justbringit89

Hi there,

So I have learned alot of Theory about SEO from doing a marketing masters but don't have the experience of actually doing SEO. Is there any website that allows you to do SEO for a mock website?

Also I was thinking of doing work experience for 2 or 3 months somewhere in order to gain experience in SEO?

Would 2 or 3 months be enough to become good at SEO.

Cheers!

pixeldesign

Why you don`t buy a domain name, upload 4-5 pages with content and start doing SEO .This will take years to learn, and hundreds of hours.If you just read from internet all you`ll find is that SEO is about link building, meta tags and choosing the right keywords.
Lets say if you start working today about 3-4 hours/day you might see some results maybe in 3 months.Search engines doesnt update their rankings every day.

beardo81

Even just set up a free wordpress page, you can work with on page and off page SEO from there. Save money on buying a domain and hosting to startup. If it becomes popular you can transfer your content over to another site in future if needs be.

pixeldesign

You don't have full controll over your files... You can't modify the code on a free wordpress blog and another disadvantage is that because wordpress is so popular, if you setup a site on a subdomain you will getting very good rankings without too much work.I would recommend to start from scratch with a unique domain that was never registered before.With 12 euro you can buy a .info domain and a shared hosting for a year.

Tommyrawr

What pixel said
Hosting from hostgator is only $4-$9 a month for basic packages and a .info domain is $0.89 (1.12 Including ICANN fee's) from godaddy.

Wouldnt hurt to try but if your looking to top google try not to get in a competitive niche with thousands of backlinks and High PR (over 5)

justbringit89

Thanks Lads!

theshamu

I have a hostgator account with one click wordpress install which is great.
Make sure you do your keyword research before you start then fill your site with original useful information, content is king these days along with some natural link building..

market myself online

Hey 89,

the best way would be to just get started using a pet project of your own. Although I'm sure you got a great grounding by doing a degree, the online world is always changing, so it would be good to try some other programs like

challenge.co/

If you are interested in working with me to do SEO then give me a shout, and we can look at some arrangement.

<Snip business details removed>

TheLordMayor

89,

As pixel design says, you don't get a lot of freedom to SEO in a Wordpress blog.

Instead I would get an account, they're cheap enough from Black Knight hosting. I went to Register 365 but haven't had a great experience with them thus far.

Then buy domain, any random one as cheap as you can get. E.g. www.bringingit89.com. It should be at most 15e.

Then think of a really obscure search phrase, like "djibouto twelve hundred" and see how quickly you can reach #1 ranking and if you make changes what kind of effect they have. Use a web pinging tool to get Google to rank your updates quickly.

Then go for a slightly competitive phrase, e.g. I went for "wedding singers Ireland", and see how high you can rank. But a word of warning, I was SEO'ing http://www.antoinetteheery.ie/ and it was on the first page for a few months, then I stopped for two months and it's now on the third page. Consistency is key! Good luck!

theshamu

I'm testing my seo skills myself at the moment and here are the steps I have taken with my project:

1) Researched a low to medium competition keyword phrase (3.6k exact searches per month for my main KW)
2) Bought the exact keyword phrase domain e.g. www.yourkeyword.com (big help when trying to rank)
3) Set up hosting plan (host gator €7-€8 per month)
4) set up one click WP install and installed Yukon - Blue theme (free)
5) Installed the following plugins;

• All in one seo
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Easy Privacy Policy
• Google Analyticator

6) Wrote a 600 word article on my main keyword
7) inserted 1-2 pictures on each page (name the picture file your keyword!)
8) wrote 5 more 500 word articles related to my niche
9) get some backlinks pointing to your main KW article (many methods to do this)

I'm probably missing one or two steps but that's the gist of how I did it and site should be going live over the weekend and hopefully start to see some traffic in the coming months. :rolleyes:

I have already ranked my company for several KW's just by doing some proper on-site seo, 90% on page 1 of google and one has hit top stop which I'm delighted about..

cormee

theshamu wrote: »

I'm testing my seo skills myself at the moment and here are the steps I have taken with my project:

1) Researched a low to medium competition keyword phrase (3.6k exact searches per month for my main KW)
2) Bought the exact keyword phrase domain e.g. www.yourkeyword.com (big help when trying to rank)
3) Set up hosting plan (host gator €7-€8 per month)
4) set up one click WP install and installed Yukon - Blue theme (free)
5) Installed the following plugins;

• All in one seo
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Easy Privacy Policy
• Google Analyticator

6) Wrote a 600 word article on my main keyword
7) inserted 1-2 pictures on each page (name the picture file your keyword!)
8) wrote 5 more 500 word articles related to my niche
9) get some backlinks pointing to your main KW article (many methods to do this)

I'm probably missing one or two steps but that's the gist of how I did it and site should be going live over the weekend and hopefully start to see some traffic in the coming months. :rolleyes:

I have already ranked my company for several KW's just by doing some proper on-site seo, 90% on page 1 of google and one has hit top stop which I'm delighted about..

Where's your target market? If it's Ireland you're better off with a .ie (yep, I know you can set a .com's country in Webmaster Tools) on a server located in Ireland (so hostgator wouldn't be very good). Another issue with Host Gator is Google now uses site speed as a ranking signal, and some of those bigger hosts' server speeds leave a lot to be desired - especially when America wakes up.

I'm not sure how steps 4 & 5 are going to teach you much about SEO, you should be learning how to do what these plugins do yourself. I'm also not sure how WordPress is going to help you learn about SEO, as, according to Matt Cutts “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO).” http://tyn.ie/3v3 - so basically it's very optimised straight out of the box, which means it's doing all the work for you. You'd be better off just setting up a simple website yourself and learning about the relationship between site structure and SEO.

600 words sounds very wordy, read Letting Go Of The Words, some very good advice on writing web content.

Best of luck.

theshamu

cormee wrote: »

Where's your target market? If it's Ireland you're better off with a .ie (yep, I know you can set a .com's country in Webmaster Tools) on a server located in Ireland (so hostgator wouldn't be very good). Another issue with Host Gator is Google now uses site speed as a ranking signal, and some of those bigger hosts' server speeds leave a lot to be desired - especially when America wakes up.

I'm not sure how steps 4 & 5 are going to teach you much about SEO, you should be learning how to do what these plugins do yourself. I'm also not sure how WordPress is going to help you learn about SEO, as, according to Matt Cutts “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO).” http://tyn.ie/3v3 - so basically it's very optimised straight out of the box, which means it's doing all the work for you. You'd be better off just setting up a simple website yourself and learning about the relationship between site structure and SEO.

600 words sounds very wordy, read Letting Go Of The Words, some very good advice on writing web content.

Best of luck.

Hi Cormee,

My target market is USA and my site has a fairly plain theme and is mainly text based so load times are pretty fast. If I was targeting the Irish market I would host here for sure.

I do get and agree what you are saying about learning the techniques used in seo, I'm actually starting a dip course in IM & PR in Sept.

The site is purely a project to see can I rank for a low to medium keyword phrase with minimal work. I know a lot of web designers using WP more and more these days because of its ease of use and quality plugins.

As regards to

600 words sounds very wordy

I don't know what you mean. I wrote an article based on my own experience that I think will benefit people and offer some good advice (in my opinion anyway :rolleyes:)

I suppose time will only tell.

read Letting Go Of The Words, some very good advice on writing web content.

I'll check it out, thanks.

Shannon18

To become professional seo consultant takes time. Most search engine does not update in everyday basis, it probably updates in months. Just follow the good strategies and keep them practicing everyday and your good to go.

market myself online

It all seems to be getting highly complicated on here. My opinion for what its worth is to keep things simple (Ive always said if I cant explain it on one side of A4 its not worth explaining).

1. Get a webpage (wordpress helps because it does most of the technical things automatically, but otherwise just make sure it has a title and some text and you are good to go)
2. Identify a keyword. (use google suggestion tool)
3. Reverse engineer a competitor on that keyword
a. type the keyword into google
b. choose one of the top 10 webpages
c. go to yahoo site explorer and enter the page url
d. see where all the links come from and see if you can do the same
4. Create links using the exact keyword term as your anchor text
5. Keep getting links from anywhere else you come across on the internet.
6. Keep doing that for 2-8 months.

simples

Lindsay

Andersy

Some people think that SEO is very simple job and is very easy job. Where as it is not as people think. It is very technical and strategic Job. Analyzing the search engine behavior against your each keyword is not easy. It needs continuous concentration.

When I tell some one about it, I relate it to Poetry and Stock Exchange Business. It has touch of these both. It is not only like practice, it is some thing which you feel and execute by default, same as poetry. And how much you practice and understand market behavior in Stock exchange, same as here is your stock exchange is Search Engine.

It requires lot of time to understand and it is the name of continuous changing and updating.

thebison

Would using wordpress be enough of an introduction to SEO?? Just for a beginner?

Trojan

For me, the beautiful thing about SEO is that it's so open-ended - quite technical issues like server configuration can have a massive effect. You can start out with the obvious big ticket items and take SEO as far as you want to learn.

market myself online

Andersy wrote: »

Some people think that SEO is very simple job and is very easy job. Where as it is not as people think. It is very technical and strategic Job. Analyzing the search engine behavior against your each keyword is not easy. It needs continuous concentration.

When I tell some one about it, I relate it to Poetry and Stock Exchange Business. It has touch of these both. It is not only like practice, it is some thing which you feel and execute by default, same as poetry. And how much you practice and understand market behavior in Stock exchange, same as here is your stock exchange is Search Engine.

It requires lot of time to understand and it is the name of continuous changing and updating.

This may be so Andersy, but as Pareto's law of economics infers... 80% of SEO can be learned with 20% of the effort (and in my opinion you could do this in about 1 week of browsing the web). The remaining 20% you are talking about would take 80% of the effort to learn (years of ongoing effort).

So for the average business owner, or beginner this is not feasible. If people need something more comprehensive then I am sure they can look up someone like you or me.

market myself online

thebison wrote: »

Would using wordpress be enough of an introduction to SEO?? Just for a beginner?

Hey thebison,

there are two parts to SEO, onpage and offpage. Wordpress will do all the onpage optimisation pretty much automatically.

So if by "learn Wordpress" you mean learn how to add pages and edit some text, then sure it will give you a basic SEO optimised site.

However the off page optimisation which is really another way of saying "get lots of links to your site". That takes a little more time and effort.

Lindsay

tricky D

market myself online wrote: »

Wordpress will do all the onpage optimisation pretty much automatically.

So if by "learn Wordpress" you mean learn how to add pages and edit some text, then sure it will give you a basic SEO optimised site.

Not so. WP is great but is not an SEO automagic wand. By default, it does little SEO optimisation automatically, even basic stuff. People need to know the extra tools and have knowledge of optimisation techniques.

WP doesn't:
do keyword/phrase selection.
ensure semantic and/or optimised markup of SEO juice.
do alt attributes automatically.
...to name just a few factors.

Additionally, WP will not do SEO friendly URLs automatically as the default is dynamic.

market myself online wrote: »

However the off page optimisation which is really another way of saying "get lots of links to your site".

Way too simplistic. It's quality links not just any old links that count. Again quality links are not trivial or basic.

market myself online

hey tricky d,

of course it doesnt do that stuff (and it doesnt do automatic link sculpting, css reformatting for spiders, h1 selection, or the washing up.) thats not the point, it was a begginner question, which required a begginner answer.

Just try an experiment to prove my point, buy two domains with phrasematch to a low traffic keyword (under 100 per day), put a perfectly optimised page on one, and put a wordpress website on the other (I know, I know, link juice wouldnt be distributed on the one page website, but this is to prove that wp does the basic stuff). Leave them for two weeks and see which gets indexed in google first. My point is that for begginners a wp blog does the job. The rest can wait until people can afford SEO fees, then Im sure they will come along to you tricky d for a really complicated solution.

I quote from the godfather of SEO here (leslie rodhe): 'a page with just a title tag can be on page 1 for nearly all keywords, the answer is links... from everywhere."

And a quick note... wp does do alt tags really easily (you seem to think that wp should automatically detect image content, which would make it an impressive bit of software), the user just needs to put them in when inserting an image. I do concede that people need to learn how to use wp, but just getting a website up is far better than worrying about the kind of detail you are talking about.

A final final note, you seem to know what you are talking about, so I would be glad to continue this discussion on another thread.

Andersy

market myself online wrote: »

This may be so Andersy, but as Pareto's law of economics infers... 80% of SEO can be learned with 20% of the effort (and in my opinion you could do this in about 1 week of browsing the web). The remaining 20% you are talking about would take 80% of the effort to learn (years of ongoing effort).

So for the average business owner, or beginner this is not feasible. If people need something more comprehensive then I am sure they can look up someone like you or me.

See, SEO is some thing else you can not compare it with 80-20 law. As I know some thing about seo and I have experience too. I can say on the behalf of my experience, you may be a little bit perfect by a lot of practice and continuous deep analytical skills for SEO.

market myself online

Hey Andersey,

I am sure you are very experienced in SEO. But I made no comparison between Pareto's law and SEO. Pareto's principle is a general economic rule of thumb which can be applied to any economic array of data.

The point is that you can be 'a lot perfect' from a little effort, and then get on with the day to day of your business. For most small businesses in Ireland spending money or execessive time on SEO for their site is a waste of effort as long as they follow some basic principles.

1. have titles on each page (which wordpress does relatively easily)
2. Get links to their website from everywhere.

Its only when you want to boost your visitor count from search results, that you focus clearly on SEO methods.

Good luck with your SEO