How To Learn SEO For Beginners – Part 4

If you’re here looking to learn how to learn SEO for beginners, then check out Part 4 of our How To Learn SEO series.

Following on from Part 4, the next thing you should focus on is refining the way you do things rather than searching for quick and easy shortcuts.

Seth Godin said: “Things that look like shortcuts are usually detours disguised as less work.”

Search engine optimisation in itself is a process and most tasks often require multiple steps.

And some of these so-called “shortcuts” can often take you two steps back and one step forward.

So rather than looking for things that may go against Google’s rules and guidelines (which is guaranteed to get you in trouble at some point), focus on breaking down small tasks and then improving efficiency.

For example, if you’re noticing that finding business emails takes up a lot of your time in your link building process, consider outsourcing that part of it or create something like a spreadsheet to help save time in the long run.

Maybe you feel publishing new content takes up way too much of your time. Then take 20 minutes to research some productivity processes for blogging.

Then try the processes out for yourself rather than hiring writers for £35 per article.

The next thing, in my opinion, is one of the greatest skill sets that all the greatest SEOs have.

And that’s patience and perseverance.

Search engine optimisation requires practice.

And practice requires patience and perseverance.

And like all good things in life, the greatest things come through failures.

The best way to illustrate what I mean by this is by using the topic of link building as an example.

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve heard people say things like “link building isn’t important anymore” or “backlinks are dead”.

It drives me bat sh*t crazy because they obviously have no idea what they’re talking about!!

Even Google explains that their algorithm looks at things like the “quality of content” and the example they use to define quality is that if other authority websites link to the page, which is a proven sign that the information is well trusted.

On top of that, there are numerous industry studies that show clear positive correlations between the number of unique websites linking to a page and the amount of search traffic the page gets.

And I’ve been doing this stuff for over 20 years and I can tell you without any doubt if you want to rank your website high on page 1 of Google, then you will need backlinks. There’s no ifs, buts or maybes about it! (Rant over).

So why so much hate towards link building?

Because it’s hard and boring and not sexy, but if you don’t have some grit, you won’t survive.

Now, I don’t blame people for hating on link building. After all, the process usually requires tedious boring work and contacting complete strangers trying to get them to link to your site.

But it’s all about perspective.

If you think about it like that, then yeah, it’s boring and annoying.

But if you can think about it as a way to bring something interesting and valuable to people’s attention, those emails are usually welcomed.

So as you try some different SEO-related tasks, keep your head up. Accept rejection instead of feeling down and take it as a learning experience instead.

For example, if I were completely new to link building, I’d send around 50 emails with one approach.

Then I’d measure and see how many people responded based on the number of link conversions I get.

Then I’d take what I’ve learnt and improve on the next 50 emails. And so on.

By analysing your successes and failures, you’ll always be improving and contacting strangers will become a natural and somewhat fun way to connect with other people in your space.

In Part 5 of How To Learn SEO for beginners, and after you’ve had some practice, we’ll look at how to learn SEO step by step so you can start getting insane results.

I’ll catch up with you in the next post 🙂