A few months when Matt Codingtton made a poll titled “is SEO easy?“, most of readers answered “yes, it is“. Is it a common phenomenon when something becomes very popular people just start to talk about it as an “touch-and-go” plaything?
I consider SEO to be a very complex issue so I do think dividing it up into percentage proportions isn’t a good idea. Honesty I do think third point of my little list describes the biggest part of Search Engine Optimization, in fact.
1. Obvious things
Basic information about how the search engines work. Let’s say this knowledge was completely described in many books and tutorials. You can do a search for tutorials on blogs like one written by Hamlet Batista, also I can say internet forums might be a nice source of SEO knowledge for a newbie (it’s very time-consuming, they’re all jampacked by birdseeds & fairy tales…). If you don’t have much time for doing that I highly recommend ebooks, some of them could be very useful.
2. Advanced issues
Good on-site optimization, using mod_rewrite on your own, planning a good link frequency for respective keyterms, estimating the link value, getting the spam pages seo backend indexed, choosing domain names… In short all things that take much more than 30 minutes to learn. Most of them were described on blogs about SEO (including this one 
), as well as in other places of web. As always some how-to’s might be dangerous for your sites (yes I’m serious so those of you who just begin the game - don’t forget to be careful…)
3. Die-hard SEO knowledge
Let’s say as always there’s a bunch of secrets that no one speak public. There are only three ways to find them: figuring them out during your own ramblings, discussing with other folks interested in SEO personally OR robing somebody blind (guess it’s the most popular option). To be honest sometimes you can find a nice tip, for e.g. recently I read about getting free content from Google Code, or creating subdomains by other people accounts with a very pesky cPanel trick but I’m afraid it’s not even 1 percent of opportunities. There must be so many indeed
August 27th, 2007 #
One rule never changes. Get good (unique) content on your blog and you will prosper.
August 27th, 2007 #
Yeah right, but unique doesn’t mean good, in fact. Unless there’s a way to generate unique crap that may be good haha
Anyway, without a batch of strong links your sites will be bitten, even as write as well as editors from New York Times do
August 28th, 2007 #
Bart - Thanks for the mention. Please note that my blog is not for newbies, quite the contrary.
I use analogies and illustrations to make my points clearer. When I didn’t do that few people could understand what I was actually saying.
Please follow the links to the authoritative sources I use to back my posts.
Thanks for your feedback
August 28th, 2007 #
Oh c’mon Hamlet do not take it personally, I just wanted to give you a linkback. You know your blog is pretty noob-friendly written (comprehensive how-to articles, analogies & illustrations), which is an advantage and surely doesn’t mean it’s dedicated especially for noobs, right?
August 29th, 2007 #
Bart, I know you just wanted me to comment on your blog.
You succeeded!
September 2nd, 2007 #
Are you kidding?
September 6th, 2007 #
SEO is pretty easy if you know the basic principles. Getting images indexed is even easier, I’ve been on and off of page 1 google images results for keywords like “jenna jameson” and “jessica alba” it’s all about feeding the googlebot what it likes to eat.
September 6th, 2007 #
Okay so you can say math is easy ‘coz two plus two does equal four, don’t you? But what of the integrals, matrix, advanced equations, combinatorics and other cool stuff? Is it easy, too?
No, OBJECTION - this is NOT just a simple touch & go, right?
September 24th, 2007 #
Each component of SEO is pretty simple but it’s combining these into one successful strategy that is the hard part. Anyone can signup to 1000 directories or buy links etc but you have to know what to do, how often to do it and how to fix it if it has a negative effect. It ain’t simple like people say.
September 24th, 2007 #
That’s exactly what I say, you got it!
December 3rd, 2007 #
I still contend that SEO is easy, and additionally, dare I say, pointless to waste extensive time and effort on.
If you have decent content Google will find you and present you at the top of SERPs, if not, virtually no amount of “SEO” can help you.
December 7th, 2007 #
Unless you make money on it, and one hundred people want to rank better than you