Starting learning SEO in 2017

Starting learning SEO in 2017

I always think to myself. What advice can I give to any junior SEO expert I may come into contact with. What advice should I give to younger people looking to learn SEO from scratch in 2017 or to anyone interested in SEO and SEM. 

I have at least 8 years of experience with SEO in one form or the other. I've been around, a lot of changes and search engine updates. Even before I started practicing SEO I knew a lot about it and what it all meant 
Becouse of this, I've learned a long time ago that things can change in the SEO world in a matter of months, turning everything upside down and making all of your efforts worthless with just one update. I'm prepared for all of this and I don't mind it when it happens. 

This may be the biggest problem a person aspiring in becoming an SEO expert may face in down 2017. The fact that you can't really teach it in school because by the time you end up giving an exam on what you learned everything drastically change with just one search engine update. This is why there aren't many universities that teach SEO in detail. SEO is one of those obscure domains that few understand while the vast majority may have an outdated idea regarding this whole industry. 

Here are my top four pieces of advice on learning SEO in 2017:

1. First of all, you need to make sure SEO is for you. In essence, you need to figure out if you and SEO are compatible. It may sound cool as hell "ranking" and "hacking" your way up in Google's search engine results, but you need to understand that a lot of people may find all of this highly boring. SEO is not as technical as you may think! If you have some basic knowledge on CSS, HTML and content management platforms the only other technical stuff you will need to learn are SEO tools like crawling tools, keyword research tools and general web-based tools like Ahrefs or SEMRuh. HTML and CSS with help you understand the on-page part of SEO but overall, apart from these technical aspects, there aren't highly tehnical aspects to SEO especially when it comes to content optimization and backlink building. 

If you are coming from a programming background, make sure you don't mind being less technical about stuff and more content orientated, because you will need to write custom optimized and attractive titles tags and meta descriptions as well as giving problem and highly content based information to the copywriting in terms of creating an optimized text.

2. You need to be highly creative. As I said. SEO isn't very technical. You will need to be highly creative, using power words and emotional responses in you content optimization. At least this is what I'm doing!
To top it all off there isn't a very clear way to do things when it comes to SEO. Sure you can follow some basic guidelines and best practices but when it comes to specific campaigns, choosing the right keywords and implementing the right tactics, it's all up to you! SEO need to follow their instincts and adapt as they go. 

3. SEO is a changing industry. When you learn a programming language, for example, it can be fairly easy to adapt to new updates. Sure updates come every now and the and you may need to learn some new stuff, but with SEO all of this is on a totally different level. You constantly need to read the indutsry news and I mean, EVERY DAY just to stay up to date with the news and recent changes. Not to mention you will constantly need to test new stuff as you go along as well as dropping stuff that worked last week but isn't effective anymore, today. 
So my advice is: read at least 10 articles everyday written by top names in the SEO industry and implement at least one kind of "test" (no matter how small) every day. 

4. Failing is part of SEO. If you only want to win or can't deal with failures, maybe SEO isn't the right industry for you! SEO is part gamble and even if you implement all the right things as well as the best practices, this won't guarantee you success in bringing organic traffic. So you will definitely fail sometimes and some clients may walk away, but if you are perseverent enough you will make it and end up with successful campaigns, you just need to understand that SEO takes time to implement and witness the effects. 

So here are my top 4 bits of advice for anyone that wants to start learning SEO in 2017. Feel free to contribute in the comments below!