How to Learn SEO? (in 10 Steps)

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” ― Aristotle

First of all, my sincere apologies if you land on this page from Google (or any other search engine) hoping to find valuable SEO tips and shortcuts to learn SEO in record time and now feeling angry because of the lack of “real” SEO tips.

This post is more about learning how the learn SEO by doing it; rather than how to learn SEO.

Loads of people read loads of great SEO blogs, follow loads of great SEO people on Twitter, go to loads of SEO conferences and seminars and spend countless hours trying to learn SEO. Does it mean they can do SEO?

Nope.

Here is the truth: SEO means nothing unless it gets done. In fact, this I believe is the biggest mistake of any learner in any learning activity, spending so much time on theory (learning) but not enough time for practice (doing).

Here is my 10-step SEO learning for someone starting to learn SEO from scratch.

1-) Go to Twitter and search for people who have “SEO” in their bio. Find a few SEO experts that seem trustworthy. If you can’t, ask people to name a few SEO experts that they learned a lot from. You will come up with a few names.

2-) Then check their Twitter profiles to see who they follow on Twitter.

3-) Follow all these people.

4-) Take a look into all the people that you followed ( it must be a pool of 50+ people by now) and see whose writing style you like the most and pick 2 people whose writing style you liked the most.

5-) So now you have 2 experts that and you can relate to their writing style. Perfect. Go to their blog and explore their blog posts and create a “reading plan”. Read two articles from each expert every week and do exactly what the article says. Again, here is the key point.

Do exactly what the article says.

Learn the theory and immediately follow with practice.

6-) Create a blog (does not matter if it is a free blogspot site or a WordPress blog or whatever, you will figure out the details later) and write what you learned. Do not worry much about the style or aesthetics or what, just write one blog post about what you have learned thus far.

7-) Send your writing to the experts that you learned from. Tell them that you learned a lot from them and ask them to read your posts and provide feedback. Publish your writing on Twitter/Facebook/Reddit and SEO-related forums and ask people what they think.

8 -) Re-write your post according to the feedback that you received from the experts and the SEO community and re-publish your updated post. Repeat the 6th and 7th steps again.

9-) Now, move to another topic – SEO specialization and do what the experts say.

10-) Repeat, repeat, repeat and repeat.

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.” ― Benjamin Brewster