Over the past few weeks I’ve been detailing various ways to increase knowledge in SEO if you’re just starting out. Somethings are simple, and some things are more complex for new users(the excel post for one).  All in all though, some stuff is pretty standard and somethings are being done differently by thousands of different people to attain the same result. It’s pretty much the ability to adapt and learn the various techniques that you can learn and grow from.

So today I figured I’ll post about the 5 simple things I started doing and why they will work for anyone that’s looking to start out or get more familiar with SEO. So here we go!

1) Read one article a day that deals with SEO

There is no doubt that this list is going to seem generic or common sense to most.  If you’re feeling that way, I hope you continue to read and expand upon what you know or deal with in the SEO industry.  This post is the basic of the basic for the simple beginner, and that simply starts with reading.

Your entire goal throughout all of this process is to never stop learning. I feel that reading one article a day works for me in various ways to keep me interested and constantly learning. Sure, you can always read more than one a day, but I feel I get burned out more, don’t process the knowledge as much, or take into consideration the focus of the entire articles if I spread out my focus to multiple pages.

Not to mention, reading one article a day assures me that there will be a never ending list of quality articles from respected and quality sites to always read.

2) Become familiar/comfortable with editing simple HTML code

You don’t need to be the best web designer in the world to practice SEO, however I do feel that learning simple HTML so you can make back-end changes to the code in order to work with SEO more is vital to the process of actually learning how to correctly do SEO.

Learn how to edit META Tags(and learn why they’re important), ALT and TITLE Tags and just get familiar with the standards of labeling things with <H> tags.  Most of all, these few simple HTML structure codes lay a solid foundation on how you’re going to create a strategy and promote your material. These few simple tags and edits will help you attain and keep on top of the web world that’s always changing around you. Being able to go in and edit the information yourself helps keep the site up to date as well as you on top of strategy.

3) Never stop planning or adjusting to what the searches dictate

The world is going to constantly change. Web habits, web searches, things will get popular/less popular, and most of all the general search population is going to look for ways to get better results for their specific targets. This is essential to lay in your mind right now, NEVER stop planning and always have a plan if things need changed.

Don’t ever go into something without first knowing the effects of what it’s going to do to what you already have established and working on your site. That being said, keyword research goes hand in hand with this tip.  Make sure to research your competitors and what they’re doing. Plus it’s always good to see what they’re doing and how it’s working for them. I like to think of it as a game, and all of this planning is just essentially a game plan specifically created to adapt and change to any other “competitor” looking to get into the ring with you.

If you always have an active and evolving game plan, then there should be no surprises for you in the future. The ability to adapt to the changing world is essential to success.

4) Document, Document, Document(learn to love Excel)

I honestly feel so strongly about this that I can’t believe I waited this long to talk about it. Learn to document absolutely every thing you can and really learn to LOVE Microsoft Excel. Excel is as simple or as complex as you want to make it. I started out just doing simple tracking searches and over time I was able to add some more in depth metrics and keyword tools to enable me to understand how the changes worked/didn’t work when applied to my specific strategy.

The even better thing is that if you document everything you do when you’re starting out, you’re learning about the value again of a strong foundation.  This way, you’ll ALWAYS have something to go back to and learn from.  You’re able to see in real time your success and failures which leads me to my most common sense tip of all.

5) Expect failure but don’t stop because of failure

I’m going to put this as blunt as possible for the new people starting out. You’re going to fail. You’re going to fail on things you didn’t even think you could fail on. However, learning to expect failure and working through it is an ability not too many people deal with in this field. It’s a large reason why you see the people who are really successful at it, and you see the thousands of people who try it and quit doing it purely because failure is a constant.

Things aren’t going to work and that’s a given, but the learning process is about finding out what you’re comfortable with and making it work for your specific strategy. Don’t be discourage when you don’t start ranking immediately, it’s a process and the time of something showing up is a variable that’s never constant.

This also provides for the reasoning that something that was a success can actually become a failure over time. Especially with no specific plan to continually progress in the SEO world. Keywords become stale/dry and will lose rankings. It’s great that the ability to keep them is pulling in searches, but like I said before, the community changes and so do searches.

So that’s it.

Hopefully someone out there can learn from these simple tips.  I have and I’m more than happy to get this kind of information out there for everyone to read.