How much time it took you to become good at SEO? And how did that help you to get your site at the top 10 in Google? st12
I think that's the beauty of it... you need to stay in the game and learn all the time or the engines will beat you... nice challenge
it happens by accident sometimes. Good is relative, you just suddenly start hitting it and your sites rank - after that things are easier
Nothing happens by accident. With billions of pages out there, if you are going to expect yours to rank just by a miracle you are in for a long wait.
What I was trying to say was that the timing is something you can't always predict. You can work for a few months and nothing happens, all of a sudden you look at your stats, and you went from 10-15/day to 300-500. At least it happened to me like that back in the days. Of course, it wasn't an accident, but it sure felt like one... That is where many newbies are lacking, the ability to see that they are actually on the right track, even when their sites are not yet ranked.
It took about 9 months worth of DP addiction. Then I had 2 months to experience the joy of tweaking a META tag and getting to #1 in Google. After that it all changed and one came the needs for linking. Then we had the time of getting to #1 by adding a couple hundred IBLs. Now I'm probably in the content is King camp. SE's (well, Google only really) have evolved, we have to adapt...
I have been at it a year or so. I agree that constant self training is essential. On the other hand I have learned to work on the basics and don't immediately try every new fad. One screw up can take a long time to overcome. As others said, content is your best friend.
I've been studying SEO about a year-plus. Still learning. Becoming part of Digital Point has increased the learning curve. It is has begun to show results, with 11 keyword phrases currently in Google's Top 10. Admitedly, though, I am not in a highly competitive niche. However, since applying (always white-hat) SEO techniques, I've seen a consistent and steady rise in daily hits and unique visitors. Daily page loads have grown from a few dozen to nearly 1,000 recently. An example: I found two relevant keyword phrases that described my site exactly. But my website was nowhere to be seen in Google searches for these KWs. So I began to apply reputable SEO techniques to these two terms (they total about 800 searches daily on Overture). After a couple of months of SEO tweaking, these two terms stand today at #8 and #11 in Google. They are #1 and #3 in MSN search results. Search engine optimization does work!
Ten years and learning. The three most important things are: 1) experimentation, 2) experimentation, and 3) experimentation. Nobody can tell you what will work best for your particular site. Experimenting is cheap and fast on the Internet.