At the start of last year, I hadn’t even heard of SEO, but last month one of my client’s webpages moved up the rankings and overtook their competitors as a result of my efforts.

By rights, they had slim chance of getting to the top of the rankings as their competitor is a brand that almost everybody has heard of.

It was a two-month long slog, dragging their SEO up page by page, post by post, until we finally claimed victory.

To get to that stage, I had to teach myself everything I now know about SEO practices.

From the very basics to implementing them in a real-world scenario.

Here’s how I taught myself SEO, and how you could too.

Learning is like an onion – start at the core and work your way through the layers

To paraphrase Shrek – Learning is like an onion.

The core of the onion is the most basic principle and with each layer you go out from the core the complexity increases until you reach the skin – the most fragile and complicated topics of all.

To learn effectively in a field as dense as SEO you need to start at the beginning with the most fundamental principles.

Then, work your way out to the more nuanced and lofty subjects.

For SEO, I would recommend you start with keywords. It is a natural starting point and leads to further investigations in numerous ways.

After you have learned about keywords, I suggest you read about:

• Meta descriptions
• Geographic considerations
• Backlinking
• Internal/external linking

Integrate what you have learned and apply it to your current role

I’m a copywriter, so for me this was easy.

When I posted a blog, I just made sure I had thought about the keywords, the links, the readability, etc.

By doing so, I was getting free practice at SEO every time I did my daily work.

If you are a copywriter or write your own blog, start integrating your SEO knowledge into your work.

Even the smallest step will teach you something about SEO that could be applicable further down the line.

Don’t be afraid to get it wrong

Yes, SEO is complicated but getting it wrong is very unlikely to damage a website.

Inputting the wrong keywords or linking to the wrong site won’t break the underlying code – it just won’t have the desired SEO effects you were looking for.

Read about SEO whenever you can

I am subscribed to multiple SEO-themed journals and email lists which all provide different degrees of complexity.

My recommendation to you would be to subscribe to a couple as well.

Even if you don’t read them all, the titles could give you ideas for further study!

For beginners, try Search Engine Journal.

Or, if you’ve enjoyed this article so far and want some more no-nonsense SEO knowledge, subscribe to Absurd Insights. You’ll get at least one SEO article per week, and all content is absolutely free.