In today’s blog post I’m going to be answering the logic-defying question: should I learn SEO before I start a blog? The answer is no! That’s a little bit like asking should I learn to be a mechanic before I buy a car. You could conceivably think that part of owning a car is actually shelling out a lot of money every time it breaks down. I should know about this as it happens to me a lot! You could think to yourself “I should learn how to repair cars before I actually buy a car”, but would that be a good use of your time? When it comes to SEO especially if you’re starting from scratch there’s going to be a learning curve, and that’s gonna take you some time to to get over. Even if you spend six months learning SEO and get down the basics, and start to build confidence, there will still be a ton of things to learn. This is why many people decide to use a search marketing agency who specializes in this area.
When I began learning SEO it was easy to go down every rabbit hole into different areas, as there are a ton of different methods and areas to learn and practice in. Learning SEO in 2009, things were much simpler than they were now. Techniques like sending thousands of spammy links to your website would actually be effective and bring you results. Nowadays, doing this will just cause your website to be penalized by Google. But, I can say if you do decide to try to learn SEO, you’ll likely be distracted by all the shiny objects, whether it’s an SEO course advertising some way that you can rank your website in minutes, or a tool that will do everything you need in a single click. There are many experienced marketers in the internet marketing niche who know just how to sell their software or course to you, so stay strong and focused on your original goal!
If you’ve been spending weeks, or months learning SEO and feel confident, now will be the time to start your blog. At this point, you may no longer have the same desire to create a blog or may have changed your mind about what you want to do with your website. Now on the other hand if you do what I’m suggesting and you start your blog now, you can still learn SEO as you go and in that parallel reality what happens is when you get to that six months or that one year milestone and you feel confident with your SEO, you have a blog with a ton of content and you can go back to and start optimizing using your new SEO skills. The important thing is that you’re already blogging you already have momentum, and you’ve created months of posts that can both appear in Google’s search results and attract visitors.
When you start your blog we can recommend one plugin to help you get started. That’s Yoast SEO, which is a free plugin that will make recommendations on your blog post’s title, description, and content. You may want to read their basic guides to understand some of the basics of SEO just so you can practice some basic optimization of your posts as you create them.
