Little Things Matter Most in SEO

Search engine optimization is extremely complex. It gets more and more complicated with every passing year. In fact, it can change dramatically every couple of months it seems. When you are just starting out with online marketing you have to start out with the big picture. It's like taking a picture of a house. You have to stand across the street and adjust the camera lens out wide to get the full scope of the property.

When you are just starting out with SEO, this is the view that you get. You start to learn the very basics of what search engine optimization is and how it works. You learn about the general parts and pieces of SEO strategy, much like you see where the house stands, the yard stretches out, and the storage building sits in the back of your picture.

The problem with this wide-focused, overall view is that you don't see all the little details that go into SEO. You might see the house in the image, but you can't make out whether the paint is chipped on around the windows or if the blinds are open or closed. You just see the most basic lines with some changes in color between objects.

This is a good start, but if you are interested in purchasing this house and moving your family in for years to come, then you will need to get up closer and make out all the finer details. This is essentially what you have to do with SEO. You need to learn how it all works in general, long distance terms, but you need to figure out the finer details before you can really put it to work and become highly successful with it.
First Steps

You can reach some level of success just by figuring out the basic details of how search engine optimization works. You can figure out some basic strategies that have worked for others and implement them on your own websites. You can mimic studies and research ideas that you read about on the SEO blogs.

The problem with this is you won't completely understand why these things are working for you. If they aren't working for you, then you don't know exactly why. This means you can't fix the problems so your strategies work better. You don't know when to scrap a complete strategy and when to hang in there and give it more time to pay off.

This is the danger of not knowing the fine details of the SEO picture.

Stepping it Up

If you are just playing around and learning with your projects you may have the time to just keep reading the blogs, trying new things, and piecing it all together as you move along. If you don't have a ton of time to waste experimenting and learning over time, then you should work with an SEO professional while you learn. This speeds up the learning curve and ensures that you don't make major rookie mistakes that come from only viewing the photo from across the street in the wide angle.