I’m going on about this quite a bit now, but it’s worth it because we are hearing really good things from people who are spending just a little bit of time on their SEO and getting great results.

And that’s the key to this. You may feel as if your competition has you overwhelmed and is dominating the first page of Google, but really, given a bit of time and effort – you can beat them.

But yet again it comes down to the ‘skills’. You need to know what you’re doing and importantly, you need to know what not to do to get yourself ranking well – and this is where people trip up.

You can’t just get a copy of SEO for Dummies from Amazon and expect to know what you’re doing straight away. For a start, it’s a rubbish book full of out of date information (which is why you can get it for free from many places), but the main problem with books like these is they don’t give you the practical help that is necessary in order to ensure you know how and when to do the right things.

Although SEO is a pretty structured process (and we have these structures in place, written down and documented), you need to add a little bit of ‘flair’. SEO is an art and a science. Things need to be done at the right time and in the right manner, but depending on a lot of factors, you need to change what you do and when you do it.

For example, any good course on SEO will explain that you need to build your incoming links, it makes a lot of sense – but what if you check and you find that your competitor only has five links, you have a hundred but he’s still higher than you? Well, you have a different problem.

You see, many will tell you that there are about 200 different ranking mechanisms that Google uses to place your site in the results, but what are they and do you need to look at them all? Short answer: no.

You need to do enough to beat your competition and then stay on top of it so that they don’t overtake you. If you burn yourself out right at the beginning of the process and don’t follow it up (for even a few weeks) then you will lose out to someone else, because as sure as eggs is eggs, someone will now be trying to beat you.

Training is therefore a great help because a good course will give you some follow up, it will probably use your web site as a case study and it will explain how to continue doing the actions.

The best way to learn something is to do it. Get on a course, do it and learn.