simples: Stick your soul and heart into it. It aint rocket science, it's methods. You need to learn which methods work best for you, which yield the best results and which you are going to spend the next 12 months, 8-12 hours a day working on. That wont be one method though but will be a mixture of techniques that work for you and a systematised approach to it.
Hobby SEO 101
Rule 1. You dont need to code, or learn to code. You have nothing to fear.
Rule 2. Onsite SEO, learn your keywords, headers, titles and meta monkeys. Place to good affect.
Rule 3. Learn what link building is, how to approach it and best methods. (trial and error) First rule of thumb though is this: Approach EVERYONE in your industry and try and get them to link to you, dont pay, but offer them a deal too good to be true (lifetime link from them if they link to you with your anchor text!) anything that sweetens the deal. 3 way links are king in my opinion, set up a sister site and link to people from that, and they return the link direct to your selling site.
Rule 4. Automated software - anything to make life easier, from ranking checkers to domain name finders. Google hates these programs, SEO enthusiasts cant stand the sight of them, but hell don't listen to them. Little bits of software here and there can help you. Anything from automating the process of finding relevant domains to simply checking your rankings on a daily basis. There are numerous excellent tools out there, just don't rely on them to do the SEO work for you, they are only time saving tools at most.
Rule 5. Patience - 6 weeks good seo work might bring in no results, failure might seem imminent and you are going bald from all the head scratching.. But do not fear! Google does all sorts of weird things and amongst them are simple things like analysing: How long has a link been valid for? How long has the host containing the link been valid for? Sandboxing the link. Calculating what sites link to the sites that contain the link and are there shared links between the 2 independent site, showing relevancy and if so.. Well who bloody knows. However sometimes it takes a long time to see the fruits of your work.
Rule 6. Any site worth a punt needs 12 months good SEO done on it to get it on top of it's game. If you are willing to put in the effort, then the site seems lively and Google notices and ranks accordingly. But it takes at least 12 months for a good SEO job to start showing "real" results, and by real i mean your site @ 150 visits per day to your site @ 1500 visits per day.
SEO aint complicated but it is something that needs learning and it amazes me how many people do not understand the fundamentals, but then again, i know sweet bugger all about astrology but i'm sure i could learn
Onsite SEO: Title, Header 1, Body, Header 2, Body. Regular Fresh Content
Off site SEO: Article marketing, relevant links, blog posts, profile links, directory links.
Time: All your bass belongs to us.
