Help learning SEO basics (without investing)

Is there anyway to make decent money online (specifically organic SEO) without having to invest money? I've been on this forum for awhile and have learned a lot but I just don't seem to be able to get the basics, unless I decide to spent a bunch of money.

Note: When I'm talking about spending a bunch of money, I'm not talking about domain registration/hosting. More to do with buying links/blasts/services and softwares. It's crappy because even if you buy the softwares you have to get into getting tons of proxies, accounts, etc.

So I try to get started on a website without having to spend any money and I register a new domain name and start making some articles with some keyword phrases that are getting a little bit of traffic and aren't very competitive. I figure.. if I can get this to work on a low-scale.. Then I can upscale.. and maybe start putting some money into it. So I work out all the keyword density rules I find on here and post the articles. Then the pages later end up getting indexed.. but not in the top 1000 SERPS even though it's so closely related to the phrase and the other 1st page results aren't related at all. So I made a post here a while back about it and was told that maybe I need to get some link juice to the page to get it started but it's maybe a bit hard to do that without spending $$ although I did try to get a few links from a few websites but wouldn't have any affect.

Soo.. Eventually just lose interest. It seems like such a basic thing. But I can never get it right. I see people on here say that they are ranking 1st page for a keyword phrase getting 100+ searches per day and they make it sound like it's so easy. Yet, I can't even find ones that are in the 10+ range. Although maybe it just has to do with my writing ability.. I'm not very confident when it comes to writing about stuff.

Any thoughts? I know I'll probably get criticized for a few things here especially for being cheap and not forking out money to invest.

Okay, it seems you tried hard to learn SEO. but it dint work for you. remember rule of never give up and keep on writing and if you find any way to do it. then share back it to tha community.

I'll help you out. Are you building links to your websites. If you are what kind of links are you building and how are you doing it?

You don't actually have to spend money to build links. Money just makes things easier and automated so you can do things on a larger scale. I agree you don't have to spend alot of money just to see some results so you know this works.

I have the same situation as u, but i think keep doing sth would the the best choice for many of us, if u are not success now, then it maybe means u should learn more right?

Is it possible? Sure.

Is it likely? No.

It takes money to make money, and these days SEO is getting more and more expensive because the cheap stuff doesn't work any more. If you don't have money to invest, you're going to get crushed all day long by the people using things like PBNs and Paid Links.

Get a day job, raise some money, and keep on learning.

Try spending more time on keyword research. You should be able to find keywords that have usable search volume but can still be ranked easily. When I say ranked easily, I mean you can hit at least page 5 by just putting up content with decent on-page SEO. KW research should always be given a high priority, but if you can't afford to spend money, then it should be absolute top priority.

eimFlood said:

Try spending more time on keyword research. You should be able to find keywords that have usable search volume but can still be ranked easily. When I say ranked easily, I mean you can hit at least page 5 by just putting up content with decent on-page SEO. KW research should always be given a high priority, but if you can't afford to spend money, then it should be absolute top priority.

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That's the odd thing though. I'm trying to put a low of effort into KW research and finding what appears to be very non-competitive keywords, but then I never show in the top 1000 SERPS.