'the theory is easy but the practice is killing us' - this applies perfectly to SEO. You can learn the basics very quickly but it will take lots of time to put in practice what you know in theory.

I want to learn SEO too. can anyone give use some idea?

No one can give a time period of learning SEO. It is a on-going task. You will find you must learn all the times.

If you take a couple hours to reasearch, you should be good. That's how I learned

As it has been said before, you can learn the basics easily, but things change all the time in seo and you have to keep up with the change or what you know will be obsolete...so as long as you keep up to date with everything it's not that hard

Its tough to say how long its going to take you to learn it. You just gotta get in there and get your feet wet, its the only way. Unless you wanna pay someone.

If you want to learn i higly recommand

Aron Walsh Seo Book

It takes time reading (constantly) testing (constantly) and personal ideas/inovations (i allways adapt some things to my personal use...)

SEO is change over time,it changes base on many things,what consider Good seo tips today would be bad on next,it require more years to get all updated,to learn seo it simply need open minded and patient

Learning will never end due to lack of resources. The best thing is get practiced with best results. Then we can allocate a time slot to learn and work with SEO. basically we need 3-4 months to do some research in SEO.

I suppose it takes on the avg about a month?

Understanding SEO is easy, but putting it to use is the part where most people give up.

It's also true that you must keep yourself updated to the constant changes. For example, Google used keyword meta tags for ranking, but not anymore.

A growing trend is using Social Networking Sites especially twitter and facebook.

I have some articles on my site murimo that might help too.

The length of time it takes to become knowledgeable in SEO is not that important. It is amazing how many so-called SEOs believe that there are actual resources on the Internet as well as from various books and forums that entitle the reader/attendee to become proficient SEO specialists. And the search engines themselves do not want to release any important inside information about how they search algorithms work (i.e., Page Rank of Google.com) even at the company sponsored seminars. Therefore, there exists many “secrets” which when collected over the years gives a minority of SEOs a special advantage and these SEOs can garner any price from clients who expect and demand high search engine rankings of their websites. Yes, there’s a special and very secret formula that can be activated with proper web design, placement of critical metatags, choice of host provider and timing which in the long run, achieves the goal of high search engine placement of major websites.

It can sometimes take years to learn everything about SEO that you need to know but you can get up to speed in a few weeks and understand enough to get by.

It isn't necessarily understanding SEO as it is implementing it though, linking is a pain in the neck when done manually.

SEO learning is never ending and continuous process since search engine always introduce new algorithms and seo expert have to go thru the new terms for proper result

agree to smith..seo techniques are not constant so there is no time limit