You can get the top 10, that's not a huge biggie, it's the time taken to get there that's annoying for me though! Anything from 3 to 12 months and of course things so go wrong!
The most challenging part of SEO is keeping up with the constant changes, and how it affects real life businesses. Many people will have you believe that SEO is only about manipulating rankings, and these are the guys that have the hardest time. When it's all said and done, you are trying to increase visibility for a real business, while challenging other businesses.
There are loads of blogs you can follow, referenced below, that can give better insight into the ups and downs, but more importantly just pay attention to what could happen next, and don't waste your time with what happened yesterday. SEO is not complicated, it's time consuming. Most people in are just to lazy to do any really work so ranking and gaining visibility is easy if you are willing to work hard. Hope this helps.
All fundamentals employed in SEO are all challenging, but I think the updates are the ones which are most difficult to handle because they greatly affect the pagerank results. You are probably aware of Panda, Penguin, and the latest Hummingbird.
Nevertheless, these updates are beneficial as they increase the effectivity of NEGATIVE SEO. They usually penalize the following violators:
1. Websites with Poor Quality Articles
2. Websites that contain Bad Links (which usually come from autoapprove, non-moderated blogs)
3. Websites without real On-site Activity by any visitors compared to inbound links
You may not be a violator but you can be a victim of a violent linking. So as a part of SEO method, you always need to be careful and protect the credibility of your website.
I really hope this helps.
source: seoexpertpage.com
With all of the algorithm updates and negative SEO these days, I think one of the most challenging parts about SEO for the average site owner is knowing when to use the link disavowal tool. Obviously it has the benefit of telling Google to ignore incoming links that are doing damage, but when used incorrectly you can mistakenly damage your rankings. The post I reference in the source gets into fundamentals of the link disavowal tool a bit more.
The most challenging part is knowing which SEO service best suit you and achieving results. Forget all about the SEO jargons, what matters at the end of the day is the implementation and result.
You might find this helpful:
http://www.webtrafficbyus.com/seo-jargon...
The most challenging part of SEO is to keep update yourself according to the guidelines and updates of search engine specially for Google. Increasing your knowledge and prepare yourself for changes in the algorithm of Google.
Every SEO has their strong points and their weak ones. For me, subjects like content creation and keyword research have always come naturally, but others like methodically using analytics data to improve and running manual link building campaigns have always been a challenge.
I think the most challenging part is to be on top of the SERP's even after following Google rules.
I think most challenging part is to get top 10 position of a high competition keyword and to maintain it on that position.
There are many challenging parts, actually manipulating ranking without incurring long term penalties is one big challenge.
