SEO – Mythbuster

SEO, my question is, is it such a bigger beast as it’s made to believe?
No matter how much enthusiastic you feel about starting, you’re always put down by the posts here that tell you how difficult and time consuming it is.
I’m no Tom Cruise and certainly do not intend to join mission impossible, so what i’d like you guys to explain is what’s so hard about i? Is it the actual coding of the sites, or the link exchanging or what? The bottom line is, for a begginer to SEO how do you get to kick the beast in the balls and start cracking the thing.

I really have trouble understaning and I’ll give you an example:
Last week I bought a new domain, created a quick site, no SEO or even meta tags (it was supposed to be done later when I found time), and yesterday I got hits on google. Followed the trail and I rank first for a key phrase that I could only dream of. How is this possible? I don’t even have a single link to that site.

I hope some of the Gurus can shed some light on this as I’m sure that other begginers are quite afraid of the beast.

Cheerio,