The online marketing industry is growing everyday and the jobs that are introduced in this industry are among the jobs that will be needed more in the future. We all know that online shopping as well as online services have become part of our daily lives and websites are looking for a professional SEO Specialist to keep up with their competitors in order to stay ahead of their competitors.
There are currently more than 1 billion websites, and each of them needs specific activities to be on the search engine results page (SERP). This has made learning search engine optimization (SEO) an attractive skill set and a great way to gain a foothold in the job market.
This article provides an overview of the work of an SEO expert, the career path in SEO, best learning sources, and why practical training and learning helps you to outperform other competitors and make you become a professional SEO in this growing industry.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a science that increases organic traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. With the help of this science, more users can be directed to the website. Simply put, SEO means improving a website to be seen in user-related searches in search engines.
When your website is on the first pages of Google search results, you can drive more customers to you and ultimately earn more money from them. The goal of many businesses as well as webmasters is to be able to be on the first page of search results in the words they search.
Who is a Professional SEO Specialist?
A professional SEO specialist is a person who has experience, technical and scientific knowledge, skills and… in the field of site optimization. In fact, this person is able to optimize sites for search engines based on the techniques he knows.
This person actually has the skill to draw users to your site in the shortest possible time using Google algorithms or other search engines for specific keywords that attract your target audience.
What Does SEO Do?
In order to be able to optimize your website and its pages, you must first understand how search engines work? In fact, it is the search engines that examine the content of your website and show it to the right audience.
There are several factors that search engines use to analyze and determine the relevance of a website to the keyword that the user has searched for. Google does not often disclose these things, but professionals in the field still look for these factors and use them to optimize their websites. An SEO expert should be aware of the important factors in ranking web pages, and the following are some of the most important factors in ranking websites:
- Domain age, URL and its authority
- Links
- Website optimization in mobile version
- Optimized and quality content
- Page loading speed (including the speed of web pages in the mobile version)
- Availability as well as site security
- User interaction on the social networks of each website
- Technical SEO
- User experience (UX)
Website ranking means your website is on the first page of search results when a user searches for a word. In fact, a website can get this ranking if the above factors are observed and also its SEO can use the most up-to-date methods to optimize the site.
Search engines generally follow the following three steps when ranking a website:
1- Crawling
All search engines have bots whose job is to crawl or scan their websites and pages. Crawling website pages puts your content in search results.
2- Indexing
At this stage, the website and its pages are added to the search results. If your website and the pages you want are not in the search engine results list, you will lose the chance of being seen by the user.
3- Ranking
When you type something in Google, the most relevant websites appear in search results. These results are based on various factors such as geographical location, language, user experience and so on.
How to become a professional SEO Specialist?
Some SEOs did not start from scratch with the goal of becoming a SEO. Some started working in this field quite by accident and later increased their learning in this field day by day.
Let’s take a look at the career path of an SEO specialist and see what steps you need to take to become an SEO expert:
1- Is SEO Right for Me?
The first step in choosing a job is to make sure you are really interested in the field. You certainly do not want to waste your time on a job in which you have no interest or talent.
If you do a good research on this job, you can find out if you are suitable for this job and even if your mood is compatible with this job or not. You may be suitable for another job in marketing and have chosen the wrong field of marketing.
2- Understand the basics of SEO
As a SEO, you need to know that the fate of your business depends entirely on how the search engines work. That’s why you need to know about crawlers or search engine robots. These are the bots that decide the quality and relevance of your content, and several key factors make that decision.
Search engines are like a black box and usually do not reveal their information and secrets. But you can use known factors to optimize your site and make it more prominent among other competitors.
To become an expert, start with the basics. You first need to understand how users and search engines interact with each other and what you can do to optimize your content.
3- Build Your Website
Once you understand the basics of SEO, it’s time to use them. Most professionals will advise you to go for SEO building and testing on your website. That means you have to experiment with everything on your website.
Learn HTML. Learn all the tags and try them out. Choose a topic that interests you. This will make it easier for you to generate content.
4- Learn WordPress
One third of websites are built with WordPress. So if you want to become an SEO expert, you need to know it well.
The fact that everyone uses WordPress is not the only reason to choose it for learning, but this site builder is one of the best CMS available for SEO.
WordPress is very important because of the impact it has directly and indirectly on SEO performance, and learning it should be in your program.
5- Learn how to work with Google Analytics and Google Search Console
SEO fans use a variety of tools to optimize content and analyze their performance. The base and foundation of SEO is always learning to work with Google Analytics and Google Search Console . In fact these two tools give you useful information that you can use to improve your website. SEO expertise is tied to mastering these two tools.
6- Read About SEO Everyday
Search engines are changing and they see a lot of updates every day. That’s why you should read about changes continuously to know the ranking factors of the website to become a professional SEO specialist.
Knowing the latest search engine algorithms like Google allows you to make the best decisions for websites and optimize them, and also have more to say among your competitors.
7- Look at the Search Results
This step is where you need to pay attention a lot. Check the search results carefully.
- What is their structure?
- What content do they usually show to the user?
- Which website has performed better in providing content?
- How do the results change when searching for different words?
Google is always looking to show its best to users. So keep track of the search results and check it out soon.
8- Learn About SEO Technical
Technical SEO is all you need to do with the technical team so that Google and other search engines can crawl and index your site more easily.
SEO includes site optimization for display in the mobile version, site speed, structured data, JavaScript and all the mechanisms that affect the performance of the website.
These factors play a role in ranking a site in search results. You can have amazing content, but the site is slow or has a lot of bugs that will ultimately damage your website performance in search results.
9- Learn about strategy, production, optimization and content promotion
While SEO helps search engine robots crawl and index your website better and faster, knowing all the information about how to write and optimize content will also help you create a better user experience and user presence.
This content should also be supported by an advertising strategy. SEO alone is not enough. Other marketing channels (for example, social media and email marketing) can help your content succeed.
10- Learn about link building techniques
Link building is one of the most important factors in SEO. A professional SEO specialist knows the importance of link building in driving users to websites very well. In general, the higher the quality of the websites that link to you, the more likely you are to rank high in search engine results. So to get the most out of link building, you need quality links.
11- Be Patient
As you may know, becoming an SEO expert is a time consuming task and requires years of experience and effort. Be aware of changes in SEO algorithms and keep yourself updated.
None of this is possible in a hurry and one day. If you are passionate about becoming an SEO expert, you can also use patience in your work and become a professional SEO specialist.
Authentic resources and tools for learning SEO
Do you want to learn SEO in a professional and principled way and introduce yourself as a claimant in this profession? The following resources are the best learning resources to learn SEO strategies, tactics and tips:
- Google Webmaster Central Blog
- Search Engine Journal
- Search Engine Land
- Search Engine Roundtable
- The Moz Blog
- SEMrush Blog
- Yoast SEO Blog
- Backlinko
- Neil Patel SEO posts
- HubSpot SEO Posts
- Ahrefs
Jill Whalen: “Good SEO work only gets better over time. It’s only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.”
Remmember as Jill Whalen says, you always have to be updated to be aware of ranking algorithms. We’d love for you to share your thoughts about professional SEO soecialist and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
