What is an SEO Specialist?
Imagine you want to know the best place to buy a used car. So what do you do in this day and age? You Google it and the first result you get is www.cars.com. What about this website makes it the first to pop up? The answer is SEO.
Job Description
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. A website's SEO uses keywords to help people find specifically what they are looking for. SEO Specialists are the ones who place the keywords in websites and its contents to make sure the site shows up high in the ranking on engine searches.
As an SEO Specialist, you will look at the website you are given, do your due keyword research, and optimize the site to show up in the search engine’s results. SEO specialists are important and valuable to a company and its website because they are the ones who bring traffic to the website. Without SEO Specialists, a website may not perform well in search and people would rarely see it.
What does an SEO Specialist really do?
A good example of an SEO Specialist is when you type something into Google or Bing. The first results are the ones that are most optimized by SEO Specialists. Basically, they maximize the traffic to a site by improving the website's rank.
Imagine you are a college student who has never done laundry and you do not want to embarrass yourself by asking someone else, so you google it. The first websites to show up are www.instructables.com and www.wikihow.com. That means they are the most optimized sites.
The first sites to show up are typically the most trusted ones. They are visited the most and so people believe they are being given the most valued and trustworthy information.
Any website, from informative websites to online shopping websites, they can all be optimized by SEO specialists. Certain keywords rank higher than others. It is important for the specialists to keep up to date with the current trends in website optimization techniques.
An SEO specialist also analyzes a website for improvements. They try to strategize for their clients on how to make their site show up higher in the search engines. To do so, they write content for them that includes optimized keywords.
Anyone looking for something should be able to find your website promptly through search engines. The importance of SEO on a website is invaluable to a company because the specialists are the ones who generate more and more traffic to the site.
How to become an SEO Specialist
Becoming a certified SEO Specialist typically requires a degree and 1-3 years of experience. With that being said, a college degree is not always necessary. Many SEO Specialists become so through a job that they had previously had. They worked at that job, probably had a few experiences with SEO, and decided to market themselves as a specialist.
It is common as well for SEO Specialists to understand the basic web design coding languages of HTML and CSS. They also are comfortable with sitemaps in the XML (extensible markup language) format. Sitemaps are valuable because they help search engines with the ability to scan a website's content before ranking it.
There are a multitude of different specializations within the SEO careers. You could focus on local search optimization, on-page SEO, analytics, mobile search optimization, content development, and many more areas.
Like a lot of other possible web careers, you can learn your way up to be a talented SEO Specialist by reading about it. There are many websites and books with information that can help you get started. Below I have listed some sites that can help teach you learn search engine optimization.
Like any job, it is imperative that you get real world experience. You can do this by looking at freelancing jobs or even creating your own website! By optimizing your own website, you can see where your talent leaves you in the search engine results. There are freelancer jobs available on the given websites below.
Tutorial sites:
Find Freelance SEO Work:
What is the salary for an SEO Specialist?
The average salary for an SEO Specialist falls at around $43,000, according to payscale.com. The range varies from $30,000 to $65,000, based off of experience and skill. Location and employer are also factors of the variations in salary.
What software does an SEO Specialist use?
SEO specialists are accustomed to Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. You must be comfortable with HTML and CSS coding. You will use and help create sitemaps to provide search engines with a sort of cheat sheet to your website’s content. If your site matches with what the user wants, it will show up sooner rather than later on the search engine.
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Executive Producer of 2440 Media and creator of Drupal Aid, a "Human as a Service" for providing Drupal support and Maintenance.