An SEO Newbies Guide to Starting a Career in the Industry.

Starting a career in SEO might not have been your idea of a dream job when you were a kid but you can make it an exciting and stimulating career if you really want to. But where do you start?

As a newbie to the world of SEO it can be overwhelming, there is so much information out there and it’s hard to know where to start. It is important not to dive headfirst into the industry, instead you should take time to learn about SEO and the only real way you can do this is by… well doing it!

But if like me, you entered the world of SEO as a complete amateur the first bit of advice I would share with you is to learn the jargon.

In SEO keywords are flung about the place so it is a good idea to learn some of the most important terminology because as a beginner in the industry you will hear many terms and not have a clue what they actually mean. The terms used can sound like a foreign language to those who are new to the industry but once you know what they mean you’ll never forget.

Read, Watch and Learn

SEO constantly changes. It is an approach that not all businesses can comprehend, especially if the business is small or one person is singlehandedly responsible to figure it out.

If you really want to learn SEO it is important to read about the subject. Read news articles, read books and read expert blogs. If you are a beginner then you should start with the complete basics. This way you are less likely to miss out any significant information when you have begun your career in SEO.

It’s a good idea to pull together some basic skills. This will put you at an advantage if you decide to expand your career in SEO. Start a blog on a topic of your choice. It would put you at an advantage if the blog is on a topic you are interested in and have knowledge on. This will help you with your writing skills and also teach you to write for SEO.

So what do I mean by ‘write for SEO’? Content writing for SEO is more than just putting a few words together and hoping for the best. You must be strategic about what keywords you are including within your article as this will push Google to notice your efforts and thus result in more visitors to your website.

It is not enough just putting the keywords in your article a couple of times, you must include them in the title of the blog and within the body text. The people using Google to find these specific keywords are searching for that particular phrase and this will result in more website hits.

Learn the importance of link building

Link building isn’t easy. It is tedious and it can take some time to see results but the key is to be persistent and stay positive. Link building is arguably one of the most important components of SEO. Links help search engines discover new web pages and help determine how well a page should rank in their results.

Generally speaking, the higher the quality of the website that links back to you, the more likely you are to rank well in search engines. Effectively if a high-quality website links back to your blog/article then it is essentially saying that you are a reliable source of information. Recently Google have started to penalise the rankings of websites who overuse link building techniques because they see it as being ‘over optimised’.

At the moment, if you get high-quality links to your website it will rank better and get more traffic. Link building should focus on quality not quantity. Building a good relationship with quality websites will give the most SEO value.

Keep your friends close and you enemies closer

Know your competition. Know who they are, know where they rank and know their methods.

By analysing your competitor’s websites you can see how much content they have and even think up ideas that you can expand and improve on. You can also gain a lot of information about your competitions web presence.

Apply your knowledge

As you become more informed and experienced within the industry you can begin to trust your own judgement. You will be able to find resources that available out there that can help you expand your knowledge.

As mentioned before the best way to learn SEO is to actually do it, so if you are lucky enough to land yourself a job in the industry you should absorb all the knowledge around you and take the required steps in becoming a true SEO expert.