SEO has become in recent years the workhorse of many online entrepreneurs, in fact many people learn to do some “tricks” to achieve their small goals on the web. But things change when we are talking about long-term projects and covering more complex structures.
When not having an official education by the educational system, an SEO Professional has to train himself using everything the web lends him, I say the web because in a subject that changes every day you can not trust a book that was published 5 years ago, because today would not be much use. What forces to be in constant preparation and self-learning using the network as a main tool, but can not be taken lightly.
Nowadays, a lot of fans emerge, proclaiming themselves as the SEO expert and all they do is saturate a web with keywords and place links where the opportunity presents itself. And at the cost of many things achieve the results they were looking for, “appear in Google”, but let me clarify: “SEO is much more than appearing in Google.”
Anyone who wants to get involved in the SEO industry should first get out of their head that the goal is to fill the keyword page and get many links. This vision is very mechanical and does not contribute anything to anybody, neither to the search engines, nor to the clients, nor to the users, that the latter is for whom we are supposed to be doing the web and in what Google strives so much for achieve.
Being an SEO Professional is not something technical that you can learn in a course or a career, even not having a degree in programming or engineering ensures success in SEO, it is a profession that covers several aspects, from the computer, until marketing. But more importantly, SEO is learned by doing, observing, interacting. Nobody knows the Google algorithm, we only see its operation from experimentation. You do not understand what it is to position a website until you see one of your pages positioned, it is there when you understand how the thing works, there you see what you did and what you did not do, what works and does not work.
Apart from reading and being up to date with the changes, with the trends, the best teacher in SEO is the practice, each project is adjusted to a different structure, so each one has to be approached in a different way. If I had to relate a profession with SEO, I would say that Marketing would help a lot, because at the end of the day it is still people who interact. Google looks at the links and social interaction to give power to a site, you can even see a site with 0% optimization onsite but in # 1 and this is because there are other metrics that weigh more. What are these metrics? Well, the users. Google wants natural links, Google wants people to talk and share … if the website meets the expectations of the users then all this will come up, they will link you, they will talk about you …
The mechanical work in SEO no longer works, just by mentioning the new Google updates we already see many webmasters suffering. The strategies that must be implemented from now on must be oriented to the users, how we capture the attention of those users, how we manage to get quality links, how to make people talk about your site or your business. This is marketing, link building is marketing, social media is marketing, optimizing your website should be to capture users and this in turn will capture the search engines.
Now, having all this in mind is not something you can do with having read a few articles and you know then that you have to optimize titles, meta tags, images, urls, get a link here another there, that create a Facebook account, on twitter … etc … It is a strategy, a strategy to dominate a niche market on the internet, you can not forget how things work in real life by the simple fact of moving in a virtual environment . You have to contribute something, you have to give the user value, what users are looking for, you have to give it to them, that’s what Google wants to give users.
If someone wants to dedicate themselves to SEO as a profession, they can not take it lightly, this evolves every day, every time is more complex and it is not about simply putting keywords here and getting links there. Gone are those times, SEO evolves as an industry that goes further, much further than appearing in Google. Maybe in a few years it will emerge as an official career in the education system or a specialization, but for the moment in the absence of formal education, it is up to the professional to train in all the necessary areas to undertake a web positioning strategy that is based on more durable principles.
Taking SEO as a profession and not as an activity lightly makes the difference between real results and partial results, permanent results and temporary results.