SEO Query

Kintarō Hattori

Folks, I'm currently looking for a new job and have for the past four years worked more or less in account management (physical product). Looking at this now some roles are calling for people who know about SEO. I've never done this before so my questions are:

Is it reasonably easy to pick up if you apply yourself?
Is it something I could reasonably teach myself?
Would I need to spend days, weeks, months to apply the basics?

My apologies if it's way more complicated than I thought.

Many thanks.

5rtytry56

Why not browse around the Google Apps like I have done! (To see what I'm talking about, click the square blocks when you are in your gmail o hope you have a gmail account).

A DUMMIES book on SEO can also be purchased:

http://www.dummies.com/store/product/SEO-For-Dummies-6th-Edition.productCd-1119129559.html

A brief but useful segment on SEO was included in the IDIOT'S GUIDES : HTML5 and CSS.

Best of luck!

grumpylumpy

I picked the basics up in about a week of asking every SEO specialist all my stupid questions and compulsively reading the Moz blog and every article on Search Engine Land!

SEO very intuitive and a lot of common sense with some technical knowledge thrown in.

After you've got the basics, it's just picking up knowledge and advanced techniques through experience, which I got by throwing myself into an SEO heavy role, and reading about it a lot

If you have a Wordpress site things are made a lot easier by using plugins like Yoast (Yoast actually have a good blog too). Yoast do a "SEO Basics" course for about $200 but it sounds like a rip off to me.

Keyword research is probably the most basic place you can start, so maybe try reading about that for now!

Asterion SEO Cork

At it's heart SEO is a very simple process. It's just making sure the website is optimised and you have lots of links. And that's a good to start with. The problem is that as with most simple-type things people have unreasonable expectations. To get a website ranking is a long-term game. It does not happen overnight.

Doing the basics will help but to be good you need to now the tools that provide knowledge on page and domain strengths, which links to target, which keywords etc. And you need to be at least aware of what Google is doing - mobile friendly pages and AMP are critical right now if you want to be found on Mobile.

The approach for a local business is different than for a national, and requires different tools for instance.


You can pick up the basics just reading around but be prepared to make mistakes - set up a website just to practice on. Definitely don't start with the site you want to rank!

the sword

[font=Calibri, sans-serif]I currently work in this area and find the basics are fairly straightforward to pick up on and there are plenty of great tutorials/blogs to get you going. [/font]

[font=Calibri, sans-serif]Like anything in technology, it is never standing still and for this I would advise browsing the search engine land website. This is updated daily with emerging content and data driven research. [/font][font=Calibri, sans-serif]But to pave out a career in seo you would need to have a fair grasp on several different areas of web strategy (Google Analytics, basic coding knowledge etc) as they all complement each other long term.[/font][font=Calibri, sans-serif] [/font]

[font=Calibri, sans-serif]If you need a hand with a start let me know and I can forward on some information![/font][font=Calibri, sans-serif] [/font]

mel123

Asterion SEO Cork wrote: »

At it's heart SEO is a very simple process. It's just making sure the website is optimised and you have lots of links. And that's a good to start with. The problem is that as with most simple-type things people have unreasonable expectations. To get a website ranking is a long-term game. It does not happen overnight.

Doing the basics will help but to be good you need to now the tools that provide knowledge on page and domain strengths, which links to target, which keywords etc. And you need to be at least aware of what Google is doing - mobile friendly pages and AMP are critical right now if you want to be found on Mobile.

The approach for a local business is different than for a national, and requires different tools for instance.


You can pick up the basics just reading around but be prepared to make mistakes - set up a website just to practice on. Definitely don't start with the site you want to rank!

Any links to good articles to read, online tutorials etc?

thegreatiam

mel123 wrote: »

Any links to good articles to read, online tutorials etc?

The best Seo articles are easy to find, if you can't find them then they probably aren't worth reading

the sword

[font=Calibri, sans-serif]Finding basic seo information should be fairly simple and a google search will find what you need. [/font]

[font=Calibri, sans-serif]For up to date and new technologies/ research studies I visit search engine land daily. Also most digital marketing agencies have blogs packed with relevant information which are great. Koozai have plenty of whitepapers and their youtube channel is fantastic also![/font]

grumpylumpy

mel123 wrote: »

Any links to good articles to read, online tutorials etc?

The best ones I found when I was starting out were the Moz blog, Search Engine Land, and the Yoast blog. All good sources. If you're on LinkedIn join some SEO or digital marketing groups. Most days I read one or two interesting SEO-related article there.

ahmsalo

mel123 wrote: »

Any links to good articles to read, online tutorials etc?

I found lots on kickass site

egreavy

If you just want an understanding of how SEO works then yes reading moz, searchengineland etc will provide you with the information you need. However if you are intending to place yourself as an expert in your role and apply SEO to a business website then you need to take care. Poor SEO knowledge and tactics can cause a lot of damage. I agree with the poster above who recommended that you create a test website to trial your strategies.

Some good resources online for more in depth strategies (perhaps not always addressed by the more white hat blogs mentioned above) include Source Wave and Semantic Mastery (google them!). They each have a monthly membership fee but well worth it if you want or need to develop your skill sets.

Horus11

Depends really. You can learn it on your own but it will take time, because there are alot of methods and techniques used in on page and off page SEO like the Whitehat (forum posting, high quality content writing etc) and Blackhat methods. For whitehat methods, you should definitely invest in the field of content writing, maybe hire services from Textun because they're really good.
You could do some reading up on it and it'll become clearer to you eventually.
Cheers!

thewhitecoats

There is a lot good advice here as to where to get info on SEO. One thing however is overlooked a lot, and the reason it is is because it scares clients. Your clients will be under the impression that if the hire an SEO company to optimize their site, then they will show up in google searches everytime. This is so far from the truth.

I have built websites with very high optimization points, 70's, 80's and once 90's (its very difficult to obtain perfect optimization, and not necessary). But even if they were 100 percent optimized, will they rank highly? No, they wont, and here's why...

The most important thing for your website in google rankings are users. Nothing trumps it. Think about it, if 100 websites like yours (that's a very conservative number) are all optimized well, but no one is using your website, then why should google rank you higher than the others. The answer is they wont. Everyone uses site optimization these days so your customer base is the only thing that can separate you from the rest.

This is why you see huge TV ad campaigns from the likes of Booking.com and GoCompare. For your website to succeed in search rankings you still need good old fashioned advertising, and this is what scares clients, because advertising is expensive. The reason I am laying this out is because it's so important, and along with good SEO skills, good marketing skills can give you the edge over others who simply deal in site opimization.

Hope this helps

Rioga na hEireann

Kintarō Hattori wrote: »

Folks, I'm currently looking for a new job and have for the past four years worked more or less in account management (physical product). Looking at this now some roles are calling for people who know about SEO. I've never done this before so my questions are:

Is it reasonably easy to pick up if you apply yourself?
Is it something I could reasonably teach myself?
Would I need to spend days, weeks, months to apply the basics?

My apologies if it's way more complicated than I thought.

Many thanks.

make sure you avoid spammy SEO at all costs otherwise your site will receive a smackdown from the next google algorithm shift. PageRank is an important algorithm but not to be manipulated like was done about 10 years ago by a high profile car company who had a link manipulating scheme of multiple sites linking to each other. If you are doing this eventually you will be found out, and try getting back into the good books then? You gotta go with patience and the long tail, and the long game, and within reason let your backlinks build naturally. A greyhat approach seems the most sensible. Here's ten pointers for beginners in anyt case.

1. learn how to code htaccess files, learn how to modify HTTP HEADERS, focus on technical aspect of SEO
2. always canonical or robots:no-index tags, one or the other
3. avoid duplicate content at all costs. it's not about you, it's about them - think about what google want and what suits their business model. what they don't want is the same meta description coming up one line after another on a served page of search results
4. your title tag is your single most important tag. 160 characters, use pillars not dashes
5. write compelling, keyword-rich, but not keyword-stuffed content. google monitor how long users spend on each page on aggregate and use that info to figure out which are the best results to serve in future searches.
6. 301 redirect all moved pages, but best of all don't have redirects so planning is important
7. research best practice on EVERYTHING from at least three sources before implementing ANYTHING
8. focus on speed. htaccess rules are faster than php. http.conf rules are faster than htaccess. faster your page loads, better user experience for google users.
9. focus on security. waking up one day to find your page in Chinese due to hacking will not get you much trust with SERPs
10. be smart with your domain registration. don't use lookup privacy and register your name for more than one year., Google are a domain registrar so they know who you are anyway.

Digital_Guy

thewhitecoats wrote: »

There is a lot good advice here as to where to get info on SEO. One thing however is overlooked a lot, and the reason it is is because it scares clients. Your clients will be under the impression that if the hire an SEO company to optimize their site, then they will show up in google searches everytime. This is so far from the truth.

I have built websites with very high optimization points, 70's, 80's and once 90's (its very difficult to obtain perfect optimization, and not necessary). But even if they were 100 percent optimized, will they rank highly? No, they wont, and here's why...

The most important thing for your website in google rankings are users. Nothing trumps it. Think about it, if 100 websites like yours (that's a very conservative number) are all optimized well, but no one is using your website, then why should google rank you higher than the others. The answer is they wont. Everyone uses site optimization these days so your customer base is the only thing that can separate you from the rest.

This is why you see huge TV ad campaigns from the likes of Booking.com and GoCompare. For your website to succeed in search rankings you still need good old fashioned advertising, and this is what scares clients, because advertising is expensive. The reason I am laying this out is because it's so important, and along with good SEO skills, good marketing skills can give you the edge over others who simply deal in site opimization.

Hope this helps

This is totally not the case! Those brands advertise because they are...brands! They need to keep their profile up, especially in such competitive markets.

It is of course possible to succeed in SEO without doing advertising as well. It doesn't mean you shouldn't consider advertising as well, as long as it serves a purpose as part of an integrated strategy.