SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become a popular term and anyone who spends time online will come across the term. SEO is more like a mind set that every website owner who cares for his website and the incoming visitors must develop. SEO skills can be developed easily and a lot of information is available online or one could just go to one of the SEO conferences and get the hang of it all. Small websites can be optimized in-house itself if there is the time and resources, or by outsourcing the optimization work to SEO professionals.
Though the number of techniques and tools for SEO keeps increasing there are some major skills that must be developed by anyone interested seriously in SEO. Leading SEO gurus do realize the importance of the fact that an effective SEO professional must be a person who can always see the big picture and need not be a specialist at only one thing. Here is the list of essential ethical SEO skills that may be mastered by the SEO professional:
- Link building skill
- Keyword analysis
- Copywriting
- Account management
- HTML skills
- On page SEO tactics like tagging/titling etc
- Marketing/sales strategies planning / SMO
- Web analytics
- Server side management
- Online public relation skills
- Awareness of all SEO tools/techniques
- Blog marketing
- Ability to research / search online
- Social SEO media
For the SEO professional it is also important to at least get to know about the various
black hat SEO techniques but it is more important to make a conscious decision not to develop those skills as it is unethical and not fair game.
The author of this article is Ricci Mathew of
OSI (
Outsource Strategies International ), a US based company that offers services in
Search Engine Optimization, SEM,
PPC advertising for clients across the US.
