How You Can Be a Better SEO

Our industry is perhaps one of the fastest evolving, most exciting industries to belong to on the planet. I’ve travelled to 6 different countries in the past 2 months, and met with search marketers in all of them. Something that they all have in common is their drive, enthusiasm and love of their art.

SEO takes a long time to master. Its breadth and depth as a marketing discipline is, enormous. The requirement for us to learn and stay on top of new developments is no small ask, and it takes long hours to keep your knowledge fresh.

Before we continue, I want to tell you a little about me first. SEOgadget is the result of the incredibly hard work of the good people that belong to my team. We’ve grown from 1 member of staff in August 2010, to 14 today. My purpose is to lead my company towards our goals. My mission is to build and maintain the fastest growing SEO, inbound marketing agency establishing ourselves with an international presence within 4 years. I’m proud of our achievements to date, but it couldn’t happen without a clear understanding of what we want to achieve as a team.

To make this possible, I’ve spent a lot of my time thinking about the attributes, the qualities of what makes for a successful SEO consultant. To me, it’s far from being just about the skills, learning keyword research, building links, making technical recommendations, understanding content marketing, using Excel, coding – these are things that the right people can learn if and when they choose to.

To me, better SEOs have something special about them. Today, I’m not going to show you more Excel queries, share link building tips or talk about log file analysis. If you want to learn more about those things you can Google them. I’d like to talk a little more honestly about some of the key attributes I’ve observed in my peers, and more specifically, what you should do if you want to be a better SEO.

1. Decide what your goal is. If you can’t, set your first goal to decide on what your goals should be
2. Get a mentor – or find someone your respect and copy them
3. Don’t be happy with just “ok” – if you don’t love it, it isn’t ready
4. Learn entrepreneurial spirit, develop new products and processes
5. Learn how to pitch yourself, you owe this to your hard work to date
6. Always seek the simplest, most elegant way to communicate – you are your own product
7. Understand the perception people have of you. Is it the one you want?
8. Be curious and always ask, why?
9. Learn something new once a week. That’s how you stay relevant, permanently
10. Decide you want to be successful in whatever you do
11. Keep every positive piece of feedback you receive in a folder. Dwell on how you could improve in each of those situations instead of patting yourself on the back
12. Don’t accept that how you’re doing something now is the norm, it’s already out of date
13. Be totally responsible for yourself – don’t ever let your boss have to manage you. If you’re doing well, you’re slowly making them redundant
14. Realise that the second you walk through the office door, you’re on stage. Act like the best person you can be even when you feel like crap
15. Rehearse everything. It’s what makes the difference between ok and awesome
16. Take yourself outside of your comfort zone on a regular basis
17. Make yourself indispensable, learn a specialism
18. Learn how to spot good people, their strengths and their weaknesses
19. Realise when you’re distracted and learn to refocus yourself
20. Build your own website. What SEO doesn’t have a decent website?
21. Pitch for the job you want – if you’re nailing the job you have all you have to is demonstrate a solid understanding of the job you want
22. Learn to sell anything and everything
23. Care about what you do and show it – people will want to teach you everything else
24. Always follow up even if you have to stay up all night to do it
25. Know your figures all of them, and know them better than your team
26. Communicate your successes regularly
27. If you want to learn leadership, learn that leadership comes from certainty and confidence
28. Understand what being a consultant really means – you’re an authority, and you’re independently able to learn everything you need to survive without asking your boss
29. Work towards making things a little bit better, every day

I’d just like to thank you all for listening, and I wish you all the best of luck in becoming a better SEO

What Is SEO

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query.
SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.

This SEO tutorial covers all the necessary information you need to know about Search Engine Optimization - what is it, how does it work and differences in the ranking criteria of major search engines.

How Search Engines Work ?

The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results –crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.

What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts
calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to
SEO , if you'd like to be at the top.

The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.