Web Design Ireland

I’ve been following recently with much interest at the response Lyndon has received over his recent announcement of a custom SEO recruitment service. It appears that hidden in the woodwork of the web there is alot of SEO talent out there not getting what they deserve.

I’d be interested to see the breakdown of how many creative SEO’s have submitted C.V’s from the UK, Ireland and the U.S -my thinking is that Ireland is pretty dry in comparison when it comes to the people who can create, manage and carry through successfully SEO campaigns.

So what makes a great SEO? What combination of skills and talents should you be on the lookout for?

If you ask me. I’ll tell you what makes a great SEO.

1). Great writing skills

Writing for the web isn’t like any other medium. People want their information to be snappy, and the written style to be chatty. Knowing how to articulate yourself and get your clients message across with a degree of fluency and eloquence is majorly important, and if you can’t do the creative writing with ease hire someone else. See point 2.

2). Knows who, how and when to outsource

We can’t all be brilliant at everything. Be self critical, and critical of the team you have around you. Know your own strengths and weaknesses, and when you need to say outsource a particular piece of writing.

3). Knows the market

Having a firm grip and understanding of your clients target market is vital in an SEO campaign. Particularly in relation to visitor demographics. Use the wrong lingo , style or tone in a linkbait campaign, and no one will bite.
You should engage with industry figureheads and leading companies in your clients niche when you get the opportunity, to learn as much about their business, the buying process and ultimately what makes their website visitors tick. Knowing this puts you at a distinct advantage, as the ideas for virally marketing to this audience will come naturally.

4). Can see content opportunities

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity“- Albert Einstein.

Being able to identify gaps in knowledge online and filling them within a niche is important, especially if there is a technical slant to that particular niche.

5). Is a social person online

It’s never been easier to contact with absolute strangers online before. The social web is brimming. Be selective, go after niches, and connect deeply with the people around you. Rinse and repeat. In fact I’ve blogged on this before for beginners.

Choose a small sector of important influencers that have potential to link to you and keep in contact with them. Tweet them useful links, Email them things that may influence them. Comment on their blogs. At good SEO engages online. A great SEO engages selectively within their niche.

6). Social person offline

Just as you connect with many people online. So too should you be building relationships offline.

7). Knows onpage tactics inside out

Any SEO worth their salt should be able to tell you what on-page tactics work, and which ones are myth. For those of you reading who don’t know or are unsure of what on page tactics are tried and tested see here for an SEO for idiots guide.

8). Communicates with blackhats to learn new whitehat techniques

Learning what experiments blackhat SEO’s have done, and learning from them, is a great way to understand the engines. Crossing over to the dark side every once in a while with throw-away domains is vital to staying at the forefront.

9). Measures success

Metrics and measurement go hand in hand with any marketing activity. If you aren’t scientifically approaching your marketing including Search engine optimisation you are dead in the water.

10). Thinks like a Search Engineer.

Hands up who reads Matt Cutt’s blog? The majority of SEO’s are all there for the same reason - to grab either a glint of gold, or to try and get into the mindset of a Google spam team engineer, and someone who is responsible for the quality of the results.

11). Has great coding skills.

Search engine optimisers are a rare breed - in that they are often as good at bashing out a computer program as they are at marketing and realising opportunity. Think of the number of free SEO tools that are out there, the majority of those have been created with linkbait in mind, and having programming skills is a wonderful asset when it comes to create something dynamic that will attract natural links.

It is also important for on-page factors to know your way around HTML, and being able to squeeze the size of your files down, via shorter algorithms is always going to please the bots.

And if you are one of those who doesn’t - see point two again.

12). Knows how to ask (politely) for a link

It’s extremely easy to spot SPAM mail from an original, personal plee for a link. A great SEO makes all of their requests that way.

13). Experiments. A/B Tests

Experiments - just like science class back at school - are the only way to find out accurately whether your hypothesis on Googlebot is correct or not. On a similar vein a great SEO will know how to A/B test their content and or Adwords.

14). Groks the tools

There are a number of different SEO tools available out there to help us along, knowing which one fits the bill, or which one you can manipulate to achieve results is paramount to success.

15). Researches.

The best of the best SEO’s are natural readers, and can absorb information like a giant sponge. They have an RSS list full of the industry blogs, and have setup alerts for breaking news on multiple sites.

16). Is a creative thinker

SEO’s often have to think up new and interesting ideas to promote their client’s sites. Creative thinking and writing comes naturally to them.

17). Learns from mistakes

We’ve all made them. We’ve had to retract things we were’nt proud of putting on the web, we’ve had to remove links, delete things which were a bit too close to the wire. A great SEO learns from their mistakes, adjusts, corrects and lives to breathe another day.