There are more and more specialists who want to develop in the field of SEO every year. This is a highly demanded area, where experienced professionals are worth their weight in gold. If you are one of those who want to become a professional in SEO, then, first of all, you need to develop your skills.
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The number of skills is vast and that is why every beginner has a long way to go. Luckily, there are plenty of online courses, guides, and tutorials out there that make it easy to get started on your own. After learning the basics, you can try to gradually increase your experience by participating in various projects and trying your hand.
We will share what are the key skills for a specialist in this field that you can start developing today.
Keyword Research
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The task of each specialist is to bring as many users as possible to the site, blog, or other web resources. You can only do this if you know what your customers, buyers, or readers need, depending on your field of activity.
To do this, experts are engaged in the study of keywords. These are the words or phrases that people enter into search engines, wanting to find out the information they are interested in. Depending on your industry, you need to research those keywords that are relevant to your business. Of greater interest are those words and phrases that have a larger search volume. The result is that such words begin to be used when writing articles and blog posts or websites.
The Technical Side of Knowledge
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The main work of analyzing web pages and sites in search engines is performed by specially tuned algorithms. Their task is to analyze web resources, evaluate them and, subsequently, either lower the rating of the resource or, on the contrary, increase it if it meets all the parameters.
As a specialist, you need to do everything possible so that the algorithms can positively evaluate your web resource. This includes working on increasing the loading speed of the site, the company blog, and its web pages, building a sitemap that displays all key links to important web pages, and ordering the structure of unique web resource addresses. In addition, this includes the removal of broken links, which can be easily checked using the broken link checker.
Ability to Work with Google Search Console and Google Analytics
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These are two key tools that every novice specialist should learn to work with. The first tool helps to understand how your web resource works in a given search engine. This includes verifying a website, getting information about the position of the resource at the moment, and finding problems with your site.
The second tool helps to qualitatively analyze the number of users visiting your web resource, as well as track their interaction with it. Using it, you can find out the number of visitors, their demographics, the most frequently visited pages, and track where the flow of visitors comes from.
Working with Authoritative Sources and Link Building Skill
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This skill among professional specialists is considered one of the most difficult, especially for beginners. The bottom line is that you can increase traffic to your web resource if more authoritative sources start linking to yours. Such sources are trustworthy and well-ranked by the algorithms, and therefore, if you get a backlink, then the attention of the algorithms, as well as other users, will be drawn to your company.
Working with Web Pages
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Content creation is not limited to searching and researching keywords. Further work continues and the specialist should build web pages in such a way as to satisfy both the needs of users and allow algorithms to quickly evaluate the meaning of the page.
This includes working with headings and subheadings, the quality and quantity of links inserted, content richness with keywords, writing meta descriptions, writing high-quality articles and using visual materials, and much more.
Mobile Content Creation
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In recent years, the number of mobile users has been increasing by leaps and bounds. That is why the ability to create content for mobile users is one of the key skills.
The challenge is to create the best possible experience for users surfing the web using their smartphones. Your web resource must meet all the requirements of modern users. That is, this includes the ability to increase the speed of loading web pages, demonstrate a friendly interface, and more.
Increasing the Rating of a Web Resource Based on Location
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Another possible way to improve your rankings is to do quality work with your local SEO. This skill goes hand in hand with mobile optimization, as users’ search results change based on their GPS coordinates.
Thus, users can receive valuable information based on their location. This is important for companies that have offices and divisions in certain regions.
Conclusion
The challenge for a beginner SEO specialist is to master all the above-mentioned skills. It is essential not only to learn the basics but also to conduct continuous learning, as methodologies and techniques are constantly changing due to updated technologies, information, and policies.