Define Six Secret Skills Of Search Engine Optimization Works?

There is a lot of talk on the web about search engine optimization (SEO) and how doing this one thing will get you to the top of Google. If only it were that easy! In fact, I believe there are seven different skills that a search engine optimizer must have. Most people have one or maybe two of these skills, very rarely do people have all seven. In fact, to get to all seven, people who are good at two of them need to actively develop the other skills. This takes time and effort, and if you’re running your own business, do you really have the time?

The six skills that I believe are essential to working in search engine optimization are:

1. Web Design – the creation of a visually attractive site
2. HTML Coding – Developing the search engine-friendly coding behind web design
3. Copywriting – creating really readable text on the page
4. Marketing – What are the real searches, which keywords are actually bringing more business to your company?
5. Eye for detail – even the smallest mistakes can prevent spider bots from visiting your site.
6. Patience – there is a time lag with every change you make, waiting is a virtue.

• Web Design

Many website designers are creating increasingly engaging designs with animations and clever features that they hope will attract people to their sites. This is the first big mistake; using such patterns can actually reduce your chances of high Google rankings. Yes, that is correct; all the money you paid for website design can be wasted because no one will ever find your site.

This is because you need to get the spiderbots to like your site before you can bring people to your site. Spiderbots are pieces of software that are used by search engine companies to crawl the internet, look at all the web pages, and after they review the pages, use complex algorithms to rank the pages. They come to your website, look at the HTML and exit the stage right without bothering to rate your website. So you won’t be found in any meaningful search.

I’m amazed at how many times I look at a website and immediately know it’s a waste of money. The problem is that both the web designers and the company that paid the money really don’t want to know. I actually stopped playing messenger of bad news (too many bullets!); Now I am solving the problem.

• HTML Coding

So optimizing a website to suit Google is often a trade-off between a visually appealing site and a site that is easy to find. The second skill is optimizing the actual HTML code to be suitable for spiderbots. I see it as different from web design because you really need to be “down and dirty” in the code rather than using an editor like FrontPage, which is fine for web design. It takes a lot of time and experience to develop this skill, and just when you think you’ve cracked it, search engine companies change the algorithms used to calculate how high your site appears in search results.

This is not a place for even the most enthusiastic amateur. You need to constantly monitor the results, add or remove pieces of code and check what the competition is doing. Many people who design their own websites feel that they will be searched because they look good and skip this step altogether. Without a strong technical understanding of how spiderbots work, you will always struggle to get your company on the first page of Google results. We actually run seven test domains that test different theories with different search engines. Remember that different search engines use different criteria and algorithms to rank your site – one size does not fit all.

• Copywriting

Third, I suggested that copywriting is a skill in itself. It’s about writing actual text that people coming to your website will read. Googlebot and other spiderbots like Inktomi love text—but only when it’s well-written in well-formed English. Some people try to stuff their pages with keywords, while others put white text in white space (so spiderbots see it, but people don’t).

Spiderbots are very sophisticated and not only don’t fall for these tricks, they actively penalize your website – in Google’s terms, this is sandboxing. Google takes new sites and “naughty” sites and effectively pushes them down for 3-6 months, you can still be found, but down to page 14 results – really helpful! In addition to good English, spiderbots also read HTML, so a copywriter also needs to appreciate the interplay between the two. My recommendation for anyone copywriting and writing their own pages is to write normal, well-constructed English sentences that can be read by both machines and humans.

• Marketing

The fourth skill is marketing, after all that’s what we do – marketing your site and by extension the company and products/services on the site. The key here is to set up your website to be searchable, which will get you the most business. I have seen many sites that can be found when you enter a company name. Another one that can be found by typing in “Accountant Manchester North-West England”, which is great, except that no one ever actually does that search. So marketing
the skill requires knowledge of the company’s business, what they are really trying to sell, and an understanding of what real prospecting can pay dividends.

• Eye for detail

Another skill is attention to detail. Even a simple change to a website can cause an error that means spider bots won’t crawl your site. I recently linked to a site that didn’t have a www. on the front of the address. The link still worked but the spiders stopped crawling and it took my partner a while to find the bug. We recently invested in a very sophisticated HTML validator that catches errors that other validators simply cannot see. These errors do not stop pages from displaying correctly to the human eye, but they cause huge problems for spider bots. Almost all the code I look at on the site with this validator indicates serious errors, even from search engine optimization companies.

• Patience

Some people seem to want to make daily changes and then think they can watch the website rank the next day. Unfortunately, it can take a week for the absolutely correct changes to take effect, during which you’ve made six more changes. Add to this Google the reluctance to allow new sites directly onto their lists by adding a wait factor of maybe three months for new sites and you have a completely out of control situation. We tell all our clients that a piece of SEO work should be viewed as a marketing campaign that runs for six months, because only after this time can a true judgment be made about the effectiveness of the work.

The final and seventh skill is an appreciation of how search engines and algorithms work, for which both IT and mathematical backgrounds are useful. People who have programmed at a detailed system level have a natural feel for how spiderbots will read the page, what they will look for, what tables they will set up, what weight they can assign to different elements. All of this creates a picture of the database that will be created and how it will be accessed when searching. Unfortunately, this skill is the most difficult to learn because it relies on years of system programming experience. Make sure that whoever you choose for search engine optimization work can cover all the bases.