How to Become an SEO Expert

Looking to become an SEO expert this 2020? 

It may sound overwhelming, but it’s easy to understand when you take the time to find out how search engines work and how you can tailor your content to get it into the top-ranking search results. 

Although there’s a lot more to SEO than optimizing meta tags on a website, becoming an SEO expert isn’t as complex as you think. In fact, you really don’t have to practice SEO as a profession to become an SEO expert.

Search engine optimization or ‘SEO’ is the process of optimizing your website to increase organic search results on search engines. 

An SEO expert is someone who can grow organic search traffic from search engines consistently.

Learn SEO from scratch — Here are 8 tips to get you started:

1. Learn how search engines work

Understanding how search engines work is the first step you need to take if you want to become an SEO expert. This is where the whole concept of Search Engine Optimization revolves around and learning it will, later on, help you understand the complexities of the search engines and how you can improve your SEO strategy to get the best results from SEO, working your way up to the most complicated theories.

2. Become an Expert in Content Marketing & Content Optimization

Search engine optimization and content marketing are entirely dependent on one another. Failure to utilize content marketing would likely result in an unsuccessful SEO campaign. Besides, content is the only reason search happens on the internet. Therefore, writing and optimizing your content and making it SEO-friendly is very important.

But don’t worry — you don’t have to be a well-experienced copywriter to be an expert in content marketing. After all, it is not just about writing and posting blog posts  — videos, infographics, and images are some of the content types that you can use to draw traffic to your site from different platforms as well. However, you need to understand what good content looks like, how to find good writers, how to build a content strategy, and how to create compelling calls-to-action that moves the right people to the right decisions.

3. Learn About HTML & CSS 

Get acquainted with basic HTML. You don’t need advanced coding skills, but having a basic understanding of HTML won’t harm your SEO career. In fact, it will be much easier to optimize your website for search engines if you have basic knowledge of HTML. In addition, it will help you address a number of technical issues that may affect your site’s SEO performance in the future.

4. Get to know the Basic Principles of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) 

Search engine marketing, or simply SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that involves promoting websites by increasing their exposure on search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. This includes Google Ads, paid marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Social Media Marketing and Optimization, Link Building, Content Marketing, Online Reputation Management, etc.

SEO is simply an element of SEM. Hence, to become an SEO expert, you must familiarize yourself with search engine marketing as well – This way, you can expect the kind of results you’d get from your SEO activities and the other tools you can use in conjunction with SEO to make your internet presence stronger.

5. Master the core topics of SEO

You can`t be an SEO expert without mastering the four core pillars of Search Engine Optimization. These are:

Technical SEO: This is about website optimization so that search engines can crawl and index the content efficiently, and visitors have a good user experience. This includes enhancing the page speed, creating mobile-friendly sites, removing internal and external broken links, readable fonts, using canonical tags to avoid duplicate content, adding hreflang tags to multilingual material, optimizing robots.txt for crawl efficiency, and so on.

On-Page SEO: This includes everything you do to help boost rankings on your site, as well as to attract more organic traffic from search engines, and to make the website more user-friendly. Examples of this form of SEO involve optimizing web pages, using keyword modifiers, writing intriguing meta titles and descriptions URL, internal links, alt tags for images, and more.

Off-Page SEO: There are three main aspects of off-page SEO that can help improve rankings and boost the organic and referral traffic of your website. These include link building, which is the method of obtaining new backlinks from third-party websites, social media marketing, and social bookmarking.

Content SEO: This involves optimizing the content of your website based on keyword research that has high traffic potential, business value, and low ranking difficulties. In addition, as an SEO expert, you need to ensure that your content is informative, engaging, and useful. This also includes writing the proper titles, headings, and sub-headings that make your content better not only for the search engines but also for the website visitors. 

6. Stay updated with all the latest Google algorithm updates

 Google has a persistent habit of updating algorithms to provide searchers with the most relevant search results. Hence, it is crucial to stay up-to-date with all the latest Google algorithm updates to help adjust your SEO campaigns accordingly to maintain an SEO-friendly website and sustain top rankings in SERP.

The easiest way to stay up-to-date is to follow a variety of SEO news websites that provide information about on-going SEO changes as they happen. A few sources include:

• Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Land
• Google Blog
• Google Search Blog
• Google Webmasters Blog

7. Choose the Right SEO Tools

Let’s face it – you can`t do SEO on your own. Thus, to save time and expect better results, the right SEO tools have to be used. The market is packed with a lot of SEO tools that you can use to run SEO campaigns and generate analytic reports without any problems. Most of the excellent SEO tools are paid, but in the long run, they deliver better results that are worth the cost. Some of the top SEO tools include:

• Google Webmaster Tools (Free) 
• Google Analytics (Free)
• SEMRUSH (Paid) 
• Ahrefs (Paid) 
• Yoast (Freemium)
• Google Keyword Planner

8. Practice and be patient

Finally, it takes a lot of practice and patience to become an SEO expert. 

But never give it up! Keep creating good content, optimize your pages, follow the best practice keyword research, and build enough high-quality links until your pages eventually start to rank. Don’t rush to conclusions too soon, even if your content doesn’t reach the first page in the first few weeks. After all, becoming an SEO expert is not a one-night process.