Sunday 22 April 2012

Becoming A Search Engine Optimization Specialist

Search Engine Optimization or SEO has become quite a buzzword on the Internet for a number of years now. It seems that people claiming to be an SEO expert are a dime a dozen but many of these people only have a cursory knowledge on the matter and are only looking for a way to make money quickly. The question is do they really have what it takes to be able to call themselves an SEO professional? To earn the right to this title, you will need to be equipped with quite a few skills and capabilities and sadly, few of these so-called experts are in fact fully qualified to take on the title. Here then are some of the skills that you will need to be able to consider yourself an SEO expert.

HTML or Hypertext Markup Language has been around almost since the earliest incarnations of the World Wide Web. In spite of its long and colorful history, and the relatively recent influx of graphically oriented web site design software, HTML is still quite relevant today and a fairly extensive knowledge of it is a must for successful SEO. To have a better appreciation for the importance of HTML, you have to realize that search engines primarily read the source code of a particular web page. Therefore if you can fully optimize your web page at the source code level, you stand a considerably greater chance of ranking higher in search engine page results. A good rule of thumb to gauge the qualification of your HTML skills is this: if you are able to produce professional looking web sites using only a text based editor (such as notepad) and you can type out HTML code intuitively, without looking at your keyboard too much, then it is safe to say that you are good enough at HTML to achieve effective SEO results.

CSS capability is another valuable skill to have in your arsenal and while you need not be an expert in this area, developing a thorough knowledge of the basics will come in quite handy. CSS related tasks that you can expect to encounter on a regular basis in the interests of SEO include transforming a JS menu into a CSS menu and styling the heading tags of your web pages.

Search engines are one of your most important allies when it comes to SEO-or it can be one of your most formidable enemies. It would be worth your while to have a thorough knowledge of just how search engines rank web pages. This knowledge is something that can only be developed by many hours of observation, testing and studying as well as a comparison of the differences between major search engines and their ranking algorithms. In relation to this, you will also need to know how to fill your web sites with relevant keywords that ensure the popularity and competitiveness of your web site.

http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Becoming-A-Search-Engine-Optimization-Specialist/1791871

No comments:

Post a Comment