The Web and More

what does it take to become an SEO expert

An SEO Expert is going to understand what is in a page. Not just what is seen visibly, but what is also under the hood. That's like having a race car driver who doesn't know jack about what is happening under his/her hood.

I think all SEO's need to have a basic understanding of what is happening under the hood. They should have knowledge of HTML elements and attributes. They should also have a basic knowledge of CSS. Without that, they are just Content SEOs which is just one part of the equation.

Its like using a WYSIWYG editor. If you don't understand what is happening when you push a button, how are you to know that what you just did was wrong? The same concept applies to SEO. Do you know what a title element is? How about a title attribute? Not you Marcia, but in general.

Do you know which elements you should be using for which content? Should that go into a list element or a paragraph element. Should that be an h2 or an h3.

I've found that writing valid code has forced me to fully understand what each and every element/attribute I am working with is doing.

I think you miss an important part by just learning certain "layers" of SEO. If you can learn a little bit about each layer and combine that knowledge and expand from there, you have a more solid foundation for learning.

You can take comfort in knowing when you view the source code of a page you can figure out what is going on from top to bottom at quick glance. You can decipher the pages you may be looking at that are ranking highly and really refine your understanding of why.

posted by Don Marchand @ 7:06 PM