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do I Become an SEO
How do I Become an SEO
By: Aaron Wall
This year was my third SES conference. I think while
eating lunch 2 of the 4 days people described my eBook
and site to me without knowing I was me, which must
mean I am getting a good bit of market saturation. :)
Many of the people who talked to me at past SES events
either were SEOs or wanted to know how to hire one.
Recently my inbox and at SES a much higher percent of
my inquiries were people asking "How do
I become an SEO?"
I have been a bit of a branding whore so it would seem
that over time I would get more questions like that,
but I think a ton of people have recently been entering
the SEO market. The Google IPO and the like brought
many new faces to the field.
Some companies are still out to lunch though. The last
day of the conference I met a person who read my eBook
and wanted to chat. He was the single employee Webmaster
/ programmer / backend database / web marketer for a
few nationwide stores which were doing over $5,000,000
a year in sales from one of the websites.
It would make sense that a person working on salary
doing all that work may want to go it alone. If I were
him I would.
The general things I think that can help people who
want to jump into doing SEO are:
- Start a site about something that interests you.
Get involved in that community.
- Your first site may totally suck. Mine did, and
the second and third did too... the beauty of the
web is that nothing is permanent and you rapidly learn
from your mistakes.
- Do not be afraid to be wrong or make a mistake.
- Go after a niche. A large part of the reasons my
first site sucked was because I was a bad writer and
bad designer. An equally large reason my early sites
sucked was because they were too broad in scope.
- If you are unsure of how to niche out your idea
look for feedback from blogs, forums and Google
Groups. If you do create a large site you will be
able to break out many of the ideas into their own
smaller sites.
- Build content on that site using a regular human
voice. Try to build an audience by participating in
other communities.
- Within any channel or site limit the number of choices
you give people to make it easy for them to do what
you want them to. If you have another product idea
or target audience you may want to set up another
website to sell it.
- Read a ton of literature about topics that interest
you. If you know a ton about a topic it is far easier
to crank out a ton of content about it.
- Subscribe to RSS feeds of topical blogs.
- Don't worry about keyword density. Write pages that
are focused on usability and conversion. Use headings,
subheadings, and the like to work the appropriate
words into the content.
- Use descriptive anchor text. Use many variations.
- If you sell SEO services most people who want to
buy SEO services want services that cannot be done
at the prices they are willing to pay unless you do
things that will damage their brand. Stay away from
bad customers. If you can create passive income streams
they will pay you just as much as bad customers do
while requiring far less work.
- It is better to have a few strong partnerships than
to spread yourself too thin working for a ton of customers.
A good way to find some customers might be to talk
to local merchants you know and trust and do a profit
share partnerships with them.
- Price points target your audience. If you are the
cheapest on the market you will find the people who
can't afford good products or are not interested in
fully committing. About 5 months ago I doubled the
price of my eBook and get less refund requests and
customers who are more serious and more friendlier.
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