SEO is a key element of the success of any online business, so how do you establish yourself as an expert in this field?

We explore the digital skills and knowledge you need to be successful as a freelance SEO specialist in this blog.

How Does SEO Work and Why Is It Important?

Traffic generation is the key to growing your website and is the foundation of any good digital marketing campaign. Any digital business relies on it as the benchmark indicator of how well a website performs. The goal of SEO is to boost your website’s ranking on search engines such as Google for relevant searches, which in turn should increase your sales.

Although there are many methods for driving traffic to your page, it is important to keep in mind that SEO refers to organic traffic – otherwise known as unpaid advertising. A search engine enables individuals (or businesses) to find products and services according to their own preferences.

What Skills Are Required to Become an SEO Expert?

The field of SEO has its language and best practices that extend far beyond your website and page views. The following are some key concepts that you need to master to establish yourself as an SEO expert.

  1. Authority

An authority website is one that can compete with other sites in similar searches based on its power and popularity. The race for the top of the search ranking is never-ending, so every business is constantly competing.

The domain or the content of your site determines your authority. It is difficult to understand without getting too technical, but the key to ranking higher than your competitors is to provide relevant and engaging content for your users; keyword research plays a vital role here.

  1. Search Engine Crawlers

A bot is a piece of software that crawls the internet continues to analyze and index websites worldwide. Each search engine has a different bot. While determining the rank of a website, they look at things like title tags, keyword tags, heading tags, and hyperlinks. Additionally, they will be looking for on-page ranking factors that contextualize your web pages (such as alt tags) and clearly define what they are about.

When it comes to crawlers, you need to remember that the rules can change regularly to punish people trying to cheat the system so that legitimate websites with quality content are rewarded.

  1. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Google uses LSI to index and search pages based on a combination of keywords and how the words fit with a particular search or batch of content. As artificial intelligence advances, search engines are able to understand more and more about the context of specific searches, so long-tail keywords may have more value in the future for search engines than they did in the past.

  1. Keyword Research

It is all about how to use keywords when writing for high-level SEO value. To learn more about how SEO behaves in the content context, you can use a feature such as Yoast for WordPress. Using something as simple as Google Keyword Planner or basic predictive searches can also give you an idea of how to use keywords and phrases.

Making sure your website ranks well starts with determining the optimal type, amount, and placement of keywords and their placement. The key is to research which keywords go where.

  1. Link Building

Creating quality links is one of the most difficult parts of being an SEO, but it will continue to provide value over time. It shows search engines like Google and Yahoo that your site is valid and viewed as an authority in your field. In some cases, these links will come naturally from people who see your content as valuable and wish to link to it; in other cases, they will come from outreach link building efforts, which is harder as you have to directly approach bloggers and other sites with high domain authority to encourage them to link to your site.