What Are the Skills Required to Be An SEO?

One of the questions which I always encounter is how can I become an SEO expert? What are the skills required to be an SEO?

A few days back I shared a blog post on SEO as a career, and I received quite a few mails asking me how to become an SEO. Many of them even asked me for the skills which are required to become an SEO, especially an SEO expert.

Precisely I write a normal response to everyone that nothing specific are the skill sets required to be an SEO, but still there are a few things which are required.

Basically you don’t need a degree like Engineering, or M. Tech or anything else for becoming an SEO, but you must need a few qualities to become an SEO expert.

 Skills Required to Be An SEO?

Here are a few skills through which you can take off your career as an SEO:

 Internet Savvy

To be very frank the most basic and essential requirement for anyone to become an SEO is to know the functioning of internet only. The person should know how to search for a particular thing. Not only this they should also know how to get the answer for a particular thing.

It is quite simple to search for anything. Those who know a bit of internet are aware of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. and they also know that we can type some keywords to get relevant site from those websites.

But, to find out the exact required things is not that much easier. You can get hundreds of result for your searched keywords, but then with your experience you will understand that many of them are not closely related to what you were looking for.

So to understand if a particular web page which you have opened for your searched keyword is serving the same thing which you were looking for or not, is a bit difficult, and you can gain this with your experience. And hence if you really want to become an SEO, especially an expert SEO then you should know how to use internet and how can you get the results which you can search for.

In my career as an SEO I must have taken so many interviews, while for fresher’s I use to look for this quality only. While discussing a few basic questions with the candidate I can realize if the person is capable of finding anything quickly on internet or not?

 Sound HTML Knowledge

Being an SEO I cannot expect anyone to develop a website. Being an SEO I cannot also expect anyone to hardcore something for us, but then I can at least expect that you can know the basics of HTML coding. Although I cannot expect you to understand the coding of PHP or .Net, but then if you do have the idea of some of the basic coding in HTML, I am sure with time you can do manage them as well.

As an SEO you only need to check a few of the coding, like a href, img src, div, alt, title, etc. and these are some basic things only as far as HTML language is concerned.

As I said that the person should be internet savvy, and hence I can expect them to search for some specific coding if they stuck somewhere. Hence if they do have the basic knowledge of HTML coding they can easily be able to understand all those coding part later on.

 Communication Skills

Now, this is the requirement which an SEO needs badly. They should know how to communicate properly whether in written or in oral form.

It is although true that an SEO need not to face the customers upfront, but then an SEO need to communicate with many other SEO’s regarding links, blogs, etc. and hence proper communication skills are required.

One of the things which I found lacking badly in India is the communication ability only. I am not saying that the person would be a master in literature, but then the person should be able to express properly what they want from other person.

 Chat Savvy

As I said that those who want to be an expert in SEO should possess the good communication skills and must be internet savvy, but then not only these two things were enough. The person should also have the knowledge of how to do instant messaging with others.

The person should know how to do chat with different people and understand what others is saying to them.

 Social Media Friendly

If you really want to become an SEO, you must need to know how Facebook and Twitter works along with the Google+. If you can have an account in FB and twitter, and you know at least the basics of how to manage them then you can simply use any other social media sites in future.

Having a Gmail account is a must, as through that only you can be able to connect with many other SEO’s, which is quite essential these days.

 MS Excel

Although I myself is not an expert in using MS Excel, but then I knows the basics of the same, and this is what I do at least believe that a person should know before becoming an SEO.

While as an SEO you need to play so many data items, and what best tools you can have except MS Excel to arrange them.

Although this is something which you can learn from your own experience, so I am not counting it as the most essential requirements.

Other than all these a person also need to know a bit about what blogging is and how a person can do blogging. Later on a person who wants to become an SEO will have to manage different blogs, and hence at the beginning the person must know about blogs.

Also the person need a bit of decent IQ level to become an SEO.

Though those who want to be an expert SEO will have to understand that for this first they will have to be an SEO, and for this you need to learn so many things. It is not like that if I spent 10 years of mine in SEO field, so I should not need to read new things. Well, I must also need to update my SEO knowledge on a daily basis.

You won’t believe me if I will say that I actually know only 2-3% of what SEO is, but it is true. So to become an SEO you need the passion towards learning new things of the industry.

Do let me know your opinion about this blog post of mine. Please do share your feedback, or review in the form of comments below. I would love to hear what you all think about this blog post of mine.