Could someone direct me in the right direction in becoming an SEO? - Developers

I was offered a job paying $17hr to become an SEO at a company (training is provided) but its for someone who has already been familiar with SEO for at least 1+ yr. I'm not sure if this is the right forum to post this to, but I've spent a week now looking around the internet and searching on what an SEO actually does and what I've gathered so far is that they do analytics and back linking to certain websites to show up in the top search in Google. I also learned that your site can be penalized if you do it wrong/illegally. Another thing I learned is that "keywords" aren't AS important as they were back in 2005 versus now. Its more about the traffic/popularity. I would just like to know if someone can get more in detail on what an SEO does..

This might be a good start: [url]http://www.4seotraining.com.au/three-hour-seo-course-for-beginners.htm[/url]

What is important at any highly regarded SEO firm is the conversion rate. Traffic and ranking really doesn't matter if you get 1000 visitors but only 1% buy, you would rather have 50% of 100 visitors to buy. What I do recommend though, is, if you really have 1 yr+ experience, then you should have some pretty solid results, rankings and conversion rates at the back your hand. If you have impressive results then there should be no problem to get a job. If not, then maybe you should do some PRO BONO work to get these results, so you can show it to an employer.

[QUOTE=mikkeljuhl;46763374]What is important at any highly regarded SEO firm is the conversion rate. Traffic and ranking really doesn't matter if you get 1000 visitors but only 1% buy, you would rather have 50% of 100 visitors to buy. What I do recommend though, is, if you really have 1 yr+ experience, then you should have some pretty solid results, rankings and conversion rates at the back your hand. If you have impressive results then there should be no problem to get a job. If not, then maybe you should do some PRO BONO work to get these results, so you can show it to an employer.[/QUOTE] Conversion rate optimization is not SEO. SEO specifically means search engine optimization. Conversion rate is very important, but it's not SEO.

In a basic sense there's two sides of SEO, technical and the backlink aspect, these can both be broken further. Technical is making sure the site has pages aligned for the keywords you want to rank, for this you need to know the search terms that people looking for the websites service use. e.g. if you sell flowers what will someone type into Google, if it's "flowers by post" is there a page set up around this? You also want to make sure search engines are properly indexing the site's content, that the bots they use can crawl everything on the site properly with minimal errors. e.g. if there's loads of pages linked to on the site that 404 that could give a bad user experience so could count against the site or is part of the site being blocked for the crawlers in the sites robots.txt. Backlinks are where things get interesting. One of the factors (and probably still the major factor) that Google uses to rank a site is the links to it. At one point simply number of links and the anchor text of the links were most important. As you can imagine people tried to use this to manipulate the results in their favour. Obviously Google doesn't want this and over time they have adjusted their algorithm to spot what is a genuine link. So now it's also where the links come from and whether the link is genuine, anchor text of the link has also become less important e.g. a link to your site from a national paper is going to be a better place than a random blogspot linking to loads of unrelated sites - gambling alongside online flowers. What you'll find now is a lot of SEO is more along the lines of PR where you want to encourage other sites to talk about the website/business rather than try to just get as many links as possible. e.g. if you're a fancy dress shop rather than just buy directory links you'll try to break the world record for people dressed as superman, link it to charity and contact the traditional press, comic book sites, movie sites etc. about it. There's obviously a lot more nuance to the whole thing than this but it might be useful. I think [url]http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo[/url] is a pretty good introduction to a lot of the concepts.

[QUOTE=KmartSqrl;46765813]Conversion rate optimization is not SEO. SEO specifically means search engine optimization. Conversion rate is very important, but it's not SEO.[/QUOTE] I am fully aware that SEO is an abbreviation of search engine optimization. Now I never said in SEO conversion rates are important, I said at any highly regarded SEO firm the conversion rate is important. Now OP is asking what he can do to become an SEO at a firm, therefore I assume he would want to know what a SEO firm is looking for, now that I work for one, I think I am quite qualified to say what they will be looking for. If I was at a job interview and the interviewee was rambling about ranking #1 on t shirts, I would have doubts, now if this guy instead said he had a conversion rate of 75% for people searching for black crew neck t-shirt, I would hire him (given he was qualified, but from that it seems as if he is). I think you misread my first sentence, but I hope you do have a merry christmas and your conversion rates are fantastic :-)