Cebu SEO

A few friends of mine queried on what's the real nature of my job as an SEO Specialist, especially when they knew that it does not correlate with the field that you took up in college. So, I simply answer, "Google it!" Seems like I'm not exhibiting courtesy and politeness with them, perhaps for some! But others, would really demand for an answer that they will understand right away even in their average world wide web knowledge, and i.e., in leyman's term. Maybe I could try to react verbally that "SEO is Google Optimization"? 

Some people even generally tagged SEO practitioners as spammers and not even a career, maybe they don't treat this as a profession where you need a level of education. Yes, it's true that you only need a relative experience in SEO BUT not all in the field of SEO are spammers! Those are just people who are practicing Black Hat or Abusive SEO. Link Baiting is an SEO Tactic not spamming, you know?! I hope so...

And one might asked, what's the career path of being into SEO? Quoted from a thread in SEO Philippines forum by Sir Benj Arriola as this has caught attentions by many.

SEO Entry Point Career

• IT/Programming/Graphics/Web
  People who started here are good with the code. They know what makes websites appealing, and how they function. In the process of making websites, they learned about SEO. And from there, they got hooked and wanted to learn more.
• Marketing/Sales & Promotions
  People who are into marketing and sales has the ultimate goal of increasing profits. Sales people know what it takes to convert off line, from telemarketing, tri-media (TV/Print/Radio) and face-to-face selling skills. Marketers know how to create the buzz and helps in the overall sales process. But as they learn the potential power of selling online, they hear about SEO and start learning how to do it to augment their marketing and sales skills to be well rounded.
• Journalist/Writer
  They write eloquently, appealing to the people that read what they write. Convincing, and puts in all the hooks to call the baits and increase sales. They may have started with newspaper press releases, print ad copy, or even TV and Radio commercial scripts. Then suddenly they had to do the same thing for online marketing and press releases, articles and blog post and learn more about SEO which adds in more required knowledge like keyword research and writing proper title tags, meta tags, h1,..h3...h6 tags, image alt tags. Making better calls to action. Click compelling titles for blog post and articles and social bookmarks. Content that is good for search engines and yet still keeps the readers hooked until the call to action and conversion.
• SEO From The Start
  Unaware of what they really wanted to do, but was highly influence by other people. Friends, brother/sister, other relatives, parents, spouse, etc. They never had any other job but was exposed to SEO right away and wanted to learn it right away and eventually wanted to do this all their life and do nothing else. Or it just so happened you were interested right away after reading about SEO from somewhere and was immediately hooked.
• It just landed on my lap, my first job
  They had no job and didn't really know what they were going into. Landed in some company to do some procedural work for an SEO company. Let's say started out as a link builder just posting everywhere.

Mastering Your Craft

• Learning The Technical Side of SEO
  This is for the Writers and Marketing people. Since code is their disadvantage, the next step is learning the code.
• Learning the Marketing Side of SEO
  This is for the Tech people and the Writers. Learning how to sell and how to market online pushes SEO in the next step. SEO should not be only about the highest ranking, but about maximizing the sales and marketing benefits of search engines.
• Learning the Writing Side of SEO
  The Marketing and Tech people should learn how to write well. The better your content is written, the better the ranking is, and the more conversions it can create.

It may not be an easy task to master all very proficiently, but good enough to know what works and what does not and start passing it on to their own team members, or outsource people, or just do the best themselves.

The Next Step - Trying to make it big.

• The SEO Employer/Manager/Supervisor
  You own a business, or has a high ranking position in an SEO business where you handle a team of SEO people. By this time you should be paid a bit higher than the rest. From the experience you gained learning all aspects of SEO and proving your knowledge pays off for you to be a leader. Here you need management skills too. Not only on managing people, but managing projects. Occasionally you can be pulled into customer support calls, sales calls or may even need to help out in making proposals and doing pricing. Of course your prices should make sense that you can justify the sale, at the same time make the company profitable and employees happy and well paid. And since you have a good well rounded knowledge of SEO, you know how to come up with a process that is cost-effective and repeatable.
• The SEO Employee
  You have proven your worth and has made a name for yourself in your own way that you become a sought after employee. Companies chase you because of what you know. You may eventually end up a manager/supervisor of an SEO team, but if you do not work for an SEO company, but just any company as their in-house SEO guy, you are the SEO go to man (or woman). You call the shots and simply coordinate with the company's marketing and sales people, IT people and copywriters.
• The SEO Consultant
  You do not work for anyone but yourself. You have not only proven your worth to a potential employer, but to other SEOs as well. You are respected among SEO peers. You have great knowledge that even other SEO people talk about you. You do speaking engagement, and teach and promote the industry. Companies hire you on a contractual basis to help grow their own SEO teams.
• SEO My Own Stuff
  You do not work for anyone but yourself. But you do not care about having SEO clients nor doing consultancy. You make money simply because you really know how to rank well and increase online sales through SEO. Thus you decide to do your own business and SEO it. Either a brick and mortar business that you do some SEO to increase sales, or simply have no products or services and just do affiliate marketing or ad publishing.

Some SEO people may land in more than 1 spot here but specializes in a few or one of them only.

After SEO

• PPC - Need to harness more power of on-the-spot sponsored results. Manging budgets, writing proper ad copy and making a good ROI.
• Email Marketing - Subscriptions and other opt-in list type of marketing. Drip marketing. Mailing list cross-promotions etc.
• Media Buying - Banner ads, post-roll and pre-roll video ads, learning your niche industry and proper places to advertise.
• Social Media - Building communities and leveraging them to generate more business.
• Usability/Accessibility - Learn the art and science of making your web visitors happy, pleased, less confused that all generates into better sales.

You're rich! What do you do next?

I don't know, you tell me? Invest in real estate? The stock market? invest in Gold/Silver? In Oil? Bonds/Mutual Funds? Buying a company? Or just spend the money where they supposed to go to. Like your family(or future family), make your spouse and kids happy. Give them a full experience of acquiring knowledge of what you are doing so the chain goes on that it would be easier for them to run their lives when they grow up.

Yet, I am still not sure that SEO as a career is good for long term or not but I am getting good money in my work as an SEO Specialist.

Most people never feel secure because they are always worried that they will lose their job, lose the money they already have, lose their spouse, lose their health, and so on. The only true security in life comes from knowing that every single day you are improving yourself in some way, that you are increasing the caliber of who you are and that you are valuable to your company, your friends, and your family.”