The types of skills required by Search Engine Optimisers/Marketers

The toolsets and skills of a good modern search optimiser are incredibly large, and there is a steep learning curve involved when starting out in the industry.

I finished my degree in Entertainment Technology about 3 years ago, and at that time I had a decent grip of html and had been taught some project management skills, so felt ready to enter the working world. I applied for the job at Vertical Leap, and was taken on to learn the trade of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

My first task was to learn about the intricacies of keyword analysis, a skillset that is difficult to be prepared for at university. Trying to determine the user’s intent behind making these searches and working out whether or not your client is a good fit to attempt to target these phrases is no easy thing to learn, and the methods and tools we use for keyword analysis have adapted as time has progressed.

This was just the tip of the iceburg – since then I’ve had to learn a massive array of skills – coding pages to better optimise content from an SEO perspective, how to validate HTML so that it can be crawled more easily, how to create XML sitemaps, identifying newly developed tools to help speed up this process on bigger websites, analysing link profiles of websites, identifying duplicate content issues that can really damage a websites potential to rank prominently, making proper use of robots.txt to ensure that only areas of the site we want indexed are spiderable.

I’ve learnt how to rewrite ugly and non user/search engine friendly URLs through a variety of methods, how to geo-tag websites so that search engines know that they are targeted for a specific region and with all of these things I haven’t even touched on the link building and off page optimisation strategies that need to be employed – or the reviewing of analytics data, which can provide insights into what your website does well, or badly.

In recent years, we’ve added

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