Valuable skills

- [Instructor] So you're wanting to do SEO and you're maybe thinking what kind of skills do I need? I would say the biggest skill you need is curiosity. You want to understand how a search engine got its listings. You want to be that person or in that mindset that when you see someone ranking number one you ask yourself how did they get there? And then you explore it and you try to look into some of the factors, you try to look into some of the things that are causing that whether it's the content they've been using or whether or not you can tell that they seem to have a lot of engagement that's happening with their content. You want to figure things out. If it weren't for curiosity I literally would not be here doing these videos with you today. Years ago when I was doing web development I had a client come in and didn't understand why they were not ranking well on the top one of the search engines back then. I don't know if it was Lichos or Yahoo or Excite but those were the names we were dealing with 20 years ago. And I didn't have an answer. Nobody had an answer for it then. So I spent over the course of four months time looking at how the search engines were interacting with their content. I was watching whether or not they were coming in and picking up the material, what other pages were doing well and what seemed to be the main factors that were controlling whether or not something ranked well or not with the search engines. And all that learning and all that experimentation launched me on a new career that I'm on today which is talking about and explaining and helping people understand what SEO is about and it all came from just being curious and taking the time to experiment and examine and give the space, the time that it deserved. So I'm not saying that you need to become an SEO expert, I'm not saying you need to have an entire new career in SEO but having some curiosity about how you are showing up in the various search engines out there and the very search listings can lead to your own personal success for your own business. Beyond that I think that if you are more of a content SEO type person it can help to be a good writer or someone who can understand how to tell a good story and go beyond just the basics. If you're a more technical SEO person it gets back to that exploration that you like to dig in and really test and experiment and understand how some of your content or how some of your material is interacting with the search engines and that you're solving any of the problems that you're seeing that are out there. Then the skills beyond that can often depend on whether or not you're more of a content SEO kind of person or technical SEO kind of person. Content SEO people deal more with the content and the words and the material and so someone who enjoys telling a good story, who understands writing, who understands perhaps interviewing people or pulling material together, those are all great skills to have whereas a technical SEO person is someone who maybe builds a website or at least can actually understand how to speak the technical lingo and language that's involved with it. They get java script, they understand the elements of html, they understand the things that need to be involved with dealing with secure websites or dealing with mobile friendly technologies. It doesn't mean that you have to have a pure technical knowledge if you want to do that. It may mean that you're just versed well in it but you can talk or work with someone who really is a developer. Just like if you're a technical SEO it doesn't mean that you can't do content because you probably have some of those skills as well. There are a couple great resources I can recommend to get you started on your journey in learning how to do more with SEO and acquiring the skills that you need. Certainly LinkedIn Learning has a lot of content that you can find right here if you want to look at that. Google offers its own guide to SEO and it's a free pdf that you can download so you'll want to check that out. You can even google it to find it or if you head over to our own site at searchengineland you'll find a link called SEO where you can just search for what is SEO. We have an entire page about SEO which includes a link over to the google guide, another guide from Moz, similar guides from across the web, material from across the web as well as our own guide to SEO to help you understand the things that you need to be doing. So do check those out.