Biggy

Hi, I'm currently working as an SEO specialist for quite a big company. I'm not very experienced but I can tell you how I started. I had an interest in the digital marketing sphere and started reading some blogs and stuff online. After some time I offered to make a website for a friend of mine who had a offline business for free. I have created the website and started reading how can I drive traffic to it. I choose SEO because it is pretty much for free, requires only skill. Luckily for me there were not that many competition in this niche and the site started getting pretty good ranks in Google and started driving clients to the business. This project landed me an internship in SEO agency, which landed me a job in better and bigger agency. It is pretty easy to enter the sphere. Employers like real projects where you've put your skills in practice and it worked out. SEO is very powerful indeed and can do big things because you can give answer to people's problems and make them easily find what they need. Everything you need to know and pretty much what I do for clients in the company can be found online for free. I don't like Udemy courses which are made only to soak your money and to tell you "the big secret" This is very good blog you can start with: https://moz.com/blog Here you can find almost anything. SEO pretty much consists of these 4 categories: - On-Page SEO - working on the code and content of the website to make it meet the requirements of the search engines and solve user's needs and problems. - Off-Page SEO - this consists of building backlinks which are one of the most important ranking factors. The more links you have to your website from quality sources (other websites similar to your niche reffering to you) the better. Google loves seeing that your content helps other people on the web. - Technical SEO - this is advanced stuff and consists of deep code knowledge - for example how to optimize your JavaScript or Ajax to make it easier for search engines to crawl. - UX/UI - another very important part of SEO is making sure your website is user friendly. Another important factor for Google is how users interact with websites. For example - the more time people spent on your website, the more pages they visit, the better. So is SEO gonna die? Nobody knows. These hoaxes are on the internet since SEO became independent part of webmastering or marketing. The fact is that Google is more and more focusing on content since their mission is to help people find information easily but even with the greatest content that solve people problems your site can suffer from technical errors like blocked pages for indexation and many more. The art of SEO is how I see it - to make your site both very useful to users and easily accessed from search engines. But are we going to see search engine results pages (SERP) that is answering our problem and don't show websites. Nobody knows. These are the most ranking signals that Googles takes to point when wondering how to rank your website: https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors Consider this. Google makes like 400-500 changes to their algorithm over a year and they don't publish them on the web. When talking about SEO I reffer to Google because it's the biggest search engine and pretty much you only need to know how to optimize for them. All of the advices you find on the internet are from SEO specialists who tested something and it worked. Google is open only for the biggest changes they make to their algorithm: https://searchengineland.com/8-major-google-algorithm-updates-explained-282627 This is another very useful article that can help you pretty much land a job in the field: https://moz.com/blog/junior-seo-task-list I don't know how is it in your country but here agencies like coding skills in the new job apprentice - HTML, JavaSript, CSS Here is another link for you: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo How I said Moz is one of the best sources of information for SEO. I pretty much like SEO because its somewhat of a mix between technical skills - coding but not on expert level and marketing fundamentals - which is the target group of people who are visiting the website, what problem they seek, how your content solves that. But most importantly you have to practice the things you've learnt, it doesn't happen with reading only. Find less competitive niche, buy a domain, put a Wordpress on it since it's one of the easiest CMS's to use that requires less coding skills, and practice! So this is for now, hope it helped, if there's something I can help with more or you have questions - write me a message, I would love to help. And I'm not trying to sell you another course or anything.