Taking Seo As a Serious Career

Hi friends,

I am working as a seo for past one year and basically i have a technical degree. I am really confused about continuing my career as a seo between i really like the job as I find it quite interesting and have grabbed some good knowledge about seo.

But I become confused as we don't have any control over search engines and when ranking goes down our clients give us nightmares.

So all i want to know is that it is good to opt seo as a full time career. And as I am from technical field my friends says SEO is non technical field and I have wasted my time in doing the tech. degree.

Please help, I am really Confused and Worried.

If you enjoy what you are doing then it shouldn't matter what your degree is in. Just do what makes you happy.

^i agree with that... and you can still learn other stuff... your in a world of internet.. you can learn alot...

^^ yeah i agree that i can learn a lot but i have to do only one job at a time and i think if money is coming everybody is happy.

What i am feeling is that there are so many seo companies small and big are emerging and even some software development firm started seo phase, means where we are heading....only who will fit in survives.?

tehrijack, SEO could be a rewarding career, but it's difficult to predict. While I was working as a webmaster/sr.web developer, SEO always was on my list of responsibilities. When I switched to SEO as a full-time career about two years ago, it wasn't easy to find a position since only big companies were able to afford to have somebody in this role, and here in Vancouver we don't have many of them. But last year I saw many more openings, and even more SEO jobs in US. This year it is still a hot career. It was really funny for me to get a call from Nordstrom head office with first question "When are you ready to start?" after they found my resume but didn't realise that I am Canadian and need visa to work for them.

What will happened in the future - nobody knows. IT industry is not something really stable. But I know for sure that your technical background will add leverage to your SEO career.

Develop your skills and knowledge in PPC campaing management, web analytics, different SEO and web analytics tools, web user experience (usability) - and I think you will be OK. You just need to get on-hands experience as much as you can.

Try to get job in SEO or Internet marketing firm to learn, then you can find position in IT companies as well. Try to find some contract jobs if you have time.

Actually I think SEO is only going to get more technical so your technical background is only an asset and probably will make you look more attractive to employers. If you choose to go your own way that is another story. Here is what I see.

There are a lot of companies claiming to offer SEO services. Some are good and some are not so good. With people taking a online SEO courses or a two day Bruce Clay seminar then jumping in and entering the field as SEO consultants the field is going to get more crowded with both competent and incompetent SEOs.

You are definitely at the will of the search engines. As long as Google makes slow changes over time you should do well but you need to be versed in my facets of SEM like Pay Per Click marketing too.

If you go solo don't just rely on SEO for your revenue. Look for companies you can outsource your services to and look for deals where you can offer your SEO services at no charge for a percentage of sales or equity in the company. The Adsense idea might be good too. I'm not doing it so I can't say good or bad.

I'm finding that less of my revenue is coming form SEO hourly projects and more is coming from revenue sharing deals. If you get five companies giving you a cut of sales for your SEO skills and one giving you equity you never need to find another SEO client. Then you can let all the newbies in the field and SEO only firms fight it out while you count your money.

The perception of SEO as non technical is completely non sense in my opinion. No SEO would be able to efficiently do the job without having an intermediate knolwledge of programming and basic HTML. SEO involves a lot of components and the technical aspect is pretty significant. Of course if you refer to technical as developing code then yes you will not develop code or applications as an SEO. Monetize SEO with clients is tough when you are charging a monthly fee for the services. Rather look for shared-revenue deals in order to gain a bigger share of profits in the long run. The idea is to lock in cliens for more than 1 year. You will need lot more than just SEO to achieve this. So my opinion combine SEO with other services and offer an integrated value to the company.

Agree with you in many ways, sdhinteractive.

But some of the big guns on this forum are not.

Check discussion all the way at
http://forums.seochat.com/seo-profe...ded-148042.html

My take on it. SEO is really about marketing and content creation. Do you like doing those things? A background is business is a big help if you want to go it alone. The actual technical side of the internet is not that relevant to SEO. Doing well on SE is mainly about links. People link to content.

A career is a long time. Get some experince in a variety of areas. This day and age people want multi-skilled individuals. Your technical skills will be useful to an SEO company but creativity and oportunism are really what makes a good SEO brain.

Get some experince in your area you studied in before branching out to much. Do some SEO as a side line for your own sites, family, friends etc. SEO is not a glamarous job it can be fairly tedious and repetative. See if you would like to be doing it full time. Your qualifications will not count for much in this industry really.

SEO will become harder in the traditional sense as SE improve their algo. The future most important people to SEO will be content creaters, marketers and PPC consultants.

Best of luck

Even i face the same problem to an extent such as the one discussed here, but i think whatever you do, you've got to develop an expertise in that particular field. Regarding the glamour quotient as mentioned, i cant say much about it, may be its not there in this career, but in the end money counts, and i hope it is there? What say pros as they are in a better situation to tell and i am fairly new!!!

thanks guys for taking my query seriously.
I feel really calm after reading your answers..

I am very thankful to you all...