If you are looking to really supercharge your SEO career, take a look at Gyutae Park's,
14 Steps to Transforming Your Career Path to Super SEO Status. Gyutae lays out his advice for starting your career with a great foundation and building a rock solid career. His advice starts with "learning design and programming from the start." Whether you continue to handling coding or not, this step is very important for being comfortable with everything SEO. Gyutae goes on to suggest a business degree as a good way to familiarize yourself with marketing principles. Your clients will always be concerned with the bottom line, so understanding basic business principles will give you a headstart. Search marketers who understand business principles will be able to find the marketing value in the next "twitter" before having to read about it in the blogosphere. Take a look at Gyutae's guide, you might have skipped a step that is holding back your career.
Over at Techipedia, Tamar Weinberg wrote a great piece on What Traits Define a Social Media Marketer. As one of the best social media marketers out there, her research on the topic carries a lot of weight. Tamar asked a stable of top notch experts in the industry what skills they consider necessary for social media marketing success and compiled the responses into a great post. Some my favorite points were.
A social media marketer’s job never ends - Reem Abeidoh
A knowledgeable social media marketer has experienced repeated success on various social media websites and knows what sort of content succeeds and fails, and effective ways to write, submit, and promote various pieces. - Rebecca Kelley
A social media marketer is someone who is fundamentally oriented towards LISTENING first, and only then offering contributions that move the conversation forward. - Laura Fitton,
Without a working knowledge of customers, markets, online communities, and the dynamics of their company’s business model, Social Media Marketers will succumb to the brilliance of shiny new social objects and remain hypnotized by their allure and promise. - Brian Solis
Whether you are looking to get into social media, or are looking to refine your tactics, read through Tamar’s post as she really received input from some of the best in the industry.
Are you looking to hiring someone to help improve your conversion rates? Well Mae Allam, of Invesp Blog, has put together a list of 14 Smart Questions to Ask Conversion Optimization Consultants. When looking for someone to help optimize your website, it is easy to get wooed by people with quick answers and a snazzy sales pitch. To avoid hiring the wrong person all you need to do is ask the right questions. Mae’s list will help you find the right person and hopefully avoid wasting time and money on someone who pulled the wool over your eyes. Some of my favorite questions from her list were:
#3 What happens if our conversion rates do not increase at the end of the project?
#5 Do you follow a specific methodology to optimization?
#9 What is expected from my team?
#11 What will I learn from you?
For anyone looking for a little outside help, Mae’s post is great start to finding the perfect consultant.
On the other hand if you are looking for a decrease in traffic, plummeting conversion rates, and a virtually non-existent website, take a look at Conversion Marketing’s Hire a Crappy SEO Firm in Only 10 Steps. Sometimes it can be hard to find a great SEO Firm, or at least the right SEO firm to fit your needs, but it isn’t hard to drop a bomb on your progress and send your site to the bottom. Conversion Marketing has put together a very funny list of how to make sure you don’t hire a good SEO. If you are interested in improving your website, reverse the list and you should be able to eliminate the majority of the snake-oil salesmen out there.
That’s it for this week, please check back next week for another update.
