Career Opportunities as an SEO Specialist

 When it comes to choosing the right career option after completing attaining professional degrees, they have a plethora of choice in various fields like software development, application development, engineering services, technology research, web Design and development etc. One such option can be Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is gaining significant grounds not only in India, but worldwide, given the gigantic growth of internet based services and product promotion.

In a nutshell, a good SEO analyst can do wonders for an organization by using analytic skills to improve its online presence and make it a numero uno website on any popular web search. SEO has very bright future for someone if he has great analytic skills, because he has to research a lot to sculpt a strategy to beat tough competition on Google and Yahoo, and now Bing. Apart from that, he should possess excellent writing skills, which would provide him a definite edge over others.

Search engine optimization process involves the following components:

• SEO research and objectives
  Keyword Strategy
  Search engine spider-ability assurance
  Template page optimization
  Content Optimization
  Code optimization
  Internal linking
  External linking
  Ongoing management and reporting

People often consider SEO as a technical or highly scientific thing, but it’s an art. It’s an art of selecting right keywords for a website, it’s an art of researching the competitors for those keywords, and it’s an art of defining right strategy for scaling gruesome competition for high rankings. He ought to be a right planner with a great marketing mind. He muss access the needs of website visitors and should provide right information and right tools to them. This will help the organization in attracting a lot of traffic to its website. Only an artist like an SEO professional can work on a website with his unique artistic flare that can ignite sales from any website and generate a high and significant Return on Investment (ROI).

SEO is a profession that can be practiced while working for a company or as a solo practitioner. There are many jobboards like Dice and Craigslist that publish SEO job advertisements. It is worth noting that the compensation for SEO employees is equal to or even higher than that of developers, designers and marketers. Salaries over $80K per annum are not going to be an exception for SEO jobs.  As a solo SEO practitioner you can make even more money. Almost all freelance sites have sections for SEO services and offers for $50 an hour or more is quite common. If you are still not confident that you can work on your own, you can start a SEO job, learn a bit and then start your own company.

 Many companies offer turnkey solutions that include Web design, Web development AND SEO optimization. In fact, many clients expect that when they hire somebody to make their site, the site will be SEO friendly, so if you are good both as a designer and a SEO expert, you will be a truely valuable professional. On the other hand, many other companies are dealing with SEO only because they feel that this way they can concentrate their efforts on their major strength – SEO, so you can consider this possibility as well.

 Recent estimates states that Google search engine alone has indexed about 10 billion pages into its databases. Assuming that the other two search engines Yahoo and MSN has indexed just half of what Google has indexed, then this would amount to about 5 billion pages. So, the total number of Web Pages that has been indexed by the three major search engines is about 15 billion Web Pages. Every day new website business are designed and included in the World Wide Web. Obviously, every website owner would wish to see his website on the top 10 list of the search engine results page. With this being the situation you can imagine the kind of demand for SEO professionals is there and would prevail for a very long time to come.

Few important Things You Must Know

• Search Engine Dependant: It is true that in any career there are many things that are outside of your control but for SEO this is a rule number one. Search engines frequently change their algorithms and what is worse – these changes are not made public, so even the greatest SEO gurus admit that they make a lot of educated guesses about how things work. It is very discouraging to make everything perfect and then to learn that due to a change in the algorithm, your sites dropped 100 positions down. But the worst part is that you need to communicate this to clients, who are not satisfied with their sinking ratings.
• No Fixed Rules: Probably this will change over time but for now the rule is that there are no rules – or at least not written ones. You can work very hard, follow everything that looks like a rule and still success is not coming. Currently you can’t even rely on bringing a search engine to court because of the damages they have done to your business because search engines are not obliged to rank high sites that have made efforts to get optimized.
• Rapid Changes in rankings: But even if you somehow manage to get to the top for a particular keyword, keeping the position requires constant efforts. Well, many other businesses are like that, so this is hardly a reason to complain – except when an angry customer starts shouting at you that this week their ratings are sinking and of course this is your entire fault.
• Patience is the Virtue: The SEO professional and customers both need to understand that SEO takes constant effort and time. It could take months to move ahead in the ratings, or to build tens of links. Additionally, if you stop optimizing for some time, most likely you will experience a considerable drop in ratings. You need lots of motivation and patience not to give up when things are not going your way.

 Popular job site Naukri lists more than 4200 SEOjobs while monster.com lists more than 3200 jobs. These number are expected to increase drastically with more and more companies adopting the internet advertising and marketing methods. Every company needs to promote its products and services on Internet to gain more and more sales. Due to this trend, there is a growing demand for SEO professionals in India, however there is a shortage of experienced SEO professionals.

                                                                                                                                                                   image courtsey: www.thatseosite.com