What Technical Skills Should Search Engine Experts Have?
An Analytical Mind
Surprisingly, the most basic requirement for search engine experts is not a technical one. You can learn to code, be good at it, and get used to all the tech talk. However, on the whole, it’s all not about the syntax or libraries, but about being able to solve pressing issues.
Knowing what information is necessary, being able to understand it, noticing patterns in things — these are the skills that do matter for individuals who strive to become search engine experts. The skills mentioned above come into play at every step of the SEO process. While technical SEO knowledge will allow you to make great ideas come to life, the analytical mind will help you generate them first.
HTML Coding
HTML coding is pretty much indispensable to your job. As you might know, SEO is not just about keywords or linking. In a deeper sense, it has always been about building sought after websites. In most cases, the best sites are built in a certain way:
- They are accessible;
- They are easy to follow;
- They are well-organized.
To efficiently deliver content to your target audience you need to know how to create and manage it in a way that is in tune with the environment it resides in. Because you’re in the business of building commercial websites, you have to know the code and understand the syntax when you see it. Simple as that.
Web Hosting Experience
Selecting a quality web hosting provider is crucial when building a high-ranking website. Web hosting choices must consider downtime, which refers to the amount of time your resource is inaccessible due to issues with the hosting server. If one of Google’s spiders visits your site when it’s down, it will record the site as such and move on.
Even though there’s no such thing as 100% uptime, your goal is to get as close to that as possible. Keep in mind, it’s your responsibility to track your site’s downtime/uptime and make changes when you notice any drops in percentages. Furthermore, you should be familiar with other web hosting related things. Uploading files, changing settings, modifying content and configuring accessibility should be easy tasks for you.
Excel Basics
When it comes to SEO, there is a lot of data to be analyzed. Fortunately, there are many useful tools to help you make sense of the information you gather. Knowing Microsoft Excel at a medium level is advisable for individuals who call themselves search engine experts.
No need to get to the level of using VBA macros, but knowing graphic objects and logical functions will be a huge plus. You can use Excel to filter, sort and group data when searching for specific information in large data streams. Excel is also often applied to identify trends, compare data strings, manipulate text. All of these can come in handy when analyzing data.
Conclusion
There’s a lot you can do regarding SEO without technical skills, but there’s so much more you can do with them. To call yourself a search engine expert you need to understand and even know how to write a bit of code. It’s also a good idea to get familiar with the server and the programming language. In the long run, it will pay off.
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