The New York Times discovers SEO

The New York Times’ “Fresh Starts” section takes on the SEO job market, which tracks the success of a history major in becoming Director of SEO of an ad agency based on his experience in an internship. I’m guessing / hoping that more than an internship was involved with this position but with the dearth of experience in this area, who knows. God help us all if It’s really freaking cool if just an internship can get you a Director-level position at an agency.

Thematic eye rolling sarcasm aside, SEO really is an awesome field to work in with a ton of upward potential and a wide open field. I can’t recommend enough that whether you’re involved with it right now or not to start reading everything you come across that mentions how it works. The reading time costs you nothing and allows you to at least speak competently on the subject. If you’d like to go further down the rabbit hole, try putting it into practice in a couple of different ways:

• Start a simple website or blog for personal information and work towards getting it to rank for a particular phrase (for example in the current economy, targeting your particular skill combined with ‘resume’ might be a consideration). Go out and get some links to it. For extra fun, add Google Analytics, learn what it takes to do so and what all it can show you.
• Help a friend with his / her site, which will help you get the swing of making indirect changes to a site.
• Nudge your marketing and IT teams to make some SEO-based changes to your company’s website, showing them why it’ll help. Learn what it takes to push through a website change at the corporate level. Track its effect in terms of traffic, revenue and rankings.

Since there’s relatively little experience or formal knowledge out there, even a little is better than nothing. Based on a (admittedly relatively small) survey on the topic:

• An equal number of respondents cited that they were involved in web marketing OR web design and development and ‘sort of drifted into it’ (37% each).
• 24% of respondents got into SEO ‘by accident’, and
• Only 3% got in because ‘I wanted to be an SEO’!

I know ‘by accident’ sounds like a crazy way to end up in a job career, but having been a part of it myself it’s amazing what can happen out of need and opportunity. It’s a great area with upside – look into it today.

Mom says there are no posts that are like me. I am unique.

Tags:   Search News · SEO News · traditional media Share on Twitter

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