12 Things Being a Good SEO is all About

SEO
In my hum­ble opin­ion there is a lot of mis­in­for­ma­tion out there about SEO. This list is an effort to cut through the rub­bish and let you know what a good SEO pro­fes­sional should be doing.
A good SEO pro­fes­sional should:
  1. Add value to the web
  2. Cre­ate unique and engag­ing content
  3. Improve traf­fic and con­ver­sions (not just rankings)
  4. Under­stand web­site tech­nol­ogy (html/css, pro­gram­ming, .htac­cess files, site archi­tec­ture, inter­nal link­ing struc­ture, anchor text, how search engines crawl web­sites, page speed, etc.
  5. Under­stand how web opti­miza­tion fits into dif­fer­ent busi­ness mod­els and how it should inte­grate with other mar­ket­ing channels.
  6. Under­stand how search engines judge back­links (link­ing c-blocks, link­ing root domains, his­tor­i­cal back­link acqui­si­tion, link veloc­ity etc.
  7. Under­stand the con­cepts of inbound marketing.
  8. Know about the art and sci­ence of key­word research — search vol­ume, rank­ings, com­pet­i­tive­ness, search intent.
  9. Under­stand social media, how it improves not only rank­ings but trust and author­ity for a business.
  10. Test, mea­sure and track everything
  11. Be com­pletely trans­par­ent with their clients about every­thing they do
  12. Bring a mea­sur­able and sub­stan­tial ROI over the long term