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What does one has to do to become a SEO professional.Do I have to do some course.
The best course you can take is available right here in WW. If you have the time read, read, read, read.
The job is time consuming but doesnt really sound very difficult
Its not difficult but if you do not have basic fundimentals in HTML it would become more complicated. It is time consuming but only in the sense that you have to perform the various tasks to optimize your site. You also have to be up to date with the latest SE news (again, the best place to do that is here at WW)
anyone has any suggestion or can any SEO share thier experince how they became an SEO.
People Skills. If you're planning to be an SEO w/i a large company, or even if you'll be doing it as a business, you'll need people skills and lots of them. You'll need these skills to be able to commuincate to your often very skeptical customers your ideas. You have to keep in mind that at the end of the day they are paying you lots of money today for results that might or might not show up sometime in the future.
Then spend all your time writing and producing good solid and original content.
Good solid white hat sites are the way to go if you are interested in the long term.
Too much 'messing about' and you'll be joining an update thread one day saying
"my site has disappeared for no reason"
Here is a quick recap of how I became an SEO. I started working for a computer/networking company when I was in college. Gained a lot of technical knowledge there. I actually majored in sociology as far as college goes.
I quit school to start my own internet company during the .com boom back in the late 90's. I learned web design and development on my own and that was a primary part of my business. Some of my clients were some major players in the auto industry so they were early adopters when it came to the web. This is where I gained my first real exposure to "internet marketing" and search marketing in particular. I started managing ppc advertising before Adwords was even around. It was not that effective, but it was good experience. I also started messing around with natural SEO and it was rather easy back in the day (meta tags and keywords).
I did this for a few years until I got bored and one day I got a call from someone who happened to see my resume on Monster. It was a local internet advertising agency who had recently switched their business model from a full service creative agency to doing SEM. I thought it sounded pretty interesting so I took the job. It seemed like it would be some good experience and it turned out I was right. While I was there the SEM market took off and we became one of the most recognized agencies in the industry. I was a senior technologist on our key accounts team and got to work with a list of Fortune 500 companies. To the say the least it was very exciting and rewarding as well. I have now moved to the client side and work as the in house SEM manager. It is a little less stressful, but just as exciting. I love what I do and am excited to get up and go to work everyday.
My advice would be to learn as much as you can about the industry. There is a wealth of information out there and webmasterworld is one of the best. Take the information you learn and try to apply it in real life scenarios with real websites. If you can prove yourself and the value of your services you can be successful in this industry. There is a largely untapped market in small to medium size businesses when it comes to SEM.
