I’d make sure you know what you are getting into. SEO is complicated and multifaceted. You need to be qualified to work for clients. I’d start with the following guidelines and afterwards, search for other free guides and tutorials and consume them all: The Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization from Moz
As far as salary goes, it has a large range, mostly based on your experience. If you have no experience, but know enough and have the tools, I’d suggest getting some SEO projects done so that you build your experience and confidence. Check out Upwork, the world’s largest online workplace for freelance gigs.
Quora question: Can an on-page SEO and off page SEO with backlinks and social signals alone be enough to skyrocket your site or do you also need a marketing campaign as well?
It sounds sketchy. Backlinks and social signals ONLY sounds a black hat SEO strategy. I’d suggest you never do this for a client. The risks are stratospherically too high. Buying cheap backlinks and social signals is easy on sites like BHW and Fiver. I would never do that for clients. In the new world of SEO, content rules as do REAL backlinks and social signals. The search engines have won. Get over it. Else you may build up a site for a few months and then Google Seach’s AI catches up with you and that site drops like a ballistic missile. Don’t chance it.
Geesh! I wrote a blog post last week about what I thought was a rather clever article about what I presumed might be “Preferred” Google abbreviations in NAPS (Name, Address, Phone) usage across the Web. In fact, I’m taking a very difficult Data Analysis (DA) nanodegree with Udacity and in my Data Wrangling project I strongly suggest in it that we Data Analysts should use consistent abbreviations when doing Search Engine Marketing, etc. and data cleanup. One of our tasks is to clean up street names in a large dataset taken from Open Street Mapping (OSM). Thus, the abbreviation idea for street name cleanup. My point: Standard abbreviations will actually reduce computing time across the planet. Haha. Maybe.
Well, my PeterBakke.com site that contained the aforementioned blog got hammered. It tumbled from page 1 SERP to Page 6 SERP with no end in sight when searching for “Peter Bakke,” c’est moi. Perhaps the word “Google” appeared too many times in my post and Google penalized me for keyword stuffing. Or perhaps Google thinks people writing about Google are pandering. Dunno.
In any case, I’m also learning about machine learning [ML aka AI] in my nanodegree and the Google automagic search result demotion is certainly an example of ML, good or bad. C’est la vie.
So, if you are a search engine company, say, Google, and you have data centers all across the planet and a significant amount of the work that those data centers do is to parse text (and I mean LOTS of text) every microsecond of every day, then you could see why search engines might want to have standardized abbreviations so that text can be processed in a uniform and efficient way. Thus, I suggest the idea of preferred Google street mapping abbreviations (see example table of abbreviations at bottom of this post).
Google Data Center / Google
After all, using standard abbreviations means that search engines need to process fewer characters which means less processing time and less processing time means fewer resources used with less cost. Catch the drift here? It may not seem like much to mere humans to save a few characters in a text string containing a long form street name versus a short form street name. However, multiply all that work, as Carl Sagan would say, “by billions and billions,” and then you might just generate some tangible savings.
The new mantra for digital marketers and SEOs is to “make search engines happy,” which really means making the AI search bots ‘happy.’ The simple act of standard abbreviations could help the job of savvy digital marketers. After all, the difference in SERP position A versus position Z could be significant. Could one signal for better ranking be a uniformly abbreviated business NAP everwhere in cyberspace? (See “NAP” at bottom of this page.) Who knows? It’s worth a try.
Finally, simply imagine, if you can wrap your mind around it, the teraflops you’ll be personally responsible for saving in a lifetime by abbreviating everything, everywhere, uniformly. Perhaps we digital marketers could single-handedly affect global warming by reducing extra heat entering the atmosphere from data centers that we are saving from executing all those extra teraflops… all of this by merely shortening “Street” to “St” or “улица” to “ул.”
