
Over the past few years, the demand for the position of an SEO expert has increased significantly. This job has become popular and well received, which represents a strong incentive to enter this field. Given that there are no colleges that offer degrees in SEO yet, it is up to you alone to pave the way to learn this creative job. The mission of this guide is to educate you about SEO and how to enter this field and start your journey to become an SEO expert. The options are many and the skills of the job are diverse, and we will make sure to cover them as fully as possible.
table of contents:
- Who is the seo expert?
- The ABC of SEO: Search Engine and Ranking Factors
- The most important ways to learn SEO
- What are the SEO skills you should learn?
- How to become a freelance SEO expert?
- What are the duties of an SEO specialist?
- How to choose your niche as an SEO expert
- Read daily about SEO
Who is the seo expert?
The SEO expert or search engine optimization expert (Search Engine optimization- SEO Expert) is responsible for optimizing the website to rank higher in the search engine results, and its main goal is to lead the search results and get more visits from researchers on the Internet. Of course, experience is a relative term, but in our case, experience simply means that you have enough knowledge to achieve good results for your client, not just become an SEO specialist.
The ABC of SEO: Search Engine and Ranking Factors
We will now go over the basic information that any SEO expert needs to know. It is no exaggeration to describe these basics as chemistry, where different components mix together to produce the final compound, the “search results page”, the arena of competition between SEO professionals.
1. How does a search engine work?
The search engine mechanism can be summarized in three main steps:
- The first step: The Google search engine sends spiders (bots) to find pages on the Internet. The spiders crawl the web and read the text in the source code of the web pages.
- The second step: Once a page is crawled, it is added to the index (archive) of the search engine, which is a large database with a unified structure, which includes trillions of pages. The indexing process (archiving the site) includes the discovery of keywords on the page.
- Step 3: When a user searches the web, Google searches the index pages that match the search query (keywords), and ranks the results based on Google algorithms that include many ranking factors.
This means that when you search on Google you don’t get results directly from the web, but Google shows pages from which it has already indexed, that’s why search results appear within milliseconds.
2. What are the ranking factors?
Google uses over 200 ranking factors in its algorithms. Top SEO experts struggle to find them all, so you don’t need to study them all, but it is important to know that they are used to measure three things:
- Relevance: The degree of relevance of a page to a person’s query.
- Authority: means the “cognitive authority” of the site on this topic, which reflects how much Google trusts the content it creates. It is measured by the number of links pointing to the page as the source.
- Quality: Quality is measured based on various factors such as the website’s popularity on the Internet, the format of the content, and how visitors interact with the website in search results.
searchengineland, a blog specializing in search engine news, has captured important ranking factors in a beautiful, easy-to-understand visual design in the form of the periodic table, covering the most important elements of success and failure in search engine optimization, divided into six categories: Content, HTML and Trust, Site Structure, Links and User Experience . Giving each element a relative weight that expresses its importance.

How to learn seo
Here are the most important possible paths to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which vary in features and characteristics:
1. SEO Tutorial:
This option guarantees obtaining a certificate that you have the appropriate knowledge in SEO and can work in it efficiently, and gives you credibility at the beginning of the career path. It is the most expensive option – unless it is from one of the free sources – but it is the fastest, and within a few weeks you will finish your educational path, with great ease in absorbing the information with the help of qualified instructors.
You may be able to get it at a local training center or through ever-growing digital educational platforms. For example among the free educational forfeiture; SEO learning course from Hubspot Academy , free courses from Semrush , Hsoub Academy tutorials and articles , Moz Learning Center which is a leading platform in the world of SEO and offers free educational content.
One of the most important weaknesses of this option is the theoretical educational content that is far from practical practice. What requires you to do some research on practical projects to apply what you have learned within the curriculum.
2. Your website
It is the most effective way to learn SEO on the ground. If you already own a website, you have a golden opportunity to learn SEO by doing, applying the best SEO strategies and testing them yourself. You will learn quickly on a not easy journey with a lot of trial and error on your own without anyone’s guidance.
In order to create your own blog or website, you will need to choose a topic you are interested in, then purchase a domain and hosting, followed by website design and start writing professional articles . In order to start building on a good knowledge of SEO, see the Arabic guide prepared by Google to help beginners, and review the following resources in the Skills section.
Apply what you’ve learned to the site by optimizing the content , building links, and ensuring that the technical aspects of the site are sound from a search engines perspective. It takes continuity in publishing content until results are obtained on the search engine results page, and in this case, you can use writing and translation services on Fiverr, to help you produce the required content if you cannot manufacture it yourself.
3. Work with an e-marketing team
This option is not available to everyone, but it may come as a later step in theoretical SEO learning, such as an internship or a permanent job. It may be a change to your current job path if you work in an e-marketing field and want to become an SEO expert. You will learn quickly in this path with the help of experienced colleagues who will shorten a lot of the learning journey for you and share their knowledge with you on real SEO projects.
What are the SEO skills you should learn?
SEO is a world of techniques and skills, and at the beginning of your path to becoming a SEO professional, it is necessary to know exactly what skills you must master, on the one hand, in order to choose the educational path that includes the largest amount of these skills, and on the other hand, in order to know what skills you need. It is lacking and you must work to acquire it. SEO skills can be divided into two categories that should be mastered gradually.
1. Basic SEO skills:
- key words
Keywords are the starting point of any SEO campaign, the right keyword selection will push the page to the top of Google search results for relevant search queries targeted by thousands of searchers. While the wrong choice leads to burying the site at the bottom of the fifth or tenth page of the search results, where the abandoned pages that no one visits.
The appropriate keyword is one in which three components meet: it has an acceptable search rate, the target audience is interested in it, and the degree of competition for it is not great. Your target keyword list should include both long and short keywords, both brand keywords and NON-BRANDED keywords.
- content industry
The role of the SEO expert in the content is similar to the role of the director in the works of art, after he identifies the keyword, and the writer creates the content, the SEO expert makes sure that the content is presented in the best possible way, unique and substantial, rich in information and of sufficient length equal to or greater than what competitors offer.
- Technical SEO
This skill helps the SEO expert to employ many accurate and important technical details in order to improve the appearance of the site in the search results and encourage visitors to click, the most important of which are:
- Title: catchy, including the main keyword, and no longer than 60:75 characters.
- Meta description: informative and short, no more than 160 characters.
- URL: Brief descriptive, less than 100 characters.
- Alt texts and image names: Clear and relevant, including target keywords.
- Site structure: hierarchical and organized, so that the home page includes links to category pages, which in turn include links to products in each category.
- Internal links: scattered throughout the site, with clear and concise text on every page.
- Speed: The site has a good speed.
The previous skills fall under the name of On-Site Seo or internal seo, while the skill of external links is called Off-Site seo or external SEO, and it is concerned with obtaining links from other sites indicating the content of the site to be optimized for search engines. It is an important way to allow search engines to discover the referred content, and to decide where the page should rank.
Focus on high-quality content in your link building campaign, keeping your hyperlink text descriptive and concise. Planning for building external links goes through three steps:
- Choosing the content to be referred to, or building it from scratch after examining the external links obtained by competitors.
- Determine the targeted trusted websites that have a high Domain Authority.
- Communicate with these sites and request the inclusion of an external link
An external link building campaign requires a combination of analysis, content creation, and public relations. This step-by-step guide covers how to properly build external backlinks .
2. Advanced SEO skills:
As indicated by the name, this set of skills represents the advanced level of work in the field of search engine optimization, and you will need to master it in order to obtain the title of a well-deserved SEO expert. The following is a presentation of the most prominent of them, along with some educational resources to learn more about them:
1. Google Analytics
We mentioned the word analytics elsewhere in the article, and Google Analytics is the first tool for analyzing your site and understanding how to measure the success or failure of your search engine optimization efforts, and it also helps you discover new SEO opportunities. For example, the best-performing content, which you can use in an external link campaign, as we mentioned in the previous paragraph. In this series of articles, I will introduce you to the basics of using Google Analytics.
2. User experience
User experience is an indirect factor in Google’s ranking algorithms, but it has very objective importance. For example, suppose your visitors are having difficulty using it. There is no doubt that this will make them leave it to other search results, which will harm your ranking on the results page. Introduction to the User Experience book , presented by Hsoub Academy, provides a thorough explanation of the basic and important concepts when thinking about how to design a comfortable and excellent user experience for the customer.
3. SEO tools and programs
It is an inevitable skill that you must master in order to access a lot of the important information that you need in your work in the shortest time and with minimal effort, and it is a very logical condition for becoming an SEO specialist. Prominent ones include Ahrefs, MOz, SEMRush, and Yoast SEO. You can learn more about the best SEO tools in this article.
4. Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is an integral part of any marketing strategy, and since SEO is a gem in competition with other sites to top the search results, it is very important to study and analyze competitors to learn and identify their SEO techniques, and then match them better in what is similar to reverse engineering . For example, content design and length, external links, target keywords, and site structure.
5. Mobile compatibility
Google is currently adopting a policy of archiving mobile-friendly sites first, which means that mobile-friendliness is no longer optional in SEO, but rather an imperative. To learn about the mobile-friendly best practices recommended by Google, see this topic .
How to become a freelance SEO expert?
Experts recommend putting everything you’ve learned about SEO into practice in real-world projects in order to become a real SEO expert. Either by employing your personal website for this purpose, because you will be able to make the required changes quickly, as we mentioned earlier in the SEO learning methods, or by working as an independent SEO professional and starting to display your SEO services in front of real clients.
For example, you can create a seller account on the Fiverr microservices site, and design an SEO service in which you can display your capabilities, to start receiving purchase orders from interested customers.
Your knowledge of SEO is a competitive advantage in itself, as not many people possess it, and even those who do have it from the site owners often cannot accomplish all the SEO tasks themselves because they are numerous and require time and focus. Think of the first orders you receive as training projects rather than as a business for profit, as the more buyers and the more practical experience you will be able to raise the prices of your services and make the profits as you wish.
How do you read the results of changes that occur to the site?
After making improvements to the site, you will want to notice changes in its ranking in search results. In principle, look for results that are big and consistent, and don’t presume that your improvements are always the cause of any results that occur.
For example, if you add a number of keywords to a page, and you notice that the page rank has become 5 instead of 7 in the search results. Don’t always assume that your optimization caused this, Google often makes changes in its algorithms, which can cause a few ups and downs in site rankings and traffic over the course of a month.
Instead, take care of the big changes, and in order to be sure of the real impact of the improvement you made, implement it on different pages, if you notice the same consistent results, then it means that what you did was the reason behind these results. There are many optimization factors that you can make, for example: optimizing the title with the appropriate keyword, changing the style of the content from lists to directories, increasing the number of words of the content, or adding internal and external links.
How to choose your niche as an SEO expert
Designer, marketer , developer, engineer and other disciplines, her skills are embodied in the shape of the letter T. The same applies to the SEO expert. This means that you master a wide range of SEO skills, but only excel in one particular area.
For example, you might excel at keyword research, SEO, backlink building, technical SEO or website archiving. Rather, it may target specific markets, for example, owners of online stores, or local companies, etc.
Do not rush to choose a specialization when starting the journey of learning SEO, and learn about everything related to SEO in order to have a solid foundation of knowledge about the field first, and then choose your specialization after some time has passed. request accepted.
What are the duties of an SEO specialist?
An SEO specialist’s list of duties includes some or all of the following responsibilities:
- Manage SEO campaigns through keyword research, content development, and internal SEO.
- Perform site analysis and check the quality of the content.
- Develop technical SEO recommendations.
- Determine search engine optimization success measures and required performance indicators.
- Develop public relations with other websites and companies to share content and obtain external links.
- Using search engine optimization tools to monitor and analyze the site and competitors’ sites and extract information required to improve the site.
Read daily about SEO
One of the best habits of SEO experts is to commit to a daily schedule of reading about SEO. Search engines make changes every day – even shorter than that – and you need to know the impact on your site and have explanations for changes in its ranking if a customer asks. Knowing helps you solve problems that you may encounter quickly and easily because you have read other people’s thoughts and experiences in this regard.
Priority should be to follow the Google Webmaster Blog , as well as niche SEO blogs like Moz , SEMrush , and Yoast . Among the Arab sites that publish renewed content on SEO are Hsoub Academy and my blogs Fives and Independent. View new news, recommendations, and guides, and do not stop honing your knowledge of everything new in SEO in order to maintain the quality and effectiveness of your SEO services.
In conclusion, your journey to becoming an SEO expert requires two keys to be successful; The first is a high willingness to learn, and the second is a practice of applying what you have learned. We hope that this guide will pave the way for you to start your journey in the light of basic knowledge and useful sources of information, and that it will answer many of your questions. Now it’s your turn, share your experience, experiences, and opinions about this trip for the benefit of others.