Thinking of a SEM career? I have some advices for you

I had to think of a couple of advices if would give someone who’s planning on following a career in Internet marketing, and especially the part involving search engines. All these are a part of my previous experience with engines, are not rules by any mean, just my thoughts about the subject.

• First of all, make sure you like this. Working with Search Engines might be monotonous and boring some time, and it’s a domain where you have to research and read a lot, all these while sitting in front of a computer .
• Read the rules. Learn what you are allowed to do and what not, by reading search engines’ TOS pages. You can find these for Google here: http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS and for yahoo here: http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/ .
• Learn all you can about the factors influencing ranking and search engine positioning. There are quite a lot of them, so I’ll recommend you to read everything in here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors .
• Research a lot, read as many authorities in this field as you can and try to keep up with everything changing or new in this domain .
• Practice a lot. All the SEO rules can be read and learnt in just a couple of days. Everyone can do this, but the thing that makes the difference between a newbie and a specialist is practice. You should build sites, create content, try to rank these sites, try to build links, use virals, social media, forums, use paid search, use everything you can.
• Don’t try to fool the search engines by using non-ethical tactics that might not be accepted with the TOSs. In the end, the one fooled you’ll be you, you’ll get your site declassified or banned and you’ll loose all the hard work done before. Remember, only ethic tactics can give you the long range results you need .
• Don’t be afraid to fail. Failing is part of the learning process, and most of the time, you’ll only learn things "the hard way" .
• Try not to focus on SEO alone. Learn a bit of everything, while focusing on one domain. A little bit of email marketing, coding, graphic designing, copywriting, all these might come in handy sometime.

That’s about it. Of course, lots of other things could be added here, and if you do have something to add, please do. In the mean time, I’ll leave you with a couple of great SE knowledge databases, just a few of the ones you should have in your reader if you plan to become a successful SEO developer:

• http://www.seomoz.com
• http://www.seobook.com
• http://searchengineland.com
• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com

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