If you don’t have the technical know-how to launch and conduct SEO, don’t do it. Rather give it to someone, or a team of consultants who make it their business to know.

The List starts

What do you need to know? Well, first and foremost you need to know how to code, or at least understand HTML if you are to understand how search engines read source code on your pages. But, you needn’t be fundi, knowing how to produce a website using notepad and being able to type in HTML will suffice.

Knowing how to design and develop a website is vital. you must know how to produce a basic, good quality website from scratch, but there is nothing wrong in outsourcing certain aspects like graphics to SME’s (that is, subject matter experts). At the least, you need to have more knowledge on website development than the average ‘man on the street’.

You also need to understand how search engine ‘bots’ rank pages and to do this you need to study them by observing and testing them until you know how they work. Not that simple but attainable. Something else which you need to understand is how to tell the difference in ranking algorithms between major search engines. On this stream, knowing how to find the best keywords is vital. Being able to do this entails investigating how popular they are, how competitive they are and how relevant they are to the subject.

The list continues

While a lot of people think they can write, being able to craft and write good content for a website acts as ‘link bait’. Good content will be able to more easily act as bait and attract more links to the site. Link baits work with networks, social networks and a basic understanding will take you a long way. While writing good content, a good SEO needs find and remove any duplicates, that is, anything that brings up the same content on more than a single URL is considered duplication and needs immediate fixing.

Working with SEO tools, understanding how link building works and how ‘link power’ runs through a site is powerful as this will help you create good internal navigations through your pages. So too, search engines use them as a form of ‘voting’ which has an impact on your rankings. Your knowledge needs to encompass factors such as ‘anchors’, positioning of the link as well as it’s age and relevance as well as having a fair understanding on how the text surrounding the link works since this will be helpful once you start building them.

And the List goes on

You need to know what CSS is, ‘on-page’ factors are and what a ‘long-tail’ is. You need to know about page rankings and what tools to use for extracting reports and statistics. You need to write in codes like ‘HTML’, ‘PHP’ and ‘MySQL’. You need a basic knowledge of sandboxes and filters and what constitutes a cause for penalties. And the list goes on.

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