SEO consulting services should be a natural part of your over all online marketing strategy.
As a professional SEO consultant you always need to get the hole picture of the clients strategies to incorporate the SEO initiatives. To be a good SEO consultant you need to know a lot of things and to be a professional SEO you need to know how and when to use it! I have listed the most important here:
- HTML: As an SEO, knowing HTML is a must. You need to see and understand how the search engines are reading the source code of the web pages.
- CSS: You don’t need to be a CSS-expert but you need to know all the basics fluently.
- Web Design / Web Development: You should be able to produce nice web sites from scratch without help. At least a basic knowledge is needed and you can outsource the design tasks and use CMS‘es for your or your clients sites.
- How search engines work: You need to know how search engines rank pages.
- Keyword Research: You need to know how to find the best keywords by looking at popularity, competitiveness and relevance.
- Trust with Google: You need to know some basic things on how a site can gain more trust (trusted links etc.).
- Knowing and understanding on-page factors: You should also know which CMSes are the best to use for different purposes.
- Ability to write link baits: A good SEO is a also a good writer. A good writer can get links much more easily.
- Basic knowledge of the social networks: With link baits you work with social networks (digg, reddit, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon etc.) and you need to know how they work so that you can use them.
- How to redirect pages: There is only one proper way of redirecting a page or site, the 301 redirect.
- Using long-tail: The long-tail are all the non-competetive big volume of search queries.
- Handling duplicate content: Part of a SEO consultants job is removing duplicate content on a site.
- Link power and how it works (PageRank): You need to understand such things like how link power flows through a site. You need to know the difference between toolbar PageRank and real PageRank and that PageRank is just one out of 100 factors used in ranking.
- Link metrics: For each link there are several factors such as the anchor, link position, link relevance, age, surrounding text, C-class IPs and more.
- Link Building methods: There are many strategies in getting links. As an SEO it should be easy for you to get good links, links are vital for SEO.
- Basic knowledge of penalties: To know what factors that can get give penalties or banning in the search engines are very important.
- Knowledge of and ability to set up backlink generators: As an SEO you need link power in order to power your network of sites.
- Basics of PHP / MySQL: Many sites are written with PHP and using MySQL. You should have a basic knowledge on how it works
- Statistics: Statistics are very important. You need to understand how to use it in your SEO.
- Competitive Research: You need to know what your competitors are doing, how they get their links and how well optimized their sites are.
- Connections with people: If you are going big and plan to build an empire of own sites and handle a large amount of clients you should have a full list of partners.
- Google sitemaps, robots.txt and more.