I recently had the opportunity to interview an SEO expert about his work. I didn’t realize until the interview was complete that I’d held a bunch of preconceived notions about what type of person might provide professional SEO services. Although I knew that SEO was something done by almost all online businesses, I’d expected someone who was an expert in the topic to be working at a technological level that was beyond my own brain. What happened, of course, was that I met someone who had a thorough understanding of SEO but who was otherwise exactly like you or I.

The individual who runs an SEO company is really more knowledgeable about business and marketing than about technology per se. Although the marketing is applied to the world of the Internet, the work is designed to increase attention to websites. This is done through following algorithms that are set up by search engines. However, it’s rooted in basic marketing practices. For example, this particular expert told me that the basic rule of SEO is really the "I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine" mentality of social networking.

And he told this to me in simple language that I could understand. As we wrapped up the interview, I realized that my assumptions about this expert underlined assumptions that I held about the difficulty of SEO. After the interview was complete and I’d realized how mistaken these assumptions were, I became much more open to the idea of learning how to implement some basic SEO on my own site.

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