SEO professionals are the iconic "knowledge workers." The difference between a mediocre search engine optimizer and a true "expert" is potentially millions of hits. In talking about how to become an SEO professional I will be concentrating on defining a lone SEO consultant and won’t talk about starting an SEO company.
I will do this because I am a lone SEO consultant and not the owner of an SEO company, and people should ideally only talk about what they know. I have worked with an SEO company so I do know what the structure is like, but businesses are more than structure. Some of what I will say will be "my" story, while other parts will be the stories of other people who are SEO professionals and who have made their mark in the industry.
In The Beginning
I entered the Internet as a web designer, working with graphics and code/script. I loved hanging out on search engines simply because I could find anything I wanted. Since my college days I have spent hours searching for arcane bits of knowledge in order to put information in the departmental news letter.
When I became a web design professional, designing for paying clients instead of friends and family, my first paying client (my father) asked me to get him "traffic." From worrying about databases and how best to use flash animations I was suddenly saddled with the responsibility of making sure that the web site I was working on (with a team of two other designers) would be visited. It was then I discovered search engine optimization. I soon discovered that this "traffic" issue was no insignificant problem. Every client I met with was more interested in increasing ROI than they were in what color scheme to use on the site.
These basic beginnings led to a deepening interest in SEO and also to my going back into copy writing, on which I base my SEO campaigns. If you ask what I did to become an SEO who on an ongoing basis optimizes three sites at any one time (while working on web development projects), I would probably reply "not much." There are no schools for search engine optimization per se, though there are courses on search technology, Internet marketing, web copy writing, web design and a myriad of other topics that could strike your fancy. But for the netizen intent on becoming an SEO professional, there is nothing that beats getting traffic into a site; no degrees can beat results.
Search Optimization 
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