Top 9 Skills all SEOs should have. (That’s one more than the SEJ list. WTFSEO FTW!)
- A Sense of Humor. Let’s face it, nobody visits this site so you probably came here from Ryan’s SEJ article and are realizing that he wrote this post simply for the sole purpose of linking to his own site from SEJ. If so, you’re correct. If you find this funny, you have what it takes to be an SEO. Keep reading. If you don’t find this funny, you need a better sense of humor – so please read at least 15 more articles on this site before leaving.
- Bullshittery. The second most important SEO skill is the ability to bullshit. Most of your days are spent talking to clients about algorithm updates, machine learning, statistics, and programming. You don’t need to actually know any of this stuff to be an SEO as long as you can pretend you do and sound confident while bullshitting about Ngrams, machine learning, inverse document frequency and other buzzwords that secretly confuse you while you claim to be an expert in them. We’ve gotten so good at it that you probably didn’t even realize that “bullshittery” isn’t even a word.
- Snake Milking. Because snake oil has to come from somewhere.
- Copy and Paste skills. Doing your own research and testing is hard. So is thinking critically. The good news is, somebody else somewhere has probably already written something on the topic you’re interested in. Just go copy their work. The same is true with being an influencer. No need to come up with your own fresh insights, just get good with that retweet button. Now you’re a curator!
- Drinking Ability. Seriously this isn’t just something for the “serious” post. You’ll need to learn to put away lots of free drinks from other influencers without getting all wobbly.
- Ability to write top X posts and relate boring SEO stuff to current trending topics. Especially celebrities. What? You’re reading this article aren’t you? Point proven.
- Perfunctoriness (ed note: this one is really a word, we checked!) or in other words, the skill of saying “correlation is not causation” and then immediately going on to assume that it is.
- A poker face. It’s important not to laugh when saying things like “link juice” or “link condom” or charging your client for tactics that a simple Google search would reveal to be complete bullshittery. (ed note: you can keep using it all you want, it still won’t make it a real word.)
- Ignoring Facts. If you want to be an SEO you’re going to need to subscribe to a dozen or so conspiracy theories. To do this, you’ll need to actively ignore any data or facts that contradict your point of view. It helps to approach Google with a myopic view of a webmaster, and never take into account the perspective of somebody who searches on Google. By doing this, you can convince yourself that users looking for the current time would not be interested in the direct answer, but would rather fancy a website with 19 popup ads that takes 30 seconds to load.
