What is an SEO expert called?

An SEO expert (or Search Engine Optimization Expert) is often called an “Internet Marketer”, “SEO specialist”, “Search Marketer”, or very precisely, an “SEO consultant”.

An SEO expert is someone that uses various tactics to make webpages to be considered more relevant or more popular/important for users’ keyword queries in search engines. An SEO expert’s work is intended to help a website attain higher search engine rankings. Even more descriptively and accurately, an SEO expert’s work is intended to help a website get more qualified traffic from organic search results, and to achieve more sales or other conversion activities on a website.

SEO experts come from a variety of backgrounds, because search engine optimization typically combines practices from a number of disciplines, such as Marketing, Information Technology, Computer Science, Graphic Design, Statistics, and Writing/Copywriting.

SEO techniques are broadly categorized as “on-page SEO”, or “external SEO”.

On-page SEO is concerned with incorporating keywords into important places within a webpage’s code, and also construction of the webpage in terms of including other structural elements that improve appearance and rankings in search results.

External SEO typically refers to promotion of the webpage/website on other websites, and is often also referred-to as “Link Building” or “Link Development”, as the major search engines rely heavily upon analysis of links to webpages as a determinant of how important a webpage should be considered. The original Google algorithm was called “PageRank”, and it could be described simplistically as treating links to webpages as a type of votes, while also taking into account the importance of the page where the external link originated. Other, ancillary tactics are sometimes considered to be in the category of External SEO, as their ultimate goal is to generate more links. Such ancillary tactics include: Content Marketing, Guest Blogging, Article Syndication, issuing Press Releases, and more. (A number of these practices are contravened by Google when done specifically for the purpose of generating external links.)

Another category of search engine optimization is called “Technical SEO”, and it focuses on improving search performance of websites by detecting and correcting numerous technical issues which can impair the indexation of a website’s content by search engines, and which can impair rankings of a website’s pages.

There are numerous job titles used by companies that have SEO experts on staff, and there are numerous types of independent SEO experts. Here is a partial list of SEO specialist job titles: