Next, I started picking up content from others: Search Engine Land, SE Journal, Blind Five Year Old, SEER, and hundreds of others. So a few years ago, I took my expert SEO knowledge, resume, and applied to one of the top 50 websites in the world. I landed an interview. After being declined for the job, I stopped consuming every piece of content marketing. I stayed up to date with the major publications and am grateful to those blogs for having a solid understanding of SEO, but I spent my time reading job descriptions that I was not qualified for and started.
The worst part about
Failing the analysis was when I asked what I could have improved, the director couldn’t tell me. I was in the dark. I didn’t know if it was because my analysis was executive data so off that she didn’t know where to begin? Or was she afraid of giving away secrets (am I missing something crucial)? Where was the transparency? Up until this point, everyone in SEO had been transparent: in conversations, tweets, and articles. Not receiving an answer made me seek answers more urgently. What had I missed? How was I to take it to the next level? Was there another blog I was not reading? And then, it hit me: Want to the best in SEO? Stop reading only the mainstream blogs, start reading job descriptions of the world’s largest sites, and implement the skills they require.
I Stopped Reading
Only the Mainstream Blogs Once I got the fundamentals down, I realized that my skill set was fairly stagnant. I knew all of the terms, had grown sites in organic Fax List traffic, but needed more. The names above represent some of the greatest minds in SEO: Nike, Etsy, TripAdvisor, Getty Images, and Amazon. For the most part (minus Kaitlin, while she worked for Portent), many of the names above are non-existent on the popular blog sites. Did Steve Bates SEO The write an article when Nike became the worlds largest shoe site? What about an article on how they used SQL + Visual mapping to make architectural changes that led to better crawling and more indexing? What about Peter – when Amazon became one of the most visited sites in the world.