Attributes of a Quality In-House SEO

So what makes a good in-house SEO? Well, obviously the person would need to know what SEO is, duh? But aside from that, what other attributes and skills should the person possess?

This morning, I’ve read an interesting post called “What To Look For When Hiring InHouse SEOs” by Lisa Barone, and I’ll have to say she pretty much hit the nail on the head. Some traits that she believes a high quality SEO should possess include:

Technical skills - being familiar with some basic web languages and applications like CSS, HTML, PHP, etc. That is so true because optimizing a site for search engines involves plenty of discussions with developers and server people. The discussions will probably go nowhere if you don’t even know the difference between HTML and Javascript. So this really is a must skill/knowledge for any SEO wannabes.

Analytical skills - being able to interpret and analyze user and traffic data is critical to the in-house SEO position. All the efforts and hard work mean nothing if information is not retrieved, deciphered from the huge pile of mindless numbers, and presented to the management and other key stakeholders in a meaningful and intuitive manner. It would also be helpful if the prospect have some experience in different web analytical tools like Comscore, Omniture, Google Analytics, etc.

Research skills - another obvious requirement of a good in-house SEO, as this person will need to conduct researches on the industry, competitors and most importantly, keywords, from time to time. Keep in mind, Google and Yahoo! will never tell us about their algorithms, so the in-house SEO is going to spend many hours doing research on the latest happenings.

Creative problem solving skills - SEO is not an art nor a science, as many people have suggested before, so whenever problems come up, the in-house SEO will need to find the best solution, sometimes unconventional (no, I don’t mean blackhats), to solve the immediate dilemma with the least amount of resources used.

Ethics - this one is easy to understand. Just imagine hiring blackhat SEO and see your site disappeared from the Google index instead of getting the top rankings.

Communication skills - this attribute is often being overlooked and underrated. Most of the time, good rankings are the results of the collective hard work and contribution of many people from different work groups. Sometimes the SEO will need to build trust and good working relationship with the other key stakeholders in order produce good results. Bad communication is not only counter-productive, but sometimes even destructive as well, as animosity between work groups will increase as time goes by, and chaos in the office will eventually take over.

One more attribute that I would like to add to this list, from my own experience, is the knowledge of the marketing concept. After all, SEO is all about serving the user what they want at the right time and right place.

Got any other key attributes and traits in mind? Let me know!