For people who love writing, playing with words, making equations out of words, juxtaposing words, and making up words, search engines are like the ultimate playgrounds. Search engines algorithms are all about words–words on websites and keyword searches–and we SEOs spend large portions of out time keeping up to date on how the algorithms may be changing and what words need to be changed or added to a client’s site in order to advance up the rankings for keyword searches.

And speaking of clients, you’ve got to love them too–and you have to love selling to them because the best SEO in the world can’t be an SEO if he or she isn’t making money at it. If you can’t sell yourself and your skills to a client, you’ve got to at least sell them to an employer who will pay you to do SEO tasks for them. You’ve got to be a good business person to be an individual SEO consultant or agency.

As far as all the other stuff, reading blogs (as Jason mentions) (How’s it going Jason?), on-page and off-page stuff, web page programming, backlinks, etc., you’ll pick that up as you go if you really enjoy the work and you’re smart.

SEO ain’t the sexiest job in the world and it may not always be the most fun but if you are great at playing with words, few other jobs can match it.

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