What makes you an expert? Is it training, experience, knowledge, skill, ability or education? How about a little of everything? It's hard to call someone an expert without any experience regardless of the book 
knowledge. Just because you took 300 hours of real estate education did you know everything there was to know about it when conducting your first transaction? Probably not. If so, wow, maybe you are an expert!
You can Google just about any SEO term, phrase or question and perhaps get 3 or more differing opinions. Do you trust the first one you read? Do you believe the first doctor that tells you that you have 6 months to live? I would hope not. It's the second opinion, comparative results and research that help make an informed opinion on the subject. And even then, many times it is still just an opinon. BUT - Do you have the time? When it's not life and death and you're talking about codes and URL's you probably don't have the time to bother looking up every theory or technique. This is where you have to put your faith into someone that actually does take the time to research and develop a system that works.
Did you know there are SEO blogging platforms just like ActiveRain solely for SEO professionals? There are. Quite a lot actually, much more than real estate because we ARE online. All the time. We don't leave the computer to do our job. The computer is our job. We toss around ideas, theories, what works and what doesn't and collaborate on the best practices for our clients and ourselves. This is our full time job. We don't practice real estate any longer although we used to and have blended that knowledge with our current profession. We are not mortgage lenders that do a little SEO on the side. We are not inspectors that helped out our friends get going on the Internet. We are 100% SEO - online business marketing - all the time.
Granted there are many SEO companies that claim to do many things and then outsource, drop the ball or just plain don't deliver. Such is the case with any business I assume. There is always going to be real estate agents that over promise and under deliver by a long shot. Does that mean they all are poor professionals? You tell me? Of course not, you're saying. Does 1 year make you an expert? 5 years? 20? - ok, SEO probably didn't do much to the system in 1991 so no one can claim decades of SEO experience.
What makes an SEO Expert?
Results, Testimonies and Consistent Trial and Errors.
If you can't produce, and don't have testimonies to prove it, forget it. There are over 200 variables to ranking a site well. Saying one thing over the other is the end all source for SEO just cannot be verified. It's the constant and consistent application of most of these variables all working together. Its the testing a theory over and over, finding what works and what doesn't and excelling on what makes a site rank higher than another. You can't learn this by doing it on one site but on hundreds at the same time to see how your work and skill performs across the board.
So is it s Experience - yes 10+ years - Is is knowledge, yes, researching the latest algorithms, blogs, videos, news and changes. - Is it Skill and Ability, yes, the brain power to comprehend intricate code issues, programming and URL creation. Is is education - yes, 12+ years of certifiable training and knowledge built up by applications, testing and learning through classes and performance training.
If you want to increase your expertise on SEO here are some great blogs and resources to get you started. But you could just leave it to the "experts". ;-)
Personal SEO has been helping hundreds of sites build and maintain higher traffic and increased ranking for over 10 years.
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