How did you become an SEO, what attracted you to the industry? Many SEO's have sprung up in the past few years and a lot have different reasons for wanting to be or choosing to jump into the industry. *example: I originally started doing Web design and development, but with the birth of search engines and the need for web sites to be positioned for certain keywords I decided to offer inhouse SEO. The learning process went quickly for me, but what really attracted me to search engine optimization was the challenge it presented and the income potential for being good at it. You can be as detailed as you like, but make sure to include the specific reasons SEO attracted you or maybe you simply HAD to learn it to promote your own sites. I am planning on doing a write-up later using the results from multiple forums and the best answers will receive a direct link from the write-up, a basic link and a featured link in my SEO directory. In addition if it's popular enough I may distribute the article, so it is possible there will be links on other sites as well. Once I publish the main article, I will include what attracted me to SEO and site promotion and the whole industry surrounding.
My reason is rather simple: good design and good SEO can and should be interconnected. I've noticed that a good number of SEO companies are lacking design skills, and this quite often loses potential customers for their clients due to lack of consistency, slow load times due to excessive code, and archaic styling (deprecated tags, aliased text from common fonts such as Arial in images, etc.) A good number of web design companies are lacking SEO skills as well, which in turn costs their clients potential business due to lack of effective promotion.
Cool, that's a new one. Although I am sure many people agree with you, it hasn't been mentioned yet. So you are out to be the best you can in both design and promotion aspects since most companies are either good at one or the other? That is great! You saw the need to have a quality designer AND quality SEO in the same place. Thanks for the opinion!