The Profession of Search Engine Specialist
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to probe the secrets of the search engine black box and determine the best ways to gain qualified traffic. You must learn obscure lore about page optimization, link popularity, and PageRank. You and you alone are accountable for the success or failure of your company’s rankings. That is because you are a search engine specialist.
The position as a whole only took shape a few years ago when search engines first started becoming a major source of revenue. People needed to gain a competitive edge, and the search engines weren’t offering up any hints as to the ever-evolving state of their algorithms. Thus, it became the role of the search engine specialist to research and decode the techniques that would offer their clients higher placement and higher revenue potential.
As a profession, search engine specialists are very disorganized. There are no officially recognized certifications, or even official organizations for that matter. Only time will tell whether or not the position solidifies into a common field in information technology.