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When I was a younger person I studied computer programming (before I got to study computer science). In the programming world (back then) you had Junior Programmers, Computer Programmers, Programmer Analysts, and Systems Analysts. You also had team leaders and project leaders and vice presidents and people running around who were important but they didn’t have titles.

I felt a bit like the kid asking the Wise Owl how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop. The Owl figured out it was three but I’m afraid that didn’t work in the programming world.

I started out as a Junior Programmer because I had a diploma from an 18-month Technical School. That was 18 months of hands-on programming, 5 days a week, 5 hours a day (not counting homework and so). By the time I graduated from Tech School I had more programming experience than any 4 year degree college graduate. They would start out at twice the salary as me and they were called Computer Programmers.

The fact that I could write cleaner code faster than the college grads — a fact they acknowledged — didn’t matter in the corporate scale of things. The Wise Owl said I was a Junior Programmer and that was that. I was quite a bargain for any company that hired me and now, many decades later, I’m not surprised at how easy it was for me to get a job in those days. And then came the Carter-Reagan Recession of 1980, so I decided to go to college and get that 4 year degree so that I could become a Real Computer Programmer.

In all the years that I worked in the software industry I never made it to the level of Systems Analyst, although admittedly by the time I became a Branch Data Processing Manager, Programming Manager, and Asst. Director of IT (for different companies) the title of Systems Analyst was probably a bit beneath my stations. Maybe I just needed to work in an IBM shop or something for twelve years. I dunno. I never met a real live Systems Analyst except maybe when I interviewed for a job with EDS (the company Ross Perot founded and later sold off to General Motors).

Today I would be surprised if I could get a job as a Computer Programmer, much less a Programmer Analyst. My knowledge of programming is ancient. I don’t use the new-fangled languages that kids in their 30s have grown used to and I’m not sure what the babies in their 20s are being introduced to. Does anyone actually write real computer programs any more?

So what’s my point and what does all this have to do with “how to be a good SEO analyst”?

Well, search engine optimization is not as strictly tiered as computer programming can be. In theory (and sometimes in practice), the Systems Analyst would look at a problem, design a solution, and either hand it to a team of Computer Programmers (and Junior Programmers) or ask a Programmer Analyst to engineer the solution. The chief difference between a Programmer Analyst and a Computer Programmer (I was told) was that the Programmer Analyst just needed to know what the problem was and how the desired solution should look. The Computer Programmer was expected to work as part of a team, following a specification written by the Systems Analyst and the team leader.

The Junior Programmers were usually relegated to the world of writing Inventory and Sales Analysis reports, which were about as harmless a task as you could give an inexperienced programmer who needed not only a detailed spec but constant supervision to make sure he was just READing the data and not WRITEing it.

Do we even have Junior SEO Technicians? We have SEO trainees, who are often handed a full project and told to get to work. 4 year degrees don’t get you much of a salary boost in this industry as far as I am concerned, although telling me you took so-and-so’s SEO course may cause me to knock some numbers off the offer I contemplate making you.

Since we lack the tiered structure of programming, we don’t really have an analytical/specification model. That is, I don’t know what an SEO analyst is, except that an SEO is expected to be an analyst. Perhaps the people who want to know how to be a good SEO analyst are just being redundant in their unnecessarily repetitive language. Or perhaps someone somewhere who doesn’t know what they are talking about got angry at the SEO team and chewed people out for not being “good SEO analysts”.

You can have an SEO technician or six. You can have an SEO manager. You can have team leaders. You can have SEO strategists. You can have Directors of Search Marketing, Directors of Search Strategies, and Directors of Stuff So Secret Nobody Talks About It. But in my mind they all have to be analysts.

A good SEO technician has to be able to do keyword research. I’m not asking for perfect keyword research. Just find some relevant keywords that people search on and figure out where to put the relevant copy (and, if needed, supporting links).

A good SEO technician has to be able to set up and watch the metrics. The metrics tell you where the referrals are coming from, where the conversions are, and where the best performing keywords are. You enhance or replace your earlier keyword research based on what the metrics tell you.

A good SEO technician should be able to do minimal competitive intelligence. Too much competitive intelligence in this industry is pretty much BS. All you need to be able to do is look at the SERPs and decide (more or less correctly) that people ARE or ARE NOT optimizing for them. That’s good competitive intelligence.

That’s all done at the SEO tech level. SEO managers and team leaders need to make sure people are doing their jobs and that the bogus deadlines don’t kill the work. SEO managers and team leaders need to do the internal reporting that ensures people who don’t know what they are talking about think they are improving the situation by approving reports that have been dumbed down for them.

Search strategists — okay, they get to do the sexy stuff like setting up hundreds of Websites and watching which ones fail and which ones hang around long enough to possibly be useful. Search strategists get to read all the SEO blogs, watch all the SEO videos, and shake their heads at how many people really believed PageRank Sculpting was going to be the miracle cure for Lack-of-Intelligence. You need a lot of intestinal fortitude to be an SEO strategist because of all the crap you’re forced to digest.

Maybe there are companies out there that have actual SEO Analyst positions. If that’s the case, I’m not the person to tell you what those guys are supposed to be analyzing that everyone else on the team shouldn’t be analyzing. You cannot do good SEO without doing good analysis. But every SEO must be doing SOME analysis. Otherwise you’re not optimizing for search. Maybe you’re writing copy or designing Websites or placing links, but without the analysis you’re not doing SEO.

So, to me, you will be a good SEO analyst when you are a good SEO. Plain and simple.