In that same line, emanuelh, you can say that
SEO is also not a marketing job, and also not a web designer job. The reality however, is that you need at least a little bit of knowledge in all these fields. Mostly you need to be a marketer (which is not the same thing as a marketing job) with some programming knowledge (the more the better) and you need to at least understand what design factors are important (but if you´re too good at design, you're likely to be a bad
SEO because your priorities will be wrong.)
One thing that I strongly believe, is that it is not necessary to understand how a search engine works. So the secrets of the search engines are not what's important. There is no relation between how much you know about the algorithms and how good an
SEO you are. Ask any Google engineer that knows the algorithms to build a site and get it to rank high for what ever keyword you want and he will get less results than an experienced
SEO.
Just knowing how a piano works doesn't make you the best piano player in the world.
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SEO is also not a technical profession that has to cope with some degree of uncertainty, like meteorology for instance. It has to cope with the fact that practically almost all data one needs for everyday practice is very effectively blocked behind a wall.
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Just like a meteorologist can only observe, an
SEO also observes the SERPs. Based on those observations, knowledge-sharing, and trying out stuff, an
SEO can become very good at optimizing a website. He has access to a lot more data than you think. It does require a technical mind set to be able to do something useful with all that data. And that's why
SEO is considered a technical job. But I agree that it is a lot more than just a technical thing.