A local company needs people with skills as mentioned ::
Excellent knowledge of both On page & Off Page optimization techniques.
Blog Commenting, Forum Posting , Blog Writing.
Interact with People online in social networks like: LinkedIn, Facebook .
implementing strategies for increasing site traffic.
Keyword research & Content Writing - For Blogging, forums and articles.
how to acquire these skills, can I start a blog and practice all of these on the blog,??? I wonder what stage of a website building or blog setting up does, seo come into picture?
The skills that you have listed can be acquired online by subscribing to and reading past articles published on reputable blogs such as SEOMoz, Copyblogger, Social Media Examiner and many others.
To understand what SEO is all about, I highly recommend The Beginners Guide to SEO by SEOMoz. Once you completed the guide, you should have a good understanding of what SEO is all about. One word of caution though, stay away from marketers or gurus who are touting shortcuts, or anything that looks like a shortcut, to SEO success.
Research is a big part of writing good content for any medium and businesses often leave it up to the writer to research the topics they assign to you. Nobody here or anywhere is going to hand you expertise on a platter. As suggested before, start researching what you need to do and how to do it. Then if you have specific questions, come back here and ask them.
From what I have seen of your posts, you have a good start on knowing the mechanics of good writing. But, if you want to write for others you will need to learn how to research and you may as well start by researching the questions you asked in your post.
The thing that you should first consider is whether you really want to work in this industry for others or just become a self entrepreneur.
The local company basically wants someone to work as a SEO guy for them.
SEO is something which some1 can take years to master.
Unless you take personal coaching, it will be really hard for you to actually understand the concepts of SEO.
Yes, you might get to learn the basics, but again if you want to learn the internal secrets, other techniques which can help you manipulate the system and get websites on top, you might require personal guidance from some1 who has extensive knowledge in this field.
Just by creating a blog, you cannot learn seo because you first need to understand keyword research and then try to rank your blog/website for that keyword.
If you just take a random keyword and try to rank for it, you might never know what is the competition for that keyword and how many people are searching for that keyword.
So you need to understand and learn more than the basics.
Then again, Google is continuously making changes to its algorithm with frequent updates.
I think you are not getting the point. PKWrite78 wants to be a writer, which makes sense since this is the Writing area of SitePoint. If you wish to further discuss the glories of SEO, please do so in the appropriate forums which is the Internet Marketing Forum, not this one.
These skills are learnable you need to learn about seo by reading articles and blogs related to seo. There are also some e-books available on seo which can be downloaded. It takes time, effort and patience to learn about seo.
Acing the skill takes time - starting with a blog to improve your writing skill is a good idea.
Try to write on the large audience topics, such as traveling, education, etc.
Read, read, and read some more - to understand the writing patterns that grasps reader’s attention you will have to read not only blogs and online magazines, but something old school (such as NY Times) as well.
I wouldn’t advise you to mix content writing with other skills in your post - start mastering them one by one. It’s already a challenge.
Also, it is crucial for you to know the audience you’re writing for - different demographic groups prefer different writing styles.