This has been one busy week, and two blog posts from Derek Powazek made me think long and hard about that thing called SEO, and how many people abuse it and slowly label it as sophisticated spamming or con art. At first I was upset at the very personal and aggressive nature of the posts, but after as while started to think of the reasons such a well known person would lash out like that an rant about SEO’s, this week provided more than enough samples to show me why he did that.
Powazek's Rant - Has A Point
SEO has a place in the world, it is an honorable and difficult professionals game, it did initially spread out from web development and mixed into marketing eventually to require enough resources and attention to be its own trade. However a quick search in Google or on Twitter will show you thousands of expert SEO’s and internet marketing gurus, some fresh out of high school (not that I am saying there are no young geniuses out there, but I noticed 15 in a 5 minute search), with that explosion of so call experts it is sure that the lame person would call this for it is – con art.
In the beginning of the internet age, or at least when I started using it back in 1993 anyone who could have created an HTML page and upload it to the internet was considered a genius, no one argued with that person, and no one negotiated too long for rates, people treated it like some magic thing… someone would work at him desk for a while et voila! a page was born. As time passed people learned that like everything else there are levels and ranks in any profession, and applied it to web design and development, SEO is at that stage right now, many people call themselves SEO’s but are cons, many say they know SEO but really know only a little HTML (like how to change title tags) and they all are very happy to give themselves the title of an Search Engine Optimizer Expert.
Who suffers the most? the real honest SEO’s out there. Because if this continues, just like Derek explains in his post, SEO will be a very bad word to be associated with, it might already be one.
The way to change SEO and the way it is perceived by the market is probably by doing an honest job and teaching people what a real SEO can and should do, which is a very wide service compared to link bombing, comment spamming and light HTML editing.
Work Hard and Show the world What's Good SEO
