Am I an SEO expert or not

Oct 10, 2006

I certainly am not and I tell this to my clients outright. I certainly write SEO content and it gets my clients’ websites, most often, high rankings, but beyond that, I tell them I have some experience, but I’m not an expert. Still, some clients hire me for their SEO work simply because I’ve been around for a long time and have a basic idea of how search engines evaluate various web pages.

Through this post on SEOmoz blog I reached this post that is full of vitriol against SEO service providers in general and SEO experts in particular. I partially agree, and partially disagree with the latter link. I’ll share a secret here.
A few “SEO experts” have approached me to write search engine friendly content for their websites so that it can improve their search engine rankings. Sometimes they look for “SEO writer” and find this link among the top 5 results on Google. Impressed, they want me to write SEO articles for their websites. Quietly, I do their work, wondering how they’re going to provide SEO services to their prospective clients if they do not have writers to write SEO content for their own SEO websites.
Anyway, what I mean to say is, there are very few SE optimizers who can claim to be experts. Rand’s (at SEOmoz) rage seems well-placed because his company seems to be providing high-end SEO services, as he mentions in another post, charging around $50,000 for typical SEO projects. So you cannot just wake one day and proclaim there are no real SEO experts. Tomorrow you’ll say there are no true C++ programming experts. If you can deliver results, methodically and without resorting to wrong means, then you are an expert.

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4 Responses to “Am I an SEO expert or not”

Maree Kimberley
October 10th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
One of the problems is that there is no recognised qualification for an seo expert. But there are a few who are well known enough (Jill Whalen comes to mind immediately) and who provide useful forums to help people who have an interest in seo from beginners to experts. Like any industry, there are good seo experts, people who claim to be experts when they shouldn’t and lots of shades in between.
I’m working on an seo strategy for the site I’m employed by at the moment. I’m no expert, but we can’t afford to hire an expert so I just research what I can and do my best.
Amrit
October 11th, 2006 at 11:55 am
Hi Maree. I agree that there is no recognized qualification for an SEO expert. There should be. But for now one can select an SEO by doing some research upon the person.
sandy
October 11th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
Is SEO the same as content writer?
I write contents, mostly keyword ricked content for more or less 500 KW and i got paid per topic. This is one of my sources of income aside from my full time job. I also mainatin 3 websites with google adsense but not
the revenue are just ok.
I have several webites that offers links only.
I am not an database administrator nor a web programer but I know how to create
a website linking other affiliate sites.
I used craigslist.org to advertise and its free!!
Amrit
October 19th, 2006 at 2:52 am
Hi Sandy.
You asked: Is SEO the same as content writer?
I don’t think so. SEO is a big package, and content writing is a part of that package. Good content definitely improves your website’s ranking, but it is not because your website is being SEOed, it’s just that, good, relevant content should anyway be ranked well. Unfortunately, people use different tricks to get higher rankings and therefore sometimes we — content writers — have to manipulate content in such a manner that without sounding “spammy”, it contains enough density of keywords to convince the search engines that we are really talking about the term being searched for.