SEO EXPERT in-da-house…!

Everyone who has ever considered putting together a website will have come across one of these people.  They’re called SEO Experts.  I fully understand that a website needs to have itself aligned to be crawled and indexed by a search engine, but let’s not get a stiffy about it.  I mean, we’re talking about something quite basic really.

SEO has two main parts.  The optimisation of individual web pages to meet the requirements of the search spider.  Secondly, the volume and quality (yes, quality, i.e. from long standing established good websites) of the links that point to each webpage from the interwebs.  That’s it, really.

Following on from my last blog, where I had the honour of sitting at a table with a web-developer offering custom Fan Pages and flogging them by saying ** Facebook Fines **, I thought I’d ask the audience about your views on SEO.  We all understand the Long Tail and we all understand that a nice position 1 / 2 / 3 on a popular search means £££ for sellers.

SEO is pretty much a Google invented industry as far as I see it.  Before the days of the search placement, we had directories like Yahoo! DMOZ who simply listed pages according in categories to return as results.  SEO is a fundamental component now.  It is there to ensure that the Google Indexing system and others, look favourably on your page and indexes it accordingly.  So much so, that many of the Open Source programs from the Open Source community, such as WordPress and Joomla have pre-build SEO features.

These programs are aimed at the uninitiated but have become so good, you can’t not use them, requirements depending.   I was chatting to Roy Barber @roybarberuk (see my last blog post) during the last Doncaster Rovers match  about WordPress and the way it PING’s IP addresses to inform the lookup servers that search engines use to achieve express indexing.  He cleared some of this stuff up for me, which was great – it took about 2 minutes of conversation.  We nodded and moved on with the conversation.

Now, these PING’ing features are pretty much standard features in these open source packages.  Naturally, they save effort, you save time and as a developer you avoid re-inventing the wheel on every build.  They have become so popular that they are becoming more wide spread and acceptable in use.  What I’d like to question is the WordPress box-shifters who claim to do SEO. Ohhh LORD..!!!  Should I stop this blog here?… no, I’ll carry on

Next time you see a web-development company using WordPress and saying “we do SEO”, ask yourself “What do they mean?”  Do they mean, the system is SEO Ready and they’re just charging you a levy for what is fundamentally there already.  Or do they mean, that they individually optimise each page through hard graft?  Do they extend this to going out on an exercise of placing valuable inbound links across the interwebs for you giving your page a higher ranking?  OR are they simply giving you thin air and charging you a lot of doe?  I might become a John Doe after writng this.. haha.!

Moving on:  Once you set a WordPress system to PING an IP address on a post, you’ll find your new pages appear in search results within about 10-20 minutes of them being released.  Now, is that SEO Expertise?  Or is it, I’m a clever sod, I use WordPress cos I don’t know anything else system?

WordPress, Joomla, et al are great, but unless you really are SEO’ing for people, please, please don’t start the £ 100.00 / £ 200.00 / £ 500.00 per month SEO surchages on peoples diddy websites.  It’s almost as bad as those link holders who sell you people links from their forum posts for a month.!

Furthermore, your Page 1 placement for HOLIDAYS IN TENERIFFE ON 22^ND JANUARY WITH A BIG SUNLOUNGER BY THE POOL with 8million search results and 1 active search per month probably doesn’t count towards calling yourself and SEO Expert either.

There are two people on these social networks I know of who validate.  Those who know me, will be laughing at this point..!

• First person, type Internet Marketing Expert
• Second person, type Search Engine Optimisation

There are others, but the above two actively do this stuff for a living

I’m not telling you “who” they are…  you can have your own guesses, but they are sure as hell on the list and there are many great people out there too.  What’s your view about all this?

How do you find it swimming with the sharks and the fishes?

Helloooo...!!

@tweetsbyskeet is on Twitter, micro-blogging, writing musings and enjoying the difference between Web1.0 and Web2.0. There is nothing this skeeter doesn't enjoy more than looking round the web and creating musing and thought provoking blogs for people who are now taking part in the interwebs. Despite the rambles, our skeeter has an honours degree in business information systems, has worked in systems design, coming from a Business Analyst discipline and now churns out plug and go artwork products for companies of all sizes.

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