daveblake.co.uk

So, I saw this post on Reddit “Why SEO is not a job” by Johnny Idol and felt compelled to write a reply.

I haven’t actually written in this blog for ages (as you’ll see if you check out my other posts) so hopefully what I have to say is going to be worthwhile. Now, i’m not an SEO expert, i’m a developer who knows a fair amount about SEO. I also work with a lot of SEO companies on behalf of clients so I have first hand experience on what they actually do.

First - SEO is a job, most definately. If SEO was not a job then people wouldn’t be able to make money from it. SEO does bring results, people look for increased results usually in revenue from either selling goods, services or advertising. When the revenue increases the search engine optimiser has done his or her job.

Like all jobs there are people who are good and bad, i’ve worked with both. The ones that are bad generally use trial and error - they don’t know what they are doing an read forums and blogs then implement what they read without understanding what they are doing or why.

In the “Why SEO is not a job” article the poster says:

Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his spare time, working on the strenght of contents or services offered

I totally agree, content is always what matters most - if you want to be found by a search engine but have no content you may as well give up. Unfortunately the poster is likening a small, personal website to a large company website. In a large company who is going to go through the pages checking the content, everybody there has a job to do already.
An SEO expert should also be good a copy writing have have the skills to improve content. Adding keywords and phrases throughout a page can be done but the general aim is to improve the quality of the content.

To really understand what a good SEO company will do you need to look at why they are employed in the first place - to increase profits.
A company will judge if an SEO expert has done their job well when their profits go up or down. The good companies I have worked with take SEO beyond just getting a website found by search engines, they look at everything.
Good SEO experts love statistics, Google Analytics usually, they just love the infomation in those log files.
An SEO expert who does their job properly will be setting up split tests - serving two version of the same webpage and analysing which one customers prefer.

I have seen split testing used on everything, checkout pages, product pages even domain names.
If you have an SEO company that is not using split testing then they have nothing to measure their results against - get a new company.

SEO is not only about bring customer’s to your website but it is also about keeping them there. There is so much more to SEO than just checking for valid html, correct http responses and things like ALT text on images. If you have an SEO company and this is all they do get a new one.

If you’ve got a website that deals with data then chances are you have a search field somewhere on that website. If you’ve got a search field on your website then chances are you want that search to return the most relevant information, chances are your customers want this even more than you do. We’ve all been frustrated by websites that provide a search box but don’t seem to provide any useful results. Using the following tutorial you can ensure that searches on your site are better than the competition.

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I don’t really mean to pick on PHP, it’s just in that unfortunate position where it has become so popular any old numpty can pick up a book and suddenly he is a PHP programmer. It’s a bit like Windows - get it out the box and it runs great, give it to someone with no knowledge and a speedy internet connection and pretty soon they’ll have a box choc full of spyware, adware and general rubbish. Of course when their computer starts running slowly they never even consider it might be their fault - it’s Windows that’s crap! (more…)