I was doing some browsing round the forums and blogs today, feeling pretty good about life, that I was helping my clients to survive in this gloomy financial period we are having in the UK, that I have two working legs to be walking around on and no major ailments when I spotted yet more rants about how all seo people are nothing more than dodgy used car salesman. Am I Upset? I should coacoa!
I know a lot of people in the legitimate seo industry, and most of them are incredibly hard working, pleasant individuals who care if their clients actually get a good return on investment, and it becomes a bit upsetting when the whole seo industry is, metaphorically, tarred with the same brush as the wanabee seo crew who have seen the trend and started to offer Search Engine Optimisation alongside their 'web design' offerings.
Now I can fully understand that if someone gets shafted by a so called 'seo Company' who don't know the first thing about how to build a standards compliant website, let alone optimise for highly competitive keywords, they are going to get pretty upset (I would be too!), but as these charlatans are, to put it bluntly, polluting the gene pool of genuine seo Experts, maybe it's time to move on and introduce a new term to fly the flag under?
How about 'website analyst' or 'web ROI consultant'? Suggestions please..!
****update***
My business partner in one of the other businesses I hold Directorship in informed me that today a so called 'seo Expert' claiming to be from 'Google' contacted her (yeah, right... have you EVER had an employee of Google contact you personally, it's hard enough to get them to answer your bloody emails!) to say that their website did not appear in Google for some obscure search term (well it wouldn't would it... if this so called expert had done any actual analysis he would have seen that the website was not optimised for that particular term because it would have yielded no traffic!) Another bogus 'seo expert' selling dodgy 'link packages' to add to the pile!
Hi
I read this post with interest - mostly because while SEO has been given the 'dodgy salesman' title, social media is the place where a few real 'dodgy salesmen' are appearing with increasing regularity and largely for the same reasons.
I don't think SEO is all about that at all and unfortunately, like social media and the influx of so called 'experts' cropping up giving genuine providers a bad name, you have suffered with the same problem. Pollutants in SEO and now sadly the same in social media.
I think the problem is that some folks are willing to work for very little, provide a bad service as a result and then end up ruining it for the genuine providers.