I certainly don’t discount your ideas, in fact I wish there would be more discussion about this important subject (at least as far as I’m concerned). Those who now offer certifications (and the list is growing) will resist any movement towards anything that cast a shadow of a doubt on their current programs. Standards will never exist because everyone is playing the game by their own rules.

“We’ll only have SEO standards when we finally have truly open discussion of how we do the things we do.” I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Unless one accepts that the first rule of the standards would be to accept that the standards must continually evolve with the engines?

The standards must therefore define their own method of evolution – basically algo chasing admitted up front im afraid.

Mark

Search optimizers — ideally — want to help all three groups. But we need to agree on what the fundamental principles are, and from there we need to agree on what the basic processes need to be.

I recognize that what I’m about to say is about as welcome as a tank of napalm at at backyard bbq. However, I will say it.

Before you can agree on anything, you must have something to agree on. As long as the engines control their own listings, you don’t have much to agree on.

It might be useful to remember that there’s no ‘business’ of search. There is, however, a business of ad delivery.

The theory behind optimization is less about dissecting search algorithms and more about evaluating what people do with search engines. There are three groups in search: those who provide the data, those who organize the data, and those who use the data.

Search optimizers — ideally — want to help all three groups. But we need to agree on what the fundamental principles are, and from there we need to agree on what the basic processes need to be.

As long as people keep using Yahoo! for “competitive analysis” this industry will never achieve more than a low-grade professionalism.

ON EDIT: But I have to add that the need for open sharing of proposed standards is a necessity. Right now, SEOs lack credibility simply because we don’t speak the same language even to each other.

We have come full circle from industries of trades and apprenticeships to more centralized industrial processes and back to trades and services. What is the value in recognizable certification? One can be taught a million ways how to play chess; how you learn is how you learn. You can teach someone how to get better by studying the patterns of their opponents. What I’m getting at is ad-hoc spontaneity is a difficult concept to embrace and harder still to prove to a potential employer or investor. If a paid course can offer 3 ways to move a page a single ranking in the SERPs(a measurable benchmark) it is thereby conveying a snapshot relevant and current to that single query in a real-time industry. The process can be replicated, tweaked and built upon.

At the end of the day a certification no more makes you a better SEO than anything else but in a world of intangibles it is a business catalyst used to further careers and bolster company credibility. In that regard it is worth its weight in platinum.

I think the industry can never have standards (not public standards anyway). As maybe the standards would lead to a detailed explanation of the best methods of creating websites which would always outperform non-standardized developed sites in the serps.

I’m one person in 10,000 and then some who would be unlikely to contribute (due to lack of skill – ie not a “master SEO”) to those standards, however I am certain me and the others would utilize such standards to our advantage in the serps.

I know this sounds obvious – but I think theres an amount of truth in it.

Cheers,
Mark.