SEO Experts and Expert SEO Services

The new buzzword in town seems to be “SEO expert”. It’s no longer enough for people to tout themselves as professional SEOs — now we’re all going to be experts. Heck, if you don’t feel like an expert, someone will be glad to take your money and teach you to be an expert. You can get advanced SEO training, expert SEO training, and even some sort of SEO certification.

Yes, friends, your SEO expertise is just a dollar and an email away. Sign up for the course, endure the lessons, and take the tests. Do whatever it takes so that you can distinguish yourself from the rest of the field of so-called SEO experts.

I wonder how many people would expect an advanced SEO to be an expert SEO? Frankly, I don’t equate the two expressions with each other. In my opinion, and perhaps a few other people’s opinions, an expert is someone with specialized skill or knowledge — skill and knowledge above and beyond average skill and knowledge.

Let’s take on-page optimization. Anyone can scarf up forum-based advice and publish it on their blog or in their book. That doesn’t make them an expert in anything other than scarfing up free advice. To be expert at on-page optimization you need to be better at it than most people. That means you have to practice on-page optimization in ways that most other people don’t. That means you have to have a pretty firm understanding of content presentation, structure, emphasis, and organization.

Most SEOs don’t speak about developing content that way. They talk about writing “good, relevant content” or “natural, free-flowing content”, or something like that. In fact, SEO pundits like to write very short, brief, bullet-point content so why should we believe what they say about content? If they don’t do it for themselves, how well do they do it for other people?

An SEO expert has to have real SEO expertise. The expertise shows itself. We will know the tree by the fruit it bears. An SEO expert should ooze expert SEO skill in some way, although not every SEO expert is an expert SEO copywriter.

For example, you might find an expert SEO link analyst. These guys don’t mess with Yahoo! link counts (and you’d better believe their expert SEO tools don’t focus on Yahoo! link counts or Technorati rankings, either). An expert SEO link analyst is going to look at everything surrounding each link. Knowing that Yahoo! sees 10,000 links pointing to your domain is worthless. Knowing that Google has indexed 10,000 pages that Yahoo! thinks links to your content is more interesting. Knowing which of those pages are verifiably passing value — that’s expertise.

Your expert SEO services should extend beyond writing title and meta tags, placing H1 headers, and telling people to embed ALT= text in their image placement. If you’re going to be an expert title tag SEO, for example, you’d better have some concrete opinions (that is, opinions with examples both pro and con to show why you form your opinions the way you do) about what should and should not be included in the title tag.

If you’re going with “Brand + Keyword expression”, WHY? Because someone blogged about it? Because 100 people blogged about it? If that’s your rationalization, you’re NOT providing expert SEO services. You’re providing CopyCat SEO Services. By-the-blog SEO is a very poor form of SEO. You can get ideas for tests and experiments from blogs and forums but if you don’t try this stuff out yourself and see what happens under multiple conditions, you’re not an expert SEO and you’re not providing expert SEO services.

Let’s take a look at analytics. An SEO analytics expert should be able to knowledgably discuss at least 4 or 5 analytics packages because he is currently using those packages. The SEO analytics expert needs to be able to tweak each package. The expert SEO analytics person also needs to be able to extract data from each package and compare data between packages. And an SEO analytics expert needs to be able to read raw server log files and analyze them without the help of an analytics package.

Self-proclaimed SEO experts are a dime a dozen. And to prove they are SEO experts they have set up social media profiles so that when you check their search reputation management skills you see they can make social media profiles.

In fact, search engine reputation management (or online reputation management as most SEOs now seem to be calling it) is the latest money-making trend in the SEO industry. I seriously doubt most SEOs make much money at it today but if the hype heats up the SEO industry might see several hundred million dollars in SERM revenues by 2012 or 2013 (that’s just my guess). You’d better believe the people who hit the top of that market won’t be the guys who flood their search results with social media profiles.

If it seems like we have an endless supply of SEO “experts”, fret not about search reputation management. So far only a few dozen people seem to be claiming they are online reputation management experts. Well, if you think pulling examples of good organic SEO out of self-proclaimed experts is tough, just try asking SERM experts for examples. If they are not under non-disclosure with their clients, I would have to ask what other risks they are taking with their clients’ reputations.

You cannot tell people you’re managing your search engine reputation. Especially not if you’re trying to counteract the poison pen campaign some hostile entity is conducting against you. So having your “SEO expert” get up in front of the media and proclaim, “We’re managing the reputation for so-and-so and let me tell you, we’re doing a GREAT job!”.

Which is not to say you won’t occasionally get a public referral from a client. Some clients don’t have any problems with their name spaces. They’ve done nothing wrong, offended few to no people. They just cannot find themselves when they search on their names. So they hire someone to help them optimize relevant content for their name space.

A lot of SEOs are easily capable of providing that kind of service. It should not be very expensive, either (in my opinion), unless you’ve got a shared name space. If an expert SEO cannot tell you what a “shared name space” is, he ain’t expert at search reputation management. And if he is sharing his best tips and secrets on the Web, he ain’t expert at search reputation management.

Where else do expert SEOs offer their expert SEO services? They have expert SEO forums, expert SEO tutorials and classes, expert SEO blogs, and they are speaking expert SEOs at various functions.

Some people are more expert at schmoozing in the SEO industry than they are at providing expert SEO service. There are relatively few true general-purpose SEO experts. There is so much to learn and know in this industry that to be a master of most or all skills is darned near impossible. Some people are better at figuring out how to optimize servers for search than they are at figuring out how to optimize sites for search. Server optimization may not seem like a big part of the business to you, but it helps to know the basics when your client says, “We can’t seem to get indexed” and it’s great to have a server optimization guru to call upon when you’re stumped but your gut feeling says it’s got to be the server.

You can learn the basics from SEO blogs, forums, seminars, and conferences you can only acquire your SEO expertise in one place: engaging in full hands-on optimization. That doesn’t mean you have to do everything. It means you do whatever you become expert in because you can only become expert in whatever you do. You have to know what works and what is nonsense.

No one is an expert SEO because other people say they are. No one is an expert SEO because they put marketing hype on their Web site. People become SEO experts by constantly outperforming other SEOs in whatever skill sets they develop their expertise. You’re the expert when you can take the topic of discussion further than everyone else. You’re the expert when you no longer wonder what the other guy is doing.

There are no credible Expert SEO Certifications. We’ll have credible Advanced SEO Certifications before we have credible Expert SEO Certifications. Anyone can learn Advanced SEO techniques (although most so-called “advanced SEO techniques” are nothing more than the basic techniques rehashed under the advanced label). Only a few people will ever become experts in advanced techniques because an expert, by definition, surpasses the majority.

The real experts push the envelope faster and further than the rest of the community, who mostly just follow along. Every now and then someone new comes along, develops a passion for some aspect of SEO, and throws himself into it. Eventually, if he stays with it, he may become a true expert in the craft he has chosen.

But he won’t be telling you when he hits his expertise stride. You’ll just know when you see him in action.

There is no bullshit in expert SEO service. There doesn’t have to be.