SEO Certification – Is SEO Certification For Real?

SEO Certification is a really scary topic. There are dozens if not hundreds of Web sites offering SEO Certification and, in an industry that has no professional standards, many of these sites claim to base their certifications on “peer reviewed” processes and nationally recognized standards. I know of only one established peer-reviewing group and that is Search Engine Marketing Journal. I’m not aware of any publications by the body on standards or certification.

In fact, there is only one internationally recognized organization that has anything approaching the credibility of being a “standards body” and that is the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Association. SEMPO does teach classes and offer certifications in its own courses but their certification isn’t really worth much more than the certifications offered by unknown agencies who pop out of nowhere.

If two job applicants came to me, one with a SEMPO certification and one with some “5-day Master SEO Course” certification, I’d talk to them both but I wouldn’t pay much attention to the certificates. I’ve got programming certificates (I think — I may have thrown them out). Not one certificate ever helped me get a job, although your experience may be different.

When it comes to the credibility of SEO certification there are levels of scale. For example, while someone like me is not likely to be impressed with an SEO certification it may be enough to convince a small business owner to offer you some contract work or maybe even get your boss to make you the in-house SEO expert. Once you have a business reason to do the work you’ll sink or swim and your certification course may prove to be more of a detriment than a boon.

Not having reviewed all these certification courses, I can only look at the blogs that some of these sage dispensers of search engine marketing expertise hand out. They frighten me. I cannot put my faith in an industry that is represented by a cadre of self-promotional certifiers who have basically only certified themselves and their disciples. That’s not a very good SEO certification, in my opinion.

The lack of credible standards and the vacancy in the “industry council” arena (SEMPO seems to be totally uninterested in forming and promoting a standards body) has allowed some unscrupulous people to make truly false and outrageous claims. For example, someone has taken it upon themselves to go around to consumer complaints sites, filing false complaints about online reputation management companies — and I don’t mean a few. Dozens of SEO firms, many of them very recognizable, have been libeled online by an anonymous poster who (among other false statements) claims to be part of the National Search Engine Optimization Association.

There is NO National Search Engine Optimization Association and if there was I wouldn’t be a member of it because, frankly, its name has been tarnished by lies and propaganda. But people in the SEO industry are only slowly becoming aware of the fact that we are represented by SEO certification into which we have had no input — that we have a spokesperson in a (probable) persona that has staked out an online claim to the name of “National Search Engine Optimization Association”.

I’ll believe there is a National Search Engine Optimization Association when I see a link to its Website on SearchEngineLand, WebProNews, SE Roundtable, Search Engine Journal, and Search Engine Watch. If you want to be taken seriously as a real organization, you have to get those Web sites to link to you, talk about you, and report on your news. Otherwise you’re not credible — not to me.

The need for SEO certification is certainly very real but with so many practitioners in the “art” of SEO it’s impossible for a naive consumer to know what is going on. There is no market value in SEO certification, except in so much as anyone selling certifications can pull in money for these classes. If people want to teach basic SEO principles from their own experience, that’s fine. They can help newcomers get started, although I have no doubt many bad lessons are included in the basic curricula of these companies.

But it’s the so-called “Master” SEO Certifications that really upset me. Who in their right mind could possibly believe they should be able to take a 5-day or even a 90-day class and become a “master” SEO? There are very few real “masters” in the industry and these are people who don’t normally write on blogs or offer to teach classes. Some of the teachers ARE what I would consider to be master-level SEOs. They understand there is more to it than “links and research”.

At some point community demand for search engine optimization classes will drive universities to develop some sort of curriculum. The first generation of academic courses probably won’t be very good, but they will offer some structure and they’ll require term papers, projects, and readings in the field. Students will have to learn to compare source A’s opinion to source B’s opinion. The good professors will try to qualify their opinions in class while showing the students how to construct rigorous tests.

A good academic search engine optimization program will require that you take some math (Set Theory would be high on my list of requirements), some economics and statistics, and basic marketing. And, oh yeah, — you might as well include some basic information retrieval science so the SEO students can at least see that search algorithms are not simple rule sets that can be deciphered in Web forums and blogs.

I’ve taught SEO classes and I’ve written SEO tutorials, manuals, and tip sheets. I’ve even written some SEO tests. I’m told I’m a terrible test-writer. Nonetheless, I’ve made the effort on more than one occasion so I know something about what is involved in teaching search engine optimization to people. You don’t just teach someone to be a “master SEO” in 3 months. No one can do that. No one knows enough about search engine optimization to be able to credibly teach that kind of course.

The proliferation of SEO certifications will help bring more people in tune with our industry. It will contribute toward mainstream understanding of basic search optimization practices. But it also inflicts some harm on us and inevitably on the people who believe in SEO certifications enough to pay for them. You may be learning yesterday’s bad SEO techniques or you may be learning absolute drivel. And you will probably learn basic terminology so that you can start browsing SEO blogs and forums and reading the free online tip sheets. It’s a mixed bag of results.

Search engine optimization needs to be taken with a grain of salt. While it’s not rocket science neither is it something you can learn out of an Acme SEO Manual. All the SEO books out there constitute a body of literature that together makes search engine optimization a credible practice. But every author invents his own terms and standards and there is no real consensus on what the true standards should be.

Standards are not really techniques. An SEO standard should require that you use multiple resources to conduct your keyword research, not that you use specific resources. An SEO standard should require that you understand which keywords are likely to draw real converting traffic, not that you choose keywords on the basis of some arbitrary formula. An SEO standard should require that you create a sensible reporting plan, not that you check rankings on a periodic basis.

Most of the truly influential people in our industry are afraid of standards and certification. I think they view certification as a time-wasting process. They already know how to do this stuff so they don’t want to be forced to take a test. But I think people are confusing certification with licensing. You can have standards and certification without licensing. We the grandpas and grandmas of search engine optimization don’t need to prove we know the basics by taking certifications. But we owe it to the next few generations of SEOs to stop gibbering about what constitutes “best practices” and agree on what the real basics are.

If we fail to accept this responsibility our industry will continue to be known as snake oil providers because that’s who represents us. As long as you have to find out about the National Search Engine Optimization Association on bogus consumer complaints blogs and forums you will constantly be defending search engine optimization against every angry blogger and Web developer who wants some attention.

And an industry that fails to learn from its mistakes not only deserves to live in that kind of hell, it makes the most cogent, eloquent case for the need to develop real standards and certification.

This is your bed: how do you want to make it? How do you want to sleep in it? Do you really want to roll around in it the way it appears today?