I am taking an 18 hour class in Search Engine Optimization at the local university.
I am amazed at what I have learned in just two classes, and am really liking this course a lot. This is truly a specialized field that requires keeping on top of things.
Almost every bit of info I thought I knew about search engines has proven to be woefully out of date and irrelevant.
Our instructor has quite a bit of experience and is giving some great links, tips, and teaching the concepts very well. She is also honest and letting us know how fast things are changing and that if we don’t subscribe to many of the newsletters and links, everything we are learning will be out of date in six months.
However, it seems that more and more companies are hiring SEO’s and SEM’s for their websites - and from what I have already learned, I can see why! Search engines can make or break a company - and learning the ways to work with them can be tricky.
Do you know of any professional SEO’s or SEM’s? And do you, or the company you work with, use their services?
I run an SEO copywriting firm. I have several clients that are large SEO firms, as well as people doing their own SEO work. It’s definitely a great business - I have 10 writers that I keep very busy
I know an SEO company. Our company does work for them (they went from just selling SEO to selling full blown Web sites, which they have no idea how to create). We do not use their services for our own sites. In fact, we’ve found that we as Web designers know a hell of a lot more about optimization than they do. They’re just good at selling things.
Thanks for taking the time to register as a guest and responding, Wordworker!!
As I mentioned, I have only had two classes, but already I can see how SEO is certainly time-consuming work - not only in keeping current, but keeping track and writing. I can well imagine you keep those 10 people busy.
Thanks for the comments, ZipperJJ…our instructor sort of mentioned the type of SEO company you mention.
There are lots of people out there making some pretty outrageous claims and promises that they cannot possibly keep. There are others who can screw up a website, causing it to be blacklisted from search engines and ruining someones business. She gave an example of a local firm that tried to be sneaky, got caught, and almost every one of their customers found their sites suddenly disappear from the major search engines. Most had to completely start over, creating new domains and losing a lot of business. Lawsuits ensued.
One thing she has already ingrained in our little brains is what to realistically expect and honestly be able to offer to clients. She insists on us using fair (white hat) methods and not resorting to shady (black hat), quick tricks that will give great results initially, but ultimately will come back and bite you on the ass.
There are certainly bad SEO firms out there. Either they’re ill informed, or just trying to cash in on what they perceive as the latest hot trend. A good SEO firm implements long term best practices, rather than resorting to the cheap and easy (and not usually effective) blackhat tricks such as keyword cramming and link farm flooding. It’s all well and good if you get 10 times more people to your site, but if none of them ever use your services or buy your products because your website is ridiculous or nonsensical - or worse, completely irrelevant to what they’re looking for - you’ve just wasted a lot of time and money to have the most visible awful site around.
A lot of my work comes in fixing the damage done by other firms who hire cheap writers. They turn out useless, uninformative content that has no value to the reader. Without bragging, I think the fact that I only hire people capable of doing the necessary research and creating valuable, relevant content is the main reason my company does well. If you could see some of the articles I’ve seen and had to rewrite… Shudder.
Organic optimization is, of course, best. Many of the high ranking sites out there never took any intentional SEO measures, and simply got to the top by having sites that are optimized naturally through good design. SEO is a good start, but it’s not the end all and be all of search engine rankings. Visibility is important, naturally, but visibility + usability is the real recipe for success, I think.
