Everyone’s an SEO Expert…
You may chuckle, but one of the big problems small businesses have with search marketing is knowing who to trust. Everyone’s an “SEO Expert” these days, and since our industry feeds so much on blogs, articles, etc., the barrier to entry for someone who wants to declare him/herself an SEO is virtually nil.
I’ll write a longer article on this at some point, but for now a couple quick links:
On Small Business Hub, Dharmesh Shah lists 7 Signs You Should Run Screaming from an SEO Consultant. I usually run screaming from these kinds of articles, but this one is pretty good. A small business owner reading that will learn something.
Entrepreneur magazine, which is a trusted source for its target audience of SMEs, ran an article a few days ago, The No. 1 SEO Tip by a “recognized authority” on SEO. A lot of entrepreneurs will read that, I’m sure, and they will think they’re learning a lot, but not all learning is “right” learning. Sure, there are some basic truths in the article, but also a lot of crap that makes me run screaming in the other direction.
Sure wish there was an easy way to reach more small businesses with information and advice they can trust, and I’m not declaring myself the authority, or anything like that. Just saying I wish there was a solution to the misinformation that often gets spoon-fed to hungry small businesses….
Okay, Matt, if you won’t declare yourself the authority, I will! I’m the authority!!! Haha. Just wanted to say that.
Seriously, though, the misinformation out there really can be a killer for small web business owners who are genuinely trying to get a handle on what is going on. Hopefully they find sites like yours to get them going in the right direction. Hopefully….
Miriam
Hmm, I was thinking about writing an article where I reveal the true secret of Search Marketing… that for 2007 you should try to target a search engine called “The Google”, there’s a lot of buzz around it in the industry this year. :p
It is very difficult for business owners, who do not know SEO to differentiate good SEO people from bad ones. Unfortunately if you find bad one then you do not trust the good ones as well 🙁
Yeah, I was pretty disappointed with the “#1 SEO Tip”. Articles? How about looking a the basics, right? Google will never rank a site just for having good articles with links to it. I still say the #1 SEO tip is having an optimized TITLE Tag. I have seen sites with few to no inbound links, but optimized titles rank well in niche fields. But you all already knew that, right? 🙂
Yep, I think we already knew that, oldschool. Shame the guy writing for Entrepreneur didn’t know it, eh? 🙂 BTW, thanks for visiting and making your first comment. Hope you’ll be a regular.
And thank you Miriam, Simon, and Mariusz for the good comments, too.
oh my goodnes….as an seo pro of 15 years I had no idea that to easily get to the top of Google, all I had to do was write good articles…and here i thought the only way was to keep buying Google stock, and if they refused me top rankings I would sell that stock to Yahoo! 🙂
LOL! I hadn’t thought of the stock idea, bsburnsie, but you might be on to something… 🙂
Reminds me of the telemarketing call I received from a self proclaimed “SEO Guru” that for a fee, would change my urls so they “wouldn’t include the question mark”.
He only wanted 3500.00 to optimize my 20 item ecommerce site for seo!