SEO Certified - Will it ever become a reality
January 27th, 2008
Net Magellan recently wrote a post entitled “SEO Certification - What Is Your View?” tackling the thorny issue of SEO certification in todays Search Marketing industry. This topic of conversation always brings a variety of perspectives and heated debate.
As the head of an Online Marketing organisation, dissecting the wheat from the chaff is often a difficult thing to do, particular within the UK SEO market. I recently had a candidate who came in - who had previously been responsible for campaign where the client operated in a moderately uncompetitive sector - and the client in questions was spending 2K a month on paid linkage. Now - putting in bluntly I would suggest most people with an inch of intelligence would be able to do that, let alone a specialist search engine optimisation specialist.
Having some form of certification one could argue would be useful here - perhaps along the lines of the Google Advertising Professional qualifications, where the examinee is tested on his knowledge of the system, however it is here in my opinion that the grey area in the SEO certification debate exists.
Just what is acceptable SEO. Google has developed a set of guidelines - Paid Links are bad/Content is good. However lets face it - in an industry where the stakes are getting bigger - and the market more competitive -who is going to share valuable knowledge unless they really have to.
Secondly - What constitutes good SEO. There has long been debate around the ethical nature of SEO - and what hat us various SEO experts are - whether it be Black, White or a varying shade of grey. Surely some common ground rules have to be developed before we can develop appropriate and valuable SEO certification - something you can associate with your CV with pride -and know a potential employer (such as E-Gain) is going to appreciate.
I don’t for one minute think certification is a bad idea - however at present I would add it is nothing more than confusing for a market that do not always understand SEO. Lets get the foundations in place and make it something that is going to benefit our industry - rather than do something for somethings sake…
Entry Filed under: SEO Industry, Search Marketing
2 Comments Add your own
1. Michael Martinez | January 30th, 2008 at 12:08 am
Google may have guidelines for inclusion but simply following their guidelines is not good search engine optimization. In fact, that’s pretty bad search engine optimization since it’s not optimizing for search but rather optimizing for Google’s approval.
I’m not advocating that people run out and buy or sell ilnks to game Google, but the real problem with SEO certification is that we have no industry standards and we cannot look to the search engines to provide those standards.
The search engines can certainly play a role in the process and I would not mind seeing them offer service-specific certification.
But in order for the SEO industry to adopt a credible, acceptable certification process (which would only assure that SEO technicians have been schooled in generally agreed upon fundamental principles) we need to adopt a set of standards.
Without the standards no certification has any credibility.
People need to ask SEO conference organizers (of all scales) to put SEO Industry Standards on their main programming calendars. Until the industry takes standards seriously, certification will be a joke.
2. SEO 101: Introducing your&hellip | May 12th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
[…] Truly thats a worrying stat, given the amount of ‘SEO experts’ out there, but probably symbolic of the lack of SEO standardisation out there (however thats probably another conversation and one that has been tackled before on the E-Gain blog in a post called ‘SEO certified - will it ever become a reality‘. However I would suggest if your SEO consultant does suggest the implementation of the afore mentioned tag - point him here, and perhaps to one of these established resources as well […]
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