HTML is to SEO as Anatomy is to Doctor - Big Requirement for SEOs

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59
Sphinn It!

Went Hot: Apr 15, 2009 - 09:59 am
Posted By: pageoneresults 300 Days ago
Source: http://www.winningtheweb.com
Category: SEO

"What does it take to be an SEO? What do you need to know and be good at? Last week, Edward Lewis aka pageoneresults wrote an article called HTML 4 SEO that listed out 50 or so HTML elements related to SEO. Does one actually need to know how to use all of these tags and attributes in order to be an effective SEO? You can see that the topic generated heated debate on Sphinn where some claim that you’re not an SEO if you don’t know these by heart while others argue that SEOs can leave this sort of information to web developers. So who’s right?"

10 Comments

Comments

from planetc1 300 Days ago #

Votes: 1

I like that title, but I’d still bring a magic marker and put a big L and R on your body parts before going into surgery. :)

from Halfdeck 300 Days ago #

Votes: 3

Lol..seems the fire’s still raging on :)Gyutae, SEO "experts" don’t even know how to set up robots.txt and META NOINDEX correctly. So which one of these places do you recommend for Graywolf? :Dhttp://www.dailycognition.com/index.php/2008/10/28/top-10-deadliest-prisons-in-the-world.htmlI spent a day coding a spider and a robots.txt parser. That’s why I appreciate the complexities behind Google’s robots.txt simulation tool. That’s why I know that the first thing Googlebot has to do before crawling any URL is fetch robots.txt. Thats why I know a spider can’t digest a META NOINDEX without crawling a page first. That’s why I know that botched HTML may not kill a site but can make Googlebot parse links and anchor text incorrectly. There are too many ways people can screw up HTML for Google to anticipate. If every SEO was required to code a parser from scratch - as easy as that may be - most would fail miserably. But guess what? At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter -- if a client just cares about ranking higher and her site doesn’t need any troubleshooting.Check out this thread: "My site keeps getting reported as an attack site - nothing is wrong!"http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5d4a0c4eccff0a7c&hl=enBefore reading JohnMu’s reply, as an seo "doctor", what would your diagnosis be? Should every SEO be able to solve problems like that? That’s a higher bar than I think most people calling themselves SEOs are comfortable with.If you’re an SEO who specializes in troubleshooting websites, you need to know HTML, MOD_REWRITE, .htaccess, robots.txt, and a whole bunch of other "technical" stuff - though that wasn’t the issue to begin with (question Edward raised was should SEO know proper HTML markup - not the same thing).If you want a jack of all trades master of none, fine, demand that an SEO you hire is proficient at everything. But if an SEO has a solid track record of increasing website monthly revenue by over 30% but doesn’t know any HTML because he’s used DW all his life, firing him IMO would be insane.

from Ryan 300 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Agreed. I basically said the same stuff earlier in my reply to the post:http://www.dotcult.com/should-seos-know-html

from martinp32 300 Days ago #

Votes: 1

Turn this discussion around for a second... would you hire an SEO who ONLY knew "HTML, MOD_REWRITE, .htaccess, robots.txt, and a whole bunch of other "technical" stuff"?One of my clients essentially tied my hands by restricting SEO efforts to the above as anything else was too great an investment in time and energy (their corporate thinking). Anyone care to guess how successful that campaign turned out?I think that every skill and piece of knowledge can be useful and contribute to a successful SEO, but some competencies rank higher than others.

from Sebastian 300 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Actually, hiring an SEO/SEM genius who brilliantly covers each and every task might be somewhat tricky. What’s true for cute algos applies to (SEO) services too: Does it scale? With a tiny site a one man show SEO can get away with broad and not that detailled technical skills. With larger sites that’s a completely other story. Here we work in teams with highly skilled technical SEOs on board. Thus, the skills asked for solely depend on the particular job. At the end of the day success is scored by the client’s earnings. Personally, I do think that an SEO w/o solid technical knowledge is kinda misplaced.

from steveplunkett 300 Days ago #

Votes: 1

<div>(opinion)</div><div>Some have one, some have many, functions. Some people are like Oatmeal and have mad grafix skillz and can code. I don’t have mad grafix skillz.. </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>Copywriter - The copywriter at my office writes copy for clients’ websites. He has the keywords before he writes the copy. I use his body copy to rank with quite often (no metas, no links, etc.)</div><div>This dude can create a long tail off of 3 paragraphs that is thought provoking marketing copy, you wouldn’t know you had just read keywords. part wordsmith, part mathematician</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>web designer = knows illustrator, photoshop (well!), CSS and dreamweaver - the people who make webpages look GOOD. (possibly knows flash and action script)</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>Programmer/HACKER/ADMIN = java, CSS, linux, perl, php, sql, .net, etc.. database admin. Person who has to fix stuff when it breaks on a shopping cart, or do the 301 redirects, manage DNS, etc.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div>webmaster/ADMIN = knows html, understands directory structure, the person who is going to code the forms for the web designer. Does site wide coding changes, manages web server, etc.<div>(DISCLAMER: my designer(s) code all my forms, i don’t do forms.)<div></div><div></div><div></div><div>seo = webmaster + search - applies to mainframe search application developers on unix, people who have simply defined criteria for sorting via a database at some point and can apply that to the Search Engines - G, Y! and MLK?(Msn Live Kumo)</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>SEM = knows links and ppc. Posts 30 blogs a day or offshores 1000’s of them... hasn’t figured out that posting articles all over the place has devalued the sources.. and given no authority to the client’s own domain, just a bunch of inbounds... droppin.. like flies...</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>Paid Search Specialist - Knows pay-per-click like Danny Sullivan knows SEO, has systems IN-PLACE for A/B, Multivariate, or Taguchi Method testing for ads, understands the importance of landing pages, ad copy, ad placement, ROI on CPA, etc.. can run multiple campaigns on thousands of keywords at once. Has run a campaign on Yahoo! search paid inclusions, etc.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>(/opinion)</div><div></div></div>

from pageoneresults 299 Days ago #

Votes: 0

That is 8 job titles you have listed above. Let me go out and start sourcing those people for a client project. Let’s see, the budget is $30,000. I don’t think I can get all those people on board within budget. So, where does that leave me? So if I’m a small business owner, how do I approach this? Am I going to need that many people to handle my Internet Marketing Campaign? I sure hope not. I think I’ll go find a well versed SEO who can do most, if not all the above and a bit more. If you’re an SEO providing a niche service, hopefully that one service is enough to keep you going. I don’t think it is in many instances, not in 2009 anyway. If the client has a minimal budget, it is usually up to one person to do everything, or possibly two, maybe three at most. If you get any more than that involved, the campaign is usally a crapshoot because not everyone is on board and people tend to want to do things their way and not the suggested way. They know how to do it better and everything now becomes an a la carte option. Which of course translates into less than satisfactory results.

from phillmidwinter 299 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Why can’t we be successful in all these categories?I’m an SEO, I know as much as I can about each area because I want to provide value to my clients in any way possible.Do you think that Search Engineers at Google are content to just know how a database works and be happy with their lot? No, of course not.Someone can restrict themselves to a category if they like, but at the end of the day they won’t win as much work as they could.

from Halfdeck 299 Days ago #

Votes: 1

"Do you think that Search Engineers at Google are content to just know how a database works and be happy with their lot? No, of course not."Googlers are compartmentalized. Matt Cutts, for example, is responsible for search quality. He doesn’t have direct access to stuff like on-page factor weights (he had to ask some other Googler to answer whether [i] scored higher than [em]) or detailed crawling behavior (Crawl Team is responsible for that). He doesn’t know much about Adwords/Adsense. In the past he specialized in building SafeSearch and these days it seems like paid links detection algoes are his primary concern. Stuff like Universal Search, personalized results, Local search, Google Maps, Streetview, Search Wiki, Google Docs, Gmail etc are outside of his domain. Each of those I’m guessing requires thousands of man hours to fully develop. And when Vanessa Fox worked at GoogleI think her focus was developing Webmaster Tools and helping Googlers interact more with webmasters.Are you going to argue people like Matt and Vanessa should try to do ’em all anyway? There’s too much food on that plate for one person.

from steveplunkett 299 Days ago #

Votes: 0

@pageoneresultsthe same way not everyone uses all your HTML 4 elements..not everyone can affford to hire all those people..The copywriter isn’t budgeted under SEO.. he’s budgeted in the website and colleateral production so different line item... and as i said above.. "I don’t have mad grafix skillz.. " nor am i an SEM or Paid Search Specialist.. the rest however fit.feel free to take things to an extreme for arguments sake.. you and halfdeck have fun..