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Posted By:
Palatnik
170 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://palatnikfactor.com)
Category: SEO
What constitutes to be an SEO expert?
17 Comments
Posted By:
Palatnik
170 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://palatnikfactor.com)
Category: SEO
What constitutes to be an SEO expert?
17 Comments
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Comments
An expert isn't necessarily one who knows all the answers, but moreso is one who knows where to go looking for all the right answers.
Then, on the flip side, there are those who, while surrounded by all the information they might ever need, totally fail to heed its clear advice.
@g1smd: An expert isn't necessarily one who knows all the answers, but moreso is one who knows where to go looking for all the right answers.
Where do you go while looking for answers?
Where can I find all the information I might ever need? I look arround and it's not there.
Emanuel H: It's not in a central location. But by gathering a list of forums centered around your niche(for me it's wickedfire/syndk8), and blogs that are within, and extend slightly past your niche, almost anything you could need is likely to be there. Or instructions on how to get it.
Your job as an seo is to improve on it.
Really? Where can I find information about the relevance scores of my own website?
I dont do too much PPC. Sorry, not my niche.
It's not that hard to find though. Try the search on sphinn I suppose. then google?
I don't know sweet FA about so many different things, even if I wanted to do regular consulting I would have to be really careful what kind of job I undertook.
It is almost embarrasing that the page which receives the most search traffic on my blog is a compilation of code gleaned from other places that I couldn't have written myself.
Then again I am brutally honest stating that on that particular page, reference my sources, and send traffic to those sources daily.
I don't think a single person can know everything, but they can still be looked on as a specialist or expert and know nothing about other aspects of the business.
You can make a lot of money online just by doing the basics, in fact people sticking to basic stuff often earn more.
If someone is referenced in an editorial capacity by people who you consider to also be experts, then that goes some way to transfer trust. This is ultimately what Google wants in their rankings too, though they seem to think an expert if compensated will betray their audience - I am sure some or many do.
Does someone have to develop new ideas to be an expert, or just a good practitioner of accepted best practice?
Should an SEO blog concentrate on basic SEO concepts, or only write content based upon new research?
When you write an article about why title tags are important for SEO or conversion, who should you credit who has done the research?
Maybe it is easier to credit a collective intelligence document such as the SEOmoz ranking factors, but finding original research on title tags online isn't as easy.
If an SEO practitioner simply uses the Ranking Factors document to explain what he will do for a client, and fixes basic stuff and does a little link building, and makes his customers happy, does that make him an expert, or someone who doesn't really know what they are talking about?
A Doctor is still looked on as an expert in the general field of medicine, even if they haven't done specific research in a topic to the same extent as a neurologist
@ SlightlyShadySEO: I've asked Where can I find information about the relevance scores of my own website? and you replied I dont do too much PPC. Sorry, not my niche.
Isn't it a perfect example of the fallacy of your statement: almost anything you could need is likely to be there. Or instructions on how to get it... Try the search on sphinn I suppose. then google?
Whatever you want to know, you can bet that someone has already been there and done that, and if you're lucky will have written it all up. On the few occasions I have found very little, or what I found I could see wasn't up to snuff, I went away and did my own primary research to find out for myself. I read a lot of forums, blogs, and technical resources. I use Google and Yahoo for searching all the time. After a decade online, I think I can make a sound judgement as to whether information is sound, or just spin and hype. There's a few sites I completely avoid as they are unreliable, and filled with junk.
Where can I find information about the relevance scores of my own website? And where can you, g1smd, find such information about your website? Or you don't think that this is necessary information, without which one cannot measure the results of experiments?
Relevance scores; by whose criteria?
Every tool is going to be designed differently, with different weightings and different selectors.
I have never seen the need for such a device. So far. I don't do "SEO by Numbers".
I am very much surprised - after a decade online it seems that you are still not familiar with one of the most fundamental terms of search engine optimization and you probably consider yourself an SEO expert .
Relevance score is what the search engine's ranking algorithm does (I hope you've heard about the algorithm): it measures the relevance score of every web page in relation to a given search query. Web pages that have a relevance score higher than zero are arranged in SERPs by the descending order of their relevance scores.
But we cannot know the actual relevance scores of our own sites because the search engines do not want to let us know! Consequently we cannot measure the results of our own experiments, and we cannot estimate the amount of work required to raise the relevance score of our own page at say # 11 for a given search query so that it will be higher than that of the page at # 10.
Thankfully, emanuelh, one doesn't need to know the actual/exact relevance score in order to raise the ranking of any given page (or more importantly, gain additional targeted search engine traffic for the page).
The SEO expert knows from experience and from within his or her gut exactly how to raise the search engine profile of the page.
It is only the non-expert who needs to seek out the exact formula for doing so.
Hello Jill, this is exactly where thinking qualitatively, which you do so well, fails. If you don't know the actual relevance score you don't know whether the new SEO technique you have implemented is beneficial or harmful. And you don't know whether the old SEO technique you're using is still beneficial or has become harmful. The ranking may raise because the page above you has lost more relevance score than yours, and the apparent success is very likely to be short-lived because your page is now too dangerously close to the relevance score of the page that formerly was below yours.
There are of course many ways to gain additional targeted search engine traffic. But mentioning them is irrelevant when your specific task is to raise the relevance score in order to raise the ranking. It only helps to make one forget the question by diverting the attention elsewhere, as in an interview with a well-trained politician.
The SEO expert knows from experience and from within his or her gut exactly how to raise the search engine profile of the page. Really? Please spare me the sales pitch. What happens after a minor
algorithm shift? Are the guts of so many SEO workers automatically readjusted? And what exactly do you mean by search engine profile? Is it ranking?
If one adopts quantitative thinking, or is inclined towards it naturally, the dangers of self-deception diminish, not to mention the dangers of deceiving the client. The absence of hard figures causes real quantitative anguish. New ideas and sometimes even new tools for bypassing the problem may spring out of it. For necessity is the mother of invention and fantasizing that there's no necessity leads you nowhere.
man, is this argument still going on?
When you play a guitar, you don't sit and ponder what sequence of notes will make you more money. Sure there are music theories and all that, but at the end of the day, for talented guitarists there isn't alot of conscious thinking involved.
So what do you recommend?
@Halfdeck: that comment was worth a vote. Love it!
Sometimes, emanuelh, an apparently simple question is not so simple. Your relevance score for Google for a given keyword on a particular day is not something they publish. You could take your ranking on the SERP as a measure of the relevance if you wished. However that is only for that specific keyword using that particular country version of Google.
Given the long tail nature of the Internet, only a small proportion of searchers on that concept will have typed in that specific keyword. There will be all sorts of combinations of that specific keyword with other words. Google also does latent semantic analysis so sometimes synonyms of the keyword will be seen as almost equally relevant. In summary a given keyword search is only one of a fuzzy cloud of somewhat related keyword searches. That is why trying to have great precision on a concept like relevance score really isn't very productive.
What counts is visitor traffic that converts to sales if that is your objective. Any relevance score is only weakly related to that.