When ingesting my daily dose of webmasterworld.com one particular thread within the supporter’s forum caught my attention.  The original poster (lets call him Bob) apparently runs a search engine optimization firm and he was concerned that after creating a proposal for a client, the client would in turn take that proposal and implement it in-house.  The general consensus of the thread was that in his initial proposal, Bob should blind the client with smoke and mirrors.

Any true SEO out there knows that this should be unacceptable.  Search engine optimization is a skill.  If a normal company with no in-house SEO team can simply take Bob’s proposal and duplicate it than Bob has some serious problems on his hands.  The fact that most people in the thread thought that confusing the client with “smoke and mirrors” was the best solution only adds to my frustration.  Search engine optimization is a skill that your average Joe is unable to complete.  If Bob’s concern is a real one, then he needs to spend some serious time honing his craft.  It is true that almost anyone can add a few title, meta and h1 tags, but SEO should go beyond that.  A good SEO will spend many hours researching keywords.  His talent should lie in finding tons of those super targeted keywords that don’t get much search traffic but are sure to result in a sale.  In addition any smart online marketer knows that the original optimization of a website is only the beginning.  Once optimized a complete site analysis needs to be done and web stats needs to be analyzed.  Then the site needs a second revision in order to take advantage of the increased traffic received from the initial optimization.  After all what good is tons of traffic if nobody buys your product?

I do need to give Bob credit where credit is due because he is not black boxing his services like so many companies do.  Instead he is being 100% transparent by telling his clients exactly how he intends to optimize their site.  I would encourage more SEO companies to take this approach because as broadband subscriptions continue to increase more and more companies will realize the value of having their sites optimized and the industry is only going to grow.

If you are interested in leaning the craft of SEO, please take a look at some of these resources:
http://www.stuntdubl.com/ - Todd Malicoat’s Blog always has some great insight into the SEO World

http://www.submitexpress.com/ - Some useful SEO Tools are available here, they are also number 1 in Google for the keyword “Search Engine Optimization”, so they obviously know what they are doing.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/ - Fantastic forum that has tons of smart webmasters and SEO professionals contributing on a daily basis.