SEO is not a real job…

…or so a (tsk) .net development blog would have you believe.

I have just read the above linked post on reddit which is from a .net development blog. At first i was very frustrated about how someone could be so ignorant about an industry that they obviously don’t understand, but then at the same time i started to think about how people do view the SEO/SEM industry in a negative light. I know it has been discussed to death about how some SEO’s come across as snake oil salesmen but i feel that this post deserves some attention, especially due to the negativity of some of the reddit comments that people have left. Before i even get started on my views though i will present you with the opening paragraph of the enlightened post…

Let’s face it: SEO is a joke, not a job.
Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his spare time, working on the strength of contents or services offered. A little bit of social bookmarking, a little bit of fuss on major social or professional networks, a little bit of impression exchange, a little bit of back-links here and there: it doesn’t seem to me as a big deal.

Pretty convincing stuff huh? Well not entirely. It seem like this guy has absolutely no idea what real SEO involves. In fact he seems to think that if you just develop a website to standards then you are going to automatically rank for your chosen terms. He even goes on to say that “getting noticed on the web is extremely easy, just with a little reading and even less intelligence.

Now anyone who has tried to create a site and get it to rank for anything which is remotely competitive will certainly find that getting noticed on the web is far from easy. You obviously have to get the site architecture right, get your pages linking to each other correctly, make sure that you title tags and meta descriptions line up with the page content, ensure that there is no duplication of content, actually right decent content and get it up and indexed by the big G. Now that’s just the on page side of things, we all know how hard it can be to get free links hence why linkbait and creative viral is so effective, and usually not cheap. Lets not even get into link buying which can cost a lot of money for a small site to break into a competitive area.

So its quite obvious that SEO is a job, because if not it wouldnt be a multi million pound industry. However i do see why people look at us so bad. There are so many stories of companies ripping people off and saying how they will submit your site to a gazillion search engines, but it is so frustrating when uneducated fools make comments and posts like the one above. I know some people have bounced around the ideas of having academic standards in the world of SEO, and whilst i am against it, it could help solve some of the negativity that surrounds us all?

Oh, and don’t even get me started about the post author disabling the right click on his website! 1999 called, it wants its javascript back 🙂

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Doug aka Nullvariable
15 years ago

There are bad apples everywhere. I think the hard thing with SEO is the same problem with getting some companies to do marketing. There are values to the service that you just can’t quantify. Many people have never done any SEO optimization to their sites and so they’ve not missed it. But they fail to realize that brand name carries. I’ve had companies that decided to not advertise because they weren’t getting hardly any business from it. A poor choice since often an advertisiment might sit on someones desk for quite awhile before they act on it. I guess my point is that SEO is a requirement from the most basic standpoint but if you’ve never benefited from proper seo then you’ll never grasp the need. SEO and marketing are the foundation, without them you’ll never be able to go as far.

PS I saw your comment on Anne’s blog post and dropped by and couldn’t help but drop a couple of lines =) if you ever have the urge to guest post drop me a line!