Dave:
Thanks for stopping by and being so agreeable in your comments about the high ROI delivered by competent SEO professionals. You will make a lot of friends if you can maintain this tone.
After ten years of SEO and eight years of PPC, both in-house and for an agency, I want to point out that the people your comments actually hurt are not the professional SEO consultants. You may have annoyed us, but your not making our life more difficult. The damage you’re doing is to the in-house SEO folks who are fighting to justify the investment in time and money to attend conferences, buy tools, or hire a consultant to help achieve results.
I am sure you have spent a lot of time reading what people write about you and defending your reputation of late, so I offer the following suggestions.
1. Agree to Danny Sullivan’s call for a truce and clarify your position with an interview on Search Engine Expo.
2. Clearly recognize the difference between White Hat SEO – with a little gray matter – and “edgy SEO”. If you want to blast edgy SEO tactics for established brands, the roar of agreement will almost match the shouts of indignation you caused so far.
Edgy techniques have high risk. A good SEO consultant should steer clients away from risk, or at least, show clients how to use affiliates systems to lower their risk.)
3. Answer Gord Hotchkiss’s excellent observations that you need SEO expertise because the search engines have no vested interest in companies succeeding in natural search.
4. Make the case for the business community that to be effective with in-house SEO, they can’t rely on programmers or web designers. They need skilled people who spend a significant amount of time every week keeping up with what’s going on in search.
Make the case that they need an SEO specialist who attends conference and stay up to date with the evolving world of search. Whether that person is in-house, a consultant, or an in-house person with a consultant on retainer doesn’t matter, but you seem to agree that they need to know what they are doing.
5. Tell Mark Simon, your VP of industry relations, that his utopian vision of a time when “won’t need you to tell them how relevant your page actually is, because they’ll understand it on their own” misses the point. Engines will only be able to understand what a site is about because SEO professionals have helped companies unlock the content they have hidden away in databases and clunky CMS systems by understanding information architecture, crawlers, and site usabilty.
Natural Search Marketing exists at the intersection of search engines and users. Most SEO consultants spend zero time reverse engineering Google, Yahoo or MSN; we’re too busy solving basic site issues and discovering huge opportunities hidden in the analytics.
6. Sponsor a ” That Other Dave Pasternack Says He’s Sorry party at SES NYC” and buy us all a drink! We may accept your apology and you can stop spending your days defending your reputation on hundreds of SEM blogs!
See You in New York.
And say hi to Kevin for us ?
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