I liken SEO to the early days of medicine.

In every forum where SEOs congregate, sooner or later someone brings up one of two topics:

• Is it worth my while to get SEO certification from XYZ academy?
• My SEO client was ripped off by some amateur posing as an SEO.

The discussions usually mention:

• Examples of shoddy or outdated SEO practices such as keyword-stuffing, over-optimised content, needless site redesign, mass directory submissions, etc. The insinuation here is: “I am a better SEO because I can point out shoddy SEO work.”
• Who is competent to certify someone as a professional SEO? The insinuation here is: “I am a competent SEO but I doubt that anyone offering certification is better than me (or equal to me).”
• A comptent SEO should be able to provide evidence of successful rankings. The insinuation here is: “I can show some page-one results for my SEO work, therefore all competent SEOs should be able to do likewise.”

I own a very part-time business where I teach SEO and I certify some of the students as Professional SEOs. I have trained dozens of students but only two were awarded a certification. (This isn’t a pitch for that business, so there is no link to that website.)

Therefore, these discussions used to intrigue me, particularly because there is very little interest in taking up SEO training.

SEO = Witch Doctor or Quack?

I began this post by likening the SEO industry to the early days of medicine. Nobody knew how the human body works, but they knew that certain actions (eating, sleeping, exercise etc) were good and others (starving, poking big holes in the torso, etc) were bad.

Then came the medicine men who found ways to cure illness. They found that eating or applying certain herbs was beneficial. It took many centuries before someone decided that this stuff needs to be written down and taught in a college to ensure repeatability and reduce the loss of innocent lives. Even today, humans haven’t fully guessed the body’s algorithms.

Are today’s SEOs comparable to witch doctors? Some can cure a ranking malady and others cannot. In these politically correct times, let’s not offend witch doctors but let’s compare SEOs with quacks. I am reminded of an old joke, modified for the SEO profession:

Q. What’s the difference between a used car salesman and an SEO?

A. The used car salesman knows when he is lying.

On SEO Certification

I’ll explain why my SEO training business is very part-time. Three years ago I left an employer after making them the then-largest SEO company in the country. (I headed that division). I can’t take credit for the large number of SEO customers – having a great sales force and a large customer base (for other products) had a lot to do with it. However, over 90% of the customers enjoyed a top-10 ranking and 94% had a top-20 ranking.

Buoyed with my own ranking success, I started an SEO training business offering a one-day SEO course and a half-day PPC course. Back then Kalena Jordan ran the only business offering SEO training, but it was online. I felt that a classroom approach also had a place in the market. Later, other companies joined the training bandwagon.

I wrote down all my acquired knowledge, partly to give myself a handy checklist for topics that I didn’t encounter very often. I regarded my course content as a short cut to learning current best practices without wasting time on outdated or ill-informed material that you will find on the web.

I invested in local print ads and AdWords. I booked a venue. There were a few nibbles but a lot of excuses -  the date was not convenient. The price was too much. It sounds very technical. And so on. The course was cancelled. The remaining students were trained at their own premises.

In 2007, I went to India for a holiday and almost at the last minute a friend offered to organise a training opportunity in Pune. It was oversubscribed – a great success. Later, the training course was expanded to three days, then cut back to two days because students could not get time off.

Unfortunately, after deducting the cost of an air fare to India and charging an affordable number of Rupees, there isn’t a lot of profit left to make it an ongoing business proposition by my standards. That country is still clamouring for competent SEO training, which is a good sign, given that we in the West like to point out shoddy SEO work from some Indian SEOs. I still get 2-4 training enquiries every day from India without any advertising. I point them to my self-paced online course but very few take it up.

So, for the time being I am happy to be back in corporate, in-house SEO land. When I get an enquiry from Australia, I offer to run the course on a weekend at their premises. That’s where the interest disappears. There’s also a price war of late. I used to charge $1795 for two days but I see others offering a two-day course for less than $600. Good luck to them.

Giving a Bad Name

Not surprisingly, some trainers have given SEO training a bad name. What do you make of this post – SEO Certification Guide? Has anyone tried this one?

Why Get Trained?

A friend who runs an SEO agency asked me an interesting question, “Why are you selling SEO training?” I asked him why this puzzled him. He could not understand why I would want to share my secrets. Perhaps he didn’t want the market to be flooded with competent SEOs – he didn’t say.

I told him that I was tired of retail SEO, having worked on nearly 2000 websites at that stage. It was a sausage factory, with sales pressures, etc. I liked the thought of being my own boss, travelling as I pleased, attending more than one SEO conference in a year, and so on. I said that there was an obvious shortage of experienced SEOs (I trained all but one of my SEO staff on the job).

A State of Mind

The lack of interest in paying for SEO training suggests to me that a lot of operators think that they know all that they need to know and don’t need to pay for any formal certification. This is a simple economic decision. After all, most of us are self-taught in Microsoft Office and unless an employer is paying for it, we don’t do a course in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Similarly, short-sighted SEO company owners are happy for their new hires to be trained on the job. I get that.

However, I don’t understand why some people are so vocal against SEO certification. Don’t we need operators to have a minimum level of competence? Is SEO destined to be a black art, only to be learnt at the expense of clients?

There is also a lot of ego at risk. I am not certified, so why would I presume to certify others? I have demonstrated expertise, so I don’t need to prove it any further and get certified myself. Similarly, the A-list SEOs are not about to apply for SEO certification anytime soon.

The State of the SEO Profession

The SEO profession consists of in-house SEOs like me and consultants/agencies who work for clients.

A lot of the in-house SEOs I have met or observed appear to be new to the profession, which is not surprising, as very few business owners hadn’t heard of SEO five years ago. That they are hiring full-time SEOs is a great sign. This group includes expert SEOs who work on their own websites, i.e. they don’t work for others.

The second group is more visible. They include A-list SEOs who speak at every major conference and who try to engage Matt Cutts on Twitter.  Their public visibility is usually aimed at picking up new clients and good luck to them. Most of them have excellent blogs or informative websites where they attract more subscribers and potential clients. Their SEO knowledge is undeniably excellent. They are expensive to hire.

However, the large B-list of this grouping is unknown. They include the fresh IT graduates who advertise themselves as an “SEO Expert” and use a Gmail email account. Then there are the agency owners who haven’t practised SEO personally for years but who hire fresh IT graduates and pay them peanuts. Most of the shoddy work I have seen comes from this part of the industry. They don’t invest in their staff and make them follow a checklist of tasks including mass submission to low-quality directories. By the way, shoddy SEO work can be found in all parts of the world. Don’t always blame the operator – blame their boss.

Demand for SEO work is still on the increase; therefore, the number of agencies has increased. It’s a scary thought to think that large numbers of fresh practitioners are learning on the job. I don’t think other trainers are getting much business.

The B-list also includes an unknown number of competent, unsung operators who rarely identify themselves in their forum posts, if any. Don’t for a second assume that all SEO gurus are well-known.

SEO Competence

I believe that most people who perform SEO work can deliver ranking success for a non-competitive keyphrase, particularly one that mentions a suburb, e.g. Avondale Heights b&b. In many suburbs there won’t be more than 10 B&Bs with a website. At best there will be directory entries in the top positions but they can be beaten with an optimised, dedicated website.

However, once you need national or international ranking or have multi-national websites, the number of competent SEOs drops sharply.

To conclude, here is what I would look for in a competent SEO:

• On-the-Job Experience. Both depth and width of experience are necessary, which is easier for the agency SEO than an in-house SEO. The agency SEO sees large and small websites in various industries, each with its own peculiarities. However, they only learn where the assignments are customised, that is, they don’t use the same checklist for every customer. Getting a new website to rank #1 nationally for “home loans” is not possible for a $5,000 or even $10,000 price tag.
• Personal Experience. Even an agency SEO cannot get a breadth of experience unless he or she owns their own websites. Not one but many personal websites. Some can be affiliate sites, some can be information sites and at least one blog. What you can experiment with on your own sites must not be done on a customer site.
• Currency of Knowledge. If you still believe that an H1 tag or the Meta Description are important for ranking, then your knowledge isn’t current*. If you don’t want formal training, you need to follow the right people on Twitter and participate in the right forum and read the right blog. There are some other good sources but there are also a lot more places where you could waste your time listening to the voice of ignorance.
• Marketing or Business Experience. A recent IT graduate might know how to perform on-page SEO but you need someone who is first a marketer and then an SEO. This industry is known as Search Marketing and not Search IT for a good reason. It’s about selling or engagement with the customer, which requires knowledge they teach in business school. A Marketer-SEO can always hire an IT expert to solve technical issues.

* The H1 is important but not if that’s the only change you are making to the site. Google can recognise a heading even if it is not marked up as such. The contents of the heading are very important. The Meta Description needs to contain some compelling words to encourage a click. Using it just to repeat the Title Tag might not attract a click. Therefore it has importance, but not in the sense that keywords-in-meta-description help the ranking. The clicks help ranking, if you see the difference.

So, what are your views on SEO competency training and certification??

Popularity: 2% [?]

I found that Firefox 3.5.6 was not loading Google.com in spite of trying a few times. I noticed in the bottom left of the browser (the status bar) that it was stuck at loading clients1.google.com. This was a new subdomain to me, so a quick search brought up a Google web discussion.

The initial suggestion by a Google employee to check for malware was not relevant. I had just performed a full system scan with no problems.

Another suggestion was to turn off Search Settings > Query Suggestions. I didn’t try it as I had no problem with that feature so far.

The third suggestion worked for me. At the top right of the Firefox page I changed the search provider from Google to Yahoo! and the search engine loaded as before. This doesn’t solve the problem, which is probably at clients1.google.com and not on my PC, but it is a workaround that suits me as I never use that search box in Firefox.

Popularity: 4% [?]

It’s a sad indictment of the times when the print media can’t hire competent humans to proofread the galleys but resort to spell checkers. But sometimes, the result can be funny; sometimes it is apt. From the Melbourne, Australia Herald Sun, 19 December 2009, page 43:

Sign at Auschwitz camp gate: "Aerobic Mac fare"

With my unusual Indian surname I can sympathise with a lot of Poles whose names can neither be spelt nor pronounced correctly by the rest of the world. What hope, then, is there for a newspaper spelling checker close to deadline time?

I was lazily browsing the local paper on this cloudy summer morning when this small item caught my eye. After reading it, I sensed something wasn’t right. The museum spokesman is named Drowsily Manifold? Drowsily, Vasily – maybe. Those East European names can end in ‘ly’. But Manifold? I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the middle name of some British aristocrat, but not in Poland. Never. Then I noticed “Aerobic Mac fare”. There is a sad irony there. Nothing that happened in that infamous camp deserves those words.

The online version of the Herald Sun article is barely a sentence or two in length, but its stable mate the Brisbane Courier Mail article has a more plausible name “Jaroslaw Mensfeld” and “Arbeit Macht Frei” is correct.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Following on from my previous post How to SEO for Google PlaceRank, I was delighted to read Bill Slawski’s discovery of a new patent: Machine-Readable Representation of Geographic Information, which was published two days ago. It isn’t easy to read, but head over to Bill’s post to get a human friendly rendering.

(Aside: I can’t view the USPTO images in spite of reinstalling QuickTime via Firefox 3.0, IE8, IE6 or Chrome on two machines. I only get the Q logo briefly, then a blank image. What am I doing wrong?)

We know how popular QR codes are in Japan. Will they work in the West? Bill asks the question:

One question that needs to be asked, is why would Google rely upon stickers for a system like this instead of using something like Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) information, or cell phone triangulation, or some other method that would negate the need for someone to take an actual picture?

The “picture” as I understand it is not of the venue, à la Google Goggles. I use a Telstra QR code app on my S60 work phone and my personal iPhone and aim it at the QR code. As soon as the app sees the QR code in focus, it proceeds to open the web browser and takes me to that URL. I can choose to bookmark it at that time or just view it and then close the browser. Thus there is no picture taken.

A few months ago, B&T reported that Telstra signed a deal with Pacific Magazines to use QR codes across the publisher’s range of magazines, including Marie Claire, New Idea, Famous, and Who Weekly. Over four months, the trial resulted in 20,000 scans by readers.

Over a year ago, my employers conducted a small trial in a Melbourne suburb using similar stickers on shop windows. The results were not encouraging, including the problem with one venue having plate glass that made it difficult to scan the QR code. However, time has marched on and as millions of iPhones and other smart phones are in use, there might be a future for these codes in the West (or Down Under).

Stickers do more than facilitate data transfer or help nominate Favorite Places – they extend Google branding (as if Google needs more branding) to thousands of passersby.

What type of business would do well using QR codes? Here is my pick:

• Restaurant bill holders are a better place for these codes than windows, for I can picture myself scanning the code when I get the bill after a great meal. The I don’t think I’d go out into the dark street to scan a sticker in the window.
• Public transport timetables for a specific train line or bus/tram route.
• Coupons, offers, whatever, provided that the URL is relevant when using a phone browser.

Phone browser? Yes, if I see a QR code URL in a magazine, I won’t bother to scan it with my phone if it is not a mobile site. This is one of the barriers to adoption.

A desktop mouse that acts as a scanner is more likely to get me to scan QR codes for use with a desktop PC. Nine years ago the CueCat scanner was ahead of its time. It was a scanner but not a mouse and was a commercial failure, as per the Wikipedia article.

Perhaps, if a phone  app can easily transfer the URL to my desktop via a sync process, I might scan QR codes more often.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Google has sent QR Code stickers to about 190,000 businesses across the US that have been tagged as a Favorite Place (they have a mobile version of their website). Favorite Places are the mobile equivalent of Place Pages (aka Google Places).

Example of a Favorite Place

Google Video explaining Favorite Places

TechCrunch has quoted Google Earth VP John Hanke, “Google will be adding these businesses incrementally. ‘They are selected based on their PlaceRank,’ says

John Hanke, VP of Google Earth, Maps, and Local. PlaceRank is like PageRank for places It tries to figure out how prominent a place is based on factors such as ‘references on the Web, reviews, photos,’ says Hanke, ‘how many people know about it, how long its been around.’”

PlaceRank isn’t new – but I believe this is the first acknowledgment of its use with Google Maps in a local search context. Bill Slawski reported it back in 2007 in this post, which is well worth reading (like the rest of his site). Here is a link to the patent that describes Place Rank (two words) and Interestingness.

Undoubtedly, Local Search SEOs will be excited by a new unit of measure (will we get another green pixel bar? – I think not). I think this is a good move, but are Americans and the West in general ready to use QR Codes?

How to SEO for PlaceRank

The patent offers some clues about the ranking algorithm.

[0047] In an embodiment, this ranking, which can be referred to as place rank, is computed based on the weighted contributions of various non-cartographic meta attributes about a geospatial entity. Rather than directly measuring a characteristic of a physical place, such as its population, these attributes reflect traits of abstractions or representations associated with the geospatial entity. Examples include an attribute of a description of an entity (for instance, the amount of detail in the description of an entity or the number of times a description has been viewed), an attribute of a definition of an entity (e.g. the context or downloads of a definition of an entity, or attributes about the creation of an entity in a public forum), an indicator of the popularity of a geospatial entity (such as the number of views, downloads, or clicks on the entity or a placemark associated with the entity or an attribute based on a ranking or score assigned to an entity), or the relationship of an entity to its context, such as the category to which an entity belongs. Attributes that fit into each of these categories are described in greater detail below:

Here is my summation of the ranking detail in the patent:

• Longer descriptions are preferred. Very short descriptions might incur a penalty.
• The author of the Favorite Place content, that is, their authoritativeness can matter, e.g. a trusted provider of data versus a random individual.
• The context of the Favorite Place mention, e.g. a discussion in the Google Earth community.
• The number of replies in the above thread.
• The number of clicks to a linked Favorite Place.
• The number of views of a Favorite Place.
• The community stature of the author e.g. number of posts, rank etc (really?)
• The number of Favorite Places within a collection of Favorite Places, which I believe could be a shopping mall with lots of recommendations. MallRank anyone?
• Age of the original recommendation.
• The relative importance of the discussion within a thread – the subsequent posts might contain additional information, or even substantially more information. This score is added to the original post.
• The relative importance of a sub-forum within a forum, e.g. a post in the What’s New forum might get a lower score than a post in a more “permanent” sub-forum.
• An externally awarded score to a forum, e.g. a rating value, number of stars, and so on.
• The density of forums in a geo-spatial context, e.g. the score for a San Francisco restaurant may place more importance on ratings gained from San Francisco-centric sites than from sites in other cities.
• The click-through rate of an entity, e.g. a Google Group discussion of pizza shops might contain links to various outlets. The CTR data would be available to the algorithm.
• The enablement rate of entity categories. e.g. On some maps you can choose to display or not display certain markers, e.g. schools, banks, churches, etc. Android GPS devices could be used to collect this information.
• The estimated score for a web page associated with an entity, such as its PageRank.
• Some of the above factors could be combined to derive a score for each entity.

So, there are numerous factors in this algorithm that might seem too complicated for an individual SEO to influence, which basically suggests that gaming PlaceRank will be very difficult.

Popularity: 45% [?]

Thanks to a post by Tom Crandall in Smallbiz Central, I was alerted to yet another addition to Google Maps Place Pages.  For certain listings that have a rating and review at Judy’s Book, a new field entitled Reputation Trend is shown, with a value of “Reputation Trend” (I presume this will eventually show an actual number), which links to the same business on judysbook.com.

Reputation Trend in Place Pages

Being do-follows, Judy’s Book  might be thrilled by these links, although I don’t believe that they count for PR.

Reputation Trend links to a rating graph on judysbook.com

In my studies of IYP rankings, judysbook.com has never rated anywhere for organic SEO. However, they seem to have a band of loyal users who help to create user-generated content by way of reviews and ratings. This is the only site I know of that uses a reputation trend chart to plot the average rating over time.

Other Yellow Pages sites (particularly ones not chosen to power Google Place Pages) should appreciate how this differentiator has allowed Judy’s Book to get a piece of the traffic pie.

Popularity: 3% [?]