First off, if you are looking for a Certified SEO to build your SERPS rank, or if you are a SEO looking to be certified, it is probably a scam. Google (or any company I know off) do not run such a certification, and I would treat a company that vaunts one with suspicion.

Should there be a certification for SEO’s?

A lot of people want it. Customers who don’t quite understand SEO feel they need protection that a certification provides. And service providers who want to show their commitment to a published code of quality, ethics and fair-play.  The support of a well known and official organisation helps overcome a lot of suspicion in the mind of a buyer.  It shows a general commitment to honest behaviour in a formalised context. It may all seem very fair and noble, but is it even possible in an industry like Search Engine Optimization? I don’t think that it is…

Good people want a badge that says they are ‘good’, it will surely lead to more work when people know it… right? Bad people want certification because it makes what they do seem more effective, important and ‘good’. ‘What the hell right? It will just be a light marketing-ethics course some ‘W3C’ stuff… we can send the office geek to that and ‘Bam!’ we stick the oak leaf cluster on the website right next to “Number 1 on Google Guaranteed*”

The Beauty Contest Accreditation Problem

I don’t think that you will ever see such a thing as an SEO accreditation. The idea seems as silly as having accreditation for beauty contest contestant advisers. In every sense an SEO will market themselves as providing the ultimate advantage.  When the truth is they simply make a website what is should be: ‘good code that is semantically structured for indexing’. Beyond a very obvious level of optimisation you are into the realm or good research, good content, good promotion, and relevant network building.

Google does not, and would not endorse an SEO accreditation scheme any quicker than the Miss World Contest would endorse a Plastic Surgery provider as the best choice for ‘competition winning breasts’. Any endorsement by Google of an SEO standard implies knowledge of the ranking algorithm that is secret and constantly changing.

Google endorses a sort of natural beauty of websites that shouldn’t be manufactured. But in the real world of beauty contests and SERPs pages it doesn’t hurt to pay someone to rub Vaseline on your teeth and tape your bikini to your ass! What an SEO does clearly lies in a similar moral space of augmented beauty. “Include these key phrases in your speech: ‘World Peace’ and ‘Children are our future’.” Sound familiar?

Simple advice before hiring an SEO company

Here is my (very) simple advice for people looking for an SEO company. Anything done that can be called SEO (as well as any web marketing formal and informal)  can be covered by The Advertising Standards Authority (or the equivalent in your country). These bodies publish guidelines for standards of honesty and morality that you should understand to the point where you can have a real discussion with your prospective SEO company.

Before you hire an SEO You should also have a good understanding of the Google Webmaster guidelines. When you want an SEO you are basically looking to outsource Webmaster responsibilities (As well as some marketing responsibilities). And like housekeeping, you should know what those duties are even if you choose to have someone else do them.

As for technical accreditation for web code: If you were only going to allow someone certified in Microsoft .Net to build it in the first place, then you want someone with the same certification to open the code and make any changes you want.

Ultimately no accreditation will protect you from unethical people in any area of business. People without ethics know how to appear to have them; it is the only way they can gain advantage by not having them. Usually the problem for the ethical person in business is to show you have them without looking suspect… but that is discussion for another time.

Philip Markwick is the principal at Papershark Media, a Online Media & Design Company mostly serving companies in Surrey, Hants, Berkshire & London.
Contact Phil at phil@papershark.co.uk about blogs, business, media… anything!

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Derek Powazek is causing something of a stir recently within the SEO industry with a blog article:  Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

To summarize:  ‘In no uncertain terms… SEO’s bottle common sense and label it as super secret and expensive cure-all for your website. They are all basically snake oil salesmen.’  This is a gross simplification, and represents what I took from the article, but I have to admit that I sort of agree with it.

Similarly Search Engine Land responded with: An Open Letter To Derek Powazek On The Value Of SEO

To summarize:  ‘We do real stuff, hear are examples of real stuff, and hear is how you can measure the effects of that stuff… and we don’t like the people who call themselves SEOs and do bad stuff either.’  It’s worth reading as it is a sensible defence.

My Thoughts on the Debate…

I am a web developer/designer and copy writer… basically a content developer.  and I have/do used the SEO term to market my services. I know that the reality is that all the stuff that an SEO does (without the knowledge to code) can be done by anyone, and should be done by the company that is running a website.

However there is a psychological need for companies that want to know that a designer is making the right choices for them. And where there is doubt in business there is always a middle man ready to ‘help’.

SEOs function like these middlemen between developers, and copy-writers. They have the responsibility and knowledge that all Webmasters should have.  The simple truth is that it is hard to justify this middleman service if you already have a Webmaster that knows this ‘common sense stuff’ and applies it to the site they administer.

Liars and cheats aside (as any misrepresentation of a service-provided is despicable) but these things are usually a problem of semantics. I don’t really have a problem with someone calling themselves a web marketer and going out there and getting links through usual networking channels. But in my mind ‘SEO’ denotes some kind of technical expertise that is more often than not absent.  It is like a stylist pretending they have the skills of a fashion designer or tailor. A marketer that knows about keywords and ‘latent semantic indexing’ is just that and nothing more.

A lot of the chips are still up in the air when it comes to SEO. At the moment it is the outsourced thing that self proclaimed ‘Gurus’, with no aptitude for code copy or strategy, do just because they have some keyword tools. I am hoping that it becomes an iterative part of the ongoing design and development strategy that Web Masters create.  I know that designers and developers want the repeat business, and I know that the iterative approach to a web strategy provides that work.  SEO has become a marketing buzz word around that iterative approach. I’m genuinely unsure if that buzz has done more damage or good?

In short: I want a world where Web Masters, Designers & Copywriters do SEO.
Not a world where SEO’s ‘do’ Web Masters, Designers & Copywriters.

Philip Markwick is the principal at Papershark Media, a Online Media & Design Company mostly serving companies in Surrey, Hants, Berkshire & London.
Contact Phil at phil@papershark.co.uk about blogs, business, media… anything!

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