Case in point, we got a client 1,800 visits because we got them high up on Reddit. I have met several black-hat SEOs and the good ones are well aware of what the consequences are, generally you’d not use black-hat on a client site unless you were competing in a really tough area such as pills, porn or casinos. You are quite right to say that there are no such things as guaranteed rankings, mostly because you cannot predict how many people will link to you and with what anchor text (short of hacking sites anyway). The point I want to concentrate on however is your statement that there is no longer a place for SEO companies. There will always be a place for them as long as Google’s rankings can be influenced for the simple reason that if somebody can move you 1 step closer to the top spot it’s worth money.

At the end of the day the job of a company is not to make the web a better place, it’s to sell stuff. If I can sell more stuff by employing an SEO to alter my site then I’m not going to give even a moment of consideration to the “state of the web”.

At the end of the day there are a lot of people that think that SEO is easy and like Paul demonstrated, they’re not hard to show up. The same however goes for both designers and developers and I think you are focusing only on the bad ones, maybe because you’ve simply not yet worked with a good one or maybe you just hate SEOs 😛

Personally, I find myself giving this advice to my clients for free, as part of an ongoing relationship with them. Obviously I want them to succeed and periodically, as much for my own reference as anything else, I’ll check their stats and possibly suggest improvements to them. This often results in more paid work for me, so everyone wins really.

As valuable as this is, I’ve never come across an SEO company that does the same thing. I don’t want to tar them all with the same brush, but those that I’ve dealt with are usually only willing to do the initial optimisation or content generation for which they are paid.

I agree with most of that, the only part i don’t fully agree with is the last point, or more specifically your definition of SEO.

SEO is optimizing content for search & search engine performance. Part of this is the ability to react and tune what you have.

A copy writer will not be able to go to a statistics package and deduce that the order of words in a product name is loosing them traffic and by changing the order you could increase traffic 10%?

I don’t know many developers who can go away and do some competitive analysis, or do some research into the popular search terms within a market? If they do, i am pretty sure they will agree that is byond the scope of “Developing”.

I DO offer SEO advice to clients for a fee, for that fee, i review their site statistics, provide interpretation and help guide them to what keywords they may wish to use, how i would estimate those keywords to affect their ranking and discuss with them how they wish to target their site. Are people finding their site through products? or by company name? Location or price related keywords? This interpretation and the time taken to implement any changes which can be made are what i am charging for.

I am not an SEO company, and the sites i develop (i am a developer / design / one-man-one-lion-band) are built using the techniques you are talking about. But that is only one element of the solution, its a good start, but working further on the site as more information is available gives better results.

So, in summery, i agree with 99% of what you have said, but not the last bit.

nice post and i enjoyed the twitter discussion to.

^licks^

Jamie & Lion

I love it when these companies phone us up, asking if we would like to improve our SEO….

Me: “How did you find us?”
Them: “On the Internet” (Cue realisation of statement…)
Me: “So, we can’t be that bad then”