SEO Expert

Posted by SEO Dave on July 27th, 2006 at 09:38pm

Are you looking for an SEO expert to help achieve high search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN?

Here’s how you find that SEO Expert, your own SEO Guru.

What is an SEO Expert?

Before we find an SEO expert, we first need to decide what an SEO expert is. There are many self proclaimed experts out there, some call themselves ethical SEO experts, others whitehat SEO experts, a few even admit to being blackhat SEO experts and the rest just plain old SEO expert or consultant.

Since search engine optimization is a relatively new industry there are no regulations covering the SEO sector like there are for say electricians or plumbers anyone with no training and no clue can setup an SEO company and start offering SEO services overnight.

For this reason you have to be very careful who you hire to advise you about which SEO techniques to use because at best you are going to waste your time and money and worst destroy your online presence in the various search engines!

As there are no recognised qualifications for becoming an SEO consultant you’ll have to use research and commonsense to determine if a particular SEO guru is indeed legitimate and will treat your business ethically.

For example I started a new site a couple of days back called SEO Consultant Services. Created it for the SEO Consultant SERP in Google.co.uk (.co.uk TLD’s rank better in that version of Google).

I’ll add relevant content to the site and along with my other SEO relevant sites build a fair amount of SEO traffic. Despite offering SEO services for sometime I’ve never really gone after SEO traffic because I’ve always had more than enough SEO work, I put most of my time into helping my SEO clients and building new sites to increase my network (I have around 150 websites, and until the other day only 2 was SEO relevant, now 3 SEO sites).

Anyway, just by looking at the site you aren’t going to determine if the person/company is skilled at SEO and HTML, you have to take a good look under the bonnet (look at the sites code) to see if they know what they are doing.

So lets take a look at the code by Viewing Source.

First thing to look for are tables. If you see a lot of table, td, tr tags the person who built the site is working with old design skills. Also add to that list font tags. This in itself isn’t a bad thing per se (it’s not blackhat SEO), but it suggests they don’t keep up with the latest developments or lack the HTML skills needed to do so.

An SEO experts needs to understand all aspects of HTML design so they can understand any site a client might have. They should be able to hand code a site using CSS only for layout (no tables) as this gives clean, easy to update code.

Take these two sites-

SEO Gold and Recipes Store

Both use the same basic HTML div/CSS based layout (view source to see the similarities). It’s quite easy to change either of those two sites without having to redesign from the ground up. That is the beauty of CSS based design.

Note since writing this the SEO Gold site has moved to a CMS.

Also look for signs of using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) type HTML editor, these include Frontpage and Dreamweaver. This type of editor adds a lot of irrelevant code, are prone to making HTML errors and unless you are very good at HTML coding it will make your sites code bulky (slows down access, eats bandwidth). So again it suggests the SEO isn’t up to date with the latest HTML techniques.

That’s not to say there aren’t highly skilled SEO consultants that use tools like FrontPage, Dreamweaver etc…, but in general if I see a font it suggests out of date skills.

Signs your SEO Expert uses blackhat SEO techniques

Some blackhat SEO techniques are very easy to spot, others are far more subtle. When viewing source look for the following-

Commented out keywords, see something like this-

<!– SEO Expert, SEO Consultant, 20 other SEO keywords –>

I’ve been doing SEO for a few years, first it was for my business site (I owned an online Lingerie business) and through a combination of my own SEO research and current search engine optimization knowledge from others managed to push that sites visitors to 8,000 a day despite the site being framed and using dynamic URLs (two big no, no’s back then). I was new to the SEO world at the time and used blackhat SEO techniques which resulted in Google penalizing the site in November 2004!

I learnt a valuable lesson, NEVER RISK A MONEY SITE which I try to pass on to my SEO clients and anyone who will listen. When you use the “right” blackhat SEO techniques like comment spamming, SEO becomes easy, but the risk to reward ratio on a site you care about just isn’t worth it. Yes you can get away with it for a year, maybe two, but you want your online business site to be successful for ten, twenty plus years, a legacy to your children and your children’s children. Blackhat techniques can destroy a sites organic search engine traffic and some never recover!

This is a work in progress.

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