Does SEO Need Standards?

June 19, 2008

This is a very good question that may or may not have any easy answer. The whole premise of the question is based on the fact that a large group of individuals and businesses are offering SEO services that know little about Search Engine Optimization.

Those of us that do offer straight forward ethical SEO would like a way to establish some order in the industry.

I see these folks on Craigslist all the time offering services on the cheap. Usually they have gotten lucky with a Page Title for a seldom targeted search and landed in the #1 position. It’s the old saying “even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while” in action.

I use Craigslist myself and see these people’s postings. They always say “email me your URL and I’ll get back” or something like that. They never have a phone number in the post nor do they show a link to their SEO website. I email these posters and ask them to verify there work.

They often will provide a link to a website and the targeted keywords. Usually the same page title is used on every page. It doesn’t take long it discover that they got lucky and now think that they are experts.

There is also a large pool of companies that will guarantee first position on Google or your money back. There trick is that they target a very obscure phrase that no one else is using. It likely will have nothing to do with the websites products or services.

The true professional understands that it is unethical to guarantee the search results because they are out of our control. You can optimize a website based on today’s known standards only to have it changed by the search engines tomorrow. You competitors also have a dramatic impact on the results which you can not control.

Because our company is only a year old we have a link disadvantage compared with long established websites. While we currently rank well for 7 SEO related searches that we target that could change quickly if any of these established websites began to target our keyword phrases.

So it would be nice it there were rules and if everybody played by the same set of rules, but this is why even a good set of rules will not work. The search engines changes the rules all the time and they don’t tell us when they have done this. These changes become known only when we are able to detect them and this is not an easy task.

There is all kind of speculation abut various penalties but until the search engines reveal there existence, it is only speculation. We wait for Mr. Matt Cutts, the Google spokesman to inform us and even then the explanation is usually vague.

So knowing all of this I think the talk of standards is foolish. As for Tucson SEO Solutions we play by the rules as we understand them to be.

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