Excellent question, MJW, and one we've all been asking ourselves out here. I personally think SEO professionals are web designers who have gone to the mattresses.

The term, itself, is a bit misleading in my opinion. Most of us optimize for visitors to a site as well as the search engines. We're really VASEO's. Visitor and Search Engine Optimisers.

This is a tightrope, of course, and the ones doing the best for their clients learn as much as possible about how to achieve good rankings (SERP's) without using black hat techniques.

When it's done right, wonderful things can happen... like becoming #1 for "french attractions" even when you're an Irish site.

The WWW is a fast-moving river but many things stay constant, like well-written text, good navigation and responsible content.

So how do you label our profession? I'd agree with beesknees. We really are a profession all our own.

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