Where to 'place' the SEO profession?

[MJW]

Hello WebProWorld,


I’m an IT student on a work placement, my managers are having me do research on SEO.
Having no prior knowledge on the subject I started surfing the web and scouring forums, and so came to start an account here.
I’ve been following threads in this forum for three weeks and learned a lot in the process, you’ve really got me hooked on the subject now!

Why I started this thread is because I have some trouble ‘placing the profession’.
From what I’ve been reading, SEO seems to be a mixture of marketing & web design, but not fully involved in either.
SEO corrects flaws made by web designers, and ‘delivers the product’ to marketing’s target group search results.

To me it seems that SEO is a profession that exists because of things web designers & marketing folk neglect,
and a lack of communication between the two. In my mind SEO could/should be a secondary skill of a professional web designer,
a skill that a marketing department would make use of. Thus removing SEO as a single profession in larger type companies, if you catch my drift?


I stand here to be corrected. Please tell me your ‘business view’ on this unique profession.


MJW.

[beesknees]

Welcome MJW!

Good questions. I'll give you my opinion, which may vary from others. To me, SEO is easily it's own standalone profession. I'm sure many others would agree that just doing the SEO on a site can take up 8-10 hours per day.

IMHO, SEO has two basic parts - The SEO that happens when you build a site, and the SEO that you do after the site is built. I believe that webmasters and site builders should have a basic understanding of SEO to be considered professional site builders, but I don't think that SEO exists from neglect. As you have probably figured out by now, there are so many parts and pieces to SEO that it would be almost impossible for one person to know everything about both web design and SEO, much less have the time to do it all.

I actually think the reverse of your idea that SEO should be removed as a single profession, especially when you are talking about a larger company. I speculate that I am not alone in that only after my sites are built does the real "work" begin. Obtaining backlinks, managing adcenter, adwords, and other pay per click advertising campaigns, and keeping up on the latest information about SEO not only takes some time to master, but sure keeps me busy!

I can build a great looking website with lots of great content,functions perfectly and passes all validation tests. Plus, I can make sure that I do great SEO on the front end of the site (keywords, layout......). But, if I don't do the back end SEO on it (bulding links, running ad campaigns....), no one will ever even see my site!

[Peter (IMC)]

Actually it is a mixture of Marketing and (html) programming. That is if you look at pure SEO (getting higher positions). Webdesign comes in to play when you want those visitors also to do something on the site. So in the broader view of SEO, it's a mixture of Marketing, Programming and Web Design.

Now there is a problem here.

The problem is that there hardly exist any people that are good at AND web design AND marketing AND Programming. 2 out of 3 is the best that you can get and still of those very few actually exist. Generally people are good at just one thing.

But these people have the same problem as you have. In order to do good SEO you need all 3 skills.

Most SEO's are technical people because HTML knowledge requires learning HTML language. You can not have a feel for it and just know how to program HTML. Marketing and webdesign are less abstract and you could do something without having to learn it first. Wether or not that will be any good is another thing, but you can at least do something. Without HTML knowledge you can't do anything.


This pretty much also explains why comunications between these different fields is so bad. These fields are so different from each other that the focus of one is the thorn in the eye of the others.

You said you´re a student so I'll assume you don't have the experience yet that shows that different departments are really good at not understanding each other. That has nothing to do with comunications, as is often suggested. It's just that priorities for each department are different. It is a very difficult job to get everybody's priorities synchronized, especially in bigger companies and between different companies that have to work together.


The really good SEO is capable of getting priorities synchronized (even if it's just for a short while). Inside a bigger company, consider this person a project manager with the knowledge but not being the one that actually does all the work. (S)He needs to be responsible, develop strategies together with the departments, but specifically not be the person that's doing the actual work.

It would be best to have this person not work in any of the departments but to have her/him report straight to higher management. That will take out the competition factor so people are more willing to agree.

[John Dowler]

These days responsible web designers have to know the ABCs of SEO. I agree that there is an additional important profession of people who know the DEF-Z's of SEO.

If you're dealing directly with a client who has come looking for a website, it's important right up front to introduce the basic concepts. And this isn't easy, considering that much of the work is behind the scenes and must pander to Google's black box. As a web designer I've worked with graphic designers who have a hard time grasping that the elements of design for the web include more than just visual factors.

In a perfect world the client will have a post-launch plan for how they will get people to their website, but unfortunately many will do very little. It can be pretty easy to get the first 50 or 100 links into small sites, but as clients often will not take the steps to achieve this I think more than ever SEO professionals are needed. Hopefully when they start work they will find that the designer has at least had an SEO plan, even if it's rudimentary.

Hopefully SEO pros won't blame us designers for bad planning or poor execution when it's often the client who won't budget time for this or follow our tutorials for researching keywords or getting inbound links!

[SemAdvance]

I think it's a simple enough question to answer.

An SEO is a search engine optimize specialist. I am an SEO but I cannot design a website.

Is a Lawyer also thought of as an Interior Designer as well????

There is your answer.

:->

[bj]

I'm a web designer/developer with a good grounding in SEO/SEM (mostly thanks to this forum!) though I am by no means an SEO expert. I think what you're getting at depends on the company, the client, or a bit of both. I've positioned myself to work with small businesses and nonprofits, and most of my clients need both design work and SEO/SEM but may not be able to afford both as separate and distinct services. So I offer a smorgasbord of services, and try to give them the opportunity to make good choices by explaining the potential future ramifications. And I guess I'm one of those rare animals who considers that skills across the board in all three areas that Peter mentioned are necessary for me to do my job properly. Yes, there's one I'm best at, but without a fairly thorough understanding of the other two, I wouldn't have the strong following I do.

A lot of times choices made early on can make it easier to create a site that will rank well for niche phrases, and I consider my job to include letting clients know what the upside and downside of each choice is so they can make informed decisions. If they pay attention and use the tools I build for them wisely, they end up with decent rankings and respectable traffic.

I can't tell you how many times a client has come to me wanting an entire flash site on a monster template budget, AND they want to rank well in the SEs. Explaining the realities of all that in SEO terms, as well as the budgetary issues, is usually all it takes to get them grounded in reality.

That's been my experience. Hope that helps.

[staker2]

I think the biggest problem with treating SEO as a profession on its own is that higher level executives, who assign budgets for such items, have a hard time attaching a value or ROI to SEO. I am with an agency for all of my local work, and didn't get a job recently because the company in question was reluctant to pay my fee (sorry, 50.00 an hour for a daily commute of 50K plus, not a penny less - I don't think it was unreasonable).

I told my agent, who was completely down on my side of the battle, that they could easily hire a person who was straight of college and all pie-eyed with wondrous ideas like "keyword stuffing is the bomb, wow I'll bet no-one has ever thought of that before", or they could hire someone who has run the gamut of everything that the search engines consider legal or illegal, and not get their site banned from Google in the process of getting it onto the first page. In the end the dollar won, and I'm glad that I didn't get that job because obviously they didn't grok the importance of an experienced SEO professional even with such a simplistic explanation of the difference between experienced and non-experienced. I myself do not fit the role of crazy smart guru, but I could do what this company was asking for (and much more) and have been in the business of performing SEO on my own sites since 1996. I'm just not as scary good as some of the SEO experts of this world, and I am very honest about this fact.

The sad truth is that there are a ton of "professionals" out there who do not get SEO and will probably make mistakes on someone else's dime to learn SEO. That's fine, but it really makes the profession as a whole look like a snake-oil salesman's club. I say if you have someone who is willing to work for you for $20.00/hr, you have yourself a person who doesn't know bubkiss about nothing, and you should stay away. A true professional shouldn't just be telling you what they can do, they should be telling you what they can't do.

To get back to the question - is SEO a profession in and of itself? Yes. Do people in charge of the money realize it? Not unless they are true web marketing professionals, and if they are they are probably busy off making money somewhere else that isn't a stuffy cubicle. I had a hard enough time at one of my jobs convincing my older boss that I needed to be both webmaster and SEO full time in order to give our company the web presence we needed - in fact I didn't and I am no longer there partially because of that.

Until the dinosaurs truly let go of the corporate purse strings, SEO is not a full-time job, but rather a full-time freelancing gig that may get you hired somewhere if you are lucky. I am sure that a paradigm shift will occur on this sometime in the next five years, but until then I would start out with your own business, build a client list, and educate yourself as much as possible on both web development and SEO principles. Spending too much time in school will do you no good - try to get mentored by an SEO professional (or just regularly read these boards - I've been lurking here for years) and see if you can get a few smaller, easier projects to start out with. By the time firms need SEO people full time, you will have evolved your experience to the point that you'll be snapped up in an instant, or you'll have grown your own business to a point where you don't need to worry about a lifelong career somewhere other than your own house. Either way good.

[Zombie Master]

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.

[mawells]

SEO does require a lot of different skills but the site's architecture is #1 - that means a search-engine-friendly design. An SEO cannot do an effective job coming in after the fact and trying to make an "invisible" site visible (I mean invisible to search engines not site visitors).

So step #1: Get the site designed by someone who understand SEO so that it can be properly indexed.

Next comes the research (which is actually done before the site is built so that we can incorporate the keyword phrases into the proper places within the site content). This does not mean keyword stuffing - it means top-of-the-line copy writing that pleases both site visitors and search engines.

Step #2: research keyword phrases. You need to know how people are looking for your goods and services and you need to understand the best opportunities your site may have for high rankings. You need targeted but popular phrases.

Once the site is launched (or relaunched, as the case may be) then comes the submission and link-building process. This is the most tedious and least appreciated aspect of SEO (from a client's viewpoint you're not really doing anything because they can't see the effort spent in research - especially when often for non-conusmer sites the research can prove to be fruitless.)

Finally, you can also get involved in SEM (search engine marketing) and these days it's pretty much a requirement if you need targeted traffic immediately. This requires an entirely different set of skills to manage ad campaigns - good writing, good math to stay within the client's budget and good analytical skills to determine the best outcome for the client.

My company does all of the above, but we sometimes collaborate with a web designer if the client has a web designer that he prefers instead of doing all of the design work ourselves. Often, however, we do everything from soup to nuts.

[Duncan Pollock]

One of the truisms about SEO that's widely recognized and accepted is that Content is King -- and this moves you into the marketing side of the equation.
SEO, without question, will enhance a website and enable the search engines to recognize its existence and lead to its appearance. It's no simple task and involves a host of factors and their inter-relationship and importance. A website that's just thrown together isn't likely to go very far, save only when someone who knows the URL types it into the search box. Otherwise, you need to know and understand the need for a relevant description, well chosen page titles, as many backlinks as you can obtain, and a reasonably extensive experience in using html and other aspects that will move the site up in the SERPs. (And, of course, you need to know what words such as URL, html, and SERP mean, not to mention other similar concerns that an SEO specialist deals with.)
But the content needs to connect with site visitors. It has to explain in unmistakable terms what's called the site owner's Unique Selling Proposition. It needs to reflect an awareness of the WIIFM (what's in it for me) that will convince the visitor that this is the company/product/service/information/whatever that he/she is looking for. It should anticipate -- and provide answers to -- all the questions the visitor has. It should say what needs to be said and, more than anything else, say it either in a way that no-on else says so well or, in fact, in terms and appeal that no one else uses. It has to help the site owner stand out in a crowd (that's often hundreds and thousands of competing sites). And this, also without question, calls for marketing knowledge and experience.
As my colleage Peter says, the key lies in a merging of SEO and marketing know-how and isn't as commonly available as many people (including a fair number of self professed SEO wizards) may think -- and never mind the ability to create an appropriate design (which should also have some uniqueness to it).
All told, you're looking at a combination of skill sets that all involve a reasonably lengthy learning curve.
The possibilities are decidedly great, but the problems along the way are no less numerous.

Duncan

[Zombie Master]

[quote=mawells;375327] An SEO cannot do an effective job coming in after the fact and trying to make an "invisible" site visible (I mean invisible to search engines not site visitors).

Not to be contentious but I believe many times the best SEO work can be done after the fact. We took over the website for a smaller New England furniture maker last September that had virtually no SERPO's with Google.... nada.... none except for their name.

Today they're #1 ranked for "safe childrens' beds." You can spell childrens any way you want.

[Big Juice]

SEO isn't a profession in and of itself simply because it will not stand the test of time. What will become of SEO when search itself changes, what would it be applied to when the Internet as we now know it is no more?

SEO techniques work on search engines because the search engines rely upon mechanical search but the day will be coming when search engines will rely upon a kind of artificial intelligence to deliver results. Get rid of mechanical search you get rid of SEO or turn it into something completely different.

There is a lot of talk about LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. Some people believe that LSI is nothing more than the latest buzz word to lure unsuspecting clients into expensive contracts for services that they don't understand. This complaint is often applied to SEO in general as well however, not understanding something doesn't make it any less real does it? To illustrate my point; my failure to understand women doesn't make them any less real does it?

SEO is not a profession but just a department within webdev/marketing and will not be around long enough to be considered a profession.

[Zombie Master]

[quote=Big Juice;375332] This complaint is often applied to SEO in general as well however, not understanding something doesn't make it any less real does it? To illustrate my point; my failure to understand women doesn't make them any less real does it?

There's an old Irish saying, "Don't bruise your knee on a barstool not in your way."

You have a good point, Juice, but I think you are proving the argument that SEO is here to stay. The good ones I've seen are constantly changing with the flow of the internet. You can swim just as well with your eyes open as you can with them shut.

[Big Juice]

Zombie

I have been in the game for well over a decade and have worked exclusively within the most competitive industries and I have seen many trends come and go. The one thing they all shared in common is how they were applied to the flaws within mechanical search.

Sometime in the not too distant future AI will replace mechanical search and SEO as we know it will no longer work. The evolution of search will ultimately kill SEO as a viable vocation.

Sorry to all you SEO people out there but the reality is - SEO will soon end.

[jawn_tech]

MJW - Welcome to WPW and it's really cool how you've been able to learn and get 'hooked' on SEO from this forum. It is a huge industry.

To gain a lot more insight to the industry, you can also watch a lot of the videos on WebProNews, which is one of WPW's SEO news outlets (part of the vast iEntry, Inc). A lot of those videos has interviews / coverage on the Search Engine Strategies (SES) workshops, conventions, happening all over the world. If you can make it to one of those, I'm sure you'd find it insightful, not only in equipping you with developments in SEO, but also in enlightening you more about the profession. I personally haven't attended one yet, but grab the highlights and interviews when I can.

You're on the right track though.

I also agree with one of your points, I do think that all designers should be SEO-minded. Better SEO starts with better sites designed with SEO in mind.

[babychicken4u2]

To me it seems that SEO is a profession that exists because of things web designers & marketing folk neglect,
and a lack of communication between the two. In my mind SEO could/should be a secondary skill of a professional web designer,
a skill that a marketing department would make use of. Thus removing SEO as a single profession in larger type companies, if you catch my drift?

In my experience which is not seasoned...yet. The above statement is a BAD mixture.

A good designer brings un-scorned creativity to the project, while an SEO seeks to make that excellent eye candy perform.

The problem is this, and I even find myself in this rut when I design, a designer who strives to be an SEO cannot deliver the stellar designs of one not stained by the performance effects of the design.

A great designer will build a site around the theme and the total user experience without prejudice, then an SEO will find a happy medium to bring the expected performance to the project.

Just my opinion....

~Melanie

[james113]

There have been a lot of good points made in this thread and is