How to Identify an SEO Expert

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Shari Thurow has written the first of a three part piece titled “Identifying SEO Experts“. The best quote from the article is this:

SEO is the art and science of designing, writing, coding (in XHTML), and programming a Web site to increase the likelihood Web pages will appear at the top of search engine queries for selected keyword phrases. An SEO professional’s end goal shouldn’t be positioning, but rather attracting qualified traffic.

Shari goes on to give her mom a writing assignment to see how well she does SEO:

I assigned Mom to write a persuasive 400-800-word essay comparing sea otters with river otters. I gave her a 10-word (phrase) vocabulary list. She had to use words from this vocabulary list throughout her essay. She had to give the essay a title 40-70 characters long. The essay had to be divided into sections with headings and include photos with captions.

If a search professional had the same skills as my mother, I’d rank his SEO expertise level at beginner to beginner-intermediate.

This is where I disagree. I would classify her mom as a good copywriter. Writing good copy is only a small portion of the overall optimization process, even for a beginner. Notice in her quote above, she had to give here mom the vocabulary list and precise instructions as to what was needed to created the good SEO copy.

While good copywriting is an essential component to SEO, a good copywriter is just that, a good copywriter. Being even a beginner SEO requires a basic knowledge and understanding of what search engines look for and find relevant within the body content.

Shari concludes by saying:

I don’t consider copywriters, even search-friendly copywriters, to be search experts.

My conclusion would be: I don’t consider copywriters to be search beginners unless they have the knowledge to understand how to write search optimized copy without being provided the basic writing guidelines, and understand and explain why those guidelines should be followed.

I look forward to reading parts 2 and 3.

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Tags: Marketing Methods & Providers, Search Tools and Resources
Posted in Search Tools and Resources