The Spinosa Factor

As a web professional I’m running an enormous risk by publishing this article. Why do you ask? Because I’m technically bringing to light my feelings on what could potentially hurt the industry as a whole. Entire organizations have built their business structure around the concept of “SEO” but like many industries before it the mystery is beginning to fade. The jargon and promise of results is backed by nothing more than a weak verbal promise with a push to paper highlighting ZERO specifics that puts companies at a loss with no quantifiable results in site.

Their sick to the stomach every morning when they wake up knowing this truth and without enteprise budgets they can’t bring success to those that they’ve gauranteed it to….

At the end of the day SEO is about making your site relevant, obliging to web standards, and most importantly staying current on your areas of expertise/relevancy. Algorithms continually adapt and are changed to keep system exploiters guessing but everyday Google becomes more fine tuned in understanding how people think, rate content, and act. Remember the true technical definition of SEO is all onsite and has very little to do with working outside of it. Often the line has been so blurred that people don’t understand where SEO ends and Internet Marketing begins. The true definition of SEO is on the link listed below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

Most of these firms push the upsell of custom tools that are built to generate and create relevant content quickly, automatically create backlinks into the clients site, and much more but these tools aren’t anything the client couldn’t get themselves for a very marginal amount of money. The actual skillset of SEO is synonmous with that ever elusive common sense. The truth is the client is paying for what’s not yet common knowledge and the amount of labor that goes into getting quantifiable results. Companies that promise huge results for small amounts of money without any consideration or in depth knowledge of your current traffic are professional bullshit artists. Only when the client is truely a train wreck can they make such an obligatory statement because barely touching it will show the quantifiable results.

Another important thing to note: Search Engine Optimization begins and (in my opinion) ends on your website. If your website isn’t par the course then your results will match. Relevancy against the worlds search machine (Google of course) doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t convert into a metric that’s profitable for your organization whether it be measured in the access of information, contact, or e-commerce.

At my company we already include REAL technical SEO in all of our site deployments because at the end of the day their will literally be no market for Search Engine Optimization. It will fall away and the private/government clients will assume that this be considered in the deployment of a new web presence or the revival of an old one.

The end of this article? Yes, its a commodity something that only the largest of enterprises will be able to dedicate teams to because without respecting every aspect of the process; Relevancy, Qualifying, Conversion, and Currency your results will rarely be quantifiable. Don’t get trapped in a loop of perpetual mediocre results from firms that claim over and over again that they never promised “x” and you need to spend “y” more dollars to get their…. They knew it from the beginning.