by Bill Biko

Created on: September 07, 2009

I'm having a bit of a problem with the title of this debate as I am sitting on both sides of the fence. So let me explain my thoughts. I don't think SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultants are the equivalent of used car salesmen (my father was actually a car salesman and he made the majority of his sales to repeat customers in a small community!), but much of their knowledge and effect is very hard to prove making it appear useless.

Many web developers pass themselves off as SEO experts and this is potentially where more of the chicanery comes about. Many web developers have clients who are entirely inexperienced with websites and have no clue as to how they can improve their rankings. never mind anything about keywords, backlinks and Latent Semantic Indexing.The little bit of information that these sources have and are able to explain and pass on to the clients may sound effective, but is not in the relarealmm of what true SEO consultants can create.

Actually doing the work that a full time SEO consultant does do can be quite time consuming if they are good at their job. Unfortunately many aren't very good and create the illusion of doing a good job by targeting keywords that aren't much use for the clients. The true work of building backlinks, increasing content and focusing on traffic building keywords can take weeks and months before fully effective long term SEO results are in place.

If you are actually going through the process of hiring an SEO consultant or specialist you really need to due your due diligence ont he individual. You need to acquire references from him or her to verify the sites they worked on (which you should call to confirm as well!). You need to get a list of the sites they worked on over the last year so you can see how the sites are currently ranking and you need to have them explain their process to you.

A good SEO expert should be able to explain what they will be doing for you, what keywords they will be targeting and how they will increase your ranking sin the search engine. A less than good SEO consultant will be less likely to explain the process to you and possibly pass it off as a lot of high tech mumbo jumbo that you won't understand anyway, This way th eless he has to explain the less accountable he or she will be.

So in closing, perhaps a better title for this debate would be is SEO worth it, or does it even matter?

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