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I know I’m mentioned on a lot of SEO blogs, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a petulant way. Does that make me a “real SEO”? What about the hard-working SEO technicians who are not mentioned on blogs?

I’ve also been interviewed a few times (less often than most people who get to be interviewed as SEOs). Does that make me a “real SEO”? What about the hard-working SEO technicians who have never been interviewed as SEOs?

I’ve been quoted by the news media a time or two as an SEO. Does that make me a “real SEO”? If you’re a hard-working SEO technician and the news media have never asked your opinion on anything, are you a fake SEO?

Last week’s kerfluffle over Verified SEO/SEO Watchdogs leaves me wondering just how many more credibility issues the SEO industry wants to weather before people start seeing the fog clear from their priorities and agree to do something about adopting industry-wide standards (which would suck the wind out of the sails of all independent efforts to “monitor” the SEO industry).

I’ve never played the popularity game that permeates the SEO industry conferences. In fact, the only conferences I’ve presented SEO topics for were not SEO conferences. In my career I think I’ve made one last-minute pitch to be on an SEO conference (and if the email arrived by the deadline I would be surprised to hear that). My topic was something esoteric — the sort of stuff I write about but which SEO conferences eschew.

So I’m not buddy-buds with all the top SEO partiers. I don’t work on joint projects with the industry insiders (well, except when I do). My time blogging for SEOmoz is now ancient history and most people think all I do is criticize SEOmoz (honestly, why my compliments and recommendations for SEOmoz go unnoticed is beyond me — I must have lost more SEO popularity contests than I thought I had entered).

Having been nominated for more than a few SEMMY Awards (which I admit I have only begun taking a serious interest in this year), I can say that I feel like I’ve been noticed (finally) by the SEO industry as something other than a “contrarian” or “that guy who always demands proof”.

My SEO resume is, I think, tolerable. I’ve been praised and criticized, corrected and confirmed. People like me, they don’t like me. The SEO Theory Twitter account has more followers than your average bear — er, Twitter account.

But I have no credentials. I haven’t taken anyone’s course, passed anyone’s test, earned or purchased any piece of paper that says I’ve accomplished something. So, when push comes to shove, and we all unite in that great SEO achievements pissing contest in the sky, who among us will be qualified to be called a real SEO?

Here are a few ways we can sort of verify our serious intent toward being real SEOs, but are they good enough, are they achievable?

1. Get clients to publish honest testimonials on their own sites
2. Be listed in SEO industry directories that normally include only the most well-known names
3. Earn at least 25 Sphinns for 2 or more articles
4. Present at an SEO conference
5. Be cited by at least 5 news articles (on as many topics)
6. Earn a link from Danny Sullivan
7. Be mentioned by Matt Cutts
8. Have more real Twitter followers who actually retweet your articles than robots

So, what do you think? Can we all do that? Can we all prove we’re real SEOs, or are we all stuck in the same boat as the charlatans, scam artists, and beginners?

How do you tell the difference between a real search engine optimization strategist and someone who just claims to be one?

What’s the secret formula that should be promoted to our consumer marketplace, so that the SEO industry doesn’t have to worry about being dragged down by faux watchdog agencies, patent owners, and reputation trashers?

Written by Michael Martinez

A new user at the HighRankings Forum revived an old discussion to ask Is there really no professional course in SEO?. That is such a good question for someone just starting out to learn search optimization.

What makes a course “professional”? Is it the professionalism of the instructor or the accreditation the course may have earned from an authoritative body?

There are far more SEO training courses available than any one person can possibly evaluate. We don’t even have an index of them. The search engines reveal that many people have optimized sites for SEO training course.

And there is no authoritative body that establishes accreditation for SEO training courses. About the closest you’ll come to anything like a standard for SEO training might be the services offered by the SEMPO Learning Center, which offers Webinars, tutorials, and full-blown training courses.

But SEMPO, as I have noted before, has balked at trying to establish standards of any sort. Their training course — while created by dozens of experienced professionals — are really just more of the same from the SEO industry. We are good at putting together a hodge-podge group of resources and terrible at establishing anything like a minimum requirement for quality and acceptability.

Accreditation is not necessary for building a foundation of standards, although it would be the best path to follow. The problem with accreditation, however, is that there is no authoritative body to set the standards. So the closest we can come is to adopt informal standards.

There is no enforcement of informal standards but people seeking SEO training courses can be selective about which courses they sign up for. Here are some guidelines to help you evaluate the quality of the training course.

The SEO training course must have a functional description – A “functional description” means it doesn’t confuse you. It should start out with “Basic SEO”, “Intermediate SEO”, “Advanced SEO”, etc. and then it should summarize the type of information that will be conveyed.

The SEO training course must have training materials – You need a textbook, which any trainer should be capable of providing. If the trainer doesn’t have the time to write a textbook they should be able to purchase some from someone else who has written the material. Proprietary textbooks are okay but they should be printed, ideally bound, and available as .PDF files on a disk.

-You also need presentation slides for each session. These should be provided in both printed and electronic form. The slides themselves should provide structure to the discussion or presentation. Ideally, you want supplemental information for the slides, rather than all the information on the slides.

-You want a recommended reading list. People DO write books about search, search optimization, Website design, Perl/PHP programming, etc. Shari Thurow has published two books about Web search and usability. If you asked me for an opinion on reading lists, I would say any reading list would be incomplete without at least one of those books. But there are dozens of books on SEO that have been published by well-known people in the field (Tim Ash, Rand Fishkin/Stephan Spencer/Eric Enge, Bruce Clay, and more). No one is going to agree with everything these folks say, but you should be offered a reading list of at least 5-10 books (anything longer than that should be accompanied by detailed reviews).

The SEO training course instructors must have published biographies – You should be able to find these people on the Web and learn why they are qualified to be teaching SEO. Since you cannot go to a university and earn a Masters in “SEO Education”, the next best thing is to find out where these folks have demonstrated their expertise. Beware of client testimonials. Although many are real, genuine, reliable sources of information on a training course, testimonials are routinely faked in online marketing.

The SEO training course curriculum should be published – You should see before you pay how many classes there are, what they cover, how much time is devoted to them, etc.

The SEO training course should include Internet time – If the trainer is not offering real-time evaluation of Websites and search results, the course material is not current. Change is the only constant in this industry and any reasonable SEO trainer should be more than comfortable with taking students online during class. The trainer should raise that expectation in advance.

The SEO training course should enumerate the skills you’ll acquire – Students should be told in advance that their training will give them the skills and maybe tools to go out and execute specific tasks.

The SEO training course should describe its level of difficulty – Basic SEO training should be substantially different from intermediate and advanced SEO training. Again, we have no standards in this industry so one person’s idea of intermediate SEO might coincide with another person’s idea of basic SEO. Most so-called “Advanced SEO” courses that I have read about only seem to cover what I would consider to be intermediate-level topics.

An SEO trainer should be able to articulate what s/he sees as Basic SEO, Intermediate SEO, and Advanced SEO. No one has to agree with my ideas, but the SEO training course should describe the skill sets it assigns to Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced levels of training.

The SEO training course should document the standards it teaches to – But wait! If we have no standards as an industry, how can we be sure we’re learning to good standards? The truth is, no one who is inexperienced is qualified to judge between standards but it would be better to allow prospective students to compare the standards you teach to with standards other courses teach to. So a good SEO course should be accompanied by an in-depth explanation of the SEO standards the instructors are following.

If the students come away feeling like those standards were met, then they received at least part of the value they paid for. By asking for and choosing among the statements of standards that SEO teachers adhere to, people entering the SEO industry help move the standards discussion forward.

In fact, the students should be demanding standards on all fronts because standards will help them more than anything else.

The SEO training course should discuss search engine guidelines – Frankly, I believe you should offer a separate session just on the guidelines published by search engines. The SEO standards a course teaches to should not be the same as the search engine guidelines. The guidelines don’t cover all aspects of search engine optimization. Search engine guidelines are intended to help people do things that are acceptable to search engines — they don’t help people do everything (ethical and acceptable) that is necessary for search engine optimization.

The SEO training course must specifically discuss the needs and resources for at least 3 major search engines – I don’t care how much so-called market share Google has. If you’re not teaching people to optimize for Ask and Bing (and Yahoo! while it still has its own algorithm), your SEO training course sucks.

The SEO training course should teach how to measure market share – Market share is very important. It helps us analyze how competitive a vertical is. Knowing how to measure market share helps us view search engine market share reports with healthy, healthy skepticism. The data published by Alexa, Compete, comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen is largely guess-work and extrapolation. We may have nothing better to work with, but these services cannot show us the real picture.

The SEO training course MUST teach how to measure conversion, return on investment, and other success/metrics-related topics – Success has to be measured. Performance has to be measured. If you sign up for a training class that doesn’t offer any information on how to track and measure performance, there is a HUGE gap in your SEO education.

The SEO training course should provide in-depth use and discussion of at least two tools per topic – Any SEO training course that only uses the Google Adwords Suggestion Tool, or which only uses Google Analytics, sucks. There are other ways to do keyword research and any SEO who relies solely on Google Analytics for metrics and reporting had better be doing so only because they took on a braindead client who contractually forbade use of better tools.

An SEO training course should teach you to be flexible and familiar with multiple assessment tools. If you come away from an SEO training course thinking that Google provides you with everything you need, you wasted your money.

It’s okay for an SEO trainer to say, “I personally only care about Google”. But if that trainer only teaches to Google then their course should be clearly labeled “SEO Training For Google”. The students should know in advance what the value is they are paying for.

Google does not equal Search.

SEO for Google does not equal Search Engine Optimization.

We don’t have to wait for the SEO course owners to debate this proposal. The smart ones are already complying with many of these suggested standards. People who want to learn more about search engine optimization can now look at the various course offerings with a better sense of how to weigh them.

The industry is constantly improving. The process is long and slow but we’ll eventually get to a point where people look at us with the professional esteem and respect many of us aspire to. But as I have noted elsewhere, we cannot afford to leave these all-too-important issues in the hands of naive academics who don’t understand search engine optimization.

If the day comes when standards are imposed upon us by a government that draws upon “expertise” in the educational community, the SEO industry will have a huge uphill battle to wage to ensure that realistic and practical standards are set.

You can do your part now by continuing the discussion wherever you participate in the SEO community. SEO training course standards MUST be part of that discussion.

Written by Michael Martinez

I recently jumped on Steve Wiideman about his name for SEO Standards. He came to my attention because I occasionally search on the term “SEO standards”. Of all the buzz expressions used by our industry, this one seems to me (along with “best practices”) to do us the most collective harm in an unintended way.

We are an industry without standards, as has oft been noted. It SHOULD — in my opinion — come as a surprise, therefore, that people mention standards. It’s okay for people like Wiideman to open a discussion about standards, even to propose standards. But is it okay for companies selling SEO, eCommerce, Web design, and search reputation management services to say they are complying with industry standards (or to suggest as much through similar if less specific language)?

To be honest, while writing this article I attempted to see what Visible Technologies says about standards with respect to our SEO and reputation management services. Some older content seems to have said something about (implied) internal standards but in one of our recent Web content consolidations that Web document was deleted.

There is a press release from last year about Visible joining the Online Reputation Management Association and working with them to establish professional standards. I don’t know what the current status of our involvement with ORMA is — I know that some of our staff have been working with the organization over the past few months.

Standards are important to me for quite a few reasons. I feel that standards confer a certain amount of accountability upon an industry or trade group. But too often I think people confuse standards with certifications and it needs to be said (perhaps more than once) that you can have standards without certifications but you cannot have credible certifications without standards.

Standards, of course, can be either industry-wide, group-wide, or singular. That is, you as a consultant or a service providing company can set your own standards. Publishing a personal or company standard helps set client expectations. I know from personal experience that client expectations can be fuzzy at best and specifically wrong at worst.

There have been a few attempts in the past to create some standards. For example, the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) mentions a Metrics and Standards Task Force that appears to have no current members. Their first two initiatives were, perhaps, overreaching. The organization’s FAQ page even goes so far as to say: “SEMPO is not a standards body or a policing organization. Membership in or involvement with SEMPO is not a guarantee of a particular firm’s capabilities, nor does it signify industry approval or disapproval of their practices.”

Disavowing involvement with standards while proposing them is not, in my opinion, an optimal way to engage in the discussion. I think that politics (fear) prevented SEMPO from following the path it should have taken. It doesn’t have to become the SEO police force — it SHOULD be proposing standards for discussion and adoption.

We have the freedom to formally or informally adopt and support standards. I think the informal approach may be so low-key that few people will follow it — but a formal approach would demand much more time and effort than I can commit to (and SEMPO obviously failed to make it happen). So let’s try the informal approach.

The Informalist SEO Standard

Therefore, I offer the following informal standards for discussion. You can informally adopt them by publishing a Statement of Standards on your Website. But before you jump aboard the standards bandwagon (or try to run it off the road), make sure you really understand what standards mean and can do for our industry.

• Professional Services Website – An SEO firm or consultant should publish a Website that at the very least explains who the firm or consultant is, where they do business, how to contact them, and what services they offer.
• Statement of Standards – An SEO firm or consultant should publish a Statement of Standards on their Website to convey to their peers, customers, and industry observers the desire to establish, maintain, and honor a minimum professional level of accountability and performance. In the absence of an industry standard, a self-published Statement of Standards provides guidance on what others can expect.
• Professional Lexicon – An SEO firm or consultant should publish on their Website a concise glossary of SEO-related terms they use in their communications with clients and peers. This concise glossary of terms should acknowledge in a disclaimer that other terminology or alternative usage may be found throughout the industry.
• Professional Credit Courtesy – An SEO firm or consultant who rewrites, annotates, analyzes, or otherwise extensively uses the work of another SEO firm or consultant to represent their methods or ideas should acknowledge the direct and indirect significant contributions made by original authors and sources.
• Guarantees and Limitations of Performance – An SEO firm or consultant should publish a statement in clear language explaining or disclaiming any and all guarantees and limitations of performance. I don’t mean you should make promises (or decline to make promises). I mean you should make it clear that you do or do not make promises, commitments, and/or guarantees of performance. Don’t leave to everyone else to figure out whether you do (or do not).
• Statement of Unacceptable Practices – An SEO firm or consultant should publish a statement on their Website indicating what practices they will not use on behalf of clients. I would avoid use of subjective and provocative language like “black hat”, “white hat”, “ethical”, and “unethical”. Just say what you will NOT do.
• Statement of Work Practices – An SEO firm or consultant should use clear and concise language (including references to their Professional Lexicon where necessary) to explain specific work practices they employ in their work, in the event that they publish details about specific practices.
• List of Recommended Resources – An SEO firm or consultant should publish a list of resources (books, Websites, conferences, workshops, classes, etc.) they recommend to people for further study in the field of search engine optimization. This list should be disclaimed in some way to show that it is neither complete nor authoritative.
• Acknowledgement of Diversity of Opinion – An SEO firm or consultant should include a statement on their Website and in all work-related proposals that much of the work performed as “search engine optimization” is offered amid a diversity of opinion regarding the best practices, best resources, and best methods.

This is a pretty short list for several reasons. First, I think people need to see that creating and complying with standards is not the hypertensive organizational nightmare it has sometimes been made out to be.

Second, I think we can easily recognize the fact that most reputable SEO firms and consultants already do many of these things. By getting everyone to agree that we’re already following some “standard practices” (for the most part), we can move the conversation forward.

Third, I feel it’s important to illustrate that standards don’t recommend specific training programs. There will hopefully come a time when we can look at SEO training programs and see which ones offer the best, most well-rounded opportunities for acquiring or advancing search optimization skill and knowledge.

We can easily suggest standards for training classes, such as providing concise guidelines what to expect (nearly every training program I have looked at does this), providing verifiable background information on trainers (many but not all programs I have looked at do this), and covering a minimum of topics that are generally agreed upon as important for basic search engine optimization (keyword research, content creation, link building, analytics and analysis).

But suggesting a standard is easier than persuading people to adopt it. Some of the most ardent opponents of creating SEO standards have helped to set the tacit standards that I am documenting in this proposal.

If you want to help support this initiative, there are several things you can do:

1. Tweet, Sphinn, Stumble, and otherwise blog about or link to this article (using redirects and nofollows is okay with me)
2. Adopt the term “Informalist SEO Standard” and use it in your advocacy
3. Publish a Statement of Standards on your Website and make reference to the Informalist SEO Standard. You can say something like, “This Statement of Standards was modeled upon the Informalist SEO Standard proposed by Michael Martinez on Best SEO Blog.”
4. Write a response offering your thoughtful rebuttal on your own blog. At the very least, keep the conversation going.
5. Mention the Informalist SEO Standard at conferences and workshops. Don’t assume people know about it. TELL them about it.
6. Volunteer if you have the time and the passion. You can try to work through SEMPO or just go straight to the International Standards Organization or American National Standards Institute to study their recommendations for developing or proposing new standards.

Creating standards is a long, long process. It won’t happen overnight. There is way too much fear in our industry. I think that fear undermines people’s professional development. Some people would argue they aren’t so much afraid as apathetic — they just don’t care about standards.

But if that’s the case, then are these really the people upon whom you want part of your professional credibility to rest?

We’ll always be viewed with some suspicion and disbelief, criticized, and otherwise taken to task by people who don’t believe in search engine optimization. But we can weaken their arguments against our work by showing everyone that we can come together to create and maintain at least a minimal set of professional standards.

Written by Michael Martinez